Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  “All you people got to go. Now,” Raphael said, with six days left until the 8th, kicking out most of her relatives except for her children.

  “I need to get out of this place before I flip, for real,” Tiara said, with five days left. “Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte—I’m talking about fleeing, anywhere.”

  “What are we going to do?” said Raphael, with four days left.

  “I’m getting serious about signing up for that cooking class,” Tiara said, with three days.

  “I can’t live like this,” Raphael said, with two days.

  “I feel like a damn failure,” Tiara said, on the last day.

  “Thank you, Jesus!” Raphael said on the morning of the 8th, back in the aisles of Save a Lot to purchase her family’s groceries for the month, pushing two carts that creaked under the weight of 40 pounds of meat, 12 boxes of cereal, 11 packages of cheese and 75 bottles of juice. She set her items on the conveyer belt and handed the cashier her EBT card. “Take the whole balance off there,” she said. And then, a minute later, she also handed over Tiara’s card. “Take the whole balance, too,” she said.

  “Okay. You’re cashed out,” the cashier said, handing back both cards as the total hit $420. Raphael stared at the 35 items still on the conveyer belt, the ones she would have been able to afford before the government cuts. Ground beef. Tilapia. Snickers. Yogurt. “I guess just put these back,” she told the cashier, and then, as she bagged up her items, she had an idea.

  Her own food stamps no longer seemed like enough for the family, and neither did Tiara’s, but there was another option. Her eldest son had yet to enroll in the food stamp program. He had no income. She was sure he would qualify. His likely benefit would be about $160 each month.

  “I’m taking him to get signed up first thing tomorrow morning,” Raphael said, already imagining what she would be able to buy with the extra EBT card when the 8th came again.

  Congress could come up with its solutions, but so could she.

  “With three, we should be good,” she said as she carried her food into the house.

  * Saslow, Eli. “Waiting for the 8th.” From The Washington Post, December 15, 2013 © 2013 Washington Post Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. (www.washingtonpost.com)

  Back to Basics

  A SORT OF CHICKEN THAT WE CALL FISH

  By Elissa Altman

  From PoorMansFeast.com

  Award-winning blogger, editor, and author of the memoir Poor Man’s Feast, Elissa Altman can wield some wicked humor when the situation calls for it. When it comes to navigating families and their holiday traditions, sometimes all you can do is laugh.

  Ten years ago, a few months after my dad died, Susan and I cooked our first holiday dinner for my family, at my cousin’s house in Virginia. It involved a twenty-two pound artisanal turkey that we drove south from Connecticut in the back of my Subaru; it rode in a massive, two-ply food-grade storage bag stretched to its limits like a water balloon, nestled in an ice-packed Coleman cooler the size of a small casket.

  The turkey traveled in its brine, which was composed of a misguided melange of water, salt, Grade B maple syrup, short-run Bourbon, and late-harvest Tuscan rosemary clipped from our herb garden. Susan and I made stuffing from slow-rise homemade bread—one kind with fennel pork sausage, one kind with turkey; one with chestnuts, one without (for the nut-intolerants)—and stoneground cornbread dressing for anyone who didn’t approve of the stuffed-inside-the-bird variety. We made two kinds of crackers from scratch—black pepper Parmigiana Reggiano, and garlic thyme—and three kinds of pies. We roasted and pureed poblano peppers for Smoky Butternut Squash Soup and garnished it with fried purple heirloom sage leaves; we decided it would be a lovely and surprising way to start the meal.

  My family was surprised all right, especially my hot pepper–loathing aunt, who prefers her food simple and her flavors bland.

  Susan and I sniped and snarked at each other that holiday; she was in my way, I was in hers, we were in a kitchen that wasn’t ours, nobody much liked anything we made, and if they did, they didn’t say so. The next day, as if to punctuate the weirdness of the occasion, twelve of us went out for dinner to a small Italian trattoria and arrived five minutes after the chef cut his hand off with a meat saw.

  The holiday, start to finish, was an unmitigated disaster.

  Susan and I had done everything we could to make a dinner we were sure everyone would love, and that would go down in the annals of family holiday history as one of the best, ever. We demanded, yearned, ached for everyone’s approval. But in truth, we weren’t cooking for them. We were cooking for us, and that was something that we just never took into account.

  For one thing, nobody much wanted roasted poblanos in their butternut squash soup; they didn’t want butternut squash soup at all. They wanted my aunt’s traditional mushroom and barley soup, preferably made by my aunt, who had been serving it at Thanksgiving for half a century. Nobody wanted homemade crackers—who the hell makes homemade crackers?—and no one particularly cared whether or not the bird was of fine pedigree and had schlepped south from New England in the back of my Forester or had come with its own plastic pop-up thermometer, straight from the local Safeway. No one commented on the fancy French chestnuts in the heritage cornbread dressing, and the only words muttered during the flamingly-spicy soup course came from my father’s sister, who said, as she coughed and dolefully dabbed at her running mascara, I can’t eat this.

  Thank God—everyone gasped, taking their cue from the family matriarch and dropping their spoons. There was the simultaneous clatter of soup-silver-against-family-china: Susan and I got up and carried a stack of overflowing, gold-rimmed Lenox bowls dripping with thin, incendiary mush into the kitchen, where they were deposited in the sink, washed, and dried before the salad was tossed and the turkey carved.

  This was the first year that things were different—my father was gone, his longtime girlfriend decided to celebrate with her own children, my aunt was no longer making the holiday meal on Long Island and ringing her tiny kitchen cowbell to call her passel of buckaroos to the table—and so Susan and I went over the top to prepare a meal that I was certain would jettison us into position as the new keepers of the family culinary flame. This meal, we believed, would just be a lure, to let everyone know what they could all expect in the future: we were certain that it would be our table everyone would come to for the next forty years. We would make our own traditions, like my aunt and her cowbells had. And so that first holiday after my father died, we were determined to feed everyone a family dinner that was unforgettable and extraordinary.

  And it was. Just not in a good way.

  In my family, women make the leap over the transom from child to adult with the creation and serving of their first big holiday dinner. Likewise, the first time we get up to help the other adult women in the family clear the dishes—I was fifteen and no one asked me or gave me a signal; it was just my time and I knew it—is a little bit like hitting puberty: you’re on your way to becoming a full-fledged member of the tribe, and everyone around you knows it. So cooking for my father’s family for the first time just two months after his death was fraught with need and hunger and expectation: I wanted him back, to hear his laughter at the table, to feel his delight at seeing me finally as the adult woman that cooking for twenty heralds. I wanted him to look down from the heavens, and to be bursting with pride at the fact that I, the youngest of my generation, was providing sustenance for the people he loved. He would have thrilled at the fact that I’d made his family’s most important meal and the one that always brought us together around the table every holiday season.

  Cooking this meal was my way of keeping him alive. The only problem was, he wasn’t.

  When the shape of a family begins to shift and tilt—when there are f
ewer older people left and the younger ones begin to jockey into position to make their culinary mark on things—it’s very easy to get caught in a scrum of desire, assumption, and emotional desperation; the presumption is that you will pick up the historical cooking mantle like a baton passed from one generation to the next. You’ll get mired in making plans to wow and thrill, and you’ll never quite realize that these people you’re so set on wowing and thrilling may actually have other plans. They may not want change at all; odds are, they probably don’t. They likely just want what they know and what they love. Oh, and that baton? It may never actually have been handed off to you after all. You and your raging kitchen ego just assumed it was.

  Years ago, in an attempt to get her very young son to eat fish for the first time, one of my beloved cousins tried to pass it off as chicken, which she knew he liked. As he folded his arms, pursed his lips, stamped his feet and shook his head NO, his mother turned to the powers of logic.

  This, she said, is a sort of chicken that we call fish.

  Her child was unmoved; he knew better. He wanted what he wanted, not what she wanted to give him, regardless of how many times she told him it was the same thing. A chicken is not a fish; the only thing that’s the same about them is that they both can be dinner. Smoky poblano butternut squash soup is not your family’s favorite mushroom and barley soup; the only thing that’s the same about them is that they’re both eaten with a spoon.

  Things may appear to be the same, but really, they’re not.

  Ten years ago, with my father’s place at the table empty, I made my first holiday dinner for my family, certain that it would render me an adult in their eyes, and certain that it would bring my father back. Susan and I cooked a meal laden with overwrought dishes that had no place on their holiday table; desperate for my family’s approval and acknowledgement as head chef, I received neither. It wasn’t my time or my place.

  When the holiday was over, Susan and I drove the seven hours home, took our coats off, and cooked what would soothe our souls: custardy scrambled eggs made in a double boiler, toast, and well-done bacon, just the way my father liked it.

  We ate breakfast-as-dinner in the quiet of our home, and began to plan for Christmas.

  FORGET THE CLOCK, REMEMBER YOUR FOOD

  By Joe Yonan

  From Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook

  Cooking for one—even on a vegetarian diet—doesn’t have to be a chore, insists Washington Post food and travel editor Joe Yonan. To prove it, he’s given us this common-sense cookbook, full of unfussy yet delicious recipes, plus bonus essays—thoughtful conversations about what really matters in the kitchen.

  If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that being good at it relies on something deeply rooted, akin to walking, to get good at which we need only guidance, senses, and a little faith.

  —Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal, 2011

  Things were not going smoothly, not from the host’s perspective anyway. It was a summertime dinner party; several of us were sitting on the back deck near the gas grill, and she was scrambling around trying to make sure everybody had a glass of wine or a cocktail or a beer while she also tried to get the food on the table. Judging from the look on her face as she rushed out onto the deck carrying a platter of cut-up chicken, opened the preheated grill, plopped the pieces onto the grates, shut the lid, and set the timer, I realized that she was in the state restaurant cooks refer to as “in the weeds.”

  She looked around to see who might help her check this item off her punch list. I was just about to offer when she looked at me, perhaps sensing my sympathy, and asked: “Could you turn these over when the timer goes off?”

  “I’d be glad to take over the chicken, sure thing,” I said.

  That wasn’t what she meant. She sighed. “This is a Cook’s Illustrated recipe,” she said with a little irritation in her voice. “And they say to turn them after 12 minutes, so when the timer goes off, would you just turn them?”

  My mother raised me to be polite, so I wasn’t about to argue with her—not out loud, anyway. In my head, I was running through all sorts of smart-alecky replies, such as, “I seriously doubt the Cook’s recipe said that boneless chicken breasts, bone-in leg/thigh combinations, and little wings would all be done at the same time, and I doubt it said that the chicken breasts should be cut in such different-sized pieces, and I doubt it didn’t give you any ways to tell the chicken would be ready to turn other than the timing.” Or, “I know Chris Kimball, and, madam, you’re no Chris Kimball.”

  Instead, I said, “Of course, no problem,” and then as soon as she was back in the house, I turned off the timer. Sure enough, some of the smaller pieces were ready for flipping in just a few minutes, some of the bigger ones took a little longer, and still others—those leg-and-thigh combos—took the longest. I listened for their sizzle, I looked at the color, I felt them for firmness, I checked the juices, and I switched them around to parts of the grill that were cooler and hotter, depending on what I thought they needed. I took them off as they were ready, and kept them warm under a loose tent of foil. The host was too busy with other duties to notice my rebellion.

  The venerable author and cooking teacher Anne Willan, who has been writing recipes for fifty years, tells a similar tale. “My recent trainees and even my current assistant cannot understand that timing, especially on baking, is approximate and you must keep in communication all the time with what you are cooking,” she wrote me in an email when I reached out to her on the subject. “It drives me crackers!” Later, when we talked by phone, she elaborated. Her assistants “do this thing of putting on the timer, going away, looking at their computer or making phone calls. And then I say, ‘That’s going to be nearly done, I think.’ I’ve developed an instinct for some things that it’s nearly there. ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say. ‘The timer hasn’t gone, it’s still 5 more minutes.’ They think anything written down has got to be followed exactly, and it’s quite difficult to get across that every time is a little bit different.”

  I’ve never really been like that in the kitchen, and I think it comes from having learned to cook my first dishes not from a cookbook but from my mother and stepfather when I was a kid. When my mom taught me how to whip cream using her stand mixer, for instance, she would caution me to keep stopping and checking the thickness—and to be careful not to whip it so long it would turn to butter. I had my own ideas, at age eight, of what thick whipped cream should be like—like Cool Whip, of course!—so I was confident in pushing past the point where she would have stopped. Similarly, in my stepdad’s lesson on making chicken-fried steak, he showed me how to tell from the color of the crust when to turn each piece, and how it wouldn’t be done in the middle if the juices were running red.

  Hang out with any good home cook or professional chef, and you’ll see less clock-watching and more poking and prodding, sniffing and tasting, and even listening, as they evaluate the food as it progresses and guide it along the way. (Sous vide cooking, which uses vacuum packs, is one exception, which is one reason I’ve resisted it.) I remember shadowing baker Renee McLeod at her Petsi Pies café in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one morning many years ago, and there was no timer in sight. Instead, right in the middle of answering one of my questions, her nose went into the air and she sniffed, then whirled around to her convection oven and pulled out a tray of coconut cupcakes, which were perfectly done—by a matter of mere seconds. She doesn’t have to be in such close proximity, either. She told me, “I’ll be sitting in the office and suddenly I’ll call out to my people, ‘Cookies are done!’”

  Some people’s senses seem born stronger than others’, of course, but there’s no doubt that much of this kind of skill comes from experience. McLeod adapted some of her cupcake recipes from her grandmother’s instructions for larger cakes, which
means that the first time she made them she would have had no idea how long they would take. She had to watch, sniff, and learn. In a professional setting like McLeod’s, where recipes are standardized as they are made over and over again using the same equipment, and the equipment is professionally calibrated, the variability lessens and timing can become more consistent. But ovens can rarely be calibrated to within 25 degrees, and most home ovens are far more inaccurate than that. Moreover, when you’re following someone else’s instructions—someone who was using different ingredients and equipment—it’s folly to depend solely on the clock rather than learning to evaluate your food and make adjustments as you go.

  Take the simple sautéed onion. It’s all too common for recipe writers to tell readers how long it will take to get it tender, along with that garlic or carrot or celery that might also be in the skillet. But an onion is not an onion is not an onion. Even if a “large” onion is called for and used, the actual size will vary; and it could be younger or older than it was last time, meaning juicier or tougher. And even if you call for a medium or large skillet, one person’s medium is another person’s large, and a heavy cast-iron one is not the same as a thin aluminum one, especially when the onion actually starts cooking. Sure, a writer can try to specify as many of those variables as possible—the number of cups the chopped onion should be, the exact size of the pan, even its materials—but who knows the age of an onion, unless you grow it yourself? All those factors will affect the cooking time, and yet too many writers, even as we acknowledge the variables, act like the timing is the one thing we can specify with some certainty.

  Onions, as it happens, were the subject of some scorn heaped on recipe writers last spring, when Tom Scocca wrote a piece in Slate about the woefully short time so many recipes say it takes to caramelize an onion, something that, when done properly, can occupy the better part of an hour—or more. But as Chow.com editor John Birdsall wrote in response, “The thing that went mostly unnoticed in the scramble to accuse or save face was Scocca’s larger indictment, which is that professional recipe writers’ work can seem as far removed from actual cooking as a cognitive study in the testing lab with subjects wired to electrodes is from actual thinking. Recipe writing occurs under unnatural conditions, conducted by professionals with laptops and clipboards. They pretend they’re doing stuff that ordinary home cooks might do, but they’re not ordinary home cooks, and many are definitely not cooking at home, under ordinary conditions.”