Best Food Writing 2010 Read online

  And the fact remains that, at Blue Hill, I had paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of enacting a massive historical reversal. For the rest of human existence, as Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out in Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, one mark of a great empire has been the diversity of its ingredients and the distances they traveled to get to the elite. The Greeks and Romans filled their tables with spices, fruits, and fish from the farthest reaches of their dominions. Peter the Great had oysters brought to then landlocked Russia from thousands of miles away, packed in sawdust and hay. The British once cooled their gin-and-tonics in Calcutta with ice cut from Massachusetts ponds.

  Moreover, the movement of food across vast distances is literally the story of civilization: Science, mathematics, religion, language—all were carried around the world in ships’ holds filled with bread-fruit, amid camel caravans carrying spices, even (or especially) in shipping containers crammed with frozen McDonald’s beef. Locavore may have been the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year, but there’s already been a word for those whose diets are restricted to seasonal items grown in their immediate area: That word is peasant.

  Which, anyway, is what I told myself at 8:30 A.M. when the doorbell rang and I signed for a miraculous purple-white-and-orange package containing two slightly wilted but—or was it my imagination?—still warm In-N-Out Double-Doubles.

  HERE WERE MY CRITERIA: I would only order foods that were distinctly of their place. They would have to be meals—prepared dishes that, in the past, I would have been obliged to travel to distant lands to taste, or taste again. My dream list included bollito misto from Ristorante Diana in Bologna, Italy—dripping cuts of meat boiled together in a rich stock and served with spicy fruit mustards; muffuletta sandwiches from New Orleans’s Central Grocery Co.; Allen & Son Barbeque’s North Carolina pulled pork; parsley-and-marrow salad from St. John Restaurant in London; tonkatsu from Tokyo; the Malaysian noodles.

  I suppose I expected the food purveyors of the world to hear my plan, join hands, sing a round of “It’s a Small World,” and make haste for the nearest FedEx drop box. This may have been a touch naive. For one thing, I do not know the words for “obnoxious scheme” in Italian or Japanese. Even in English, the mission proved a hard sell. “That is not something we could possibly do,” the general manager of St. John politely told me. A Bolognese friend living in Brazil burned up his Skype account trying to find a willing partner for me in Italy. “How to FedEx a bollito misto . . . this is a very difficult thing to explain,” he reported sorrowfully. My contact in Toulouse, France, from whom I’d hoped to procure some cassoulet, had only this to say: “Clearly you are not familiar with the French.”

  Old Europe, though, was nothing compared with the legal issues here at home. The great traders of old dealt with sandstorms and tsunamis; they crossed mountain ranges and dodged pirates. My challenge was to navigate something called the Animal Product Manual, a publication of the United States Department of Agriculture. I would have rather had pirates.

  At 931 pages, filled with more acronyms than a Tom Clancy novel and more appendixes than a hospital Dumpster, the APM suggests a national strategy of protectionism through sheer confusion. The regulations on receiving gifts of food from foreign countries are buried somewhere among categories like “Powdered Bird Guano That Lacks Certification” and “Commercial Importations of Cooked Meat or Meat Products of Poultry and Fowl from a Country or Region of Origin Known to Be Free from HPAI (H5N1) but Affected with END.” What little I could decipher was not promising: Malaysia, it seemed, was, by USDA standards, a veritable pit of disease, home to “Classical Swine Fever, Exotic New-castle Disease, Foot and Mouth Disease, Highly Contagious Avian Influenza and Swine Vesicular Disease.” It was amazing I’d even gotten out alive. Sweden was hardly better. That meant that, even for those dishes allowed into the United States, each ingredient would need to be accompanied by reams of paperwork. When I got USDA senior staff veterinarian Christopher Robinson on the phone to assess my plan, he cut handily through the bureaucrat-speak : “I’d say it was pretty much impossible,” he said.

  Indeed, while I can’t vouch for dirty bombs, bales of heroin, or hordes of illegal aliens, I can report that our nation is perfectly safe from rogue shipments of suckling pig. That’s what I had coming in from the restaurant Ibu Oka in Ubud, Bali, where the pigs are stuffed to bursting with shallots, garlic, lemongrass, and chilies, bathed in coconut oil, and then hand-turned before a blazing pyre of coffee branches. The beauty of that description left customs agents at JFK unmoved: The shipment was destroyed. Likewise the noodles from KL. And a shipment of cotechino and tortellini from Italy. I began picturing my house as one of those little bases in Missile Command: Packages of delicious food came arcing toward my door from around the world, only to get zapped at the last moment by authorities at various ports of entry.

  CLEARLY, ANOTHER APPROACH was needed. But while I plotted, I contented myself with domestic goodies.

  I am convinced that we are evolutionarily equipped with a gene that makes us forget the taste of North Carolina barbecue, just so we continue to eat lesser foods in between pulled-pork sandwiches. The tub of Allen & Son pulled pork that showed up at my door was every bit as good in Brooklyn as it had been the last time I’d gorged on it at the restaurant’s vinyl-covered tables in Chapel Hill. In college my friends and I had stonedly fantasized about being able to be faxed a pizza. This wasn’t quite that level of instant gratification, but it was damned close. Even the hush puppies worked well when reheated, though owner and eponymous “Son” Keith Allen had categorically refused to send coleslaw, saying it wouldn’t survive the trip in a condition up to Allen & Son standards. “Sometimes I worry about you northern boys,” he told me.

  From New Orleans came the muffuletta, a stacked sheaf of sliced Italian meats and sharp provolone stuck between enormous rounds of bread and topped with olive relish. Central Grocery would only send frozen batches of three, but they arrived in surprisingly perfect shape. From New Mexico came a Tupperware container of green-chili enchiladas from a legendary shack of a diner called El Farolito; from Kansas City, Missouri, an order of Arthur Bryant’s “burnt ends,” the most grizzled, succulent parts of a smoked brisket.

  When a friend said, “You’re pretty much obliged to get something from Chez Panisse,” a shiver went up my spine. Alice Waters’s Berkeley restaurant is considered the very cradle of the localandseasonal movement. When I asked them to FedEx me a dinner, I was told, with just a hint of Northern California frost, “We don’t do takeout.” Undeterred, I dragooned a friend who happened to be visiting the Bay Area into visiting for dinner, ordering an extra entrée, and then shipping me the doggie bag. The short ribs with polenta were delicious but unmistakably tinged with guilt. I felt like I had just peed on Jacques Pépin.

  Meanwhile I thought I’d solved my international-shipping issues. It occurred to me that the USDA doesn’t police fish, so I switched to an all-seafood menu, carefully avoiding any knowledge of ingredients like chicken stock and butter to preserve deniability when it came to customs forms. From Stockholm’s great fish emporium, Melanders Fisk, I ordered fatty Baltic herr ing—strömming—pickled, and then breaded and fried. Then I breathlessly watched the FedEx tracking page. Sure enough, after a short delay at JFK, the package was released. Emboldened, my Malaysian contact and I switched to a noodle dish that seemed to pass the USDA test—prawn mee, a deeply spicy, complex seafood soup. I watched as it was picked up in KL, cleared Malaysian customs, and took wing across the Pacific. The next morning, it reached Anchorage and then . . . stopped, held for inspection.

  The herring, on the other hand, had arrived accompanied by tiny plastic containers of dill-laced mashed potatoes, lingonberry preserves, and drawn butter. (Oops.) It was delicious, but standing and eating in my kitchen, once the FedEx man had departed, I felt my vague misgivings begin to solidify. Was the strömming really as good as when I’d had it as a picnic on an island just
north of Stockholm, drenched in sunshine and surrounded by happy, pink vacationing families? By the same token, the muffuletta had been a fantastic sandwich, but did it really measure up to the one I’d had in New Orleans years before—the time I’d snuck out of the hotel while my girlfriend napped to greedily down a sandwich between the second of two lunches and a dinner at Galatoire’s? Cervantes may have said that hunger was the best sauce, but context runs a close second.

  I was even more conflicted about the dishes from places I hadn’t been. For years I’d planned on making the trip to Kansas City to visit Arthur Bryant’s. Now, why would I ever go to Kansas City? Or to the lonely high-desert crossroads where El Farolito sits? Even the massive carbon footprint of the sourdough loaf I’d had sent from San Francisco wasn’t quite enough to assuage my melancholy at having never been to San Francisco. I wondered if Peter the Great dreamt of standing knee-deep in the Atlantic, gathering his own oysters.

  This, I realized, is the dark side of the miracle of everything, everywhere, all the time—something we experience in realms well beyond food. Once upon a time, I would wait for the chance to hear Bessie Banks’s original version of “Go Now.” Banks’s version would come on the radio about once every two years. Each time I happened to catch it, I would all but have to pull the car over to let her stirring, wounded vocal wash over me. Now, of course, I own a digital copy of the song, but I have to keep it off my iTunes playlist for fear of it popping up on shuffle too often and losing all meaning. For that matter, there’s the rush of emotion that occurs every time a long-lost friend suddenly pops up on Facebook, which is so frequently that I’ve been forced to either stop caring or lose whole days in a paralysis of nostalgic reverie. For all its legitimate political, environmental, and gastronomic rationales, it may be that the localandseasonal movement is more about this, ultimately conservative, impulse than anything else—a self-protective retrenchment in the face of too much available data.

  I HAD ONE MORE free-floating bit of data out there, one more missile aimed at my front door. Day after day, I tracked the status of my prawn mee, greeted each time by the dread message: clearance delay. By the time it arrived, it had been a week since it was packed, some 10,000 miles away.

  Unwilling to give up the dream, I called the Customs and Border Protection office in Anchorage. Had the package been refrigerated? I asked the woman who picked up the phone. No, she said, it had probably just sat in a fenced-in portion of the warehouse.

  Hmm. What temperature would she say it was?

  “Um, this is Alaska. It’s pretty cold,” she said. “I sometimes wear a sweater in there.”

  Dear reader, is it weird that I still thought long and hard about eating the soup? Even though the package was starting to smell downright funky? Well, consider this: The last time I’d smelled prawn mee had been at a sidewalk market filled with all kinds of smells—cooking meat, fermented fish paste, ripe-to-bursting melons, tropical flowers. Maybe the funky aroma had been just one perfectly healthy note in the symphony? More to the point, isn’t that where it belonged?

  I’d like to think that it was this, rather than fear of salmonella, that brought my experiment to an end. I took a deep breath and dumped the soup down the sink. I took care to bale up the FedEx box for recycling. Then I went out for a slice of pizza.

  FORGOTTEN FRUITS

  By Gary Paul Nabhan From Saveur

  In his 2001 book Coming Home To Eat, chronicling a year of eating only out of his own Arizona foodshed, Gary Nabhan established himself as a leader of the local-eating movement. Here he trumpets the virtues of heirloom fruits and vegetables.

  The morning sun is just peeking over the ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains when my friend Jim Veteto and I spot a tall, old-looking apple tree arching over the side of the road. We swerve our rented PT Cruiser to the shoulder and get out. I’m hoping that these apples are Nickajacks, a rare variety that’s native to the highlands of western North Carolina, so I climb onto the hood of the car and reach as high as I can, to no avail. Jim, who is quite a bit taller than I am, climbs up next to me and, with a little bounce, snatches a low-hanging fruit. He holds it up for inspection. I can tell from its color and irregular shape that it’s not the apple we were searching for.

  “It kind of looks like a Mudhole,” I say, referring to a type once known in these parts for making excellent apple butter. I take a bite. Nope, this one is creamier, with whiter flesh. It’s probably just one of the countless unnamed apple varieties you find in the wild around here.

  “That’s the dilemma,” Jim says, as we get back in the car. “There are so many heirloom varieties that have adapted to the micro climates up here, it’s hard to identify them.” Jim, a lanky, bearded 35-year-old, knows a lot about heirloom fruits and vegetables. He works with the Southern Seed Legacy in Athens, Georgia, an organization devoted to preserving the seeds of heirloom plants in order to restore some of the genetic diversity that industrial agriculture has eroded over the years.

  On this trip, though, we’re looking for forgotten fruits, not seeds. We’re on a late-summer apple search-and-rescue mission in the mountains of North Carolina for a program I started five years ago called Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT). With the help of Slow Food USA and six other national organizations, RAFT aims to restore foods and culinary customs that are at risk of disappearing. Apples are at the top of our list because hundreds of varieties have become extinct in recent decades, their unique physical attributes and tastes basically erased. For a food that is as iconic and as essential to the American culinary canon as the apple, it’s tragic that only 11 varieties—out of the estimated 14,000 that evolved from the seeds English settlers brought to North America from Europe—constitute 90 percent of all apple consumption in the United States.

  The remaining 10 percent includes heirloom apples of all shapes and sizes—some gnarly and spotted and downright ugly, others with graceful silhouettes and glossy skin. Some are honey sweet; others have a lip-puckering, tannic tartness; still others fall somewhere in between, offering subtle hints of flavors most people may never have tasted in an apple. They have names like Gloria Mundi, Seek-No-Further, Ohio Nonpareil, Brushy Mountains Limbertwig, and Shiawassee Beauty, to name just a few. The problem is that fewer and fewer of these fruits are commercially available, as one small orchard after another is let go to seed and the names of the old varieties are forgotten. The trees themselves may survive, in the wild or on private property, but the histories of their fruit are often a mystery.

  That’s one reason why I’m driving the country roads of North Carolina with Jim: I’m meeting up with locals who can help me identify and revive some of these old varieties. This part of Appalachia—particularly the region known as the Southern Highlands, which encompasses the Blue Ridge, Great Smoky, and parts of the Cumberland and Allegheny mountain ranges—is one of the richest apple habitats in the country. Today, somewhere between 800 and 1,000 distinct heirloom varieties still grow in the area’s hills, coves, and hollers—more kinds, by some counts, than are found in all the other regions of North America combined.

  Not surprisingly, the cooks of Appalachia have strong preferences for specific varieties—one kind for eating fresh, another kind for applesauce, another for pie, and so on—that are different from the tastes of their Northern neighbors. “In the North, they eat a tart and cook a sweet. Here in the South, it runs the other way,” one North Carolina orchard owner tells us. “I love a tart Jonathan in a pie, but those Yankees might use an apple as sweet as a Golden Delicious.” What’s more, Appalachian cooks use apples in some altogether remarkable ways. Outside Appalachia, you just aren’t going to find so many people inclined to make fried apple pies, cook sliced apples with chopped cabbage, spread applesauce between layers of molasses cake, stew sun-dried apples, or dip ringlike slices of apples in batter and fry them to make fritters.

  TO PEOPLE LIKE ME, the disappearance of old apple varieties—like the die-off of an animal species—represents a pro
found loss, in terms not just of botanical diversity or rural cultural history but also of the way we eat. The striking, unusual flavors and cooking properties possessed by these heirloom apples simply don’t exist in supermarket varieties. And yet, Jim reminds me, most people in the region don’t refer to the apples growing in their midst as heritage breeds. “Most people around here have never heard the term heirloom applied to plants,” Jim says. “They just call them old-timey apples.”

  In the broadest sense, an heirloom apple is any distinct, named variety of the fruit that has been passed down in a family, community, or culture for generations. To preserve an heirloom variety, it’s not enough simply to save the seeds, though. Growing a genetically identical apple requires a concerted, calculated effort: you have to graft cuttings from one tree onto the rootstock of another. The reason for this is that seedling apple trees—those that grow in the wild from seed—produce fruit that’s essentially a hybrid of their parents and therefore a new kind of apple. This explains why countless varieties of the fruit, believed to have originated in Kazakhstan thousands of years ago, have propagated around the world.

  My trip in North Carolina with Jim is just the latest in a series of travels I’ve made with RAFT collaborators over the past few years to seek out, recruit, and learn from other Southern heirloom apple preservationists. These journeys have led me to forge friendships with some remarkable people—orchard keepers, historians, cider makers, horticulturists, and others. Perhaps the most respected scholar among them is the North Carolina apple historian Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr., who spends the majority of his waking hours matching forgotten fruits to their names. Since he took up this pursuit, in 1982, he has discovered and identified a slew of apples formerly thought to be extinct, relying mostly on horticulture books, old nursery catalogues, and archival illustrations. Calhoun, a soft-spoken 75-year-old, has also brought 300 heirloom varieties into cultivation at nurseries he consults with across the South.