Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  Ginny’s philosophy is actually much like my restaurant cooks’ approach to family meal: It’s the dovetail between What have I got that needs to be used up? and What do I feel like eating? Except that Ginny truly enjoys the added inspiration of looking through cookbooks, magazines, and websites. So for her it’s not only What have I got? and What do I feel like? but also What would Melissa Clark at nytimes.com do? On this particular day, she has dug up sesame seeds, rolled oats, an ear of grilled corn, and a knob of ginger.

  Her fast and loose attitude toward called-for ingredients is a blast of genuine home cooking that I am giddy to see in action. This is perfect data if you are in the midst of writing a cookbook and want to know how your end user feels about your strict ingredient list. In our case, the biscuits Ginny wants to bake are supposed to be made with buttermilk. She doesn’t have buttermilk, so she pulls out a small container of milk. The milk, though, is a full two weeks past its expiration date. Undeterred, and unwilling to make that trip to the store for an ingredient she lacks, she gives it a deep sniff, deems it viable, and adds it to the dough after a further souring with a tablespoon of vinegar.

  Another recipe we are cooking with calls for sorghum syrup, which she also doesn’t have, so she uses maple. The cookies she wants to make require twice the amount of rolled oats she has. They also call for pine nuts, but she has only pecans, and again, only half of what’s listed. Ginny uses liquid measuring cups for dry ingredients and her 40-year-old electric egg beater instead of a shiny Kitchen-Aid mixer, and every single thing we cook together—whether pork loin, biscuits, root vegetables, or cookies—gets thrown into the 450-degree oven. She just turns it on and goes!

  In Ginny’s happy hustle is the quintessence of home cooking. Here is the voice and the eccentricity of an unintimidated, joyful home cook.

  She has a sturdy sensibility that, at a couple of junctures, reminds me of the cooking I grew up with in rural Pennsylvania. I have consumed more than my fair share of “perfectly good” past-date milk, soured with vinegar and repurposed. And I have eaten more bruised, wilted, molded-over treasures from the pantry than anyone I’ve ever met, because my mother fed a family of seven with the same ingrained mentality as her French wartime parents, constantly making more than there was with what there was—albeit with professional-grade skills. It’s only serendipity that what I grew up eating—bones, claws, stinking cheeses, vegetables pulled from our garden—has come into vogue in the food “scene.”

  Penny and I drive in the deepening black of the Southern night until we arrive in Savannah. We speak into an intercom, then punch in a security code, and the heavy gate slowly pulls back and lets us in to drive beneath enormous live oaks. Mrs. Laurie Osteen, her husband, Chris, and their impeccably well-groomed youngest daughter greet us at the door of their majestic riverfront home and lead us into the kitchen. On the highly polished counter, typed and formatted, are three pristine copies of the recipes that Mrs. Osteen will cook for us.

  Chicken simmers in Riesling while Mr. Osteen expertly makes us gin and tonics, which I consider as much a part of home cooking as the glistening white three-tiered coconut cake practically levitating under its glass dome on the counter. We have a comfortable and lively dinner on the porch, drinking the same Riesling in which the chicken was braised, made more seamless by the fact that Mrs. Osteen considered two important factors for the meal: reliability and ease. She’s made that delicious chicken a hundred times, and it requires nothing of the hostess that might hijack her away from the table, where the best stories are told. When the cake is served, I am held rapt by the tale about how Mrs. Osteen may have killed the local priest with it (he was diabetic; what to do?). Do not let that deter you from making it. It is worth the peril.

  Day 3: Davie County, North Carolina

  The next lunch finds us at the Cooleemee Plantation House, located between Mocksville and Lexington, North Carolina. When we arrive for the family potluck that my friend Jay has arranged, there is a woman frying chicken in two cast-iron skillets. Stephanie is in street clothes, with a regular apron, but she’s using restaurant-style kitchen tongs and an insta-read thermometer. It doesn’t register as odd, because I am so attracted to the golden chicken, as is Penny, who’s got her camera out in seconds. But then I admire the tiny beans another woman is stirring, and she says, “I don’t ever cook butter beans that are but any bigger than a squirrel’s ear.”

  It’s a charming thing to say. Almost rehearsed.

  She pops a knob of fat in another skillet, slides it into the oven, and taps the door shut.

  “Bacon fat?” I ask, eager to get the exact details of everything I will be eating.

  “Yes, that’s Benton’s fat, which has a different flavor profile than Nueske’s, which, of course, I use for other things.”

  What home cook talks about the nuances of the “different flavor profiles” of cult bacon makers? And why is that woman probing her fried chicken with a health department-approved thermometer? I start to worry. Meanwhile, Penny looks genuinely happy for the first time on our trip. We’ve got good light, handsome food, and a house that enjoys US National Historic Landmark status.

  “GH, this is awesome!” she says as I ferry dish after dish onto the porch for her to shoot. While she whistles in photographer heaven, I slide down into a silent writer’s ditch.

  “There’s no story here,” I whisper. “These people are foodies. Chefs! I. Am. Dying.” Penny giggles at my suffering. I am awed by the food—it’s impeccable—so much so that I ask for every recipe, eat everything on the table, and have third helpings of the chicken. But it’s researched, perfected, and way too articulately explained. In place of handwritten recipes, two of the potluckers generously give me their published cookbooks! I ask Jay what happened to our abiding idea of home cooks at a family potluck.

  “They chickened out,” he explains. “And I didn’t want to let you down.”

  Day 4: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

  I am slightly wary of professionals the following day when we arrive at the Alexanders’ in Chapel Hill for a lunch of shrimp and grits. Lex is a professional, but I already know that. He spent 30 years in the retail end of the food business, including sourcing items for Whole Foods Markets to brand. I invited myself over expressly to see what his cooking would be like given his uncompromising respect for exceptional and responsibly sourced products, but I don’t want two ringers in a row. Thankfully, I am put at ease when I see his wife, Ann, chop the flat-leaf parsley and then wash it, rinsing the flavor down the drain. (A professional would wash first, dry well, and then chop, just moments before using.)

  So I let myself loose in the pantry and, as I expected, there is excellent chocolate, tomato chutney, an Italian fish sauce. The grits Lex is stirring come from a mill in nearby Graham. Their cooking represents exceptionally well something I have seen throughout the trip: a hybrid use of grocery-store convenience products combined with from-scratch elements to create a dish. The only difference here is that the convenience products are of the highest quality. And it reads in the bowl. The Alexanders’ shrimp and grits—complex and deep and wholly satisfying—take the blue ribbon.

  Day 5: Berryville and Nellysford, Virginia

  We have breakfast the following morning in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley with the unmistakably genuine Jean “Maw Maw” Hinson, whose home lies in the middle of horse pasture in Clarke County. Maw Maw is waiting for us in her immaculate kitchen, a Teflon pan of Depression-era tomato gravy on the stove, covered with a glass lid.

  When it comes time to prepare the Hungry Jack pancakes that go with the gravy, Maw Maw laughs with a little shrug. She is happy to welcome us, but also amused and a bit baffled at what she could possibly have that a magazine would want. “I’m not sophisticated,” she says. When she presents the tomato gravy, she shrugs again and adds, “It’s not even a recipe, really. It’s just two ingredients—the two ingredients we had growing up. We grew tomatoes and we had a cow, so we had butter.”

>   The way those ingredients work together—the sweet, bright, acidic tomato with the soft, creamy butter—stops us in our tracks. After decades of tasting long-cooked, deeply reduced tomato sauce with a paste base or, conversely, the almost inviolable summer pairing of heirloom tomatoes with fruity olive oil, Maw Maw’s ripe tomatoes, gently and briefly simmered with sweet butter and served on pancakes like a fruit, knock us out. The gravy is exceptional. Haunting. Of all the excellent cooking we’ve eaten on this trip, this is the certain thing I will be cooking from now on in my own home.

  We end our road trip an hour away in the Rockfish Valley, with dinner at the home of stonemason James “Fuzzy” Monnes. The property sits on a hill, terraced with substantial vegetable gardens. Hand-built cabins and sheds are nestled throughout, all lopsided, all piping chalky pastel-blue smoke from their wood stoves and fireplaces. There’s an instant affection here. Maybe it’s the fact of Fuzzy’s smiling and Technicolor wife, Cathy, with her glowing red hair and turquoise eyes and her golden shawl. Or maybe it’s his luminescent daughters, Mary Pearl and Sally Rose. The latter opens her arms and says, “Welcome to Appalachia!”

  “Welcome to ‘The Monnestary,’” Fuzzy adds.

  Sally Rose gives a tour of the property, a kind of homesteading, back-to-the-lander “estate” that includes a well-fenced chicken coop and a walk-in refrigerator where a keg of local beer is kept. “We have three brewers around here and we rotate,” Sally Rose explains.

  The wood-burning forno that Fuzzy built after a trip to Italy anchors the outdoor common space, which has another fireplace, a couch, and a prep table. It’s like sitting in a living room, but surrounded by trees and honoring fire and hearth—in the community sense of the word—rather than television. When I e-mailed Fuzzy to ask what he might cook, he wrote, “We are focused on stuff we’ve grown and caught, shot or harvested off our land [or close to it]. One thing for sure, there will be a blackberry pie involved . . . the freezer’s full of berries from last summer.”

  His ethos might have huge currency these days, but for him it’s as pragmatic, thorough, and unsnobby as it gets. While Fuzzy’s preparing the venison and tending to the pesto pizzas in the forno, Cathy brings us hot and creamy potato-leek soup.

  Dutifully documenting the recipes, I inquire about her soup.

  “So, Cathy, what did you do here?” I ask, holding my beautiful little bowl.

  She ticks off the “recipe,” counting on her fingers, in incomplete sentences, like an average grocery or to-do list:

  “Grew the leeks.

  “Grew the potatoes.

  “Made a vegetable stock.”

  I crack up, imagining the published recipe whose first two steps call for growing your own leeks and potatoes!

  A recipe like Cathy’s may not make it into a magazine, but when I go back to my cookbook (and my imagined reader) in New York, I will remember it. I started this trip by writing a lot of e-mails, encouraging people to be authentically themselves in their kitchens. And I end this trip having been given permission to do the very same. I thank Maw Maw for letting me know that I can include some of my own two-ingredient recipes without feeling the need to complicate them. And I thank the Osteens for reminding me how tradition and a good, funny story can make a meal more than just what you eat. I thank “the doctors’ wives” for their pragmatic reliance on store-bought convenience products, like some I use at the restaurant, and for letting me see that my devotion to specific brands is equal to theirs. I can call for esoteric ingredients knowing full well that Ginny isn’t going to buy them but that she is going to make the dish anyway—joyfully!—and that the Alexanders will already have them in their pantry. I now know from the professional potluckers that the home cook is not the only imagined reader: There will be cooks out there with scales and thermometers. And I know that I can ask the reader to do some heavy stuff, like build a fire or wrangle a whole animal or make something difficult from scratch—something that the folks at “The Monnestary” won’t think twice about.

  Turns out I’m a home cook, too; I just happen to cook in a restaurant.

  HOW TO MAKE REAL NEW ENGLAND CLAM CHOWDER

  By J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

  From SeriousEats.com

  In his weekly Food Lab column on the blogsite Serious Eats, MIT grad J. Kenji Lopez-Alt obsessively deconstructs recipes for the home cook. He gives new meaning to the term “food geek”–but really, who wouldn’t want this guy for your lab partner?

  If you’ve spent any amount of time in coastal New England, you’ve probably noticed how generously awards are bestowed upon clam chowders. Now I’ve never met the folks who run these award factories, but I take issue with any organization that passes out praise like flyers.

  Having spent my entire life traveling through New England, I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that nine out of ten “award-winning!” or “#1 voted!” clam chowders are going to arrive at the table either thick as paste, bereft of clams, or packed with clams so rubbery they make your jaws bounce, and unfortunately, most home recipes don’t turn up results that are much better. And if finding great chowder in its birthplace is difficult, you can imagine what it’s like outside of New England.

  When done right, clam chowder should be rich and filling, but not sludgy or stew-like. Its texture should be creamy without feeling leaden, like you’re sipping on gravy. Tender chunks of potato should barely hold their shape, dissolving on your tongue, their soft texture contrasting with tender bites of salty pork and briny clam; god help the clam shack that dare serves rubbery clams in their chowder!

  The flavor of a clam chowder should be delicate and mild, the sweetness of the pork complementing the faint bitterness of the clams, accented by bits of celery and onion that have all but dissolved into the broth, fading completely into the background. A good grind of black pepper and a bay leaf or two are the only other seasonings you need, unless you count the requisite oyster crackers as seasoning. I know some Yankees who do.

  The Precedents

  Chowders have a long, complex, and relatively apocryphal history that can be traced back to the fish and seafood stews eaten in coastal England and France. Like many old dishes, the name of the food stems from the word for its cooking vessel, a large cooking pot or “cauldron,” known in French as a chaudiere. Or perhaps it comes from the old English term for a fishmonger, jowter, which had been in use in Cornwall since at least the 16th century.

  Whatever the etymology, its history can be traced across the Atlantic to the fishing towns of New England—Boston, Mystic, Nantucket, New Bedford—where the European dish was adapted to work with sea journey-friendly staples like onions, potatoes, and salt pork or beef, along with local ingredients like cod, oysters, and clams.

  About a decade ago, I had a job as a cook at B&G Oysters in Boston’s South End, a fancy-pants seafood shack run by Barbara Lynch. It was there that I first started taking a serious interest in chowder-making, there that I realized that chowder is not just the sludgy stuff I’d been raised to believe it was. We made our chowder in the manner of a fancy restaurant—cooking and seasoning each element individually, combining, pureeing, straining, adding, mixing, until our broth was intensely flavored and light, our clams were perfectly tender, and every vegetable cooked just so.

  It was delicious, but it’s decidedly not the way a traditional chowder is made; a poor man’s food meant to take few ingredients and even less effort. I remember thumbing through a copy of 50 Chowders, by Jasper White, in which he unearths New England’s oldest-known printed recipe for chowder, from the September 23rd, 1751, edition of the Boston Evening Post:

  Because in Chouder there can be not turning;

  Then lay some Pork in slices very thin,

  Thus you in Chouder always must begin.

  Next lay some Fish cut crossways very nice

  Then season well with Pepper, Salt, and Spice;

  Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory, and Thyme,

  Then Biscuit next which must be soak
’d some Time.

  Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able

  To raise a Chouder, high as Tower of Babel;

  For by repeating o’er the Same again,

  You may make a Chouder for a thousand men.

  Last a Bottle of Claret, with Water eno; to smother ’em,

  You’ll have a Mess which some call Omnium gather ’em.

  Aside from the interesting technique of layering ingredients in a post to stew them and the very Victorian use of spices, the recipe essentially reads “put things in a pot and cook them.” One thing you’ll immediately notice is that dairy is conspicuously absent from the recipe. Instead, the chowder got its thickness and richness from soaked biscuits. (Note that in this usage, biscuits most likely refer to tough, cracker-like hardtack, not the fluffy leavened biscuits of the American south).

  Slowly, as dairy became cheaper and more readily available in the region, it began making larger and larger appearances in chowder, at first simply being used to moisten the biscuit, before eventually completely replacing it as the primary ingredient outside of clams, pork, and aromatics. These days, the biscuits live on in the form of oyster crackers, which as any true chowder-head can tell you, should be added liberally to your bowl and allowed to soften slightly before consuming.

  So which is the best way to cook chowder? Can the dump-and-simmer method be improved upon by some modern technique, or is there something to the classic that gets lost when fiddled with too much?

  I decided to break it down element by element and really figure out what it is that makes clam chowder tick.

  Building a Base

  Most basic recipes for clam chowder call for rendering down some form of salted pork (bacon or salt pork usually), sweating onions and celery in the rendered fat, a touch of flour, followed by milk, potatoes, chopped, and occasionally bottled clam juice. It all gets simmered together with a bay leaf or two until the potatoes are cooked and the broth is thickened. It gets finished with a bit of cream, or perhaps some half and half.