Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  For this reason, I felt grateful when Judy asked me one day to bring the knife roll to a family reunion. She was going to serve Reuben sandwiches at a picnic dinner, and she thought it would be fun to let her cousins cut those sandwiches with Bernie’s big slicers. So I did, handing them over before the meal and receiving them back again afterwards. On the way home, in the car, liking how the day had felt, I thought perhaps this was the answer: As Guardian of the Knives, I would store the collection in my home as a complete entity, but I would bring it out for key family functions.

  My daughter Hannah, wise beyond her years, found this ridiculous: “Daddy!” she said, exasperated. “Stuff is supposed to be used. You’re not supposed to just hide it somewhere!”

  I did not own a 12-inch chef’s knife, so I figured I would add that one first to my regular rotation, if only for slicing big piles of leafy greens into chiffonades. Pulling that hefty knife from the roll, I noticed a few fine, bright scratches near its blade edge, as if it had been sharpened only days earlier. This caught my eye because the knife had not been touched at the luncheon. So I scraped the blade softly sideways across my forearm, a standard sharpness test: Arm hairs flicked free, effortlessly, one after another. The blade was an absolute razor, so finely honed it wouldn’t have stayed that way through more than a few days’ cooking.

  I phoned Judy first, assuming she had paid to have the knives sharpened after her father passed away. Judy had no idea what I was talking about. So I called Mary, who laughed out loud. “Dad must have left them like that,” she said, chuckling. “I haven’t touched those knives since he died.”

  And that’s how it happened—that’s how I felt Bernie reaching through time, making contact with me. Every chef drags a fingertip sideways across the blade edges of his knives, testing their sharpness; Bernie’s own fingers, therefore, had felt precisely the edge I was feeling.

  Hannah, by this point, was poring over the contents of the knife roll, marveling at all these little tools from her great-grandfather, the legendary cook. “And what’s this thing?” she asked me.

  She held a battered old steel tasting spoon. It was stamped, on its face, with the names of the Schimmel hotels in curiously tiny lettering: Omaha’s Blackstone, of course; but also the Cornhusker in Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Lassen in Wichita, Kansas; and the Custer in Galesburg, Illinois. Not one of these hotels remained in business, and yet this spoon had served in Bernie’s most personal, intuitive act: tasting. Holding it in my hands, thinking of all the times I’d brought a sauce to my own lips, I felt a link to Bernie, and to the simple love of food he had passed along to his daughters. And, through them, to me.

  BARBECUE ROAD TRIP:

  THE SMOKE ROAD

  By John T. Edge

  From Garden & Gun

  Social historian, food writer, and tireless promoter of Southern culture, John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and a columnist for The New York Times, Garden & Gun, and The Oxford American. His most recent book, The Truck Food Cookbook, was released in May 2012.

  Jess shook his head, tapped his nose, and mouthed the words No smoke. But I insisted. How often do we get to Covington, Tennessee? I thought, as we pondered our third barbecue pit stop of the day. We might as well give their sandwich a shot.

  My boy remained dubious. He stepped to the counter and asked the gentleman in charge how they cook their pigs. “With charcoal,” the fellow said. “Gets it tender, and the sauce does the rest.” Jess looked up at me with all the world-weariness a ten-year-old with a shock of blond hair and a snaggletoothed grin can muster. He didn’t have to say a word.

  As we drove away, bound for the last stop on our semiannual road trip through rural western Tennessee—a region I’ve come to think of as a Land of the Lost for hickory-cooked pork barbecue believers, where roadside purveyors still fuel masonry pits with hickory and oak logs and undiscovered treasures always seem to lurk around the bend—I caught his eye in the rearview mirror. Jess smiled, shook his head, and tapped his nose again.

  Jess knows barbecue. He ate his first solid food, a shoulder sandwich with slaw and sweet red sauce, in the parking lot of Spruce’s Bar-B-Q in Griffin, Georgia. Through the years, on family trips to Alabama, where my wife grew up, and Georgia, where I was born and raised, he’s learned to case a joint. In addition to working his nose, he knows how to survey the woodpile, ferret out freezer case menu conceits, and spot steam table pork at twenty paces.

  A couple of years back, Jess and I began to take just-the-guys jaunts north, from our home in Oxford, Mississippi, through the small Tennessee towns that sprawl between Jackson and Memphis. Jess discovered how to scan for armadas of martin houses, made from whitewashed gourds. He wondered, rightly, what really goes on inside tanning salons, twirling academies, and taxidermy studios. And he learned to eat, with discernment, intelligence, and gusto.

  On one of those trips, I tried to get Jess to read the text of a historical marker, erected in tribute to some long-forgotten graybeard statesman. He feigned interest, as any dutiful son would. Five minutes later, he recovered his gumption. “What if I could play laser tag and you could get a really good barbecue sandwich in one place?” he asked. “That’s what we really want, right?”

  Over time, Jess and I have learned each other’s palates. I’m a thin vinegar sauce guy. Jess likes molasses and ketchup-thickened concoctions. I prefer whole hog, pulled into long strands. Jess likes shoulder meat, hacked into shards and piled high on a white-bread bun.

  More important, we have developed a shared love of western Tennessee barbecue and the people who cook it. As he grows from a goofball boy, who sings in the shower and hugs me good night, to a querulous teenager, who questions my authority and demands the keys to the family sedan, I hope we’re also honing an enduring friendship that won’t depend solely on blood and genes.

  On our most recent expedition, Jess and I hit two stellar spots before that misstep in Covington. (We also did a drive-by of the Mindfield, a skyscraping folk art environment on the edge of downtown Brownsville, and made a quick tour of the Alex Haley Museum, an homage to the author of Roots tucked in a modest neighborhood in nearby Henning.)

  Helen’s Bar-B-Q in Brownsville came first. Set in a metal hutch, on a hard curve north of the courthouse square, the six-seat café sits next to a retailer of discount jewelry and hair extensions. Across the street is a derelict tourist-court-style motel. Inside, Helen Turner, one of the few female pit masters in the South, stokes the fire and works the sandwich board. She’s a dervish. Behind the café, in a screened pit room, she burns hickory and oak down into coals between two sheets of corrugated tin. With a long-handled shovel, she slides those coals into a concrete block berth. After they spend ten to twelve hours in a swirl of smoke, she pulls pork shoulders from that pit, chops them with a cleaver, piles the meat high on buns, and douses all with a red sauce that straddles the line between ketchup and vinegar, between sweet and hot.

  Jess ate his sandwich in four greedy bites. He moaned as he ate. Literally. But he also kept glancing up at Ms. Turner, who was wearing a blue floral-print hairnet and pink hospital scrubs. As she loped about the pit room, Jess watched. As he chewed through smoke-blackened hunks of pork flesh, his eyes tracked her movements. And his mind engaged.

  When we drove away, Jess was cradling a pickle jar of Helen’s sauce and plotting the many ways he could employ it when we got back home. His eyes were wide. And so was his smile. He got it, I told myself. I didn’t have to make some fatherly point about how women can do anything men can do. About how women work as hard as men. Ms. Turner had made those points for me. And she had dished a stupendously great sandwich, too.

  Sam’s Bar-B-Q in Humboldt was next. When Jess spied the woodpile, just south of downtown, he yelled for me to brake. A jumble of hickory trunks and oak stumps—delivered by friends and neighbors as they cleaned up from last spring’s tornadoes—that wood served as a kind of free-form art installation and a de facto advertisement tha
t announced HONEST BARBECUE COOKED OVER WOOD HERE.

  The building is made of white block, patined with soot. The pit, set in an adjacent building, is an iron-lung-shaped double-decker, with wood burning down to coals on the bottom and shoulders smoking on racks up top. It’s a feat of country-boy engineering, designed by the founder, Sam Donald, and now manned by his son-in-law John Ivory. The efficacy of that design gets proved every time customers heft a sandwich to their maw.

  And that’s just what Jess and I did. We hefted two beautiful sandwiches and a slice of chocolate chess pie, still hot from the oven. And we listened as locals came streaming in. “Now, you’re the baby girl, aren’t you?” Mr. Ivory asked a woman who ordered a barbecue bologna sandwich. “Give me a sandwich with fatty meat and slaw,” said a fireman with soot on his hands.

  We could have stayed all afternoon, rubbing our bellies and listening to the dulcet tones of happy eaters. But we motored on, bound for Covington. Two stops don’t make a barbecue road trip, I told Jess. Three is the minimum. Everybody knows that.

  By the time we left Covington, we didn’t need another sandwich. We had eaten well and often. But we pushed on. That’s what you do on a barbecue road trip. You push on, no matter how full you might be, goaded by the promise that the next experience might prove to be the best.

  As rain began to splatter the windshield and night began to fall, we pulled into Millington, Tennessee. Our goal was Woodstock Store N’ Deli, a cinderblock rectangle where Anthony Bledsoe serves a green-hickory-smoked shoulder sandwich, piled perilously high and capped with slaw. He calls it the Sleeper.

  The source of the moniker became clear when Jess and I stepped back into the gloam and spread paper towels on the hood of our station wagon. Our sandwich was an overstuffed behemoth. Fatter than fat. Stacked like a napoleon of meat, slaw, and sauce. Wretched and lovely excess. Enough to put any eater to sleep.

  As we picked at stray bits of meat that had fallen from the sandwich and worked up the courage to take yet another bite, a woman approached us. She was stooped. And slight. She carried a ragged umbrella. Her hand was out. She said her belly was empty. She looked directly at Jess. I reached into my pocket for some cash. Jess folded the sandwich back into its tinfoil pouch and asked if she would accept it. She did. And then she was gone.

  Five miles from home, I asked Jess what he learned on our barbecue road trip. “Respect what you have while you have it,” he said. That insight applies to issues of hunger and poverty. And to the barbecue traditions of the South. Not to mention father-son relations.

  Though our barbecue buzz had faded by the time we rolled back into Oxford, my road-trip-fueled appreciation for Jess had grown, as had my conviction that we needed to plot another expedition. Before his hunger fades. Before he grows up.

  The Family Table

  THE FOOD-CRITIC FATHER

  By Todd Kliman

  From The Washingtonian

  Every new parent knows how a new baby upends family life. But what if you’re a restaurant reviewer, obligated to dine out several nights a week? Todd Kliman, award-winning dining critic for the monthly Washingtonian magazine, chronicles his heroic efforts to accommodate the new addition.

  “Welcome to my world,” my friend Laura said when I called to tell her my wife and I were having a baby.

  “You mean the world of early-morning feedings and interrupted sleep?”

  “I mean,” she said, “the world of chicken tenders. You’re in for a rude awakening, my food-critic friend.”

  There are things every parent-to-be fears. The grand, existential worries: Let him be breathing, I said to myself at the moment of delivery. Let there not be a cord wrapped around his neck. Let him be normal. Then there are the little, quotidian matters, the myriad concerns of getting along with what is, let’s face it, a new housemate. A wailing, demanding housemate. A housemate who makes the slob you once roomed with—the one who raided the fridge and lounged on the couch in his underwear—look not half bad by comparison.

  In the months preceding our son’s arrival, I kept hearing that life was about to change, that being a parent would alter my reality in ways big and small. But it wasn’t until Laura framed the terms of my soon-to-be life that the existential abstraction—change—became quotidian and concrete.

  I thought I had prepared myself. Long before our son was ever a notion in our heads, my wife and I sat down one night and figured it all out—discussing, with the certainty of people for whom nothing is at stake, how we’d raise our Hypothetical Kid. We’d never buy a minivan, we wouldn’t build our existence around our Hypothetical Kid’s world. Hypothetical Kid would enter ours.

  But what was this world I’d created? As a food critic, I ate dinner out every night—often following a long lunch. Sometimes I went out to two dinners in a single night, and the wine sometimes meant that those nights stretched into the morning.

  I understood when I accepted this job that I was to think of myself as a kind of public functionary—a Designated Eater. I endured the caloric overload and the punishments to the body so readers could spend their time and money more sensibly. Not that I ever complained. This was the other thing I accepted—griping was bad form when you were eating out nightly on someone else’s dime.

  If it wasn’t all Champagne and truffles, the fact remained that every meal was a restaurant meal. I lived a fantasy life, and I nurtured one, too. As much as I existed to feed my readers tips, I existed to feed their fantasy of the bon vivant. Some bon vivant I was about to be, I thought, spooning strained carrots and mashed peas to a newborn.

  “You have to sacrifice certain things now,” an obstetrician said, preparing us for our new life.

  But there were sacrifices I wasn’t sure I was prepared to make.

  In the beginning, things were a relative breeze. In their first few months, most babies sleep 18 hours a day or more. The car seat was an ungainly purse we carted everywhere, leaving it on a chair beside us or on the floor next to our table. Jesse slept in his protective pod or stared blankly and drooled. Half the time we brought him with us to restaurants, I didn’t even notice he was there until it was time to leave.

  “Wait,” my wife said. “It gets harder.”

  We hit more than 100 eateries in those first three or four months—white-tablecloth spots, dives, and everything in between. By our son’s first birthday, he had been to more than 250—a fact I shared with the friends and family who gathered at our house to eat cake and watch Jesse open presents.

  “You’re kidding,” someone said.

  “Nope.”

  “Two hundred fifty,” she said. “You’re keeping a total?”

  “Actually, 272,” I said. “But who’s counting?”

  She shook her head. “You’re such a guy.”

  In a sense, we entered a new phase when Jesse graduated from the car seat, where he mostly slept, to a high chair, where he mostly didn’t. But it was the night I took my one-year-old son out for barbecue for the first time that we truly entered a new stage of parenthood.

  Barbecue has always held a certain primacy for me among all the foods I cook and crave, and I wanted it to be special the first time my son dug into a pile of smoky ’cue.

  It was a long drive. My wife had expressed doubts about chancing a place this far from home in rush hour, and now as we hit a patch of traffic on the Beltway, she worried we’d be getting home too late. Jesse wailed and wailed. I told her we could bail at the next exit. “Stick to the plan,” she said, slipping Jesse animal crackers.

  I suspected she encouraged me to keep going only so she’d have the ideal incriminating illustration to use against me the next time I suggested we venture out too late for a restaurant.

  Traffic eased up. We managed to be only 40 minutes late. Fortunately, the food—ribs, pulled pork, beans, cornbread, coleslaw—came quickly. Jesse, despite the in-car appetizer, was ravenous. He attacked his plate, shoving bits of spare rib into his mouth as if satisfying some deep need. I’d never se
en him go at any food like this. But I’d never turned him loose on barbecue. He’s got it in his genes, I thought, marveling at his sauce-smeared face. I took pictures.

  We drove home in one of those warm, expansive moods when your earlier fears have been exposed as premature and overstated and life feels loose and easy. We laughed and celebrated his initiation into the culture of barbecue and the world of adult eating.

  And then at 3 in the morning, my son, snugly sleeping between Mommy and Daddy, spewed the contents of his stomach all over himself, our bed, and us. Even after we changed the sheets, the smell of wood smoke and stomach acid was unmistakable.

  Yay, solid foods!

  My wife laid down certain rules after that: In a high chair by 6 at the latest. If traffic is bad and we have to bail, so be it.

  Dinner became something to prepare for twice. There were the preparations I needed to make for him and the preparations I needed to make for me, to ensure that my stealth mission—my anonymous visit to a restaurant as a critic—came off without a hitch.

  Afternoons usually went like this: Make a reservation under an assumed name—my nom de mange, I like to call it. E-mail my wife to be ready to leave the house at the appointed time. Choose all of the dishes we’d order. E-mail our guests the “rules” for the night: what can and can’t be talked about at the table, when and how to pass plates so that I’m able to sample each dish, how to quiz the waitstaff about the Syrah and the veal without lapsing into an SS-style interrogation.