Best Food Writing 2010

by Holly Hughes

  Of course, I am getting ahead of myself. At the moment, Charlie’s diet is limited to two options—fresh breast milk, or thawed-and-warmed breast milk.

  Another way Charlie will learn is through language. At the peak of one of his nighttime crying fits last week, I found myself soothing him with calming words—“It’s okay, it’s okay”—but in Korean, the way my mother might have. Amy is learning the language, too. She has taken classes in Korean through an adult-education center. In fact, she can read and write Korean far better than I can. I intend to join her in these classes, or at least sit in front of a laptop with Charlie and complete our Rosetta Stone exercises together. I mean, who wouldn’t benefit from learning the Korean word for elephant (koo-kee-ree)? Perhaps this way I will register even farther east on the Korea-meter.

  Recently, we had a family dinner at a Korean restaurant in Cambridge. It was a more formal, or, at any rate, more urbane place than the one where I had made my ordering mistake. The host put us in a private room where we had to take our shoes off. During dinner, as Amy nursed Charlie beneath a cotton shawl, I dissected the ingredients in the banchan I ate, the proper method of constructing our ssam (lettuce wraps), using rice and meat and red kochujang paste. I pronounced aloud the Korean names of as many dishes as I could. And this time I remembered most of them accurately.

  Amy fears that our son won’t get a sufficient dose of Korean culture. It’s a familiar refrain. But I will make sure to offer Charlie Korean food and, as my parents did with me, exercise patience if he doesn’t want any. We will stick to one fridge in our house.

  GOD LOVES YOU AND YOU CAN’T DO A THING ABOUT IT

  By Kim Severson From Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life

  As New York Times food reporter Severson traces her career (so far) in this revealing memoir, the chapters are strung—like a connect-the-dots puzzle—along encounters with eight different cooks, each of whom taught her a different life lesson.

  The first time I stood in front of Dooky Chase, it was still slimy with flood water and looked for all the world like another bowl of gumbo would never come from its kitchen.

  A day earlier, I’d found one of the last seats on a plane full of volunteers and evacuated flood victims heading from New York to Louisiana. It had been three weeks since Katrina, and no one except rescue workers, soldiers and a handful of reporters were allowed inside the city limits. My friend Pableaux Johnson, who calls himself “your Cajun grandma with a beard,” told me he would borrow a truck and help me work my way into the city. He was born and raised in Louisiana. He’s also a good, enthusiastic cook and a food writer who is always up for an adventure. But mostly, Pableaux is a lover of his people. And his people, especially right after the storm, expanded almost daily to include those of us who fell into his orbit.

  When Katrina hit, he had been living in a rambling apartment in Uptown, one of the few slivers of New Orleans proper that stayed dry. He evacuated to St. Martinville, a little town that sits nearly in the center of Louisiana Cajun country on Bayou Teche. Pableaux owns a small wooden church there. He converted it into a house and put in a big kitchen where the altar used to be. A couple of months before the hurricanes of 2005, Pableaux published Eating New Orleans, an intensely detailed guide on how to work your way through the city’s tables.

  “Basically, I wrote the guidebook for eating in Atlantis,” he told me as we climbed into his truck.

  The city had been closed since the levees failed, and Pableaux had been scrambling to take care of his own big, extended family and all the hurricane refugees who ended up at his church. But he was aching to check on his New Orleans apartment and his friends’ places, so when I told him I was heading down to cover the culinary aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he offered to be my Sacagawea. We headed out from the church just a little past three A.M., hoping to make the drive in a couple of hours and get to work before it got light.

  We came up on New Orleans from the backside, slipping into a city that was closed along a road we could barely find in the dark. As we crept along, the headlights hit a young man with his hand up. We slowed to a stop. He stepped over broken tree branches and walked toward the pickup. For a split second, he looked like a teenager lost in the dark of a New Orleans night, except he was holding a rifle. When he got close enough, I made out his National Guard uniform. His unit was one of dozens that set up checkpoints around the city. His job was to keep people out until it was safe. I handed over my Times identification card and a letter from my newspaper that stated I was there on bona fide news-reporting business. He waved us on, and Pableaux drove into the dark city, navigating around abandoned buses and fallen trees and trying not to hit the stray, hungry dogs that roamed the street.

  We spent the morning checking on his friends’ homes and his own apartment. Every house we saw had fresh spray-painted circles bisected with Xs. In each quadrant, there was a number or a letter. One indicated the date the house was searched, another the organization that did the search, and yet another the number of bodies found inside. Animal rescuers had roamed the city with cans of paint, too. They were much less discreet, sometimes covering a good portion of the front of a house with entirely unhelpful messages like, “Cute brown dog found here. Was hungry.” In the weeks after the city reopened, pet owners were left to puzzle out where their animals ended up with only those cryptic notes for clues.

  The flooded, empty city had been baking for almost three weeks in 90-degree heat. Each time we got out of the truck, a stench would hit us so hard we pulled our T-shirts up over our noses. It was the airborne muck from maggoty food and leathery patches of mud and algae mixed with gasoline and an untraceable stink that was not unlike a rotting sneaker filled with Époisses. After a day or two saturated with that smell, you had to throw out your boots and clothes.

  We got to Mrs. Chase’s restaurant by mid-morning. The streets were so quiet it made us jumpy. About five feet up from the wall, a water line circled the building like a sad halo. It was deep green at the top and faded to brown closer to the sidewalk, marking the water level as the floodwater slowly receded from the neighborhood. The mix of seawater and wind had stripped the leaves from trees and sucked the green from the grass, so everything looked like a black-and-white movie. A rusting fryer basket was on its side just near the front door. Not too far away a paperback copy of the Dooky Chase cookbook, its pages swollen open and splattered with mud, lay on the sidewalk.

  When the storm came, Mrs. Chase had a freezer full of gumbo and crab, the same way she had forty years earlier, when Hurricane Betsy killed eighty-one people and injured more than 17,000. Back then, with no electricity, she knew it would all go bad. But she still had gas, so she cooked up everything she had and worked with the police so she could deliver her food to people stranded in their homes. Hurricane Katrina was different. Water breached the levees and flooded her restaurant before she could blink an eye.

  As we stood in front of Dooky Chase, the smell from the rotting food in her walk-in coolers mixed with the swampy, stenchy floodwater that still pooled here and there. Little flies hovered around the restaurant, swarming out of grass so gray and dry it crunched when you stepped on it. Someone had broken in and made off with the liquor and the cash register, but her precious collection of African American art had been spared, hung too high on the walls for the water to get to it and not immediately important to people looking for food, booze or cash.

  “Damn,” Pableaux kept saying. “Damn.”

  I bowed my head and said a little prayer.

  OF ALL THE potentially embarrassing things I’ve told you so far in this book, the fact that I pray every day is the one I used to be the most sheepish about. All that drinking until I passed out? No problem. Pull up a chair and let me tell you some war stories! But confessing that I believe in God? That’s much harder for me to talk about.

  I’m not a big Jesus freak or anything. My prayers are pretty simple. In the morning, I might say, “OK, God, here we go.” And at night, e
specially after a bad day, I just say, “Oh well.” I ask for some direction and the power to do the next right thing. I try to open my heart up a little more so the next day will be better. I don’t tell many people I do this, especially the food people who make up the bulk of my professional life. Most of the food people I’ve known tend to get uncomfortable if you start talking about God and prayer unless you do it with irony or nostalgia. I know I used to.You might even be getting itchy right now.

  Since I started making a living writing about people who grow and cook food, I’ve been invited to say grace—or even just pause for a minute to thank something bigger than us—maybe a dozen times before we all started eating. That’s out of thousands of professional meals, and not counting Thanksgiving or Seder or dinner at my mother’s house. But if you think about it, cooking and eating require the most consistent daily acts of faith of any activity, short of going to sleep and believing you’ll wake up in the morning.

  Each meal contains a thousand little divine mysteries. Who figured out that some beets should be golden, some red and others colored like candy canes? What blessed entity invented sugar and cacao pods and vanilla beans or figured out that salt can preserve and brighten anything? What are we to make of a hundred little lettuces and gnarled apples with so many names you can’t remember them all? Who created melons and pork fat and peanuts, for crying out loud? And what of the miracle that is cheese?

  Things get more mysteriously divine if you start to think about baking. Or how oil and garlic and egg yolk can make a glimmering, thick aioli. Mixing hot stock into a cold roux so it won’t make lumps or mixing cake ingredients in the right order—butter and sugar together first, then eggs, then an alternating mix of flour and milk—are but two of the grand mysteries of the kitchen we blindly believe in. And we believe because someone told us the recipes would work. And so, on faith, we tried them. And once we tried them, and we saw that they worked, we became believers even though we had no idea how they worked. We spread the word to others who then tried them on faith, too. They became believers. Entire culinary cultures have been built on this kind of faith and trust.

  Maybe you want to argue that all of the magic of the kitchen can be explained away in the cold scientific light of day. It isn’t God but yeast that makes bread rise. A properly braised short rib is the result of a predictable release of collagen in heated connective tissue, not some deity that believes a sticky, glistening sauce can teach us about the beauty of the human condition.

  Fine. So let’s move to something you can’t use science to argue about. Can the cold facts of the natural world explain that magic moment that comes when everyone at the table has just settled in to eat? Or the one that comes just when the delirious rush of sharing a good meal has ended? We sit around like grinning, milk-drunk babies who’ve just pulled away from the breast. Laughing comes easy. People glow. Out of nowhere, you have compassion for the jerk who was bugging you before dinner, so you ask if he’d like seconds on the braised artichokes. You belong to everyone else at the table and they belong to you.

  You can’t create that kind of communion alone, and you can’t create it without food. That one moment ought to be proof to anyone that something greater than us is at work. It’s a big part of why I have faith, but it doesn’t explain why I pray my ass off every day. That’s because it is the only way I have figured out not to have another drink. And trust me, no one wants me to have another drink.

  Still, ever since that day in Alaska when I started praying, I have fought the complete embarrassment that comes when I talk about it outside of a circle of people who feel the same way I do. I felt like it made me weak, somehow. The big intellectuals I knew would surely scoff. Opiate of the masses and all that. It didn’t help that I had grown up feeling the brunt of prejudice from people who use God to argue that I and my millions of gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should have no children, no civil rights and no happy eternity. In our household, Katia is the skeptical one. She knows that my believing in God keeps me sober, and she doesn’t argue with that. And sometimes, she suspects there’s even more to it. Like maybe there is a higher power. “Well, I hope you’re right,” she’ll say.

  But why was I so gun-shy about talking about it openly? Why couldn’t I be more like Mrs. Chase, who will tell you without a blink that God is behind her every move. In the year after Katrina, I would check in on her by phone, keeping track of how she was getting along. In every conversation, she told me straight up front and center that she prayed every day, and that she had a lot of work to do. But it would get done, she said. God would see to it.

  Mrs. Chase believes in a God who has all the answers, and really wants what’s best for her. This is a bold statement coming from a woman who grew up in a segregated country that would not allow her to vote or mix too much with white people. She is a woman who watched her city and Dooky Chase, the restaurant where she had been cooking for more than sixty years, drown mostly due to a greedy and corrupt government. But still she has faith. And she has the kind of faith I longed for: one that had been tested. In the ten years since my last drink, I had faced a lot of internal demons and few external ones. Maybe that was test enough. Maybe I just had to stop doubting my own experience regarding faith.

  ONE STICKY MORNING nearly a year after Katrina, I went looking for Mrs. Chase. I wanted to see how the restaurant was coming along, if she thought she might reopen soon. But I was also hoping to learn more about God. I found her in her FEMA trailer, which had been set up on a side street across from Dooky Chase. The trailer was so small that her husband had to stand outside when she cooked. Mrs. Chase had an infected sore on her leg, and she had to ease herself slowly along a path made out of plywood to get from the trailer to the curb. It would have made sense for her to retire, to move into one of the refurbished houses her children owned in the neighborhood. The mold, the gouging by the contractors, the impossibility of getting her infected leg properly treated in a city where the health care system had all but collapsed—any one of those things would have made lesser women walk away.

  I wanted to understand why she stuck it out, and how her faith got her through the devastation of Katrina. I wanted to see if through her story, I could find the strength to believe in my own. I asked her how she found the stamina to get back up when it all seemed so impossible. How did she not just crumble?

  “The strong have feelings just like the weak, but they just don’t show it,” she said. Besides, she said, Katrina wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to her. She had lost a child.

  Her beloved eldest daughter, Emily, her right hand and the woman most likely to carry on all the traditions and knowledge Mrs. Chase had accumulated, died giving birth to her eighth child in 1990. That child died a short time later after complications from the birth. The day after her daughter died, Mrs. Chase was scheduled to open the restaurant at eleven A.M. So she did. “I lost myself in the pots,” she wrote in her memoirs. That day, I asked her why. “I could not put my sorrow on the whole world,” she told me. “Life goes on, and that’s what we have to understand with Katrina.”

  I pushed her for a better explanation. You don’t come across eighty years’ worth of courage very often. I needed to understand where her strength—her faith—came from. She didn’t mind elaborating, using a baseball analogy.

  “I tell people all the time, I think God is just like a pitcher,” she said. And He apparently favors the low, slow curveball.

  “It’s a fun thing to see. It’s a hard thing to hit,” she explained. “But if you work on hitting this low, slow curve, it’s going over the fence. It’s going out of here. So I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve. But He doesn’t want us to strike out. I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength.”

  But Katrina?

  “I tell you, I think I had more tears in the gumbo pot than I had gumbo,” she said. “But you just cry and you just keep moving. It’s not fair to put your hurt on somebody else.” And then she s
aid something remarkable. Maybe God flooded New Orleans to show man his mistakes.

  “When you saw those people floating around in water, you saw every mistake you made.You had too many people in this city who couldn’t fend for themselves. Where were we? Why were we not directing these people?” she said. “The levees broke on us, but we had many warnings, many times before. Why were we not checking those levees out after each warning?”

  Like anyone who was there, the images from those first few days still fill her head. She says she has heard people—her own neighbors, even—say God brought his wrath down on poor black people because they weren’t living right. Or, they said, God just doesn’t like people of color. After all, the rich white folks in the Garden District didn’t get flooded out and didn’t lose their family members and their homes. But Mrs. Chase sees it differently.

  “Look at it this way,” she told me as we sat in a back room at Dooky Chase. “If we would have been saved on this end, and the French Quarter and all the big, beautiful homes Uptown would have been destroyed, look what a predicament we would be in. We couldn’t help them up.”

  Maybe the rich people were saved, she said, because they had the resources to help the poor people get back on their feet. If all the rich people had been washed away, no one would have been left to help the poor.

  “Don’t you see how good things work? No matter how bad it is, good things work.”

  Even now, when I’m on the floor, feeling scraped down to bare metal, I think about what she told me. And I try to follow her prescription: “Figure out what you have to do in life and then just go to work and do it. Look at your world as a beautiful world. And it is a beautiful world. It’s just your job to make it a little bit better.”