Best Food Writing 2010

by Holly Hughes

  I figure I can do that. I can make the world a little bit better. They say religion is for people who are afraid of hell and spirituality is for people who have been through it. Even though I haven’t been through a hurricane or lost a daughter, I have had my own little trip to hell. And I know I will have more trials. When I do, like Leah Chase and millions of other people on this earth, I will pray. Without shame and with an open heart.

  ON HOLY THURSDAY, I made Mrs. Chase’s gumbo z’herbes. It is a dish that requires faith. All recipes do, really. You have to trust the people who came before you, who burned a few things and threw out a few bowls of bad stuff in pursuit of a perfect dish. But in my interpretation of faith, whether recipe-based or soul-based, you have to have enough inner strength to change things up if you need to. God will send the directions, but you have to take the right steps.

  The dish is served on Holy Thursday because for Catholics, that’s the last day you get to eat a big meal before Easter. Catholics, my mother included, wouldn’t eat meat on Good Friday. Those who hewed even closer to the faith would fast altogether. So you needed a good, meaty meal on Thursday to get you through to Saturday noon, when people would start eating normally again. Some food historians tie gumbo z’herbes to the African-Caribbean dish callaloo, but there is some indication it really has its roots in the Lutherans who settled in southern Louisiana in the 1800s and made a green vegetable soup for Holy Thursdays.

  There is often a point when I’m cooking a new recipe that I panic. Sometimes it’s just for a second, when a sauce isn’t thickening or a batter seems suspiciously thin. I often start by blaming the person who wrote the recipe, assuming they didn’t tell me that I need to whisk something for an extra few minutes or they left out an essential half cup of flour. Then, quickly, I turn the blame on myself for either hurrying through a step or doing something boneheaded like adding cayenne instead of paprika. I can be easily distracted, burning toast if the breakfast conversation is just too engaging. But I am also the kind of cook who can pull herself out of the culinary shame spiral pretty quickly, bravely plowing forward and hoping that some combination of good ingredients, strong kitchen fundamentals and a well-written recipe will allow me to pull off almost any dish.

  Still, it was all I could do a few days before Easter to believe the thin, murky green swamp that filled my two biggest pots was going to taste any good at all.

  My kitchen in Brooklyn is kind of a puffed-up galley, with a nice back door that opens to a patio. There is enough counter space to make my friends in their tiny Chelsea apartments jealous of the setup, although those same counters elicit pity from my friends in the suburbs out West. I had plowed through Mrs. Chase’s recipe, and my small kitchen told the tale. It was as if a chlorophyll bomb had gone off. The sink was covered with trimmings from nine different greens, including carrot tops, collards and kale and a half head of lettuce I had in the fridge. Cutting boards held the remnants of ham, chopped brisket and andouille, smoked dark with pecan wood. In the two big pots, water seasoned with raw garlic and onions boiled. I had made a soft, brown roux in the grease from the hot sausage, and I had simmered a ham hock to make stock. I had pureed and pureed and pureed until everything was covered in green splatters, and the pots that once held ham stock now were filled with what smelled like a swamp with hints of forest fire.

  Sara Roahen, an excellent cook and writer I met in New Orleans, spent some time cooking gumbo with Mrs. Chase. She recounts the experience in her fine, sweet book Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, which she wrote before and after Katrina. I called her when I was panicked over Mrs. Chase’s gumbo recipe. There are several versions floating around, in Mrs. Chase’s books and others. Sara’s version begins with the warning that your kitchen will be a disaster. And she was right.

  There I was, with two huge pots filled with muck. The thyme and salt and cayenne tasted raw and out of balance. It was too hot, maybe, or too bitter. I hadn’t used Our Holy Mother of Lowry’s Seasoning Salt, one of the great saints of the New Orleans spice rack. Maybe I used the wrong greens or should have added the chicken, like Sara advised.

  “I think you just have to go with it,” Sara said.

  She was right. I said a little prayer and called people to the table. I had faith. Turns out the gumbo was awesome. It just needed time to come together.

  THIS RECIPE IS my slightly tweaked version of Sara’s recipe, which is a tweaked version of Mrs. Chase’s. I have tasted both Mrs. Chase’s and Sara’s. They are both delicious, but different. Yours will be, too. This is cooking, not an assembly line. Just have a little faith in your own skill and in the experience of the cooks who went before you. Sara says that in every cookbook where the gumbo appears, the recipe requires an odd number of greens, say five or seven or nine, for luck. Don’t get too worried about that. Mrs. Chase told Sara that the connection between the kinds of greens and luck isn’t really that big a deal. Just select at least seven of the greens listed, although you can use what you have. But make sure the pile of greens seems like way too much to start.

  Gumbo z’Herbes

  Yield: Enough for a dozen or so people to have dinner, and maybe a little left over for the freezer.

  1 large or 2 small ham shanks or hocks

  At least 7 varieties of the following greens: 1 bunch greens, either mustard, collard or turnip or a

  combination of all three

  1 bag fresh spinach or a box of frozen

  1 small head cabbage

  1 bunch carrot tops

  1 bunch beet tops

  1 bunch arugula

  1 bunch parsley

  1 bunch green onions

  1 bunch watercress

  1 head romaine or other lettuce

  1 head curly endive

  1 bunch kale

  1 bunch radish tops

  3 medium yellow onions, roughly chopped

  ½ head garlic, peeled, cloves kept whole

  2 pounds fresh hot sausage (a local sausage called chaurice is

  best, but hot Italian without fennel works well)

  1 pound andouille sausage

  1 pound smoked pork sausage

  ½ pound ham

  1 pound beef stew meat

  1 cup flour

  Vegetable oil as needed

  3 teaspoons dried thyme

  2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

  3 bay leaves

  Salt to taste

  2 cups cooked white rice

  ½ teaspoon filé powder (optional)

  1. Place ham shanks or hocks in a large, heavy stockpot. Fill the pot with water and bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.

  2. Wash all greens thoroughly in salt water, making sure to remove any grit, discolored outer leaves, and tough stems. Rinse in a bath of unsalted water (a clean double sink works well for this).

  3. Place half the greens, half the onions, and half the garlic in a heavy-bottomed stockpot or 3 to 4 gallon saucepan. Cover greens and vegetables with water and bring to a boil over high heat; reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 20 to 30 minutes, until greens are very tender. When they finish cooking, transfer them to a large bowl, using a slotted spoon, to cool. Repeat the process with the remaining greens, onions and garlic, doing it in two or three batches if necessary.

  4. When all the greens have finished cooking, reserve the cooking liquid.

  5. Place the fresh hot sausage in a skillet or medium-size saucepan and set over medium heat. Cook until rendered of fat and moisture. Remove the hot sausage with a slotted spoon and set aside. Reserve the fat.

  6. While the hot sausage is cooking, cut the andouille and smoked sausage into ½-inch rounds and set aside. Cut the ham and the beef stew meat into ½-inch pieces and set aside.

  7. In a meat grinder or a food processor, grind the greens, onion and garlic into a puree, adding cooking liquid to prevent the greens from getting too thick. Do this in batches.

  8. Remove the ham shanks from thei
r cooking liquid, reserving the liquid for stock. Once the shanks cool, pick and chop the meat and set it aside; discard the bones and the fat.

  9. Pour the greens cooking liquid and ham stock into separate bowls. Using your largest pot, or the two stockpots in which you simmered the greens and the ham, mix everything together. (Divide the pureed greens, the sausages, the beef and the chopped ham equally between the two pots, if using two pots.)

  10. Fill the pot or pots with equal parts ham stock and greens cooking liquid and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat.

  11. Heat the skillet containing the hot sausage drippings over medium-high heat. With a wooden spoon, slowly but intently stir in the flour until well combined. If the mixture is very dry, add vegetable oil until it loosens some, making a tight paste that’s still able to be stirred.

  12. Continue to cook until the flour mixture begins to darken, stirring constantly. As Sara notes, you aren’t going for a dark roux, but you do want the flour to cook. Courage is the key here. Don’t be afraid to let it get dark.

  13. When darkened and cooked, divide the roux between the two stockpots or put it into the single pot, dropping it in by spoonfuls and whisking to make sure that each is well incorporated.

  14. Add thyme, cayenne, bay leaves and salt to taste.

  15. Simmer for about an hour, or until the stew meat is tender, stirring quite often. Add more stock or water if it appears too thick.

  16. Serve over white rice.

  NOTE: Filé in its pure form is a bright green powder made from pounded sassafras leaves. The Creoles and Cajuns picked it up from the Choctaw Indians, and used it as a spice and a thickener in the winter when okra wasn’t available. If you like it, add it slowly at the end of cooking or even stir it into your own bowl at the table. Sara reports that Mrs. Chase told her, “It’ll lump up on you” if you’re not careful. Mrs. Chase’s father used to grind sassafras leaves for her, and she told Sara that Creoles always add filé to their gumbo z’herbes, even if few cookbook recipes call for it.

  THE LAST GOURMET SUPPER

  By Marisa Robertson-Textor From fastertimes.com

  Last fall, the sudden demise of Gourmet magazine sent a seismic shock throughout the food world. Of all the obituaries written for this iconic food magazine, perhaps the most poignant was this insider memory, written by one of the magazine’s newest staffers.

  Here’s a dilemma: How do you have your Thanksgiving and eat it too? For me, the answer is to celebrate early, then head for warmer climes over the holiday itself. Imagine it: all your friends clamoring to join you at a family-style banquet without family-style irritations. There’s no getting stuck at the kids’ table. No Cool Whip. And most definitely no football. It’s Thanksgiving for the Thanksgiving-lover—in a word, bliss.

  But that bliss, officially known as Gobble Gobble Night, never would have been achieved without Gourmet magazine. When I started fact-checking there five years ago, I was just another girl who loved to cook and thought she was pretty darn good at it—when she thought about it at all. During my first week, between making phone calls to price-check hotels in Rome and sending e-mails to establish the precise differences in aging techniques between tawny, ruby, and non-vintage Ports, I wandered the magazine’s mazelike hallways feeling like the youngest ensign assigned to the Starship Enterprise. “Yes, but do you really braise it?” I’d hear a senior food editor ask with the sort of concern I’d always associated with questions along the lines of, “Okay, but was it benign?” I had thought I loved food—thought I knew it—but clearly I didn’t. Not at all.

  To say that working at the magazine fed my culinary knowledge is like saying that going to elementary school endows you with a love of literature. In an ideal world, yes; but first you need to learn to read. There are disadvantages to being surrounded by professors when you’re a fumbling fourth grader, but the advantages—like that particular brand of ferocious generosity one only encounters in chefs—more than compensate. And you never know where that generosity might lead you. Back in the fall of 2006, during a discussion of the best turkey roasting methods with my colleague Lillian, I told her about my vision for a best-of-all-possible-worlds Thanksgiving. “Come with me,” she said promptly. “I have something for you.” It turned out there was an extra Bell & Evans bird down in the test kitchen. Did I want it? I did. But that was only the beginning. “You need aromatics,” Lillian announced firmly, passing me several freezer bags packed with vegetable parings. “Wait, where are you going? Don’t forget the turkey stock.” One grocery bag was filled, then another. What ensign wouldn’t seize the helm?

  That first Gobble night was too much of everything: food, labor, stress. Everything, that is, except space—my modest dining room couldn’t accommodate fifteen guests. “Could. Not. Eat,” says my brother, Alex, when he remembers that evening, gritting his teeth like a superhero whose powers are being taxed beyond measure. “No. Room. On. Table. For. Plate.” But the food, oh, the food! People still reminisce over the butternut squash and creamed-spinach gratin. It should have taken me 1¼ hours to prepare—and as the person who fact-checked that recipe, you might say I had a moral obligation to clock in at under 75 minutes—but just slicing the squash into ribbons took me almost twice that long. Then again, what was two hours? Planning the menu, scouring a dozen Brooklyn markets for ingredients, set up, clean up, not to mention the cooking itself—a good week of my life went into that first dinner. Like any Herculean endeavor, it didn’t seem worth it. But then, after the final guest departed and the final dish was put away, came the afterglow.

  By the following year, I was proficient enough in the language of the recipes not simply to follow the instructions, but to anticipate them: which vegetable would enter the pot next, when a hot liquid needed to cool off slightly before being incorporated into the remaining ingredients. That increased facility, combined with a Greek chorus of admonishments from the food editors—“Trust me, you don’t need five vegetable sides.” “Don’t bother flavoring the whipped cream.” “Outsource!”—made the second dinner far less demanding than its predecessor. (Although I realized I might have taken the outsourcing thing too far when my friend Daniel and his pals from Stockholm heroically carted six chairs and two enormous pots of caramelized-garlic mashed potatoes all the way from the West Village.) But these tactical advances—including turning my bedroom, the largest room in the apartment, into a makeshift dining room—didn’t preclude new errors. Reasoning that I’d have more prep time if I held the dinner on a Sunday night, it never occurred to me that at 4 am Monday morning I’d still be in the kitchen, grimly rinsing pans.

  Last year the guest list reached 25 people, but by that point the ritual was so familiar that it didn’t occur to me to panic. And, in fact, there was only one tiny snag. Picking up my pre-ordered foie gras from a local shop the morning of the dinner, I realized I’d procured exactly that: a naked lobe of foie gras requiring hours of deveining, prepping, and seasoning. (If any of my friends noticed that their toasts with Sauternes gelée were in fact topped with chicken-liver mousse, they were kind enough not to mention it. Of course, some of them might have been relieved.) In the eternal dinner party battle between the immovable object of logistics and the irresistible force of pleasure, pleasure had triumphed. As I looked at my friends, their faces limned in gold by the flickering candlelight, something settled inside me. I had this night. I had them. And the unspoken corollary—the thing I didn’t bother thinking about, because by now it was as natural as breathing—was that I had Gourmet.

  This September, when it came time to fact-check the Thanksgiving menus for the November issue, it took me just minutes to pick my favorites: roast turkey with cream gravy, bacon smashed potatoes, pumpkin gingerbread trifle. Perfect. What I didn’t realize—what I still haven’t quite realized—is that I was working on the last issue of Gourmet ever. Next Thanksgiving, as cooks across the country don their aprons, for the first time since before America entered World War II, the magazine won’t be
around to help.

  How does one mourn the loss of a cultural institution? It is a death, to be sure, but the grief is more amorphous, less straightforward, than what you feel for a person. It’s like passing by your childhood home, now in a strange family’s hands; like finding out that the library where you whiled away your adolescence has been torn down. Something you loved dearly is gone forever, and it is beyond your power to get it back. Yesterday, you were part of 69 years of collective wisdom; today, you are meeting with HR; tomorrow, you are once again just another unemployed thirtysomething with a passion for food. Ensign, where’s your ship?

  The only possible answer to that question lies in action. You’ve lost Gourmet.What do you do? You cook, of course.You start small, with the dishes you’ve made so often you know them almost as well as their creators: Gina’s seven-layer salmon bites, Paul’s egg salad with fennel and lemon, Maggie’s chocolate babka. Then, when you’re ready, you slowly leaf through all your old issues, recalling not just the dishes you made but—more important—all the ones you had once planned to make. All the phantom culinary visions that, unlike Gobble Gobble Night, were never realized. Remember that snowy Sunday in February when you were too sleepy to bother with the coffee-glazed doughnuts? Or how you gave up on preparing the Danish menu from the March 2007 issue because you couldn’t find five dinner guests who, like you, were part Danish? You didn’t do it then, but dammit, you’re doing it now. You’re tackling all the things that frustrate you, the things you’re still terrible at, like pastry dough and anything involving a mandoline. Because while it’s true that, having lived with Gourmet, you’re now in a better position to live without it, there’s a more enduring truth. You just don’t want to.

  RECIPE INDEX

  Roasted Garlic Guacamole with Help-Yourself Garnishes (from “Avocado Heaven”), pp..