Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  The tarka technique is a good way to play with whole spices. It’s nothing more than frying some whole seed spices in oil (or ghee) to release their flavor and then adding the contents of the sauté pan to what you’re cooking.

  2 pounds fresh tomatoes (or canned equivalent)

  1 head of cauliflower cut into florets

  2 teaspoons ground coriander

  1 ½ teaspoons whole cumin

  1 tablespoon black (or brown) mustard seeds

  1 teaspoon caraway seed

  1 tablespoon pequin chilies (Feel free to add more or less to taste or use any other small dried red chili.)

  2 tablespoons oil or ghee

  1 teaspoon garam masala

  Salt to taste

  Combine tomatoes, cauliflower, and coriander in a pot and begin heating. Meanwhile heat oil in a small skillet. Once the oil is moderately hot, add the cumin, caraway, mustard, and chilies. Heat them gently until they become fragrant and the mustard seeds begin to pop. Add the spices and oil to the tomato mixture and stir. Cook until the cauliflower is tender. Taste and add salt and the garam masala. Cook 10 more minutes. Serve over rice—or not.

  YELLOW DUTCH

  By Rick Nichols

  From Edible Philly

  Pulitzer Prize–winning Philadelphia Inquirer writer Rick Nichols nowadays covers a locavore food beat, focusing on his native Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Dutch country. For the new Edible Philly magazine, Nichols chronicled how one man revived his family’s spice business, and with it a proud immigrant history.

  One day last fall, not long after his saffron crocuses bloomed and their spindly stigmas had been hand-plucked—one by one—and dried, Justin Hulshizer showed up at the city’s Reading Terminal Market with his packets.

  He had a hunch, maybe a hope is more like it, that there might still be a niche for the stuff. There was plenty of imported saffron around, increasingly from Afghanistan, but from Italy and Greece, too, and certainly Spain, where it famously yellows the paella.

  But not a blessed thread was to be had anymore from the Pennsylvania Dutch lands west of Philadelphia where Hulshizer grew up and still lives, and where saffron was a kitchen-garden staple of his Swiss Mennonite forebears, and once—lucratively—widely farmed for export.

  Pennsylvania saffron commanded top dollar. In the early 1700s, in fact, its price per ounce—still the highest of any spice—equaled the price of gold on the Philadelphia commodities exchange. And back then it was the Spanish in the West Indies who were hot to get American saffron, not the other way around.

  The last local saffron farmer of any commercial bent in recent years had been Martin Keen of Landisville, whose patch of local saffron got boffo reviews—in Cook’s Illustrated in 2001 for its richness; in the New York Times for a potency that was easily, as Philadelphia Magazine reported, “as intense as the Persian.”

  Then seven years ago or more, Keen stopped returning phone calls from his biggest wholesale customer in the city. Soon after, his trademark tubes of M & J Greider Saffron dropped out of sight.

  Some say it was hungry voles marauding from a field gone fallow next door that chewed up his saffron bulbs.

  Justin Hulshizer did not know much about that. He was not even a farmer, actually. He was a drug and alcohol counselor for troubled kids. He once had to send a 13-year-old to rehab for heroin addiction. But he was also a home gardener who six years ago started tending an organic micro-crop of saffron in the raised beds—16 by 24 feet long—he’d wedged between the cement tracks of his Wernersville, Berks County, driveway.

  He had grown up in northern Lancaster County, a few miles south, obliviously eating “yellow Dutch,” which meant that the soul foods of his once-Mennonite (now Lutheran) family typically shone with saffron’s buttery tint: “I didn’t know that potpie wasn’t [always] yellow,” he says, “until I was 22.”

  Now he wanted to test the waters, to see if Michael Holahan at the Reading Market’s Pennsylvania General Store would be able to move the $8 packets he’d dropped off, each one with a pinch of his threads, enough for about two heaping bowls of saffron noodles.

  But when he talked about his project, he talked more about it as a sentimental journey. His saffron bulbs—technically, corms—came from the flower bed he had tended as a boy for his late grandmother, a revered school nurse named Merla Shirk Hulshizer.

  The saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) is a botanic nonconformist, its bulbs multiplying by dividing, its blooms coming exclusively in the fall, the opposite of the ornamental springblooming crocus.

  So every October, Merla would linger by her back door, and when the flowers finally opened, she’d shuffle outside, down the steps and promptly pick the cup-shaped lavender blooms. Then she’d pinch out the three dainty stigmas—antenna-like crimson strands—and dry them on the sunny sill of her kitchen window.

  That’s the way Hulshizer wrote up the story in the packets of Shirk’s Saffron that he had brought to the market. But in the weeks that passed, the narrative itself started multiplying and dividing, the unexpected postscript threatening to overtake the original tale.

  As 2014 dawned, Justin Hulshizer found himself giddily contemplating, at age 38, whether there might be more to this saffron business than he’d banked on.

  Before things started to heat up—before he got the eager call from Eli Kulp, the chef at Philadelphia’s cutting-edge Fork bistro, and a nibble from a baker at Judy’s on Cherry, a café in Reading, and inquiries from historic sites—Hulshizer had promised to cook me a lunch “yellow Dutch.”

  So we convened in his modest kitchen in small-town Wernersville, a few yards from his repurposed driveway, down Gaul Street from the local fire hall, 20 minutes west of Reading.

  His wife Louise was out of town for the day, and his kids’ parakeets—Rainbow Tail and Megalodon—were looping around. Redware pottery was stacked willy-nilly. On one wall was a framed vintage poster: “FOOD,” it said. “1. buy it with thought 2. cook it with care 3. use less wheat & meat 4. buy local foods 5. serve just enough 6. use what is left. don’t waste it.”

  It dated from the U.S. Food Administration, circa 1917, which is to say World War I.

  Hulshizer had already put a chicken in the oven to roast, and broccoli on the stove, and crimped the crust on a deep-dish apple pie. Now he folded a square of paper into an envelope, sprinkled in red threads, and on the counter top, rubbed them into powder with the edge of his thumb.

  This is how you start to turn even store-bought noodles into saffron noodles. He added the powder to warm broth, and soon its sunny, marigold blush emerged.

  It is the same blush that announced the chicken-corn soup every year at the fireman’s carnival in Schoeneck, a few miles south, where Hulshizer used to live, and near where his Shirk ancestors owned 2,000 acres of farmland long ago bought from William Penn’s sons, Richard and Thomas.

  It is the blush that colored the filling (as stuffing was called) in the Thanksgiving turkeys, and the interior of the Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy known, rather indelicately, as stuffed pig stomach.

  But most commonly it defined the potpies of the yellow Dutch, who are, simply, those who held on to a saffron cookery whose roots go back to their European homeland. “Yellow” doesn’t necessarily connote Amish, or any other sliver of the diverse German-Swiss descended community. Hulshizer is Lutheran. Some Catholic Dutch are yellow. Some Reformed Mennonites don’t touch the stuff.

  And across the Lancaster-area country where it was once farmed, and in Kinzers and White Horse and Gap, and where auctioneers still offer, on occasion, 19th-century folk-art saffron boxes painted with strawberries, it is hardly universally celebrated. Or, in many cases, even remembered.

  Still, the historian William Woys Weaver sees it as a revealing benchmark. You can conclude a great deal by dissecting a potato potpie. Look at one once served with chicken salad and fried oysters at Lutheran church suppers: “With its layers of pasta and potatoes and local-harvest saffron and spice,” he writes,
it’s hard to imagine it surfacing “anywhere else but Pennsylvania.”

  Hulshizer puts the bronzed chicken and broccoli and yellow noodles on the table.

  But I’m at a loss to pin down the aroma (hay-like? metallic honey?) and the flavor.

  Maybe it’s a mildy floral note with an undertone of earthiness. But saffron is a creature of its terroir, so elsewhere it is said to confer a nutty taste, or toasty, bitter, or pungent flavor.

  I look to Hulshizer for a little help. He has the bulk of James Gandolfini, his hair thinning, his shirt untucked from a pair of relaxed-cut jeans.

  How would he describe the taste of a bowl of saffron noodles? “It tastes,” he says, “like it’s supposed to taste.”

  Merla Shirk Hulshizer’s saffron apparently liked the move to Wernersville. Rabbits were a threat. They could gnaw its grassy blades down to the nub. And root rot was a constant worry.

  But the first time Hulshizer dug up the bulbs to clean and dry their roots—normal maintenance every three years—they’d gone gangbusters underground, multiplying and dividing. “Like crazy,” he says.

  It was as if an unseen hand had been watching over them, urging them on. He started to cry.

  He figured there are 3,000 or so bulbs now, a pittance in the larger saffron world. But still he was starting to consider—in a few years—adding new raised beds back in Schoeneck, on the street where he once lived, where his brother still resides.

  Then the saffron started to sell, albeit modestly, at the Reading Terminal Market. A handful of inquiries trickled in from gift shops at historic sites. Hulshizer knew someone who knew a purchasing manager at Winterthur, which houses a world-class Pennsylvania Dutch collection. Wouldn’t his heirloom saffron packets be a good fit?

  And then there was the nibble from Judy’s on Cherry, the ambitious café in Reading’s former farm market. And, in early January, the call from Eli Kulp who wanted a sizable supply of his saffron for a locally themed tasting menu he was putting together.

  Kulp had already lined up a handful of other small-time, local suppliers—Highbourne Deer Farms in Dallastown, which raises red deer for venison; an older lady who had a stash of hard-to-find hickory nuts (“similar to, if not better, than a pecan”); Castle Valley Mill in Doylestown, which sources grains from Bucks County and grinds them with cool, old stones; and Hodecker’s celery farm on Esbenshade Road in Manheim, one of the last family operations still trench-growing sweet, tender, golden celery hearts.

  The very notion of it all, and Kulp’s enthusiasm, got Hulshizer thinking about moving up his timetable. Maybe he’d shoot for this spring to expand his crop, put five more raised beds on the old homestead in Schoeneck, push for a total of 10,000 bulbs.

  There was south-facing space with full sunlight all day there, more than the six hours a day he routinely got in the Wernersville driveway. Kulp was keen on creating a special dish. Hulshizer mentioned the pesky affinity that rabbits had for his saffron.

  And that’s how it came to pass that at Fork, for much of last winter, there appeared on the menu a dish of stewed and roasted rabbit with smoked buckwheat dumplings, a golden pond of saffron broth lapping triumphantly at its edge.

  It was called, pointedly, Saffron’s Revenge.

  THE FORGOTTEN HARVEST

  By Jack Hitt

  From Garden & Gun

  Jack Hitt brings a yarn-spinner’s droll humor to his non-fiction articles for the New York Times, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and radio’s This American Life. His 2012 book, Bunch of Amateurs, looks at America through the lens of its tinkerers and inventors—men like this homespun crew from Hitt’s native South Carolina.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bunch of men standing around a fire must be in want of some banter. There were about a dozen of us gathered deep in the Carolina woods, and the fire blazed. When I asked one of the older men what his role was here, he said he was a project “consultant,” which, he explained, “means I ain’t doin’ a lick of work.” A burst of laughter cleared the glade of squirrels.

  One guy kicked the dirt and confessed that he didn’t really understand a whole lot about what we were doing. To which another consultant started in on a story—about a young fellow, newly hired at a stable, who confessed to the foreman that he didn’t know a lot about horses. “Yeah,” said the foreman, “stay around here long enough and you’ll find out how little all these other people know.” Once again, the squirrels bolted for the far woods.

  Yet it was probably around a fire like this one a few aeons back where the first mysteries of cooking dinner blazed into revelation. And if that’s the case, then not much has changed except the location. It was a brisk fall morning, and we were way down a dirt road beneath some oaks and tall pines on Lavington Plantation in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The rowdy fire howled inside a brick hearth built to support a massive kettle—five feet in diameter and weighing about three hundred pounds—bubbling with eighty gallons of sugarcane juice, which would take some five hours to boil down to eight gallons of cane sugar syrup. The process involved a lot of watching. At various moments throughout the day, the whole lot of us sometimes just stood there, staring into the rolling boil, seized by a silent reverie Herman Melville might recognize.

  It’s hard to say which is more mesmerizing, the reddish depth of the juice bursting onto the surface in an amber lather, or just the kettle itself. I say “kettle” but that somehow puts in mind a cauldron one might see in a high school production of Macbeth. There is no good English word for the simple beauty of this stunning object. It is pure cast iron and shaped like an outsized cereal bowl. You could wash a couple of children in this thing or use it as a birdbath for pterodactyls. The curve itself is enough to pull you in, a shape that grabs the eye like the slope of a horse’s back or the gunwale of a schooner.

  Four hundred years ago, the European longing for the sweetness in this kettle got the first colonial economy going, and was part of what set the slave trade in the Americas on a trajectory that would last for centuries. There is a lot of history in this kettle. But for much of the last hundred years, cane sugar syrup was the main source of sweetness in small communities when everything else was too expensive. By lunchtime, we were all looking into the foaming broth to catch that magic moment when the concentrated liquid would quickly thicken into syrup, but honestly, I was looking to see if there was anything else in that kettle besides nostalgia.

  My friend Jimmy Hagood and I have, off and on, been poking around old Charleston recipes and fading cooking techniques, mostly for fun, looking to find old flavors that somehow got lost. Hagood used to be an insurance agent, but one thing led to another and now he’s one of the Lowcountry’s leading pit masters, and his company, Food for the Southern Soul, sells all kinds of mainstays from grits and rice to Charleston specialties like benne wafers and Jerusalem artichoke relish. A while back, for instance, he started fooling around with jerky. When I joined him in the kitchen one time, it was a revelation to learn just how much has been lost between what everyone’s grandparents used to make and that crud dangling by the cash register at the gas station. A lot. Real jerky was once the vehicle for a host of complex marinades and spicy vinegars and varieties of smoke—before it got streamlined into a greasy finger of sodium nitrite.

  This time, Hagood invited me out to his uncle’s place, where once a year they boil the juice into syrup. And that syrup is said to be milder and more complex than the potent bullet of sweet that is granulated sugar. So, I wanted to know, was there something real here, something different in that kettle that our grandparents might recognize? Or was this just an exercise in old-timey fun?

  By the time I showed up, the general task of the day was already half accomplished: A quarter acre of sugarcane, about a thousand stalks, had been cut in about three hours the day before by the manager here, Ben Ferguson. He was one of three—as I counted them—head cooks in charge of this brew. “When I grew up, every year the whole community would come together and ma
ke cane syrup,” he told me. “For a lot of people there was no granulated sugar, and if there had been, they couldn’t afford it.” After the stalks were cut, they were run through a cane press—two heavy iron drums with just a crack of daylight between them hooked up to a tractor engine. The cane was mashed and then the juice strained through a T-shirt laid atop a croker sack and into a bucket. By mid-morning, the juicing was done and the eighty gallons from the thousand stalks were in the kettle.

  The third cook on this endeavor was David Maybank, who owns these woods and has been the motivating force behind making the syrup since the late 1990s.” I was in Brazil, and the drink of choice turned out to be cane juice,” Maybank told me. “On every street corner there was a small cane mill running off a little three-horsepower gasoline engine.” They poured it directly over ice. “It beat out Coca-Cola two to one.”

  At eighty-two, Maybank is a soft-spoken man whose Geechee lilt is perfect Charlestonian, rare to hear these days. He wore a cap out of which sprouted an unruly head of hair, still with traces of red. His easygoing manner belies a stubborn sense of determination. In his late sixties, he talked up his desire to sail around the world, and then one day in 1997, he and some friends weighed anchor, returning the following spring, in 1998.

  While they were moored in Salvador, Brazil, he encountered the syrup, and Maybank remembered old-timers in South Carolina who used it during the Depression. “It was the only way to sweeten your coffee,” he said. But he actually loved the taste, so he bought one of those street-corner presses and shipped it back to Lavington. He planted his own cane, and he and Ferguson have since been learning the nuances of making cane syrup. “We probably made every mistake you can make,” Maybank said.

  Ferguson was eager to explain the process. Sugarcane is a perennial, but the cane starts to lose its sweetness in about the third year, so you have to buy new seed cane and lay it down. Each section of a cane stalk has a little eye in it. Seed cane is, simply, fresh-cut stalks laid end to end and buried. Each eye sends up a fresh stalk. “You have to overlap them a little bit because the end pieces aren’t reliable,” he said, in a tone suggesting that every tidbit he knew about cane was learned the hard way, by trial and error. A lot of people nourish their cane with nitrogen, but Ferguson said, happy to spare me a world of pain: “I top dress it with cottonseed meal.”