I Have A (Cooking) Confession

Confessions of a Reformed Cheese Snob

I was a parmesan cheese snob.  There, I said it.  And not for just any parmesan, mind you, my cheese had to be Parmigiano-Reggiano and had to be aged at least 24 months.  Nothing else would do.  Ever.  Under any circumstances.  God forbid that I subject my completely unrefined palate to anything lesser.  If I was at an Italian restaurant and wanted to put cheese on my pasta, I could feel the cringe run up my spine as I sprinkled on whatever unworthy white stuff they had in the cheese shaker.

Until recently.

A couple of months ago, I decided to up my pasta game.  I sometimes made fresh pasta but my pasta definitely wasn't great.  Even my best efforts turned out to be just okay.  The only thing making it worth the effort was that even mediocre fresh pasta (like mine) beats dried pasta any day, but my work definitely wasn't memorable by any standard.

I wasn't sure what to do until I thought back to an episode of 'Chef's Table' where Massimo Bottura brought in a little old lady from the Modena neighborhood where his restaurant is to teach his chefs how to make pasta.  If anyone knows how to make pasta, it's little old Italian ladies who have been making pasta every day for the last sixty years, right?  They're the quiet Masters of the Art.  And where do you find little old Italian ladies making pasta?  Why, YouTube, of course.  YouTube, literally, has videos of anything and everything.  God bless the internet.

Sure enough, after a few false starts, I found 'Pasta Grannies'.  'Pasta Grannies' is just what it sounds like; it's videos of Italian grannies making pasta.  Vicky Bennison, the creator of the channel, is a British lady who tools around Italy making short and very watchable videos of Italian women, many in their eighties and nineties, who make pasta that I could only dream of making.  I watched a bunch of videos, went to Sam's Italian Market to get some specialty ingredients, and began to cook.

One thing I noticed was that the Pasta Grannies rarely used Parmigiano-Reggiano.  They used local fresh cheeses to a great extent and when they needed a dry cheese, they frequently turned to Pecorino Romano.  What were they doing to that beautiful pasta, using cheese unworthy of their handiwork?  How could these wonderful cooks be committing such a cardinal sin?

I wanted to substitute.  I really did.  But I also wanted to be faithful to their recipes, at least at first.  I told myself that I could "fix" them later.  Then I started cooking.

God, was their pasta good.  And the cheese flavor in the cappelletti and the agnolotti... it was like a salty, cheesy explosion in my mouth.  Holy crap, I realized, these ladies were on to something.  If you were in my kitchen, you probably would have seen the proverbial light bulb go on above my head.

Of course these women were on to something.  Any one of these ladies has forgotten more about good cooking than I know  (and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know).  With my epiphany, my preconceived notions about Parmigiano-Reggiano were shattered forever.  Gone was my cheese snobbery in a puff of 00 flour.

What I realized, yet again, was that there was a place for every ingredient.  For pasta in a heavy sauce with lots of strong flavors, I needed the sharper Pecorino Romano to cut through all that and add its note to the dish.  Parmigiano-Reggiano, with it's more delicate and nutty flavor profile, would get drowned out in a sea of tomato and garlic.  Everything was about balance and the needs of the dish.  I didn't stir fry in extra virgin olive oil.  I didn't make beef stew with filet mignon.  Ingredients had their places, their roles in the opera.  There were places for the stars singing their arias but there were equally important places for the wide array of singers in the chorus.  A delicate soloist would get lost in the volume of the chorus but will shine on center stage.

I still love Parmigiano-Reggiano.  To me, nothing beats the rind of old parmesan cheese, with it's intense, aged flavor.  If I'm shaving cheese on top of a salad or roasted asparagus, you can bet I'll have my block out, aged at least 24 months, of course.  But in my cheese drawer these days is also a block of Pecorino Romano, waiting for its call to the stage.

The 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg

Given the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, I thought I'd share one of the many incredible stories of valor from Gettysburg.  If you've watched the movie 'Gettysburg' or if you've watched Ken Burns' 'Civil War' documentary series (which I highly recommend) then you know the big stories from Gettysburg... Pickett's Charge, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top, and so on... but for every big story there are dozens of little stories.  For this one, I chose the 1st Minnesota.

The 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment was made up of officers and men who had joined in 1861 and had seen action at First Bull Run, the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.  On the morning of 2 July 1863 the regiment mustered 262 hardened veterans under command of Col. William Colvill.  They were in reserve as part of the II Corps when the Confederate attack fell onto Dan Sickle's exposed III Corps and crushed it in battles we still remember for their ferocity and savagery; the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Devil's Den, and so on.

Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, commander of the II Corps, was on top of Cemetery Ridge as the Confederates broke through the shattered III Corps.  Advancing rapidly on Cemetery Ridge was Wilcox's Alabama Brigade, some 1,500-1,800 men.  Nothing stood between the Alabama men and the rear of the Union Army, nothing except for the 1st Minnesota.

Hancock knew what had to be done.  He rode to Col. Colvill and ordered his men to attack.  Hancock needed time to find and bring up more troops or the Union line would be split in two and Gettysburg would turn into yet another Southern victory.  The Minnesotans looked behind them at the unprotected supply wagons, field hospitals, and mess tents then looked in front of them at the 1,500-plus advancing rebels.  The 1st Minnesota were not green troops.  They had seen the killing fields of Northern Virginia.  They knew both what needed to be done and what the cost would be... and they attacked.  After the war, Lt. William Lochren would remember, "“Every man realized in an instant what that order meant – death or wounds to us all, the sacrifice of the regiment to gain a few minutes time and save the position.  And every man saw and accepted the necessity for the sacrifice."

Wilcox's Alabamans were stunned by the sudden ferocity of their charge.  The Alabamans were forced to give battle, unequal as it was.  Wilcox would later write, "Three several times did this last of the enemy's lines attempt to drive my men back, and were as often repulsed. This struggle at the foot of the hill on which were the enemy's batteries, though so unequal, was continued for some thirty minutes."

Those thirty minutes, paid for in blood by the men of the 1st Minnesota, gave Hancock enough time to bring up additional troops and force the Alabamans to retreat.  When the smoke cleared, only forty seven Minnesotans were still standing.  All of the senior officers had been killed or wounded and the surviving men were under command of Captain Nathan Messick.  Depending on which historical records you believe, between 215 and 240 Minnesotans were killed or wounded.  No other unit in the history of the United States Armed Forces has lost a higher percentage of its men in a single battle.

As if that wasn't enough story for a lifetime...  Hancock gathered the remnants of the 1st Minnesota, the survivors of the day, plus 86 men who had been previously sent to other parts of the Union line.  He organized them and placed them at the center of his II Corps where he thought they would be safe.  That spot turned out to be the center of the Union line where Pickett's charge would land on July 3rd.

Other men might have broken and run.  No one would begrudge the 1st Minnesota if they did.  They did not.  They fought the 28th Virginia hand-to-hand, capturing their regimental colors.  Captain Messick was killed in the fighting, as was their next commander, Captain Farrell.  When the fighting was done on July 3rd, seventeen additional Minnesota men had been killed or wounded.  For their actions on the 3rd, two soldiers of the 1st Minnesota, Corporal Henry D. O’Brien and Private Marshall Sherman would both receive the Medal of Honor.

In an ironic postscript, in the 1990s a group of Virginian descendants of the 28th Virginia asked for their regimental battle flag back.  The Minnesota Historical Society, who still have that flag today, politely refused.  When the Virginia group threatened to sue, the Attorney General of Minnesota stepped in and essentially said that if anyone wanted that flag back, they would need to go through the State of Minnesota to get it.  The request was quietly withdrawn.

History is Changing

History is changing... quite literally.  I don't mean that the way we view history is changing or the way historians do research is changing, I mean that history itself is changing, and it's because of the internet.  The internet is changing the way that historians work, the availability of resources, who can do really good history, and... consequently... it's changing history itself.

A very wise man used to tell me that there is no such thing as objective history.  Being the naive and intellectually arrogant teenager that I was, I vehemently disagreed with him.  Surely there was an objective series of events that happened in the past and if we just looked hard enough, we could figure out exactly what those events were and capture forever a perfect, and objective, view of exactly what happened at a certain time or a certain place.  I had a Newtonian view of history.  If we could account for all of the people and sequences, we could state, beyond a shadow of a doubt, exactly what happened.  Objective history, right?

Unfortunately for my teenage worldview, the reality is that we don't... and can't... know everything perfectly.  Heck, we don't even know exactly what words Lincoln spoke in his Gettysburg Address and the Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches in American history!   (There are five known manuscripts that vary from version to version and there are additional versions from contemporary accounts, including an AP reporter's account who wrote it down in shorthand as he listened.)  How can we hope to know what happened in a conversation between two generals at some obscure battle or what was said between two congressmen as they struck a back room deal?  Beyond the events themselves, trying to determine an individual's emotional state, motivations, fears, or other deeply personal feelings is effectively impossible.  What happened here or there and, more importantly, why it happened, is sometimes not much more than guesswork.  That's where historians and the tools of their trade come into play and that's where the internet is fundamentally changing everything.

I recently read "John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General" by Stephen Hood.  I had seen "Sam" Hood speak at several Civil War conferences (thank you, C-SPAN) and I found his talks fascinating.  Sam Hood is a indirect descendant of General John Bell Hood and isn't a "professional" historian.  He's just a smart guy with a love of history who happens to be a meticulous researcher and a pretty good writer.  He's produced a well-researched book about General Hood that's as much an exercise in historiography (the study of historical writings) as it is a history of the life of John Bell Hood.  General Hood had been widely trashed by historians for the last 50 years (to the point where he got trashed in Ken Burns' "Civil War").  Sam Hood thought it seemed a bit unfair and when he started digging, it turned out that it was.

Sam Hood took General Hood's biographers to task and rightly so.  Sam Hood went back through the footnotes in these scholarly biographies, dug back to original sources, and tried to ferret out what really happened in certain situations.  It turned out that, for whatever reason, mid-20th century historians engaged in hyperbole, speculation, and some flat out making up crap when it came to General Hood.  Time and again, Sam Hood was able to cite primary sources that showed biographer bias and how they ignored source material counter to their conclusions.  Sam Hood also turned a harsh light on the intellectual laziness of later 20th century historian who simply repeated, and in some cases, embellished, the unfair or untrue earlier stories about General Hood.  To some extent, the internet made this renewed examination of General Hood possible.

One advantage Sam Hood had was the internet and the vast sources that have been digitized and put online by numerous libraries and projects.  That doesn't excuse earlier historians for not checking primary sources or picking and choosing only only primary sources that suited their story line.  The biographies cited by Sam Hood were largely written by professional historians, history professors at prestigious universities, and at least part of their job was to check their sources vigorously.  It certainly didn't excuse the second wave of historians who simply repeated the stories from the first without doing the additional research of verifying claims.  It reminds me of one brand of false news cycle where a fringe web site states something as fact, two other fringe web sites quote the first, then a mainstream site posts it, claiming that they have an original source and two additional sources that have verified whatever ridiculous claim was originally made.

I was still brooding over Sam Hood's book when I searched YouTube for lectures on General Hood.  Sure enough, there was a recent lecture by one of the Hood biographers that Sam Hood had taken to task.  Sam Hood hadn't ripped him too badly except on the question of repeating fairly serious charges against General Hood without going back to original sources.  The lecture was recent enough that it would have been after Sam Hood's book was generally available.  So I watched it.

At first, the lecturer (and I don't want to name names) avoided the more controversial parts of Hood's military career, which were mostly towards the end of the Civil War.  When he got to that point in General Hood's career, the speaker alluded briefly, and I thought somewhat rudely, to Sam Hood's book.  Referring to Sam Hood somewhat insultingly as a "shirt tail historian", the lecturer defended his practice of using stories from previous biographers as essentially something that everyone does so it was okay.  The speaker did certainly calm some of his rhetoric towards the events around the fall of Atlanta and take a more neutral position so at least in that sense, Sam Hood's book had had some success.

I was still thinking about the Hood lecture and the "everybody does it" excuse, when I saw that there was an upcoming lecture about the Grant presidency (thank you again, C-SPAN).  I decided to watch it.

The lecture was by Charles Calhoun and was in conjunction with the release of his book "The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant".  It turned out to be fascinating to watch and, in part, addressed the same kinds of issues that were raised by Sam Hood.  Dr. Calhoun addressed both the history of the Grant administration as well as the historiography around it.  And, it turns out, the opinion of biographers regarding the Grant administration has changed considerably over time.  Early in the 20th century, Grant was ranked as one of the worst presidents (even below James Buchanan) although over the century rose to be somewhere in the middle.  Dr. Calhoun was just as fascinated with this change in perception as he was in the Grant administration itself.

Dr. Calhoun went on to talk about how it took eight years to write the book.  Among the reasons that he cited for taking so long, he spoke about going back to primary sources to make sure he got the story as correct as possible.  He mentioned letters, diaries, newspapers, and other contemporary sources.  There was no "I copied from this guy because that's good enough".  It was, in a way, a remarkable presentation, especially set against the lecture about General Hood that I had watched only a few days before.  Was easier access to primary sources a factor in Dr. Calhoun's decision?  He didn't answer that question specifically but I have to wonder if it was.  Regardless, Dr. Calhoun made it clear that not going back to primary sources does a disservice to future readers and, if an author truly wants accuracy, they have to do that work.

There is no objective history but there's certainly no excuse for sloppy history.  More and more archives are being digitized.  More and more archival material is being translated and being made available in multiple languages.  The past never changes but our lens into it, and the history we see through that lens, is clearer than ever.