Best Food Writing 2010 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Food Fights

  THE FEDEX MEAL PLAN

  FORGOTTEN FRUITS

  AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF GERMAN BUTTERBALLS

  SOUL FOOD

  THE NEED FOR CUSTOM SLAUGHTER

  EATING ANIMALS

  Listen to Me

  ATTACK OF THE ANTI-MEAT CRUSADERS!

  Reason Number One: All “Ethical Omnivores” Cheat.

  Reason Number Two: Organic, Free-Range, and Cage-Free Mean Jack.

  Reason Number Three: Any Meat Eating Promotes More Meat Eating, and Most Meat ...

  DEAR ZAGAT

  EL BULLI GETS BESTED

  ANONYMOUS ONLINE REVIEWS AFFECTING TWIN CITIES EATERIES

  Dining Around

  FRIED IN EAST L.A.

  NEW ZION BARBECUE

  KYOTO’S TOFU OBSESSION

  TIME TO RESPECT THE RAMEN

  WORLD’S BEST SOMMELIER VS. WORLD’S WORST CUSTOMER

  NIGHTS ON THE TOWN

  AU REVOIR TO ALL THAT

  A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PRESENT

  Address Book

  Someone’s In the Kitchen

  THE PERFECT CHEF

  KILLER FOOD

  SWEET LIFE

  GINO CAMMARATA, GELATO KING

  WILL WORK NIGHTS

  RUSS & DAUGHTERS

  PIG, SMOKE, PIT: THIS FOOD IS SERIOUSLY SLOW

  Stocking the Pantry

  AVOCADO HEAVEN

  THE KIMCHI FIX

  SARDINES!

  RARE BREED

  THE CHARCUTERIE UNDERGROUND

  WINES FOR DRINKING, NOT OVERTHINKING

  The White Castle Burger of Wine

  The Bacon of Wine

  The Coffee of Wine

  MOXIE: A FLAVOR FOR THE FEW

  A Proposition

  Since 1876

  Contact

  The Tasting

  Home Cooking

  POTLUCKY

  ALL THAT GLITTERS

  THE JUICY SECRET TO SEASONING MEAT

  FEED IT OR IT DIES

  Week 20

  Week 21

  HOW TO MAKE PERFECT THIN AND CRISPY FRENCH FRIES

  The Anatomy of a Perfect Fry

  Hamburgling

  Deconstructing the Arches

  The Balance of Pectin, Starch, and Simple Sugars

  Bringing Home the Gold

  Getting Inside the Fluffy Interior

  RATHER SPECIAL AND STRANGELY POPULAR: A MILK TOAST EXEMPLARY

  Elspeth’s Milk Toast

  The Recipe File

  WHAT’S THE RECIPE?: OUR HUNGER FOR COOKBOOKS

  MY INNER CHILD

  PEOPLE OF THE CAKE

  YANCEY’S RED HOTS

  COMPUTERS OR COOKBOOKS IN THE KITCHEN?

  DOES A RECIPE NEED TO BE COMPLICATED TO BE GOOD?

  Personal Tastes

  FARM CITY

  A GLUTTON FOR GLUTEN

  THE DOUGHNUT GATHERER

  HOME RUN: MY JOURNEY BACK TO KOREAN FOOD

  GOD LOVES YOU AND YOU CAN’T DO A THING ABOUT IT

  THE LAST GOURMET SUPPER

  RECIPE INDEX

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  SUBMISSIONS FOR

  Copyright Page

  Praise for the Best Food Writing series

  “An exceptional collection worth revisiting, this will be a surefire hit with epicureans and cooks.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “If you’re looking to find new authors and voices about food, there’s an abundance to chew on here.”

  —Tampa Tribune

  “Fascinating to read now, this book will also be interesting to pick up a year from now, or ten years from now.”

  —Popmatters.com

  “Some of these stories can make you burn with a need to taste what they’re writing about.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Reflects not only a well-developed esthetic but also increasingly a perceptive politics that demands attention to agricultural and nutritional policies by both individuals and governments.”

  —Booklist

  “This is a book worth devouring.”

  —Sacramento Bee

  “The cream of the crop of food writing compilations.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “The book captures the gastronomic zeitgeist in a broad range of essays.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “There are a few recipes among the stories, but mostly its just delicious tales about eating out, cooking at home and even the politics surrounding the food on our plates.”

  —Spokesman-Review

  “The next best thing to eating there is.”

  —New York Metro

  “Stories for connoisseurs, celebrations of the specialized, the odd, or simply the excellent.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Spans the globe and palate.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “The perfect gift for the literate food lover.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  ALSO EDITED BY HOLLY HUGHES

  Best Food Writing 2009

  Best Food Writing 2008

  Best Food Writing 2007

  Best Food Writing 2006

  Best Food Writing 2005

  Best Food Writing 2004

  Best Food Writing 2003

  Best Food Writing 2002

  Best Food Writing 2001

  Best Food Writing 2000

  ALSO BY HOLLY HUGHES

  Frommer’s 500 Places to Take the Kids

  Before They Grow Up

  Frommer’s 500 Places to See Before They Disappear

  Frommer’s 500 Places for Food and Wine Lovers

  INTRODUCTION

  by Holly Hughes

  “But I’m already a Bon Appétit subscriber!” I protest to the faceless woman at the other end of the phone line. “I have years left on that subscription.”

  “Then we’d be happy to extend your Bon Appetit subscription to . . . [she checks her records] . . . the year 2025.” A drecky 1970s pop single flashes into my mind: In the year twenty-five twenty-five, if man is still alive.... At that moment, I feel a desperate impulse to reach my arm through the telephone and inflict grievous bodily harm on that poor innocent customer service operator.

  “Look, I’ve got nothing against Bon Appetit,” I plead. “It’s a perfectly lovely magazine; that’s why I already subscribe to it. That’s not the point. I want my Gourmet back.”

  A moment of silence at the other end, then a weary sigh. “Yes, ma’am. I understand. We’re hearing that from a lot of our customers.”

  I have the feeling that if Condé Nast had listened to its readers instead of high-priced business consultants, that landmark culinary magazine—founded in 1949—would still be with us. (It still is alive, in fact—at least online.) I reckon that once management has paid top dollar for consultants, they’re pretty much obligated to follow that expensive advice, no matter how drastic. But still—terminate Gourmet? It just doesn’t make sense.

  THE DEATH KNELL of Gourmet hung gloomily over my head as I began reading for this 2010 collection. Was food writing a dying art, I wondered?

  Yet the more I read, the more baffled I became. Maybe I’m not one-hundred-percent subjective—after all, I spend a goodly amount of time every year trying to read all the food writing that is produced, in books, magazines, newspapers, and Web sites. (Best job ever.) Still, I’ve been doing this for eleven years now, and from where I sit, food writing seems more robust than ever.

  Reading the flurry of articles that came out right a
fter the announcement, I saw that the Condé Nast executives who shuttered Gourmet were quick to blame the new media. The market for a culinary magazine has been steadily dwindling, they claimed, because readers nowadays generally pick up all their recipes on the internet. The very thought of this depressed me. And yet lo and behold, a few days later, I found my own teenage daughter sauntering into our kitchen, cradling her laptop, declaring that she’d found a recipe for blondies to bake for her basketball team. Could the Condé Nast suits be onto something, I wondered?

  Over the new few months, as her baking hobby flowered (or should I say floured?), the long row of cookbooks on our counter went untouched while she downloaded recipe after recipe—cupcakes, s’more bars, snickerdoodles. But then her birthday came around, and lo and behold, she came home from a surprise birthday dinner loaded down with cute pastel-colored cookbooks, courtesy of her girlfriends (smart girls, to keep the stream of baked goods flowing). She’s been happily discovering new recipes out of them ever since.

  The reality? Those quick-and-easy recipe sites could never be a satisfying replacement for Gourmet, not by a long shot. Sometimes we need the gorgeous photographs, the colorful writing—and yes, the glossy ads to flip through. And the more I read, the more I sensed that serious foodies demand more than ever that a recipe be meticulously tested, as the Gourmet test kitchen did so superbly; they want at least a little write-up, to give the recipe context, to explain the food’s history. I realized that it was time to add a new section to the book, The Recipe File, to compare and contrast different takes on this question, from Adam Gopnik’s essay on browsing through cookbooks (page 264), to Monica Bhide’s reflections on the value of simplicity in a recipe (page 294).

  It’s so easy to blame the internet for everything—the death of good writing, the death of measured thought, the death of the printed word, blah blah blah. The truth is, a great deal of today’s best food writing is being published online, on a proliferating number of serious food Web sites. With production costs eliminated (no paper, no printing press, no trucks hauling physical copies across the country), these sites can devote themselves to smart writing. With readers posting comments online, articles launch conversations; on timely topics, stories can be published immediately. My must-read list now includes chow.com, egullet.com, culinate.com, leitesculinaria.com, seriouseats.com, zesterdaily.com, among others. Nearly a dozen of the pieces selected for this year’s edition were published first on Web sites—and that doesn’t even begin to dip into the crazy number of independent blogs out there, or the many online components posted by traditional print media.

  Food writing has moved out of its “ghetto,” no longer confined to food magazines or the dining sections of newspapers (once referred to as “the women’s pages”). Such general interest magazines as The New Yorker, The Oxford American, The New York Times magazine, and salon.com have all gone so far as to set up annual food issues. Even the esteemed Atlantic Monthly magazine has added an entire section for food issues (dubbed the Atlantic Food Channel) on atlantic.com. A well-established core of professional food writers is thriving nowadays, getting more mainstream respect than ever. Jonathan Gold, page 68, broke the barrier first by winning a Pulitzer Prize—and I’ll bet he will soon be followed by others.

  Indeed, provocative food journalism has never been more widely read, with food matters increasingly on the public’s mind—thanks not only to Michael Pollan’s bestsellers, but to solid reporting by journalists such as Jane Black (page 175), Kim Severson (page 329), and former Gourmet contributor Barry Estabrook (page 34). That may be a chicken-and-egg situation—reporting whips up concern, which in turn creates more of an audience for more reporting, and on and on in an upwards spiral. Whatever the cause, the section that leads off this book, Food Fights, seems to overflow every year. This year, I found the carnivores and vegetarians still duking it out (as if that issue could ever be settled), but several other stories reveal an interesting backlash against the locavore trend (check out Jonathan Kauffman’s comparison of locavores to indie rockers, page 16, or Brett Martin’s lunatic plan to become a “global-vore,” page 2) and a pushback against restaurant ratings—whether compiled by critics, chef judges, or “ordinary” diners.

  These days, fluff is out and substance is in. Just look at The Food Network, which had long been trending toward puffy entertainment programs. This year, however, its executives launched a second channel, the Cooking Channel, that puts the focus back on hands-on cooking and kitchen technique (which is where food television began, after all—remember Julia Child?).

  When you get right down to it, food writing can’t be a dying art when there are so many talented practitioners of the art working at the top of their game. While no one writer has made it into all eleven editions of Best Food Writing, this year’s edition features 11 writers whose work merited inclusion five or more times in that 11-year span. That’s a broad range of writers, from New Englander John Thorne (page 251, nine times) and quintessential Southerner John T. Edge (page 163, also nine times) to the humor of David Leite (page 290, eight times) and the gonzo restaurant reviews of Jason Sheehan (page 149, eight times). But to really judge the state of food writing today, just look at how many new voices are in this year’s book. A handful of these, of course, are topnotch writers known for fiction or other nonfiction subjects, who only occasionally turn their attention to food—writers like Adam Gopnik (page 264), Charlotte Freeman (page 276), Wright Thompson (page 286), and Jonathan Safran Foer (page 38). Yet with 22 of the writers in this year’s Best Food Writing—nearly half of the contributors—being first-time entrants, that’s a lot of dynamic new food writers. They include J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (page 241), Oliver Strand (page 227), Mike Sula (page 192), Rowan Jacobsen (page 170), Kevin Pang (page 81), and Rachel Wharton (page 157), not to mention guys with a wholly different day job, such as William Alexander (page 232) and Robert Dickinson (page 203).

  My conclusion? We may still have to mourn Gourmet’s demise, but the rumors of food writing’s death have been greatly exaggerated. I’d go even farther—I think food writing is enjoying a spectacular moment in the spotlight. May it last forever!

  Food Fights

  THE FEDEX MEAL PLAN

  By Brett Martin From GQ

  Throwing locavore virtue and carbon footprint caution to the winds, Brett Martin embarked on a quixotic—and very funny—project: To feed himself exclusively with delicacies overnighted from around the globe.

  One should never underestimate the value of having friends whose first reaction, when you tell them you need two In-N-Out burgers FedExed from Los Angeles to New York by the next morning, is to ask, “Regular or Double-Double?” These are the kind of people with whom you’d be happy to share either a foxhole or a beer, the kind you know would be willing to follow you into any drunkenly conceived, willfully contrary, possibly wrongheaded, and certainly obnoxious scheme you’d manage to dream up. I happen to have such friends (their names are Oliver and Sarah), and I happened to have had such a scheme. It was this: To get as many foods as possible, from all over the world, sent overnight via FedEx to my home in Brooklyn.

  The idea came to me in the midst of one of those morose funks that occur after coming home from a long trip. In this case, I had just returned from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was moping about the house, dreaming of days spent stuffing myself with a mix of Chinese, Indian, and Malay delicacies unavailable anywhere else in the world.

  Or were they? I suddenly thought, snapping awake. Unavailable? What did that even mean in these modern times? After all, there is a network of couriers crisscrossing the globe twenty-four hours a day and promising that anything can be anywhere within a matter of hours. So if I craved a bowl of pork noodles of the sort sold on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, why would I need to do something as old-fashioned as actually visiting Kuala Lumpur? International shipping may be pricey, but as a way to stay connected to the tastes of the planet during lean times, it seems downright affordable.

 
But hold on, I hear you say, doesn’t this fly in the face of every single thing going on in the food world? Aren’t all right-minded eaters supposed to be eating locally, seasonally, and sustainably, with exquisite sensitivity to each ingredient’s provenance, genetic heritage, and carbon footprint?

  Well, yes. And the truth is that this made the prospect all the sweeter. It’s not that I don’t believe in local and seasonal eating. Clearly, the food revolution of the past two decades has made eating in America a better experience for mouth, belly, and conscience alike. The thing is, the revolutionaries have won. Ask any young chef for his or her culinary philosophy and you’ll hear localandseasonal rattled off so fast the actual words lose all meaning. Even behemoths like McDonald’s and Walmart have made concessions to the values of Alice Waters and Michael Pollan.

  Obviously, the local eating orthodoxy can produce some astonishing food. At Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber’s restaurant-cum-farm in Westchester County, New York, I had a midwinter dinner that, as far as I could tell, eschewed even such alien ingredients as lemon and black pepper. The meal was very beige and utterly transcendent. But like any other true belief that morphs into a tired buzzword, it’s worth taking a step back to note how, in the hands of lesser talents, this one may be abused: by the restaurateurs who believe that having a chalkboard menu crammed with farm names is more important than such incidentals as serving well-prepared, delicious food. By the chefs who equate the word local with a chance to up a dish’s price by $10. By those who would deny us the joy of acknowledging that we live in a gastronomic Age of Miracles. (Tomatoes in January? In biblical times, you could get five or six apostles for less.) And by the just plain silly; it was about the time that my local bar started listing Blue Diamond Almonds on its snack menu with the added parenthetical “(Sacramento)” that it became clear that local, seasonal, and their attendant food pieties had jumped the line-caught, fair-trade, National Marine Fisheries Service-approved mako shark.