Cured

Introduction

Cure |kyoor|

Verb [with object]

1. To restore, especially restore to health; to remedy.
2. To prepare an ingredient for preservation, such as by salting, drying, smoking, etc.
3. To harden or strengthen a substance, such as cement or rubber; to improve durability


Preserved foods are unlike any other ingredient: they’re magic dust, special sauce, secret weapons. But you have to know how to use them.

Ingredients that have been preserved through pickling, fermenting, curing, drying, and other methods not only form the backbone of a wellstocked pantry, they’re often the crucial element that pushes a dish to the next level. Preservation changes the character of an ingredient, altering textures and concentrating flavors. These processes can also introduce new facets of flavor, adding heat or acid or funk. The essence of the ingredient is intensified, so a small amount goes a long way. A tiny bit of bacon can transform an entire pot of beans; just a drop of fermented hot sauce makes a raw oyster sing.

Have you ever bought a jar of preserved lemons to use in a recipe you found in a magazine and then wondered what to do with the rest of it? Made a big batch of pesto with summer’s fresh basil, only to find it unused, frosty, and dull in the back of the freezer months later? Got talked into a jar of beet mustard at the farmers’ market that now taunts you from the door of your refrigerator, daring you to use it for . . . what?

This is where I come in. My name is Steve McHugh, and I’m a chef in San Antonio. I love the magic that preserved foods give to dishes, and they’ve always been at the core of my kitchen, whether it’s charcuterie or pickles or jam. When I came up with the idea for this cookbook, I wanted to share with readers not just how to preserve food but why: it’s such a simple way to improve home cooking. But it was during the pandemic that I realized the potential for a book like this. Curiosity about preserved foods had increased dramatically, and many home cooks were discovering the power of preservation for the first time. It has been generations since people have spent so much time preserving foods at home, and across the country, pantries are lined with jars, bottles, and cans of preserves, whether storebought or homemade. This is the book that will help you turn those jars into breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

To cure is to strengthen, to bolster reserves. Spending time with loved ones cures our relationship with them, setting bonds like cement as fortification against hard times. To cure is to look toward the future, to anticipate needs, to save a tiny bit of today for tomorrow. That which has been cured has been transformed; paused, changed, and emerged as something new.

I was thirty-three years old when I learned about another type of cure. I had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the cure I needed was as vicious as it can be beneficial: chemotherapy. Cancer felt like a door slammed in my face, an indication that my time was finite. I had been offered a job opportunity in San Antonio, and I considered turning it down in light of this news. It just made sense to stay in New Orleans, where I had begun my career and established a community around myself over the course of fourteen years. But my oncologist pulled me aside and said, “No one told you to stop living your life.” While cancer is a crucible, it might not be a death sentence.

So in 2010 my wife, Sylvia, and I moved to San Antonio after all. The opportunity was too tempting, too good to pass up. Cancer be damned. I had three surgeries and did eight rounds of chemo. Slowly, I got better. And I started thinking about what I wanted my life to look like.

Inside the knowledge that our days are limited, there is a human impulse to prolong the rare and precious moments that bring us joy. An extra glass of wine with friends on a sun-dusted terrace, a few minutes longer in the park with a laughing toddler, walking the long way home on the first warm spring evening: all of these are attempts to bottle time. We linger—twenty minutes more, ten minutes, five—basking in these moments, staving off the knowledge that they will soon pass.

We do the same with food. Originally, humans preserved food because it was necessary for survival, but in the twenty-first century, we preserve foods for many reasons. For me personally, I just enjoy the process of it. Preservation allows us to carry ingredients with us well past their peak season—strawberry jam on toast is a balm against a cold winter day, and the grilled sausages of summer sparkle with the bright snap of sauerkraut. Chefs love to talk about seasonality, and I’m not going to recommend you buy fresh tomatoes in February or asparagus in November. But you can freeze tomato sauce and pickle asparagus to enjoy these flavors out of season—without stressing the global supply chain or using up enormous resources.

The post-treatment life I envisioned for myself awaited me in an old brick building with higharching windows in the midst of San Antonio’s historic Pearl Brewery property, itself in need of a cure, a return to well-being. I started planning a restaurant that would nod to what cancer gave me and what it cost. The menu would be full of charcuterie, pickles, jams, and mustards alongside peak-season local ingredients: the best of the past and the present combined on a plate. It would reflect my childhood surrounded by brothers on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, my culinary education in New Orleans, and my hard-won future in San Antonio. The space would foster an appreciation for time, providing room for friendships and community to cure, both in the dining room and in the kitchen. It would be the first time I worked for myself, in a restaurant Sylvia and I had dreamed about opening since we first met. A restaurant that captured that precious, fleeting joy of lingering.

We called it Cured.

People always ask me what kind of restaurant Cured is, and it doesn’t fall neatly into a category. It’s a living, breathing thing. Ingredients drive everything we do—we utilize entire animals from our ranchers and try to make the most of peak-season produce. For us, it’s smart, sustainable business to preserve, ferment, and can, purchasing produce at the height of its freshness.

Charcuterie is at the center of our menu. It is the vehicle that helps us achieve our goals, which is to buy that 350-pound pig and treat it with the utmost respect. To me, that means using all of the animal. We make hams, we make salami, we make pâtés and sausages. We use every bit.

The same philosophy extends to fruits and vegetables. Cured has a wall of jars in every color imaginable, full of relishes and salsas and pickles and jams and mustards and fermented foods. These make for a killer charcuterie board, sure, but preserved foods inform the entire menu. Our gumbo is made with smoked pork and garnished with pickled okra; the burger is topped with onion jam; fermented hot sauce goes into micheladas and fried chicken.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, this type of cooking seemed more vital than ever. We shut down the restaurant for a period, but spring still came, and along with it, the bounty of the farms of South Texas: strawberries, fennel, purple hull peas, beets, cabbage, and more. I got to work, for once alone in the Cured kitchen, and packed away as much of it as possible. Curing then became a promise to my future self, an act of faith that diners would return. And as the world gradually reopened, I was thankful for that ever-evolving wall of jars to welcome guests back into our dining room.

I don’t expect you to make your own hams like we do at the restaurant, but I do think home cooks of all skill levels can learn a lot from looking at food through the lens of preservation. What happens when you take the highest quality ingredients you can find, preserve them (or buy them already preserved!), and let that inform how you cook? My guess is you’ll start cooking a lot more interesting, flavorful foods—for not a ton more effort.