Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  I first glimpsed the image on a postcard I bought at a Memphis bookstore. In that rendition, the black woman in the background was left unnamed. Because I knew a bit about the history of Café Nicholson and the role that Edna Lewis, the African-American cookery writer and chef, played there, and because my eyesight isn’t so great, I wondered, perversely, whether the black woman ferrying what appears to be a pot of tea to the table was Lewis.

  Edna Lewis was the most respected African-American cookery writer of the twentieth century. Over the course of a long and varied career, she set type for the Daily Worker and labored as a dressmaker for clients like Marilyn Monroe. After working with Johnny Nicholson, she began to write and publish the cookbooks that earned her recognition as the grande doyenne of Southern cookery. Foremost was The Taste of Country Cooking. Published in 1976 and re-released in 2006, it was an homage to the land and larder of Freetown, the Virginia community where she grew up. In the foreword to that thirtieth anniversary edition, Alice Waters wrote that Lewis, the granddaughter of freed slaves, was an “inspiration to all of us who are striving to protect both biodiversity and cultural diversity by cooking real food in season and honoring our heritage through the ritual of the table.”

  If Lewis could go unnamed in a picture that foretold the promise of America in the postwar era, I figured that image might serve as a metaphor for the lesser role Americans have long ascribed to African-American contributions to the culinary arts. Telling that story might be a way for me to pay down the debts of pleasure, both culinary and other, that a privileged white son of the South like me has accrued over a lifetime. This spring, I attended a conference on food and immigrant life at the New School in New York City. Speakers from as close as NYU and as far away as UC Irvine talked about “gastronomic cosmopolitanism,” defined “neophilia” and “neophobia,” argued for the recovery of the “fragile orality of recipe exchange,” and predicted that, for those of us who study food, “epistemological implosions” are on the horizon. (I’m still not sure what that last one meant.) But what really walloped me was a speech by Saru Jayaraman, director of the UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center and author of Behind the Kitchen Door: What Every Diner Should Know About the People Who Feed Us.

  The people who put food on our tables, Jayaraman argued, often can’t afford to put food on their own. Primary among the contemporary culprits she identified was the National Restaurant Association, which she called the “other N.R.A.” Jayaraman said that when Herman Cain, the Republican presidential candidate and former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, was running the organization in the 1990s, he brokered a deal that has since kept the federal minimum wage for tipped workers like waiters and bartenders artificially deflated at $2.13 per hour.

  Wages for non-tipped workers like line cooks have risen, she said, but not at the pace of other professions, nor have they earned benefits enjoyed by other workers, like paid sick days. Workers of color suffer the most. A four-dollar hourly gap separates them from white workers, she reported, citing two primary reasons. Within a single restaurant, workers of color are more likely to be hired for back-of-the-house positions that pay less, like busser and runner, and they rarely get promoted from those positions. Within the industry as a whole, workers of color are more likely to get jobs in fast food, which generally pay less than fine-dining jobs. She was speaking, for the most part, about new immigrants. But listening to her talk on that early spring evening in New York City, I heard what sounded like an old Southern story of the black housekeepers I knew in my Georgia youth, who suffered under the burden of coercive social pressures while scraping by on substandard wages and hand-me-downs, retold in this modern American moment.

  Jayaraman’s tales gave me a new reason to dig into the story behind Bissinger’s photo and the circumstances surrounding Edna Lewis’s tenure at Café Nicholson. Reading contemporary reviews of the restaurant, I learned that Lewis rose to fame there while serving simple and elegant dishes like roast chicken, which Clementine Paddleford, the reigning national critic of the day, described as “brown as a chestnut, fresh from the burr.” She also favored Lewis’s chocolate soufflé, which was “light as a dandelion seed in a wind.” In the New York Times archives, I discovered that the 1948 partnership offer from Nicholson was timely for Lewis, who grew up on a farm near Freetown, Virginia, but had no other demonstrable experience in the industry. At the time they began working together, Nicholson told a reporter, “Edna was about to take a job as a domestic.”

  Café Nicholson employed a conceit that presaged the reigning white-tablecloth aesthetic of today. “We’ll serve only one thing a day,” Nicholson said to Lewis, as they schemed their first menus. “Buy the best quality and I don’t see how we can go wrong.” Long before farm-to-table was a marketing concept, Lewis was challenging chefs to learn “from those who worked hard, loved the land, and relished the fruits of their labors.” Her approach, like her cooking, was straightforward. In a 1989 interview, she told the New York Times, “As a child in Virginia, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up, I didn’t think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try and recapture those good flavors of the past.”

  The archives at NYU, where Nicholson deposited his papers, yielded a cache of Bissinger photographs that made clear the afternoon he captured in that iconic image was not singular. More important, I discovered that I was not the only one who saw metaphorical possibilities in that 1949 black and white. In October 2007, Smithsonian magazine published Gore Vidal’s gauzy recollection of that moment at table on Johnny Nicholson’s patio. “For me, Karl Bissinger’s picture is literally historic, so evocative of a golden moment,” he wrote, with the mixture of brio, ego, and privilege that was his signature. “I don’t know what effect the picture has on those who now look at it, but I think it perfectly evokes an optimistic time in our history that we are not apt to see again soon.”

  With that dispatch, Vidal, who wrote the introduction to The Luminous Years: Portraits at Mid-Century, a collection of Bissinger’s photographs, was finished. But Smithsonian wasn’t. Two months after Vidal’s recollection ran, the magazine published a letter to the editor by Edward Weintraut of Macon, Georgia. “I am troubled that his text does not make the slightest reference to the black waitress,” wrote Weintraut, a professor at Mercer University. “I found myself wondering whether she shared Vidal’s view about this time being so optimistic, whether she would welcome a revival of the society and culture in which this scene is embedded, whether she enjoyed a similar golden moment as the author and his friends did during lunches at Café Nicholson.”

  Over the years, I’ve taken a number of swipes at the “good food” movement. Because I think too many of its members are surfing trends and indulging passions that will prove dalliances, instead of forging a true path toward a better-fed future, I’ve referred to overzealous twenty-somethings trying to effect change in our broken food system as agriposeurs. After hearing Jayaraman speak, and after tracing the reception of the Bissinger photo, I recognize that my real complaint is that too much of the attention now focused on food skews toward natural resources instead of human resources—and that imbalance has proved more egregious when it comes to people of color.

  Recent victories, won by groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which fights for the rights of tomato pickers in Florida, watermelon harvesters in Georgia, and others, have begun to right the wrongs in the fields. But precious little work has been done to address the plight of restaurant workers. The “meal that arrives at your table when you eat out is not just a product of raw ingredients,” Jayaraman wrote in Behind the Kitchen Door. “It’s a product of the hands that chop, cook, and plate it and the people to whom those hands belong.”

  It’s a product too, of the men and women who serve that meal. Base wages for waiters and waitresses have not risen in more than twenty years. The notion that servers should be ill-paid conjures too easily a time when a permanent American underclass was de
fined by skin color. Today, the restaurant industry remains one of the last bulwarks of a system in which nameless workers of color labor out of sight, and often out of mind.

  Readers with better eyesight than mine probably recognized on first glance that the woman in that photograph was not the same woman who appeared on the cover of The Taste of Country Cooking, wearing a lilac dress, picking tomatoes in a summer field bordered with sunflowers. Virginia Reed served the crowd that day. She wasn’t a metaphor. She was bone and flesh. Scott Peacock, who co-wrote Lewis’s fourth book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, published in 2003, and is now finishing a solo book about their relationship, told me that Nicholson and Lewis both called Reed a “character,” which I take to mean that she was a woman with a quick wit and a bawdy humor. She was also the cook with a clock in her head, who had an uncanny ability to divine the exact moment when the Café Nicholson chocolate soufflé was ready to pull from the oven. Not much else is known about her life, which was often the case with the black workers who ran Southern restaurants in the twentieth century, and is now often the case with the twenty-first-century immigrants who have replaced them on the cooking line, at the dish bin, and on the dining room floor.

  I’m pretty sure that Bissinger did not intend that his photograph be read as a metaphor for the exclusion of black labor from conversations about excellence in the culinary arts. Along the path of my argument, Bissinger was a fellow traveler, which is to say that he, like Lewis, had once been a member of the Communist Party, focused on workers’ rights, the sort of thinker who would have owned up to a sin of omission. But I’m the petite bourgeois fellow who forced this issue. To do good work in the world of Southern food, I’ve come to believe, we have to start by paying down the debts of pleasure we owe to the men and women who sustain our society. For me, that means acknowledging Virginia Reed, the woman with the glowing smile and the clock in her head who brought that pot of tea to the table in 1949. For restaurateurs of today, that means renouncing the lobbying work of the other NRA, paying employees a working wage, and as Jayaraman puts it, taking the high road to profitability.

  THE DIGNITY OF CHOCOLATE

  By Eagranie Yuh

  From Edible Vancouver

  Eagranie Yuh is definitely a chocolate expert—a pastry chef with a master’s degree in chemistry who teaches chocolate-making classes, as well as being a copywriter, blogger, and freelancer for Northwest Palate and Edible Vancouver. Chocolate may be a luxury indulgence to most of us, but here she discover another side.

  This was supposed to be a story about chocolate—specifically, an unlikely chocolate shop in the Downtown Eastside. It was supposed to be about where chocolate comes from (it grows on trees), how it is made from cacao beans (through many complex steps requiring chemistry, physics, and a bit of alchemy), and how it becomes confections and truffles.

  I soon learned that this story has everything and nothing to do with chocolate.

  I first met Shelley Bolton in the fall of 2012. Shelley’s the director of social enterprise for the Portland Hotel Society (PHS), which runs several single-resident-occupancy hotels in the Downtown Eastside. Shelley’s job is to start businesses—more precisely, social enterprises. PHS operates a few, including a thrift shop called Community, and an art and sewing shop called The Window. These social enterprises provide training and work for people with barriers to employment.

  Over coffees at Nelson the Seagull, Shelley shared her plan to open a chocolate shop and coffee roastery next door at 319 Carrall Street. And not just any chocolate shop: one that would source its own beans and turn them into chocolate, often called bean-to-bar chocolate. The shop would use the chocolate in confections and drinks.

  Shelley and I met through a mutual friend—one Nat Bletter, co-founder of Madre Chocolate in Hawaii. Madre Chocolate is one of the companies that comprise the bean-to-bar chocolate movement in the United States. Since 2008, I’ve been connecting with these small-scale chocolate makers to help share their stories. The more I’ve learned about their work, the more I’ve realized that it’s a labour of love, and often of heartbreak. I’ve learned that making chocolate is expensive and risky, and that it’s hard to make good chocolate.

  What I hadn’t yet learned is that where Shelley goes, magic follows.

  Leading up to the shop’s opening in April 2013, Shelley hired eight women, collectively called “the ladies.” Since East Van Roasters is on the ground level of the Rainier Hotel, it’s fitting that the ladies, at least initially, were residents of the Rainier.

  Shelley also recruited Merri Schwartz—former pastry chef at C and Quattro, and founder of Growing Chefs!—to teach the ladies how to make bars and bonbons. Merri was skeptical. Could culinary novices really create fine, polished products? But the class went well, one thing led to another, and Merri agreed to be the shop’s head chocolatier.

  East Van Roasters gets its cacao beans directly from farmers. The beans, which arrive astringent and ghostly in enormous burlap sacks, are coaxed into their burnished, full-flavoured selves when roasted. From there they are destined to be ground into a paste, mixed with sugar, and refined into smooth, luxurious dark chocolate. There’s just one problem: the cacao beans are trapped inside a papery husk, which must be removed in a process called winnowing. Larger chocolate makers have winnowing machines; East Van Roasters has the ladies.

  So on a bright, brisk day this past January, I join two of the ladies in the shop’s back room. One of them, Sheree, agrees to be in this story. Her nails painted like fire engines, she shows me how to gently press each bean between my fingers. The husk falls away to reveal a perfectly shiny bean, which she deposits in a small bowl.

  Over the rattle of beans and husks, we talk. Sheree lives on the third floor of the Rainier Hotel with Charlie, her three-legged cat. She describes herself as happy, healthy, and healthy-minded. She likes to write, and one of her stories—about robbing a bank twentyish years ago, only to get caught jaywalking afterwards—was published in an anthology.

  Back then she was using heroin. She’s been homeless, including a stint living in Stanley Park, and has been hospitalized a number of times. “I was really not taking care of myself properly . . . I’m bipolar . . . I was completely delusional and using street drugs, and not able to make good choices for myself.” She looks at me, her bright eyes framed by a touch of mascara.

  “Shelley’s got great vision. [When] she told me she was going to open a chocolate shop, I couldn’t vision it down here . . . Sure enough, here we are.”

  And here Sheree is. “There’s three different types [of beans] we do—Peru, Dominican Republic, and Madagascar,” she says. The Madagascar, which we’ve been winnowing, is the easiest. She grabs a few beans (she calls them nuts) from a bucket behind her. “Here’s a Dominican nut. You need to cut it along the seam, along the side,” she says, demonstrating with her bird’s-beak paring knife. “You can see it’s a lot more work, right?”

  I mimic her technique as best as I can, then pop the liberated bean into my mouth. It tastes of freshly pressed olive oil and a grassy field on a spring day. Sheree inspects the bowl of Madagascan beans in front of us, picking one in particular and placing it in my palm. I taste it. It’s bright, fruity, citrusy. “See the difference? Tasty, right.” When she says “right,” it’s half question, half statement.

  Sheree has come a long way since moving into the Rainier five years ago. “I have my family back in my life, and that’s not something I thought would be possible again . . . Now that I’ve gotten older I can see how painful it must have been to see someone who’s so hell-bent on destroying themselves, whether it’s deliberate or not.”

  I ask what East Van Roasters means to her. “It’s great to have some income coming in, and I leave here and I feel good about myself . . . I feel like a productive person. And even though what we’re doing [winnowing] . . . you could look at this as menial, but it’s the most important part of it, right. Without the nuts, there’s no chocolate.” We keep on w
innowing. “It was my birthday yesterday,” she says. “I turned 45 yesterday.”

  Winnowing is one of the biggest jobs at East Van Roasters, but it’s not the only one. As we work, one of the ladies runs the front cash. At Christmas, Sheree wrapped the finished chocolate bars in gold foil. “It’s like origami from hell when you first start, right.”

  Raven, another one of the ladies, started working one day a week, and now works five. “I like the cleanup at the end of the day,” she says over the hum of the dishwasher. “It’s not my dream career by any means, but it keeps my mind stable.”

  It’s not just the ladies who are finding their way. After working for more than a decade in kitchens where tough love rules, Merri has found joy in a new way to work. “The restaurant industry is just so harsh,” she says as she lines heart-shaped molds with chocolate. “I’d come to believe that was the way to get best results, the way to train people. I had to retrain myself to approach problems with a whole different attitude, a different level of compassion.”

  Meanwhile, Shelley is nursing a batch of chocolate. Today she’s making chocolate, but we’ve both learned that her job is much more than that. She’s part counsellor, part wellness advisor, part negotiator. And while she may be the boss, she doesn’t rule with power.

  “If people don’t feel respected and aren’t given the ability to heal themselves, no matter what you try to teach them, they won’t trust themselves to do the work,” she says. “They need to feel that they are needed and a part of something bigger than themselves, and I think that’s what we give people here.”

  All this time, a question has been tickling the edges of my brain. It finally crystallizes: of all the businesses to start, why this one? The answer is remarkably practical, yet philosophical. Because it’s so labour-intensive, making bean-to-bar chocolate means more jobs. But more than that, says Shelley, “there’s beauty in taking a raw product and creating something that’s really refined and considered high quality.”