Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  It was not always thus. In her fascinating book The Cookbook Library, Willan says that it wasn’t until the twentieth century that writers started regularly listing precise timing, mostly because until then most cooks had wood stoves with no consistency of temperature whatsoever. Cooks would test the heat of wood stoves using their hands, or they would put in some newspaper and see how long it took the paper to scorch: thirty seconds was very hot and good for baking pastries, for instance, then as the temperature came down it was appropriate for bread, then roasts, then stews. “In Catholic countries, they would time it by saying a rosary,” Willan says. “And of course if the paper didn’t brown or scorch at all, then the oven wasn’t hot enough for anything.” Even when she went to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in the 1960s, the equipment was so antiquated as to make timing estimates pointless. “The ovens had top heat, bottom heat or both together, and we controlled the heat by putting a wooden spoon in the door, propping it open,” she said.

  Exceptions to Willan’s twentieth-century observation abound, naturally. Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking School Cook-Book of 1895 is largely credited with introducing specific measurements, times, and temperatures to recipe writing. When I scoured through some other antiquarian book, I noticed that The Improved Housewife of 1846 would include timing in one recipe and not in the next. For parsnips and carrots, you just “boil till tender,” but for beets that same instruction is followed by “in summer one hour, in winter three.” Don Lindgren, co-owner of Rabelais Books in Biddeford, Maine, says that even Mary Randolph included some timing in her influential 1825 book, The Virginia House-Wife. But the most entertaining outlier I saw was an excerpt from The Nonpareil Cook Book, an 1894 collection by the Ladies’ Lend-A-Hand Society of the Baptist Church of Worcester, New York, that Lindgren sent me. The book includes a chart for vegetable boiling times that by today’s standards are comical, including a half-hour for potatoes, an hour for squash, three hours for string beans, and four hours for beets. (The latter in winter, I presume.)

  Ultimately, recipe writing, like so many other things, is an idiosyncratic discipline, with writers taking all sorts of approaches in getting across their own interpretations of a dish, and teaching it in their own style. To this day, charcoal grilling calls for an approach similar to the rosaries Willan mentioned; many Southern recipes instruct cooks to count how many “Mississippis” they can utter while holding their hand over the grate, while many of those same recipes still attempt to say how many minutes it then takes to char an eggplant. In a recipe for baked red snapper with grapefruit in The New York Times Cookbook of 1961, Craig Claiborne wisely leaves out the minutes it takes to accomplish of one of the first, most basic steps: “In a skillet heat four tablespoons of the butter, add the onion and cook until it is transparent.” My style exactly. And then he specifies that the stuffed fish should be baked “until it flakes easily when tested with a fork, about fifty to sixty minutes,” a crucial step for which he gives the reader a good testing mechanism. By 1979, though, his friend and frequent coauthor, Pierre Franey, was going in the opposite direction in his 60-Minute Gourmet, deemphasizing descriptive cues and listing a time whenever possible. It makes sense; as more and more women were leaving domestic life behind in favor of the workplace, our cooking culture was becoming ever more focused on speed and convenience. Perhaps Franey’s approach was to some degree a way of helping readers count the minutes and see for themselves that they wouldn’t add up to more than the all-important hour he was promising.

  After a long downward trend in home cooking, recent years have seen a rediscovery of the kitchen. That’s nothing but good news. Yet the standards are different when the target audience includes less experienced cooks, and trying to account for this is where I think we’ve started to really go off the rails with recipe timing. When I called Sally Schneider, author of The Improvisational Cook, to talk about the issue, she said that as much as she tries to write recipes that include many other descriptive cues in addition to timing, she still gets emails and calls from readers asking shockingly basic questions, such as how to tell when that simple sautéed onion is done: “The problem is people these days don’t have basic structures in place in their heads.”

  Writers and editors often think that to make recipes doable by less experienced cooks, they must attach time cues to each and every step, however small, and to weigh or otherwise measure every last smidgen of every last ingredient. The irony, though, is that by trying to account for so many variables, the recipes can become so long-winded that they run the risk of intimidating the very cooks they’re trying to appeal to. Even worse, they might be doing a disservice by not helping even the most inexperienced cooks learn what I think they need to learn most: How to make their own judgments. How to interact with their food, to roll with the punches, to develop instincts. How to make mistakes, and recover. How to learn. How to be free. Schneider echoes the old “teach a man to fish” adage when she says, “If you tell somebody how something works, if they understand the workings of it and what its end point can be, it gives them more confidence.”

  Technology has long tried to come to the rescue of home cooks (most of them women) who had their hands full, whether with other household chores or work outside the home. Generations of slow-cooker devotees have loved the fact that they can close the thing up, head to work, and come home to a meal. That Ronco rotisserie oven hawked on TV has sold gazillions on the promise of its earworm of a slogan, shouted out by Ron Popeil and the audience in chorus: “Set it and forget it!”

  But should we forget it, really? As Willan said, cooking has always been about multi-tasking. Nobody’s asking you to stand there and do nothing except watch the cake rise in the oven. “But you still have to have it in the back of your mind while you do other things,” she said. “It’s a skill to be acquired.”

  I’m no Luddite, but I can’t ignore some of the tradeoffs we’ve made in our dependence on technology. For example, I’m as addicted to my smartphone as anyone I know, and am especially dependent on the built-in GPS to overcome my lack of a natural sense of direction. So when I’m walking or driving and staring at Google Maps rather than at the streetscape around me, I don’t really learn where I’m going, I just get there anyway. What’s the harm in that, you may ask? Well, putting aside the possibility of running into a parking meter on the sidewalk, or heaven forbid into oncoming traffic, the harm is that this is just one more area where I’m getting a little bit dumber, a little less independent. More than once I’ve run out of battery before I see where I’m supposed to make a turn, sending me into the nearest gas station or Starbucks to do the old-fashioned thing, and ask for help.

  There are countless cooking apps, too, and many feature built-in timers, not to mention voice commands to move from one step in the recipe to the next. Maybe one day Siri will teach everybody to cook, or perhaps she’ll do the sautéing herself. But in the meantime, when you’re in the kitchen, why not just . . . look up? As author Tamar Adler puts it, learning to cook by interacting closely with your food is a little like learning to drive on a stick shift rather than an automatic. You feel more connected to the process of driving, and therefore you understand it a little better.

  Adler’s book An Everlasting Meal calls for a return to instinctive cooking, and she tells audiences and students and readers that they can make their own decisions about recipes, that they don’t need to be slaves to any instruction, timing included. And she says they are surprisingly quick to respond. “At first they feel incredibly unmoored and unsupported, and they say, ‘That’s all well and good for you, because you know how long everything takes, and the processes, so you’re not nervous, but what about me?’ I always say, ‘I learned this by standing over the pan and paying attention.’”

  You may have heard this before, but I’m going to say it again: Recipes—mine and everyone’s—are road maps. Throw away the stone-tablets idea, and you’ll eventually be a better cook.

  The more I think about this issue
, the more committed I become to making sure my own recipes give readers something more than just a bunch of numbers. I have long insisted that my own recipes in the Washington Post put the time cue last in a sequence, the hope being that if readers read that the eggplant should be baked “until it blackens and collapses, about an hour,” rather than the other way around, they’ll be more attuned to the blackening and collapsing part of the equation. When I initially sent the recipes for this book to testers, I asked for feedback on the plethora of time references, to make sure as much as possible that the ranges I was giving were working for others, and I used that feedback to make sure they did. But then I made another decision: in many of the instructions, particularly the ones about sautéing an onion or anything else that happens relatively quickly—and exceedingly variably—the time references have come out altogether. In their place, I’m trying to describe to you as best I can how to tell what’s happening with the food and, therefore, how to really cook it.

  The result, I hope, is that you might find your own cooking rhythms and realize the point of all this: that what you see, hear, smell, and feel happening is the only thing that matters. I think it might be easier for single cooks to get there than others. If your primary consideration is your own craving and nobody else’s, you can learn more naturally to listen to your instincts as you cook, and to let them lead the way—hopefully to something that satisfies you. No matter how long those onions took to soften.

  MEALS FROM A HUNTER

  By Steve Hoffman

  From the Minneapolis Star Tribune

  Juggling various roles as a freelance writer, tax preparer, real-estate agent, beekeeper, hunter, and dad, Steve Hoffman isn’t wrapped up in foodie fads and gourmet snobberies. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t think profoundly about how—and why—we eat what we do.

  It was certainly the best meal I’ve ever eaten while sitting in snow. Maybe one of the best meals I’ve eaten anywhere.

  A friend and I had spent a January morning ice fishing, then an afternoon with shotguns slung across our backs, snowshoeing the cedar-lined shore of one of those Boundary Waters lakes that look like claw scratches along the Canadian border.

  The day’s result: Zero fish. One snowshoe hare.

  Back in camp we balanced a soup kettle on a teetering propane stove, melted some snow and slowly defrosted a frozen block of venison stew. By headlamp, in the late afternoon darkness, we scooped olive oil, turned gelatinous from the cold, into a camp skillet, browned the skinned and butchered hare, then added the thighs, shoulders and saddle to the bubbling, wine-rich stew.

  An hour later, squatting outside a glowing tent, we improvised a table from an upside-down enamel pot in the snow, set the kettle of stew on top of it, and ladled out two steaming bowlfuls. Clouds of our own breath drifted through the cones of our headlamps, as we forked up gravy-glazed carrot and onion, and big, dripping cubes of venison shoulder, our forks clanking against the metal bowls with our shivering. We peeled fat shreds of glistening hare from the bones with our brittle fingers, and agreed that there was really nowhere else we’d rather be.

  The dish failed every test of Food Styling 101. This was not fine dining.

  But it was many other kinds of fine, seated as we were at a stock-pot table, under a frozen dome of stars, as guests of that gruffly hospitable country, tasting meat that had been flavored by the willows and cedars rocking in the wind around us, before it had been flavored by garlic, red wine and a mirepoix.

  It was a reminder, sometimes obscured by talk of gear, techniques and trophies, that hunting is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. And that end is the table—whether a turned-over cooking pot in a snowbank or candlelit white linen.

  A reminder, as well, of what wild game can be when cleaned immediately, cooled quickly, butchered with care, and cooked with gratitude—not just lean and healthy, not just full of Omega-3s, not just ecologically sensible, but to many of us, quite simply, the best tasting meat in the world, and the most complete expression of our connection to wild places.

  A Local World-Class Gift

  During a recent extended stay in rural France, I was able to observe the hunter-cook connection at its most intimate. One day our neighbor, Jean-Luc, came home with a double brace of snipe from an undisclosed local wetland. He spent 15 minutes in the middle of the street, describing every detail of how he would roast them en brochette, as their long necks swung loosely from his hand.

  Another day, I found myself leaning against a truck after a morning’s mushroom forage with two hunter-farmers who would, in their way, fit seamlessly into a Stearns County bar. They were parsing the precise preparation of each type of mushroom in their baskets, arguing heatedly over whether lactaire mushrooms grilled over a vine-wood fire were best served with, or without, a persillade of finely chopped parsley and garlic.

  That kind of thing doesn’t happen in the Midwest as often as our game deserves.

  Well cared for, the game of Minnesota is a world-class gift. Even a brief tour among its species might lead a culinary traveler past such wonders as seared wood duck breast with foie gras, pheasant cacciatore, cottontail hasenpfeffer, squirrel pad Thai, roast wild turkey stuffed with Honeycrisp apples, sautéed woodcock with chanterelles, a daube of whitetail venison or minted grouse breasts with wild mushroom risotto.

  I merely mention these things. Of course, boneless, skinless chicken breasts are fine, too.

  From Field to Kitchen

  But let’s be clear. “Well cared for” means you can’t heave a gutted four-point buck in the back of your pickup and drive for four hours through the slush of Interstate 35. You can’t walk trails all day with that morning’s grouse in your vest pocket. And you can’t leave a bag full of soggy mallards on the garage floor for very long and somehow expect to work a little Thomas Keller magic when you get to the kitchen.

  Here, along those lines, are some very personal and noncomprehensive rules.

  •Warmth in the field is the enemy of taste at the table. Put the gun down for just a minute, O Nimrod Son of Cush, and field-dress your animal right away. Meat lockers are cold for a reason.

  •Save the heart and the liver. No, seriously, it’s all concentrated right there. If you just can’t bring yourself to eat them whole, mince them and add their rich flavor to a pan sauce.

  •Use really short cooking times, or really long cooking times. Either medium-rare, or braised until it falls off the bone.

  •Cook legs and thighs (furred or feathered) long, rich, wet and slow.

  •Duck breast looks like steak. Cook it like steak.

  •Venison looks like steak. Cook it like steak. That medium-well backstrap medallion that feels like a flexed quadricep and looks like a hockey puck? Yeah, it’s gonna taste like a hockey puck.

  •Wine is good.

  •Grilling is good (but it isn’t the only way).

  Remember: They’ve been doing this for a long time in Italy and France.

  They’ve been doing this for a long time in Mexico.

  They’ve been doing this for a long time in the hills of Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.

  We can all still learn a thing or two.

  Back in the Woods

  About 400 years ago, a party of pretty quirky Brits, somewhat newly arrived, took matchlocks and fowling pieces and headed into the New England woods with their native hosts. I’d like to think it was a congenial hunt, with flat November light filtering down through the beeches and chestnuts. I’d like to think there were some jocular insults tossed back and forth, and taken the right way, and that there was time afterward to lean against whatever the 17th century had to offer in the direction of a pickup truck, in order to talk over the day’s events.

  Such talk, I’m certain, would have been heavy with more or less accurate recountings of soft-footed stalking, sharp reflexes, misfires and cold toes.

  But it’s worth noting that history has forgotten the particular exploits of the hunters on that occasion. It has
not forgotten the work of the cooks.

  Which leads me to the second best wild meal I’ve ever eaten—the tenderloin of a Michigan whitetail, grilled and served medium-rare on an ancient table in a white cedar cabin with no electricity. The chef was a Marquette hunter and friend, who cares to get things right.

  There were six or eight of us at the table. Not a particularly sentimental crew. But we did know instinctively what word to use at the end of the meal.

  It’s not a bad word to have in mind when thinking about good cooks. Or about the deer you’re eating. Or the snowshoe hare. Or their wild, native country. Or, for that matter, about olive oil and garlic. Or thyme and rosemary. Or chile peppers. Or lemon grass. Or the wanderers who brought such things with them from so far away, and then decided to stay and add their flavor to the communal pot.

  At the end of the meal in Michigan, we turned to the cook and said, “Thanks.”

  THE MAN MACHINE

  By Oliver Strand

  From Fool

  Though he’s based in New York City, food writer Oliver Strand covers a worldwide java scene for the New York Times and other publications; he just may be the universe’s preeminent coffee writer. In this essay from a beautiful new Swedish food magazine, his reflections on the current coffee scene could apply to all our foodie fetishes.