Slow Food Fans Cook Up Old Ways to Savor Their Meals

They descended upon the Temecula winery, not to drink Chardonnay but to pick olives. About 40 professional men and women clutched plastic pails and jars and bedsheets for collecting the little green orbs from olive trees that ring the grounds.

They plucked, they shook, they scaled.

“Middle-aged people were climbing up into trees,” says Los Angeles restaurateur Evan Kleiman, who organized the olive-picking field trip, her voice reflecting the awe and fear she felt at the time. “I was thinking, please, God, don’t let anyone fall.” (He didn’t.)

The able-bodied group happily carted away to their homes gallons of bitter-tasting, underripe olives, determined to spend the next couple of months curing them with continuous salt water baths.

“You have to play around with them until you get what you want,” says special education teacher Mindy Pfeiffer, whose Riverside County olives are marinating in glass jars in a murky-looking mixture under her Pasadena kitchen table.

The fact that people with busy lives are picking and curing their own olives says something about their dislike for store-bought olives, but more about their enthusiasm for the Slow Food movement and its embrace of hand-prepared and locally grown foods. The Los Angeles chapter sponsored the olive harvest.

The Slow Food movement was born in an effort by a group of Italian gourmets to block a McDonald’s from rising in Rome’s historic Piazza di Spagna. Unsuccessful at stopping that particular McDonald’s, they convened an assembly of like-minded gourmets in Paris in 1989 and composed a manifesto. They dedicated themselves to preserving regional cuisines and encouraging, as their credo puts it, “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment.”

Slow Food is the antithesis of fast food and the so-called “McDonaldization” of life. Although some fast-foodies may quibble with the notion that they’re not getting sensual pleasure from Big Macs and Filet-o-Fish, they’re generally not among the 60,000 Slow Food devotees in the 400 chapters (called convivia) of a worldwide organization.

The quarterly journal, called Slow, is published in five languages at the movement’s headquarters in Italy. The Slow publishing operation also includes cookbooks and guides to food, wine and travel.

The Los Angeles convivium that Kleiman runs--one of the largest in the country--has 125 members who pay annual dues of $60 (which covers a subscription to the magazine). A hard-core group of 40 shows up at almost every event. The group includes teachers, business people, doctors and lawyers, many of whom are already drawn to cooking.

Slow Food enthusiasts eschew the mass-produced and instead seek out the products of small farmers, bakers and dairy producers--the craftspeople or artisans of food.

Though the movement encourages the idea of unrushed, savored meals as the centerpiece of an unrushed and savored life, being a member of the convivium doesn’t mean you’ve pitched your cell phone and drive the speed limit. Slow Food devotees fit their commitment into days filled with meetings, children and trips to the gym.

“It’s not about turning your back on the real world you live in,” says Kleiman, the chef-owner of the Melrose Avenue restaurant Angeli Caffe, where the tenets of Slow Food are observed. “It’s about understanding the deep cultural traditions from which this food artisanship comes--and recognizing the value of that to our society and not allowing it to die.”

The movement dovetails perfectly with the increasing popularity and proliferation of farmers markets in Southern California. Slow Food members love farmers markets.

“It’s about recapturing the gentility of life,” says food writer and Slow Food member Amelia Saltsman. “You run into the supermarket. Nobody is saying a word; you buy this shrink-wrapped thing. What did you do that didn’t make you feel like it was a chore?”

When they can, Slow Food members trek beyond the farmers market to the actual farm.

“People here are so hungry for contact with the earth,” says Kleiman. “There’s something incredibly satisfying about growing something or making something.”

In addition to olive picking, the group foraged for snails. “I had a wait-list for snail hunting,” says Jennifer Larabee, a 38-year-old attorney and Slow Food member who organized the group of 12. The expedition was led by Italian folklorist and food expert Luisa Del Giudice, one of the founding members of the Los Angeles convivium.

Larabee refuses to divulge where they went snail-hunting, other than that it was in Los Angeles.

“I’d have to kill you if I told you,” she says, respecting the wishes of the snail guide.

These were not the garden variety snail. “This is a particular kind of Mediterranean snail and she didn’t want the supply depleted,” says Larabee, who took up cooking in law school to relieve stress.

The hunt was followed by a lesson in cleaning and preparing snails. The reward was a dinner of them.

Coming soon will be an olive oil tasting at the restaurant Lucques, and cherry picking.

In the Slow Food tradition of savoring meals, Kleiman has also organized several sumptuous high-end dinners and tastings, most notably a meal last May at a private estate in Sierra Madre when Slow Food movement founder Carlo Petrini was in town from Italy. Chefs cooked with ingredients provided by local farmers and then everyone sat down to eat together--chefs, farmers, and Slow Foodies. The organization’s members paid $70 each to attend.

“It was like ‘Babette’s Feast,’ ” says Slow Food member Maga Jackson-Triche, referring to the film of gastronomic bliss. “Every course that came out was perfection.”

Jackson-Triche, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, has gardened since she was a little girl and now does it with her two sons and her husband, David Triche, a middle school librarian.

“One of the nice things about the Slow Food movement for me is getting really close to people who are good at cooking things,” she says. “I’m experimenting with tomatoes of different flavors.”

Even Slow Food members are pressed for time. They just cook with really good ingredients. Saltsman made dinner in 20 minutes the other night for her family. “I roasted asparagus, I brushed the filets of sole with a little oil so they wouldn’t stick to the pan. I sprinkled pepper, salt and paprika on them--425 degrees for maybe 10 minutes.” That’s 10 minutes per inch of thickness. “I didn’t do anything fancy. I did put a pat of butter on each filet afterwards.”

The olives, of course, demand weeks of care. Pfeiffer and her husband, Jordan Vannini, washed the olives-- which are bitter and inedible at first--and pricked them with a fork. Then the olives were soaked for a week in big salad bowls of water and then in a brine of water and salt that was changed once a week for a month.

Straight from the brine, the olives are too salty. So Pfeiffer has been rinsing them overnight and storing them in the refrigerator.

“They do taste like an olive now,” says Pfeiffer. She plans to share the fruits of her food craft.

“We told a lot of our friends that we were making olives. They said, ‘Oh, let us try some!’ I’m going to put them in jars and give them as gifts.”