Posts tagged ‘Baccalà’

What does it really mean to be a locavore?

Next week, I’ll start receiving deliveries from my neighborhood CSA, which means I’ll have a summer’s bounty of organic produce, grown locally in the Hudson Valley. Sometimes being a locavore means supporting local businesses as opposed to the big chain stores. As I sit here drinking direct trade organic coffee at Indian Road Cafe, I see that the menu boasts bread from Balthazar Bakery of NYC, meat and sausage from Vincent’s Meat Market in the Bronx, and vegetables from Migliorelli Farms in Tivoli, NY.

Eating locally is a choice that requires a lot of effort. Ironically, it’s far easier to go to your local grocery store and buy meat raised and processed in Kansas, fruit from Chile, and seafood from Indonesia. I contemplated what my food choices would be if I lived in the Middle Ages, when one’s options were to eat what was raised and grown locally or starve. Then, I started researching exactly what people were eating five hundred years ago in Western Europe. The upshot is similar to the scene today: Food in Italy, Southern France, and Spain was quite good, while the diet in Germany and England left much to be desired.

People along the Mediterranean enjoyed a diet rich with grains like spelt, olive oil, fennel, fava beans, and fresh fish. Almonds were used to sweeten and thicken food. Today, almond milk has gained popularity and I’m constantly seeing farro (spelt) on upscale menus.

The inland regions ate much of their food dried, pickled, or salted. Porridges of grains including spelt, barley, and wheat were the staples of most everyone’s diet. Pottage, a general term for a boiled vegetable stew, was also standard. Wild game like pheasant was a mainstay of the aristocracy. The nearly impermeable class divisions also dictated how well you ate. The closer you lived to the land, the closer you ate from it. In the Middle Ages, you were what you ate.

>> Read on to find out what happened when people got sick of porridge and pottage. Yick. >>

Butcher shops are once again growing in popularity. Thanks to Michael Pollan, Fast Food Nation, and Jamie Oliver, we now have a much better sense of how that shrink wrapped piece of meat ends up in the fluorescent fridge of our grocery store. We also understand that it doesn’t taste nearly as good as it should.

Before grocery stores became supermarkets and super Wal-Marts, most people shopped at butcher shops where their meat was custom-cut by skilled butchers. I appreciate the role of a butcher not just because I’m a foodie, but because I come from a long line of butchers.

My Grandfather Oteri owned a butcher shop in the Bronx where my father worked and my mother’s family always shopped. Eventually, my Dad first asked my Mom out on a date while she was stopping by the butcher shop.

All of my Grandfather’s brothers were butchers as were the brothers of my paternal Grandmother. Her father was a butcher in East Harlem, which, up until the 1960s, was the biggest Italian neighborhood in New York. All of these shops have changed hands and are no longer butcher shops. The shop where my parents met is now a Tower Isles Jamaican Beef Patty store. My Uncle Pat’s specialty poultry store is now empty, and the shop in East Harlem has probably turned over a dozen times.

There is one, however, that still remains, and what is most remarkable is that it is the very first store owned by family in the United States: Vincent’s Meat Market on Arthur Avenue is still a busy and bustling, custom-cut butcher shop with a huge array of Italian specialties. In my opinion, it is one of the best food shops in all of New York City.

>> Click here to find out more about the history of the shop and find out what Oscar-winning movie was filmed there! >>