We’re developing a Northeastern cuisine.
Northeastern Cuisine
We believe that great food cultures are born not from abundance, but from constraints — regional limitations that spark creativity. Garum, the fermented fish sauce of the Roman Empire, transformed fish guts into a shelf-stable source of umami. In the Alps, milk couldn’t travel down into the valleys from mountainous pastures before it spoiled, so it was fermented into hard, long-aged cheeses like Comté and Gruyère. The vegetarian constraints of Japanese Buddhist cuisine shaped the flavorful larder items — shoyu, miso, and more — of modern Japanese cuisine.
The Northeast USA developed largely post-abundance. It wasn’t long after the colonization of New England, for example, that sugar-cane based sweeteners came to supplant tree syrups, fruit, and honey. Soon after came refined sugar. There was no driving force, therefore, to develop a cuisine around those limitations. Only a little bit over a century after the founding of the USA, refrigeration became popularized - so preserving food became less important. Trade and importing became easier and cheaper, and ingredients became less localized. As a result, the Northeast USA really has no cuisine — no driving techniques and larder items that define it as a region.
That’s the purpose of the project: to build techniques and larder items around the vegetables, grains, fruits, and funghi of the Northeast - in other words, to build a cuisine of the Northeast.
Cuisine Development
Toward that end, we research, experiment, and collaborate with restaurants.
The question is not only how to build a Northeast cuisine, but how cuisine can be built intentionally to benefit farmers, the economy, the environment, and importantly: our tastebuds. For example: how can we make important cover crops — like rye — delicious? How can we find uses for efficient, nutricious crops like kelp? How can we turn wastestreams like oil presscakes and stale bread into delicious and economically viable food products?
Independent Research
We hope that this project can serve as a blueprint for food research and cuisine development. Food research is decentralized:
Private CPG companies research to develop highly palatable, cost-effective, and high-adoption products. Biotech institutions – like Novozymes in Denmark – research to manufacture enzymes for industrial food production, animal feed, and non-edible applications. Restaurants research to create interesting and tasty food for diners.
Just like physics, biology, or history, we believe that food research needs shared infrastructure to improve. It’s easy to track the advancements in physics— our understanding improves, as does our technology. Can we say the same — or to a similar extent — about taste?
Beyond food, we hope this serves as a node in an ever-growing network of independent research projects. Not everything gets funded in academia, venture, or public markets. Therefore, is important that we dedicate time to building infrastructure for independent research.
Open Sourcing Knowledge
Everything we do is shared — ideas, prototypes, flops, breakthroughs — in the same structure and language we use internally. This website is our lab notebook. You can explore the full network of our research through the knowledge and flavor graph. We add new notes regularly, sometimes daily or hourly. There will be a lot more coming soon.
The website and all of the technologies we use are open-source. If you want more information about anything, just send us an email. We will update the website and Github regularly with notes on how we maintain this notebook and the project, as well as new technologies.
Inspirations
If you’re interested in some books and people who inspire us, please check out our bookshelf.
_ Does any of this resonate with you? Do you strongly disagree? Send us a note: info@northeastlarder.com. We love to chat._