Leather Storrs: What’s in a Name?

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Leather Storrs, GoLocalPDX Contributor

“Hey Whitney, you seem a lot peppier, guess you finally took your grandma’s advice and drank that prune juice, huh?”

“Ewww, never Kaitlin! That’s for old people! My cool older cousin turned me on to this new organic sports drink, called GO! It’s made with air cured heirloom stone fruit and it makes me feel just like a regular girl, not all old and icky!”

Prunes have an image problem, and a rose smells no matter what you call it, but words only have the meanings we give them.

Fussy old French guys, thinking on language, made the point that the letters R O S E only mean the fragrant flower because we all agree that they do. There are no hard rules that tie the letters of a word to its meaning; language is arbitrary. The neat part of this ambiguity is the idea that because there is no absolute bedrock of meaning, the value and nuance of words is always shifting.

Run-DMC expressed this notion elegantly in their song Peter Piper: “He’s a big bad wolf in your neighborhood. Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good.”

So now bad means good. Guess what, so does “sick.” And “dope.” But really, what does all this have to do with prunes? Simple, prunes have a problem even Run-DMC couldn’t fix. The word “prune” is buried in negative connotations. Prunes are wrinkly, like an old person and old people drink prune juice to stay regular so it’s sort of like medicine. But air cured heirloom stone fruit is… Sick! Also, it’s prunes.

The power of naming in food is a magical thing. When dried tomatoes started tanning and became “sun-dried,” we went bananas. When the Patagonian tooth fish got rebranded as Chilean sea bass, we ate it all the way to endangered. Bacon didn’t need any help, but we gilded the lily by calling out “apple wood smoked” and pork belly futures exploded. When chicken wings got to be the most expensive part of the bird, some nefarious marketer chopped up chicken breasts and gave us “boneless wings.”

Now stock gets a makeover and reveals as “bone broth”- a term that is both vaguely grody and an oxymoron. When I went to culinary school we made stock, lots of it. We also made broth. The difference? Stock is made with bones, broth is made with meat. Often, stock is the basis for a broth. Stock suggests a building block, broth is a finished product. So what’s the deal and why are well heeled prune juice drinkers setting down their Louis Vuitton bags to pick up a cup of $10 stock? Collagen baby! And gelatin, elastin and glycine and glutamine. In short, all of the things that make Jello wiggle.

The best source of these restorative, healing and wrinkle reducing agents happens to be feet and hoofs. At my shop we always put a couple of pig feet in with our beef bones for stock- they add loads of body. When a good, rich stock is cold it’ll bounce like a super ball. But hoof soup won’t sell so presto change-o and we’ve got bone broth fever. Now if we could just pull cranberries out of their pigeonhole we’d be onto something. I don’t know, maybe that’s just Craisin.

Leather Storrs is an Oregon native who has served 20 years in professional kitchens. He owns a piece of two area restaurants: Noble Rot and Nobleoni at Oregon College of Art and Craft, where he yells and waves arms. He quietly admits to having been a newspaper critic in Austin, Texas and Portland.