America is known for a fast-track culture in general and for fast food in particular. Still, increasing numbers of food-focused citizens have come to think of eating as a pleasure to be prolonged rather than a routine to be gotten done with; they are part of the slow food movement. First articulated in 1986 by Italian journalist Carlo Petrini, the worldwide phenomenon has formally dedicated itself to “mankind’s inalienable right to pleasure through good eating.” Slow Foodies celebrate local produce and regional foodways; they support small-scale growers and producers; and they advocate for “an adequate portion of sensual gourmandaise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment.”
The culture of jiffy cookery notwithstanding, America’s foodways are rich with traditions that are all about slowness. Consider such no-hurry feasts as the Downeast clambake, Wisconsin’s chicken booyah, and the lazy culture of barbecue, which takes forever to cook, whether it’s at a Carolina pig pickin’ or from a Texas butcher’s back room pit. Years ago, when asked what made his beef so tasty, the legendary Dallas pitmaster Sonny Bryan said, “There are no secrets. There is just time. Time and smoke.” Bill Armbrecht of the Brick Pit in Mobile, Alabama, cooks pork shoulders 30 hours before meticulously hand-pulling the meat. At Clark’s Outpost in the Red River town of Tioga, Nancy Ann Clark lets her briskets bask over low-smoldering green hickory and pecan wood for four full days.
As for slow savoring, observe the way people eat at Stroud’s in Kansas City, where fried chicken is unhurriedly cooked in a skillet to brittle-edged perfection, and where it is devoured sensually from the first, audible crunch through crust to the final, toothsome worrying of every bone to get its last shreds of flavor. Or visit one of the Deep South restaurants that carries on the boarding house tradition of all-you-can-eat family-style meals composed of countless serving bowls of vegetable casseroles, biscuits and corn bread, fried green tomatoes and sliced fresh tomatoes still warm from the sun, and, of course, huge piles of catfish and hushpuppies or chicken and dumplings.
In recent years, as chefs have become celebrities and their restaurants cultural shrines, a new wrinkle has been added to the slow food movement— waiting in an interminable line for the privilege of ingesting the famous food. An hour, two hours, or even more is not an uncommon wait time at some urban hot-ticket eateries, although an evening spent hoping to be seated probably ought not to be included in the manifesto’s definition of “prolonged enjoyment.”