Slow food, fast food

One of life’s ironies is traditional slow food cooked fast. Did you know you can cook lamb shanks in a pressure cooker in thirty minutes today? Prior to pressure cookers and even slow cookers, a lamb shank was cooked slowly in a pot of stew or a very slow oven for at least three hours.  Full of flavour, and enriched with vegetables and herbs, a lamb shank’s meat is not only delicious but will fall off the bone when it is cooked long and slow.

The lamb shank is traditionally a humble, cheap cut of meat.  There are four shanks on your average spring lamb and they are one of the toughest cuts of meat.    All that lamb leaping about requires muscle!  The shank, being the part below the lamb’s knee has to be cooked a long time in order to break down the sinewy tissue.  (Or not! If you have a pressure cooker.) 

While not a member of the Slow Food Movement, I am a fan of local foods and traditional cooking methods.   For this reason, I resist cooking recipes under pressure when they were meant to be cooked slow.  I am also a fan of cooking from scratch rather than from a packet or a bottle. 

I might be one of an increasingly rare group of people though; people who actually cook. According to research in the United States,  grocery shopping and cooking are in a long-term decline. Cooking has shifted to a ‘niche activity that a few people do only some of the time.’  In spite of all the cooking shows on TV, we apparently want to eat more (and watch more food TV), but not necessarily cook our food.

When I did a search for lamb shanks on one of the major grocer’s websites, I found one entry for the raw meat, two for sachets of herbs to add to your slow cooker and three ‘slow cooked’ lamb shank meals.  That has left me shaking my head and thinking there is an even bigger irony; fast food cooked slow!  

Photo by Ting Tian on Unsplash