The Honest Plate

Salvage. (The new recycling.)

Our New England home was build sometime between 1910 and 1920, and in the couple of years that we've owned it, have spent a great deal of time and energy bringing it into the 21st century.  I'm talking real basic stuff -- like electric wiring.  When we bought the house, much of it was still wired with the original "knob and tube" cloth-coated wire.  We had to have the house re-wired for a number of reasons -- safety, being the biggest.  Insulation was another "upgrade".  For our first winter, we endured perpetual drafts and chills, even with the heat on, so we got that fixed too.

Despite shortcomings like these, I love our house.  It's an amazing structure, built of old-growth timbers by skilled craftsmen, and the did it all almost 100 years ago, sans computers, laser-levels, or nail guns.  Everything in it is still solid -- the banisters, the doors, the floors.  I have great respect for this place, and my wife Gretchen and I are doing our best to restore it .  Luckily, the previous owners didn't mess with it too much, making only a few minor cosmetic updates here and there.

One of our guiding principles is to use as much salvage as much as possible.  And doing so is easy, because we're close to an amazing supplier of architectural salvage:  New England Demolition and Salvage.  This store is simply mind-blowing.  Occupying a huge old shipping warehouse in New Bedford, Massachusetts, it's a well-organized nirvana for old home restoration.  Half a mile (it seems) of nothing but old doors.  Thousands of old wooden shutters.  Cast iron tubs, porcelain sinks, ornate radiators.  Door knobs, drawer pulls, hinges of every size and shape.  They even have a huge supply of pintels, which is the hardware that enables a working shutter to be affixed to the house and swivel.  New, they cost $30 a pair (sold online by a specialty company).  At New England Demolition and Salvage -- they're $2 each (I bought 20).  I also bought a beautiful 5 panel sold fir door -- it matched the other doors in our house exactly -- for $40. 

Not only is this generally the lower environment impact way to go, what you can find in salvage is often better and certainly cheaper than modern replacements.  I've purchased a number of old shutters from NEDS, and at $40 a pair, they're far cheaper than the equivalent custom-built wooden shutters, which can cost up to $600 a pair.  And I can't imagine they're built any better either than these old pieces (held together without nails, still going strong after 100+ years).

This has us thinking about all the other ways that re-using/salvaging/recycling is part of our lives -- from accepting our wonderful neighbor's hand-me-down toys for our 2 year old, to trash recycling, to composting...yet I am sure we aren't doing nearly enough.

The Greenhorns.

There's an exciting film project in the works called The Greenhorns -- a feature-length documentary about the new world of sustainable agriculture and the young farmers who have committed their lives to it.  The trailer is here:

This is an independent, boot-strapped production, but they've been able to gather an impressive advisory board, including Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Bonnie Powell (of Ethicurian.com), and others.  The film's blog is here:  The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles.

Local is everywhere.

There's a mathematical function called the "s-curve" (or sigmoid curve); it looks like this:

Economists, sociologists and business-types use it to describe trends.  Typically the vertical axis will represent units of product or number of users, and the horizontal axis represents time.  Right in the middle of the graph is the inflection point, where the trend changes sign -- it's still growing, but the rate of growth begins to slow down.  But in the lower left-hand portion of the graph is where the growth sharply accelerates, giving the curve a "hockey stick" shape.  This is sometimes referred to as the tipping point -- when a previously rare or niche product suddenly and rapidly becomes common. 

I think the Summer of 2008 might be remembered as the point when local food tipped. Marian Burros has a feature on the front page of the New York Times food section on the growth of local food -- "Supermarket Chains Narrow Their Sights".  Loads of sound bites in her article, such as Wal-Mart announcing that it will spend $400 million this year on locally grown produce, and Wegman's Food Markets seeing a 20% increase in sales of local produce this past year.  Sure, it may be tempting to view some of this with a suspicious eye (Wal-Mart?).  But on the whole, that major chain retailers are shifting their focus toward local food systems is a very good thing. 

The myth, the legend: shortening.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Feeding America, an amazing website (courtesy of Michigan State University) that provides high resolution scans of very old cookbooks (warning:  Feeding America is major derailer; if you have real work to do, best leave it alone).

I've been looking through several of the older cookbooks (pre-1920), and the curiosities in them are endless.  Desserts are king -- sometimes, half of the book is dedicated to cakes and pies (how much of this stuff did they used to eat?).  And just about every dessert requires an ingredient that we see less and less of today:  shortening.  Which got me wondering -- why do they call it shortening?  Why not just call it fat?  Where did the term shortening come from?

So off I went on mission to find out.  I consulted a few cookbooks (modern, that is), the web (the usual suspects:  Google, Wikipedia, et al) and McGee's On Food and Cooking.  Here's what I learned about the legendary shortening:

• Shortening (i.e. fat) refers to the effect it has on pastry dough, in that it results in a "shorter" baked product.  A shorter (or short) baked good is one that's tender, crumbly (not short in height, or size); hence:  shortbread, shortcake and short crust.  The word short, in fact, used to mean weak or pliable.
• Shortening has appeared in recipes for the last five- to six-hundred years; OED traces usage of the word as far back as the 15th century
• In 1911, Crisco hydrogenated vegetable oil was introduced to consumers; prior to this innovation, shortening consisted of a mixture of butter and lard
• Today, we know that shortening works by interfering with the wheat flour's ability to form long chain protein (gluten) strands, keeping them shorter and weaker...which is an interesting coincidence, considering that 600 years ago, our ancestors knew nothing of long chain proteins. 
• An example of a shortening/fat in action: a traditional baguette has no added fat/shortening and has a chewy, relatively tough texture (long chain proteins). However, a biscuit, composed of essentially the same ingredients as the baguette, does have fat/shortening (butter, lard, Crisco, etc).  The shortening gives the biscuit a light, fluffy, even crumbly texture (caused by weak, shortened protein chains) .
• A bit of a side note: many people believe that shortening (e.g., processed vegetable oil) produces pastry that's superior to lard or butter.  Part of this may be due to the fact that gas bubbles play an important role in the texture of pastry -- the more small gas bubbles, the more tender the crust.  McGee points out that modern shortening has a different structure than animal fats, allowing smaller bubbles to form and remain in the dough during baking.  Also, he notes that manufacturers "fill shortening with preformed bubbles of nitrogen (around 10% of the volume) and bubble stabilizing emulsifiers u(p to 3% of the shortening weight)."  Personally, that's enough to make processed vegetable shortening a deal-breaker (and I won't even get started on hydrogenation.)

For a fascinating etymology/history lesson on shortening, check out this post:  The Origins of Shortening

Tractor envy.

I've been a subscriber to Hobby Farms for about a year now, and hands down it's one of my favorite magazines.  If you're a budding small farmer or ambitious gardener, you'll read it cover to cover.  It's packed with stuff on organic agriculture, heritage animal breeds, ethical treatment of animals, how to build things, how to run an ecologically responsible farm, even articles on alternative energy (wind mills!) 

But the tractor ads generate a visceral response in me. I find myself running to my wife, "Honey, look at this".  She laughs in my face.  Whatever. It is pretty ridiculous, I guess.  Why do I want one?  I really don't know...I have absolutely no need for a $50,000 heavy farm tractor, and probably never will.  Then again, if I did need one, Hobby Farms has a pretty good Tractor Buying Guide