Towards a Local Food Culture

My trip to Sweden changed my perspective in so many ways, but the one thing relevant to this blog is the extent to which Swedes have a local food culture. We happened to be in Sweden for Midsummer, which is a very big holiday celebrated in much the same way that Memorial Day is in the U.S. as the official start of summer. It's actually a much bigger deal there, where the winters are so terribly dark and cold. And how do they choose to celebrate it? They weave garlands of wildflowers to wear upon their heads, dance around a maypole-like structure festooned with ivy and pine branches, hold a bonfire to ensure there's light through the shortest (and not terribly dark) night of the year, and they eat local food. Lots of it. In particular, strawberries and new potatoes.

Because of the unseasonably cold and wet weather, locally grown strawberries were less abundant than usual and thus in high demand. Strawberries are a key symbol of midsummer, and if you dare to show up to your midsummer party toting strawberries imported from Poland, oh, my! The sneers and jeers. Far better to pay $10 for a local pint. In grocery stores, the wooden strawberry baskets were stamped with an elaborate Made in Sweden symbol. Along the highways, local farmers set up farmstands selling strawberries, potatoes, and bouquets for garlands. Every restaurant we went to offered local strawberries and cream for dessert and pancakes with strawberries as a kid's meal.

Swedes also take tremendous pride in locally grown new potatoes. Ask any Swede, and he'll expound at great length on the superiority of the Swedish new potato in flavor, texture, and abundancy. I have to admit, they were tasty and creamy. Swedes even have special potato tumblers - they look rather like salad spinners - in which you place a dinner-sized amounts of new potatoes and turn a crank to remove all the peels.

Swedes take pride in several other local foods, such as lingonberries, shrimp (particularly in Stockholm) and crayfish (particularly in Gothenburg). What astonishes me, however, is that they take pride in their food at all. Aside from New England maple syrup and clam chowder, and chile in New Mexico, I've never experienced this kind of fierce loyalty to one's regional food. Sweden has a deeply ingrained local food culture, of the kind that Michael Pollan discusses in his book, In Defense of Food.

...the "What to eat" question is somewhat more complicated for us than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most of human history, humans have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us, we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and when and with whom have for most of human history been a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to child.

Somehow, Swedes have never really lost this culture. Yes, I saw Mexican food in grocery stores, passed a sushi restaurant, ate at a pizzeria in Gothenburg (bleh). And Swedes love their coffee and are the highest per capita consumers of bananas in the world. And yet, nearly every meal I ate while in Sweden had its roots in Swedish food tradition, from the herring appetizers with nubba (shots of aqua vit) to the hot dogs (korv) sold on street corners.

And Swedes can be inventive when using local food. On the one day of the vacation when I utterly succumbed to jet lag and stayed home instead of visiting yet another castle, my husband brought me back an enormous tub of horseradish soup. That's right, horseradish. Apparently, he and his various relatives had gone to a restaurant where the cook knew a local farmer with a bumper crop of horseradish. She blithely made a creamed soup out of it, using cream, creme fraiche, butter, eggs, and herbs and spices. This is so quintessentially Swedish, where nearly every dish has some addition of butter, cream, or both. And the soup was utterly delicious. I can't wait to start hunting through farmer's market stalls for horseradish so that I can try it myself.

This all reminds me of New Mexico, where I grew up. New Mexico also has a strong local food culture, particularly centered around chile and corn. My mother is Hispanic, and in my grandparent's house on their farm in Albuquerque, I ate very traditional New Mexican cuisine: enchiladas, tamales, posole, chicharones, sopapillas, calabacitas, papitas con carne al caldo, carne adobada, biscochitos, empanaditas.

And, just as described in Michael Pollan's book, my mother cooked almost none of these with the notable exception of enchiladas. (A favorite family story is how my Anglo father used to wash my grandparents' ceilings for seven-layer enchiladas with a fried egg on top. My dad is 6'4", and the ceilings were 7 feet high.) Instead, my mother made chicken cacciatore, chicken imperial, spaghetti and meatballs, salmon croquettes, Hawaiian hot dogs. And they were all wonderful - my mother is a fantastic cook. But they weren't her culture, nor were they local (with the exception of homegrown vegetables and beef from the farm). When my family eats out, and they do that more now than ever, they eat Chinese, Indian, Italian... anything but local cuisine, until I come to town and demand a run to Los Cuates or El Pinto. And yes, there are lots and lots of New Mexican restaurants in Albuquerque, all doing a fine business. There is still a local food culture in New Mexico. But it's not what it used to be.

Other regions of the U.S. have retained their local food culture, most notably the South. Living here in Boston, however, I have to look hard to find any remnants of a New England food culture. It's easier to find on the coast, in places like Hull and Gloucester and Cape Cod, though I have to wonder how much the tourist industry has tainted this cuisine. This seems tragic to me, that we have no real local cuisine. One of the things I love about Boston is the abundance and variety of restaurants: Greek, Chinese, Ethiopian, Himalayan, you name it. But I can't think of a single restaurant that serves only traditional New England cuisine. Has it died out altogether?

I think it's time to create a new New England food culture and cuisine, one that builds on old traditions and makes use of new techniques but always and particularly makes use of locally available foods. If you know of a restaurant that specializes in traditional New England food, let me know. If you're an nth-generation New Englander with recipes passed down through the generations, please share them! Let's revive our local food culture and make it stronger and better than ever.