On culture, cultures, and signs of home
Rethinking the familiar in food and landscape (also: a seaweed ASMR video)
In July, I traveled internationally for the first time since 2019 (and perhaps the last time for a while, though I'm in theory going to Greece in October).
Using some of my many flight vouchers from canceled 2020 trips, I booked a flight to Iceland and spent a week exploring, largely in the Southeast.
Like I talked about last month, the ecology of this space was unfamiliar to my home in Georgia, but I was surprised once I got there how many traces of home were scattered on my plate and in the landscape.
Chickweed makes a regular appearance in my kitchen and in my medicines, and it was wonderful to see what to me is a early spring/late fall herb thriving in midsummer. Likewise, two other friends, dandelion and curly dock, were in abundance. And people use them in similar ways, too: you can even buy a chickweed and yarrow "wound charm" (a salve for minor injuries) in the duty-free shop at the Keflavik airport.
On my plate were dense breads and a curry-scented mayonnaise that reminded me a bit of a particular chicken casserole, chicken divan, that was a regular on the table during my childhood. Fermented shark, even, had undertones of the ripe, soft cheeses I regularly eat: a present but not overwhelming sharpness met by a lingering aftertaste of ammonia. There was butter, too, and lots of it: sometimes cultured, sometimes salted, but always delicious, it rounded out the meal as butter often does by adding a cozy, satisfying richness.
Even the landscape itself, though a far cry from North Georgia, held comforting pieces of home, but allowed me to reassess my home landscape in a new way: stunning cliffs and lava flows thrust from the earth within recorded memory (and in some cases within this calendar year).
These are a mark of a landscape still forming, a place becoming. A mark of what my own landscape may have resembled when its mountains formed, at a time before mammalian fossils or our current configuration of continents.
The mountains of my home are old enough to stretch across Europe and West Africa: they are mountains smoothed by the storms of millions of years. It is perhaps easy to think that such mountains have ceased becoming: that they reached their onus long ago, and perhaps now are static or in a slow decline.
But nothing is static.
Those mountains, formed before human memory and existence, continue to shape and nourish countless beings, and they themselves continue to shift in response to the environment around them.
What can we learn when we look at food traditions through this lens?
It often seems that our infatuation with old ways of being is often just that: we humans run from the newest thing to the next, whether it’s the now passé trend of putting foams on fine dining plates (for the record, one of my least favorite food trends) or camping out for the latest tech gadget.
We run and run until the old seems new again, then we run to it, eager for a connection. Eager for depth. For something “authentic” (we’ll leave that loaded term aside for another conversation).
In this moment punctuated by an information glut, people seem eager to find balance between our quest for the new and our desire to reconnect with the old. It's a sentiment not unique to this age, but one that seems heightened by both our access to information (or lack thereof) and the variety of information available.
In Iceland, I felt the pull between old and new as I wandered a space where we are much closer to the earth than we are most places, including my home in Atlanta.
It's easier to slow down and listen to the earth when large swaths of wild spaces, minimally impacted by humans (to the extent we can minimally impact things), exist all around you.
It’s a place that reminds us of the oldness of the rocks and soil, the magma, the microbes. But it reminds you that each can be repackaged and repurposed: microbial colonies in the soil and in our bodies change based on what they're exposed to, and as we saw above, the land itself changes.
Ecological succession is a real thing, and the very landscape and the beings that inhabit it change over time. So too does human culture, which here only dates back to the Middle Ages as far as we know, but which has built its own unique culture distinct in some ways from neighboring Nordic countries, though still rooted within those traditions.
Cultured butter and “culture”
Cultured butter, a nod to this month’s member recipes as well as to my forthcoming book (from which the recipe below comes), is an entry point into this dual perspective of old and new.
Traditionally, butter is cultured with the same cultures we use for yogurt: cultures we learned to harness millennia ago to help our fickle, perishable dairy products last a bit longer. Even if the culture you use was not handed down for generations, the knowledge of it was, and when you culture butter you tap into that knowledge.
You also tap into your own space: the microbial environment of my home and of my person is going to be just a bit different from yours. If we both kept yogurt cultures in our homes for several years, even if from the same starter, we may notice some changes in flavor and performance based on what those cultures were exposed to and how they were stewarded.
You are, at once, rooting down in your own place and tapping in to a wider knowledge older than yourself.
But cultured butter speaks to the new and exploratory, too: as I learned from chef Sean Doherty, it can be cultured with all kinds of stuff. He taught me blue cheese butter (highly recommended!) but I’ve used the scraps from making banana vinegar, pickle brine, fire cider, and any number of other goodies, all of which impart their own flavor profile to butter and buttermilk. The paths for exploration are endless: nourishing our desire for the traditional and the novel in one fell swoop.
I think, perhaps, this touches on our desires of this moment. The desire for novelty and to connect with the past do not have to conflict. Rather, as cultured butter teaches us, they can live in tandem.
Root news
Our Herbs, Ferments +Art CSA featured some of my favorite late summer blends for clearing away late summer sluggishness, from bitters to a hops-infused shrub to tincture for settling stomachs after too many summertime treats (to see the full descriptions for each month, head here). There's even some chickweed in the mix.
As always, the CSA includes free shipping anywhere in the US. You can sign up here.
My newest class over at The Fermentation School is also ready for you!
Mindful Eating, Mindful Making: Building A Creative and Sustainable Fermentation Practice at Home is all about engaging with making and enjoying our food as a full sensory experience, being present in the cooking process, and using our time in the kitchen to build a playful and present mindfulness practice.
Preorder the class and get two free months of Root membership, which includes the paid member newsletters plus free access to mini-classes, discounts, etc.
The Hidden Cosmos: A Fermentation Recipe and Oracle Deck will be available for preorder next month, after a surprise equipment malfunction at the printer. Thank you for your patience!
To read
I wrote this piece, for Mother Earth News, about turning to the foods of the past to help us navigate the future.
Our relationship with our microbiomes has been a hot topic of research, and one that has changed over time (there will be a ton on that across traditional medicine modalities in my next book).
I gave a talk recently on fermented foods as medicine, where we touched on humoral theory, and used this piece as a reference. And, in the last month, about ten or twenty folks have sent me this study, which suggests that microbial diversity in the gut lowers inflammation.
Speaking of cultures, here's an overview of qurt, a packable yogurt-y travel snack from Central Asia.
I often wax poetic about how the recipe form as we know it is a thoroughly modern invention, and how printed cookery knowledge through about the mid 1800s (and often later) was mostly suggestions in paragraph form: no measured ingredient list and step by step list here. Marian Bull ties that history to Sam Sifton's newest book, New York Times Cooking: No Recipe Recipes.
The 68-plate banquet carved into the arch of the Seville cathedral reminds us that historic diets are often more varied and complex than we give them credit for.
Ancient wine vessels, and our description of them, are also worth a revisit. We tend to classify any clay container it was in as amphorae, but that’s far from accurate: yes, these Greek vessels have been found in dig sites far from Ancient Greece because, well, trade BUT they weren’t the only contenders. This piece offers a very brief, but helpful overview.
Speaking of beverages, I was interviewed for this piece in Imbibe on kombucha.
Alicia Kennedy offers this compelling piece on bones, our language and perspectives around food, and ultimately how these might map to what and how we eat in the future. She also shares this wonderful list of her must-read newsletters: Highly recommended for adding some new gems to your inbox.
For some Atlanta-specific news:
The Refugee Women's Network launched its Virtual Chefs Club, providing a platform for immigrants and refugees in the metro area to share culinary knowledge and traditions with a wider audience.
Common Good Atlanta, whose instructors provide college-level courses for incarcerated scholars in Georgia prisons (and who I had the pleasure of teaching for years ago), has launched a journal, The Hourglass, which is seeking submissions.
And finally, if you need something soothing to get lost in, might I suggest this video of seaweed, which I shot in Reykjavik.
To Make: Cultured butter
Cultured butter holds a special place in my heart, serving as a blank canvas for a host of flavors and as a way to use up our live cultured food scraps in a way that honors them and brings them some new life.
A chunk of blue cheese, leftover peppers from making hot sauce, apple scraps from vinegar making, or the scraps from infusing fire cider all can be transformed into something new with this method. The flavor of whatever you culture your cream with infuses into the cream, giving you both butter and buttermilk with their own unique spin.
For vegans, you can replicate this somewhat by infusing your scraps into cashew cream overnight in the fridge. You won't get butter, per se, but you will get a flavor-packed creamy spread out of the deal.
If you’re making something with scraps, rather than liquid, it’s also super easy to just mix softened margarine (or other preferred creamy spread) with your scraps in a food processor for a tangy compound butter situation.
This recipe is a sneak peek from my next book, Our Fermented Lives, which comes out next year from Storey Publishing.
Makes about 1 pound
1 quart heavy whipping cream (not ultrapasteurized)
1 tablespoon plain yogurt (see note)
Note: When selecting a yogurt to use for culturing, look for plain yogurt, preferably organic, with live and active cultures. If you like the way it tastes, you can use it to start your own yogurt, too, and never have to worry about buying yogurt again! There are many resources out there for learning to make yogurt, and you can find instructions online or in many fermentation books, like Sandor Katz' Art of Fermentation. If you want to buy a starter culture rather than yogurt from the store, you can find them through Cultures for Health and other retailers, or perhaps from a fermentation-loving friend.
1. Combine the cream and yogurt in a nonreactive mixing bowl and whisk together. Cover with a clean cloth or towel, and allow to rest at room temperature overnight.
2. Using an electric mixer, beat the cream for 5 to 10 minutes, until it forms butter. Initially you’ll get a thick whipped cream and might think you’re done. Keep going! You’ll know you have butter when the buttermilk and butter separate.
3. Pour off the buttermilk into a separate container and store in the fridge. Buttermilk is best used as soon as possible for the freshest flavor: I recommend using it within 2-3 days, though it will keep for up to a week.
4. Gently massage the butter under cold water until the water runs clear to remove the excess buttermilk. This will prolong the life of your butter.
5. Transfer the butter to a jar or other lidded vessel and store in the fridge. Like your buttermilk, cultured butter tastes best when used relatively soon after making, though it can keep in the fridge for about 2-3 weeks.
Butter Culture Variations
You can make cultured butter using all kinds of ferments beyond yogurt. I was inspired to jump down this rabbit hole by Maine-based chef and fermenter Sean Doherty, whose experiments culturing butter with blue cheese (which is so good) inspired me to start my own. Each ferment imparts its own unique qualities to butter, giving you another layer of flavor when you use that butter in dishes or as a spread.
The process is the same as above; just substitute another ferment for the yogurt. For most, I use between 2 and 4 tablespoons of ferment per quart of cream. This is a great space to play around and see what tastes best to you. In all cases, make sure you’re using live cultures.
My favorites include:
· Crumbled blue cheese
· Unpasteurized fire cider
· Live-culture pickle brine
· Unpasteurized banana vinegar
· Unpasteurized strawberry-jalapeño vinegar
· Unpasteurized honey vinegar or mead