Best Food Writing 2013 (2 page)

    
By Katie Arnold-Ratliff

The Swedish Chef,
From
TableMatters.com

    
By Joy Manning

The Gingerbread Cookie Reclamation Project,
From
The Washington Post

    
By Tim Carman

Hortotiropita and the Five Stages of Restaurant Grief,
From
FoodForTheThoughtless.com

    
By Michael Procopio

Lobster Lessons,
From
The Cassoulet Saved My Marriage

    
By Aleksandra Crapanzano

A Bountiful Shore,
From
Saveur

    
By Bernard L. Herman

T
O
B
E A
C
HEF

Empire of the Burning Tongue,
From
New York Magazine

    
By John Swansburg

The King of the Food Trucks Hits Hawaii,
From
Food & Wine

    
By Jonathan Gold

Fish and Game,
From
Edible Manhattan

    
By Peter Barrett

His Saving Grace,
From
The Chicago Tribune

    
By Kevin Pang

Spin the Globe,
From
AFAR

    
By Francis Lam

To Serve and Obey,
From
Fire & Knives

    
By Karen Barichievy

This Is Tossing,
From
Make

    
By Chris Wiewiora

P
ERSONAL
T
ASTES

Meet the Parents,
From
Fresh Off the Boat

    
By Eddie Huang

When the Kids Make You Breakfast for Mother's Day
, From
Kim-Foster.com

    
By Kim Foster

Coke and Peanuts,
From
Leite's Culinaria

    
By Carol Penn-Romine

Eating the Hyphen,
From
Gastronomica

    
By Lily Wong

Variations on Grace,
From
Graze

    
By Paul Graham

In Susan's Kitchen,
From
Poor Man's Feast

    
By Elissa Altman

What I Know,
From
Eating Well

    
By Diane Goodman

When There Was Nothing Left To Do, I Fed Her Ice Cream,
From
GiltTaste.com

    
By Sarah DiGregorio

Recipe Index

Permissions Acknowledgments

About the Editor

I
NTRODUCTION

T
he vegetables were beautiful this year, fat lush heads of arugula and romaine, gleaming taut-skinned summer squash, lusty round beets, impudently tall leeks with loamy soil still clinging to their hairy roots. Every week there were a few horizon-expanding surprises—who knows what I'd have done with those spiky knobs of kohlrabi if the CSA hadn't provided recipes? And the fruit! This was the first year I'd bought a fruit share, too, and I was astonished by how sweet and succulent the berries and peaches were, the cherries delicate and tender, not rubbery like supermarket Bings.

Every week I'd lug home this embarrassment of riches, then panic about using it all. So—what else?—I invested in a mandoline. Each Monday I made a vegetable terrine to cook up the last produce, emptying the crisper drawers for Tuesday's CSA pick-up. Aside from the evening I nearly sliced off my fingertip (so
that's
why they include that finger-guard), I found those meticulous hours of slicing and layering wonderfully meditative. Some combos were better than others, granted, especially before my daughter went full-on vegan and we had to leave out the goat cheese. But making vegetables the main course of our dinner? It seemed like an idea whose time had come.

So this is where we stand in the year 2013: The season of foam and gels has passed, and the Year of the Pork Belly has given way to the Year of Kale. Over the past several months, combing through bookstores and magazines and websites to compile this year's edition of
Best Food Writing,
I've seen the ground shift back towards slow food. Today's true believers are all about farm-to-table sourcing and hand-crafted ingredients, and it's tempting to join in.

The mandate to “eat local” has done a lot to level the playing field—as Brett Martin declares in this book's opening essay (
page 2
), nowadays there is “Good Food Everywhere,” not just in a few big restaurant cities. It has also inspired some fine writers to dig deep and reaffirm their faith in the elemental act of cooking—as meditation
(Michael Pollan,
page 223
), as a way of living life (Edward Behr,
page 41
), even as a form of prayer (Paul Graham,
page 350
). Yet I sense that the locavore dogma is due for a pushback. Other voices in this year's book view locavorism with skepticism (Katherine Wheelock's “Is Seasonal Eating Overrated?,”
page 32
), tongue-in-cheek humor (Erica Strauss, “The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater,”
page 36
), thoughtful re-examination (Todd Kliman, “The Meaning of Local,”
page 52
), and clear-eyed socio-economic reaction (Tracie McMillan, “Why Cooking Isn't Fun,”
page 48
).

I hope that one effect of the local-sourcing movement will last: Giving quality food producers some star power, on a level with chefs. In this edition of
Best Food Writing,
we meet several of them, from all over the country: Erin Byers Murray's Massachusetts female farmers (
page 112
), Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl's Minnesota cheesemaker (
page 119
), Rowan Jacobsen's Maine heirloom-apple grower (
page 104
), Barry Estabrook's Vermont hog farmer (
page 142
), John Kessler's Georgia cattleman (
page 150
). Any self-respecting carnivore these days should vicariously slaughter an animal just once (see Tim Hayward's “The Ibérico Journey,”
page 160
), or even better, go hunting with Mike Sula (
page 180
), Steven Rinella (
page 196
), and Hank Shaw (
page 199
), or snail-gathering with Molly Watson (
page 129
).

Scoring ingredients is only the first step, though. In this Golden Age of Foodism, it's okay to get a wee bit obsessive in the kitchen, especially when a dish carries special significance. Check out culinary mad scientist J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, deconstructing his childhood favorite New England clam chowder (
page 212
); Tim Carman, resurrecting a lost family cookie recipe (
page 240
); Michael Procopio, trying to reproduce a favorite restaurant dish that was cut from the menu (
page 246
); and Bernard L. Herman, lovingly curating a Thanksgiving feast keyed to his family retreat on the Chesapeake shore (
page 259
).

Farm-to-table sourcing hasn't killed off the four-star restaurant—far from it. Witness the current vogue of multi-course chef's tasting menus, as lamented by Corby Kummer (“Tyranny: It's What's For Dinner,”
page 19
) and played out in real time by Matt Goulding (“Confronting a Masterpiece,”
page 74
). But the rules seem to have subtly changed for top-flight chefs. Joy Manning's skeptical review
of Magnus Nilsson's
Fäviken
cookbook (
page 236
) holds star chefs to a real-world standard. John Swansburg (
page 266
) profiles Danny Bowien, whose Mission Chinese started as a pop-up; Peter Barrett (
page 281
) follows Zak Pelaccio as he re-invents himself for a small-town market; and Kevin Pang (
page 289
) reveals Curtis Duffy as an ex-delinquent redeemed by cooking in high-end restaurants. Eddie Huang's memoir
Fresh Off the Boat
(
page 330
) credits his family's passion for Taiwan street food as the root of his restaurant Baohaus.

Other chefs profiled this year are working all over the place—cooking in a food truck (Jonathan Gold,
page 276
) or on a small Caribbean island (Francis Lam,
page 309
), as a private chef (Karen Barichievy,
page 314
) or a pizza maker (Chris Wiewiora,
page 323
).

The line between epicurean ambition and simple home cooking requires constant navigation, as Elissa Altman shows in her memoir
Poor Man's Feast
(
page 357
). Foodies can be just as interested in Low Food as in High Food, which may be why Dan Barry rhapsodizes about Ding Dongs (
page 99
), Katherine Shilcutt surrenders to the allure of the McRib (
page 95
), and Sarah DiGregorio marvels at the healing power of Hood ice cream in a cup (
page 371
). As Katie Arnold-Ratliff confesses (
page 230
), our favorite cookbooks aren't always the complicated ones.

Buzzwords like “local,” “seasonal,” “artisanal,” and so on are bound to fade away, as trends always do; what's certain is that our national obsession with all things foodie shows no sign of letting up, especially in the 18-to-30 demographic. As publisher Daniel Halpern remarked in a recent
New York Times
article, “The passion my generation felt about poetry and fiction has gone into food, I think, into making pickles or chocolate or beer.” Another
Times
article interviewed 20-somethings in entry-level jobs who spend all of their limited disposable income on dining out in trophy restaurants, instead of on rent or clothes or travel. My college-age kids raptly watch
Chopped
and Guy Fieri's
Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives
every night during dinner, not because of me—God forbid!—but because that's what their friends are talking about. Only a couple of years ago, snapping a photo of your restaurant meal to post on Twitter would instantly brand you as a food obsessive. Nowadays—for better or worse—it's almost
de rigueur.
With such an insatiable audience, there are more outlets for food writing than ever, in print and online and on the airwaves. It's an embarrassment of riches, not unlike those overstuffed CSA bags of produce. Cutting through the chatter to find the really good stuff can be a challenge—and that's where
Best Food Writing 2013
comes in. Curating this year's collection has been a bit like assembling a vegetable terrine, building a rich flavor from many different tastes, layered all together. Plunge in and enjoy!

The Way We Eat Now

 

 

G
OOD
F
OOD
E
VERYWHERE

By Brett Martin

From
GQ