From this interview:
This brings us to the difference between having an intimate knowledge of food versus fetishizing it?
Kurt: Yes. Is there a more fetishized food than bacon?
Tamar: Bacon is a great example. Bacon is a sort of magic food, a little like olives, or anchovies, in that if you have a little, anything else you have seems special. If you have a tiny bit of bacon around, simple pasta with butter and cheese becomes a wonderful version of carbonara. Or an egg, fried in [bacon] fat, seems rustic and hardy. If you have olives, you can make olive paste, which disguises the fact that other than that you only have toast. A couple of anchovies transform anything, from pasta, to salad, to stale bread. But I didn’t feel able, in my book, to say that bacon was magical for all those reasons, because instead of understanding bacon as deeply economical, and all it takes to transform a staple into a great, rustic meal, we [now] understand it as something that needs to go into bourbon and chocolate. Even into peanut butter! We manage to pervert the most useful things, and in so doing, lose the ability to really marshal them.
The most profound and artful cooking is easily the most humble and satisfying. I write these words as the aroma of bacon still hangs in the air and reminds me that simple abundances -- eggs from a co-worker, the last two potatoes, a bit of homemade bacon, and some toasted bread slathered in butter and a little something from a jar of summer preserved -- these are all that are needed to make a meal that will nourish and beautifully sustain the body, and the spirit, regardless of the time of day.
...cooking with economy and grace here.
