Anyone with ragged, cherished family recipe cards handed down and copied through generations knows about base flavors. Those ingredients that seem out of place listed next to garlic and onions, are indispensible to the finished dish, binding flavors together and laying underneath it all like the long pull of a lone base string amidst a hundred person orchestra.
Three of my favorite base flavors are below. They’re shockingly easy to use and with a bit of practice, will utterly transform your cooking.

If you’re from anywhere in Amercia that’s not the South, chances are ham hocks are foreign to your home cooking. Don’t let them be. The hock, known as a pork knuckle, is the extreme shank of the pig. It’s not something you’ll eat on its own much. There isn’t a whole lot of meat and what’s there is tough to get at and tough to eat. But it is insanely great for building delicious dishes. Add chunks of hock to anything you’re going to simmer for a long time. The payoff is a concentrated, meaty flavor that turns broths and sauces into silky, rich, heady liquers.

Strattu is from Sicily where it’s long been a secret ingredient of grandmothers everywhere. It’s a super concentrated tomato paste and by super concentrated I’m not kidding: it takes ten pounds of tomato sauce to make one six ounce jar. It’s simmered so slowly for so long, there’s hardly any moisture left, just a very, very concentrated paste that explodes with tomato flavor. Start your next sauce- with a half a spoonful of strattu and olive oil and see what happens when you unleash this monster. The great thing about it is that, unlike ham hocks, which take hours of slow home cooking to extrapolate flavor, strattu is ready to go right from the jar. You get all the benefits of slow cooking without actually having to do the slow cooking.

Finally, anchovies deserve some attention. I’ve been on a crusade for years to bring this great fish out of the culinary closet. People usually see them as despicable pizza toppings and claim they hate them. But the same folks probably never realize that they’re part of their favorite foods, including Worcestershire sauce, remoulade or caesar salad dressing. A small anchovy added to the pan early on in sauce creation dissolves so diners are none the wiser. What it leaves behind, though, is a base flavor that adds enormous depth to the finished dish.

Sardines and anchovies are two foods that, at least in America, share a strange combination of fascination, scorn, passion and obscurity. Since you can go years without seeing an anchovy article or a sardine TV show thought I’d spend a little time explaining a bit about them.

Anchovies first. The Mediterranean is the traditional—and generally, still the best—source of anchovies. There is no single “anchovy fish” to be found, but rather a series of aquatic relatives—anywhere from sixteen to upwards of one hundred—that make them recognizable to us as members of the same fishy family. Like any other “crop” the haul is subject to the vagaries of weather. At most a small boat might bring in fifteen tons. Other nights, with high winds, they come in with nothing. A fisherman’s yield can vary from year to year by a factor of ten. All of which contributes to the high cost of anchovies which are often two or three times as expensive as sardines.

The curing process is comparable to that of aged hams in that it’s basically the anchovy’s own juices that make it happen, with bacterial fermentation playing a bit of a supporting role. For most of human history this salt packing was the way that anchovies were sold. It’s only in the 19th century—with the advent of modern canning—that the industry introduced the idea of filleting and packing in olive oil. Still, even if they are sold in oil like most of ours, they were first cured in salt.

Not so with sardines. Certainly for centuries previous, people were catching, cleaning and salting sardines as others did anchovies. There are still salted sardines to be found. Chuck Prine, a 40 year sardine veteran, gives indirect credit to Napoleon for tinned sardines: “His troops were dying of starvation. He was offering rewards for anyone who could come up with a way to conserve food. A guy named Nicholas Appert took a fried fish, and, if you will put it in glass with olive oil, and sealed it. It lasted 35 or 40 days. That became the first canned sardine.”

Mediterranean sardine producers in Portugal, Spain, and France work with what are known as pilchards. These are fat, very flavorful fish, usually only three, four, or at most five to a can. While France pioneered sardine curing, many consider Portugal to be the best source today.

When Herb Eckhouse decided to locate his acclaimed cured ham house, La Quercia, in Norwalk, Iowa, he didn’t mean it as a statement. He wanted to make a positive impact in the place he’d long ago decided to raise his family. “We wanted to do something for Iowa. Something we can be proud of from this amazing bounty.”

But if you know anything about the current state of hog farming it’s hard to think of Herb’s work without considering the statement it’s making. He carefully selects his hogs from folks who practice old-fashioned, industry-rattling farming practices. No sub-theraputic antibiotics. No hormones. Access to the out-of-doors. A breed palate that moves away from the low-fat, fast-growing, disease-prone standard white bread pig. Mixed grain feed that doesn’t rely on Iowa’s most contentious crop, genetically modified corn.

Herb certainly isn’t the first ham curer to be working with this kind of humanely raised pork. But, in my view, he’s the first to be working at this kind of scale, at least in America. Since U.S. law prohibits us from importing most cured meats—Prosciutto di Parma being a notable exception—American hog raising practices have a huge effect on the kind of cured meats we eat. There are a growing number of small charcuterie houses who make great salami and other cured meats from pork raised humanely. But salami cures in a matter of weeks. It takes almost a year to cure a ham. With that much meat literally tied up, it’s difficult to make the business math work unless you work at a large scale.

Herb’s main aging room has thirty thousand hams. Add in another few thousand in the other rooms—charmingly named “winter” and “spring” since they replicate the weather a ham would encounter if it was aged at ambient temperatures in sync with the seasons. There’s tons more pork aging in the form of loins, bacon, jowls and so on. The scale is something that he’s even surprised at. “It always freaks me out. I used to make them in my basement. I started out with six hams.”

Add it up and it’s easy to see what it means to Iowa pig farming. He’s helped to create a national market for cured ham made from humanely raised pigs. His hams are on the menus of great restaurants and hanging above great deli counters across the country. Iowa farmers now have a willing buyer when they raise a pig in a way that takes extra work and extra expense. Thousands of pigs now enjoy a completely different life thanks to the standards Herb keeps. And Iowa is increasingly finding itself in the vanguard of old-fashioned, full-flavored hog farming.

Download the Zingerman’s Newsletter September-October 2012 (PDF)