Best Food Writing 2011 Read online

  Do not eat the swine—do not even touch it. Just stop eating the swine flesh and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother’s old fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15 minute biscuits made with baking powder. Put yeast in your bread and let it sour and rise and then bake it. Eat and drink to live not to die.

  Pork is haram, or forbidden, to traditional Muslims. Pork, especially the less-noble parts, was also the primary meat fed to enslaved African Americans. Pork in any form was anathema to NOI members, as were collard greens or black-eyed peas seasoned with swine. The refusal of the traditional African American diet of pig and corn was an indictment of its deleterious effects on African American health, but also a backhanded acknowledgment of the cultural resonance that it held for most blacks, albeit one rooted in slavery. Pork had become so emblematic of African American food that the forbidding of it by the Nation of Islam was radical, and the refusal to eat swine immediately differentiated members of the group from many other African Americans as much as the sober dress and bow ties of the men and the hijab-like attire of the women. Forbidding pork made a powerful political statement, but the real culinary hallmark of the Nation was the bean pie—a sweet pie, prepared from the small navy beans that Elijah Muhammad decreed digestible. It was hawked by the dark-suited, bow-tie-wearing followers of the religion along with copies of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, spreading the Nation’s gospel in both an intellectual and a gustatory manner....

  Increasing numbers of African Americans chose to celebrate Kwanzaa in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a part of a growing awareness of their own African roots. The Peace Corps and continuing missionary work by churches black and white sent African Americans to the African continent, resulting in more widespread knowledge of the African Diaspora and expanded gastronomic horizons, and contributed to a growing sense of shared culinary underpinning. In larger cities and college towns, dishes of West African jollof rice and Ghanaian groundnut stew began to be found on dinner tables alongside more traditional favorites.

  Then, in 1977, the publication of the autobiography of writer Alex Haley, Roots, and the subsequent television miniseries based on it transformed the way many African Americans thought of themselves and of Africa. Blacks were galvanized by Roots, and large numbers made pilgrimages to the African continent with hopes of discovering their own ancestral origins. (Coinciding with the release of the television miniseries, a travel organization began to offer trips to Dakar, Senegal, for $299, a price that was affordable for many who might otherwise never have traveled to the continent.) They boarded the planes by the hundreds and on the other side of the Atlantic found myriad connections between African American culture and that of the motherland. One major connection they discovered was West Africa’s food. They visited markets and recognized items that had for centuries been associated with African American life: okra, watermelon, and black-eyed peas. They tasted foods that had familiar savors and learned new ways to prepare staples of the African American diet like peanuts, hot chilies, and leafy greens. In Senegal, they tasted the onion-and-lemon-flavored chicken yassa and the national rice-and-fish dish, thieboudiennse; in Ghana, they sampled spicy peanut stews; in Nigeria, they savored a black-eyed pea fritter called an akara. African Americans began to taste the culinary connections between foods they knew and those of the western section of the African continent.

  This new knowledge found its way to a larger public, as the avant garde of African American cookbook authors took a more international approach and reflected a sense of the African Diaspora in their work. Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor, and The African Heritage Cookbook, by Helen Mendes, look at the traditional foods not just of the American South but also of an international African culinary diaspora and contain recipes for dishes from the African continent and the Caribbean as well as traditional Southern ones....

  The 1970s were a time of political consciousness on all fronts. How one dressed—dashiki or three-piece suit or shirt jacket—subtly advertised a point of view. For women, long skirts or short, afro or straightened hair all took on great significance. How one ate was equally fraught with political subtext, and a meal with friends of differing political stripes could be transformed into a minefield of culinary dos and don’ts.

  Members of the Nation of Islam were identified by their bow ties and their well-pressed suits. They were also recognized by their diet, which was without any hint of swine. It was a highly codified regimen with foods that, although they were considered healthier than the newly named “soul food,” retained some aspects of the traditional African American taste profile—sugary desserts and well-cooked vegetables. There was no alcohol to be seen, and dessert was more often than not a bean pie—one of the religion’s hallmarks.

  Dashiki-clad cultural nationalists ate a diet that was multicultural and infused with international flavor. The calabashes and carved wooden bowls that appeared on their batik tablecloths were likely to be filled with dishes like the spicy jollof rice from western Africa, or the seafood-rich stew of leafy greens known as callaloo from the Caribbean, or a Louisiana file gumbo, or one of the newly created health-food-inspired dishes with a real or ersatz African name. Anything might turn up on their tables.

  The upwardly mobile bourgeoisie continued to dine on Eurocentric foods and to emulate the culinary styles that James Beard, Julia Child, and Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, were bringing to the television sets weekly. Beef bourguignonne, beef Wellington, and cheese fondue were party standbys. In the privacy of their homes or those of their friends, they might indulge in some chitterlings or a slice of watermelon, but unless done to evidence culinary solidarity with others, it was not their public position.

  The classic foods of the African American South—stewed okra and butter beans, pork chops and fried chicken—maintained their place at the table as well. These were the foods of rural Southerners and those Northerners and activists who wished to signal their solidarity with the more traditional arm of the Civil Rights Movement. For some, they remained the daily dietary mainstays; but for most, they evolved into the celebration food of family reunions and Sunday dinners.

  Those with no special allegiance to any one faction ate what they wished or whatever was placed in front of them. Their tables might groan under a meal of Southern fried chicken and Caribbean rice and peas or be set with the finest family china upon which would be placed chitterlings and a mess of greens. The gastronomically flexible developed a chameleonlike ability to change with the prevailing culinary trend and political view.

  By the end of the 1970s, food, like all aspects of African American life, had become a battleground for identity. The period’s multiplicity of gastronomic and political positions and their dietary restrictions were difficult to navigate and confounded more than one diner. The political table wars were fierce, and ostracism, often accompanied by indigestion, awaited anyone who unwittingly crossed the dietary dividing lines. However, the new foods and the myriad cooking styles they brought into the African American culinary lexicon expanded African American taste, globalized the foodways of the African American world, and paved the way for the African American culinary omnivore of the last decades of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century.

  FROM KENYA, WITH LOVE

  By Rick Nelson

  From the Minneapolis Star Tribune

  A native Minnesotan himself, Rick Nelson—veteran restaurant reviewer and columnist for the Twin Cities’ major daily newspaper—also explores the flavors that recent immigrants add to the food story of this big, and increasingly multicultural, Midwestern metropolis.

  From the road, the small farm resembles its neighbors, at least at first glance: a weathered red barn, a well-kept yard, a few hard-working vehicles parked in the gravel driveway.

  But unlike the rest of the fields lining the hilly river valley a few miles east of the Mississippi River, this acreage is tended by elegant African
women, their figures wrapped in vividly patterned fabrics to keep the insects at bay. Look closer and you’ll see that bedrock of American agriculture’s neat-freakishness—strict, militaristic rows of monoculture crops—has been willfully cast aside for a melange of plants seemingly spreading out, willy nilly. Look even closer and wonder: Just what the heck are they growing, anyway?

  Chinsaga. Rinagu. Egesare. The Kisii-language names of these East African greens roll off the tongues of farmers Albert and Sarah Nyamari like operatic lyrics. The couple, aided by an extended clan of fellow Kenyan family members and friends, are cultivating a dozen or so greens and other vegetables that may be unfamiliar to American eyes and taste buds but, “are like hamburgers to us,” said Albert.

  To the uninitiated, it’s tough to discern what’s a weed and what isn’t, at least until one of the women working nearby starts quickly plucking finger-sized leaves off a knee-high plant, deftly stuffing them into paper bags.

  “Chinsaga,” said Albert, passing a handful for a taste. It’s chewy and slightly bitter, and while the leaves can be eaten raw, they’re usually boiled until tender, and often sautéed with onions and tomatoes.

  “For Kenyans, nothing is cooked unless it has tomatoes,” said Sarah with a laugh.

  Teardrop-shaped rinagu looks and grows a bit like basil, and for Kenyan cooks it’s the most versatile of the three staple greens. “It’s tastier, more tender,” said Sarah. “You can get more recipes from it.”

  A stretch of egesare, its diamond-shaped leaves a favorite for sweetening soups and stews, is the farm’s prettiest field, each plant forming a gentle green dome; hundreds of them create a kind of bubbled carpet. “This is how I see it in Kenya,” said Albert. The plants’ root structure thrives when it has room to spread out, rather than forced into neat rows, so its haphazard beauty only accentuates the dull predictability of linear, by-the-book agriculture. Grant Wood would have never painted this farm. His loss.

  A Growing Market

  Albert estimates that there are 7,000 to 10,000 Kenyans living in the Twin Cities, far away from their native home, their families, their foods. Many are gardeners, but no one, at least locally, is growing beloved Kenyan staples on the Nyamaris’ scale, and certainly not on a commercial basis.

  The couple don’t sell through traditional farmers market channels, or via the Community Supported Agriculture farm-share model. Instead, theirs is strictly word-of-mouth marketing, filling orders from more than 100 customers (“people see me and they see vegetables,” said Sarah with a laugh) as conditions on the farm dictate. Demand is so great that there’s a waiting list.

  Other crops include a variety of spinach called emboga, and dark green pumpkins called omwongo that thrive under a protective canopy of weeds and are prized for their enormous squash, hand-sized leaves and sweet seeds. Amarabwoni, a white sweet potato, could be the farm’s Next Big Thing; while his fellow East Africans favor its crunchy root, Albert plans to cultivate a larger crop next year to cater to West Africans and Asians, who prefer its leaves.

  Most of the farm’s initial seeds were sourced out of an expensive California-based specialist, but Albert cannily supplemented his inventory by foraging, post-harvest, in Minneapolis community gardens, searching for familiar plants among Kenyan gardeners. With permission, of course.

  Lake Pepin via Kenya

  The farm is a unique partnership. The land, a series of basketball court-sized fields tucked up against steeply wooded hills, belongs to Marge Lorayne and her late partner, Helen Johnson. The two couples met several years ago when Albert, then a hospice worker, was caring for Lorayne’s dying son. At the time, Albert was farming a small rented plot near Zimmerman, Minn., but the arrangement wasn’t working out. Lorayne’s son asked his mother to find a place on her underused Wisconsin acreage for the part-time farmer who was making his last days comfortable.

  She agreed, but was unsure how to proceed. “I knew that there would be a lot of cultural things that would come up,” said Lorayne. “We sit down and talk about them, and then we laugh. We laugh a lot.”

  This is how close the families have become: the Nyamaris’ three children call Lorayne “Grandma,” and Sarah calls her “Mum.” “We’re close,” said Lorayne. “We’re family.”

  Their first encounter was something of a baptism by fire. Lorayne and Johnson returned from a party at midnight to unexpectedly find 15 Kenyans crowded into their kitchen, using every knife in the house to carve a goat on the kitchen table. “What else could we do but join in?” said Lorayne with a laugh. “It was fabulous. There was singing and dancing and they wouldn’t let us go to sleep without eating their food. That was our opening with them, and since then, there have been a thousand wonderful, delightful things.”

  That was three years ago. With each growing season, Albert has ambitiously expanded, tilling more land, adding more crops. He handles the planning, plowing, planting and weeding (their produce isn’t certified organic, but the Nyamaris steer clear of chemical fertilizers and pesticides), while the painstaking picking process is strictly women’s work. “Men are more slow,” said Sarah with a laugh. “They don’t have the patience to get one leaf at a time.”

  Many of the women harvesting at the farm are the mothers of Sarah’s friends, visiting from Kenya. “They’re used to doing this every single day at home,” said Sarah. “It’s a pleasure for them. Watching TV is not their thing.”

  That the industrious Nyamaris find the time to farm at all is something of a mystery. Along with raising their three young children, Albert, 34, who grew up on a farm, just launched Kastone Mobility Services, his own patient transport business. Sarah, 32, works as a nurse and is also in school, working toward an advanced nursing degree.

  Their carefully planned commute to the farm from their Brooklyn Park home is a 90-minute drive, although they make the trip so frequently that “it now feels like 10 minutes to me,” said Albert with a laugh. Still, any time in the car is time not tending to the land, and each trip is viewed as an escape from the pressures and sounds of urban life. The family’s long-term goal is to relocate to their own farm in the Lake Pepin area and expand the business they are so carefully nurturing.

  “I don’t want to let this opportunity pass me by,” said Albert. “Always my blood is at the farm.”

  PEASANTS

  By Geoff Nicholson

  From Tin House

  Author of such darkly satiric novels as Bleeding London, Everything and More, and Still Life with Volkswagen, Geoff Nicholson divides his time between London and Los Angeles, with all the cultural dislocations that entails. Who knew pigs’ trotters would follow him across the pond?

  Once a week, as I was growing up in the north of England, I watched my Irish grandfather eat a boiled pig’s trotter. I watched with fascination rather than envy, since my parents had assured me, with the certainty parents so often have, that I wouldn’t enjoy the taste of a pig’s trotter. Later in my life I learned this wasn’t true, but at the time I didn’t argue. There were, for sure, other, much bigger battles to be fought against my parents, but when I look back on it I wonder quite why they were so insistent that pigs’ trotters weren’t for me, and I think the answer is because they’d decided pigs’ trotters weren’t for them. My parents were making a long, arduous journey from the working class to the middle class, and instinctively they’d decided that eating pigs’ trotters would slow their social ascendancy. Trotters were peasant food, and my parents were no longer prepared to be peasants.

  Today I live in Los Angeles, not entirely a bastion of social egalitarianism, though certainly a place where an Englishman can kick over the traces of his origins if he wants to, at least until he meets another Englishman. It’s also a place where it’s currently hard to find an upscale restaurant that doesn’t serve pigs’ trotters. Peasant food is now very hip indeed. Mario Batali’s Osteria Mozza serves trotters with cicoria and mustard: at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon they come with sauce gribiche. At Animal, a newly fashionable
and pork-positive eatery, you’re likely to find not only trotters, but also pigs’ ears, cheeks, and tails.

  These would have been even more unthinkable to my parents, though they were perfectly happy to eat any number of other “low” pork products: pork pies, black pudding, “scraps,” which were a type of deep-fried pork skin, and also “dripping”—the fat found in the bottom of the pan after roasting a piece of pork: this was regarded as a wholesome bedtime snack. Pork roasts themselves, of course, were regarded as rather superior fare, and bacon was eaten at every available opportunity.

  I was born and grew up in Sheffield, specifically in the rough but striving working-class neighborhood of Hillsborough. Various members of Def Leppard also hail from there. At the time it seemed all too unremarkable, but looking back on it, two things stand out: that it had a large Catholic population (which included the majority of my own family), and that there were more pork butchers and “pork shops” than you’d think such a small suburb could possibly support.

  A Sheffield pork shop was, and still is, a place where you buy hot pork sandwiches complete with crackling, apple sauce, and stuffing: pretty much the best reason I know for visiting Sheffield. Los Angeles doesn’t have an exact equivalent as far as I’m aware, but having a large Latino population means there’s no shortage of places to buy and eat pork in myriad forms. Chorizos, longanizas, morangas, chicharróns, cueritos, quesos del puerco: we got ‘em.