SAVOR ENCORE
Homemade Goodness
Local venues create their own syrups, jams and pickled foods Once a staple of The Greatest Generation, at-home food preservation is heating up again, along with at-home condiment preparation. Pinterest, cooking magazines and recipe websites such as Bon Appetit, Epicurius, Food Network and Better Homes and Gardens are chock full of recipes for homemade jams, sauces, syrups and pickled foods. “Preserving food cannot be considered new and trendy,” said New York Times writer Julia Moskin in a 2009 article about the resurgence of canning. “But the recent revival of attention to it fits neatly into the modern renaissance of handcrafted food, heirloom agriculture and using food in its season.” It’s no accident, say sources such as the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Seattle Magazine and National Public Radio, this revived interested in food preservation through canning and pickling coincided with the Great Recession. People’s desire to save money, use local produce and food sources, and pull back to slow, home-cooking methods has continued trending ever since purse strings started to tighten in 2008. Depression-era cooking methods such as canning and pickling can prove tricky to master. Locally, Fair Food Matters and Tillers International offer classes on how to properly make homemade foods and prepare foods for preservation. If you’d rather leave trendy food preps as beautiful pins on Pinterest and nothing more but still desire that homemade taste, many local restaurants offer canned, homemade sauces, jams, syrups and pickled goods. Here’s a small sample of where you can find such foods:
Old Dog Tavern Old Dog, at 402 E. Kalamazoo Ave., dishes up a plethora of throwback foods, from infused simple syrups such as habanero, ginger vanilla, brown sugar cinnamon nutmeg and cherry vanilla flavors, for use in signature cocktails, to pickled vegetables 16 | ENCORE APRIL 2015
Brian Powers
We want it just like Grandma made it.
Old Dog Tavern creates its own simple syrups to be used in drinks, including habanero (in the Drink Me bottle), cherry and maple syrups.
for Bloody Marys. Old Dog even features a homemade mustard made from a recipe that originated on owner Sean Smith’s Irish side of the family, the Dorgans. Hence its name — Dorgan’s Mustard. “I found the handwritten recipe in Sean’s mom’s house,” says tavern co-owner Amy
Smith. “I made the mustard and copies of the index card it (the recipe) was written on and gave it as a gift to the whole family. The family used to put it on everything from corned beef to pastrami.” After resurrecting the recipe, Amy Smith made it a part of Old Dog’s menu, adding