Taking and Making Stock

The Meaty Bits and the Meaningful Scraps of 2024

As I wrap up my work for the year, I’ve been thinking a lot about satiety, and why it’s so hard to pin down. For those not already embedded in the discourse of the Ozempic era, “satiety” is defined as a sense of fullness, the experience of being physically or sensorially gratified to the point where your body doesn’t feel the need for more. But satiety is more than just a physical sensation—it’s a whole mind-body experience of satisfaction, of feeling that you have received enough and given enough to feel at peace with yourself and your appetites. While a medication can help quell cravings of the mind and body, it takes a much deeper understanding of hunger—for encouragement, for acknowledgment, for success—to actually settle one’s stomach for the long haul.

In many ways, this has been a year of reckoning with my appetites, and for articulating what it is that truly feeds me. I’ve had to take stock, both of my accomplishments (finally finishing my doctorate, expanding my freelance portfolio, and writing on topics that show just how far a focus on food can go) and of my still-outstanding to-do list (to pitch new outlets, to apply for more positions, to reach out to still-unmade connections with all my questions about what exactly one with my crazy background does next). Finding satisfaction in that awkward post-PhD life hasn’t been easy, because I know it won’t fall into my lap—like any satisfying meal, I’ll have to cook it myself. But I also take inspiration from every new title I’ve read this year. In writing two roundups for SAVEUR on the best books of the year—one cookbook-centric, one narrative-centric—I’m reminded how many different ways there are to approach the subject of food, and more importantly, that many of the authors on this list had no certainty that their ideas would pan out. In a section of one of my favorite titles this year—Steve Hoffman’s A Season for That—the author recounts some of his college days in Paris, in which he repeatedly muttered to himself “puis” (the French word for “then”), not only to perfect his pronunciation but as a kind of mantra for everyday living. To always think of the next step, the “puis” that pushes us forward, is a necessity for freelance life, to always be onto the next story, the next project, the next collaboration that will give us income and, just as importantly, a reason to keep going. In 2025, I’m hoping to live by the “puis,” both in the kitchen and at my computer. (And to make the “puis” of this platform just a little bit more consistent…one of my many resolutions.)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been storing little odds and ends in a bag in the freezer—discarded chicken, duck, and turkey bones from past cooks; amber-colored onion skins and the emerald-green tops of leeks; curls of carrot peels and the flowering ends of celery. At so many times it’s seemed like a waste, a bag taking up space in an otherwise overstuffed freezer. It also requires more than a little effort and foresight, a commitment to staying home and awake long enough to convert the bag of scraps into usable stock. Yet even when it seems like a waste, I know that these discarded bits, when dumped into a pot and covered with water, and a fistful or two of good salt, can turn into something of value, something of depth and nuance and possibility. Something, in short, worth savoring.

I’ll be stepping offline until the new year, to close out projects, get some rest, do some free reading, and start planning for the new year. But watch this space in 2025—same great taste, whole new menu.

Recommended Reading: I’m packing two books (well, e-books) to take with me on vacation, two titles I’m sure I’ll write about a bit in the new year. First, Irish Food History, a tremendous compendium on the many traditions and histories that inform Irish cuisine. (Having spent a few days in Dublin last summer, I realized how much there was to learn about Irish food, and I’m looking forward to diving into this one.) Second is Rachel Hope Cleves’ forthcoming book Lustful Appetites, an amazing work of scholarship on the relationship between food, sex, and desire of all forms. It’s a hugely valuable text in thinking through the gendered barriers to culinary access throughout the 18th-20th century, and offers tons of sharp insights about the evolution of the restaurant as a sensual (and sexual) public space.

The Perfect Bite: This past week I spent a few days in Toronto with the Gastronomica editorial collective at our annual summit. As we did during our last summit, one of our hosting editors welcomed us to his home, where he had arranged for an enormous spread of take-out dishes that showcase the dazzling array of immigrant foodways present in Toronto’s local food scene. We had everything from a pan of Filipino-style lechon to pineapple curries and mutton biriyani and several types of Georgian pkhali, but perhaps my favorite was the sisig fries, the closest thing I’d get to poutine all weekend yet with a far tangier and crispier finish.

Aside: There are many reasons I’m sad to be departing the Gastronomica collective after five years—the journal was a liferaft for me throughout graduate school, and taught me so many valuable things about academic publishing. But most importantly, it gave me the regular opportunity to collaborate with some of the most brilliant and compassionate minds in academia today, all leaders in food studies who, despite their different disciplines and home institutions, retain a passion for their subject matter, and who find as much value and complexity in food as I do, whether or not we’re dining together. I’ll miss them terribly and am so grateful that I had the chance to learn from each and every one of them.

Cooked & Consumed: We’re in clean-out-the-fridge mode here in advance of our travels, and so it was finally time for me to do something with the cucumber languishing at the bottom of our crisper drawer. So I tried the viral cucumber recipe, shaking sliced cucumbers and fennel in a quart container with enough force to pulverize them, in a mixture of rice wine vinegar, shiro shoyu, and a few killer spoonfuls of Fly By Jing’s Erjingtiao Pepper Flakes (one of the many treasures hiding in Jing’s advent calendar, which is quickly outpacing the Bonne Maman calendar as my favorite holiday food experience.) Spooned over roasted salmon and white rice, the salad was a welcome reminder of one of my future food resolutions: to never let cucumbers go bad again.