Purposeful Primitive Brethren: Iron Chef Mario Batali
29 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Purposeful Primitive Brethren: Iron Chef Mario Batali
You dont need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
There are Purposeful Primitives in music, art and sport. One man who exemplifies the PP mentality in field totally unrelated to fitness is Mario Batali, a guy who is at once primitive and sophisticated. Batali is an innovative classicist who breaths new life into old school methods and techniques. He has bought to his audience a renewed appreciation of tradition and technique. I love the guy for many reasons. He turned his back on a lifetime career path when he quit as an executive chef for The Four Seasons hotel to go and live in a small village in Italy in order to immerse himself in classical Italian cooking. Its always risky to throw away a comfy corporate career for some crazed Mila Romano, Kunte Kinte Roots-style retro crapshoot but in his heart and soul Mario wanted to connect with his ethnic heritage and translate that into his culinary art. Jazz and blues musicians are also moved in this way; possessing enough technical chops to make a pile of dough playing music they have no emotional connection to but preferring instead to make less and stay passionately connected to their art. Thats a key distinction: a Purposeful Primitive will do what it takes to stay artistic and passionate and will refuse to devolve into a tradesman or a craftsman. Batali, as I myself do, grapples with the eternal irreconcilable contradiction: how to maintain the elemental effectiveness of primitive methods yet blend in modern sophistication that does not taint or ruin the Old School simplicity.
Unlike most of his TV contemporaries he refuses to talk down to his audience or students. He refuses to compromise or dilute his meals and recipes in order to make them easier, more user-friendly or sellable. Hell use unpopular food sources if thats whats called for, say cuttlefish or chicken liver. And hell prepare cuttlefish or chicken livers with a degree of expertise that will make your head spin. No compromise in order to make a sale. His foods are politically incorrect to the max and to Health Nazis he must be the Anti-Christ. I grew up on what I term rural peasant food; Deep South delta food made by my grandmother. She worked her early life as a cook for cotton pickers and field hands. When I see a guy like Batali wax poetic about trying to recreate the cooking of Italian grandmothers I know that of which he speaks. When Mario says that when you visit a small town Italy and ask wheres the best food in town? the answer from the knowledgeable locals will always be, not the tourist restaurant, but at the home of an aunt or grandmother, I know of what he speaks. I was exposed early on to the rural American version of that rural Italian peasant cooking tradition. Instead of ossobuco and bone marrow it might be catfish with hush puppies, instead of braised short ribs in red wine it might be slow smoked pork ribs. I know he would have been right at home sitting down at my grandmothers table for beer biscuits, okra, perfect chicken and lard crust fruit pie.
My grandmother had a large truck garden and because she lived alone and was poor, she raised her vegetables. I knew about the taste vibrancy of fresh plucked fruit and newly picked vegetables long before organic gardening became hip. She raised chickens, turkey, geese and ducks and they were free range decades before someone coined the term. We supplemented fresh vegetables with fresh brown eggs from the henhouse and catfish and bass caught from the Mississippi and Current River. We killed and plucked our own fowl. Pork and beef grown by the local farmers would be bartered for vegetables and the fruit pies she was famous for. Or she would barter sewing she was an expert seamstress and the wives would flock to her for Sunday-go-to-meeting dresses. The freezer was always filled by wintertime and supplemented with eternal canning. Canning was an ongoing ritual and the misty fragrant smell still reverberates in my head. A chord of wood for the potbelly stove cut down on the expense of the propane gas she heated the house with. Her indoor bathroom was built in 1965. Once my younger brother reached under the kitchen sink to recover some soap and leapt back when he saw a coiled water moccasin. He was 10 years old and freaked out. She matter-of-factly shot it where it lay with a .38 revolver she kept next to her featherbed. That to me is the very definition of a liberated woman. When I come across someone like Mario attempting to resurrect the old school rural cooking traditions (albeit from across the pond) it plucks a sympathetic chord in this man. One thing I learned from my grandmother (she taught me to cook and I took to it if you cooked you didnt have to wash dishes afterwards) was fresh foods are naturally delicious, so dont overwhelm them.
Iron Chef Mario is teaching the same lesson. His respect for tradition and his insistence that the freshest ingredients make the best meals assume the preparer is smart enough to get out of the way and let the natural vibrancy and depth of flavor shine though. The sophisticate enhances flavor and doesnt hide or disguise natural goodness in order to satisfy culinary ego. I try and pass on my love of fresh food prepared simply to the chronically overweight folks who seek my consul. To prepare your own meals is to control your fitness destiny. The people I try and teach basic food prep techniques to are continually surprised that diet meals can taste great. Im not a Food Nazi who insists people eat nothing but steamed chicken breast, rice and broccoli five times a day, 24-7-365, and unless they do they must not want it bad enough. Prison food dieting is the norm in the fitness world which is a damn shame when you understand how quick and easy and effortless it is to prepare a perfect salmon filet or a slew of BBQ shrimp or a platter of vegetables that are mind-blowing delicious. Our Purposefully Primitive approach to fitness in general and eating specifically is unorthodox and counterintuitive across the board: we challenge every convention and accepted practice and food prep is no exception. There are countless ways to prepare fresh foods in a fashion perfectly sympacato with someone trying to eat right in order to melt off body fat and add muscle.
Not every dish an Iron Chef prepares is appropriate for an individual trying to build muscle and melt off fat. On the other hand there is a hell of a lot we can learn from passionate food artists. The easy part is in knowing what to eat and what we shouldnt eat. It is fairly easy to determine how much a person should eat. Dylan said, You dont need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. You dont need a nutritionist or a dietician or a medical doctor to tell you not to eat sweets, artery-clogging saturated fat, junk food or man-made processed foods loaded with chemicals. We know that: hell, weve had that drilled into our heads so many times over the years that the real question is, tell me something I dont know. I am continually amazed at folks who shell out huge bucks to go to a dietician or a $100 an hour nutritionist to hear them say, Dont eat those bad foods. No sh#t Sherlock! What we need is access to a food artist, someone who can show us how to make delicious versions of the foods we know we should be eating. Taste is King and by introducing taste into diet foods the nutritional battle is all but won. When you are able to develop a repertoire of delicious diet dishes, meals so tasty we look forward to eating them, dieting is no longer is dietingit becomes what I call Performance Eating. All hail to Brother Mario Batali and all other Purposeful Primitives, no matter what art form they might practice.
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