Happy Late Summer! The season starts, per The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), on August 2 and lasts through the autumn equinox. Summer generally means cooling salads, and this section offers a few fairly traditional ones, so I thought I would go with something less expected: soup!
The Bloodroot Collective was serious about using local and seasonal ingredients before it was cool, so the Beach Plum or Elderberry Soup showcases these values. (The introduction says, "Feminist food is seasonal. We use what's close at hand, what is most fresh and local, and therefore the least expensive and least 'preserved.'")
My favorite part of the recipe is the lecture about using wild fruit in step 1: "First find your wild fruit. This soup recipe is insipid made with cultivated fruits." If you can't find nearly a quart of wild beach plums or elderberries (or rose hips or chokecherries), you're out of luck. Then there's simmering, sieving, sweetening, thickening, and checking for an excess of "foxy" flavor, whatever that might be. The nice thing is that this can be served chilled on a hot summer day.
This section also includes one of the rare seafood-based dishes: Champagne Shrimp Bisque.
The champagne is not in the title simply to signify that it is superlative; there's actually leftover champagne in the soup itself. I guess this silky soup is supposed to be a way not to feel too let down the day after a special celebration (though I'll admit that I'd rather just drink the leftover champagne and call it a day).
These waning days of summer can start to feel like an extended Sunday night, a creeping feeling that busier schedules and cold weather are just around the corner, so I appreciate the desire to go all out-- Pick the wild fruit! Enjoy champagne in multiple ways! Before you know it, you'll be spending 14 hours a day lecturing, planning lessons, commenting on essay after essay after essay.... (Okay, maybe that's just me. But summer is running away from all of us.)
Interesting how seasonal food is feminist. It hardly seems like it has a less complicated prep than anything out of season. I guess that the difference is that they didn't have to preserve it for later use first. Maybe getting out of the house to find wild fruits is the feminist part.
ReplyDeleteI also wonder how people back then didn't have scurvy given the fact that they cooked everything with vitamin C to death before consuming them. I guess they must have had a lot of hand squeezed juice since it was still a difficult preparation without having to use the stove.
Then there's the question about how thickened fruit pulp with sugar is soup. I always think of soup as being a savory dish, not dessert.
I think the feminist bent to seasonal food is that it's a connection to mother nature. You're paying attention to the earth rather than the corporate, man-made world. (Of course, I find it sexist to imagine that women inherently have more of a connection to the earth than men do, but ideas change over time...)
DeleteI do see quite a few sweet soups. I think they're a pretty big thing in Scandinavian countries.