Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  I believe that I am the man for that job. The fat have a fellowship, a shared knowledge that regular people can never grasp. Once Michael White, a chef of no small bulk himself, looked at my shoes and said, “I see you have ‘fat man laces.’” “Fat man laces?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  “They’re tied on one side of your shoe. Fat guys tie their shoes with their legs crossed because they hate to bend down.” The inescapable truth of this hit me; a glimpsed image in a passing mirror, and I knew he was right. I did have fat man laces! Sherlock Holmes, cadaverous though he was, might have figured out such a thing—but he would never have known the indignity of pushing and peering over his own stomach, of it getting in the way of his feet and knees like the gross, distorted imposition a fat man’s stomach really is. Nor would the genius of Baker Street ever deduce the general unsteadiness that threatens a fat man on those rare occasions when he bends down, trying to hold bodies in balance when every law of physics seeks to topple him unhappily to the floor.

  I know about this because I’ve been varying degrees of fat for most of my life. I’m at a low ebb at the moment, and this has allowed me to reflect on how to make a restaurant for fat people. We’re only really happy at restaurants, you know—and then only for a few minutes. (We prefer to be at home, eating over the sink or munching away in front of a monitor of some sort; but the more gregarious of our race, when we do go out, generally head to restaurants—or would, if they were better designed.)

  For example:

  •Fat people have bad backs and poor posture. They don’t like to sit in narrow, hard-backed chairs. What they really want most is a padded La-Z-Boy or some such contraption. But since eating requires an upright posture, a well-padded chair, with rests for bulky broad arms and plenty of lumbar support down low, is a must. Fat people live in a world with twice the gravity of Earth, after all. That’s why they wheeze and waddle the way they do. We’re not saying it’s OK. It’s not.

  •The restaurant should be cold, too cold for thin people. This will have the doubly beneficial effect of driving thin people out, because, really, who wants to look at thin people? And of course fat people, their swollen, unhealthy bodies working hard just to pointlessly stay alive, are fiery furnaces deep within, churning and chewing away beneath troubled brows. We require constant refrigeration just to keep going. Thermostats should be set for a frigid 55 degrees, with all fans set on high for maximum cooling.

  •The servers need to be fat themselves, but fat in a non-threatening way. The last thing a fat person wants to see in his or her server is a sweltering, shameful wretch, wincing under the stigma of her body image. On the contrary! What’s needed is a cheerful vulgarian, a postmenopausal mother figure with a ready smile and a sprightly line of patter. The sort of lady who might say, “Do you want some more coffee, Hon?” were you somewhere more downscale. I say, “The last thing a fat person wants to see”—but of course, there is something a fat person wants to see less: a thin, long-limbed, carefree twenty-something, glorying in her sexual prime and regarding the customers as so many hideous zoo animals, waiting to be fed. (They don’t need to actually have this attitude; just being young and attractive is enough.)

  •Speaking of sexuality, there shouldn’t be any. Dining here is a solitary and celibate experience, in which both sexes are protected from even a hint of having to socialize. For this reason, every table is a solo one, kidney-shaped—its full space angled to the diner’s sad eyes and ravenous maw, its shape allowing advanced convex gut docking, as well as maximal hand and arm reach in every direction.

  •Certain design elements are mandated for the Fat Restaurant. Obviously, there will be no mirrors, frosted or otherwise, anywhere, and the lighting will consist of a dim and melancholy twilight interrupted only by chiaroscuro spotlights not on the table, indeed, but rather on the food itself. Always the food itself—only the food.

  Speaking of which, the menu will consist of, but not be limited to, the following:

  •Large joints of meat—most notably the shoulder, leg, buttock or round, saddle, baron, and ham, suitably burnished with a luminous glaze, to dazzle the weak, beady eyes of gourmands, and bring a temporary sparkle to them. The imposing size of large cuts dignifies the act of eating, and the fact of having one entirely to yourself gives a temporary sense of value and worth to the customer. Uneaten portions can be used for subsequent courses, their fat rendered for hash browns, the exposed pink flesh seared off in saucepans with olive oil or brown butter, the more difficult pieces ground up for hash, the bones split and seared for marrow (to then be used as a dressing on the hash).

  •High-piled platters of fried foods, including chicken, cutlets, country-fried steak with cream gravy, crusty onion rings breaded with panko, matzo, fine flour, coarse flour, and/or pork cracklings; non-vegetable tempura items; semi-boned chicken wings; untrimmed shoulder pork chops in joyously shatterable beer batter; cod filets; shoestring French fries; slow-braised short ribs; tender melting lamb breast; long-simmered veal stew chunks; and other softened meats, pressed and refrigerated and bound with their own collagen, and then plunged into cauldrons of the appropriate boiling animal fat; and tater tots, lots of them, dressed with fried garlic and Maldon salt. (These should also be available as bar snacks, petit fours, and bathroom mints.)

  •Grilled cheese prepared on the airiest conceivable bread, thin and diaphanous to the point of abstraction, orgiastically slathered with oleomargarine, and containing nourishing viscous, mild and rich slices of bright-orange American cheese, such as gluttons remember from the faint mists of their childhood, when a future entombed in necrotic, immobilizing tallow still lay unimagined.

  •Heavy stews, civets, porridges, congee, risotto, lush plovs, and pilafs, and other starchy, melting media for fat and flavor. Each bite is prized by the portly for their soporific effect and the brief periods of torpid slumber that result.

  •All variations of the hamburger, including meat loaf sandwiches, sliders, meatball subs, leftover Salisbury steak served on slices of untoasted potato bread, massive steakhouse burgers with carbonized char marks and red bleeding interiors redolent of zinc and Roquefort; flattened coffee-shop discs, served on large toasted white buns, on each half of which a slice of tangerine-colored cheese (see above) has been melted; maid-rites; Jucy Lucys; sloppy joes; steak tartare on toast points; and Manwiches.

  •High-piled layer cakes with copious amounts of lemon frosting, chocolate fudge, or coconut, depending on age and region of the diner, with or without heavy dollops of fresh whipped cream, and who’s kidding who, it’s obviously going to be “with.” (And let’s have another dollop over here, too, thank you.)

  Once the diner has finished eating, no further presence on his or her part is required: no labored shifting in the chair to accommodate a burdened body, no polite excuses to go out and take an “air bath,” no endless wait for the server to return. Fat diners, at the moment of having eaten a big meal, are at the absolute nadir of their day-to-day existence: their best and only pleasure and goal has been sated, leaving in its wake an aching, angry nausea and a self-hatred almost as deep as the pleasure they’ve just taken at table. They no longer wish to sit alone with their thoughts. They don’t want to face the far side of the meal now working its way through the bilious labyrinth of their innards. All they really want is to get out, and quick. So an EZ Pass-type device, perhaps implanted in an earlobe or neck fold, will debit their bank account as they pass through the gate of the Fat Restaurant back out into the world, until they are ready to return.

  BONE GATHERER

  By Mei Chin

  From Saveur

  Essayist and fiction writer Mei Chin often stretches the bounds of food writing, mixing in elements of memoir and magical realism. Besides award-winning Saveur articles, her writing has appeared in Gourmet, Vogue, the New York Times, and on her website bastethebook.com.

  I’ve always loved meat on the bone—spicy, messy chicken wings; pan-fried pork chops; the beef ribs m
y mom used to bake, coated in bread crumbs and mustard butter—but I never really thought about bones until a recent trip to South America forced me to take them seriously. I had signed on as a camp cook for a birding expedition to a remote part of Central Suriname. We were helicoptered onto a patch of bare rock several thousand feet above sea level, a place where, we were told, no human had been before. We were surrounded by jungle filled not only with birds, but venomous snakes. I was assured by my companions that any resident jaguars would mistake me for a small mammal and, hence, lunch. Torrential rains flooded camp every night, and our waterlogged satellite phone died, leaving us with no contact to the outside world.

  It was a feral life. I hacked through bamboo with a machete, washed my hair in a stream. I cooked with peanut butter, rice, and from time to time, the roasted carcasses of the birds that we had collected. I had learned the weird but beautiful art of preparing specimens, a painstaking process in which you separate the bird’s skin from its flesh while leaving much of the skeleton intact. We had set up bird-checking nets a bit higher on the mountain, and I would check these while my mates were out exploring. The rocks above camp were slippery with moss and rain. I have been clumsy since I was a child, but in the mountains, I got very good at falling—indeed, I became kind of addicted to it.

  It wasn’t until a couple of weeks after my return to the States, when I took a spectacular spill on some hotel stairs, that my falls on the mountain came back to me with a vengeance. I found myself in excruciating pain, with a broken hip, and doctors were telling me that my left femur—the leg bone between the pelvis and knee—was so messed up, it would have to be replaced. I’d be off my feet for months. According to the older Chinese women in my life, I was supposed to eat a lot of bones, in keeping with the traditional Far Eastern belief that you should eat whatever body part is ailing—owl eyes for myopia, pig lungs for emphysema. Condemned as I was to crutches and virtual house arrest, the old beliefs started to make sense.

  Besides, despite my own fragility, bones are powerful things. In ancient China, they were used to make prophecies. In the Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a girl carries her parents’ bones around in a sack, where they clank and groan until a spot is located for their burial. In my favorite fairy tale, the bone of a murdered man is carved into a flute, which plays a song that reveals the killer. There is a restlessness in bones, a personality that endures long after the owner has passed on.

  I began my convalescence by making a stock from beef necks and veal knuckles the color of old lace. When I saw them—beautiful, haunting—I was reminded of the animals from which they came. When you look at a steak you don’t necessarily think of a steer, but the neck bones, shaped like giant jacks, conjured the massiveness of the animal and how it moved.

  Nothing demonstrates the elemental magic of bones more aptly than a stock. Any Chinese child with the flu will know the taste of pork bone and ginger stock, hot, heady, and healing. Korean babies are weaned on sullongtang, the milk-white soup made from beef bones simmered for anywhere from 12 hours to days on end. The French chef Auguste Escoffier claimed that a great kitchen is founded on great stock; serious cooks approach their stocks with shamanic intensity. It’s a matter of extraction. Protein, sugar, and fat break down during cooking and are released from the meat and bones into the water in which they steep. And while the meat contributes to flavor, the bones, loaded with collagen, impart body and a velvety mouth-feel.

  Home from the hospital, staring at the stove in my apartment’s small kitchen, revisiting old volumes on my shelves—the fairy-tale collections and cookbooks and photo albums—I began to entertain a romantic notion of the perfect broth, based on the memory of a brodo I had when I was 11 years old on a chilly March evening in Venice. Limpid, sweet, and nuanced, it was as fortifying as wine or tea—a rich yet balanced infusion of meat, bone, and aromatics. Broth has always been part of my cooking repertoire, but I’ve frequently allowed mine to boil because I could not be bothered to watch the pot. If there’s one thing all the cookbooks I now pored over agreed on, it’s that should your broth ever so much as begin to boil, you should throw it away. During boiling, particles of fat and protein are agitated and become suspended in the liquid; a boiled broth is murky and greasy.

  In pajamas and slightly stoned from daytime television and Percocet, I had plenty of time on my hands—time enough, finally, to heed the experts. I set my stove to its lowest heat and prepared to wait a very long time: By all accounts, the water—and beef bones and turkey wings, carrots, onion, garlic, celery, and bay leaf—would take more than an hour just to come up to temperature. I left the pot on the stove overnight and all the next day. A brodo should barely simmer; several seconds should pass between bubbles. At a very low and constant heat, unwanted impurities released from the meat and bones will coagulate and rise to the top or cling to the sides of the pot, and they can be easily skimmed off.

  When at last I strained the broth, the result was pure alchemy: a clear, golden liquid with a perfume much greater than the sum of its parts—there were notes of caramel and nutmeg, butter and clove. It was one of the most thrilling moments I’ve experienced as a cook. How often do we manage to duplicate perfectly a romantic notion? I garnished my first bowl with curls of Parmesan and sipped it slowly, inhaling the sweet steam.

  Of course, these days it’s trendy to be into bones, not only wings and ribs, but chicken necks and ham hocks and shanks. Much as many chefs can now be found flaunting their affinity for bones, they’re still a fantastic bargain: At my local butcher, marrow bones go for $2.99 a pound. This is true of all sorts of bones and bony cuts. Sometimes, if a customer orders a noisette—the meaty eye of the rack of lamb—my butcher will even give me the bony remainder for free.

  Years ago, the same butcher had taught me how to french a rack of lamb, a technique that involves scraping some of the meat away with a long, thin knife to lay bare a fringe of elegantly curved bones. Now, laid up and armed with a boning knife, I found the taxidermy skills I’d acquired in Suriname useful. I started frenching everything in sight, and was alarmingly good at it. I turned chicken wings into chicken lollipops and frenched itty-bitty rabbit racks. I found out that the technique also worked wonderfully with shank—the length of bone and meat just below the knee—by far my favorite part of any animal.

  The marrow was silk on my tongue, and yet the white bone on the plate retained an echo of the visceral and the wild.

  Lamb shanks braised low and slow, until the meat is tender and the bones release their marrow to enrich the braising liquid, are always marvelous served with something starchy to soak up the sauce—polenta, mashed potatoes, risotto—but I like them best when they’re set, gigantic and resplendent, on a bed of white bean purée. Frenching the shanks makes the presentation that much more spectacular, a hunk of meat beckoning at the end of a length of parchment-colored bone. When I tried it, I browned the shanks thoroughly before putting them in the oven, and I made sure to turn the meat every half hour or so for an evenly caramelized exterior. Cooking a shank in this way is virtually foolproof due to its high ratio of bone to meat; because the bone absorbs heat, the meat immediately surrounding it cooks slowly and is the most succulent. And let us again not forget the collagen that attaches the meat to the bone. Over the course of cooking it turns to gelatin—a special treat to enjoy once you’ve dispensed with the meat.

  Then there’s marrow. When the creamy, voluptuous stuff is scooped from the bone’s hollow, it can be stirred into a sauce to add lushness. It is the best part of an osso buco—that’s Italian for “bone with a hole”—and once you’ve stripped the meat from the long-braised veal shank and devoured it, inside that bone you’ll find a final treat, a secret store, best coaxed out with a long, slender spoon.

  To eat marrow—the tissue that produces new blood—is to indulge in an act that treads the boundary between the rude and the refined. There was, in fact, a time not too long ago when my supermarket was selling
marrow only as a dog treat. But once I felt well enough to put on a dress and hail a cab, marrow was the first thing I sought. Together with my new hip—a man-made bone fashioned from enameled metal—I headed to a Manhattan restaurant called Ai Fiori.

  If eating marrow is typically a messy, primal, hands-on affair, at Ai Fiori, chef Michael White has resolved the issue by halving the bone lengthwise. For the dish he calls Mare e Monte (“sea and mountain” in Italian, a play on surf and turf), White lines the halved bone with celery root purée, nestles in overlapping disks of steamed scallop and black truffle, lays out a layer of marrow on top, and then broils the whole thing. It was silk on my tongue, marrow I could eat with a knife and fork, a subtle balance of flavors and textures—and yet the white bone on the plate retained an echo of the visceral and the wild. It conjured what lurked in the shadows on that mountaintop where I fell so many times, and it evoked my mending body ensconced in that gleaming haute dining room, my crutch still at my side.

  With bones, in other words, the possibilities for reincarnation are endless. A joint becomes a stock, which then becomes the base for pot au feu, or another rich, meaty stew. I’ve even taken to roasting cuts from animals on racks made from their bones, a roast beef on a bed of marrow bones. It’s culinary id. At some point, though, my fridge started to look like a boneyard, my hair smelled like veal, and I began to long for another life, one away from the stove and skipping on both legs. Still, I am grateful for the chance that being hobbled for a while presented me: to linger in the kitchen while things cooked slowly; then to grip the bones in my fist, use my teeth to strip the meat, and quietly relish the savagery—and the delicacy—of it all.