Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  After I spoke to Amy Lyles Wilson and Bryan Curtis, and after I learned that Jack Bishop is a respected food professional who evidently needed some extra pocket money in 1994, and after I took a quick glance at the book and was reminded that Matt LeBlanc used to be a Levi’s model and that Matthew Perry’s father famously starred in a series of Old Spice commercials, a question occurred to me. So I gave my Aunt Karen a call. “Oh, yes, of course I watched Friends,” she said. “I loved it. I still do. I never cared for Monica, though—she was just too fussy.”

  Monkey Lovin’ Mocha Mouthfuls

  (adapted from Cooking with Friends)

  4 tablespoons unsalted butter

  2 ounces semisweet chocolate (I use Scharffen Berger, and I double it to 4 ounces)

  ⅓ cup sugar (I always substitute brown sugar—in this and in all desserts)

  1 large egg

  1 tablespoon coffee liqueur, such as Kahlua (though a tablespoon of brewed espresso does just fine in a pinch)

  1 teaspoon instant espresso powder (though I like to use actual coffee grounds, for the texture—which may be an acquired taste)

  ⅓ cup flour

  ⅓ cup chopped walnuts, plus 12 walnut halves

  (The recipe doesn’t call for it, but I add a ½ teaspoon of kosher salt and a teaspoon of vanilla extract.)

  Preheat the oven to 350. Generously grease a twelve-cup mini-muffin tin and set it aside. (If you only have a regular muffin tin, it’s fine—just let the cupcakes bake a little longer, until a knife stuck into the center emerges clean.)

  Melt the butter and chocolate together in a double boiler (or, like me, in the microwave), stirring until smooth. Set mixture aside to cool slightly. Stir in the sugar until smooth. Whisk in the egg, liqueur, and espresso powder. Fold in the flour and chopped walnuts.

  Spoon the batter into the prepared tin, filling cups about three-quarters full. Place a walnut half in the center of each cup. Bake about twenty minutes. Let the cupcakes cool in the tin for five minutes, then turn them out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

  Note: If cupcakes without frosting make no sense to you, (a) I understand, and (b) feel free to make use of those tubs of frosting at the grocery store. I always do.

  THE SWEDISH CHEF

  By Joy Manning

  From TableMatters.com

  As a recipe editor (Tasting Table, Prevention, Cooking Light) and author of her own cookbook (Almost Meatless, 2009), Joy Manning was intrigued by the buzz surrounding Magnus Nilsson’s Fäviken cookbook. How could recipes from a locavore restaurant in rural Sweden possibly translate to her Philly-area kitchen?

  When it comes to cookbooks, I am typically willing to do whatever the writer asks of me. Order obscure ingredients online and pay more for shipping than the product? I’ve done it. Visit seven specialty and international markets to make a specific pan-Asian noodle dish? No problem. Start a dinner three days in advance to allow gels to set and flavors to meld? I am ready, willing, able.

  So when I got my oven mitts on Fäviken, a new cookbook by acclaimed Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson, I looked forward with pleasure to the rigors of what I had heard was an ambitious, challenging cookbook.

  Before glancing at any of the recipes, I read the long introduction by Bill Buford, author of one of my favorite culinary memoirs, Heat. He dedicates numerous paragraphs to describing the stark remoteness of Nilsson’s restaurant (also named Fäviken). According to Buford, a visit there requires employing the services of the region’s single cab driver. He tells the restaurant’s origin story, explaining how difficult it was for Nilsson to hire anyone to work at his new restaurant due to its isolated location in the northern part of snowy Sweden. Though Nilsson’s ambitious daily hunting and foraging is reverently described, I was no less confident I could cook from this book.

  Next comes a foreword by food writer Mattias Kroon. In it, he describes an Alice Waters–like dedication to the local and the seasonal. To my American sensibilities, this is hardly a novel approach to cooking. I’ve become so inured to this manifesto, in fact, that I can scarcely suppress an eye roll when I hear it in restaurants—mostly because, in reality, few places actually cook according to this code. One look at a restaurant kitchen’s spice rack or the olive oil likely to be served with bread will reveal sins against the gospel of local.

  But according to Kroon, and as was evident when I moved onto the recipes, Nilsson has conscribed the scope of his culinary creativity to only those foods he can coax from the miserly arctic landscape that surrounds him. His cooking must be like a haiku, where limitations and restrictions force a lean poetry into existence that couldn’t have been conjured any other way. With mere weeks as a growing season and a severely limited range of things that will grow in the first place, Nilsson must rely on a range of preservation techniques and genius twists to keep his food interesting through the long, dark winter where he lives and cooks.

  That said, Nilsson’s restaurant is situated on a large piece of unspoiled wilderness where he forages and hunts regularly. He is near enough to the water that he gets daily deliveries of just-plucked-from-the-sea-bed scallops and other fish.

  I, on the other hand, live on a tiny scrap of concrete in the middle of asphalt-bound Philadelphia. I have not even a window box or container garden at my disposal. In the foreword, Kroon comes out and says that the type of food made at Fäviken simply doesn’t travel. I wondered if that were the case, why anyone would go to the trouble to write a cookbook about it.

  Page 25 had a somewhat reassuring headline: How To Use The Recipes. (By now, I was having considerable doubts I could even comment on a book it seemed impossible to cook from.) In this section, we learn that:

  1. The recipes are vague and confusing—but it’s OK, they’re meant to be that way.

  2. The instructions shouldn’t be taken literally because they are just suggestions to help the reader understand where good cooking really comes from—intuition and passion.

  3. We should not even try to replicate the recipes because we are not from northern Sweden. Northern Sweden is the unlisted yet most crucial ingredient in every recipe in the book.

  4. We should be inspired by the approach the recipes exemplify and actually create our own recipes from our own local ingredients.

  5. “If it tastes good, it is right.” This is obviously my favorite line in the book.

  Unhelpfully, this section concludes with two famous last words: “Good luck!”

  Still, I was determined to find a recipe from this book I could, in spite of being warned to the contrary, actually recreate.

  Some dishes looked like candidates at first glance: Beef marrow and heart with grated turnip and turnip leaves, for example. Upon closer examination of the ingredients list, what I needed was not merely a turnip, or even a local turnip, but a turnip “that has been stored in the cellar with its little yellow leaves that have started sprouting towards the end of winter.”

  Even if I possessed such a turnip, I don’t think that my rowhome basement, complete with its bug graveyard and fine toxic coating of dryer lint, would be an appropriate place to store it. And even if it were, I’ve still got months to go before the end of winter and this story’s deadline looming.

  I was drawn to the rackfish and sour cream recipe and could reasonably access the necessary ingredients, but I don’t have the pH testing kit I’d need to “control the pH level so that it drops quickly to below 4.46.” Even if I did, there are no instructions given regarding how to manipulate a pH level. How fast, in minutes or hours, is “quickly”? Regardless, I didn’t have the six months minimum I’d need for this preparation to “mature.”

  Other impossible-to-procure ingredients include:

  •The burnt-out trunk of a spruce tree

  •“good, clean” moss

  •2 handfuls old autumn leaves from last year

  •1 lavender petal from last summer

  After combing Fäviken cover to cover multiple times, I had to face facts. There was al
most nothing in this cookbook that I could really cook. I zeroed in on a recipe for “Douglas’ Shortbread Biscuits,” which does call for homemade jam. I actually don’t make jam, but I have a jar a friend made and decided to proceed with that.

  Unfortunately, though I followed the instructions to the letter, the recipe just didn’t work. Crumbly and dry, the dough was impossible to roll into the spheres depicted. I mounded them up in little craggy hills only to watch it collapse into a mound of gravel-like crumbs when I tried, as instructed, to make an indentation with my finger for the jam. Ultimately I pressed all the loose crumbs into a small baking sheet in a single, jam-dotted layer and hoped for the best.

  What I decided to do next was follow Nilsson’s instructions for using his book. I could take inspiration from his dedication to making a truly local cuisine from a pretty stingy environment. Given the cold and the dark and the abbreviated growing season, he is more or less wringing blood from a stone. It makes what Alice Waters does, from her agricultural Eden of a home base in California, look easy.

  If Nilsson can forge a local cuisine from so little, surely I can consciously lay off the olive oil, lemons, and avocados that often shape my home cooking–at least for this one meal.

  I would like to tell you I foraged for mushrooms in the hills of nearby Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, the mushroom capital of the US, or that I donned my hunting gear and shot a deer for a cauldron of venison stew. A more rugged soul might take just that inspiration from Fäviken and its chef, frequently seen in photographs swaddled in a furry pelt of something he probably recently shot and ate.

  My way of interpreting the recipes was to visit a food vendor that sells only regional, environmentally friendly ingredients. I chose what appealed to me (chicken sausage, shiny red cabbage, potatoes, butter), added nothing far-flung from my pantry, and marveled at my luck. Even in December, at least in Pennsylvania, we have a feast of local ingredients at our fingertips.

  Though this main course appears nowhere in the Fäviken cookbook, my dinner was more in its spirit than the shortbread cookies, which looked like a crumbly mess but tasted good. So, according to Nilsson at least, they were right after all.

  THE GINGERBREAD COOKIE RECLAMATION PROJECT

  By Tim Carman

  From The Washington Post

  Intrepid food reporter Tim Carman scours DC for cheap eats in his The $20 Diner column; formerly at Washington City Paper, he won a James Beard Award for his Young & Hungry column. But sometimes the food you want most isn’t sold in even the most authentic neighborhood restaurant.

  The gingerbread cookies would arrive the moment my grandparents pulled into our narrow driveway on 123rd Street in Omaha for their much-anticipated Christmas visit. The cookie tins, one a repurposed Saltine cracker container, were usually tossed in the trunk, as if they were hostages. My older sister and I would rush the vehicle, perhaps pausing long enough to hug our grandparents, and begin our annual campaign to survive on the sweets of the holiday season.

  So remembers my older sis, who more than 20 years ago started calling herself Deborah, as in Deborah Kellogg, her married name. As a boy, I always knew her as Debbie, or sometimes just Deb, an informal, diminutive name that belied her place in the family hierarchy. She was the bossy first child. I was the quiet second one.

  Regardless of how I viewed Deborah when we were kids—artistic, culturally aware, soul-sucking Medusa—she became, as so many first-born do, the responsible one as an adult. She checks on and cares for ailing relatives and friends. She sends cards and gifts on birthdays. She knows the family history better than anyone else in the clan.

  Deborah has also become, via sheer indifference from the rest of us, the custodian of the family’s gingerbread cookie recipe. In this regard, and in this regard only, she is more Betty Draper than Betty Crocker, failing to notice when the recipe had wandered far away from home.

  How else do you explain a nearly 35-year span in which the family gingerbread cookie had not one speck of—wait for it, waaaaait for it—ginger? For more than three decades, Deborah has baked these cookies in all manner of shapes, each without the namesake ingredient, and passed them out to co-workers, family members and “Mommy & Me friends, which is a lot of people,” she tells me over the phone from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Mark, and their son, Bryant.

  And no one noticed the missing ginger, least of all Deborah herself. “I know,” my sister says now. “It’s embarrassing!”

  She reminds me that she sent the offending cookies to me once or twice, too. “Did you ever question if they were gingerbread cookies?” she asks, the accusation ensnaring me like sticky cobwebs in the back yard.

  Of course I didn’t. Part of that has to do with a kind of culinary habituation: Once you eat something for so many years, you pay less attention to its flavors and textures, gobbling it down mindlessly, your brain automatically filling in the missing details. I think that is particularly true with our family’s gingerbread cookies. It was a distinctly homely thing in the first place: a thick, dry beast slathered in pink icing (yes, pink) and always in desperate need of dunking in milk. I still loved it, with every molecule in my body, like only a cookie-addicted boy could. It always reminded me of Monna Kuykendall, my maternal grandmother, and her warmth, generosity and (for some unexplained reason) souvenir spoon collection.

  Anyway, about two years ago, as the gingerbread story unfolds, Deborah was visiting relatives when she realized the horrifying truth about her ginger-less gingerbread cookies. True to her first-born, bossy-sister personality, she wasted little time regretting her 35 years of spice-free Christmas cookies. Instead, she conducted an FBI-like investigation to track down the origins of the family recipe. By the time she was done, she had collected five gingerbread cookie recipes, spanning four generations, and forwarded them all to me.

  Which launched my own attempt to research the recipe that produces a cookie everyone in the family loves to eat, but few love to make. After spending almost an entire weekend reviewing recipes, and baking and baking some more, I came to one incontrovertible conclusion: My family is full of lousy copyists. Every generation made errors in copying the recipe from the preceding generation, sometimes omitting ingredients (such as ginger or a full cup of sugar), sometimes transposing the amounts needed, sometimes neglecting directions altogether. It was a game of telephone, home baker-style, and the message had become so scrambled that it was like Bill the Cat translating the words “I love you!” into “Eck oop thhhttpd!”

  The original recipe is attributed to my maternal great-grandmother, Stella Miller, whom everyone called Mimi (pronounced “Mimm-me,” not MeMe). Mimi Miller was born in the late 19th century in Ohio and was known among the family as an excellent baker, remembers my mother. Around the holidays, Mimi would make bourbon balls, Russian tea cakes and, of course, “ginger cookies.” Her moist, russet-colored gingerbread cookies were based on a beautifully minimalist recipe, one that calls for a modest amount of flavoring agents, like molasses and cinnamon, another form of Midwestern self-denial. Most important, though, the recipe did not call for a set amount of flour. Instead, the directions just said to “alternate buttermilk + flour till a soft dough to roll.”

  In the span of one short generation, however, Mimi Miller’s flowing, open-ended recipe had hardened into a set rule over the amount of flour. In her own handwritten recipe for Ginger Cookies, Monna Kuykendall, my grandmother, directed all bakers to sift the dry ingredients “with about 8 cups flour, enough to roll out to cut.” My mother, Kay Billingsley, and my older sister dutifully followed the eight-cup directive in their own recipes, even as they omitted, ignored or changed other steps and ingredients. (My mom’s icing, for instance, called for blending butter, not whipping three reserved egg whites, which she arbitrarily decided belonged in the cookie dough instead.)

  Let me tell you something about trying to incorporate eight cups of flour into this dough: After a certain point, it’s like trying to roll out a hardened
lump of potting clay with a toothpick. I suddenly realized why my family hated making these cookies. This was weight training, not baking. The fascinating part about this blizzard of flour is that the resulting gingerbread cookies are still delicious when topped with icing, which helps sweeten the slightly bitter, molasses-rich dough that’s short one whole cup of sugar compared with the original cookies. My main problem with these flour hogs is that they turn to rocks within 48 hours.

  This recipe mutation, I realized, needed to stop before Mimi Miller’s original gingerbread cookies ultimately morphed into frosted paperweights. The proper course of action, it seemed, was to go back to the source recipe, as an homage to my great-grandmother, the baker, the one who injected flavor and sweetness into the holidays through many generations. I followed her recipe exactly, save for one thing: I ditched the pink icing, which, according to family lore, became a tradition when there wasn’t enough red food coloring on hand.

  The time had come to correct this longstanding early-20th-century (and probably apocryphal) pantry deficit. Could we not spare a few more drops of food coloring? Mimi Miller’s legacy, after all, deserved to be preserved in deep, vibrant shades of red and green. I mentioned this to Deborah, and she wholeheartedly agreed. She even asked me to bring some gingerbread cookies to our younger sister’s wedding later this month. They will be the gift of something old.