Best Food Writing 2011

by Holly Hughes

  To serve:

  1. Place 3 cups of the sauce in a large frying pan over medium-high heat until simmering. Add the tofu, stir gently to combine, and simmer until the tofu is heated through, about 3 minutes.

  2. Transfer to a serving bowl, garnish with cilantro and scallions, and serve with steamed rice.

  THE INADVERTENT EDUCATION OF A RELUCTANT CHEF

  By Gabrielle Hamilton

  From Blood, Bones, and Butter

  Gabrielle Hamilton’s making-of-a-chef memoir is the sort of tour de force you’d expect from this talented writer, perhaps better known as the chef-owner of the pioneer East Village restaurant, Prune. The twisting path that led her to Prune made sense only in hindsight.

  Several blocks later, I found a café—the European kind with coffee and snacks—and went in it to warm up and to sort out some of my anxieties. I ordered a sandwich and sat in the grip of my own fuckup—impossible to go back home, impossible to wander another frozen minute in another impenetrable city, impossible to last much longer on my dwindling traveler’s checks and impossible to go straight to balmy, exotic and indecipherable Indonesia until I’d gotten some more experience as a lone female traveler in friendly western recognizable Europe—until the waitress put the plate in front of me. There was, as I’d ordered, a cold ham sandwich on good buttered grainy bread, but it came with a warm salted potato and a wedge of Gouda that had aged so much that it had gritty, very pleasant granules in it, which at first I thought were salt grains but then realized were crystallized calcium deposits from the milk of the cheese. I ate the little potato right away. Its pale yellow flesh was perfectly waxy, and its skin snapped when I bit into it. I don’t know under what other conditions a simple, salted, warm boiled potato could ever taste as good as this tasted. Probably none.

  Usually the food that meets your hunger sends you into a calmed and expansive state of deep satisfaction, but I instead sat in that café and became quite heavy and defeated. Yes, I had wanted to leave everything behind—I had grown to hate my country, my culture, my own first and last name—but the sharp and creamy cheese, the starchy, warm small potato, somehow made it starkly apparent how weary and lonely and physically uncomfortable one could become in exile. I had fantasized I would be gazing at the Van Goghs while my bicycle with the basket rested outside a lamppost, unlocked. But instead I had just seen some guy in a coffeehouse fully blacked out at the table. I was about to return to three drugged-out and frightfully skinny roommates.

  I needed a better plan. Slowly savoring the last bites of my ham sandwich on that corky pumpernickel bread, I pored over my travel notes and found the letter from my mom with the list of her relatives and friends in France. There was also a contact in Algeria—the family of one of the dishwashers from Mother’s—but when I imagined trying to manage that phone call, shouting over the static from an international booth at the post office, our words overlapping in the delay, and trying to cheerfully introduce myself while asking if I could be their guest for, well, several weeks, I immediately opted for France. I would be welcome there.

  Marie Nöelle had a crêperie, tabac, and bar des sports in the tiny town of Montauban-de-Bretagne. I was silently thrilled to get off the train and, not one other backpacker or drug addict in sight, be met by this luminously blue-eyed old friend of my mother’s.

  “Gabrielle!” she waved.

  “Marino! Salut!” And we were off, my heavy pack in the back of the Volkswagen Rabbit and she, as if I were her peer, began to speak of everything—complex and troubling, simple and pleasing—that had arrived in her life these past many years since we had seen each other. We drove through small villages on our way from Rennes to Montauban, and pulled up finally to her little spot in the center of town. The bar was closed, on a Sunday evening, and so we went without interruption upstairs to her apartment and settled me into the attic room.

  While I unpacked a little and arranged my things, Marie Nöelle put together a simple dinner of soup and cheese and brought it up to her room on the second floor, where she said she preferred to eat in the winter when it got dark so early and the nights were so very long. Her husband of a few years had just months before killed himself by mouthing a hunting gun and pulling the trigger—right in front of her.

  I slept more that night than I had in thirty days combined, it seemed, relieved beyond description to not have to keep nocturnal watch over my traveler’s checks and my passport and my expensive camera, which all of the winter drug addicts in every youth hostel I slept in would have razored out of the bottom of my sleeping bag while I slept had I not remained, even in sleep, alert. When I came down to the bar to find Marie Nöelle, the place was open and busy, and there was the smell of coffee being ground each time an au lait was ordered. The room was warm and simple, with a stand-up bar, a small area at the cash register for lottery tickets and cigarettes, and a separate area with a pool table and a table soccer game up a few steps in the back. The crêperie, with its heavy, black cast-iron griddles and just a few tables, was in another room open and adjacent to the bar.

  She put me to work at the bar at first, pulling espresso and steaming milk. She introduced me to one of the stout and ruddy-complexioned farmers and as we shook hands, his rough and calloused clasping mine, I said, “Bonjour, Roger.” And Roger bowed slightly and said, “Enchanté, Mademoiselle,” revealing his brown teeth. Marie Nöelle taught me how to pour his little ballon of vin rouge ordinaire with a good splash of water in it, because at eight-thirty in the morning, he and all of the other blue-clad men with terrible teeth who now stood against the bar, with manure and red dirt stuck to their black rubber boots, were on their first of many to follow. Throughout the day they would stop back in for “un coup” while their tractors sat haphazardly parked on the side of the road just outside. Bottles of Pernod, Ricard, and my favorite, the bitter orange-flavored Suze, hung upside down from a clever rack, and I learned to push the glass up against the spring-fitted nozzle to drain out a perfect one-ounce pour.

  The eggs sat out at room temperature in the kitchen and Michel, the crêperie cook who wore big thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes huge above his mustache, let the cigarette dangle from his lips as he cracked them into the crêpe batter, made of buckwheat flour each day. The salad dressing was made in the bottom of the bowl with garlic, mustard, vinegar, and oil and tossed in with the Bibb lettuce that we bought at the little open air market that set up every morning across the street.

  I stood often with Marino at her post at the cash register and sold lottery tickets, Gitanes, Gauloise, and Rothman Rouge by the carton, and from the register I could look straight into the crêperie where Michel spooned out the batter onto the oversized black turntable griddle and then swirled his little dowel of a baton around like a dj scratching the beat. He was decisive and swift, and he cracked the egg right onto the galette and sprinkled the grated Gruyère and laid out a slice of that jambon with the white fat cap over and over again, working the two griddles effortlessly. To finish and plate each galette, he used his metal spatula to fold in the four sides, forming a square from a circle with the contents exposed still at the center, and deftly ran the spatula under the savory crêpe, delivering it to the plate. “E viola!” he said each time, and then turned to the next. That meal—with the salad right on top of the complet, and a bottle of the hard cider kept at truly cellar temperature in an actual cellar—was one I ate every day without ever getting bored with it. I had never before given a single thought to how different the lettuces and the cider and even the butter, bread, and eggs tasted when left at room temperature and never refrigerated, but now I was keenly aware of it.

  For the duration of the winter I hibernated inside her warm little hub of life in that tiny village and earned a few francs by working every day in the bar or the crêperie or at the cash register selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. I fixated on the local shops—the boulangerie, poissonnerie, boucherie, fromagerie, and pâtisserie—and how they displayed their foods in that
careful, precise, and focused way that never, in spite of all that precision and care, looked rigid or antiseptic or strained. Every piece of food in every store—no matter how artful, precise, and often jewel-like—begged to be touched, smelled, and heartily eaten. We bought bread at the bread store, meat at the meat store, dry goods at the dry goods store. There was a huge supermarket that had just been built at the edges of the town, but when we went there—to get something in bulk supply for the bar or crêperie—Marie Nöelle kind of smiled sheepishly and moved quickly across the parking lot to the car.

  In town at the local boucherie, though, the rabbits and pheasants and geese were displayed in the cases with some remnant of their living life still with them. The geese were laid out with their long necks arranged in great question mark arcs around their totally plucked bodies as if they were not dead but simply deep in sleep, their black beaks and faces nestled in striking contrast to their bare creamy bodies. The rabbits looked like clipped show poodles, wearing fuzzy slippers, otherwise skinned, but their furry feet left intact while their little bloody faces revealed their tiny bloody teeth. Pheasants in full stunning plumage hung for a few days until their necks finally gave out, and you could see, physically, a kind of perfect ripeness to the meat when it became tender enough to pleasurably chew, as if the earliest stage of rot itself was a cooking technique. Boudin blanc and boudin noir overran the charcuterie and traiteur cases as Christmas and New Year and saint’s days in the deep of winter demanded these traditional foods, made only at this time of year when animals are slaughtered not bred.

  Young cooks who desired to be chefs went to auberges in the countryside of France and slept on cots and worked without pay for sixteen hours a day, six days a week. They did these apprenticeships called “stages,” which I never heard of until well after I’d opened my own restaurant. Of course I had never worked anywhere in my life where young people apprenticed for free in hopes of learning something valuable; The Canal House and The Picnic Basket and Mother’s were the kinds of restaurants where the only thing that mattered to anyone was their paycheck, their tips, and their free shift drink.

  People who knew about stage-ing were French boys on the cusp of manhood who lived in France and spoke French, and when they were fourteen and clearly not cut out for the books at their lycèe, would wander down the road to their local two-star inn and tap on the screen door of the kitchen there.

  They joined—at the bottom—the ranks of a brigade kitchen and did their little part learning how to be clean, fast, efficient, and perfectly repetitive. They plucked the feathers from partridges that arrived through the back doors of the kitchens, they quickly washed berries picked by local men and women from their own bushes, they scrubbed copper as punishments. I knew nothing of it. Not one detail. I didn’t even know such an apprenticeship existed or that anyone would aspire to such a thing.

  I was clearly in no two-star country auberges. The locals—Riton and Andrè and Yannick—all of them strangely cross-eyed, chain-smoking, semi-literate drunks—leaned too many days a week and too many hours a day against that bar where I was understanding for the first time the chasm between coffee ground to order per cupful and what I’d slurped every morning from Dimitri with my egg-on-a-roll, which came out of a stainless steel tank. The patrons and crew of our little sports bar cum crêperie on that gray corner in that drab small town resembled nothing of the fine dining clientele of a two-star Relais and Chateaux inn nor its brigade. Michel, always in street clothes with the same apron used for the whole work week unwashed, smoking while mixing crêpe batter, and Marie Nöelle, nervously sipping her tisanes to calm her ever since Yves had offed himself, and the barmaid Sylvie with her long black hair rarely washed and never pulled back, who seemed to know just the right time to pour a free round and who very warmly received the flirtations of the cross-eyed, toothless, shit-stinking admirers—resembled not one aspect of a tocqued brigade meticulously fluting mushroom caps. Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about the baguette at breakfast, and everyone knew how to prepare a simple roast chicken and a few potatoes cooked in the local heavily salted butter. Everyone casually tipped the last sip of the red wine from their glass into their dish of soup and mopped it all up with the crusty heel left in the bread basket. I was sucking something in. Something unmitigated.

  This is the crêpe.

  This is the cider.

  This is how we live and eat.

  This man with bits of straw stuck to his thick blue Breton sweater, leaning up against the bar for a ballon of vin rouge ordinaire with a splash of water in it at eight-thirty in the morning, is the farmer whose milk we have been drinking, whose leeks we have been braising. These are the knotty, wormy, quite small apples from which the cider is made. And here, as a treat to celebrate my last day before continuing on my journey, when we drove to the coast, past fields of shooting asparagus and trees about to burst forth, and we stopped finally at the water’s edge, in St. Malo—here are the platters of shellfish pulled that very morning from the sea—langouste, langoustines, moules, crevettes, huîtres, bulots, bigorneaux, coques. These are the pearl-tipped hat pins stuck into a wine bottle cork for pulling out the meats of the sea snails. The tide ran out, and the fishing boats slumped in the mud attached to their slack anchors like leached dogs sleeping in the yard. The particular smell of sea mud went up our nostrils as we slurped the brine from the shells in front of us, so expertly and neatly arranged on the tiers.

  “Cin Cin!” Marino and I saluted each other, celebrating these past few months, and clinked together our glasses of Muscadet sur lie.

  I am aware, in hindsight, that no real chef or restaurateur, when signing the thirty-year lease on her first restaurant, thinks back suddenly to the miserable beginnings of her wintry backpacking trip and considers it as part of her business plan. I now fully understand that instead of conjuring peak food moments in my life and trying to analyze what had made them so important, as if that was some kind of legitimate preparation for tackling the famously difficult restaurant business, I really should have been crawling up into the pipe work, noticing the water damage in the basement, and asking hard questions of Eric about the infrastructure of the one-hundred-year-old tenement building. If I had even known what one was, I should have asked about the C of O. While I was dreaming of how I would someday get that Gouda and that warm salted potato into the mouths of future guests, I should have been researching the restaurant’s Certificate of Occupancy, arguably the most basic important document your restaurant will ever need. I’d never heard of due diligence. But there I was, pacing around my apartment, puzzling out how I could harness a hundred pivotal experiences relating to food—including hunger and worry—and translate those experiences into actual plates of food and wondering if eight dollars was too much to charge for a wedge of aged Gouda cheese and a couple of warm, salted boiled potatoes.

  Of course it wasn’t a stage; it was not a real education in a real kitchen. It was just a few months of living at the source of something rather than reading about it in a food magazine or learning about it from a chef-instructor in a starched and monogrammed jacket at cooking school, in the lifeless context of stainless steel and insta-read thermometers. I didn’t consider it, at the time, anything pertinent to my future. But I was emboldened to sign that lease, in part because I had learned about buckwheat galettes and white flour crêpes and room temperatures lettuce and salted butter and cellared hard cider in a typical Breton crêperie.

  To be picked up and fed, often by strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger, became the single most important and convincing food experience I came back to over and over, that sunny afternoon humming around my apartment, wondering how I might translate such an experience into the restaurant I was now sure I was about to open down the block. I so completely understood hospitality and care from a bedraggled recipient’s point of view, that even before I came to understand how garbage removal is billed on square yardage of waste and that a commercial storef
ront should have a separate water meter from the building’s, I knew I had to somehow get that kind of hospitality into this minor little thirty-seater in the as-yet-ungentrified and still heavily graffitied East Village.

  EXPRESSION

  By Lisa Abend

  From The Sorcerer’s Apprentices

  After all the press lavished on Ferran Adría and his restaurant El Bullí, Lisa Abend—an American food writer based in Spain—took a fresh behind-the-scenes angle: Profiling the apprentices who put their careers on hold for six months to learn from the master.

  Although European chefs have practiced locavore, or farm-to-table, cuisine for centuries, an emphasis on exotic ingredients and year-round availability in recent decades had displaced what was once a necessary tradition. Now, as that old kind of eating becomes fashionable once again and an evergrowing number of chefs seek out heirloom vegetables and pastured meat, the product itself has assumed greater importance. Santamaria, who has always featured local, Catalan ingredients and techniques in his cooking but certainly isn’t averse to serving a tomato in February or importing oysters from Normandy, appropriated the rhetoric of this new movement in his attack on avantgarde cuisine.

  Here too, Ferran feels compelled to defend himself against misconceptions about what goes on in his kitchen. Yes, he serves Japanese tofu and Ecuadoran roses and Dutch succulents and French smoked butter. “But did you taste this?” he will ask, holding out a raw leaf, or smearing an uncooked dab onto your hand. “It’s the best in the world.” Like any other decent chef, Ferran can get very excited by a product that does nothing more exotic than taste good. And he can be just as disappointed when it doesn’t live up to his expectations, no matter how rare or unusual it is. When a shipment of Lola tomatoes that he tasted a few weeks earlier finally comes in—the fruit elongated like a jalapeño and packed preciously in straw—he opens the box with the joy of a child at Christmas. Immediately, he grabs a knife and starts slicing into a tomato. One piece, then two, then another; the tomato has disappeared, and still he can’t stop eating. He starts in on another.