Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  “So how much might they pay you or your husband for the harvest of chile pequins?”

  “Two dollars a pound,” Maria whispered, as if trying to keep her neighbors from knowing what a deal she received from the buyer who came from the other side of the border.

  Two dollars a pound? The same chiles retailed in stores from West Texas across New Mexico and sometimes into Arizona for sixty dollars a pound! The harvester—the poorest player in the entire value chain, since the chiles changed hands five or six times before reaching a kitchen table—received only one-thirtieth of the final market value. With the entire economic deck stacked against them, no wonder Maria de Lourdes and her husband could hardly keep their children fed and clothed.

  “Do you have any chile pequins I can buy from you?”

  Maria motioned for me to stay on the porch, and she went inside. She brought me back a glass Nescafe jar filled with small bright-red wild chiles, some of them round, but some of them beaked. I couldn’t easily guess their weight, so I just handed her a hundred-peso bill.

  “No, that’s too much, and I don’t have any change.” She sighed, looking embarrassed. “You just take them as a gift. After all, you carried my water.”

  Now I was the one who was embarrassed, if not humbled. “Keep it all. Get something for the children. . . . I can eat chiles, but they need something else to eat that isn’t hot.”

  “I know,” she said, relenting. “I’ve had to stop eating so many chiles now that I’m pregnant since it makes the baby inside me kick. . . . Here, if you’re going to give me money, why don’t you take all of our chiles?”

  I heard Marcos or Sammy whistling for everyone to come back into camp, get some coffee and breakfast, and pack up. “Es la hora para embarcar,” I explained, and she nodded.

  As I picked up my plants and turned to go, Maria de Lourdes put a small gunnysack of chile pequins in my hands. She then tucked the hundred-peso bill into her blouse and shooed me out the door. I bowed to her, departing from her ramshackle home with enough wild chiles to last me for a year.

  The next village we visited, Boquillas del Carmen, was many times larger than Ojo Caliente, claiming some fifteen houses down below a mesa, another nineteen houses up on top, and five more intermingled among a few tourist stores. In Boquillas, they will try to sell you anything that can move, that has moved since the time of the dinosaurs, or that will appear to move if you ingest enough peyote to send it into flight. When I was there, I could get bootlegged sotol for five dollars a quart, and false peyote (the star cactus) for the same price. If I had persisted, I might have been able to find some real peyote for far more than that per button. I could also purchase petrified wood, ponchos, ammonites, crystals, leather purses, sombreros, leather vests, baskets, miniature huapango guitars, gallon jugs of cheap tequila, Christmas cacti, cheeses, tortillas, and hot sauces galore.

  While my rafting companions decided whether or not to try a shot of sotol or to purchase various and sundry curios, I walked around the village until I noticed an elderly woman making something in big bowls on her porch. Thinking that she might be Isabela the Curandera, I approached her and asked if she was an herbalist.

  “No, I’m not her. But is it that you are interested in plants? I am using a little poisonous berry to make cheese right now.”

  “A berry? May I see what kind of berry?” I asked.

  “Sure, come on up here onto the porch. I am using the berries of trompillo . . . making a batch of queso asadero. See, the trompillo berries are in that bowl,” she said as she wiped her hands on an apron that covered her flowered cotton dress. Her gray hair was largely covered by a scarf of the same flower pattern.

  I stood behind her and peeked into the bowl. There were five little golden berries of trompillo, a deadly nightshade that I guessed to be Solanum eleaginifolium, which is sometimes called buffalo berry in English. It is a thorny, poisonous weed that colonizes overgrazed or recently flooded areas.

  “I crush two fresh berries and three old ones in a half of a cup of tepid water. See? Let them soak until the water is yellow. Like this. See? I strain out the seeds and skins of the berries,” she explained. “Then I use it to congeal the curds out of the whey.”

  “Is the cheese made from cow milk or goat milk?”

  “Our cows aren’t here no more. They’re being impounded on the other side. So this batch is from our goats. Bi-national goats,” she said with a smile. “They browse on this side of the river, then they sneak over to that side too. They are too fast and crafty for those Rinches de Tejas to catch them and put them in jail. What do you call them? Texas rangers? Park rangers?” She laughed.

  “Watch. I put the half cup of trompillo water in with three gallons of goat’s milk. Here, I stir it for ten seconds. I’m using one-day-old leche de agria [sour milk] for half of the mix, and fresh leche dulce [sweet milk] for the other half. I can’t tell you how long before the milk will have begun to curdle. If I leave this batch in the sun, it will turn to curds in three hours! Later in this afternoon, that’s when I’ll separate the curds from the whey. That’s when I’ll concentrate the whey. Make into a cream cheese we call riquezon.”

  “But why do they call what they do with the curds queso asadero?” I asked, having wondered why the cheese is said to be “grilled.” “Do they say that the berries cook the cheese?”

  “No, it’s because we actually take the curds and melt them. We do that by kind of roasting or grilling them—haven’t you ever seen it?—by heating them on a comal griddle over a wood fire. As they begin to melt on the griddle, we pick them up. Shape them into something like a fat tortilla, you know, a gordita. We turn them over on the griddle and leave them ’til the texture is even. Then we pick them up. We stack them, you’ve seen them that way, between wax paper in a pile. That’s how we make the true queso asadero.”

  Milk from bi-national goats. Berries from a deadly nightshade. Cheese tortillas that are grilled as if they were hamburger patties. I had to buy them and try them for dinner.

  “How much does it cost for two dozen of them?” I asked. She named her price and I complied. She went into her house and brought me out two neat stacks of queso asadero, wrapped them both in a paper sheet, then enveloped the piles within the paper sheet in a pale cotton cloth. She pulled the ends of the cloth over the cheese, then braided them together and tied the braids into a knot that also served as a carrying device.

  “Will I get sick if you put too many trompillo berries into the milk?” I asked as I counted out my money to pay her.

  “No,” she said with a straight face, “you’ll be dead! Why do you gringos worry so much about getting sick and dying? By the grace of God, it’s to happen to all of us sooner or later. Just enjoy the few days, the ones you have left with us here in this desert,” she said matter-of-factly. And then she went inside and closed her door. That was the last I saw of her. . . .

  Of course, I could not undo the absurdity of floating down a river at a hundred dollars a day through a place where the few remaining residents would make only three dollars an hour for most of their lives. My catching a couple of fish did not make the loads of store-bought groceries in the eight coolers suddenly disappear. I had been floating down the River of Inequity, and all of its blatant juxtapositions were still immediately before me.

  But that catfish, queso asadero, chile, and oregano gave me a way to be nourished by both sides of the river, and by the life of the river itself. I would no longer privilege one side over the other, nor let myself be fed by something utterly remote from where I actually stood.

  The next day, as we floated out of Big Bend National Park and arrived at our “take-out” location, one kind of journey came to a close, but another one had started. My imagination and my palate had been sown with the seeds of a Seek-No-Further sensibility that would soon germinate in the desert soil of the Southwest borderlands, where wild chiles and oreganos still grew whether we noticed them or not. But I had noticed them, and I decided to put m
y own roots into the same soil.

  ITALIAN AMERICA

  By John Mariani

  From Saveur

  John Mariani’s eclectic tastes in food and wine have for years informed his reviews in Esquire, Bloomberg News, and his weekly Virtual Gourmet newsletter. In his latest book, How Italian Food Conquered the World, he comes home to the cuisine he grew up on: New York City Italian-American.

  At my family’s home in the Bronx, we ate slices of fresh, milky mozzarella with seeded bread from the Italian bakery down the block, macaroni shells stuffed with Polly-O ricotta, lasagne with little meatballs between the layers, baked rigatoni, eggplant parmigiana, chicken cacciatore, beef braciola. We drank chianti that came in a straw-covered flask and espresso from a drip pot, with a sliver of lemon peel. This was the 1950s and ’60s, and though Mom was always cooking for our family and friends, Dad knew his way around the kitchen, too. He took to the stove on weekends, concentrating on a single dish: lobster fra diavolo, because my mother hated handling live lobsters.

  We thought we were eating authentic Italian food, because the dishes were the same ones all the other Italian families we knew cooked and ate. But in reality, our cuisine was an American invention: an amalgam of hearty, rustic dishes brought here, primarily by southern Italian immigrants (my grandparents came from Abruzzo and Campania), then adapted and embellished upon in American kitchens. By the time I started writing about food in the mid 1970s, this homegrown cuisine had fallen out of favor as northern Italian—inspired dishes, deemed (sometimes erroneously) lighter and more authentic, became all the rage. I can’t say that I didn’t welcome the new trend of delicate fresh egg pasta, or celebrate the fact that grilled branzino had replaced shrimp scampi on so many Italian menus. But I will never deny my love for a supersize plate of spaghetti with homemade meatballs, or an eggplant parmesan hero, with its ample breading and sauce and molten mozzarella. There’s a beauty and succor to Italian-American food, and it’s for a good reason that so many chefs have been returning to those classics recently, preparing them with a newfound zeal and sense of respect.

  The story of the rise and fall and rise again of Italian-American food is a fascinating one; it’s an American story, its plot interwoven with the entrepreneurial drive, embrace of pop culture, proliferation of convenience foods, and creativity of home cooks that has informed our country’s culinary spirit. It began authentically enough, with Italian immigrants who were skilled at making the very most from the very least. The abbondanza for which Italian-American cooking is known stems from the fact that these immigrant cooks, most of whom came from dire poverty, took pride in being able to feed family and friends sumptuously on the kinds of foods they couldn’t afford back home. Ingredients like mozzarella and ricotta were no longer used as accents, or as meals in themselves: They were added to dishes with abandon. My father’s lobster fra diavolo, which was likely inspired by tomato-based seafood stews made with small spiny or inexpensive rock lobster in Italy, was another example: When it was popularized in the 1950s in Italian-American restaurants, it became a lavish dish—far bigger in size and flavor than its predecessors—of fat New England lobsters cooked in a fiery tomato sauce. Another ingredient considered an extravagance in southern Italian cooking, veal, could be found on early Italian-American menus in myriad forms: alla parmigiana (breaded and covered with sauce and cheese), alla marsala (doused with fortified wine), and as massive one-pound veal chops, often stuffed with mozzarella and prosciutto, then smothered with tomato sauce.

  Foods from the homeland became springboards for invention in the States. Take pizza, which evolved from its simple Neapolitan roots into styles unlike anything found in Italy (see Any Way You Slice It), with more cheese, more sauce, and more toppings. Or, tomato sauce, for that matter: When my wife and I first traveled across Italy, on our honeymoon in 1977, we saw neither marinara (that quickly cooked sauce of just tomatoes, garlic, and oil) or the long-simmered “Sunday sauce,” stocked with all kinds of meats, which most families I knew while growing up served on Sunday. Of course, tomato sauce exists in Italy; the irony is that tomatoes were brought to Italy from the Americas in the 16th century and considered poisonous by all but southerners, who found them a delicious addition to their meager diet and discovered that they flourished in their sunny clime. Which explains why when more than 4 million Italians, a vast majority of them from the south, immigrated to America between 1890 and 1910, they brought tomatoes, and tomato sauce, with them. Every cook had a version, and it became the food on which immigrant mothers staked their eminence within their neighborhoods. Growing up, we would no more insult a friend’s sauce than we would his mother or grandmother. The sauce was sacred.

  Soon enough, red sauce became emblematic of Italian food in the United States, embraced by Americans from every ethnic group and marketed by savvy restaurateurs as part and parcel of the cuisine’s abundance. My family dined out at least once a week, usually at a place called Amerigo’s in the Bronx, which began as a pizza stand in the 1930s and evolved into a restaurant of extraordinary breadth, with a menu that ranged from antipasti to zabaglione, and a dining room decked out with an illuminated waterfall and a mural of the nearby Throgs Neck Bridge. It was at restaurants like Amerigo’s that we feasted on the kind of fancy dishes that Mom didn’t make on weeknights: I always had the gnocchi with tomato sauce and my brother, the manicotti. My father would order a massive New York strip steak, introduced to the city’s steakhouses by Italian-American butchers, and my mother would have filet of sole “Livornese,” a dish with clams and mussels, white wine, and a moderate amount of garlic. Portions were huge, including the cheesecake and cannoli for dessert. A waiter came to the table to whip zabaglione in a big copper pot.

  The epitome of this style of dining was Mamma Leone’s on 48th Street in Manhattan. That multistoried spectacle of Italian kitsch, with nude statuary and blocks of mozzarella and provolone cheese on every table, opened in 1906 and was operated by the same family until it was sold to a restaurant group in 1959, eventually closing in 1994. Had Verdi lived to eat there, he would have written an opera about it, and Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini—both of whom were immortalized in pasta dishes that bore their names—would have sung the leads.

  As much as Americans adored places like Mamma Leone’s, Italian-American food was often referred to as grub for “greasers” and “garlic eaters.” It wasn’t until the arrival of first-rate Italian ingredients—many of which had been kept out of the U.S. by trade laws—in the 1970s and ’80s that Italian-American cooks were able to reproduce the regional flavors that travelers to Italy complained they could never find in the States. This included prosciutto di Parma, extra-virgin olive oil from different locales, parmigiano-reggiano, arborio rice, funghi porcini, balsamic vinegar, and outstanding Italian wines from producers like Angelo Gaja and Giovanni di Piero Antinori.

  By that time, many Italian-American restaurants had become tired and tiresome, and some restaurateurs tried to refine the clichés—and justify higher prices—by turning to northern Italy for inspiration. In New York there were Romeo Salta (opened in 1953), Nanni (1968), and Il Nido (1979); in Santa Monica, California, Valentino’s (1972).They all downplayed the red sauce factor, substituting butter and cream sauces and adding—at $20 a plate—risotto and, of all things, polenta, a dish that had been the thrice-a-day staple of poor northern Italians who could afford to eat little else. This food was welcomed as authentic regional Italian: Lasagne with meatballs and meat sauce was dismissed in favor of lasagne alla Bolognese, with besciamella and spinach pasta. Italian-American cheesecake and cannoli were replaced by tiramisù and panna cotta. The old chianti bottles in straw fiaschi baskets were abandoned in favor of expensive barolos, barbarescos, and “super-Tuscans.” Murals of Mount Vesuvio were painted over in favor of blown-up photos of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

  Red-checkered tablecloths disappeared; now the tables were set with Frette linens.

  The zeitgeist looked north for
another reason: Italian fashion and design (centered in northern cities like Milan and Florence) was all the rage in the 1980s. The chicest new restaurants in the U.S. proclaimed they were Tuscan-style trattorias or grills (even if they didn’t serve Tuscan food). Among the first to promote their Tuscan origins were Da Silvano, opened in 1975, and Il Cantinori (1983). Both, still operating in New York’s Greenwich Village, became darlings of magazine editors, art gallery owners, and other members of the cultural elite. Before long, their menus were copied across the country, and extra-virgin olive oil became the new red sauce.

  These northern Italian–inspired places adopted the tenets of the Mediterranean Diet, named for a book written in 1994 by cookbook author (and Saveur contributor) Nancy Harmon Jenkins. The basic argument was that what real Italians ate—a diet abundant in vegetables, seafood, grains, and olive oil—was far more healthful than the meaty, rich, fried, cheese-laden, red sauce–drowned food of Italian-Americans. Quick sautéed greens and farro were in; chicken parmesan and meatballs were out.

  But who doesn’t love meatballs? As influential as the Mediterranean Diet has been, the Italian food you are most likely to encounter in London, Berlin, Moscow, or Mumbai will be far closer to the old “red sauce” archetype than to regional Italian menus featuring Alba’s white truffles, Sardinia’s cheeses, or Venice’s cuttlefish ink risotto. Even the most trailblazing purveyors of modern Italian cuisine in America, while proudly serving regional specialties, still champion the good old-fashioned Italian-American classics, even if they change the names. The addictive, confectioners’ sugar-dusted fried doughballs known in the Italian-American canon as zeppole often show up as similar bombolini, and what used to be called plain macaroni is now broken down into specific subclassifications, whether it’s rigatoni rigate, garganelli, or casarecci. At Osteria Morini in New York City, Michael White—born in Wisconsin and trained at San Domenico, the Michelin 3-star outside of Bologna—serves mostly Emilia-Romagna-style food, but he also offers meatballs in tomato sauce and pasta with white clams.