Now that's what I call a healing diet! Very inspiring!

Laurel Blair, NTP
www.dynamicbalancenutrition.com


A Lake Clear chef resurrects hearty Adirondack “cure cottage” cuisine

https://www.7dvt.com/2011fat-without-fear

BY CORIN HIRSCH [07.27.11]

In the late 1800s, Saranac Lake, N.Y., with its robust mountain air and preternatural quiet, became a destination for legions of people afflicted with tuberculosis. Dozens of Victorian “cure cottages” sprang up there, their enclosed porches designed to expose sufferers to the fresh air that was thought to be part of the cure.

Patients ate three hearty meals a day, but not necessarily foods we associate with recuperation: copious amounts of raw milk, meat and eggs. Fat, people believed, paved the road to recovery.

Whether the air or the food was responsible, thousands of people left Saranac Lake in good health, and its reputation as the place to kick TB persisted until the 1950s. Today, however, the classic convalescent diet of whole milk, game and other meat, and fermented vegetables may seem as quaint as the cottages. The Adirondack culinary cure has fallen victim to modern trends in healthy eating, fed by the belief that fat clogs our arteries and regular consumption of meat inclines us toward all kinds of ailments.

But one Adirondack chef is bucking those trends and reviving the tradition. Cathy Hohmeyer’s kitchen lies eight miles outside Saranac Lake on the shores of smaller Lake Clear. Here, at the resort she owns with her husband, Ernest — Lake Clear Lodge & Retreat — she fuses the hearty fare of those cure cottages, the German and Polish dishes she learned from her mother-in-law and the local and foraged foods of the mountains, all with an eye to improving our constitutions. Hohmeyer touts the healing virtues of this “Adirondacks-Alpine fusion” fare, as she calls it, and says it’s her best shot at answering a tricky question: What exactly is Adirondack cuisine?

“We’ve taken different traditions and developed our own,” says Hohmeyer, 50, a petite woman with gray-green eyes. The backbone of her menu is local meat, dairy and produce, supplemented by whole foods that are fermented and sometimes raw. Ernest Hohmeyer points out that his wife’s fare uncannily resembles medieval European cuisine, with its bone broths, lots of cultured and whole-milk dairy, roasts, and absolutely no fear of fat.

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