Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  Tom has a theory about most things in Silver City, including the Curious Kumquat, where he and Consuelo are regular customers. “I say Rob’s food is a sort of joke,” he says. “Rob hates when I say that, but it’s true. He deconstructs the food, and then he reconstructs it. And what you end up with is a pun—what you’re eating is not what you’re eating.” I think of the mozzarella balls that are actually corn shoot panna cotta, the pomegranate boba that look like caviar. “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is his favorite movie. You look at that movie, and you can figure out what he’s doing in the kitchen.” (Watching the film later, I am at a loss. I wonder who is being fed pages of his own books, and who is being cooked and eaten.)

  Tom’s theory about Silver City is oddly similar to his theory about the Kumquat: it’s like a giant pun. Picture a copper mining nestled in the Gila Mountains just east of the continental divide. The northernmost city in Grant County, it’s not on the way to anywhere, excepting the Gila National Forest, whose cliff dwellings and hot springs draw light tourism. Founded in 1870, Silver City looks like other small western cities, but unlike most, it was never a railroad town—more of a loading dock for ore. There wasn’t so much as a switchback; trains had to back sixty miles into the station.

  Speaking to outsiders, citizens of Silver City frequently cite this isolation as a reason why so many diverse populations can live alongside one another peacefully. Conservative Anglo-Protestant ranchers, Catholic Hispanic miners, liberal hippie retirees, gay artists, and spiritual seekers attracted to the Sufi retreat outside of town—they live and work side by side in the tiny town that dead-ends in the Gila Mountains. As Rob says, “It’s so small and so isolated that people have to get along. If they don’t like gay men, where are they going to eat?”

  Where most see isolation from the outside world, however, Tom Hester sees forgotten money trails and political influence that have fueled internal conflicts since the town’s inception. Tom has picked apart the town history, deconstructed it down to its basic units of old newspaper clips, correspondence, deeds, and ledgers. And when he reconstructs it again, it is not diversity that he sees, but divisions—lasting, bitter, and often silent. Mexican mineworkers may no longer be relegated to Chihuahua Hill, where running water and paved streets were scarce into the twentieth century, but there is still a stark racial divide between the historic downtown district, where the houses all have wind chimes and colorful pendants and hand-tiled walls, and the outskirts, where Hispanic miners and service workers form a second city marked by the presence of a Walmart and a strip of sagging motels with kitschy signs.

  In the late 1940s, Silver City was the site of a famous mining strike, an incident that divided the town: striking Mexican miners and the Catholic church on one side, Anglo-Protestant miners and bosses on the other. The sheriff eventually buckled to pressure from New York investors to crack down on the labor unions, and a court order against the miners took them away from the picket lines. The miners’ wives, however, took over the strike, and were eventually arrested and marched to the county jail in a public relations disaster, some with small children in tow. Director Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten and an avowed Communist sympathizer, came to Silver City shortly afterward to film a barely fictionalized movie version of the strike. Biberman cast most of the parts with original participants, including union leader Juan Chacon as the character based on himself. Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who played the female lead, was deported during the making of the film; it had to be finished with a body double. The film only screened once in New York in 1954, just long enough for Pauline Kael to hate it and Bosley Crowthers to like it, before it was locked away, the only film to be blacklisted in the U.S.

  A few years ago there was a symposium on the film at the Silver City Museum. Aging white labor organizer Clinton Jencks (who played the character based on himself in the movie) gave a moving speech, which was recorded by the museum. Some of the Mexican women who had participated in the strike itself were at the symposium too, but their panel, held in soft-spoken Spanish, was not recorded. Meanwhile, Tyler informs me that a local storytelling project is getting nowhere with the Hispanic population, because those old enough to tell the stories aren’t talking. “They know better,” he says. “You don’t tell those stories to white people. White people don’t want to hear them.”

  As for the more recently arrived inhabitants of Silver City—the hippies, the artists, the retirees, the gays—they are an awkward fit with the town’s most established residents, the low-income mineworkers and libertarian ranchers who do not appreciate efforts to protect the endangered wolf population, among other things.

  It was the Fourth of July when I first discovered the Curious Kumquat. The bed-and-breakfast where I was staying was tricked out with red-white-and-blue ribbons. My friend and I were searching for a restaurant that would be open on the holiday, and the proprietor pressed a few flyers for local restaurants into our hands. One photocopied menu on the side table caught my eye—venison, foraged greens—and we asked about it.

  She shrugged. “Oh, that’s that new place.” (At the time, the Kumquat had been in operation for five years.) “It’s kind of strange.” She pointed to another menu. “This is where the locals go. You know, that other restaurant isn’t even open half the time. You have to call. No, I wouldn’t go there.”

  •

  It’s the big night, the night that Rob has been stressing out about so much that he canceled lunch earlier that day—the second time in eight years.

  At the Javalina, Tom Hester may have held court, but at the Curious Kumquat, his wife Consuelo reigns supreme, wrapped in a fur with a big sparkling butterfly brooch. I am given the seat of honor right across from her at the long table where many of Tyler and Rob’s church friends are sitting. Throughout the meal, Consuelo gets special treatment; Rob brings her an extra bite of her favorite course, spoonfuls of experimental sauce that didn’t make it into the dinner. She tells me that when she and Tom first started eating at the Kumquat, she used to play a guessing game, deciphering Rob’s puns into their distinct flavors. She describes her first encounter with boba, the translucent balloons of flavor formed by hydrocolloids that look like large caviar. Consuelo put one in her mouth, thought and thought, and finally said, “It tastes like beets.” From that day forward she has been his champion taster.

  As courses begin coming to the table, Consuelo concentrates on the task at hand. She holds each bite in her mouth for a moment, chews and swallows it carefully, then methodically eradicates the sauce, using her fingers to clean the dish down to its original Ikea whiteness. Then she pronounces. The chocolate-dipped aloo gobi sitting in a puddle of scented butter is perfect. She adores the beet soup in a pint glass, although she can’t taste the cacao smoke. She struggles a bit with the salmon-stuffed cocoa ravioli wreathed with strands of bitter moss in a pool of murky squid ink, then points out that if you eat the moss in the same bite with the salmon they balance nicely. I agree; furthermore, sipping on the malbec pairing brings out a nice smoky flavor in the moss. The chocolate tamale topped with crunchy bits of caramelized black garlic is universally adored.

  Then comes the main course: the goat with a rub of cocoa powder, peanuts, and vanilla beans, garnished with a beautiful fuchsia fleurette of beet foam. The taste is delicious, wild and rich, but the texture is sinister. Several are complaining that it’s too rare. The atmosphere grows tense as knives and forks make screeching noises on the plates, mingled with the sound of silver clinking to a resting position as, one by one, the more delicate constituents of the United Church of Christ give up. When the server comes to the table, Consuelo draws herself up to her full height. “The goat did not go.”

  “Didn’t go?”

  “Tough. Inedible.”

  Tyler leans forward. “Sometimes with these local goats that’s a problem,” he says. There’s a brief chuckle over the phrase “local goats,” but it does not distract Consuelo from the matter at hand.<
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  “Someone needs to tell Rob about cabritos,” she says. “The young goats.”

  By now Rob himself has appeared in the doorway. “It is young! Like, four months.”

  “No, no, I’m talking about two months. Two or three weeks, even. Cabrito.”

  “This isn’t Mexico,” Rob says impatiently, and disappears to chitchat with the other room, which is filled with strangers and tourists.

  Rob always talks to each table, even when the restaurant is packed, and he remembers most of their names. It makes every guest feel special; plus it helps him sell wine, which is where Rob’s restaurant makes its money. (At $44 for the standard seven-course tasting dinner and a $5 discount for locals, he certainly isn’t making it off the food.) In the kitchen yesterday, Rob boasted about his tableside manner, but a moment later admitted he desperately needs the positive feedback. “If they’re not gushing when they leave, I haven’t done my job,” he says.

  A few minutes later, Rob pokes his head back in and says, “By the way, the other room loves the goat.” Consuelo rolls her eyes.

  Near the end of the meal, everyone at the table has had a fair bit of wine and a lot of food, even the ones who skipped the goat. Rob appears every once in a while to sag, exhausted, against the doorframe, and then disappears into the other room to talk up the folks who are visiting from out of town.

  Tom Hester, who is sitting on my right side, begins to reminisce about the parties Rob and Tyler used to throw before they opened up the restaurant. “Tell her about the cheese club,” Tom calls across the table to Tyler, who is sitting near the end.

  Years ago, when they owned a gourmet grocery store down the street in a space that is now the Yada Yada Yarn Store, Rob and Tyler had a cheese club. Tyler says they were getting drunk over dinner one night and lamenting the lack of good cheese in town. Tipsy, Rob decided they should start a club. “We could call it the Cut the Cheese Club,” he suggested. “Our motto will be, ‘We Have a Friend in Cheeses.’”

  “That’s when I knew it was going to happen,” Tyler says. He reels off a list of parties Rob themed around such fanciful ideas—the Outhouse Open House, with its hinged toilet seat invitation, or the “hoedown,” when they mailed out unshucked ears of corn with invitations tucked carefully inside the husks. Once Rob threw a birthday party for one of the town’s oldest citizens, seemingly for the excuse of sculpting the man’s likeness from a giant hunk of Velveeta cheese.

  The first Cut the Cheese Club meeting took place in Tyler and Rob’s modest, one-story house. “Half an hour before the party was supposed to begin, Rob all of a sudden looks at that carpet and grabs a little corner and pulls it up. He says, ‘There’s a beautiful wood floor under here.’ And next thing I know, he’s pulling up the carpet.” Tyler sighs dramatically. “People are coming over for a party in twenty minutes, and Rob is literally pulling up the carpet.”

  “The floors were beautiful!” Rob protests. “Aside from some foam and some carpet tacks.”

  The Cut the Cheese Club became a huge success. Rob and Tyler would order the pricey cheeses, portion them, and label them. Members were supposed to keep the tags for the cheese they had eaten and pay at the door on the way out to offset the cost. The club grew and grew, quickly becoming the most popular party in town. It outgrew residences, and Rob and Tyler started renting venues. People passing through town would somehow hear about the cheese club parties and gate-crash. Soon enough, Consuelo interrupts indignantly, people weren’t even paying—they would just float in, hoover up some cheese, and take off. Moreover, they were drinking the expensive bottles of wine that Rob and Tyler ordered and leaving bottles of cheap wine in their place, a blatant abuse of the BYOB rule. “We would end the night with a dozen bottles of ‘two-buck Chuck,’” Tyler complains, miming pouring a bottle down the sink.

  Eventually, there were hundreds of people showing up at each party. Rob began ominously invoking the “final clause” in his emails to the membership. (“Rob had actually written up bylaws for the Cut the Cheese Club,” Tyler explains. “And the final clause stipulated that when it stopped being fun, the club would immediately be put to death.”)

  But the last straw was the infamous furniture store party. The club had outgrown the largest venues in town, and the furniture retailer was a venue of last resort. Perhaps putting 250 people and several gallons of red wine in a closed furniture store for an evening was not the best idea. Stained upholstery was just the beginning.

  “We had ordered this particular wine to go with one of the cheeses,” Tyler relates. “Rob was really excited about it. It was more than usually challenging.”

  “And expensive,” Rob adds.

  People who dropped in for the party went, as usual, for the free booze, ignoring the pairings and gobbling cheese at will. However, the wine proved too challenging for casual gate-crashers (and, it is just possible, for some of the regulars as well). Raucous, intoxicated guests began tipping their glasses of wine into the potted plants. In the morning, every plant in the store was dead, the furniture store owners enraged.

  Nobody else in town wanted to host the cheese club after that. The final clause was invoked, and the Cut the Cheese Club was no more. It would seem that Rob had reached the limits of the town’s patience for highbrow food culture—the haute ceiling, as it were.

  Tyler puts it in a more positive light. “The cheese club showed us that there really was a core group in town who would turn out for this kind of thing,” he said. Without the Cut the Cheese Club, Tyler explains, the Curious Kumquat would not exist.

  He mused for a moment. “The thing is, Rob doesn’t even really care about cheese, do you, Rob?”

  Rob smiles. “Not really,” he says.

  FIXED MENU

  By Kevin Pang

  From Lucky Peach

  Chicago Tribune features reporter Kevin Pang’s usual beat is the cheap-eats end of food. But in a freelance gig for Lucky Peach, he ventured even farther, discovering a cadre of accidental chefs who really make do with nothing—or at any rate, whatever they can scrounge within prison walls.

  I type this sentence twenty minutes after eating leftover spaghetti and clams for breakfast, a Hungry Man-sized portion at nine a.m. It is an exertion of my free will to do so. It is within my civil right as a dedicated grocery shopper and keeper of leftovers, imprinted in the Charter of Man, that I am free to eat however much I want, of what I want, when I want.

  In prison, that right is stripped away. Craving pizza on a Saturday night? Feel like washing it down with cold beer? It’s not happening. Your right is reduced to eating portion-fixed food dictated by a warden on a set schedule. If you’re hungry after dinner, you’ll go to bed hungry.

  The thought of losing this control sends me into a panic attack.

  The town of Westville sits beneath the southern curve of Lake Michigan, an hour’s drive from Chicago, past the belching steel plants of Northwest Indiana. It is every small American town that ever existed, a patchwork of green and brown rectangles on Google Map’s satellite view. On the two January days I visited Westville Correctional Facility, the winter’s second polar vortex was bearing down on Middle America, plunging daytime wind chills to –25 degrees Fahrenheit. Westville’s position south of Lake Michigan also makes the area prone to biblical lake-effect snowstorms. And so, against the howling white-out squall, the eighty-five-acre prison—occupying about one-eighth of Westville—appeared utterly gulag-ish.

  The first thing you notice when walking into Westville, however, is that the staff is unflinchingly Midwestern. Their jocular disposition—beginning with your pat-down officer at the security checkpoint—is unnervingly pleasant. I remember a coroner I met years ago who had the most inappropriately morbid sense of humor—he mimed the suicide victim on the gurney blowing his brains out, complete with exploding hand gestures from his temple. It was, I realized, a coping mechanism to deal with the darkness he sees daily, one that might explain why the prison staff (at least in the presence of a r
eporter) seemed so sunny.

  To enter the prison compound proper, you step through a mechanized door into a holding cell, and wait as that door closes before a second door slowly grinds its metallic gears open. When that second door clangs shut with a sound just like in the movies, you enter a world of around 3,300 inmates, each serving an average of four years for offenses from burglary and drug possession to arson and worse.

  Their favorite pastime seems to be staring at you. An Asian reporter and Hispanic photographer are curios when every day’s the same day: wake up at five a.m., don your beige prison garb, work your twenty-cents-an-hour job, sit around in the dorms until lights out at eleven p.m. So the inmates are eager to talk, if just to break up the monotony. And when you mention you’re here to write about food in prisons, it’s like ramming a car into a fire hydrant and watching the water gush skyward.

  “Why don’t you grab one and eat with us, bro? And you tell us what you think,” says Shaun Kimbrough, who’s wheelchair-bound and serving a five-year sentence for aggravated battery. “It’s gonna hurt your stomach, but we’re used to it.”