Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  A spot in nearby Lakeview, Wishbone, employs a flying-chicken decorative theme (think scores of soaring chickens painted on rafters and soffits overhead, like a comic vision of Hitchcock’s The Birds) and serves what it calls “Southern cooking for thinking people.” The implication is not that inchoate emotions typically rule diners from the former Confederacy. Instead, the motto is meant to convey that the kitchen prepares the food with supposedly healthy ingredients. The Wishbone menu throws around descriptors like “Asheville” to indicate blue cheese and honey-mustard dressing in a salad. And it takes liberties with established dishes. Hoppin’ John translates as a bottomless bowl of black beans and brown rice under a thick cap of melted cheddar cheese. Bless their hearts.

  At Buck’s in Wicker Park, the tagline is “Southern fried funk” and the website promises “a taste of ‘Down South, Up North.’” It is a place of lounge seating, grandma china, buckets of fried chicken, Cheerwine floats, ironic hospitality-pineapple wallpaper, and hot biscuits served with forlorn little plastic cups of pimento cheese. Look at the booze menu, though, and you couldn’t be anywhere but Chicago. The signature “Bucknasty” brings a Schlitz tallboy and a shot of Malört, the locally beloved bitter liqueur that tastes like Fernet-Branca’s evil twin. This is food and drink designed to help you endure the cold.

  A restaurant called Dixie will soon open five blocks from my home. The name gives me pause, as does chef-owner Charlie McKenna’s talk of taking design inspiration from “the antebellum South.” McKenna, a South Carolinian who worked in high-end restaurants before opening a well-liked local barbecue spot, Lillie’s Q, has strong ideas about the kind of South that Chicago wants. That vision includes cocktails and non-traditional small plates, such as Nashville hot sweetbreads with white bread sauce. (Itself a riff on hot chicken and the white bread that traditionally accompanies it, a version of the dish first appeared at The Catbird Seat in Nashville.)

  I walked to Dixie in an early-April snowstorm that swirled to a near whiteout before blowing off. McKenna met me at the site on a hopping restaurant block. Tucked alongside a French bistro and a Japanese izakaya, built as a typical A-frame brick house, the Dixie space had once been the Michelin-starred restaurant Takashi. McKenna gutted the building and poured a raised concrete front porch for rocking chairs to face the busy street. Inspired by the piazzas of Charleston architecture, he tucked the entrance at the side of the building, halfway down a narrow alley. (“We’re thinking of putting up a sign that reads, ‘In the South we enter on the side,’” said Nick Bowers, head of the architecture and design firm overseeing the buildout.)

  I tried to ask McKenna about the words “Dixie” and “antebellum.” To my ears, both are charged with layers of complicated meanings. I had to push, perhaps a little too stridently, the question of slavery. I could tell this wasn’t where McKenna expected the conversation to go.

  “For me, the name Dixie kind of represents the South as a whole,” he said, pausing to find the right tone. “You know, it’s where I came from. I’m going to be taking a lot of the food and ingredients the slaves brought over and celebrating it in a better light. It’s just a word. It’s the people who make the South great.”

  I pursued the question later with Bowers, who had been researching antebellum color schemes (“greens, blues, reds: bold colors”) and design accents (“brushed brass and gold”). Historical photos, purchased from a restaurant-prop supplier, would blanket the side walls. I asked if they planned to vet the pictures to find out if they depicted slave owners. I asked if any of the pictures would include black faces. Bowers grew uncomfortable, saying, “Obviously slavery is not a focus to the restaurant. If we know it’s somebody who was negatively impacting the South, we wouldn’t use that image.”

  I wonder if Dixie will be a place where no guest will know the tune to whistle it. I am looking forward to those sweetbreads, and when McKenna talks about serving country ham and cheese straws at the bar, the very words thrill me to my toes. But with its rocking chairs and brushed brass, Dixie promises to thematize the pre–Civil War South for a curious dining public, much as the lace curtains, art nouveau lettering and pressed tin ceiling of its neighbor evokes the idealized Paris of a hundred years ago. Southern food and Southern history belong to all of us, and after living in Atlanta, I can’t separate them.

  Paul Fehribach, the Indiana native who runs the city’s best and most thoughtful Southern restaurant, Big Jones, thinks Southern cooking resonates because it is, at heart, American country cooking. He says that’s why you see the word “Southern” on Chicago restaurants as often as (if not more than) you see “Midwestern.” “Southern” translates, in the minds of diners, as a kind of idealized home cooking.

  Fehribach, who builds historical research into his recipes, serves collard-green sandwiches on cornbread, house-cured tasso ham, Sally Lunn bread, Memphis-style barbecue, and Edna Lewis–inspired fried chicken that earns national praise. His menu surveys the subregions of the South in their fractured glory, but it all feels of a piece.

  All of these restaurants are on the predominately white North Side of the city. Most black Chicagoans who can trace their roots to the South and to the Great Migration make their homes on the South Side. My own family began its Chicago adventure last summer in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park, a diverse community where we lived for a couple of months in University of Chicago housing. Our flat was in a dark, stately Renaissance-revival apartment complex that made me think of Rosemary’s Baby. It has, through the years, apparently housed more Nobel laureates than any building in the country.

  There were no “Southern” restaurants nearby, but the local market stocked produce I recognized from Georgia, including okra and scuppernongs. Once when I returned home laden with groceries and couldn’t open the massive wrought-iron grille door, Belinda Clark, the African American woman working the front desk that day, leapt up to help me. “Now what are you going to do with those greens?” she laughed, looking into my shopping bag. I explained that I cooked a good, if non-traditional, pot of collards. To prove my bona fides, I let it slip that I had just moved from Georgia. Clark’s face lit up. Her grandparents emigrated from Alabama and Mississippi. The South fueled her imagination. She and her husband hoped to take a long driving vacation once they could get the time.

  Clark grew tomatoes, collard greens, beans, peas, and okra in her home garden. Some years she wouldn’t plant until May for fear of a frost. Her husband hunted to stock the freezer. They loved fishing together. Her cooking was not that different from her grandmother’s. For the next couple of months, we talked about food every time our paths crossed. She helped me deal with the dull ache of homesickness and the equally insistent ache for okra.

  Home. That’s surely what I miss when I miss Southern food. I get it. When I mutter that the grits at some trendy brunch place suck, I’m also saying that it shouldn’t be 42 degrees outside in May, that I miss my backyard garden and my friends, and that I fret I will never experience in Chicago that sense of food and place, of season and cook, that was the soul of every meal at Cakes & Ale in Decatur.

  Then again, sometimes I wonder if that’s what everyone here looks for in Southern food, even if they’ve never been to the South. Maybe it’s part of our shared cultural memory, our American identity. Or perhaps Southern is the new Thai—a crowd-pleaser with a whiff of the exotic.

  I’m cooking more Southern food now. I keep Anson Mills grits in the freezer, and I cook a pot of greens whenever I find any that look half good. And now that I live on the North Side, I can walk a few blocks for a pimento cheese and fried green tomato biscuit sandwich. It’s an unholy trinity, let me tell you. I sometimes want to stand on my bar stool and yell to all Chicago, “People! Cold pimento cheese and hot biscuits: not a thing!” Then again, on a chilly May night, it doesn’t taste too bad.

  Chicken Potpie for the Modern Cook

  BY JULIA MOSKIN

  From the New York Times

  A reporter for the
New York Times’ Dining section since 2002, Julia Moskin*–who has also been a cookbook editor and co-writer (with chefs Bobby Flay and Patricia Yeo)–applies her recipe skills to a nagging question: Were the dishes we loved as kids really as good as we remember?

  I never like to argue with the bible of American cookery, “Joy of Cooking.” Much of its advice is timeless, like the best way to skin an eel and how to make fritters from day lilies.

  But in search of advice on chicken potpie, this confident statement made me pause: “None of us has lost the taste for creamed foods served on toast or in bread or pastry containers.”

  “Joy of Cooking” was published in 1931 and now, 85 years later, I must admit that I have mostly lost the taste for creamed foods, contained or not. Apparently others have as well.

  Apart from a few holdouts who insist on creamed onions at Thanksgiving, I don’t know a modern home cook who regularly turns out creamed mushrooms, chicken à la king or the dreaded creamed chipped beef on toast.

  But still lingering on American menus is chicken potpie, a dish based on creamed chicken that is so beloved that the taste of it doesn’t seem to matter.

  If it did, would we ignore that most versions have very little flavor? Without the crust and the mini pie dish, would we be made happy by a bowl of chicken in gummy sauce stirred with frozen peas and carrots?

  Probably not.

  What our “creamed” dishes have in common is not cream, but white sauce, a thrifty substitute with many uses in the kitchen. (It is called béchamel in French and besciamella in Italian.) It is made by lightly cooking flour in fat (this is also known as a roux), and then thinning it with milk.

  In early American kitchens, white sauce stood in for cream, which was reserved for making butter. Later on, canned “cream of” soups supplanted white sauce in many creamed dishes, like the filling for a “Joy of Cooking” quick chicken potpie: a poached chicken, canned cream of chicken soup and milk. (No, thanks.)

  I grew up believing that a frozen potpie was one of life’s great rewards, signaled by the arrival of a babysitter. This meant relief from my usual monotonous diet: home-cooked dinners made from fresh ingredients by my parents, both excellent cooks. (This is the food version of unconscious privilege.)

  At that age, I loved the frozen version’s salty crust, the Day-Glo peas and carrots, and the soft bits of chicken. As an adult cook, I labored to reproduce it by making homemade chicken potpies: blanching tiny cubes of fresh peas and carrots, poaching organic chicken breasts and stirring all manner of herbs and spices into my white sauce in an attempt to wake up the taste.

  They were O.K., but all of them had the telltale blandness of milk, which tends to muffle flavors instead of brightening them. Chicken breast generally has no taste to start with, and when bound in that sauce, even sweet, fresh carrots and peas give up.

  Finally I realized the underlying problem. As an emulsion of flour and fat, white sauce itself is a kind of liquid piecrust.

  White sauce has its place, on biscuits, heavily peppered and cooked with sausage meat or between the layers of a lasagna. But in a pie, it doubles the starch and blandness.

  I first received inklings of an alternate potpie universe at the sleek and modern NoMad Bar in New York. It is not the kind of place associated with American comfort food: The room (and everyone in it) is chic and expensively accessorized. Similarly, the NoMad Bar’s chicken potpie, introduced in 2014, is decorated with a skewer of foie gras and spiked with truffles.

  But the big-ticket ingredients are not the real draw. Nor is it the pie’s burnished brown crust, lofty as a hot-air balloon. It’s what lies underneath. When I cracked through that crust for the first time, I discovered brown gravy instead of viscous white fluid, and it was scented with chicken juices and wine, like the best kind of stew. This has possibilities, I thought.

  I tried making a pie filling with stock instead of milk: an instant improvement. And then I began to question all the rules for the traditional recipe. What purpose is served by the carrots and peas? Why cook the ingredients separately if you’re going to combine them anyway? Is a bottom crust really necessary?

  Here are the updated rules for a modern potpie:

  • There is no need for a double crust. A single crust is enough, and pie crust, biscuit dough or puff pastry can all do an excellent job. But the flakiness of pie crust makes the ideal topping.

  • Instead of milk, use stock, wine, vinegar or a tasty combination as the liquid in your binding sauce. Season the sauce aggressively.

  • Boneless thigh meat has more taste and better texture than boneless breast.

  • Vegetables should be served separately, not force-marched into the filling. (Roasted carrots, peas with mint and buttered steamed asparagus are all nice to serve with chicken potpie.)

  After some messy experiments, I realized that the right filling for my modern pie was at hand: a basic chicken sauté. Brown the chicken, deglaze the pan and there it is: meat and sauce, fully cooked, in one pan. Flouring the chicken parts before sautéing not only thickened the sauce, but produced more of the stuck-on brown bits at the bottom of the pan that make the best pan gravy.

  On a mission to make a lively filling, I found that the components of a French poulet au vinaigre—sherry vinegar, parsley and mushrooms—called to me. But it would be just as effective to swap in white wine, tarragon and shallots or another combination of aromatics and liquids. (If you miss the creaminess of the old-school filling, stir a little crème fraîche into it at the end.) Whether made in one large pie pan or several small ones, it makes an easy, impressive and reasonably quick main dish.

  Most satisfyingly, it has the reassuring textures of the old-school recipes, with the deep flavor of chicken. There is nothing wrong with the traditional white sauce version, but it’s not all that chicken potpie can be.

  Modern Chicken Potpie

  Time: 1 hour

  Yield: 6 servings

  1 tablespoon vegetable oil

  1 garlic clove, peeled and smashed

  6 ounces bacon or pancetta, preferably thick-cut, sliced into strips

  1 medium onion, chopped

  8 ounces mushrooms, such as button or cremini, thickly sliced

  ¼ cup all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon dried thyme

  ½ teaspoon paprika

  Salt and ground black pepper

  1 pound boneless chicken thighs, cut into bite-size pieces

  2 tablespoons butter

  2½ cups rich chicken stock

  ¼ cup Marsala, Madeira or sherry

  1 tablespoon sherry vinegar

  2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley, more for garnish

  1 9-inch pie crust, chilled, or 1 sheet puff pastry

  1 egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon water

  Preparation

  1. Heat oil and garlic together over low heat. When it sizzles, add bacon and onions and cook, stirring often, until fat is rendered and bacon is golden brown. Adjust the heat so the bacon slowly gives up its fat. Remove garlic clove and add mushrooms. Cook, stirring, until mushrooms are browned and slightly softened.

  2. In a sealable plastic bag, combine flour, thyme, paprika, 2 large pinches salt and 1 large pinch pepper. Add chicken and shake well to coat.

  3. In the skillet with the bacon and mushrooms, add butter and melt over medium heat. Add chicken pieces and any flour that remains in the bag. Cook, stirring, until chicken pieces are golden and the flour on the bottom of the pan is browned. Pour in stock, Marsala and vinegar. Scrape bottom of pan, and let simmer about 5 minutes, until thickened. Taste for salt, pepper and vinegar and adjust the seasonings. Turn off heat and stir in parsley.

  4. Heat oven to 400 degrees.

  5. Transfer chicken and sauce to 9-inch round pie dish or 8-inch square baking dish. Roll out piecrust to desired shape and size. Drape crust over filling, making a few slits or decorative holes on top. Tuck edges down around filling and brush crust with egg wash. If the dish is piled high with fil
ling, place on a baking sheet to catch any overflow before transferring to oven.

  6. Bake until crust is browned and filling is bubbling, 20 to 30 minutes.

  7. Let cool slightly, at least 10 minutes, before serving with a big spoon. If desired, garnish each serving with parsley.

  * Moskin, Julia. “Chicken Potpie for the Modern Cook.” From the New York Times, October 3, 2016. Copyright © 2016 The New York Times. 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.

  A Mother’s Lesson in Cooking for a Crowd

  BY JOE YONAN

  From the Washington Post

  Journalist and cookbook author Joe Yonan* has been the food and dining editor of the Washington Post since 2006, with a goodly stint at the Boston Globe before that. But as a native of West Texas, he sometimes gets a hankering for the dishes he grew up on—well, with a few tweaks here and there…

  Of all the dishes my mother made for special occasions, the one I remember most fondly was Texas Salad. The ingredients:

  1 head of iceberg lettuce

  1 large can of pinto beans

  1 tomato

  1 onion

  1 large bag of Fritos

  1 block of cheddar cheese