Cooking like it's 1950

On Saturday, I shopped for food and cooked dinner in a way that probably resembles how my women shopped and cooked in the 1950s and long before. I walked to Reading Terminal Market and went from shop to shop to buy fresh ingredients. I picked up pasta, freshly cut to the width I requested, spices at the spice shop, fresh cheese at the cheese shop, and produce at the produce shop. On the way home, I stopped at a bakery to get a loaf of bread. This all took a lot longer than a typical grocery shopping trip--close to two hours--but then, it was an outing in itself. I stopped to gawk at the chocolate shop, grabbed a water ice to eat on my walk home, then sat in Rittenhouse Square for a bit.

I cooked without the t.v. on, using the ingredients I'd purchased earlier in the day. Somehow, as I was chopping vegetables, sauteing garlic, and sipping a drink, I felt a sense of relaxation slip over me. Something about how closely you have to attend to details--whether the garlic has gotten brown enough yet in the saute pan, or if the parsley is chopped finely enough--makes me feel the way I feel when I meditate. It occurred to me that cooking for women in past generations was a lot more work than it is now, and they had a lot more people to feed, but I wonder whether they might yet feel this sense of peace from the task.

To Market, To Market

This Saturday, I visited DC's Eastern Market. It was perfect weather for a walk around Capitol Hill and a morning of shopping outdoors. I wanted to make sure to visit this month, though, because the market has been suffering since its historic 1873 building had a terrible fire on April 30th. It's one of the places in DC that I'll miss most when I move.

Going to a public market has an appeal to it that a shopping mall will never capture. In some markets, being outdoors is one part of the allure, but so is interacting directly with the people who make, grow, or at least select their own merchandise. It also feels like a bit of a step back in time, since people have been selling goods this way for centuries.

Two of my favorite places from past visits to Philly are historic public markets. The city's Italian market claims to be "the oldest and largest working outdoor market in the United States," and I'm excited to be able to go there more often. Reading Terminal Market is a bit closer to where I'll be living and is historic in its own right; it apparently evolved out of an outdoor mess of stalls along what became Market Street.

I discovered that a fellow GW American Studies program alum has published a book called Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America that explores how markets were key to the development of shared community values. The book focuses on New York and Philadelphia, but I think the recent fire at Eastern Market has demonstrated how central the space was to the community here in DC.

The community isn't just about the people that come to the markets; it's about the vendors interacting with their customers. The Slow Food movement (part of which is focused on buying local) calls this "linking producers and co-producers." I think I'll go eat some of the cherries I "co-produced" right now, in fact.