Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  1 bottle of Kraft Catalina dressing.

  Notice anything about those amounts? Texas Salad represented a class of recipes that were easily passed around and replicated, and, most important, remembered because they were built on single units. No measuring required.

  For my mother, who spent about four decades cooking for her family, it was a godsend to have dishes she knew by heart and could make quickly. Another was something she simply called broccoli cream cheese casserole: 1 head of broccoli, 1 onion, 1 block of cream cheese, 1 stick of butter. The only break in the one-unit measure was with bread crumbs, which went on as a sprinkling.

  My mother was a child of the Midwest, born in the late 1920s in an Indiana town a couple of hours’ drive from Chicago. By the time she was cooking for me and my sister Julie, the last two kids left at home, we were in San Angelo, Texas, because my father had been stationed there as an Air Force pilot after a tour of bases throughout much of the South. And by that point, she had cooked for six other children and two husbands. In my memory, she approached cooking as a labor of love—but labor nonetheless. She didn’t seem out-and-out tired of it—that would come later—but merely not too excited. Who could blame her?

  So she returned to her favorites time and again, and we loved them. Ground beef and broccoli over rice. Meatloaf with cream-of-mushroom (as in the Campbell’s soup concentrate) gravy. Stuffed peppers, stuffed cabbage, pecan tassies (little mini-pies with a cream-cheese crust). That Texas Salad was a soggy mess the day after, but freshly made it was always a hit, every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every birthday. In hindsight, I know Mom was teaching me that variety and experimentation were all well and good, but especially with a crowd to feed, there was nothing wrong with a repertoire, even a small one, of dishes that worked.

  I also learned the elements of a satisfying salad: fresh greens, something crunchy, something a little fatty, some protein, a pungent dressing. Mom hasn’t cooked in many years because of physical and mental frailty, but I’m one of several of her children who have taken to it with gusto. These days, I make what I jokingly call Ex-Texas Salad, using romaine, fried corn tortillas, feta, slow-roasted tomatoes and a homemade cilantro vinaigrette. I may not be able to put the exact quantities to memory the way she did, because they don’t divide up so neatly, but I do something else: improvise with what I have on hand, and taste and adjust as I go.

  Maybe she did that, too, and I just never noticed. When I first started showing interest in cooking, she indulged me, but let’s just say my interest was scattered. I was 8 or 9 and fascinated by her stand mixer (a machine!), so my preferred tasks used it. I remember pleading as soon as she started cooking a holiday meal: Don’t forget to let me mash the potatoes! Please let me whip the cream! Then I would disappear for hours, probably riding my bike who knows where, while she kept working—crushing the Fritos in the bag, grating the cheese, chopping the onions, boiling the potatoes—and I would return to find the stand mixer warm and its bowl soaking in the sink.

  I was infuriated: Why didn’t she wait for me? She would apologize with a shrug and a smile and move on. Now, of course, I know why: She needed to keep the cooking on track, and when the moment was at hand—the potatoes boiled, the cream chilled—she looked up, probably looked around, perhaps even called for me, and I was nowhere.

  I don’t have kids, but I can imagine how the on-again, off-again presence of a little one who insists on doing just this one thing and nothing else would be less than helpful when 20 people were due in an hour. If I could do it over again, I’d stay put in that kitchen and ask, “What else can I do, Mom?”

  I bet she would’ve appreciated that.

  Ex-Texas Salad

  Tested size: 6 servings

  This is a radically updated version of the 1970s-era salad popular at potlucks in Texas.

  Make Ahead: The vinaigrette can be refrigerated for up to 1 week. The tortillas can be fried and stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.

  For the vinaigrette

  ¼ cup fresh cilantro leaves, coarsely chopped

  ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  ¼ cup canola oil

  ¼ cup red wine vinegar

  1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped

  1 teaspoon sugar

  ½ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more as needed

  For the tomatoes

  8 large tomatoes, stemmed (but not cored) and cut in half vertically

  Salt

  Freshly ground black pepper

  ¼ cup olive oil

  8 teaspoons cumin seeds, toasted and ground

  For the salad

  ½ cup peanut oil, for frying

  Six 6-inch corn tortillas

  12 cups lightly packed, torn romaine lettuce leaves

  3 cups homemade or no-salt-added canned black beans, rinsed and drained

  6 scallions, trimmed and thinly sliced on the diagonal (white and green parts)

  12 ounces feta cheese, crumbled

  12 large pieces 12-Hour Tomatoes, drained and chopped (may substitute 18 oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes)

  Directions

  For the vinaigrette: Combine the cilantro, extra-virgin olive and canola oils, vinegar, garlic, sugar and ½ teaspoon of salt in a blender; puree until smooth. Taste, and add salt as needed. The yield should be about ¾ cup.

  For 12-Hour Tomatoes: Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil or parchment paper; do not overlap. Place the tomatoes, cut side up, on the baking sheet. Season on the cut side with salt and pepper to taste, then drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle ½ teaspoon cumin on each tomato half. Bake for 8 to 12 hours, or until the tomatoes have collapsed and shriveled to about ¼ inch thick; they should still be moist inside. Cool completely, then refrigerate in an airtight container.

  For the salad: Line a plate with paper towels.

  Pour the peanut oil into a large skillet over medium heat. Once that oil starts to shimmer, add 2 or 3 tortillas (or as many as will comfortably fit); fry them on each side until crisp and golden brown, 1 to 2 minutes. Lift each tortilla with tongs and let the excess oil drip off, then transfer it to the paper towel–lined plate. Working in batches, repeat with the remaining tortillas. Let the tortillas cool, then break them into bite-size pieces.

  Toss the tortilla pieces with the lettuce, black beans, scallions, feta, tomatoes and ½ cup of the vinaigrette in a large serving bowl. Add the remaining ¼ cup of the vinaigrette if desired, or reserve for another use. Serve right away.

  * Yonan, Joe. “A Mother’s Lesson in Cooking for a Crowd: Rely on the Tried, True and Remembered.” From the Washington Post, May 2, 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. Submissions for Best Food Writing 2018

  Someone’s in the Kitchen

  The Genius of Guy Fieri

  BY JASON DIAMOND

  From Esquire

  Brooklyn-based, Chicago-born Jason Diamond takes pop culture seriously (just read his 2016 memoir, Searching for John Hughes). Among the many jobs he’s had—magazine editor, website founder, freelance writer—he’s also been a barista and a fry cook. Who better to really get TV chef Guy Fieri?

  It’s supposedly 97 degrees and I’m grossly sweating through my shirt on a rooftop in the middle of Manhattan. From where I’m standing, New York City is all floating buildings and blue skies; no sidewalks overcrowded with tourists bumbling past self-important men in suits rushing to wherever they have to get to. All around me are grand buildings like St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 30 Rock, and the Scribner Building, and the roof I’m on has the greenest grass I’ve ever seen in the city, a little pool, and four huge steel letters that spell out M-E-A-T with unlit light bulbs that I’m guessing will be turned on once the sun sets. I’m on this rooftop with a beer in one hand and a plate
in the other that’s piled with Andouille sausage and chicken. That’s when I realize: Holy shit, I’m in Flavortown.

  I let that sink in as I take one last sip of the warm beer, and begin to follow a very tan woman who leads me to meet the ruler of this mythical land, Guy Fieri.

  I know a fair amount about Fieri. He was born Guy Ferry, and he changed his last name to honor his immigrant great-grandfather. I know he hates eggs—not necessarily eggs in his food, but actual eggs: scrambled, sunny side-up, omelets. I’m aware he’s the subject of a fair amount of ridicule from some of our best restaurant critics and biggest celebrity chefs. Some people confuse him for a member of Smash Mouth or Insane Clown Posse. He’s practically a meme walking among us. I get all that, I do. But I need to put all of that to the side of my overflowing plate for now.

  As I start talking with Fieri, who is in town to promote his new BBQ venture with Carnival Cruise Line, I think about all of that stuff, but I try to be a good interviewer and strip away any preconceived ideas I might have about him. He greets me with an enthusiastic fist bump. (Later I notice a nick on my knuckle oozing blood from where I grazed my hand on one of his impressive signet rings.) We strike up a conversation about Sammy Hagar. (“I was even more of a Hagar fan when he was just Hagar and not Van Hagar,” he says.) It’s hard not to look up above the Diners, Drive-ins and Dives host’s face and focus on his famous head of bleached blond hair. It sticks so straight up that you could imagine him lowering his head and charging toward a line.

  I have a small rush of panic that shoots through me—like when I worry I left the house with the faucet running or forgot to feed the cats—when I can’t find his famous pair of white sunglasses, usually perched on the back of his head. My eyes dart desperately and I see them resting atop a bag nearby. There they are. The fear subsides and we continue.

  Here’s where I admit I’m an unabashed fan of Fieri’s television shows and that I definitely watch several hours of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives each week. “Because you have good taste,” Fieri says when I make my confession. Of course, I tend to agree with Fieri, but when I tell any of my friends how much time I spend watching Triple D, and I see the look they give me in response, I feel the need to also mention that I really enjoyed reading Dan Fox’s Pretentiousness, that I love to work to William Basinski’s minimalist masterpiece The Disintegration Loops, or that my wife and I put money away every few months because we’re on a mission to eat at Blue Hill at Stone Barns at least one time for each month on the calendar.

  I feel as if I have pretty decent taste by the standards of those strange enough to share them, yet when I mention that one of my favorite things to do is to sit on my couch with my dog and watch any of the Fieri shows that pretty much make up the bulk of the Food Network’s programming, people tend to laugh—or worse, assume I’m hate-watching. “No,” I tell them. I really enjoy watching Fieri drive around America in search of what he calls “real food for real people.”

  I love food television. I’ll watch Julia Child reruns or anything with Andrew Zimmern, plus Chef’s Table and, of course, The Great British Bake Off. I also love Anthony Bourdain’s many shows and books, and I understand why he’d find a person like Fieri such a personal affront. But while Bourdain looks at the bigger picture on his shows, examining the political economy of every city he visits, Fieri visits the real unknown. He takes that bright red convertible to little spots that are uniquely unexciting, places that aren’t owned by celebrity chefs, and parks firmly outside of the hype stream that steers the bastions of good taste. His episodes don’t have unifying themes. They don’t even focus on one geographic area, a strangely democratizing choice when it comes to place and space. Not one city is elevated among the rest, even by editing. Yet once Fieri shows up, all of his fans are in the know—and more often than not, they tend to remember.

  There’s this place called Sidecar on the southern end of Park Slope. It opened in 2006, and I’d have to imagine it’s considered older by Brooklyn standards since good restaurants don’t tend to last a decade around there thanks to rising rents, ticket-happy health department employees, and the finicky tastes of New Yorkers (not to mention a host of personal dramas that factor into a restaurant’s longevity). I’ve been going there since around the time they started serving food and drinks, and from the fried chicken and club sandwiches to the “Hangover Soup” they serve at brunch (it has saved my life more than once), I’ve never been disappointed in a visit to Sidecar. It’s a late-night place, the kind of spot chefs go to when they get off work and want to grab a few beers at two in the morning.

  Yet there it was, resting prominently on the bar’s chalkboard for at least a year: a hyper-realistic drawing of Guy Fieri. Having seen the episode where Fieri stands outside of Sidecar and says that brothers John and Bart DeCoursy are “rockin’ the neighborhood” with the best Cuban sandwich (disclaimer: I’ve never had the Cuban at Sidecar, so I can’t vouch for the validity of the statement), I finally had enough drinks at the bar one night to ask why the hell they’ve kept that thing up so long. The bartender looked at me and smiled. “A lot of us pay our rent because Guy Fieri tourists come here to eat.”

  Yes, Guy Fieri tourists. They’re a thing. Even in New York City, a place with never ending things to do and places to eat, has benefitted by the constant loop of Fieri’s shows driving foot traffic into restaurants. They get a leg up from the boost. All across the country, restauranteurs can attest to the “Fieri Effect” that starts when the Bleached One features a place on his show. “They told us, ‘We can do a lot for your sales,’” Ann Kim, co-owner of Pizzeria Lola in Minneapolis, told MinnPost last year. “We had no idea.” Another restaurant owner reported his sales were up 500 percent after Fieri rolled up in his red ’68 Camaro.

  As somebody who travels quite often, I’ll admit to have taken a few of Fieri’s suggestions and enjoyed the occasional thrice-fried monstrosity when out of town. I can’t always follow the Eater Heatmap, so I take the leap.

  Beyond all the jokes about his appearance and the fact that, no matter how much I wanted to think otherwise, the New York Times’ Pete Wells was totally right about the place being truly terrible (even Fieri seems to know that), I know that Fieri is a smart chef. You watch reruns of the second season of Food Network Star that he won, which aired ten years ago starting this past April, and you realize he’s got skills. A French-trained chef with a Michelin star would probably rather feed whatever Fieri makes to dogs, but that’s never been who he was cooking for. The art of cooking was never what he was interested in.

  “I was pretty driven with what I wanted to do,” Fieri tells me. His dad, his hero, helped him lay out his plan at an early age. Fieri never wanted to be Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud. “I wanted to work in corporate restaurants,” he says, repeating something I’ve heard him say proudly a thousand times in various interviews. But it’s a line that speaks volumes about Fieri’s personality: He had a plan this entire time. Fieri’s food is not an art, but a craft—practiced with care but not pretension. And yet he takes every plate piled high with burgers and fries as seriously as you might an entry in the Bocuse d’Or. Simple food—diverse American Food, in all styles, made by Americans—is Fieri’s rallying cry and religion.

  “Real food for real people,” I think to myself as I listen to him talk. It’s so damn simple, yet totally brilliant. It’s the food version of bipartisanship in politics: You can’t make fun of it because then you’re a classist snob, but you also have to take it with a grain of salt because it’s really perfectly pandering. And that’s what Fieri intrinsically understands. He knows he’s not Oprah or Ellen. He’s not a good-looking late night talk show host like Jimmy Fallon. He’ll never be America’s sweetheart. His first job is to get viewers, and he does that by making everything super simple. He knows more viewers are going to tune in to see him talk about good pulled pork (for what it’s worth, Fieri knows a good deal about BBQ—enough to get him inducted into the Barbecue Hall of Fame)—rat
her than some young hot shot chef in Los Angeles talk about his experimental cooking with compost.

  You can watch his Food Network audition tape from a decade ago; it’s clear that he’s stuck to that plan all of this time—and it has made him incredibly wealthy. He’s also helped out a number of small, independent businesses along the way; no matter what you want to say about him, it is hard to argue with his success.

  As our interview winds down, I notice how many handlers Fieri has around him—including his publicist, his manager from William Morris, another publicist, and a few other folks with clipboards. I know the drill. I’ve done a few of these before. These people are here because I might ask some questions to trip up their client, to get some sort of funny quote out of him, or to press him into a mold that I walked in with in mind. The media wants him to be a clown, to perform the sort of comedy that comes at his expense. A journalist scheduled for an interview after mine told me, “I just want him to say something dumb.”

  Yet Fieri is articulate and engaging. He’s got his spiel. He curses. He talks about business—not like a person with an M.B.A., but like a person who has learned what he knows by paying attention and doing the work himself. He’s off the cuff and unscripted, but he’s genuine, clever, and warm. You can call Guy Fieri a lot of things, and by the end of our brief time together I know that “smart” is definitely one of them. How many of us are as resolute in our self-knowledge, in our personal aesthetic, and in our plans for life and work? Fieri is more confident and assured than I am—and certainly more well liked. I shake his hand when I turn off the recorder.

  I watch his shows, often claiming that they help me zone out after a long day at the office—comfort TV, if you will. Just about everybody has a Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. But it dawns on me that even I’ve been taking Fieri for granted. I’m not yet giving him the credit he deserves. When I get up to leave, he gestures at my Chicago Cubs hat and asks if I’m really from Chicago. I know it’s suddenly trendy to wear a Cubs hat now that they’re finally good, but yes, I answer proudly. “I am.” He stares me dead in the eyes and tells me that my hometown is his favorite food city. He’s probably told people from Boston to Seattle the same thing for all I know, but the conviction with which he says it rings true. My heart leaps with the places he names off—a little Cuban spot, a random Greek joint, not somewhere cool like The Publican or Longman and Eagle.