Eat Your Ham By the Steak

I suspect that one luckless day a stern mob wearing crisp white aprons and pointy toques will rap on my front door with outstretched palms, insisting I surrender my food-writer membership card. The woman who extols the singular crackle and give of a great baguette.

Or the subtle char and zip of a Mexican platter of enchiladas en adobo. The acute exception to my Gallic ambivalence is pork and juniper, two staples of French regional cookery.

Combine the sweet versatility of sausages and cured pork belly with the resinous snap and funk of juniper-laced braised sauerkraut, as in the classic choucroute garnie of Alsace, and I will unfurl the vertical blue, white, and red and start belting “La Marseillaise.” More than a decade ago, when I was both a fledgling writer and a fledgling gay, I went to a conference at the Greenbrier. The man wrote tomes, books that regularly topped 500 pages on single subjects like sauces, seafood, and soup. In my edition of his Splendid Soups , the element list runs 29 pages and there are 51 recipes for single-vegetable soups alone.

No, I saw in him a version of myself I was desperate to become. I withdrawal inserting myself into a dining situation with Peterson’s partner, Zelik, Peterson’s agent, Elise Goodman, and Peterson himself, dapper and gray-haired and then about the same age as I am now.

The attendees—plebes and experts alike—all stayed on the property in the town of White Sulphur Spring. At the time, his most recent book was Glorious French Food , a 770-page attempt to inventory the breadth of French preparation.

After our chance meeting, I cooked a little from the book, including a sublime version of oeufs en meurette, a homey dish of poached eggs in red wine sauce. Then, the other week, I pulled the tome from the bookcase that runs down my hallway and paged through it.

My eyes saw the book through a clean lens, buffed after 15 more years of cookery and, on my good days, living. A gaggle of pork dishes caught my interest, including one with ham draped in a cream sauce flavored with juniper berries and vinegar.

Then you add wine and reduce it since this is French cookery, after all. Then in go finely chopped shallots, crushed juniper berries, black peppercorns, cream, and a wallop of vinegar to shock the richness.

Smoked ham steaks, in another deeply French move, are fried in butter, then slicked with the sauce. I might have already become the very person I longed to catalyze all those years ago in West Virginia.

Or maybe I will not ever be that version of myself, as that dreaming was a notion, an idea, never capable of being made flesh. Many years of eating, cookery, and writing about food have left Scott Hocker with many stories to tell.