Year of the Cow (15 page)

“Thanks for hanging out with me, buddy.”

“Cheers!” He raises his glass, leaning awkwardly across the table to make triple sure the glasses touch, otherwise—by toddler logic—it doesn't count. I grin. This is fun.

“Declan, we should definitely do this more often.” This sort of moment with my son is all too rare. Precious. Special. Right now, I'm acutely aware he won't be this age forever. But running from place to place, checking items off to-do lists, and performing the necessary maintenance duties of our daily lives, I find that it's easy to forget.

“Peas!” he yells, plunging a fat, plastic spoon into his stew.

Peas. And thank you.

 

Pho

Time: About 4 hours, largely unattended

Serves 4

Pho is a glorious thing. Savory and rich, equally suited for winter and summer, and fantastic for sharing with guests, as everyone can prepare their bowls exactly how they like.

It takes a little time to make, but it's worth it.

This recipe is adapted from one in
Into the Vietnamese Kitchen,
by Andrea Nguyen.

BROTH

2 white onions, halved and peeled

4 inches fresh ginger, cut in half lengthwise

Canola oil

5 to 6 pounds beef bones (marrow and knuckle)

1 cinnamon stick

1 tablespoon coriander seeds

1 tablespoon fennel seeds

5 whole star anise

1 whole cardamom pod

6 whole cloves

2 tablespoons sugar

1½ tablespoons kosher salt

¼ cup fish sauce

SOUP

1 eye round, about 3 pounds (refrigerate unused meat for two to three days to re-create soup)

Rice noodles of your choice (if possible, get “banh pho” or “rice stick” noodles from a local Asian market)

AT THE TABLE (TO BE ADDED PER EACH DINER'S TASTE)

1 large bunch fresh cilantro, finely chopped

1 large bunch fresh mint, stemmed

1 large bunch fresh basil, stemmed

3 hot peppers (jalapeño or serrano), thinly sliced

Mung bean sprouts

Lime wedges

Hoisin sauce

Fish sauce

Sriracha sauce

  
1.
To make the broth, begin by lining a sheet pan with aluminum foil, move your oven rack to the highest position, and fire up your broiler. Rub the onion and ginger with oil and broil until nicely charred—about 8 minutes. Flip the veggies and char the other side.

  
2.
You have two options for preparing the bones. Option A—Blanch the bones: Bring 8 quarts water to a boil in a stockpot capable of holding at least 12 quarts. Add the bones (gently!) to the boiling water and boil vigorously for 15 minutes. Discard the water along with all the accumulated crap that leached out of the bones. Rinse the bones, rinse the pot. Rinse everything.
    Option B—Roast the bones: Knock the oven temp down to 400°F and move the rack back to the middle. Put the bones on a sheet pan and roast for 30 minutes, or until gently browned.

Both methods remove impurities from the bones, resulting in a clearer soup. Blanching provides a cleaner, more neutral taste. Roasting adds a toastier, nuttier flavor from the browning.

  
3.
Put the bones in the gigantic pot and cover with 6 quarts cold water. Lid up, and return to a boil over high heat.

  
4.
Once the liquid is boiling, reduce the heat to a simmer. Add the charred ginger and onion, the cinnamon stick, coriander, fennel, star anise, cardamom, cloves, sugar, salt, and fish sauce.

  
5.
Simmer, uncovered, for 3 hours. From time to time, skim the surface of the liquid to remove whatever scum rises to the surface. Otherwise, find a good book. Something you've been meaning to read. Use this time to escape into a world of pure imagination.

  
6.
After 3 hours, strain the broth and return it to the pot, discarding the solids. Taste the broth and adjust levels of salt, fish sauce, and sugar as necessary. When in doubt, add slowly. You can always add more seasoning to the broth, but you can't remove any.

  
7.
Stash your eye round in the freezer for 10 to 20 minutes so that it's still firm but not frozen solid. Utilize the meat's resultant stiffness to slice it no more than ¼ inch thick. Thinner is better. Set aside.

  
8.
Cook the rice noodles in water according to the package instructions. When they're ready, drain and set aside.

  
9.
Stash the requisite number of (oven-safe!) bowls in the oven at its lowest setting to warm. This step is solely to warm the bowls.

10.
On a large plate, arrange the cilantro, mint, basil, peppers, mung bean sprouts, and lime wedges. Place on the dining table along with a jar of hoisin, a bottle of fish sauce, and enough Sriracha to wake the dead.

11.
Goose the heat to bring the broth back to a rolling boil. Place a warmed bowl on a small dish (so you don't burn your hands). Place a few slices of raw beef in the bottom of the bowl, followed by some rice noodles. Ladle the screaming-hot broth onto them and take the bowl immediately to the table. Repeat with the remaining bowls.

12.
At the table, add accoutrements according to your taste.

13.
Eat. Eat now.

 

6

Ancestral Foodways

Kids are fast.

I realize this as I try to maneuver my six-foot-one-inch-tall body through a door frame that, at that particular instance, seems built for dwarves. Of course, it isn't—I'm just clumsy and slow. My son, however, is neither.

“Dec, we need to brush your teeth!” It's his bedtime and time for this evening ritual. Part of this ritual, evidently, has become a rousing episode of everybody's favorite game show:
Let's Evade Daddy!
And we're in the bonus round.

He rounds a corner on stocking feet, squealing with delight. I galumph after him, knocking a picture off the wall in my chase.

Headed down the hallway, I stretch out my stride. The tiny man has me on the corners, but he's toast on the straightaways. I catch him in two strides and swoop down upon him like a demented paternal raptor. “Gotcha,” I proclaim, picking him up as he squeals with delight.

I carry him back to the bathroom. “If you don't brush your teeth, they'll fall out. Then you'll look silly in yearbook photos and you'll have to eat pudding for the rest of your life.”

I corral him in the corner of the bathroom, pick up his toothbrush, and get to work. As I'm brushing his teeth, I muse aloud, “I need to talk to your mom. We need to take you to a dentist one of these days.”

*   *   *

Dentists have been on my mind lately. When I picked up my cow, Chris sent me away with an armful of books and recommendations to make the most out of my beef. Foremost among them, a volume titled
Nourishing Traditions,
by Sally Fallon. It's the hybrid cookbook/manifesto of the Weston A. Price Foundation—the man after whom their foundation was named was a dentist.

As all good manifestos should be, the tome is earnest and enthusiastic. It opens with a solid eighty pages of small, dense print regarding what's wrong with the state of modern nutrition and agriculture and how to fix it. It's the Dr. Bronner's soap of cookbooks. And I've been reading it a lot.

Weston A. Price did medical work all over the world in the 1930s, especially with indigenous peoples still subsisting on traditional, locally sourced diets. In many of these populations, he found that they enjoyed superb health, with far lower incidence of chronic disease than first-world populations, despite lower access to medical care. And as a dentist, he especially noticed that most of these individuals had perfect bites without braces and very low incidence of dental cavities.

He also noted that when these populations transitioned to Western industrialized diets, these benefits vanished.

These isolated groups placed a high value on animal products, especially animal fats. They focused on vegetables, nuts, raw or fermented dairy, and unrefined whole grains. In short, their diets roughly resembled those of subsistence farmers. And they thrived.

The Weston A. Price Foundation has me considering a question I'd never really thought about before. Today in the United States, people are trying harder than ever to live healthier. Supermarkets are packed with low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-sodium foods. Yet heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. Stroke comes in at number four. And diabetes at six. If Americans are trying harder than ever before to adopt healthy lifestyles, why then are so-called lifestyle diseases killing so many Americans?

Nourishing Traditions
attributes the prevalence of these chronic conditions to the nutritional deficiencies of a modern diet. They posit that conventional theories of nutrition, such as the food pyramid, are flawed. Not completely wrong per se, but lacking in some fundamental ways.

According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, fat in particular is unnecessarily villainized. Fats found in whole foods from animal or vegetable sources should in fact be considered healthy, including saturated fat and cholesterol, because they serve not only as a ready source of metabolic energy, but also as building blocks for bodily structures such as cell membranes and critical structures in the nervous system. Further, fat is necessary to make use of fat-soluble vitamins and is also the raw material through which the body regulates hormone production. It's only when these fats are excised from whole foods, refined, condensed, and chemically altered that they become dangers to health.

A famous (and, since it began in 1948, famously long-running) study in Framingham, Massachusetts, on the causes and contributing factors of cardiovascular disease found that, whereas participants with elevated blood cholesterol levels were more at risk for heart disease, no correlation was found between cholesterol intake in diet and elevated cholesterol levels in the blood. Furthermore, participants in the Framingham study who ate the
most
cholesterol on average weighed less and were more physically active.

Instead of fat,
Nourishing Traditions
lays much of the blame for cardiovascular disease—as well as diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and a host of other maladies—on refined carbohydrates, and especially sugar. It strongly recommends replacing refined sugar with unrefined sugar and eating only whole grains, preferably either soaked, fermented, or sprouted before consumption to make their nutrients more biologically available.

Very old school. Positively Amish. Many foods I enjoy do have a significant fat content (I never really had a sweet tooth, but fat is flavor), though I never considered them especially healthy. Was I wrong?

Further, the book encourages the use of raw or fermented milk and milk products and strongly discourages use of pasteurized and homogenized milk. This is madness to me—pasteurization kills disease-causing pathogens, right? Per
Nourishing Traditions,
raw milk is naturally antibacterial due to helpful lactic-acid-producing bacteria already present, and pasteurization is largely unnecessary. (It lays the milk-borne disease epidemics of the past on dirty equipment and unclean work environments.) Further, the book holds that the pasteurization process kills a lot more than bacteria. It also destroys or reduces the availability of milk's vitamins and minerals, requiring them to be chemically added back into the milk in less-than-ideal, chemically synthesized forms. For example, synthetic vitamins A and D are added to most milk sold in supermarkets. Then, in 1 or 2 percent milk, powdered milk solids are added back to give the liquid a mouthfeel more like whole milk. This powdered milk features oxidized cholesterol, which is the kind of dietary cholesterol that actually
has
been linked to heart disease. (Oxidized cholesterol is damaged cholesterol, different from normal dietary cholesterol.)

I'm not sure what to make of all this. On the one hand, this would imply strongly that people should buy milk from a farmer they trust. Sound reasonable? Sure. I don't think that's controversial. But to advocate buying raw or fermented milk exclusively and avoiding homogenized and pasteurized milk? That I don't know about. That's a tougher sell. Disease born of contaminated milk has been a problem in the past, hence pasteurization. However, the latest outbreaks of milk-related disease have occurred in pasteurized milk. But how many deaths did pasteurization prevent? That's a negative that's hard to prove. At what point does the health value of pasteurization outweigh the potential health value of raw milk consumption? To me, it seems that as long as the consumer is making an informed decision, the choice of milk and the choice of milk providers are personal and depend heavily on that person's relationship with the farmer—at least until more definitive research is done. Of course, this biological calculus is somewhat complicated by the fact that many of those who drink milk and would be disproportionately harmed by any milk-borne pathogens are children, living with the choices of their parents.