The lowly ham hock

Today I am indulging in what I consider to be a guilty pleasure -- bean soup with a ham hock. Ham hocks are humble things -- not the height of aethetics. In soup, they devolve into a glutinous mass of jellied skin, fat, and a few scraps of salty meat.

Yum.

It's just that kind of texture food that so many American children cringe from -- yet in many parts of the world, this is the focus of cuisine itself.

In the very early 80's, I got a reputation at the Asian Studies department of UMass/Amherst for enjoying truly traditional Chinese peasant cooking -- organ meats, dishes with sugared pork fat laid over dried-fruit studded rice.

One of my professors, surrounded by a knot of colleagues, stopped me in the hall one day. He had heard that I was doing an independent study on Historical Chinese Gastronomy, and was sometimes eating lunch with the Wang family, who ran a local Chinese restaurant, and much enjoying the slow cooked casseroles they saved for the 2:30pm break.

"You eat this stuff?" he asked me. "You enjoy it?"

Very much so, I assured him.

"Hmmm..." he narrowed his eyes and examined me, as though for subtle signs. "I think maybe you were Chinese in a previous lifetime." He stood up straight. "What did you do wrong?"

I always took that as a compliment.

The ham hock -- probably more associated with the American south -- is an element of cuisine that would be enjoyed by the Chinese. It's peasant food, with its own delights, a model of efficient use of the animal. In China, no doubt, some star anise would be added -- I just add it to the bean soup. Great northern beans, succulent and marrowy, kale braised with soy sauce and lots of garlic and ginger, some sliced jalapenos, a slosh of sherry.

But once the house is perfumed with it, and the beans are tender, I will remove the hamhock, dice it for the meat, and then invoke cook's privilege and indulge a bit in the parts that cook down, fat and tendon and tender skin, the "inedible" bits, the delicate parts, the humble delicacy.