Like prosciutto — or the currently more ballyhooed Spanish jamón serrano — American country ham is the uncooked, salt-cured leg of pig, hung to mature for months and sometimes years. The long curing was originally meant to let the salt work into the meat and preserve it from rot, but for eaters in the age of refrigeration, time-consuming chemistry is where the action’s really at. Slowly, enzymes naturally in the meat will break proteins down into our coterie of tasty friends, the amino acids, which give us the satisfying, blooming taste of umami. The fats in the meat slowly change, too, creating beautiful compounds that Harold McGee describes as “characteristic of the aromas of melon, apple, citrus, flowers, freshly cut grass, and butter.” Wait, did you catch that? Pork fat that tastes like butter.

But there are two vital distinctions between country ham and its European relatives. One, it’s often smoked, giving it different layers of flavor. But even more important is the stark difference in the culture of its fans. Americans have learned to savor European hams, acknowledging them as delicacies — the finest examples can command well over $100 per pound. But country ham in America doesn’t have the same kind of reputation among gourmets, and it remains a deeply democratic food. Allan Benton, who makes one of the true gold-standard country hams, charges $6.50 for a 15-ounce package.

John T. Edge, one of the great food ambassadors of the South, told me that he once took a superb chef to breakfast in the Mississippi Delta. Blown away by his plate of country ham and eggs, the chef asked the waitress where they got it, expecting a romantic story of the artisan ham curer down the way. “The Sysco truck brings it by,” she said. Even Waffle House serves it.

Where did it come from?

Salt-curing meat for preservation is nearly as old as raising animals for food, but American country ham was almost certainly “invented” in Smithfield, Va., where colonials took the pigs they brought from England, fattened them on peanuts slaves brought from Africa, and salted and smoked them according to local Indian methods. According to another of the great Southern food ambassadors, John Egerton, in “1737, William Byrd complained in his Natural History of Virginia that the people of that colony ate so much pork that they were becoming ‘extremely hoggish in their temper … and prone to grunt rather than to speak.’”

Smithfield ham became one of the world’s most famous, but it eventually ran with the wrong profit-mongering crowd, and is now made in the typical industrial fashion — fast, cheap and not nearly exciting enough to be out of control. And, as Peter Kaminsky points out in “Pig Perfect,” “the fine old Smithfield Company has the biggest operation in the country of environmentally ruinous hog factories.”

Happily, the tradition of country ham spread throughout the South, and is still being made today by a handful of traditional curers, though they are, admittedly, aging. Allan Benton is (deservedly) a darling among hamficionados, but others, including Colonel Newsom’s in Kentucky and Burgers’ Smokehouse in Missouri, are doing amazing things.

Who’s eating it?

This is where the cultures of high and low cuisine get interesting. Country ham has never left the Southern table, whether soaked overnight and then baked like a fresh ham or sliced, fried and served with biscuits and redeye gravy at breakfast.

But as high-end chefs around America have fallen for it, many have taken to presenting it through the European ham-filter. At the super-sleek Modern in New York, Gabriel Kreuther makes food of uncommon finesse, and uses Allan Benton’s ham in his beer-based Alsatian Country Soup, infusing it with deep, funky, smoky complexity. Having grown up near the French-German border and therefore no stranger to amazing pork, chef Kreuther said to me, “I grew up on a farm, and this ham … it reminded me of the hams that we made when I was growing up. These are the tastes you remember.”

Taking cues from the culture of prosciutto, David Chang’s ever-fawned-over Momofuku Ssäm Bar opened in 2006 with a country ham service, slicing it paper thin and serving it raw, highlighting the meat’s silky texture and subtly sweet complexities. (Remember: pork fat that tastes like butter.) DG Strong, Salon’s own Nashville boy and a bit of a country ham himself, was beside himself with the news: “Lawzy! (putting cool compress to forehead) The thin ham thing will certainly get purists’ dander up.”

But purism or no, high-end chefs are hooked. As Edge said, “We’re in the third generation of country ham obsession among chefs. First they fell for it. Then they lionized Allan and the other honest curers of hams. Now they’re curing their own. At the City House in Nashville, I saw Tandy Wilson hugging a 27-month-old ham like the proudest kid in the world. Sean Brock and his sous chef at McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C., trotted out their ham like it was their child’s bride.”

Longevity rating: 10 (out of 10)

Country ham is one of those foods that is endlessly romanticized but, in the wailing ballads of its partisans, seemingly no one ever eats anymore. Like so many traditional, time-intensive crafts, the bells have been tolling for country ham since at least the ’70s., when James Villas wrote “Cry, the Beloved Country Ham” for Esquire. It’s always about to be ground under for good by modern industry. But the culture of American country ham has fought the good fight and kept it alive for this many centuries, and it might just be bourgeois foodie culture that’s going to sweep in and save it for good.

Rejuvenated by the respect of chefs and food media, and inspired by the artisan- and heritage- food movement, master curers like Allan Benton are making their hams even better, experimenting with heritage pigs and better sourcing. As chefs take to curing their own product, some of their acolytes will likely branch off and specialize in the craft. And, given the bacon fad’s vampire-like ability to just … never … die, it’s not hard to guess that Americans will always like themselves a touch of cured pig. “This art’s got legs,” John T. said to me. “Two hind legs, at least.”

2. Abed from “Community” shows up on “Cougar Town”:

Easter egg for the super fans and the people who love Subway.

3. OWN picks up new series, “Don’t Tell the Bride“: Groom and future wife are separated for a month before the wedding; he has to make all the decisions about planning the event. Hope she likes nachos and a boob-shaped cake.

4. Student makes Chanel bag out of beef jerky:

(Photo by Nancy Wu)

Oh what? It’s all cowhide, no matter which way you look at it. Calm down and take a bite.

5. Museum-going men are happier than their counterparts: That 2 percent of the male population must be having a blast.

6. This mommy kitten is hugging her baby kitten:

Yes, dear, it’s very, very cute. Please let me go back to bed now, I have work in the morning. Well, if it’s so great, take a video of it! I’ll watch it later.

7. “Pop-Up Video” is coming back to VH1: Though now it’s just called “tweeting during music videos.”

8. “Jersey Shore’s” Ronnie and the Situation get into a fistfight in Florence: Really, guys? Really? Italy was ready to boot you out before you even showed up, and this is how you show your good behavior?

9. Mark Zuckerberg, woodsman: The Facebook CEO will only eat food he kills himself. His private message to friends on FB just read: “I just killed a pig and a goat.” And not on FarmVille.

10. “True Blood’s” fourth season trailer: “Oh great, now I have to deal with witches?“

Our thoughts exactly.

Brown rice syrup is just one of many “natural” sweeteners that have taken off in the wake of the backlash against artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, which, of course, were invented to defeat the dietary axis of evil — refined white sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Once confined to Berkeley communes, these not-refined-sugar, not-man-made substances pose a huge marketing opportunity, since most people who avoid sugar don’t want to get cancer but also aren’t ready to commit to a joyless, dessert-free existence. Natural sweeteners are the perfect answer to this conundrum. Right?

The biggest problem is that the term “natural” is a slippery one. Unlike with organic foods, there are no official standards in the U.S. to determine a natural versus unnatural food. Essentially, it’s a word that promises a lot — those wholesome fields — but can mean nothing.

The potency of that promise depends on the leap people make from “natural” to “healthy.” But because the popularity of alternative sweeteners is relatively new, there’s no definite consensus on their long-term risks and benefits. Plus, there’s no telling what unholy quantities Americans will consume of a sweetener with no yet-known health consequences whatsoever. 

Then there’s the issue that sugar, in all its caloric and cholesterol-boosting splendor, is just so damn delicious. For one thing, sugar is more than just a sweetener; in baking, it’s a structuring agent that resists lumping and introduces air into batter as it creams, creating a fluffy and even texture. It also caramelizes when heated, developing a flavor much more complex than mere sweetness. How can you beat that? For people with diabetes or sugar allergies, natural non-sugar sweeteners can be a godsend. But those seeking a consequence-free sugar fix, beware: not all sweeteners are created equal. We took a standard sugar cookie recipe — flour, eggs, vanilla extract, butter — and subbed in a different sweetener for each batch to find out what works, what doesn’t, and what actually tastes good.

Agave syrup

The facts: Beloved by raw food enthusiasts, agave syrup has become one of the easiest alternative sweeteners to find in grocery stores. It’s derived from the Mexican succulent plant agave, of which there are several varieties. It has to be processed to become sweet, and depending on that process, it can be comparable in composition to the dreaded high fructose corn syrup. True, agave has a low glycemic index — meaning it releases glucose into the blood stream at a slower rate than refined sugar — so it can help keep blood sugar levels stable. Eating agave as a “healthy” alternative to sugar, however, is pointless; the two have the same number of calories, no nutritional value whatsoever, and, even though it doesn’t spike blood sugar, the primary sugar in agave, fructose, has been linked to cancer and cholesterol problems when consumed in large quantities.

The experience: Agave syrup is very similar to honey or maple syrup in terms of consistency, though it has a distinctly deeper, cleaner sweetness than either, without as assertive a flavor. Subbing agave for sugar is relatively simple; because it’s sweeter than sugar, a cup of sugar should be replaced by ¾ cup of agave syrup. Don’t expect an identical product, though — our crack team of Salon taste-testers noted that cookies made with agave syrup became “densely chewy” and “raisin-like” in taste, with a “nice complexity.”

Brown rice syrup

The facts: Brown rice syrup is what happens when cooked brown rice meets barley malt enzymes. The sweetness comes from starchy complex carbohydrates, which take a couple of hours to digest. As a result, the glucose is released gradually into the bloodstream, providing a steady supply of energy rather than the rush — and crash — of cane sugar. Plus, the syrup maintains some of the nutrients in brown rice, like protein, so it’s not a total nutritional bust like most sweeteners are.

The experience: Although nutritionally, brown rice syrup is the best you could hope for, it certainly doesn’t taste like table sugar. Maltose (the kind of sugar in brown rice syrup) is not as sweet as sucrose, so you’ll need about 1¼ cups of syrup to replace a cup of sugar. By itself, brown rice syrup is similar to butterscotch in taste and consistency. Baking it into cookies, though, resulted in an “unpleasantly gummy” texture, and made one tester feel “like I just woke up from a nightmare where I was stuck in a San Francisco commune in 1971, only to find out that it wasn’t a dream.” The mild butterscotch taste has potential, though, and could work well as a complementary flavor in bread or a savory dish.

Stevia

The facts: Stevia’s not technically a sugar; it’s extracted from a sweet herb of the same name. Therefore it has no calories and doesn’t raise blood sugar. Though the FDA labeled it a “dangerous food additive” in 1991 after an “anonymous industry complaint” (read: shadowy figures in lab coats), stevia is now back on the market as a “dietary supplement.” In the rest of the world, particularly Japan, widespread use of stevia has been going on for decades.

The experience: The biggest drawback of this seemingly perfect sweetener is that it has an “odd chemical aftertaste” that is not weakened in the baking process; one tester described the aftertaste of the cookie as “psychological torture.” It’s a pleasant, pure sweetness at first that just keeps on going … and going … and going, long after you are ready for the taste to end. If you can get used to that, you only need a teaspoon of the powder to replace a cup of sugar. Keep in mind, though, that sugar is more than just a flavoring; take away its structural properties from a recipe and you’re left with one crumbly cookie. To adjust, we added in more butter, resulting in a shortbread-like consistency.

Date sugar

The facts: Date sugar is so low-tech it’s kind of funny — it’s just dehydrated dates that have been ground into a powder. That means it’s completely unprocessed and retains all the nutrients in dates. It’s high in fiber and protein, and has lots of vitamins and minerals like iron and potassium. Plus, it qualifies as a raw food. It still contains sucrose, fructose and glucose, so it’s not a good alternative for diabetics or people looking to control their blood sugar.

The experience: Date sugar seems to be the Salon staff’s favorite sweetener of the bunch. It has a very subtle sweetness that evoked almonds for one tester. Another described it as “nutty, not super sweet.” The cookie’s texture turned out to be “very crumbly” and “chalky” but not unpleasant. Date sugar’s not soluble, so don’t try to put it in tea or coffee. It is, however, simultaneously delicious and nutritious, which is no small feat. 

And this is what I tweeted in response:

MrEddieHuang @mattduckor cantonese razor clams predate the trend by at least a couple dynasties… #ohamericans…

Gael and Matt know their bidness. Not trying to call them out on anything. It’s their job to report trends and identify them; they do it well. They didn’t determine the way Americans — and to a certain extent postmodern foodies around the world — dine. This is just how they found it. And you may think, “Eddie, why would you care if razor clams are a trend or not? Let ‘em eat razor clams!” But, see, as a chef and a person who cares about food and cares about culture, it’s not that simple.

From skate to pork belly to razor clams, there’s always something that’s priced reasonably, previously ignored, and able to fill a role on a menu. That’s where these things start. Your purveyor comes to you with a new product, say, Mangalitsa pork, and asks you to try it. It was almost extinct in Hungary as a lard animal but now they want you to experiment with it. There’s an introductory rate. The pig really isn’t good for much but lard, yet you can charge a premium for the experience and novelty. Call it “Kobe pork!” While the purveyor is showing it to you, he’s showing it to five other chefs in your neighborhood: Boom. We have a trend.

The Mangalitsa isn’t a bad product. It’s interesting. I’d like to spend some time with it, slowly integrate it, and figure out how to deliver it at a fair, sustainable price so it isn’t here today, gone tomorrow on my menu. Am I selling a trend or selling a good dish? By the time you cycle through those thoughts, Mangalitsa prices go up for a season, then they level out. But by the time it levels out, the eating public is bored. They just paid $30+ for a Mangalitsa pork experience that doesn’t really outdo your average Berkshire, which is known, widely available, quality pork. But the bigger issue is that chefs are coming up with specials and pushing trends before truly understanding the product, because they don’t have to. The novelty sells itself.

It’s a disservice to the product and the eating public. I’m sure Mario Batali knows exactly what to do with cannolicchi (razor clam) and ditto for April Bloomfield with Mangalitsa, but they aren’t the problem. It’s the copycats, it’s the people who are expressly selling the “trend.” They produce cheap knockoff interpretations or, worse yet, drop razor clams on some stupid farm-to-Brooklyn-to-table restaurant that thinks cooking simply involves buying a new locally sourced ingredient and putting some pink sea salt on it. There’s no craft. (“Just taste the simplicity, the essence, the natural flavor!” No, asshole, COOK it.)

You know what happens when you sell trends? You sell crap. I’ve been guilty of this myself. People wanted Cheeto fried chicken from reading my blog, a lot of people were mashing up Asian/Down-Home American, so I got caught up in a trend and introduced some crappy items at [my now-closed restaurant] Xiao Ye. I didn’t intentionally sell garbage; they were just crappy because I didn’t take the time to really understand what I was trying to do. It happens. No one’s perfect. Live and learn.

But razor clams aren’t a “trend.” You’ve been able to find them, for cheap, all around Chinatown or Italian neighborhoods for decades. Just look at the search results for “razor clams” on Yelp, it’s a who’s who of Chinese, Korean, Italian and then Eater Top 38 restaurants. They are on lowly Chinese diner-type menus such as Wo-Hop, but once the PAC (People Above Canal Street) play it out, the price goes up and you may see it disappear from certain menus never to come back. You have to realize, it may only take New Yorkers five months to cycle through a food trend like Mangalitsa or razor clams, but that’s just the beginning. You find it in D.C., Philly, Boston, Miami, Seattle, Portland, Austin … God, and at some point dare I say, it’ll be in my hometown, Orlando. Just like “the man” took the Black Eyed Peas from the underground and sold them back to us auto-tuned with a chick who should have been in the WWF, we are going to be buying back razor clams at $20 a pop in Chinatown soon. Which sucks, because we are the people who won’t dismiss razor clams when they aren’t hot on Yelp. It’s not a trend for us, it’s a staple.

It is better for food culture if we are slower to absorb new ingredients into the canon so that they have staying power. Despite everything you hear, the foodielution in America is still young and not all-powerful. I still somehow end up on dates with birds who only eat chicken (cannibals) and don’t eat meat on the bone. There’s a lot of work to do and we aren’t even close. On the flip side are the line cooks from two- or three-star restaurants hanging out at my shop, Baohaus, cockfighting:

“Oh, dude, pork belly is so played out!”

“Yeah, screw foie gras, Mugatu is so hot right now.”

You guys are a bunch of Zoolanders. People “in the scene” (puke) need to dig their heads out of their asses and understand that the rest of the nation still subsists primarily on ground beef and chicken breasts.

I’m not saying we should serve burgers and chicken breast, but if we look like a bunch of chickens with our heads cut off running from new ingredient to new ingredient and the public can’t follow, well, then this whole exercise is just intellectual masturbation, ’cause there is no lasting effect on national eating habits, on getting people to be open-minded about what they eat. Maybe that isn’t your concern, but everything is everything, and all this “sustainable” talk is for nothing because they’re going to eat McDonald’s ground beef until it kills us. We may go down with Mangalitsa saddle bags, but we’re going down nevertheless. The rate of consumption during these trends is unsustainable for most products. They need to be given time to grow and meet demand slowly. We also have to manage demand so that people don’t dismiss our products with only a surface understanding. I am passionate about this, ’cause I saw it happen to street wear. We thought we were the epicenter in New York, boutiques were busy, and certain brands were selling across the nation, but we were packaged as a “trend.” People didn’t understand what we were trying to say, they just recognized a common aesthetic between certain designers. People bought the “look,” not the message or the actual soul of what was going on. When that happens, you have no longevity. As soon as the recession hit, everyone went down. There was no customer loyalty because they were just buying clothes, they didn’t buy into the culture.

As consumable art, food lends itself to competition, but why are we in such a rush? Does it really matter if you were first in line? As eaters, it makes sense if you are more concerned with understanding the food, experiencing it, and soaking it in. There is no need to run around town eating, dismissing, and checking things off a list. One of my favorite things is to take a train to a neighborhood I don’t know and just collect menus representing a certain style of cuisine, perhaps Eastern European in Brighton Beach or Coney Island. I’ll look at them all and try something new, then I’ll go back in a month and try something else in the same vein. I keep going back trying the same food item at different places until I develop a foundation and frame of reference. I remember my first piroshky in Seattle (Piroshky Piroshky). I told everyone about it, how awesome piroshky was, but I didn’t realize how dope that first hit was until I started eating it more. It’s really damn hard to make a good piroshky. Now, imagine the inverse if all I had were horrible Brooklyn piroshky? I never would have given the one in Seattle a shot. It’s for your own good to eat slowly. There’s only so much you can glean in one sitting. As my mother always said, chew slowly and eat every grain of rice ’cause anything you leave will be a freckle on your baby mama’s face.

Somewhere between the greens and beans of the old-time South to hippie-dippy nut loaves and the microwaved on-the-go Gardenburgers, we seemed to have lost our way. As meat got cheaper and cheaper, it went from an occasional (and seasonal) luxury to the center of our diets … and the center of our food culture. We became, as Elissa Altman put it on her blog Poor Man’s Feast, a nation of “vegetable idiots … Vegetables are simply not a part of the American culinary lexicon: give a man a kohlrabi and he won’t know what to do with it. Give a man a steak, and he will.” 

It’s a sort of instructive irony that nowhere is this more apparent than in the diets of millions of vegetarians and vegans. How many hours have I spent with vegetarian friends in the frozen food aisle comparing various texturized vegetable protein “burgers”? (I do actually kind of love veggie burgers; the fake-meat technology in Taiwan is amazing.) When Oprah challenged her entire staff to go vegan for a week, one of her editors came up with a helpful list of tips on what to eat. Suffice it to say that “veggie meat crumbs,” “soy butter,” and the abominable phrase “vegan mayo” are well-represented.

I don’t particularly have anything against these things, not any more than any other processed food product, but their popularity illustrates Altman’s point. Even for many vegetarians, the challenge of eating is often about how to replace the meat on the plate, not focusing on the delicious, inspiring possibilities of vegetables themselves.

I love meat. I love eating it, cooking it, smelling it, looking at it. But I realized something funny while I was in culinary school, when people asked me, all the time, “What’s your specialty?” I had nothing good to say to that, since I was really just trying to learn how to cut a perfectly straight julienne and what they wanted to hear was, “Tsarist Russian banquet cuisine” or something. But after a while, I surprised myself by answering, “I love cooking vegetables.”

And as an enthusiastic, wide-eyed cook, I was so often surprised by the vegetables, with their incredible range of flavors and textures. Think of the difference between mashed potatoes and a crisp chip. Of the difference between a bright, raw, juicy slice of tomato and the dark, chewy flavor of tomato paste. (Or of this ratatouille’s insane tomato jam.) You fry a chicken, you roast a chicken, and it still tastes like chicken. But you cut a head of lettuce into a salad and you braise another down to silky tenderness, and it’s hard to believe they started out as the same thing.

With that kind of astonishing range locked in every vegetable, and boundary-pushing dishes like “Tomato, Many Complementary Flavors” (pictured above, with some of those complementary flavors provided by curry pudding, olive-chile-garlic crumbs, a spiral of molasses and saffron gelee, and a literal balloon of mozzarella filled with clarified tomato juice), from the genius chef of Alinea, Grant Achatz, it’s no wonder after a few aggressively porky years, high-flying chefs — and the dining public — are getting more excited about what they can do with stuff that comes up out of the ground. John Fraser, an alumnus of the celebrated French Laundry, dedicates Monday nights in his restaurant Dovetail almost entirely to vegetable cooking. David Chang, who’s built an empire on pork belly and whose Momofuku Ssäm Bar menu for years notoriously noted that the restaurant was not vegetarian-friendly, recently traveled to Korea to experience the art of Buddhist vegetable cooking for inspiration.

And that sense of liberated creativity can happen in your own home, even if you aren’t a culinary genius. It’s really just a matter of trying out pairings of techniques and vegetables you may have never played with before. I remember, a mere five years ago, when I served someone roasted broccoli and it blew her mind; it never occurred to her that you didn’t have to steam it. Hell, I remember when seeing roasted broccoli blew my mind, and really it wasn’t that long before that. Or when I discovered you could throw some just-cooked peas in a blender, add a little bit of stock, maybe some herbs, and have yourself a fist-pumpingly good pasta sauce. Or when I had no idea how to cook Jerusalem artichokes, only figuring that they kind of looked and felt like potatoes, so I boiled and roasted them like I would potatoes to great success and hugs and kisses from friends.

So it’s time, people. Time to start playing with your vegetables. What new, or new-to-you things do you like to do with them? Share with us in the comments!