Acommodating “the Mother of Invention”

“When the fire dies in the hearth, the funereal delights of cold snakes come into their own.” Piero Camporesi

Poets prefer “the good old days” but hard times have inspired most of civilization’s great discoveries. In the food industry that was the case even before civilization began. When prey became scarce, ancient hunters invented salting, smoking, cold storage and air-drying. Ancient gatherers invented pickling in winter climates, not in tropical areas where fresh foods were always available. Civilization arose when tribes determined to keep a constantly burning public hearth, so that hunters, gatherers and planters could start their personal fires without rubbing sticks together.



Those fires evolved into communal ovens, temples, churches and governments.


Long before Plato noted that “necessity is the mother of invention,” men had pushed the limits of their environment until their carelessness forced them to adapt to newly limited resources. In The Iliad, Homer’s heroes consume an ox over an open fire every 300 verses and disdain fish as a food of destitution. By the Golden Age of classical Athens, fish was luxury food and wood was so scarce that Athenians invented braziers, making charcoal a major industry. For the next thousand years, most of the great inventions in cooking compensated for exhausted supplies of wood. Cauldrons, fireplaces, ovens, ranges, clay pots, woks and kitchen cutlery were all invented to cook more food with fewer resources.


Iowa’s food history, even its prehistory, developed in reaction to catastrophic events. Descending glaciers dumped the world’s richest silt on a tongue-shaped midsection of our state - the Des Moines lobe. Then grazing animals migrated to the bountiful tall grasses. Hunters tracked that prey here. When planters came, first slowly in wagons, then rapidly on railroads, they cleared the grasses and the forests to grow corn, the king of grains. In the 19th century, western and northern Europeans in Iowa reaped the greatest harvests in the world.


The state’s agricultural was converted, from vast diversity to just two cash crops, in reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Corn and soy beans were easily processed into non-perishable food stuffs that aided the World War II effort. After that war, those two crops created the backbone of an industrial food revolution that led to the political invention of government-subsidized proteins. That created the cheapest food in world history - measured in the number of hours of labor required to eat. Contemporary Americans are more distanced from hunger than any people who ever lived. But all things are relative and in today’s economic chaos, everyone is looking to cut their budget, including their food budget. If history is prelude, then new creativity will follow.


Already in Des Moines some chefs and restaurateurs are ingeniously breaking such eggs. In the Shops at Roosevelt, La Mie owner Joe Logsdon had a state of the art French bakery that was productively serving breakfast and lunch. He tried dinner service but it stretched his staff and hours and it wasn’t as productive. Tag Grandgeorge had been running the kitchens of some of the more interesting restaurants this decade - Arthouse and Grand Piano Bistro among them. After spending time in France and New York, he wanted something smaller and more French. Rent never sleeps, so Logsdon offered to share his space with Grandgeorge, who opened Le Jardin for dinner only, with an entirely different staff. Two of the city’s best cafés now have a better chance of turning a profit.


Jesus Ojeda came to Des Moines after the closing of Le Francaise, a legendary Illinois café that made most national critics’ short list of America’s best restaurants. He worked there under Don Yamaguchi, one of America’s most creative chefs. After a stint with George Formaro at Centro, he opened his own café El Chisme. Determined to make all his food from scratch, even in a little family diner, he realized that tortilla recipes could be easily changed to make pizza crusts with the same machinery. His creative spark began mixing slow foods of Mexico and Italy in cross cultural applications. Then he began making scratch pasta, everything from angel hair to lasagna sheets.


Sometimes, the best new ideas are old ideas. Like snout-to-tail eating, a hot new alternative to the modern decadence of raising entire animals for just a few choice cuts and shipping the rest off to fertilizer and pet food companies. Le’s Chinese BBQ has been cooking snout-to-tail for a years now with pigs, ducks and chickens. Old Castle recently custom-built a rotisserie large enough to roast three whole sheep at the same time. Customers can not only find lamb now, they can specify orders anatomically, a service that has been unavailable here for most of the last century. Norwalk’s La Quercia, producer of pork products for the nation’s best restaurants, is applying snout-to-tail thinking too. That company introduced new guanciale, pancetta, lonza, lardo, spallacia, and prosciutto products last year, all made from precious acorn-fed pigs. That pig diet had disappeared even in its Duchy of Parma homeland but snout-to-tail made it practical again.


Some economizing ideas go to extremes. One of Iowa Pork Council’s “best tenderloin” awardees, Larsen’s Pub recently served us a tenderloin sandwich on a very cold bun. When asked if it could be toasted, the owner replied, “To do that, we’d have to light the grill. So we don’t do that.”