Best Food Writing 2013 (36 page)

Sally Rose gives a tour of the property, a kind of homesteading, back-to-the-lander “estate” that includes a well-fenced chicken coop and a walk-in refrigerator where a keg of local beer is kept. “We have three brewers around here and we rotate,” Sally Rose explains.

The wood-burning
forno
that Fuzzy built after a trip to Italy anchors the outdoor common space, which has another fireplace, a couch, and a prep table. It's like sitting in a living room, but surrounded by trees and honoring fire and hearth—in the community sense of the word—rather than television. When I e-mailed Fuzzy to ask what he might cook, he wrote, “We are focused on stuff we've grown and caught, shot or harvested off our land [or close to it]. One thing for sure, there will be a blackberry pie involved . . . the freezer's full of berries from last summer.”

His ethos might have huge currency these days, but for him it's as pragmatic, thorough, and unsnobby as it gets. While Fuzzy's
preparing the venison and tending to the pesto pizzas in the
forno,
Cathy brings us hot and creamy potato-leek soup.

Dutifully documenting the recipes, I inquire about her soup.

“So, Cathy, what did you do here?” I ask, holding my beautiful little bowl.

She ticks off the “recipe,” counting on her fingers, in incomplete sentences, like an average grocery or to-do list:

“Grew the leeks.

“Grew the potatoes.

“Made a vegetable stock.”

I crack up, imagining the published recipe whose first two steps call for growing your own leeks and potatoes!

A recipe like Cathy's may not make it into a magazine, but when I go back to my cookbook (and my imagined reader) in New York, I will remember it. I started this trip by writing a lot of e-mails, encouraging people to be authentically themselves in their kitchens. And I end this trip having been given permission to do the very same. I thank Maw Maw for letting me know that I can include some of my own two-ingredient recipes without feeling the need to complicate them. And I thank the Osteens for reminding me how tradition and a good, funny story can make a meal more than just what you eat. I thank “the doctors' wives” for their pragmatic reliance on store-bought convenience products, like some I use at the restaurant, and for letting me see that my devotion to specific brands is equal to theirs. I can call for esoteric ingredients knowing full well that Ginny isn't going to buy them but that she is going to make the dish anyway—joyfully!—and that the Alexanders will already have them in their pantry. I now know from the professional potluckers that the home cook is not the only imagined reader: There will be cooks out there with scales and thermometers. And I know that I can ask the reader to do some heavy stuff, like build a fire or wrangle a whole animal or make something difficult from scratch—something that the folks at “The Monnestary” won't think twice about.

Turns out I'm a home cook, too; I just happen to cook in a restaurant.

 

 

H
OW TO
M
AKE
R
EAL
N
EW
E
NGLAND
C
LAM
C
HOWDER

By J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

From
SeriousEats.com

In his weekly Food Lab column on the blogsite Serious Eats, MIT grad J. Kenji Lopez-Alt obsessively deconstructs recipes for the home cook. He gives new meaning to the term “food geek”–but really, who wouldn't want this guy for your lab partner?

I
f you've spent any amount of time in coastal New England, you've probably noticed how generously awards are bestowed upon clam chowders. Now I've never met the folks who run these award factories, but I take issue with any organization that passes out praise like flyers.

Having spent my entire life traveling through New England, I've grown accustomed to the fact that nine out of ten “award-winning!” or “#1 voted!” clam chowders are going to arrive at the table either thick as paste, bereft of clams, or packed with clams so rubbery they make your jaws bounce, and unfortunately, most home recipes don't turn up results that are much better. And if finding great chowder in its birthplace is difficult, you can imagine what it's like
outside
of New England.

When done right, clam chowder should be rich and filling, but
not
sludgy or stew-like. Its texture should be creamy without feeling leaden, like you're sipping on gravy. Tender chunks of potato should barely hold their shape, dissolving on your tongue, their soft texture contrasting with tender bites of salty pork and briny clam; god help the clam shack that dare serves rubbery clams in their chowder!

The flavor of a clam chowder should be delicate and mild, the
sweetness of the pork complementing the faint bitterness of the clams, accented by bits of celery and onion that have all but dissolved into the broth, fading completely into the background. A good grind of black pepper and a bay leaf or two are the only other seasonings you need, unless you count the requisite oyster crackers as seasoning. I know some Yankees who do.

The Precedents

Chowders have a long, complex, and relatively apocryphal history that can be traced back to the fish and seafood stews eaten in coastal England and France. Like many old dishes, the name of the food stems from the word for its cooking vessel, a large cooking pot or “cauldron,” known in French as a
chaudiere.
Or perhaps it comes from the old English term for a fishmonger,
jowter,
which had been in use in Cornwall since at least the 16th century.

Whatever the etymology, its history can be traced across the Atlantic to the fishing towns of New England—Boston, Mystic, Nantucket, New Bedford—where the European dish was adapted to work with sea journey-friendly staples like onions, potatoes, and salt pork or beef, along with local ingredients like cod, oysters, and clams.

About a decade ago, I had a job as a cook at B&G Oysters in Boston's South End, a fancy-pants seafood shack run by Barbara Lynch. It was there that I first started taking a serious interest in chowder-making, there that I realized that chowder is
not
just the sludgy stuff I'd been raised to believe it was. We made our chowder in the manner of a fancy restaurant—cooking and seasoning each element individually, combining, pureeing, straining, adding, mixing, until our broth was intensely flavored and light, our clams were perfectly tender, and every vegetable cooked just so.

It was delicious, but it's decidedly
not
the way a traditional chowder is made; a poor man's food meant to take few ingredients and even less effort. I remember thumbing through a copy of
50 Chowders,
by Jasper White, in which he unearths New England's oldest-known printed recipe for chowder, from the September 23rd, 1751, edition of the
Boston Evening Post
:

           
Because in Chouder there can be not turning;

              
Then lay some Pork in slices very thin,

              
Thus you in Chouder always must begin.

              
Next lay some Fish cut crossways very nice

              
Then season well with Pepper, Salt, and Spice;

              
Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory, and Thyme,

              
Then Biscuit next which must be soak'd some Time.

              
Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able

              
To raise a Chouder, high as Tower of Babel;

              
For by repeating o'er the Same again,

              
You may make a Chouder for a thousand men.

              
Last a Bottle of Claret, with Water eno; to smother 'em,

              
You'll have a Mess which some call Omnium gather 'em.

Aside from the interesting technique of layering ingredients in a post to stew them and the very Victorian use of spices, the recipe essentially reads “put things in a pot and cook them.” One thing you'll immediately notice is that dairy is conspicuously absent from the recipe. Instead, the chowder got its thickness and richness from soaked biscuits. (Note that in this usage, biscuits most likely refer to tough, cracker-like hardtack, not the fluffy leavened biscuits of the American south).

Slowly, as dairy became cheaper and more readily available in the region, it began making larger and larger appearances in chowder, at first simply being used to moisten the biscuit, before eventually completely replacing it as the primary ingredient outside of clams, pork, and aromatics. These days, the biscuits live on in the form of oyster crackers, which as any true chowder-head can tell you, should be added liberally to your bowl and allowed to soften slightly before consuming.

So which is the best way to cook chowder?
Can the dump-and-simmer method be improved upon by some modern technique, or is there something to the classic that gets lost when fiddled with too much?

I decided to break it down element by element and really figure out what it is that makes clam chowder tick.

Building a Base

Most basic recipes for clam chowder call for rendering down some form of salted pork (bacon or salt pork usually), sweating onions
and celery in the rendered fat, a touch of flour, followed by milk, potatoes, chopped, and occasionally bottled clam juice. It all gets simmered together with a bay leaf or two until the potatoes are cooked and the broth is thickened. It gets finished with a bit of cream, or perhaps some half and half.

Right off the bat, there are some issues I have with this process—flour-based roux can be pasty, and cooking the clams as long as the potatoes is a surefire path to rubbery clams. These issues would all need to be addressed. But first things first.

The Pork

There are a few salted pork options at the supermarket:

       
•
   
Sliced Bacon
is the most widely available, and what most folks buy for breakfast. It works in a chowder, but I find the smoky flavor of bacon can be a little overwhelming for the delicate clams. Thin slices also achieve an unpleasant texture as they simmer in the broth. A better option is . . . -

       
•
   
Slab Bacon,
cut into ½-by ¼-by ¼-inch
lardons
(that's fancy French for “chunks”) is a much better option. I like the meaty chunks you end up with in the broth. They match the texture of the clams, making the whole dish more cohesive. But again, its smokiness can be distracting, which leads us to . . .

       
•
   
Salt Pork,
which is simply salted and cured un-smoked pork fat and meat. It can be made from three different parts of the pig—belly, side, and back. The further up the back you go, the fattier the salt pork gets. I find the fat back to be a little
too
fatty, turning soft and greasy in the chowder. Better is to look for salt pork with an equal mix of fat and lean.

With any form of pork,
the key is to go low and slow
so that the fat renders out completely without letting the pork burn. This gives you a great base in which to sweat your vegetables.

Of course, you can also go completely pork-less—there is plenty of precedent for that.

The Aromatics

Onions, celery, and bay leaf are the traditional flavorings here, and I
found no reason to stray from them. I tried a few versions with things like carrots, thyme, leeks, and garlic, but in all cases found them to be distracting, taking away from the inherent chowderiness of the broth. It simply didn't taste like childhood to me with the alternatives.

The Clams

Here we begin to see a bit of micro-regional variation. Just as eastern North Carolina barbecue differs from western North Carolina Barbecue, so does New England clam chowder made in Cape Cod differ from that made in, say, Mystic, Connecticut. The variation largely comes down to the size of the clam used.