WHAT IS PEASANT FOOD? Peasant
food conjures up so many different dishes for so many people. That’s
because peasants exist in all cultures across every generation. I
believe creating peasant food is not just cooking a type of dish,
but following a way of life. Subsisting with limited resources, to
me, necessitates the ultimate spirit of creativity. By my
definition, my father was a true modern day peasant; not because we
were refugees or that one of his first jobs was a strawberry picker
in the fields of California, but because he was a genius for making
a little go a long way.
Like any immigrant family, mine was faced
with the hardship of limited resources. My parents worked long hours
to make ends meet. They had little time to cook family meals but
refused to buy pre-made foods or dine out, simply because they
believed that home-cooked meals were the most economical way to feed
our family and extended family. Without time to both work and
prepare meals, my parents enlisted me as the family cook at age 12,
with my father as my teacher.
And what a tough teacher he was! His method was structured and
strict with a low-waste policy, scarcity
and efficiency being a lesson taught in every meal. He believed in
making things from scratch—a more economical approach than the
mass-produced fare of the modern era. Most importantly, his adaptive
style taught me to be mindful of seasonal providings and use
creativity to make do with items available at hand. Wasting food was
taboo in our household, and preparing meals within these parameters
forced frugal cooks to create inventive dishes from leftovers and
scraps, always taking advantage of the bounty of the season.
We often had ongoing debates about the true
cost of making things from scratch. In my first years in the
kitchen, I implored my father to buy ready-made products—pre-formed
hamburger patties for large family barbeques come to mind—in order
to minimize labor. Pre-formed hamburger patties were “so perfectly
round and so, well … easy!” I would argue. “Then use your brains to
find an easy way to form your perfectly round patties,” he would
challenge. I could never resist his challenges and before long, I
found myself slapping out dozens on dozens of patties from a lid
lined with plastic wrap. I secretly loved it when guests arrived,
watching me, my father’s young cook, throw down patty after patty at
pro speed.
What I loved even more was seeing guests bite
into the hamburgers that I seasoned, that I formed, that I made.
Sure, they were just hamburger patties—a small culinary feat for a
young cook—but these experiences taught me an important
lesson—developing efficient methods in order to maintain the value
and integrity of
a meal made from scratch, by hand. Made-from-scratch food is a
genuine labor of love, something that artisans, crafters, and cooks
alike struggle with most when trying to place a monetary value on
their work.
At the time, I saw little value in my father’s classroom. As
a teen, I had more on my mind than coming up with five different
ways to prepare greens. Though my father was systematic in his
cooking lessons, he also had an artistic side and was passionate not
just about cooking, but crafting great food from instinct and
ingenuity. We didn’t own a single cookbook. No measuring cup or
device was ever used for its intended purpose. Instead we would use
them as ladles, divvying up homemade broth for his creamy chicken
and rice porridge, or his luscious, fall-off-the-bone braised oxtail
and leeks. The
dishes my father created taught me that the real art of cooking lies
in the ability to make the simplest, most humble ingredients
wonderful.
Fortunately, most of us never
face the same adversity or economic hardship my parents experienced
as immigrants. But we can all learn from living like a peasant. To
this day, I don’t have my father’s recipes documented, but I do have
a lesson I always carry with me: the core of a dish is not just in the ingredients or
gadgets; it’s the skills, resourcefulness, and above all, the
inventiveness of the cook that helps create food not only to
nourish, but to please, regardless of wealth.
With a passion for made-from-scratch cooking, a knack for creating
inventive dishes, and a refusal to associate deliciousness with
wealth, I will be serving peasant food at Go Streatery.
It may be nothing like what you
have in mind when you think of peasant food, but it will have the
spirits of peasant food—nourishing,
hearty, delicious, inventive, and all made from a labor of love.