3,000 Miles From Home.
Since first hearing our class would be visiting Honeyman Creek Farm and taking a class with Robert Hammond, something excited me. I don’t know if it was just the opportunity to see a different perspective on food, getting to meet another North Carolinian who had established themselves here, or maybe just getting a chance to see a little bit more of Oregon outside of Portland. I’m sure it was a little of everything. Up until that day, I would joke with friends and family that I traveled 3,000 miles across the country to the Pacific Northwest to take a class on southern cooking. I quickly realized it was so much more than that.
After being given a quick tour of Robert’s farm, he welcomed us into his home and talked with us about what we would be cooking and why he is so passionate about American heritage recipes. It was really moving for me. There seems to always be discussion in the food world about defining what “American Cuisine” is. I think sometimes these old regional styles might be discarded because they aren’t trendy enough to make it in the restaurant world. At the same time, with fewer and fewer people cooking at home, I feel like American “grandma cooking” is fading into extinction, no matter what cultural background it comes from.
The meal was wonderful. Just great tasting food with great ingredients, many of which came from the property we were cooking on. Nothing about it sounded difficult, and nothing about cooking it was. We all worked together so well, and everything went so seamlessly that I could picture a family gathering to prepare the meal that it would later sit down to eat. It was another revelation about the importance of this style of food: bringing people together both in the preparation and the enjoyment of it. It was inspiring to learn from and share a meal with someone like Robert Hammond, and to listen to his perspective on cooking.
I walked away from this class with an even more reinforced outlook on what we learn at the studio. Things like the importance of technique. Like knowing the foundations of and thinking behind classic cooking styles before developing your own cooking style. Like building a dish in a way that gives the ingredients their full glory, and letting them be the star. –Nick Passarella, Student
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