Carl's Corner:
Take A Moment to Savor
the Slow Life
by: Carl Anholtz

When I first heard the expression “Slow Food”, it conjured up using a slow cooker, making a stock from scratch, or simmering a stew, soup, or sauce for hours. It also might apply to bread making or canning, or other food preparations that seem to take a long time relative to “Fast Food”. Ah, that must be it! “Slow Food” is the opposite of “Fast Food”, right?

Well, yes and no. “Slow Food” is both a complex concept and a complex organized global movement, started as a counterpoint to the ever-growing “fast food,” which is mass-produced and lessens the importance of locally-grown products.

“Slow food" is more of a philosophy than a cuisine. It's not about all-day cooking in a crock pot -- slow food is defined by how it's prepared, and how it should be enjoyed. It's also the name of an international movement, founded in Italy, with more than 65,000 members across the globe. The term "slow food" was the brainchild of an Italian named Carlo Petrini, who feared that small, indigenous farmers and cheesemakers in his native Piedmont region of Italy were being forced out by larger food producers and chains, creating a homogenized market.

Italy still has the largest participation. In the early years of the movement, the leading country outside of Italy was Germany. France came to the table very late, and in the last few years, membership in the United States has been leading the charge alongside the Italians. This is largely due to the synergy between the movement's objectives and the vision of American culinary leaders such as Rick Bayless, Deborah Madison, Alice Waters, and Waters' apostles Judy Rodgers and Paul Bertolli.

The movement has three principle initiatives. These are the Ark, a directory of endangered foods around the world, the Presidia, or local organizations that work at preserving Ark foods, and the Slow Food Award, which brings attention and assistance to the agricultural activities who work with Ark foods. One of the most famous issues for me and many Americans may be the case of raw milk cheeses. As the government may at any moment tighten up on their ban on importing raw milk cheeses from Europe, creating these delights in the United States becomes more and more urgent. If you have never tasted true artisan, raw milk cheeses like Cindy and David Major’s Vermont Cheddar, an English Farmhouse cheddar, Epoisse de Bourgogne or Ossau Iraty (Brebis Pyrénées), you have missed some of the most incredible, complex tastes and flavors in the world. These cheeses truly exemplify Slow Food’s focus on artisan hand-made products

There are splendid books on the subject. One of them is Corby Kummer’s book The Pleasures of Slow Food, which celebrates heritage recipes, artisan traditions, and the rapid evolution of a movement to make good food a part of everyday life, in a world increasingly dominated by fast food. This is a remarkable book with something for everyone. You can enjoy the engaging stories of farmers, food artisans and cultural preservationists from around the world. This book offers some fantastic food photography as well. As a cookbook, this book gives you 50 recipes from some of the world’s renowned chefs. Slow food is about local, hand-made ingredients, traditional cooking methods and the producers and chefs who follow the creed.

The accompanying recipe comes from Judy Rogers at San Francisco Zuni Café. She is one of the talented Chez Panisse alumni, who have gone on to set national trends on their own.