You'd Call It Panisse, Too

Lost loves, restless and handsome young men of Marseilles called to the sea instead of romantic and familial duty, short-tempered and randy but kindly older men, some of them rich and willing to give their wealth to a young woman simply because she's pretty—is it any wonder Alice Waters wanted to name her restaurant for a character in a trilogy of 1930s films by Marcel Pagnol?

If you haven't seen the films, do. Like everything to do with Chez Panisse, they're more rooted in reality, including full recognition of tough truths, than you'd think from the image of the restaurant, which gets more fey and precious the farther you get from it. Abandonment, broken families, economic depression, wasted youth, and lechery all appear in Pagnol—as do tenderness, redemption through friendship and benevolence, and the love that only burning disappointment and acceptance of human failings can bring.

Plus, of course, there's the south of France in the thirties, which helped bond Waters to Pagnol and his evocation of a place she came to love in her own youth. She named her daughter, Fanny, for the romantic heroine of the series. She didn't name the restaurant Fanny, she told the young man who played Marius, the romantic lead in a revival of the 1954 musical Fanny that opened last night at the Encores! series in New York, because someone pointed out that "Panisse was the one who had all the money." The founders didn't even know that the name also referred to the chickpea pancakes that are the street food of Nice (pain de Nice, she explained), for four years after they named Chez Panisse.

Waters had seen the classic, marvelously gritty and stylized French movies of the 1930s based on the books, many times; she had also played the Harold Rome score of the 1954 musical, but never seen it on stage. A later film starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, and Charles Boyer adapted the plot of the musical, which compresses the trilogy, but uses the songs only as underscoring. When someone pointed this out, Waters, not a musical comedy fan, said, "It was still waaay musical for me."

The actual musical verges on opera, particularly in the first act, with the aching longing for the sea in the title song, which anyone who's heard the record recalls instantly (along with a bouncy song in the second act called "Be Kind To Your Parents," which sounds like something from the Shari Lewis show). It's beautifully sung, particularly by the romantic leads, who are artless and heartfelt. And Fred Applegate makes Panisse so winning, frank, generous, and accepting, that you'd name a business after him too.

If you're in New York this weekend, see it—like every Encores! production, it's here and gone before you know it, and the last performances are Sunday. And pay Chez Panisse a tribute by eating a long block or two away at Beacon, the midtown restaurant whose chef is Waldy Malouf. Malouf started buying from and promoting Hudson River valley farms long before the fashion came, and wrote a book about them, the Hudson River Valley Cookbook. Waters didn't want to like the sliders and lamb meatballs and bacon with angel-hair pasta as much as she did, because the name of the farms and "grass-fed" weren't listed on the menu (though Elysian Farms lamb "nose to tail" is listed on the online menu)—and she was wary of the huge split marrow bones that came to the table, because "I want to know the bones." Malouf is a chef who cares about sources. He knows his bones.

School Gardeners Strike Back

If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

Caitlin Flanagan is good at flamethrowing, and this is the incendiary heart of her argument in the current issue of The Atlantic. The children of Hispanic farmworkers around Los Angeles, where she lives, and the rest of California are being forced to waste their time, and the public's money, learning skills their parents want them to leave behind; the proper—the only—role of public education is to make children perform well enough on standardized state tests to graduate from high school and go on to college and the higher socioeconomic status their parents desperately want them to have.

In the article Flanagan saves special scorn—she's really good at witty, seemingly undisputable scorn; I've long enjoyed her writing, and once in a while even agreed with it—for Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard, the program Waters launched 15 years ago at a Berkeley middle school where she saw a vacant lot. She has tirelessly and relentlessly turned that garden and a kitchen-classroom she built into a national movement to incorporate gardens into schools and what students learn in gardens into the school curriculum. It's no stretch to say that Michelle Obama planted a garden on the White House Lawn and invited schoolchildren to be her first helpers as a direct result of Waters's crusade.

Obama has made childhood obesity her goal, and uses the garden to spread her message of improving children's diets and health. Flanagan goes after Waters for thinking that working in a garden can improve a child's ability to learn. She ridicules the idea that Hispanic farm workers' children need any introduction to fresh fruits and vegetables or won't get them other than in a school garden or cafeteria. Why, Compton, the extremely low-income Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles Flanagan visits to check her thesis, is a positive paradise of lively markets selling plenty of fresh fruit and produce!

If Flanagan was focused on children's diets and the effect that being well-nourished has on school performance, she would lambaste herself with the relish she reserves for Waters. California is, of course, the country's most abundant agricultural state—the reason there are so many of the farm workers' children whose educational rights she so staunchly defends. School gardens across the country, as she ignores, are in "food deserts"—urban, and rural, neighborhoods without ready or any access to markets selling fresh fruits and vegetables (and probably school gardens in other parts of California, too.)

Even in Berkeley, the question is not whether families can drive to the Berkeley Bowl, the famous produce paradise. It's whether parents will buy fresh produce and children will eat it, as Marsha Guerrero, executive director of the Berkeley Edible Schoolyard, told me. (Her reaction to the article? "There are a lot of crackpots who don't understand what we do.") "It's not as simple as going to the Bowl and buying chard," she said. "If kids are growing it, they'll eat it. And if they eat it, they might suggest that their parents buy it."

As we spoke, Guerrero was passing by the kitchen-classroom, and described the scene: "Kids are grinding grain on a bike, learning about how much land it takes to grow grain, and measuring how much grain they have before and after they grind it. It's a math lesson." It was the kind of scene that was a perfect illustration of the guiding principle Waters told me (she called about ten minutes after the piece appeared online) she had spent her five years as a Montessori-trained teacher pursuing: "You learn by doing, by mentoring, by connecting to the bigger world outside the school. It's like getting students engaged at home with adult activities—they all want to do it. It works like a dream." And it was the kind of scene that would have Flanagan hearing not a whirring grindstone but chalk down a blackboard.

Guerrero had no test scores to refute Flanagan; that's never been a focus of the Edible Schoolyard. But nor has the program ever relied on the public funds Flanagan says can't be wasted in what is demonstrably one of the lowest-performing state school systems in the country. (For background on the ballot initiative that wrecked California schools, see here and here).

For a view from another and yet more dysfunctional school system, I called Tony Recasner, the charismatic and farsighted head of the Samuel J. Green School, in New Orleans. Recasner opened the charter school he had spent several years building two weeks before Hurricane Katrina, and had it back up and running before almost any other school after the storm. It and a second charter school he built, Arthur Ashe, now teach about 550 students in grades K-8.

I'd met and been impressed by Recasner shortly after the storm. He'd shown me the former girl's locker room at the Green school where he planned to raise money for a teaching kitchen he would put right next to the cafeteria. Thanks to vigorous fundraising (even President Bush made a speech at the school on one of his damage-control swings through the city) he was able to build that kitchen. And thanks to pushing Sodexho, the huge conglomberate that provides the school food, he was able to get fresh fruits and vegetables into the cafeteria at no additional cost (Sodexho didn't give him a break, he told me; the company just needed convincing that students would actually eat fresh food).

Recasner had read Flanagan's piece (I sent it to him before we talked). "If I felt it was a waste of public money and students' time," he said, "if I felt I was crippling kids we serve and robbing them of valuable time, I wouldn't have participated in this." As in California and in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Edible Schoolyard program uses no public funds other than maintenance and some staff time—costs Recasner called "not unreasonable, given the number of government programs that have come down pike to address the same type of thing." He said, "We feel that with all the programs we've seen over the years—I've been doing this for 20 years—this comes the closest to addressing the problems kids have."

Those problems are eating a healthful diet and doing well in school, and Recasner told me he had seen measurable improvement in both. "All our food goes to our kitchen," Donna Cavato, the director of the New Orleans Edible Schoolyard, told me. "Families take home the remaining produce—we harvest 3,000 pounds a year. Parents tell us that the biggest impact has been changing the way kids eat. The school is in a neighborhood that doesn't have a grocery store. My own neighborhood doesn't have one."

Yes, test scores have improved since the program started, Recasner said. But "we didn't go after this to prove causation," he added. "What we know about gardens is that it opens experiential pathways for kids to learn," he said. "Different learning experiences correlate highly with improved test scores. This gives kids a stronger background knowledge in the kinds of subjects that are likely to appear on standardized tests. They'll see the kinds of ideas, people, concepts, and different languages they're exposed to with the Edible Schoolyard appear on tests. It's very helpful."

That's a measured defense of school gardens, and a measured refutation of Flanagan's fairly indefensible argument, which is in its way as elitist and dismissive as she calls Waters. School gardens might not have been proven, yet, to make students get higher scores. But they will make students lead richer lives—and likely better-educated ones too.

UPDATE: I asked Melanie Okamoto, of the Berkeley school system, to address Flanagan's claims about student achievement; she has overseen non-Edible Schoolyard programs in many schools that also have and use gardens. She sent me a page of related and interesting links on academic performance from the California School Garden Network, and highlighted some of her and its main findings in the letter below. Her main point, then full contents of her letter.

Flanagan's claim that garden-based education fails to help our students achieve academically takes an incredibly narrow view of how garden-based programs have been used around the country to support student learning and achievement. So often it's a teacher who reports how a student was able to grasp a key concept within a hands-on context in the garden, or how another student who had not participated at all in class joined in on the discussion once in the cooking class. While these stories might seem fluffy or trite to Flanagan, they are very real to the teachers and students in the program.

NEXT: The full letter.

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Calorie Labeling Works, II

Last week Stanford University researchers released a study of the effect that calorie labeling has had at Starbucks. I was particularly interested for many reasons: first, because being a typical urban fast-food snob Starbucks is where I see calorie labeling, and where it has had an impact in my own buying patterns, and those of many people I know—everyone, I'd say, I've ever talked to who goes to Starbucks.

Second, because a very widely publicized preliminary study of consumer behavior last fall triggered a wave of gleeful gotcha reactions saying that the whole exercise is a pointless waste of money, people won't change, they like high-fat food, and sanctimonious food-police types like me—and for that matter my spouse, the health commissioner of Massachusetts, who was called "the state's irrepressible nanny-in-chief" by a local tabloid when he got a statewide calorie-labeling law passed—should stop preaching and, in true libertarian fashion, let people alone already.

This reductio ad absurdum simply consigns the poor to eternal obesity and malnutrition.

The most literary, and probably for that reason annoying, form of this argument I've seen appears in our very own new issue, I'm sorry to say—one of several egregious points in an attack on school gardens I'll have more to say about shortly. In it Caitlin Flanagan quotes the famous passage in Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier saying that "when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food"—you want the solid sugar that the Industrial Revolution made affordable for every English factory worker, or the solid fat that U.S. corn and other subsidies make affordable for every low-paid or unemployed American worker. This reductio ad absurdum simply consigns the poor to eternal obesity and malnutrition, and short-circuits any government initiatives to improve health and make better food available to everyone. It's let-'em-eat-cake under the guise of libertarian realism.

I posted my own response to the gotcha chorus, which argued that the real reason for the laws is to change food-manufacturers' behavior, not individual consumers', and that Starbucks, in fact, had changed its default milk used in cappuccinos et al from full-fat to two percent. Yesterday came the official announcement of another policy the New York City health department has been working on for over a year, an attempt to make manufacturers reduce the sodium content in their foods by 25 percent over the next five years. Again, the aim is to change the environment and make all food choices for everyone less threatening to health (and again, my spouse is one of the policy's main supporters).

The Stanford study, which compared data from Starbucks stores in New York City against stores in Boston and Philadelphia, where calorie-labeling laws are going into effect (they did on January 1 in Philadelphia, and will this November in Boston) is the first widely noted sign that people do change their ordering behavior when they see calorie counts—though not the first, as New York City health department preliminary studies, and a new study at Yale, published last month, are showing. Starbucks customers reduced calories in their food (but not their drink) orders by 6 percent overall and, more dramatically, by 26 percent if they had previously been ordering high-calorie Starbucks items. Starbucks profits didn't decrease—an answer to initial fears from food companies over labeling laws. But, unreassuringly for fast-food chains, sales at Starbucks stores within 100 meters of Dunkin Donuts stores increased by an average of three percent.

I don't think I buy the explanations the study's authors gave the press: that customers fled Dunkin Donuts in panic when they saw how many calories are in (good) doughnuts versus (bad) muffins. The two chains are very different in their approaches to coffee (though not as much as you might think, and as I'll write about at a further date—I recently spent a fascinating day with the main coffee buyer at Dunkin headquarters) and food and pricing. And the study presented two facts that will give succor to calorie-labeling enemies: posting calories had a greater effect in richer zip codes; and people go to Starbucks for coffee, anyway, not food, so the study can't be extrapolated to fast-food chains and be the told-you-so that advocates of calorie labeling have been hoping for since last October.

Still, it's good news. And Starbucks, interestingly, isn't exactly crowing. Or it is, but only as a large-scale food company can when discussing an expensive change that laws forced it to make. From a BusinessWeek online story:

"Our Starbucks data in the Stanford study helped to raise visibility on the issue of a national menu labeling standard," Jill Knisley, a Starbucks spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. "Implementing a national or global standard is costly and complex. From our perspective, the regulations and standards should be uniform to enable customers to consistently compare products and make informed choices."

This cuts two ways—more information can damage Starbucks if customers decide to go someplace else once they see a rival's information, as they might have chosen to go to Starbucks rather than Dunkin Donuts in this example. But any company forced to spend a great deal to implement a mandatory regulation wants that regulation to apply to everyone—the real strategy of New York City's lead, and a strategy that's been working.

My own, and only semi-snarky question: what would happen to sales if Starbucks actually improved its food, calorie counts be damned? Since Starbucks took high-fructose corn syrup out of all its baked goods, the baked goods have gone from very bad to more or less inedible. Howard Schultz promised this would be the first thing he'd do when he came back to save the chain! I'm still waiting eagerly.

Extreme Exception

This month's issue of the print edition of the The Atlantic has an article on the Edible Schoolyard movement, and the idea of gardens in public schools generally and especially as part of a curriculum, with which I took and take great exception. But hey, we're The Atlantic! We welcome diversity of opinion, and don't spike our valued colleagues' articles (though we do make our feelings known in frank and useful exchanges).

I fired my opening salvo in my most recent post on calorie labeling, below, and have talked at length with Alice Waters about it. But I'm waiting to get in touch with people on the ground, and in the garden, before writing further. Watch this space! And in the meantime, look at this impassioned reaction by my friends Ed Levine and Vicky Bijur on Ed's terrific Serious Eats, this strong and sensible reaction from Mother Jones, and this thoughtful and trenchant piece from the always-thoughtful Tom Philpott on Grist. From my most recent post:

The most literary, and probably for that reason annoying, form of this argument I've seen appears in our very own new issue, I'm sorry to say--one of several egregious points in an attack on school gardens I'll have more to say about shortly. In it Caitlin Flanagan quotes the famous passage in Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier saying that "when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food"--you want the solid sugar that the Industrial Revolution made affordable for every English factory worker, or the solid fat that U.S. corn and other subsidies make affordable for every low-paid or unemployed American worker. This reductio ad absurdum simply consigns the poor to eternal obesity and malnutrition, and short-circuits any government initiatives to improve health and make better food available to everyone. It's let-'em-eat-cake under the guise of libertarian realism.

Tag-Team Welcome

Today marks the debut of a perfect New Year's column: getting to cook--and eat!--while training to run the Boston Marathon. License to indulge in the desserts and carbs you're careful with the rest of the year, yes you get that--if you're training, you get to eat more of everything. And, as Eleanor Barkhorn describes, you enjoy food and feel hunger in a physical way that, like the overwhelming fatigue that comes from physical exertion, is an endorphin-producing pleasure many of us who live glued to screens crave in an almost addictive way.

But you have to be careful about what you eat, too, while taking that sensational physical pleasure. Eleanor, our Food Channel producer for the past six months, answers to the description of many people who go into training: busy all day and much of the night in front of a screen, used to cooking whatever is easy, fast, and reasonably low-calorie given the time glued to a screen. But then comes that blissful hunger and its feed-me demands, and out come the recipe books.

Out come the constraints of time and budget too. That's where Eleanor's series will be focusing: on really good food that fits into all those demands. And the food she's making already is so good that it and she will inspire many New Year's resolutions. Tis the season! (Even if my own resolutions come around the start of the school year, during the Days of Awe.)

As all of our terrific contributors know, Eleanor is not just someone with the discipline and energy to both make and fulfill New Year's resolutions for each of them and pretty much every one of our readers. She is the beating-at-trained-runner's-rhythm heart of the site, the person who keeps it humming day and night. Her virtues are as limitless as, well, the number of people who wish they could cook good food for themselves every night and ponder training for the big kahuna of marathons without even breaking a sweat.

Today marks not just the return of many from holiday break, facing up to actually making some of those postponed resolutions. It also marks the arrival of someone precisely as crucial to the Food Channel as Eleanor. As she charts a new track to managing a new part of TheAtlantic.com that will make its anticipated debut next month, Eleanor will be working closely with our equally energetic and winning new producer: Daniel Fromson.

I don't think I could be more excited about the start of a new year than I am knowing I'll have the constant presence of both Eleanor and Dan, who like most of my colleagues at The Atlantic teach me things I didn't know every day (and, like all of us who spend a good portion of our lives on the Web, every night too). Readers have already begun to discover Dan's extreme interest in food in this post, about stalking wild spicebush berries hard by, as it happened Atlantic HQ. And just last week he laid down the banh mi gauntlet to the New York Times's Sam Sifton, who heretically, to Dan's mind, prefers upscale versions of the cult Vietnamese sandwich to the back-of-jewelry store counter Dan discovered.

You'll get to discover more of Eleanor and Dan over the next months--and join me in officially welcoming two young voices I'll have the pleasure of constantly listening to and learning from.

Eleventh-Hour Food Books

I've just been out doing last-minute shopping. You're out doing last-minute shopping. Or deciding what to do with the book-buying gift certificates that always make the best Christmas gifts. Here are suggestions I've been meaning to make for too long, offered almost too late--but these are all books you should own, whenever you make your way to a bookstore and however they make their way to your or a worthy recipient's library.

My first love is Italy, so I start with two Italian-themed books you need. The first, La Cucina, is an encyclopedia by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina of over 2,000 recipes that is an essential reference for professional and home kitchens. The range and scope of the recipes, many of which you'll never have occasion to make (donkey stew, tope--a name I didn't know for shark--with garlic and finferle, Tuscan wild mushrooms substituted here with chanterelles), itself sets it apart from almost any other book, particularly one in good English.

I say "good English," because although the credited translator is Jay Hyams, I know that my friend Fred Plotkin had a great deal to do with the translation of the recipes for American kitchens. I hear his dry wit in many places--"This recipe from Toscana for beans cooked in a glass flask should ideally be made with an authentic Chianti fiasco (with or without the straw)"--and see his good sense too. And as always in a book of this size and any book Fred has anything to do with, I learn things constantly. In a brief swing through, I finally found the derivation of the common Italian, especially Roman, way to refer to offal:

the quinto quarto ("fifth quarter") on the theory that the weight of these parts, which no one usually wants--including the head, tail, hooves, and tripe--was equal to one quarter of the slaughtered animal's weight.

When you have a dish anywhere in Italy and need to make it at home, you'll want to start here.

Why Italians Love To Talk About Food is another matter altogether, as discursive as La Cucina is, for all its length, terse--a gallimaufry of a book of Italian regionalism, history, and culinary traditions. "Gallimaufry" is usually a fancy way to say "hodgepodge," and indeed there are mini-chapters within each section on subjects like Pasta or Democracy. But on initial reading, the book by an essayist and translator named Elena Kostioukovitch, looks to be a series of very wide-ranging essays divided by region, in essence trying to see the country's soul through its food. As my esteemed friend and authority Carol Field says in her foreword, "Italians talk constantly about food even when food isn't the subject." She, too, likes what she calls the "interstitial" chapters "that deal with subjects as diverse as pilgrims, the liturgical and popular calendar, democracy, slow food, Jews, primary materials, eros, and restaurants." This is a work of scholarship written to be as engaged and engaging as it is informative, and will make a very good travel companion, in advance of or after an excursion.

For sheer knockabout fun, Randall Grahm's calculatedly loony wine newsletters have finally been collected, in Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology, whose punning title indicates the tone of the collection. Everyone who can't take wine too seriously has long prized Grahm's rambling, erudite, footnote-strewn, funny writing, so much a forebear of the late David Foster Wallace that I did a quick Google search (the only linkage I found was a listing of well-known non-philosopher philosophy majors). A very random search through the pages turns up this sample dialogue:

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy than a Laube in front of me.' Can you believe that? I'm telling you, he's his own worst enemy."

For all his relentless punning and anti-establishment that is itself a direct descendant of Tom Lehrer and, closer to his southern California roots, Stan Freberg, Grahm's Bonny Doon vineyard has been enormously influential, particularly in the spicy and fruity yet medium-weight Rhone-style wines he dubbed Rhone Rangers (does anyone even remember the origin of that particular pun, Sloane rangers? His own variant seems to have lasted longer). And his labels have always been as iconoclastic as he. You'll find many notes on wines, the history of those labels, and most of all Grahm's exuberance everywhere here.

Colman Andrews, an amazingly fluid writer, is always worth reading, and his Country Cooking of Ireland is, along with John Besh's My New Orleans, the picture book to buy this season. Friends are always surprised to the point of shock when I tell them that Ireland is my favorite food country, for the unspoiled, grassy, rich quality of its ingredients, particularly, milk (the butter! the cream!), cheese, and fish. And the soft, beautiful breads...I go into a reverie just thinking of them, and you can see and read about all of them in this lush book.

Now, the unread-night-before-the-exam book that's my eleventh-hour promise: William Grimes's Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, a book I've been waiting for since I first saw an exhibition of historic New York menus Grimes curated at the New York Public Library (and got to write about it for his own paper, the Times. The book isn't full-color and lavish, but it's full of black and white pictures, and menus, and more important the history of a city and its restaurants, I can't wait to read. Anyone who loves eating out and loves New York will want this book. And really, do you want to be shopping for anyone else?

Checking It Twice

My friend Ellen, like many people I know a much more skilled cook than I, wrote with some well-taken exceptions and good additions to my post on Megan's updated kitchen gift list. With her permission I offer an abridged summary:

I completely agree with you on all points, but one: Calphalon. I took the finish completely off on two separate and newish pots, twice, with batches of a rhubarb compote. Returned pots to company, who swore this was impossible, but they admitted it and that the anodizing does go in the presence of high-acid (think also tomato sauces). I sold every piece I had, concerned about leaching of aluminum and its anodized components into food (not good).

I've had similar experience with acidic ingredients: I long heated tomato sauce in a large Calphalon pot while pasta boiled in the gorgeous Alessi double pasta pot I got as a gift (it still retails for $500! Seems like it did fifteen years ago; the company's Web site dates it to 1982), and then I would heat the drained pasta in the sauce--as you of course also do every time you make pasta. The bottom of the pot turned white years ago. I assumed it was the acid, but haven't been concerned about leaching, because once aluminum, the core material, is anodized, it is said not to leach into food, and it never occurred to me that anodizing itself could deteriorate. Similar concerns might explain why a nice-looing set of three Calphalon pots, unused, turned up recently at my local thrift shop.

Have since cooked only in stainless (Sitram), stainless-lined copper, cast iron, and enamel-lined iron (Le Creuset). Am baking Jim Lahey bread in my brand new splurge Emily Henry ceramic pot.

For some reason Le Creuset seems to be undergoing a big revival this year. Always reliable, like well-seasoned cast iron, which of course is the base, and the enamel saves you from having to worry about the seasoning to keep it fairly stick-free. Maybe it's the new colors the enamel comes in, contra Megan's advice never to buy colors you'll later regret.

I, too, haul out my ancient Cuisinart for certain but rare applications (grinding nuts with flour, making a vat of hummus every few weeks, and also for your Unbeatable Chocolate Biscotti, made frequently). My knives, the Kitchen Aid mixer, or the blender I still have (wedding present to my parents--you can imagine the colors) by far the best.

Two Cuisinarts also appeared at my local thrift shop, one the original, and handsomer, International Style squared-off design, one the less-successful rounded one. The signs said they worked perfectly. They were still dusty.

Am mystified by the Silpat craze. I don't even like the feel of it, like all those ghastly sticker rubber kids toys of gross creatures. Just bake cookies on parchment!

And buy sturdy metal cooking sheets, and lots of them. Time to decide which cookies to bake in the snow--and finally dig in to some of the new cookbooks I've been saving for this week. Report to follow, but know that my first stop is Jim Peterson's new Baking, which like all of his books--many of them written in collaboration with our Sally Schneider--will be instructive beyond the recipe at hand.

About My Father

A few weeks ago I got the kind of morning call nobody wants to, especially after you've just gotten off two long plane trips to long-planned engagements: my sister saying our father had just had a stroke and was on his way to the hospital. Don't come, she said. She was driving from Boston to the hospital in Hartford he was being taken to; my brother, a gastroenterologist in New York, was driving up at the same time.

The story had a happy ending, and not just because I'm lucky enough to have such concerned and proximate siblings, one of them a superb diagonistican and a tenacious advocate for all his patients, let alone for his father. It was because my father--a longtime family practitioner who knew he was at high risk of stroke and had no desire to live an impaired life--keeps by his bedside a note asking to be given t-PA, a powerful clot dissolver. If administered within a few hours of the first symptoms, t-PA can break up clots before they choke off blood supply in the brain, causing the kind of permanent damage my father feared.

The drug, which is given intravenously, has been in wide use for just 15 years, and the risk of causing hemorrhage is so great that either the patient or a health-care proxy must give permission for it to be used. So my father had my stepmother, Joan, write out a note saying that in the event of a stroke he wanted to get t-PA as soon as possible, and authorized its administration.

No one can say whether his stroke would have been the calamity he feared without t-PA. But he feels he dodged a bullet, and we all do too.

He was fortunate in many respects. He was not regularly taking a powerful blood thinner, which can make t-PA too dangerous, as it can cause uncontrollable hemorrhaging. Because his medical history included the minor events called transient ischemic attacks, which are often harbingers of stroke, he and his doctors knew he was at high risk for an actual stroke, and that the cause would likely be clotting rather than hemorrhaging. The distinction is crucial, because t-PA can drastically accelerate a hemorrhagic stroke, the hallmark symptom of which is an overwhelming headache. In his case, he awoke with tingling in his right arm, trouble moving his hand, and some speech slurring. "I knew damn well I was having a stroke," he told me a few days later when I visited him at St. Francis Hospital.

He'd asked to be taken to St. Francis, one of two Hartford hospitals with stroke centers, because he had been an intern there in 1949, in what was then a brand-new building. It felt like "old home week," he told me, adding that he was very glad to be in a much newer building. His mood was and remains as cheerful as he's ever been--understandable, given that his minimal speech slurring (his ability to find words was luckily not affected, only his motor skills) and trouble moving his right hand are responding well to physical therapy.

No one can say whether his stroke would have been the calamity he feared without t-PA. But he feels he dodged a bullet, and we all do too. I'm even glad he can still tell me clearly that I should have gone to medical school.

My spouse, John Auerbach, is the health commissioner of Massachusetts, and happened to mention the story to a stroke specialist he met at a meeting, Dr. Lee Schwamm, a neurologist who directs the acute stroke and telestroke center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Schwamm was not just charmed by the story: he thought that other patients could and should benefit from it, by discussing their eligibility for t-PA with their doctors and keeping similar instructions in their wallets or by their bedsides. My father was able to tell the emergency medical technicians who came within minutes that he needed to go to a stroke center; "Give me t-PA," he told them, and apparently every person he encountered at the hospital. Not all patients will be so lucky as to be able to speak. And there might be no health-care proxy available to authorize administration of the drug.

Minutes count, as this dramatic account by Richard Knox, the health reporter for NPR, shows. In it a 49-year-old woman shrugs off tingling in her arm until she and a nurse friend she calls realize she needs emergency treatment; though the hospital is 75 miles away from Mass General, direct links to the hospital and to an on-call doctor's home, in which the doctor quizzes the patient to determine exactly when the stroke began, enable her to get t-PA at exactly the last minute she is eligible. It's suspenseful and incredible to hear.

Knox also liked the story of my father, and posted a piece about it on NPR's health blog, with a picture taken by my brother. I offer it here in hopes it can help someone in your life--and with great, and general, gratitude.

Gift Guide Cont'd: The Right 'Tude

Who really wants to go shopping at the holidays? Okay, it can be fun, especially when kids are aching to go, or children come back to visit and actually view expeditions as fun (like my cool stepdaughter, who lives in cool Park Slope).

But too often it's forced, and not when you want it. So for relief, I recommend our contributor Sally Schneider's site The Improvised Life, which includes posts about the marvelous food she makes in places likely and un-, like the corn cakes with slow-cooked meat she recently and satisfyingly scrounged together in a friend's cabin in the West Virginia Appalachians.

But the meat of the site is reports from her eye, and it's enormously wide-ranging. Sally is a stylist by trade and, more important, inclination--someone who by nature constantly trains her eye, and is always looking for something she hasn't seen, and something she finds appealing. As with many people who have style in their bones, that tends toward great simplicity.

You have to give a few real objects, and she's got good ideas for those. And how to make the way you wrap them as personal and, well, improvised as the style she embodies.

So you'll find links to videos, posters, living rooms of other people's houses she's come across herself or on the Web, and explanations of why she was struck. I wasn't surprised that one image was a holiday card designed by Maira Kalman, one of my favorite visual observers--and that it was for a much better gift that something found at the last minute: a contribution to the charity of your choice.

Of course, you have to give a few real objects, and she's got good ideas for those. And how to make the way you wrap them as personal and, well, improvised as the style she embodies. I like the way she lays out her holiday philosophy:

If you start with the idea that the holidays are about really giving a part of yourself rather than STUFF, and spreading joy, and celebrating what we have, you instantly start to eliminate the nonessential and stressful. These are the things that are more obligation than fun - too exhausting, too expensive, or just TOO MUCH - like shopping for the perfect gift for too many people, or giving the perfect party with a million homemade hors d'oeuvres. Where do we get these notions of how the holidays are supposed to be?

I like her suggestions too. Have a look at what she's looking at.

Gift Guide: Get Going

One of the greatest pleasures of having Megan McArdle as a colleague is not only her irrepressibly opinionated company but her irrepressibly opinionated annual kitchen gift list, which she posted today. This is Megan at her sharpest, sardonic but enthusiastic best. Of course, she's very strong-minded. Of course, I disagree with a number of her recommendations. But not that many--it's really good. So in the spirit of the spirited debate we thrive on here at TheAtlantic.com, here are a couple of cavils with this year's installment.

I agree with the recommendation against an expensive steel mandoline, that dangerous but beautiful kitchen trophy no one actually uses, and the Kyocera is probably one of the best of the low-priced fixed-blade slicers available. But pretty much any one will work for what you need it for (carrots, potatoes), and I part with her enthusiasm for Kyocera ceramic knives, which break not just when you drop them but when you slice into something with too much force. I write this from my brother's apartment, in New York, where among the most expensive knives in his drawer is a ceramic model with a very snub, very truncated nose and jagged front edge. I, who am clumsy, didn't manage this particular break, and I don't know who did--but he's an MD who knows how to do surgery! And both of his grown children are able cooks trained by their superlative French-Tunisian cook grandmother and mother. Buy metal knives.

After years of prof-chef indoctrination that tongs are the one essential kitchen tool, I've decided I hate them. They're clumsier than I am, and tear into chicken skin and pretty much anything I grab with them in the oven or a saute pan. I use many Oxo products, whose fat rubber handles are particularly good for klutzes like me--I go through at least a vegetable parer a year, some years two--but won't bother with this one.

The rotating potato/apple peeler, Rotato: I spent much of a late Yom Kippur afternoon hearing its virtues extolled by a longtime family friend who was preparing something with apples for the break fast--why is it that discussions of the break fast pick up special steam as the afternoon wears on and double digits of hours fasted climb? In any case he started with the standard apology that they sound like something hawked on late-night public-access cable TV but really liked them, so I made a new year's resolution to try one.

The Bodum tea press Megan links to is fine, and the wide, inset filter is one of my two favorite ways to make a big pot of leaf tea, something I do every morning. But I prefer old-fashioned, cuppa-style ceramic teapots with metal-filter insets; you can lift out the filter easily after four or (no more than) five minutes, and metal or nylon mesh is finer and I think better than the largish holes of the Bodum plastic inset. Also nylon/metal mesh and ceramic pots are easier to clean thoroughly. But my morning method is in a big glass press pot of the kind Jerry Baldwin and many others favor for coffee. Press down the metal filter after four minutes.

Rabbit corkscrews, as Megan generically calls what came into wide foodie use as the Screwpull, their first widely known manufacturer, are indeed the easiest and best. But in the past year I've broken my third one, progressing to ever-cheaper models: I pull the top lever back too far and it sticks in open-jaw position, and the wine shops I schlep the disabled, silly-looking spread-out openers to for a quick fix have no fix at all to offer. I guess I really am a klutz. Any ideas? In the meantime, my advice is to follow Megan to Costco, or the very cheapest one you can find.

Hand mixers: fine for egg whites and a quick souffle or something when you don't want to haul out the Kitchen Aid, but otherwise why bother with anything but a standing Kitchen Aid, as Megan wisely advocates. And I truly admire that she travels with a hand mixer, which I hope will become a leitmotif of her every dispatch from wherever she goes.

I agree on the utility of Calphalon, though they're not the handsomest pots in the world they're certainly indestructible and reliable. Their high prices may be what equips the stunning Calphalon cooking school I saw on a huge factory floor in a hip Soho-like Toronto neighborhood called, in fact, Soho. The hip and attractive young people working there told me it was the only such center in North America outside Chicago, which is much smaller, and that it offers hands-on cooking classes every day. Just the layout and equipment of the cooking stations and demonstration kitchen alone are a must stop on any Toronto tour, and of course there's a full range of products in the cellar, though the emphasis, remarkably, is on the school rather than the merchandise.

A standing Kitchen Aid was among the first things I bought with my first paychecks, straight out of college, and unlike much of what I bought (see mandoline, above) something that travels with me everywhere I live (vs Megan and the portable Kitchen Aid in her purse). I agree that you'll regret anything but white in the long run, and that the long run will apply.

She even makes me want to try a Kitchen Aid food processor, though its Target/Philippe Starck attempt at brushed-steel biomorphic cool looks pretty misbegotten. And I long ago relegated my perfect, beautiful, professional-model Cuisinart (bought right after the Kitchen Aid) to a dusty drawer. I guess the processor just does too many things! I pretty much never need it when there's a knife and a Kitchen Aid mixer available--and a blender, which is not only svelter and genuinely retro but more generally useful.

I use an older-model Cuisinart countertop oven when visiting my father and stepmother in Osprey, Florida, in the winter, and agree about its general utility, though my able-cook stepmother still misses a big oven, and you can't really roast meats or bake a full-scale pie. But Cuisinart is good at ovens, and after trying every Black and Decker toaster oven and snazzier DeLonghis, I've happily retreated to a big, somewhat clunky, reliable Cuisinart model.

This year's bonus section on bad ideas that seemed good at the time is a very good idea. Knife sharpeners don't work right, at least not in my hands (see above) and probably not in yours I'll venture to say. I went through my every-decade of rite of trying new ones when doing a piece on knife maker Adam Simha (maker of excellent holiday gifts), and go down the street to Gadgets, in Jamaica Plain, or to Kitchen Arts, the terrific locally owned store in Boston's Back Bay, for knife sharpening that works and doesn't hack up my knives.

I agree on the illusory versatility of silicone--great for rolling pins, not great for cake pans and not even for the Silpat sheets everyone loves and I have rolled up in the basement waiting to give to unsuspecting newlyweds. They're better for rolling than anything else; cookies don't brown as well as they do on plain old single-sheet cookie tins. Which I'll be bringing out again in just a few weeks, and stocking up on baking parchment.

Which brings us back to--books! The best gift. See my previous posts on Besh and Apple, and more to come.

The Aristocrat of Sandwiches

Suddenly it's New Orleans week on the site, between my romance with John Besh's book and Justin Vogt's romance with the po-boy, which includes a hunger-inducing slide show.

I've eaten my share of po-boys, always noting the contrast between the deep-fried batter (whatever you have, the deep-fried batter is what makes it good, I say heretically), the shredded iceberg lettuce, and the creamy sauce. The bread just holds it together, and is the kind of light, airy, mostly flavorless baguette that still has an honored place in France and abroad in the new world of levain and wild yeasts. It's really all crust as the crumb is so light--and the crust isn't too crackly and is generally a very light tan, in keeping with its deliberately subservient role.

I'd had plenty of Leidenheimer baguettes, the ones purists usually insist on because there are almost no contenders for traditional baguette, but have never seen the wooden slicing crib you'll see in the slide show--and certainly never tasted anything like the winner of the po-boy contest Vogt describes, a "Caminada" made by the Grand Isle restaurant,

with the East Asian flavors that have crept into southern Louisiana cuisine thanks in part to the region's vibrant Vietnamese community. The base consisted of a chili-garlic butter, in which the shrimp was cooked along with parsley, a bit of anchovy, and lime juice...Sandwiched between two slices of Leidenheimer bread, the Caminada was a flavor machine.

It's a sign of cultural renewal every tradition needs--and particularly in New Orleans, where traditions are at particular risk post-Katrina. Sandy Whann, the owner of Leidenheimer and a prime mover of the festival, talks about the sandwich's role in the community--in passing along the city itself:

"I worried that young kids who were susceptible to advertising from the big chains might migrate away from the po-boy shops in their own neighborhoods," he explained. "Going to those places teaches you to interact with other people from your community, and that ability is part of what brought this city back after Katrina."

As for what's being passed along, read the origins of the name. They're not what you think, and not what I thought either--and a sign of why a proud city needs to stay proud. Judging by Vogt's experience, it's doing just that. By eating, of course.

Buy Besh's Book

Cyber Monday for online shopping, Black Friday for what I think should be called Digestion Day--as shopping season gets under way, it's time to start thinking of gift books, which of course gives you a chance to consider which books you want for yourself. This season offers plenty, whatever is happening in the rest of print and book publishing.

I'm going through the stack that found their way too me and collecting more, and the most beautiful I've seen so far is My New Orleans: The Cookbook. John Besh is becoming a national celebrity chef--facing Mario Batali on Iron Chef, making talk-show rounds, with TV-ready looks and the genial, laid-back manner and ready, ivory smile he actually wears in repose off camera.

I first met Besh in 2005 at the Southern Foodways Alliance, when he spoke on a panel just after Hurricane Katrina about how restaurants were faring. His efforts to feed rescue workers, open his elegant Restaurant August almost immediately, and help fellow chefs get on their feet are by now New Orleans legend. But they were just an extension of his can-do, idyllic Bayou childhood, raised by a Marine father and his own years in the Marines, and the family-centered magnanimity that is everywhere in the book.

Aside from recipes that can get you cooking even immediately after a Thanksgiving marathon, the book has archival pictures of New Orleans that make it a trip into the city and region's present and past. One of the French Market, for instance, with its sloppy chaos, looks right out of the 1880s; only the telephone poles make it seem even plausible that the date was 1955. And there are farms, and hunting and fishing grounds Besh grew up around, and of course lush food pictures. I say "of course" because the editor and co-author was Dorothy Kalins, the marvelously stylish and substantive founding editor of the US version of Saveur and former executive editor of Newsweek.

This is a feast of a book, and appropriately to the city it's organized around feast days. You're only slightly late in using the book for its chapter on Thanksgiving, preparing for which is "an event in itself":

We take our feasts quite seriously here, striving to serve as many people as possible as many dishes as possible, while staying very close to tradition, never straying from the recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation.

(I'm hoping for pictures of Regina Charboneau's cast-of-hundreds annual Thanksgiving in Natchez, a three-hour drive from New Orleans and governed by the same spirit.) But you're not too late for a fall-greens salad with blue cheese and pumpkin seed brittle with cayenne--a brittle I've gotten extra plates of at Restaurant August--or, next month, bourbon pecan pie with blackstrap molasses, brown sugar, and corn syrup.

And you're in plenty of time for New Year's Eve (Reveillon) turtle soup, oyster dressing with of course bacon, and, for lunch the next day, crackling corn bread with requisite white corn meal. Then there'll be Passover, with Creole matzo ball soup, and a frustratingly tempting summer selection of all sorts of berries of the kind he grew up picking, with a salad of heirloom tomatoes, cheese, and country ham that makes me want to violate the seasons now, and "light and airy" fig cake with cane syrup--the secret and important native sweetener I grew addicted to thanks to the Southern Foodways Alliance.

"He really is as good as he seems," Kalins says in an editor's note at the end, and this book will convince you he's the real thing. (I admire her decision not to exploit Besh's equally photogenic family and four tousled little boys, who appear only in passing.) So will this chapter introduction:

Most cooks grow up almost totally removed from the source of their food--from farming and the most elementary practices of harvesting and preserving; giving animals a better life is an alien idea to most of them. Yet I have never met a great chef who did not have a respect for the origins of their ingredients. So, over the years, I've found it very effective to take my cooks out of the kitchen and into the woods, face to face with mosquitoes, snakes, wasps, and all the creatures of the wild.

Take a trip to Besh's bayou.

The panel where I first encountered Besh was moderated by R.W. Apple, who recounted it in this New York Times article, written with his typical elegance and dispatch. Whatever food books you buy this season, be sure to buy Far Flung and Well Fed (my piece celebrating it here) for yourself. It's a readable feast.

Great Pies For a Good Cause

As many of us settle into an annual case of pie panic, or are pushing back chairs after too much pumpkin and pecan, I have a trunk full of four perfect and beautiful pies--one apple, two pecan, two pumpkin. I only opted out of sweet potato.

Are these the best pies my family and friends--29, my cousin Jed, our genial host, informs me, down from the 32 my father mentioned when I saw him and my stepmother on Sunday--will ever have? Well, until next year, when I bring back more pies, all from different restaurants and bakeries. This year I plan to generously cut and serve three of the pies--and be very stingy with the the pecan one baked by Sofra, a new Turkish-themed bakery and restaurant whose chef, Ana Sortun, appeared in our video cooking her husband Chris Kurth's produce in her kitchen at Oleana restaurant. At Sofra, Maura Kilpatrick, her partner and pastry chef, makes pastries that are much too good, including chocolate-hazelnut baklava with cocoa honey; I can't wait to see what she does with pecans and (usually cloying, near-unbearable) corn syrup.

David Waters had the brilliant idea of tapping into America's collective fear of pie crusts, and I had a mandate never to make a pie again, at least not at Thanksgiving.

Milquetoast! you cry. Don't you know how to make a crust? Well, yes, I spent years as an obsessive, persistent pie crust maker, writing articles far more patient and and perfectionist than Choire Sicha's raucously funny "Stop Being A Wuss"pie-crust instructions this week. If my mother made pies every day for a month when she was first married to teach herself how, I could take many classes and make a crust nearly as light, and I documented my efforts in one of my first Atlantic columns. Every year I would dare my family, assembled at our Connecticut Thanksgiving, to say my late mother made a better pie crust (of course, she did).

But then David Waters had the brilliant idea of tapping into America's, or at least Boston's, collective fear of pie crusts, and I had a mandate never to make a pie again, at least not at Thanksgiving.

David, then head of fundraising for Community Servings, Boston's only home-delivered meals program for people homebound with AIDS and their families, thought that local restaurants and bakeries could donate pies that people too lazy or fearful--sorry, busy--to bake would happily pay for. Pie in the Sky, he said it should it be called. Proud pie crust bakers like me thought it an odd, marginal idea. Boy, was I wrong.

Today Pie in the Sky is one of our two most important fundraisers of the year--and as of the middle of Wednesday it had sold $420,000 worth of pies at $25 apiece, our biggest year ever. That's not just a lot of pies. It's dozens of restaurants, bakeries and, even more important, terrifically energetic and inventive volunteers who spend months marketing and organizing the mobilization that's just ending as I write. The event has come a long way from the days when I rented a station wagon to make emergency deliveries on the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and called up large commercial bakers to twist their arms to supply pies at cost when our orders outran supplies.

Community Servings has come a long way, too. Amazingly to those of us who've been involved since the beginning, it's about to celebrate its 20th birthday, in a great new building I pass every night on the way home in Jamaica Plain, Boston's best neighborhood (okay, the country's, but I'm not prejudiced). David Waters is now our visionary CEO. We've expanded way beyond Boston city limits, too, into much of eastern Massachusetts, and beyond the original HIV/AIDS mission to include many other illnesses that keep people at home and unable to cook for themselves and their families.

More another time on the remarkable professional kitchen and staff that turns out thousands of meals a week of very high quality, finely differentiated according to various dietary needs. For now, a column by the Boston Globe's Yvonne Abraham on what keeps us all dedicated: going out on a delivery van with one of the drivers who become family friends. Abraham went out with the remarkable Bobcat Smith, a former heroin and cocaine user who met his current wife when she trained him at Community Servings. He's a great guy. But in fact all the drivers are remarkable, and all form a strong and healing bond with the people they serve. Here's Smith:

"I loved the way they made me feel when I brought their meals to them, the love and respect they gave me,'' he said. "We got attached.'' One day, he knocked on the door and the husband appeared, tears streaming down his face. His wife had died. "I cried with him for 45 minutes,'' Bobcat says.

Bobcat will be out on the road again today, making special Thanksgiving deliveries, his bags heavy with roast turkey, herbed stuffing, and sugar-free pumpkin pie. He will chat with the people who seem to need it, and sing for the ones who will let him.

The days before Thanksgiving pose a huge logistical challenge for the Community Servings staff: not just getting the last of thousands of pies out the door but also a week's worth of meals and a special Thanksgiving menu and bag of separate fixings.

That's over. The mission isn't. And neither is the chance to support Community Servings, either with a donation here or, even better, one of the great posters that make me think Josephine Baker is going to pop out of one of our pies at the Thanksgiving table. All of us who work with CS have stolen a poster (or two) since they first came in, two or so months ago. We'll be selling the leftovers for $15, and maybe there'll be enough to sell the equally terrific-looking labels for each of the four kinds of pies, which some of us plan to frame. Non-edible leftovers suitable for framing, that help feed others! A true reason to give thanks.

Everything You Need To Know About Turkey

We all read and talk about the importance of buying humanely treated meat raised by farm families that still care about their animals, their land, and their community. Some of us dedicate our lives to it--either to finding people who do that and trying to bring them to wider attention or by getting up every morning and actually tending livestock and lend.

Two of those people are now on the site, with some of the most moving and sensible images and words I've seen on heritage turkeys. Lisa M. Hamilton, a writer and photographer who specializes in sustainability-minded farms around the world, documents a recent project in Sonoma County joining Slow Food, the good group RAFT (Renewing America's Food Traditions), and a local 4-H club to save endangered birds by raising and eating them. Teenagers in 4-H spent the summer raising birds, and just this weekend was the time to slaughter and dress them.

The spare, weathered barns, fields, and teenagers and grandparents Hamilton shows joining forces bring home the lessons of supporting local food as no amount of our preaching can. Without needing to point it out, she shows us hope and community. That's a lesson I'll be thinking about this Thursday--but whatever you're thinking about, please look at those pictures.

The always passionate and engaged Nicolette Hahn Niman provides the practical payoff to the long and good guide she started last week, telling you exactly what to look for at your market if you haven't bought your turkey yet. It's full of good advice about what catchphrases like "organic" and "free-range" and "antibiotic-free" mean and, especially, don't mean, and the phrases you should pay the most attention to--advice always good to bear in mind when buying meat. Plus she gives a link to her own go-to guy, Dan Barber, on how cook heritage birds, a question friends have been asking me, and I've been pointing them there. (It was Dan who introduced me to Lisa Hamilton--as always, he's central to what we're thinking about farming and sustainability.)

My own go-to gal on roasting meat and birds is Barbara Kafka, who this morning posted a note on her own Web site full of her usual independent-thinking, contrarian thoughts about how to roast the bird you buy: forget brining now and forever (hint--think kosher birds); don't baste; don't even dream of teaching yourself to truss. Stick a turkey, heritage included (she just told me she long ago put in her order for two Bronzes) on a roasting pan and into a 500-degree oven, legs to the rear. "Squiggle" it around on the pan after 15 minutes so it doesn't stick to the rack. Then just wait until it's done, following the roasting times in her book--yep, there's the catch, you need to buy the book to get the timings. It's worth it. Her post on the next page.

Meanwhile, the Web is full of other advice. I always go for the writing, and I'm following Sam Sifton, who's answering questions on his own New York Times blog in his droll, right-there way. Who can resist an answer that starts this way, turkey be damned?

As the pretty girls say in the movies, turning the book readers down for the prom and blowing off the kind boys who won't feel joy for a decade, when the lacrosse stars have gone to seed: Timing is everything.

Not me. Even if my own Thanksgiving timing involves logistics I haven't started thinking about. Hamilton and Niman will get you thinking about this week and beyond.

NEXT: Barbara Kafka's tips for cooking a turkey

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Welcome, Mike Taylor

This morning we have the first of what I hope will be frequent updates from Michael Taylor, a senior adviser to Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. As our Marion Nestle wrote to hail his appointment:

He really is a good choice for this job. Why? Because he managed to get USDA to institute HACCP (science-based food safety regulations) for meat and poultry against the full opposition of the meat industry--a truly heroic accomplishment. His position on food safety has been strong and consistent for years. He favors a single food agency, HACCP for all foods, and accountability and enforcement. We need this for FDA-regulated foods (we also need enforcement for USDA-regulated foods, but he won't be able to touch that unless Congress says so). So he's the person most likely to be able to get decent regulations in place and get them enforced.

I first met Taylor and heard him speak at a conference at MIT for Knight fellows in science journalism, at which he described frankly the past 15 years or so of work the USDA and FDA had done both with and without his consultation: he has previously worked at both agencies and also, as Nestle noted, at Monsanto. I knew as soon as I heard his lucid, reasonable, forceful talk that I wanted to hear from him on the Food Channel, and cheered when he returned to the FDA.

Already the agency is taking bold positions many would argue it should have taken years ago, years when it has lacked the funding to do what many both inside and outside the agency wanted it to--particularly to ensure food safety, and put in place the teeth to enforce regulation.

Along with the crucial business of food safety, Margaret Hamburg is setting a new tone at the agency regarding straightforward and easily comprehensible nutrition information exactly where people need it--on the label. The success of the standardized calorie, portion, sodium, fat, and other nutritional information on labels has given to rise to claims on boxes that need sorting and pruning. As Taylor says in his debut post, the commissioner and he intend to do that sorting and pruning. The kind of claims that the industry made in its Smart Choices program, which Nestle took the lead in what became wide ridicule--in her typically abashed way, she said of her own opinion, "Mine is that the Smart Choices program is a travesty and the sooner it disappears, the better"--will be a thing of the past. Industry will work in concert with the FDA to straighten out and make consistent the information rushed shoppers get.

That's one of only a few programs--some long-term, many urgently short-term--that Taylor, Hamburg, and their colleagues deal with all day and often night long at the agency. I'm really, really pleased that we'll be getting to hear some of their reports as they face those problems head on.

A Cake Obsession

Some writers I know from the first word I'll read with surprise, admiration, delight, and yes, envy at the sheer craft she or he has put a lifetime into learning. A number of them are in the new annual food issue of The New Yorker: Calvin Trillin on poutine, the appalling but kind of irresistible Canadian national dish of french fries and fried cheese curd--"which might be described as Cheddar before the taste is added"--under brown gravy (even after last week's very pleasurable Canadian excursion, I remain a poutine virgin and have no plans to lose my innocence); Jane Kramer on Thanksgivings she has cooked in exotic places in exotic company, with the frequent expat's experience of never finding a turkey and of forcing friends from home to pack and schlep ridiculous items in ridiculous amounts; Adam Gopnik on cookbooks, a piece my brother called me up the night his issue arrived to insist I see and whose first page in particular I in turn urge you to read.

But I reserve special pleasure for Mimi Sheraton on the page--or on the screen; since the summer she has been writing for a new online magazine on Jewish life called Tablet, as she told me when I recently ran into her and her husband, Richard Falcone, at the Greenwich Village market near their house (typical opening line: "What are you doing at my market?"). As always, she picks subjects I want to know more about, for instance this piece on pretzels and salt as an appropriate housewarming gift for Eastern European Jews; I too was taught always to bring bread and salt when visiting a new house, and fresh, salt-flecked pretzels, a great Germanic tradition that is happily, if too slowly, being revived, is an ideal way to do it.

In the food issue Sheraton introduces readers to another German baked specialty, a field of particular expertise; her two books on German food, The German Cookbook andVisions of Sugarplums, are indispensable references that will never leave my shelves. This cake consumed me in the late 1980s, as it first consumer her in the early 1960s, when she was researching her first German cookbook: Baumkuchen, stacks of tapered concentric rings on a cone spindle, exactly like those plastic children's toys in blatant, gumdrop-colored plastic but these all a buff honey color--and, mysteriously, baked in crepe-thin layers that show their own concentric rings when you cut into them, like beets cut crossways.

I was introduced to the plain, buttery, light cake with deliciously browned edges and dozens of them when visiting a graduate-level cooking school in a very small town in northern Germany. The town was Wolfenbuttel, and the somewhat unforgettable name of the school, listings for which I still find on the Web but not a Web site, was the Bundefachschule Fur Das Konditoren-Handwerk. The then-director, Gregor Frey, led me around, and our first stop was the room where I fell in wondrous love. I was able to rediscover my moment of discovery on my hard drive, thanks to the miracle of X1, the indexing program James Fallows and I can't live without:

My favorite of the rooms I prowl, closely followed by Frey, is the baking room. I watch him supervise the making of a Baumkuchen ("tree cake")--the emblem of the school, whose image appears with almost fetishistic regularity on brochures and even atop the gateposts at the driveway. A Baumkuchen looks like a child's toy with fat stacking rings, and it is even higher, with about a seven-inch diameter at the base. It tastes like a pound cake, and the school's batter is similar (for each cake, start with 50 eggs and a month's supply of butter). The stacked rings are sliced off horizontally and cut through vertically, so that each slice reveals vertical striations that look like the rings of a tree.

Frey has helped design the equipment the white-knuckled student, tall and thin and awkward, is using--an oven that looks like a rotisserie, with a trough at waist level filled with quarts of batter. A snub-nosed metal cone is slipped onto the spit and tied with string like a salami. The core is dipped into the trough, and a thin layer of batter sticks to the string. Each layer bakes quickly and the core is again spun in the batter. After the first few layers the student rakes the cake with an indented comb and spoons on more batter. This is where Frey comes in, taking less batter at a time, patiently dribbling more onto the emerging stacked-ring shape, closing the oven and occasionally peering in with an anxious concern that the student reflects.

I now learn from Sheraton's recent researches that the machine I was looking at was one of two sorts; the other is more of a traditional rotisserie in which the baker ladles spoonful after spoonful of batter over the spit as it turns, creating the ring. I saw the easier, more evolved version, which Sheraton finds in a Chicago shop called Lutz Cafe and Pastry Shop, which jumps to the head of my next Chicago itinerary.

Sheraton finds much else, including current sources, among them the Japanese pastry shop I always stop in at Rockefeller Center, Minamoto Kitchoan--where I now remember I did see Baumkuchen rings, along with other pancakes and cakes using a similar blond, airy, eggy batter. And she traces the history back to eastern and northern Europe, and twentieth-century Japan. With her impeccable ear she quotes a fifth-generation German konditorei proprietor named Elisabeth Kreutzkamm-Aumuller, who was offering baumkuchn samples at last summer's Fancy Food show (I missed them! How? Never again), who recounts young women entering her shop and asking whether they should have salad or cake: "What a question! If nobody wants my beautiful cakes, who will learn to be a baker?"

There's the dilemma facing almost every artisan practicing a dying craft--not, I hope, like Sheraton's lapidary prose, as I once and still describe it. In this case, there's an easy answer: find some Baumkuchen and eat it.

Save the Bluefin Tuna--But Don't Forget Herring

Yesterday, the day the Atlantic tuna commission voted at its Brazil meeting to reduce the eastern bluefin quota from 19,500 to 13,500 tons--a move the World Wildlife Fund, among many others including our own Barry Estabrook and the World Wildlife Foundation, considers completely inadequate to protect the fish--the Boston Globe published an op-ed about a similar fish-quote meeting today written by Peter Kaizer, a Nantucket fisherman (I guess there still are some) who fishes bluefin tuna.

If the WWF, Estabrook, and others have their way, Kaizer will have to find some means to make a living until at least 2019, the first time a sustainable bluefin fishery might come back if the bluefin fishery were closed for several years. I'll refrain from making a possibly callous remark about Nantucket being to real estate what bluefin are to commercial fish--that is scarce and overpriced--and applaud Kaizer for his concern over the fish today's meeting will discuss: herring, bluefin's main supply of food in the northeastern Atlantic. Herring, Kaizer writes, has been mismanaged and underprotected for decades by industrial trawlers that come far too close to shore:

Small boat fishermen like me have been sounding the alarm about the herring stock for years, especially on Nantucket Shoals, and trying to convince fisheries managers that the creation of an industrialized, midwater trawl herring fleet in our local waters was a big mistake.

He notes today's meeting of the New England Fisheries Management Council, which will call for new quotas, and hopes it will follow the recommendation of one independent group that has called for at least a 40 percent cut, a recommendation bolstered by another that warned that industrial trawlers are killing herring's central breeding stocks.

I feel about herring the way I do about sardines: it's the fish we should be eating, rather than the predatory fish that feast on it--though I admit to a fairly extreme fondness for striped bass, another fish that devours herring. As with sardines and other fish low on the food chain, herring is richly flavored and meaty. It's also one of the things I most look forward to in visits to Russ and Daughters, in New York--though its supply of the herring I like best, fresh, comes from Holland and only in the late spring, as the great gourmand Jason Epstein wrote in this piece quoted on the store's Web site. Mark Federman, the store's owner, uses Canadian and Baltic herring, too; his is the herring that can make you a convert who cares about herring's future, and you can get it by mail order.

For several years, the striped bass fishery was closed, largely because of a PCB scare. It came back, and was worth the wait. I'd gladly forgo bluefin tuna for the decade until it could be made sustainable again, and would miss herring a lot more. Today's fisheries council meeting could take steps to keep striped bass and recovering bluefin well-supplied--and our tables too.

The Uma Thurman of Pears

Zeke's post today comes just as I arrive home after almost a week in Ontario. The trip included two days in Toronto, where I went up and down Kensington and Baldwin Streets, the heart of the Kensington Market, looking for the kinds of fruits we don't find in Boston. The profusion is particularly painful in Chinatown, which first off is on a broad avenue, Spadina, with almost unimaginably broad sidewalks that allow almost half a supermarket to spill out onto the street. The mangosteen, rambutan, and cherimoya were spiny, grooved, and beautifully fresh. How I wanted to take some home!

But I get into enough trouble with the USDA inspectors at customs as it is, including a stern warning last time that if I failed to declare cheese I could be fined hundreds of dollars and maybe, the inspector said darkly, worse. Did I not realize I was lying when I said I wasn't bringing in any food? (I looked last night at the line on the form that mentions fresh fruit, meats, and the other things I long ago gave up trying to get in; "food" was the fourth or so and penultimate item. Does it mean chocolates, spice mixes, baking powder, and the like too? For another day and trip.)

The fruit I most wanted to bring home, though, were the Abate pears I fell on with happy recognition at the (mostly Asian-run) greengrocers of Kensington Market. These look like Boscs in a fun-house mirror--way longer, but a similar mottled light brown that's sometimes green, and a marvelously curvaceous bottom with an elegant, long, tapered body. Kind of the Uma Thurman of pears.

Best, of course, is the flesh: buttery and sweet, but not as cloyingly perfumed as Comice can be, and, though not spicy like Seckel or Bosc or as refreshing as Zeke's Asian pears, sweet and perfumed. They're essence of pear, almost the best possible (I reserve the "almost" because when Seckels are ripe but a bit firm and at the height of their spicy season, it's hard to think of a better pear). They're like a cross between the crisp flavor of a Bosc and the sweet butteriness of a good Bartlett, without descending into the one-note syrupy sweetness that by the end of a fresh Bartlett makes them taste like the canned Bartletts we all grew up eating. One source advises against leaving the core or seeds, arguing how good they are and good for you.

But why have I never found them outside Italy, where I devour them, walking down the street eating curvaceous end first like an ice-cream cone? I mean not in this country. The sources I find, both Italian reference books and on the Web, say they're a cross made by one Abbe Fetel in 1866 in the Savoie region of France; despite the French origin, some sites claim they're the most popular pear in Italy, and the Italian name ("Abate" means "abbott," Abbe' would be the French word) suggests that they took hold more firmly in Italy than France. Surely they can be grown in the United States--and probably are, but I haven't been looking in the right places or under the right name.

Anybody got any ideas? Really, you don't have to keep your source to yourself. We'll leave plenty of Abates for you too. Just maybe not quite as perfectly ripe as the ones I found at the Kensington Market.

Last of the Great Green Beans

On a fall trip to Napa, I was lucky enough to have dinner made by one of my favorite cooks, Janet Fletcher, author of Fresh From The Farmers' Market and other books--an incredible 18, according to her bio on the site of the San Francisco Chronicle, where she's a contributor. I've long known Fletcher as one of the most common-sense and thorough of food writers, with a sensibility perfectly attuned to what's in season and fresh, uncomplicated, tasty food--maybe a result of her being a graduate of the Chez Panisse kitchen in addition to the Culinary Institute of America. And maybe it's from getting to live and garden--her bio says she's a certified Master Gardener, which sounds nearly as difficult as being a Master Sommelier--in Napa, where I perhaps romantically think it's hard not to be attuned to fresh food.

As is often the case with writers working on cookbooks, we got to have recipes Fletcher is testing for her next book--about, as it happens, a woman from another part of the world with that same sensibility, Calabria, and a bountifully good cook named Rosetta Costantino, whose family emigrated when she was 14 and set about growing and preserving as much as they could in their own traditions. Now Costantino teaches her own classes in Sonoma, and is collaborating with Fletcher, who first wrote about her five years ago. With just a touch of envy, Fletcher, who has her own large garden, told me in a letter, "Rosetta's father, who was a farmer in Calabria, maintains the garden in her backyard. You have never seen such gorgeous produce. The secret, apparently, is rabbit manure."

These beans are best overcooked, and yes you read that right.

Obviously, the family has other secrets worth knowing, and Fletcher will reveal them in her next book. She made two dishes so good I immediately demanded the recipes, and she kindly provided them, with the permission of both Costantino and their publisher, Norton. I'll save one with unbelievably good pork ribs as sauce for big wide pasta noodles for when the weather gets colder, and give one now for my favorite green beans: big wide romanos.

In the height of farmer's market season, August through October, I buy ridiculous quantities of romanos, and spend even more ridiculous amounts of time topping and tailing them, as the English would say--though as my friend Sheryl Julian, editor of The New Boston Globe Cookbook, once pointed out as I complained about how much time it took, you only have to top them--the curlicue tail is perfectly edible.

These beans are best overcooked, and yes you read that right. Like the incredibly good baked Jonagold apples my stepmother made for a Connecticut visit this weekend--I told her that I considered the baking dish of six to be a single serving, and of course everyone chuckled though I wasn't joking--the beans hold their shape with long cooking and only get better with time. (My stepmother's secret is a deep pool of maple syrup from Bradway's Sugar House in Stafford Springs, which we visited during sugar season when I was a child; you can call them at 860-684-7112 to see if they're able to send any by mail. Wherever you buy syrup, though, always try to find grade B, which has far better flavor than grade A.)

I devoted an entire article myself to the virtues of long-cooked romanos, giving a Tuscan recipe for them stewed with tomatoes, onion, and fennel seed, still one of my favorite suppers. (It's not on our site! To appear in the collected works, I'm afraid.) Costantino's recipe is a variation--a room-temperature salad dressed with red-wine vinegar and including lots of garlic. I couldn't stop eating it, not just because of my love of long-cooked romanos--when Fletcher came over, we began with a cook-off of three kinds from the Napa farmer's market I'd been to that morning--but because it had something salty but deep that combined with the garlic to make a powerfully alluring flavor.

This was a touch Fletcher couldn't resist adding, though it sure isn't Tuscan or Calabrian. I didn't get it, because it was so out of context, though it clicked as soon as she told me:

Being a salt fiend, I can't resist adding a splash of Thai fish sauce to the dressing for these beans, and when I can get the mild Torpedo onions (the elongated red ones), I add some sliced red onion, too. I think Rosetta would approve of the red onion but not the fish sauce.

Her recipe, with introduction in Costantino's voice, is here. The splash of fish sauce is up to you.

In the past few weeks I've haunted the last of the farmer's markets around Boston--some of which last until the week before Thanksgiving. (We don't yet have a year-round farmer's market, as we envy New York City and Portland, Maine for having, though this group is working to start one.) And, of course, I've bought every last romano bean I could. And I've found some! I hope you do, too, and that you try either tomato-fennel seed stew or this salad, fish sauce or no. Just be sure to overcook them, please.

Recipe: Insalata di Fagiolini Verdi (Italian Green Bean Salad)

Who Should Eat Meat?

In the august house chamber of the beautifully restored Texas state capitol building yesterday, two committed vegetarians took on two committed meat-eaters as part of the great Texas Book Festival. The festival is a fairly miraculous gathering that endures in an age of authorial angst and defunded everything, and turns the already great town of Austin into the weekend-long literary capital of America every fall. I've been lucky enough to be there two years running, and each time Halloween fell during the festival--and the Halloween parade down Sixth Street is worth a trip in itself, though given the year-round music scene and college-town vibe, now with glitzy LA-film-world overtones, you never need an excuse to go.

About that vibe: after I led a discussion with Lidia Bastianich in the same "cooking tent" where the Food Channel itself began to take shape--last year I met Carol Ann Sayle in a discussion I moderated, and knew from her tangy, unmistakable voice that she had to be a founding part of it--a man from East Texas introduced himself and told me that I had to visit and get to know the thriving farming scene, something others have told me and I intend to do. "The only thing we don't grow there," he said in reference to my public praise of Austin, "is liberal Democrats."

If many of his compatriots were in the house chamber, they didn't have much of a chance to be heard, because the panelists were themselves pretty diverse (even if I doubt he'd think so). All the writers want to make you think about where the food you eat comes from and what choices you're making when you buy and eat food, mostly the hidden ones.

I was fascinated by it all, and so was the audience--and I am now by the ongoing discussion between Nicolette Hahn Niman, Helene York, and our many commenters on their posts.

They come at it in different ways. Jason Sheehan, a hardscrabble, profane, deliberately naughty chef, is following in the footsteps of Anthony Bourdain with his Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen, like Bourdain funny, entertaining, and provocative--but he also gives you an idea of just what life is like for the people who make that BBQ in the roadside joint, or the corned-beef sandwiches in the famous Irish pub on St. Patrick's Day. He's full of bravado, and you're sure he'll have sleeve tattoos, though as it happens he doesn't.

I'm late to discovering Novella Carpenter's wonderfully funny Farm City: the Education of an Urban Farmer, though friends have for months been ending conversations and emails telling me I had to read it. They were right, of course. Hers is a voice as unmistakable and entrancing as Carol Ann's, with grit and erudition and constant resilience--as she needs to turn 4,500 rubbish-heaped square feet of a vacant lot next to her mean-streets Oakland apartment into a productive paradise. There's nothing self-conscious or self-satisfied about her stories of raising not just heirloom watermelons and tomatoes but heirloom birds for meat and then pigs: just spunk and humor, and plenty of suspense as practically about every vine and animal is threatened by urban predators. She's great company.

Sheehan's and Carpenter's books are mostly about voice; the other two authors focus mainly on ideas, though they're remarkably clear and passionate writers too. Jonathan Safran Foer brings his famous blend of adventurous exploration and attuned observation of worlds both without and within to his new Eating Animals, which has ample amounts of his famous storytelling (as the excerpt in the New York Times Magazine displayed), but also straight-out reporting and advocacy against eating meat for any reason, including environmental responsibility.

Environmental responsibility is the main subject of James McWilliams's Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, a book I'm reading with close interest and will have more to say about--as McWilliams, a contributor to the Food Channel, will too. As everyone who reads him knows, McWilliams doesn't shy from breaking locavores and generally right-minded food people of many of their most cherished assumptions, even if he shares many of their practices: he's a committed vegetarian, though more from his grounding as an environmental historian than the kind of passionate personal conviction Foer brought to the crowded chamber with a kind of quiet, flame-hard purity.

What unites all the books is meat--or so I thought when leading the panel, with the long defense by Nicolette Hahn Niman, our Food Channel contributor, fresh on our minds. Particularly McWilliams's and Foer's, as they both had pretty strong reservations about the arguments they found incomplete or unconvincing. McWilliams, who calls meat "the new caviar" in a resonantly titled chapter, to evoke both its unsustainability and the costs it incurs even if it's wrongly cheap, pointed out that much of the grass in grass-fed beef is fertilized, which isn't good for the environment. Neither is the literal denaturing of all agriculture throughout history and especially the amount of land being used for meat, both small-scale artisan-level and industrial-scale. Foer devotes a fairly long, fond section to visiting the BN Ranch in paradisal Bolinas, but still can't find any defense for killing animals, no matter how good a life and good a death they have had.

The other two are unapologetic meat-eaters. Carpenter writes wonderfully about making herself part of a thousands-year-old tradition of carefully tending animals, and as the book goes on she becomes less and less tentative about the act of killing and sharing the "harvest," a word she can come to use with pride and not irony. Sheehan, who the day before the panel had told me, with his bad-boyness, "I'm your drug pusher," was sufficiently subdued by the gravity of the discussion and the surroundings to say only and truly that as a chef he wants to find the best product he can, and that if you want to know more about how your meat was raised you should talk to your chef.

I was fascinated by it all, as the audience seemed to be--and as I am now by the ongoing discussion between Niman herself in her reply to Helene York's post responding to her Times article, and the many commenters who have joined in. I also liked Sheehan's advice. We all know that we're supposed to talk to a farmer, and go to farmer's markets and support local communities--though you'll need to read Just Food to see what an incomplete and even false step that can be to achieving your right-minded ends. We know already what great voices farmers can have, from our own Carol Ann and from Carpenter's book, which you should read just for the pleasure of meeting her. Now you can resolve to talk to your chef too--and hope that he or she has a voice as salty, frank, and funny as Sheehan's.

The All-Candy Diet

I've long made no secret of the very prominent role sugar plays in my daily diet, particularly during the daylight hours (I stop caffeine at 1:00 p.m. and sugar by 6:00 p.m., or at least try to). I led a piece on high-fructose corn syrup as an unsatisfactory soda and iced-tea sweetener by saying,

Even someone who ingests indecent quantities of sugar on a daily basis, as I do, understands that certain things can be too sweet.

And my column this month in the print magazine--no link! subscribe!--is on the laudable effort to substitute the harsh, synthetic flavors and colors of decorate, sugary Necco wafers with natural flavors and dyes--something the Associated Press seems to have noticed only yesterday. (Yes, a monthly magazine can still get the jump on a 24-hour news gatherer, especially on stories of great moment.)

Candy is candy, and should dare speak its name.

A New York Times story today on Paul Rudnick's nearly all-sugar diet recapitulates a story my dinner guests brought up just a few nights ago. The context was the shocking-to-us refusal by the Asian-themed restaurant where we had torn through a very long parade of dishes--many of them so good we ordered doubles--to serve dessert. What a cheat! No green-tea ice cream, even. A consolation demitasse of chocolate melted with cream didn't console us much.

The subject of Rudnick and his nearly all-sugar diet then came up, as it often does among his friends. He is thin, strong, and perfectly healthy, as everyone including the Times writer notices with (I would say envious) surprise. As he was the very first person I met at the college I wound up going to (in the theater's green room, though he was memorably all in black and on a black sofa), I've long taken an admiring interest in his refusal to compromise--as I do every night, at full and sugar-free dinners. And now he has a new book, I Shudder, that will provide scary reading for parents and funny reading for all the rest of us fans, longtime and new.

This is the week to buy "junk" candy, preferably locally made ones like the Charleston Chews and Tootsie Rolls that are still made in a factory near me (the company's headquarters is in Chicago) that sends out marvelous chocolate smells in a new restaurant row in Cambridge. Not gourmet candy, which is wasted on trick-or-treaters and, as Rudnick I think rightly points out, on most adults. What's the point, really? Candy is candy, and should dare speak its name. But nicer flavors in the same familiar template--that's something worth tasting for yourself, as you do your supposedly-for-the-kids Halloween shopping.

What's your favorite candy? Share in the comments.

The Secret To Fresh Milk and Coffee

Paul Wachter's interesting story about the strange twin pull dates for milk in New York City--one for the city, one for everyplace outside it--brings up a point beyond just how special we all know New York to be. Wachter wonders why the city hasn't changed a rule it began in 1959, which although modified still holds: milk sold in the city is marked with a sell-by date nine days after it is pasteurized, versus an average of 11 to 12 days in the rest of the country. He quotes milk producers who say that their own "stress tests" show that their milk lasts 15 to 21 days after pasteurization. New York dairy owners tell him that the shorter city shelf life has no basis in the facts they see on their delivery routes: the containers don't wait around longer on city streets than they do in supermarket parking lots before being transferred to refrigerators; the shorter pull date uselessly drives up production and shipping costs, and thus the price New Yorkers pay for milk. They and Wachter suggest that the city consider a rethinking of the rule on its 50th anniversary.

Still, Wachter admits that the milk he buys in New York does seem to go bad faster than the milk of his South Carolina childhood, and wonders whether the reason could be that city convenience stores don't observe the rule to store milk in refrigerated cases 45 degrees and under: many of those cases, as anyone in New York knows, are barely covered with clear plastic strips or are practically in the open.

I think Wachter answers his own question, though, when he contrasts his urban life today with his childhood:

When I was growing up in South Carolina, my family would buy milk by the gallon, which would keep for well over a week. Now, I buy milk by the quart and if it's good after four days I'm happy.

He uses less milk now than he did, and most people in cities do. Of course he buys milk less often and, by letting it hang around the fridge much longer than a family that goes through milk fast, gives milk a much stronger chance to go bad.

There's something else, too. The less milk you use at a time, the more air is left at the top--and air, along with heat, is the enemy of freshness. This "headroom" problem is familiar to me from my years of research for The Joy of Coffee. In the book I give the advice, followed by our own Jerry Baldwin, or progressively transferring coffee beans and ground coffee (NB, he doesn't approve of storing ground coffee, ever) to smaller and smaller containers and seal it tightly, to eliminate its exposure to oxygen. And I keep the containers opaque and at room temperature: never keep coffee in the refrigerator, and avoid the freezer unless you know you won't be able to buy fresh coffee within two weeks. Same goes for coffee in carafes--the more air not only the faster the coffee cools but the faster that oxygen can interact with the flavor-producing compounds in coffee.

The extension for Wachter, then, is to is to buy milk in the smallest quantity possible--the uneconomical solution favored by busy urbanites everywhere, especially ones facing five flights of stairs before they get to the front door. As with old pickles and chutney and mustard, though--to pick other common items in a desolate New Yorker's refrigerator--don't blame the product when they go bad. Blame the headroom! Or blame it first, at least. And let your gluttony or abstinence, Wachter's proposed solution to the problem, determine the size of the container of anything you buy fresh.

Wild Mushrooms and Wild Hunts

A news story about a Ukrainian woman and her adult son who landed in the hospital after eating mushrooms they'd foraged reminded me of the pleasures and perils of mushroom-hunting, a hobby I've pursued on and off--mostly off--since taking part in the hi(gh)jinks at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, sponsored by the Telluride Institute. Every year, over three summer days, there are mushroom expeditions, seminars, and of course feasts. One of the founding guides and cooks was Andrew Weil, who was there the year I hiked and ate and learned.

I came back eager to go on the hunt in New England, and one of my early expeditions was in the wet woods of Vermont with Barbara Kafka, who as usual had read numerous field guides and scholarly reference books and taught herself much more about mycology than I had after my mountain-high-energized reading. Also, she'd been at it a long time--the counters of her Vermont farmhouse were from spring to late fall generally covered with chanterelles, porcini, and various boletes drying on paper towels--and had seldom suffered any ill effects.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't go on a trip of your own--guided!--and shouldn't enjoy mushrooms all year.

Until we listened to an Italian guest who came along, experienced in the dry scrubby hills of northern Lazio but not the wet underbrush of Vermont, particularly near a stream with extremely active beavers. He urged Kafka to serve thin slices of the boletus edulis we found raw in a first-course salad with shaved Parmesan--standard practice, but incautious by a busy-beaver stream. By that night we knew we all had giardia, the water-borne parasite that, the Kafkas said, is locally called beaver fever.

Mushroom-foraging is Sunday sport in most of Italy, and not just traditional but often business in Eastern Europe and Russia, so I'm sure the local Ukrainian woman had enjoyed years of mushrooms before being tripped up by an amanita--a very common, and very deadly, mushroom that takes various guises. Best to go with a guide; various chapters of Slow Food USA organize mushroom hunts, and guides are often accredited members of the Mycological Society of America; a mushroom-foraging site I found has, like most such groups, an "Important Disclaimer" right at the bottom of its home screen.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't go on a trip of your own--guided!--and shouldn't enjoy mushrooms all year. Kafka uses dried mushrooms you can find at the supermarket in many recipes, including in her marvelous Soup: A Way of Life; Jack Czarnecki has written A Cook's Book of Mushrooms, among others.

And really this whole post is an excuse to highlight Sally Schneider's marvelous recipe for a wild mushroom ragu--really a meaty-tasting, freezable, "mutable" as she says sauce you can keep on hand for a quick pasta supper or for when you're having a group, and you make what a friend's "ancient" Italian grandmother called the Big Macaroni. Our own Eleanor Barkhorn will be making it soon, and once you read it my hunch is that you will too.

The Food Critic In the Internet Age

The breathless anticipation over who would succeed Frank Bruni as the New York Times restaurant critic seldom acknowledged the question that was really being asked: what role does a newspaper critic have in a wired world where anyone can get as much information about and as many user reviews of a restaurant as she or he could want?

To craggy veterans who have spent our lives trying to make a living as writers, the answer is obvious: of course a paid writer is more reliable! We've spent years learning perfect impartiality, fairness, and enough about the business of cooking and feeding people to give us extra-special knowledge that confers godlike power to pass judgment. Oh, and we've learned how to write, too.

Obviously, I'm being facetious. But also I'm not. The wired world is a part of life--I rely on it, every critic relies on it. I've just used the Internet to book four tables at two different reservations (yes, under four different names), and revel in the ability to look up menus rather than always surreptitiously stealing menus (I still steal them, to be sure I've got the right information).

Paid critics: that's the difference between the very, very few of us left and the Web world, and I think the difference in reliability.

What I don't do--perhaps quaintly, along with the antiquated print world in which I toil, as Boston Magazine's restaurant critic--is look on forums and various sites to see what people are saying about restaurants. And don't read the work of the other paid critics in Boston, who don't work for monthlies and by definition can get the jump on me, until after my review has gone to press (again, quaint).

Paid critics: that's the difference between the very, very few of us left and the Web world, and I think the difference in reliability. Bloggers sometimes write about meals they got free, or about staff people they broke up with, or any number of other reasons that lead you to doubt their reliability. But, of course, you don't know those reasons--or whether they're there at all (most bloggers, I assume, are aboveboard).

You may love or hate a critic, but you know you can use that critic's taste as a yardstick for your own, especially after the critic has been writing awhile. And that you can learn more about a restaurant in one article than you would without spending a long long time browsing sites to get an aggregate opinion and figure out if that place is right for you.

(As for anonymity, let's not go there. My picture is all over the Web--heck, it's right on our site!--and any restaurateur who's interested knows what the local critic looks like. As one very experienced maitre d' once said of a critic's famous disguises, "If you put a wig and lipstick on a tank, don't you think I'll know a tank just came in?" Whether or not I'm recognized is always a crap shoot, but what I've learned over years is that I often go unnoticed in places where I do know the chef and am recognized in places I least expect it, because a server has waited on me in the past.)

Aggregate opinion in one place you can use it, with criteria for the checkpoints you need (price, view, open late, child-friendly, sexy pickup spot) is of course the form the Zagats mastered long ago, and put in (yes) print form you can easily take everywhere. I keep a full set at home and the local edition in my car. Every critic is constantly looking at a Zagat Survey for the perfectly digested information she or he needs, and not just on a BlackBerry or iPhone (Zagat is the highest-grossing travel app on iPhones out of 75,000, the Zagats tell me).

So I asked Nina and Tim, our gracious and never-frequent-enough contributors, what they thought the role of the newspaper critic is in a world where the whole wide Web has copied their approach. They could hardly be more central in the restaurant world: they live it day and night, as I've experienced with them and can't wait to do soon again. Of course they had the right answer.

"A good restaurant critic can paint a full portrait" as few blogs can, Tim told me. He added his own wish list for any critic: that she or he touch all the bases--service, decor, prices, who goes to a place and who can take best advantage of what it offers. This is something he's often mentioned to me, including (sigh) about my own writing. A critic needs to be a Michelin inspector (though preferably one who knows something about food that isn't French, as no Michelin inspector seems to) when it comes to seeing every detail of a restaurant and the experience it offers a diner. Knowing and mouthing off about the food won't do it for a professional.

And, he added, something else: good critics should be great writers. After all, they're getting paid!

The Times hired a great writer in Sam Sifton, as anyone who has read his recent New York Times Magazine series knows. I particularly prized the brief reviews he wrote when he edited the paper's Dining Section--just as I prize those of my friend Pete Wells, who during his interim assignment before Sifton made his debut found an utterly distinctive and confident voice with astonishing speed.

It takes time for a city with the scope and cacophonous opinions New York does to get used to a critic, particularly the most powerfully placed restaurant critic. I knew from his first review that I'd follow Pete wherever he went (in his last of this series, to Brooklyn), both to whatever restaurant and, crucially, to the end of the piece. I'm really looking forward to following Sam Sifton everyplace he goes.

Congrats, James Bennet

Usually the Food Channel looks out, not in--our job is to bring the world to your desktop and tabletop, or at least what's worth eating and thinking about, not to get into the sort of intramural tiffs that can be fun but kind of leave everybody else out. And it wouldn't occur to me to link to any of the nice praise other sites and people have had for the Food Channel--but boy, do we appreciate it!! The "we" being Eleanor Barkhorn, our incredible lead producer, and the interns who invaluably help, including now Shea Connelly.

But news that Ad Age has chosen James Bennet, editor in chief of The Atlantic, Editor of the Year is worth pointing out here, because it's a sign that the media world recognizes the untold time and thought he's put into making the magazine always more provocative and pertinent without ever crossing the line into being inflammatory or irresponsible. If that sounds like a tough line to walk, it is, and he and our deputy editor, Scott Stossel, walk it month after month, with increasingly impressive results. Their hard work is made possible by the constant support of our chairman, David Bradley, and president, Justin Smith. Part of James's vision was bringing in Bob Cohn as head of TheAtlantic.com, in a kind of emperor of Constantinople to his Rome--and his fast and fantastic work quickly landed him on GQ's Most Powerful People in Washington List. And I can't omit Maria Streshinsky, our deputy managing editor and the minute-by-minute soul of the magazine, without whom it wouldn't get edited, fact-checked, laid out, and produced every month--and who gives me my own marching orders in my print life and is my beloved editor too.

The print magazine--it's still a big part of my life, along with the minute-by-minute action and fun of producing the Food Channel, and it should be a part of yours too. As James Fallows says in his typically long-view, right-on post (and, typically, he posted it last night at one in the morning, the minute he read about it), subscribe! The print life is still worth living, and only you can help keep it alive.

A New Apple A Day

It's very nice to be able to get your favorite kind of apple now through Thanksgiving, or whenever your farmer's market stops for the winter (or you might be one of the few lucky people whose market it year-round). But once you know which you like best, it's just a matter of finding the farmers who seem to grow them best and looking for the specimens in the best condition.

Boring, that is. Much better to try apples you haven't had before, whose names sound appealing or whose looks attract you. The worst that can happen is that you'll pucker up and blow, discreetly of course. Zeke went through a number of new and old and came to his own own conclusions, ending with the always good advice to buy Cox's Pippins and russets when you find them. (Russets, generically named for their matte, rough skin, almost always have the spiciest, finest flavor I think.)

Last Saturday I visited a friend in Ghent, New York, just over the Massachusetts state line in the always splendid Berkshires (leaf-watching alert: I'd estimate that a quarter to a third of the leaves had turned, and barring heavy rains let alone my strictly amateur status, there should be three weeks' worth of good watching left). On my arrival she packed me into her de-rigueur SUV with Hobbes, her lively Airedale, and took me to the not-too-self-consciously charming hamlet of Chatham.

Our apple-discovery stop was an attractive, new-looking co-op called the Chatham Real Food Market, one of the new breed of locavore stores that look clean and spruce while still featuring plenty of raw-wood crates and hand-lettered signs.

Knowing my motto that I Brake For Bakeries, the first stop was the kind of storefront, narrow pastry shop of your dreams. Madeline Delosh, a pastry chef who trained with Jean-Georges Vongerichten among others and is a devoted Francophile, opened Mado's last summer after selling pastries at a local farmer's market. You can see her winsome, tired face in this article by Marilyn Bethany--just the same expression she offered us a few minutes past 4:00 p.m., when she was closing and there were only two things left: a few brownies and two puck-shaped walnut caramel tarts, half the top smartly dusted with confectioner's sugar. The pate-brisee crust was tender and buttery, the walnut pieces generous and held together by a not-too-sticky caramel; I devoured it on the spot, as she reminded me that we'd met a few years ago at a regional Slow Food launch event and asked why there hadn't been more Slow events lately. Between gooey bites I told her I'd kick it over to Josh Viertel and his Dumbo crew. We took a few homemade dog biscuits--the only other thing left--for Hobbes and continued.

(What is it about dog bakeries? Are they the new cupcake shops? My own Jamaica Plain just saw the opening of an enormous homemade pet-food store, with a layout like an old-fashioned general store and big glass jars of cookies and treats that I see as a big cheat for humans. Is this because people won't let themselves eat actual baked goods? Or that dog owners are taking a cue from helicopter parents and transfer their own obsessions about healthful food to the pets? The Web site has an of-course heartwarming description of the dog named Pearl, a one-eyed stray found in Puerto Rico, whose polka-like way of moving inspired the name, Polka Dog Bakery, and the owners to "use the finest ingredients, and bake and prepare all our delicacies by hand." I won't make a secret of my deep and abiding dog envy. But I'm still not sure how I view this trend.)

Our apple-discovery stop was an attractive, new-looking co-op called the Chatham Real Food Market, one of the new breed of locavore stores that look clean and spruce while still featuring plenty of raw-wood crates and hand-lettered signs. I headed straight for the apples, to see what I hadn't seen lately at Boston farmer's markets. And passed by most of them: Empire, the fine but kind of dull New York apple that helped give rise to the evil Delicious; Macoun and Cortland, related apples that are just fine but easy to find; Gala, a too-sweet apple I'll happily leave to New Zealand; and Honeycrisp, the University of Minnesota marketing smash that has taken the country (and Frank Bruni, though not Zeke despite his friend's predictions) by storm.

I went instead for two apples I always try when I find them, and will a bit later in Boston: Northern Spy, a good eating and pie apple, and Spartan, an exceptionally handsome, deep-purple apple. The Spy was fine, though still too tart; I'll wait. But the Spartan: what a fine and beautifully flavored apple, and its slightly pink, white, juicy flesh makes a handsome contrast to the high-shouldered shape and richly colored skin. Spartans have a long and proud New York State and, as you might expect from the name, New England history. Buy them when you find them.

Yes, Calorie Labeling Works

I read the report on initial results of New York City's calorie-labeling laws in Monday's New York Times with more puzzlement than dismay. Why was the sample size (1156 people) so small? Why was the most recent data a year and a half old, just weeks after the city's calorie-labeling rules began? Why did the Times reporter go to one McDonald's in a poor neighborhood to do man-in-the-street interviews that seemed to have very little to relation to the study she was reporting on?

I read the study, whose lead author is Brian Elbel, of NYU, and talked to Cathy Nonas, director of nutrition programs for the health department (as did the Times reporter) and to other public-health advocates including our own Marion Nestle, who posted on this--and my own spouse, the Massachusetts commissioner of health and who passed the second statewide calorie-labeling law, after California. I'm hardly impartial!

But I did notice a number of limitations of the study aside from the ones that struck me when reading the initial story, many of which the authors themselves pointed out. And I got a better sense of the bigger picture of the real intention behind the regs, as public-health lingo calls regulations, and the effect they're already having--the picture and the importance that bloggers, the media, and the food industry have ignored as they've dug into the conclusions with a gotcha glee as if they hadn't had a meal of any number of calories in weeks.

Getting individuals to recalculate calories at the cash register was never the main point of the rules, and isn't now, when similar rules might be written into health reform. Public health is about protecting the whole public.

Data takes a long time to analyze, but this study is really preliminary--the reason, of course, it's gotten so much attention. The New York calorie-labeling rules began on March 31 of last year, with a grace period until July 19, when violations with penalties--fines--would be issued. Many McDonald's, Burger Kings, and Wendy's didn't actually start posting calories on menu boards until July 18. Even then, placement and font size were not what the city required; by the end of the year the menu boards looked much different and were more prominent than they were in July.

The before portion of the study was July 8, and the after portion was about a month later--just three weeks after the chains targeted (McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and KFC) starting posting calories. The sample size was small, 1156 people, and deliberately chosen from poor areas where obesity and diabetes are particularly severe--a logical choice, but also areas where people deliberately search for the most value for their money, meaning the most calories per dollar.

Here's the discouraging part, the point everybody picked up on:

About half of the NYC respondents in our postlabeling sample reported noticing calorie information, and only a quarter of these reported that the information influenced their food choices. Even those who indicated that the calorie information influenced their food choices did not actually purchase fewer calories according to our data collection. We note again that our study sample consisted primarily of racial and ethnic minorities residing in relatively low-income areas; other groups may respond differently to labeling.

The authors note that other groups might respond to labeling differently, but don't point out that half of the people in their survey noticing the information translates to millions of people--and that effect just a few weeks after the information was posted. They admitted that had they conducted the study later, the impact on behavior might have been greater and the results different, and that the smaller typeface and placement of the labels might have had a greater impact after the city brought the restaurants into compliance months later. They pointed out that after the study was done the city did begin an educational campaign on subways and in buses telling people that they should eat about 2,000 calories a day; that could have changed later behavior, too.

But getting individuals to recalculate calories at the cash register was never the main point of the rules, and isn't now, when similar rules might be made national and written into health reform--the main reason the Times article got such traction. Yes, it's extremely difficult to get people to change their eating habits--the first thing the authors pointed out in their conclusion, the first thing anyone on any side of the debate starts out with.

Public health is about protecting the whole public, not any subset, even if underserved and strongly affected subsets are of course its frequent focus. It's about making society safer and healthier. That's where it rubs plenty of people (like my libertarian colleague Megan) the wrong way. The nanny state is the cuddlier term for the fascist state, and activist health commissioners like Thomas Frieden, now the head of the CDC, and his successor, Thomas Farley, are pet targets of people who use the word "activist" as a smear.

New York City was ridiculed when it banned trans fats, as I pointed out in a piece asking what the fate of the doughnut would be after the ban. (It survived quite nicely--and, as calorie-labeling has made painfully clear, doughnuts frequently have many many fewer calories than healthful-seeming muffins, especially in the colossally caloric pastry cases at Starbucks). But, as Frieden, then the New York City health commissioner, pointed out when I talked to him about the ban, the real impact was on McDonalds and the other chains (yes, Dunkin Donuts) that, once they went to the expense of complying with New York's rules, would likely change production for the whole country or much of it.

Calorie labeling has already had remarkable impact on the foods that fast-food companies make and serve. Yuppie avatar Starbucks immediately changed its default milk from whole to 2 percent, so it wouldn't have to admit that a Frappuccino could amount to practically as many calories as you should eat in a whole day; it recently removed high-fructose corn syrup from its baked goods, though unfortunately didn't make them lower-calorie--that's said to be in the works--or better-tasting, which I hope is in the works too.

And the big players, the ones health departments hope will change, are in fact changing. Just this week, Nonas told me--the day after the Times story came out--Burger King began a new ad campaign telling how customers could eat a full meal for 650 calories or less. McDonalds took .7 ounces and 70 calories out of its standard portion of french fries. Dunkin Donuts introduced an egg-white breakfast. KFC put grilled skinless chicken on its menu--not something anyone expected to see at KFC.

"We still feel it's a restaurant's responsibility to make affordable healthy choices available to the public," Nonas told me, but added that calorie posting is "one important piece but not the whole piece." She mentioned new education programs the city is running and new ways to get fresh produce into poor neighborhoods and into schools--the current focus of every health and school official you talk to, and of our own Josh Viertel and Helene York.

Nonas and colleagues are now analyzing their own study. It has ten times the number of participants, is drawn from more neighborhoods than the NYU study, and was conducted over six weeks--like the NYU study, shortly after the regulations were made enforceable. She said she had no idea what the results would show, and emphasized the difficult of picking out and cleaning the data.

They might be disappointing. It's entirely possible that the New York and other follow-up studies will show, like all studies of all diets, that people say one thing and do another and have little idea of the number of calories in what they eat--a problem dietitians have too, Nonas told me with a rueful chuckle, meaning herself. The data might show that after labeling, few people actually order less calories when they order food.

Does that mean calorie-labeling should be scrubbed? Nope. Is the fact that it's really, really hard to stop smoking reason to take pressure off cigarette manufacturers or relax anti-smoking laws? Of course not. Even if a bit better than a quarter of fast-food restaurantgoers notice and are influenced by calorie labeling--a percentage that seems to be emerging from initial and post-regulation studies--that will be a large part of the US population. If fast-food producers are pressured into lowering calories, however modestly, across the board or in significant areas, the whole public will be better off. And you might get a doughnut instead of a muffin out of it!

As book after article after book points out, food producers don't reduce calories, sugar, or fat unless they have to. Witness the end run Coke is trying to make in advance of tighter labeling laws on soda, exactly like the one KFC and other fast-food companies tried to make with menu-board labeling: listing calories per portion, rather than the fact that a typical large bottle of Coke has 800 calories, and a 12-piece bucket of fried chicken 3,090--both of them listed as multi-serving, both of them frequent single servings over the course of an evening or even a long ride home.

The study itself had the last word:

At the same time, our study does not necessarily imply that labeling is an ineffective policy. On the contrary, we found that some subset of consumers used the information to eat more healthfully. Calorie labeling could result in changes that do not rely primarily on alterations in consumers' food choices. Menu labeling regulations may encourage chain restaurants to offer more nutritious or otherwise improved menu offerings, which could be profoundly influential. [italics mine] Public health experts have shown that creating "default" incentives to improve well-being is essential to improving public health. By indirectly influencing restaurants to offer more lower-calorie items, menu labeling regulations could help encourage such default options for consumers.

Those changes don't always work, the authors say. Most changes don't always work. Some do, somewhat. Some do a good deal of good. Calorie labeling is one of them.

Remembering Johnny Apple

Three years ago, on October 4, R. W. Apple, known as Johnny to one and all, died way too young, at 71. He made his name as a war reporter and then as the kind of all-purpose Timesman who could in an afternoon assemble news scraps from a dozen bureaus and a dozen outside sources into Page One stories with magisterial sweep that made them a true First Draft of History, as our very own fascinating festival at the Newseum, in Washington, last week was called.

(Surf over to the site! I spent much of the weekend "attending" it via the videos and great real-time summaries various colleagues wrote, and recommend you do the same--the reports of individual sessions are full of embedded clips that give you a strong flavor of the whole.)

This is turning into a day of remembrance, with the shock of the closing of Gourmet. The anthologies and celebrations will continue, but the anthology to celebrate is Far Flung and Well Fed, the collection of Johnny's food writing that has just been published and for which I was honored to write the foreword.

Johnny was by nature and temperament an enthusiast. He loved good food, as you could tell from looking at him, and he loved good company just as much. His constant, big, bearish generosity and delight in people came through everything he wrote.

I'll have more to say about this gently rollicking collection, and some excerpts too. But for now, order it yourself, please, for a treat--and for a reminder, as with Gourmet, of what writers at the top of their form can do when given the time and space to satisfy their appetites for food and information.

Don't RIP, Gourmet--Come Back Soon

This is a terrible day for everyone who cares about food and for writing: Conde Nast announced this morning that it will close Gourmet after 68 years of publication.

Ruth Reichl and an enormously talented staff, many of them longtime editors and writers, many of them new, reinvented a magazine whose gloss had worn thin when she arrived; the overtly elitist, you're-not-quite-good-enough-for-our-kind tone had become mostly tiresome, although each issue had a frozen-in-time quality that was perversely appealing. Was the piece on Vienna by Lillian Langseth-Christensen from this year? From 1969? Somehow it didn't matter, though you also felt it was accurate. By remaining above the fray and beyond trends, it was both sniffy and timeless. My uncle's wedding present to his sister, my mother, was a collection of bound issues of ten years of Gourmet from its founding to her wedding, and in my parents' bedroom that collection remained, for all of us to page through. (A friend or hers and reader of this site just wrote to tell me, as I didn't know, that was my mother's standard anniversary gift to friends was a subscription to the magazine.)

Under Ruth, the magazine focused on the quality of writing--she brought it much closer to The New Yorker, whose literacy (and elitism) was likely always a strong influence on its founder, Earle MacAusland, and by the time she took over was part of the CN fold. From the start she announced that she would bring in unexpected writers--novelists, crime reporters, poets--whose unexpected and wonderfully readable takes would rethink how people considered food. David Foster Wallace's piece on lobsters will always be one of the most anthologized articles on food, and she inspired many other classics.

What I most admired about Gourmet under Reichl was not just the far broader range of writers she cultivated but the broadening of the magazine's scope, to include among many other subjects US regionalism, food production both industrial and sustainable, character studies of food producers. It became timely. Barry Estabrook, the invaluable food-politics reporter for the magazine's Web site, wrote a definitive article on the Immokalee tomato workers last March, and the kinds of negotiations whose fruition Helene York recently wrote about for us. Real reporting, as well as real writing, were part of the new regime, and both have been on weekly display in Estabrook's Web entries and those of Laura Shapiro, who along with many others have made the Gourmet Website both distinguished and invaluable.

I refuse to believe that the magazine will be gone long. I'm an optimist. Conde Nast closed and then brought back House and Garden, another venerable title, and even if that folded again I choose to think that Gourmet, which like the recently closed Portfolio will apparently live on on the Web (I hope with Estabrook and Shapiro!), will reappear in print, too. For now, though, as Sam Sifton said instantly and eloquently for all of us, it's a moment of intense sadness.

More on Green Walnuts

The green walnut emails keep coming. I'm going to ask Jerry Baldwin about nocino, the green-walnut liqueur that is a fall ritual in Emilia-Romagna and other regions. And I have a call in to Rick Bayless--of Frontera Grill, Frontera products, authoritative books, and master of all things Mexican--who's in the wilds of Baja finding Mexican wines, about the dish that my friend Pam Hunter told me she made from the green walnuts I kept running over in her long Napa driveway. Turns out it was one Rick immediately told her she needed to make, and one suited for August in Mexico, where walnuts start to ripen then rather than in September in California. She wrote:

The green walnut story actually ties back to Rick Bayless rather than Darrell [Corti, authority on all things Italian and doubtless nocino too]. He and his Frontera team kept up the demanding fall tradition of hulling green walnuts for the beloved dish of Puebla, Chiles en Nogada. This is a rich festival dish commemorating Independence Day, August 21, 1821, in green, white, and red to celebrate the Mexican flag and General Agustin de Iturbide's defeat of the French.

This dish can be too rich but, as I recall, Rick worked with a recipe that embraced all the beautiful complexity of flavor with some restraint.

Many recipes for this dish use ripe walnuts, but green are better. When I last visited Rick in Chicago, he had worked out a way to source them directly from an organic walnut orchard in California.

For home cooking, this is a dish for a group effort that allows everyone to lose themselves in the social experience to tolerate the tedious work of hulling green walnuts. Tight gloves are essential to prevent longterm purplish black walnut stains.

I'm asking Rick what his source is, so you can try shelling, picking, and blanching the fresh nutmeats yourself--something I've done and can't say I'd leap to do again, though for the "white walnut" sauce of his I found and give you with his office's blessing, I intend to order more by mail. It's got milk and bread, like the original gazpacho, and sherry and cinnamon too. Sounds good enough to invite friends over for, making them help with the work, as Pam sagely suggests--and of course eat the nutmeats, though they're sufficiently astringent that you won't lose too many to the helping hands. Here it is, over fruit-stuffed pork, and more to come on things nogada and nocino.

Fallows on Fat People

No, not really Jim Fallows, but a judicious and ordered sampling of the many--"unprecedented," he calls it--letters he received in response to a fairly offhand observation he made, one of an omnibus roundup, on what he sees here now that he's back after living in China for three years.

No need to repeat his grouping by topic, but I will ask the farm-minded among you to consider in particular the letter from the Vermont city-dweller-turned-farmer, puzzled that the rigors of rural life, even for the non-farmer, don't prevent a high number of obese people, even though access to fast food is relatively difficult.

Ruralites (as opposed to urbanites), please weigh in: do you, like the writer, notice an increase in sheer physical labor in the country, vs the city or the suburbs? Or is all travel done in the car, and does all travel bring one beside various fast-food outlets and stores selling the processed foods that other writers posit are the main culprit?

Obesity as perhaps today's most obvious marker of class bifurcation is by now a given. Have a look at the absorbing theories Fallows's correspondents offer as to why. Then more of your own, please.

Green Walnuts, Purple Plums

Ari Weinzweig's post about finding fresh fruit in Serbia--that is, fresh-tasting fruit preserves from Serbia--reminded me that some of the best jams I've had have come from Serbia and Czechoslovakia. I always assumed that the relative lack of pollution and development made for acres of unspoiled fruit, but I'm no doubt trapped in post-Wall, early-90s romanticism. There might be some of that at play in Ari's new discovery, but the likely reason is, of course, the cold climate: think Swedish cloudberries, the thimbleberries and everything-berries the Northwest produces.

His endorsement of green walnuts is what caught my eye, though: last week, on a lightning trip to Napa (barely 36 hours), I kept running over walnut shells on the long, long drive to the house of the friends I was visiting. "I'm so sorry Darrell Corti isn't coming over," my friend Pam said, referring to the legendarily erudite expert on all things Italian and Spanish and buyer for his family's market in Sacramento. "We always make the most wonderful liqueur."

It was walnuts I brought back on my dawn flight home. I didn't find any at the very good, and big, farmer's market in St. Helena, or perhaps I was distracted by the one nut vendor, who was hawking a sample of a fruit-nut mix as I passed by: "The cranberries are from Massachusetts!" Not what I needed to bring back to Boston. The late-season raspberries and tiny Italian prune plums, perfumed and honey-sweet, wouldn't travel either.

So on a stop at Sunshine Market, the grocery store everyone frequents in St. Helena (people who live there, that is; there's a Dean & Deluca down Route 29, where you need to go for cheese), I asked a manager to point me to the freshest and best and most local nuts. He breezed me past the bulk section, passed the fancy packages, and pointed me to a humble, awkwardly shaped tall plastic tub of extremely generic-looking walnuts marked "Our Kitchen, San Mateo, CA." Walnuts and almonds, he said, were what to buy.

They weren't as good as the walnuts from a friend's tree Pam and Carl had in their kitchen, which we shelled at the end of the evening, or the sensational, slightly bitter almonds that their friend, the superb cook and writer Janet Fletcher, author of Fresh From the Farmer's Market and other good books to cook from, had roasted, lightly salted, and brought over to go with drinks; she'd found them in a dreaded bulk bin (usually failsafe way to find rancid nuts), but this at the famous Berkeley Bowl, and said that the variety was called Carmel, as opposed to the usual Nonpareil. We were all interested in and pleased by the hints of bitter almond, which her roasting--in a low oven, 300 F, for a long time, 45 minutes--brought out.

Really, though, who can resist roasted nuts? Not me, and my spouse apparently can't resist those fresh walnuts either: I note this morning that my spouse has gone through half the tub in three days. Not enough to make Judy Rodgers's salad of fennel, fresh walnuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and balsamic vinegar from the always-reliable Zuni Cafe Cookbook. Time to find a reliable mail-order source!

Zingermans will sell you the green walnuts in syrup Ari mentions, which I intend to try. And his post reminds me that it's time for my annual order of jams from my favorite purveyor, Katz and Co. Do go to their Website--but only after I've reserved my case, please.

Where Hunger is a Way of Life

What's it like as an expat in Kenya to shop for and cook food? That was the simple question I put to Pascale Brevet, a particularly talented former student in the master's program of Slow Food's University of Gastronomic Sciences. I knew that after the course she would be spending time in Kenya working for a nonprofit on sustainable agriculture and food-security issues--and that between her Lyonnaise and Provencale grandmothers she had intimate knowledge of wonderful food.

Brevet gave me much more than I asked for, as students often happily do: a piece that shows what it's like on the dusty ground every day in Molo, the small city where she works, mostly with people with HIV, and what foods she can find. I'm particularly interested in the idea of boiling whole arrowroot, something I know only as processed white powder to make a thickening slurry useful to add at the last minute to a woefully thin sauce.

The real story of food where she is, though, is that there's almost none of it, and what there is is simply a utilitarian dose, "necessary fuel for a life of toil."

After a particularly interesting account, she reminds us: "To understand that is one thing; to live it even for a few months is entirely another." That's a particularly apt reminder on a day of reflection, when many of us are in Yom Kippur services and, for one day, reminded what life is like across too much of the globe.

Vote For Necco!

The Boston Globe reports that a committee will hold hearings to consider the sort of state namings that seem more appropriate to silly season than post-Labor Day agendas: the Fluffernutter as state sandwich, Charleston Chew as state candy bar, and Necco wafers as state candy. They would join the current list of five state foods, which unsurprisingly include the baked navy bean and Boston cream pie, and somewhat more surprisingly the corn muffin and chocolate-chip cookie (completely generic, it would seem to me) and the Boston cream doughnut, which I don't recall seeing in a long time.

It's actually the exact season for Fluffernutters, because this Saturday is the annual Marshmallow Fluff festival in its birthplace of Somerville; it's still made in Lynn, both cities near Boston. I've always wanted to go and will try, as it's also perfect timing to rack up some last-minute reasons to repent on Yom Kippur, as David Sax writes deli owners will in his very funny post.

I don't repent advocating the new and improved Necco wafers, though, as I do in this month's issue of The Atlantic, which I churlishly don't link to because--you should subscribe! I got into the super-secret headquarters in Revere, adjacent to both Somerville and Lynn (what is it about sugar and Route 1, I wonder?), though not as far as the yet-more-secret production floor, and found that just in time for Halloween, the company had removed all artificial flavors and colorings from Neccos, which was harder than you might think. The result is subtler and better on all counts.

Yes, I know that stuffing pure sugar into children's mouths is hardly a way to improve their health. I won't defend it, though I will defend choices made by sentient adults--and Neccos, I learned, are an adult candy (the company actually hopes to appeal to concerned mothers by putting in natural flavorings and colors). Now we just have to hope that we don't see a "Smart Choices" logo slapped onto the label, though I'm sure nothing would surprise Marion Nestle.

Farmed Fish Forever?

Helene York writes about sustainably raised seafood today, something she's in a position to influence in her role at a company that buys food for hundreds of college campuses. She gets right to the heart of the matter for those of us who care both about flavor and the environment:

The oceans are in serious trouble, lakes aren't in great shape either, and those of us who like seafood because we enjoy the taste are losing out. The salmon I tasted is grown under positive environmental circumstances. But is growing bland seafood a good thing?

She picks the two commonest farmed fish to concentrate on, and the ones most telling: salmon and tilapia. I long ago took a proudly harsh stand against ever, ever eating farmed salmon, as I wrote about when I visited Alaska to watch really good and well-managed wild salmon be fished, cleaned, and shipped:

Farmed Atlantic salmon, which in just twenty-five years has overtaken the world market, is almost always mushy, bland, flabby--criminally dull. I gave up ordering it several years ago, when I decided that no amount of pineapple salsa could render it acceptable, let alone enjoyable.

Since I wrote the piece, I've encountered several pieces of edible farmed salmon, two from Scotland and one from Norway. That's pretty much it. And as a restaurant reviewer, I have to eat my share, ever-hopeful and ever vigilant to order salmon during permissible harvest season, roughly from the beginning to the end of summer.

But that changes every year. Last year the California and Oregon salmon fisheries collapsed. This year the long battle over four dams on the Snake River, which James Fallows wrote about in our pages, has gotten noisy again, with new calls for the Obama administration to breach at least a few of the dams to allow salmon to return to their spawning grounds--rather than trucking them around the dams, a silly solution, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out last month. But the administration's report, released last week, didn't call for measures nearly as strong as environmentalists had hoped.

So farmed salmon, for all its environmental and culinary faults, will still be the only alternative out of season. But legal season is still open! And this year the catch has been strong, and I came away from my Alaska trip convinced that the fishery is well-managed.

That doesn't help most of the world get sustainable protein with all the benefits we keep hearing omega-3s offer. Is the rest tofu of the sea, as a friend of York's memorably calls tilapia? Yup. Except, as she says, oysters and mussels, which I enjoy too, and perhaps naively trust more--not that you effectively have much choice anymore, particularly when it comes to mussels (the best farmed I've had are from Prince Edward Island).

While environmentalists call for a moratorium on much salmon fishing, I'll keep up my personal moratorium on eating farmed salmon--but rely on people like York, who make significant buying decisions, to keep tasting and keep hoping.

Paris Reacts to Julie & Julia

Julie & Julia has just opened in Paris, and to the surprise of no one who knows them the French are utterly ignorant and likely uninterested in the woman who introduced their bourgeois cooking to the American bourgeosie, as this piece in the Times makes clear. They do like Meryl Streep, though. And maybe they'll like the extremely romantic early scenes of late-1940s Paris.

And they might be surprised by the picture that emerges of the doyenne of the Cordon Bleu, fierce and contemptuous of the big, brazen American woman who wants to invade her school. By the time I met her, in the late 1970s, Mme. Brassart was formidable and fairly scary. But my summertime experience at the Cordon Bleu was memorably enjoyable, if rigorous, and I came to understand the concerned rigor with which she ran the school. And I learned much more about her when I later wrote about her daughter-in-law, Sabine de Mirbeck, who started a marvelous cooking school near Brighton.

Those who really knew Mme. Brassart have been upset by the person who emerges in the film--a caricature of lofty French contempt perfectly embodied by Joan Juliet Buck, the English-born former editor of French Vogue, also the subject of a Times piece. Who better to understand than Buck, who tells Ruth La Ferla, the reporter, that the French could never condone even her footwear?

But she was much loved, including by our own Nina and Tim Zagat, who immediately set the record straight on our site. And now Valerie De Montvallon, her great-niece, has written an article of her own to introduce the woman she knew and who showed her, she says, what living really means. The Zagats sent me the draft, and I quote from the article (my translation), with the author's permission:

One of these women represented American enthusiasm, with its slightly disheveled dynamism, its will to do things fast, its wish to get someplace disregarding any [cultural] usages that could stop that will, at the risk of ignoring certain subtleties or of misunderstanding the long patience that is history. She plunged herself into French cuisine and the society that welcomed her with her own experience, her social codes from the other side of the Atlantic, and her absolute ignorance of what had preceded her in this culture. Doubtless, that would be her force and the source of her success.

Big, awkwardly oversized, with a high laugh, brusque gestures, and sketchy clothes, she met a small, lively woman with big blue eyes bubbling with malice, a woman who was always impeccably dressed and who could with a piercing look go to your soul and see the marvels that could bloom--a woman who thought that accuracy, moderation, and hard work led to success in life. Unfortunately, we learn nothing about this confrontation of two characters. The portrait is imbalanced, acerbic, willfully unpleasant.

In this tendentious portrait we see nothing of the woman who captured young and old alike with her piercing blue eyes and welcomed them with a listening ear that was always open, always young, always curious. No one could help but like her immediately. You sat down by her side and she asked you what you liked best: if you played rugby [here she uses the charming French rugbyman], she'd ask you questions about rugby rules; if you were a comedian, she'd ask about your vocation and determination. She found value in the person in front of her. She was full of humor, humor that was alive, happy, acute. She had class and tact and finesse.

This film wounds everyone who loved and admired her--and they are legion--all those for whom, at the age of 99, she remained the absolute adviser in the art of nurturing the elegance of one's soul. Without her, I would never have understood what "living" means.

The French, of course, have an expression for it: Vive la difference. De Montvallon wants us to understand what the difference really was.

Organic Agriculture's Future-and-Present Star

At a sustainability conference last week sponsored by Slow Food's University of Gastronomy, there was a screening of Terra Madre, a new film in release in Europe and with luck to be released here to be released this fall, directed by Ermanno Olmi, famous chronicler of Italian folk life and much-awarded neorealist filmmaker, especially for his Tree of Wooden Clogs. You can get in this trailer a sense of the conference for which the film is named, the every-two-year gathering of farmers and food producers Slow Food sponsors, improbably gathering them in huge halls in Turin.

Olmi intersperses them with lyrical passages of two farms in the Italian countryside, to show two styles of self-sufficiency. One is occupied by a hermit of 35 years, and not from what we can glean a very happy one--the farm as refuge from humanity. The other is modest but paradisal, the farmer silent and methodical, his craggy face creased with weather but lighting with the pleasure he takes when his barely-toddler son accompanies him through tomato and grape vines. In a long, wordless passage at the end of the movie we see a compressed planting cycle, starting with the farmer sitting at his simple, handsome table with a glass of wine, plotting out what he will plant, through a harvest lunch filled with friends and children and the vegetables we have watched him tend. It seems a bit too perfect to be true, but the very modesty of his life and land belies any gentleman-farmer suspicions, which I always have when I see beautiful farms.

As his very conclusion Olmi chooses--the speech my young, high school junior future-and-present star Sam Levin gave at Terra Madre's opening session, about which I had written a post just days before seeing the screening. Above is a screen shot with Italian subtitle of his, and the film's, last line: "We will be the generation that reunites mankind with the earth."

And in this week's Boston Globe an article updated progress on the ambitions Levin announced to get vegetables from his Project Sprout, at his high school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, onto school tables, now with the help of Kathy Sullivan, the school's food service director (the link doesn't show the nice picture of Levin and Sullivan picking lettuce for the cafeteria). Starting a school garden is one thing. Getting produce into a school kitchen, in the unlikely instance that a school has a kitchen, is another. I'm not surprised Levin has lined up help.

Leaving a Legendary Restaurant

Pairing wine with food is a vexed process at best, or so it's always seemed to me. There's so much mystification and mumbo-jumbo involved that you're seldom allowed to rely on your own sense of flavor just to think, This goes nicely or, That not so much.

But there goes my wine-speak prejudice! Plenty of sommeliers live on their ability to demystify wine and claim to extend those services to pairing it with food.

Grant Achatz, who makes some of the most complicated food in the country, turns out to have the ability to extend his gift for speaking simply about that food to speaking simply about wine. And, as he reveals in the beginning of a new series on wine and food, he worked at a winery for more than a year while apprenticing at the French Laundry, in the Napa Valley.

His reasoning was simple: if he was learning to cook at the highest level, and learning more about preparing food to professional standards than he'd ever had the chance to, shouldn't he learn winemaking from the bottom up too? As soon as he spells out the reason he quit a great job in what was already a legendary restaurant, it seems clear that every chef de commis up and down California's winemaking belts should do the same.

Did You Go To An Eat-In?

Josh Viertel and Gordon Jenkins have written about the huge organization efforts Slow Food USA put into gathering hundreds of people at open-air picnics on Labor Day to launch their school food initiative. It took a lot of work, I can report from having been present at the creation--just a year ago, as the climax of the first Slow Food Nation.

The gathering was at Dolores Park, in San Francisco's Mission district, which itself has a distinguished past for gatherings of youth who want to bring about change. And the day was idyllic, as Labor Day was this year throughout much of the Northeast. The students were mostly college and high-school age, and many of them had been on their feet and on buses for most of the past week, volunteering at City Hall Plaza and Fort Mason for Slow Food Nation, which was a great hit. This was their celebration and finale.

It had much of the sweetness and harmony so many people have recently written about in the endless Woodstock reminiscences, and I imagine that last year's and this year's will inspire their own hagiographic literature in a few years. Why not get a jump start?

I have to start with the food, because it was so good. The event was potluck, so students got together whatever equipment they could in the apartments they were staying at and put together pretty glorious salads, stews, huge pans of cornbread, with of course everything free-range and much of the produce from the farmer's market that had operated at City Hall Plaza during the festival. There were pies baked my students at the Mission High School baked with help from Mission Pie, and using ingredients grown at Pie Ranch, on California's San Mateo coast.

Then there were the speakers. The event was really a mellow rally--mellow but with inspirational speakers.

There was, as is de rigueuer at all large locavore and foodie events (I wouldn't be surprised at vegan ones, too) a pig roast. Everything was set out along an endless, serpentine table donated by the Outstanding In The Field, which organizes outdoor group events at just this sort of table, generally cooked with local ingredients; I've seldom seen such an inviting table, let alone such a long one. I typically brought bread, typically filched, I mean begged, from the ovens at Fort Mason (a photo that an SFN-goer randomly took because she was so amused I was trying to balance my bread struck me as so characteristic that I use it on my Facebook page).

Then there were the speakers. The event was really a mellow rally--mellow but with inspirational speakers. They spoke from a stage with a red dutch-roofed frame in the shape of a barn and hay bales. Jered Lawson, of Pie Ranch, exhorted students to grow their own wheat so the world "wouldn't be reliant on our green revolution," and called for not just gardens but farms at every school. His conclusion was perfectly appropriate to the setting: "We've got fast food. We're dealing with it. We've got slow food. Now lets have love food. We want people who grow and make it to love that food. We're proud initiators of the love food movement."

Bryant Terry, an "eco-chef" who wrote the book Grub& with Anna Lappe, did a call-and-response to remind people that the Black Panthers and Bobby Seale "said, 'Revolutionaries got to eat too'--can I get an amen or ashay about that?" Melina Shannon-DiPietro was already onto this year's campaign when she called for "an America where every student sits down to a good lunch." She added, "We need a president who can invest in young farmers the way Kennedy invested in science." (Recall that this was at the height of the campain, and about five minutes before the economic meltdown.) Josh Viertel, just starting his tenure as president of Slow Food USA with a brief to make it into a much more political and activist organization, told the young people, "You've got not just my ear, you've got my heart."

And then there was Sam Levin, a high-school sophomore who as a freshman began Project Sprout, an organic garden on an elementary-school soccer field and sustainable-dining program at his Monument Mountain High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. He and his fellow students donated vegetables they grew to the local WIC office several days a week, he later told me; at the start he worked with a junior, a senior, and a guidance counselor, and had soon built a core group of ten. They built support among other students and teachers, leaving a cherry tomato in every teacher's mailbox.

"We've produced tons of vegetables," he said. "Every Friday we've had a kindergarten class come and learn. Now I'm here preparing for next big hurdle--getting our food in our cafeteria. Every day I've felt more energized to get back to our garden and take that next step, which I know will happen." He addressed the younger students who might be afraid to propose starting a garden on, say, a soccer field: "Tell them, We have to do this. We're so young no one has noticed us. You have to be really ready to tell them it's not just the right thing, we have to do it. This is going to be the generation that will act--the generation that will go down in history."

If I haven't made it clear: Sam electrified the crowd (you can get a sense of it here). And he repeated the same astonishing performance six weeks later in Turin, where Josh and others clobbered Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, and the organizers of the international conference into letting Sam be the youngest plenary speaker ever.

"Project Sprout has given me sleepless nights," he told the 7,000 farmers, food producers, teachers, and students from all over the world, gathered in a stadium built for the 2006 winter Olympics. "I'd take a thousand more of those nights for more days like the ones I've had this year." He summarized some of what he and his fellow students had done in the garden and ended, "This is a message from our generation to all who came before us that says, 'We will be the generation that reunites mankind with Planet Earth." He got a standing ovation. It was all that Petrini, a master orator and crowd-rouser, could do to follow him.

I was in the hall when Barack Obama jolted the Democrats out of their lassitude at the 2004 convention. I said this was hagiography. I was there when Sam Levin woke up 250 students and then thousands of rural farmers.

Arrivederci Gelato: Proof that Airport Food Is Improving?

Airport food is evidently improving, or so I keep reading though I see little evidence of it. And in Italy, where small regional airports used to have branches of local caffès where you could get a locally roasted coffee, and even Rome's Fiumicino had a variety of coffee brands and shops, now it's all the same dismal Autogrill, of the greasy croissants and ridiculous, low-flavored muffins.

Recently, though, I had more than an hour to kill at Fiumicino, and found that the whole place had improved in the past two or three years, when the nonstops from Boston, where I live, had all landed at Milan's Malpensa, speaking of irredeemably dismal (that green!). I wrote of the amusing "My Name Is Bagel" at the typically maladroit, though in this case charmingly so, Autogrill.

But I neglected to mention my real find: an oasis at the end of a long, fairly hidden corner up a ramp to a mezzanine in Terminal A, in what I see in online references as the "MyChef Food Court." If you have any time to kill yourself, follow signs to that terminal, which will likely be a bracing walk from wherever you are, and look for the elegant caffè serving Illy, with what looked like they might be decent cornetti, though I couldn't be entirely sure they weren't Autogrill in disguise.

And then a glorious exception: an outpost of San Crispino, one of the best gelaterie in Rome. I first learned of it from our own Faith Willinger, who, knowing of my gelato obsession, sent me by foot way way behind the main train station to find the original shop--about a half-hour walk through not particularly enchanting neighborhoods.

But of course the trek was worth it, for the freshness of the fruit flavors and the exemplary consistency (texture is crucial in gelato) and integrity of the ingredients. "Try the pistachio," she told me. "That's always the test. Theirs isn't chemical green." Like true pistachio, it was barely green-tinged white. As the years went by and more people listened to Faith, San Crispino prospered, and opened two locations in extremely central neighborhoods, one tucked behind the Trevi Fountain and one behind the Pantheon, epicenter of gelato and caffè.

Now the world is used to top-quality, even heirloom ingredients in gelato, mostly thanks to Grom, with two shops in New York. I'm not much of a Grom fan--it's too rich, with too little "overrun," or air whipped in while the ice cream is churning, resulting in something much too close to Haagen-Dazs and not what I'd consider real gelato. But the flavors, many of them using Slow Food-protected ingredients, are first-rate.

San Crispino doesn't make the same cult out of its ingredients, but they're a good deal better than most. Most important, it's at Fiumicino! Time for one fond but reluctant farewell--and a reminder of why you'll have to get a plane back at the earliest possible opportunity.

Why He Was So, Well, Frank

Every restaurant critic has different reasons for taking the job and different ways of doing it. Frank Bruni's way of doing it, we know. If the first duty of every critic is to make readers want to read a review start to finish, week after week I saw Bruni work hard to write compelling, structured narratives.

That isn't easy. Reviews are about restaurants and food, sure, and need to be useful guides. But they're also columns that take up space in a paper--space that was always contested and today is only getting scarcer. As a longtime Times veteran, Bruni knew just how contested that space was. And one of his best friends, mentioned frequently only by her first name in his new Born Round, is the extremely entertaining Maureen Dowd.

Bruni also came at criticism the way he came at every subject in a career that included covering the White House and all of Italy--as a reporter. His own first loyalty is clearly to the truth. This is an impulse different from many memoirists, who can be fabulists first: if a story is good, make it a little better. Sweeten it.

Born Round is the story of the complicated relationship Bruni had all through growing up and making his mark as a reporter with food, and the role food played in his loving, overabundant family and then in his largely lonely adulthood. He's honest about everything, and that honesty is often painful to read. He isn't afraid to make himself vulnerable, something that takes real courage to do--and isn't something reporters are obliged to do. Quite the reverse: truthful as they are expected to be about the world, reporters are seldom called on or expected to put themselves into a story.

Because that relationship was so painful for so much of his life--it included throwing up after meals for a brief time, taking amphetamines to control his appetite (standard, doctor-prescribed procedure in the 1960s and '70s), and eating to curb a loneliness that only grew as his weight did--early readers of the excerpts that appeared as a cover story last month in The New York Times Magazine assumed that the point of the book was to help others through similar eating disorders.

Nope, Bruni says in a surprisingly honest post. Sorry, scratch the surprising part: it's Bruni's entire impulse to be honest. And so he is about the reason he wrote the book and the process he went through of shaping the story and keeping the focus where he wanted it--on eating.

Eating, not food. If the first duty of every food critic is to keep readers reading, the second duty is to love eating. You do a lot of it, especially with a weekly deadline. And through all his troubles with his weight--troubles he came to terms with, mostly through self-control and exercise--Bruni loved to eat. It came through in his reviews, especially when the subject was red meat (I'm not sure I've ever read a critic who would go to the lengths Bruni did to get and judge good steaks--and, in his valedictory piece in the Times dining section, he said all his friends and guests wanted steak above all). It comes through in his new book. And in his article for us.

On the Menu: Dragon's Lingerie

I asked Ana Sortun just what she'd put on the piece of sea bass she wrapped with blanched brussels-sprout leaves, a new leaf I wanted to try as soon as I tasted its firm, textured, slightly sweet flavor.

But the rest of what she tucked in while we shot our video was equally fresh and memorable, and though I knew there were new potatoes, I wasn't sure of the spicing. She told me that she sprinkled sumac, the indispensably lemony thyme-like eastern Mediterranean herb, and had spread a bit of parsley-and-whipped garlic sauce. It's a standard component of dishes at her restaurant in Cambridge, across the river from Boston.

It was the broad beans I wanted to buy along with the brussels-sprout leaves--dappled and pretty to look at, almost as good as my plain-Jane favorite summer bean, romano. And I saw them again Monday night, at Peter Hoffman's bright, hip Back Forty, in the East Village. They were part of a marvelous outdoor supper he served family-style, in a big outdoor garden at long wooden tables--the nicest way to eat, I think, and particularly unusual in New York City.

A summer shell bean salad with pancetta was practically as meaty and rich as the slow-roasted pork shoulder he served them with, but it was a tossed-off salad of fresh string beans in a strongly tarragon lemon vinaigrette I couldn't resist. In with the haricots verts (so much prettier and thinner and blander and duller than zaftig romanos) were my new friends, those dappled, yellow-based wax beans.

"Dragon's lingerie!" I cried. Peter and his chef, Shanna, said, "Around here, we call them dragon's tongue."

I felt proud. For once stodgy, starchy Boston had settled on a sexier name than New York!

New Potatoes: Not Even Thin-Skinned

As I've said in the magazine and here, new potatoes are more unlike anything else that's familiar that you get fresh at a farmer's market, even if they look the same. Their skin hasn't even formed yet, so it flakes away with the merest prod of a fingernail, and not even a sharp one at that. The starch hasn't fully changed to sugar, so they have a softer and far sweeter texture than any potato you're used to.

Ana Sortun, of the marvelous eastern-Mediterranean-themed Oleana restaurant, in Cambridge, calls them her "my favorite crop in the whole wide world"--and she should know, as she's married to the farmer Chris Kurth, of Siena Farms, and can pick (as in choose) what she wants to cook every morning before she leaves for the restaurant.

In our new video, she slices open new potatoes and shows the glistening, "bright, vibrant" sugar that immediately forms a sheen on the surface. I learned my own favorite way to make these from Barbara Kafka, who uses the French étuvé method of placing them with a knob of butter and a very small amount of water in closely covered, heavy-bottomed pot and shakes them for 25 minutes, never opening the pot, or so until they're steamed soft and browned all over. As devastating as this summer's late blight has been to tomatoes and to some of Siena Farm's potatoes, many of the new small red have been spared, and you're likely to find new potatoes at your farmer's market too.

There wasn't time to show more than Ana wrapping a beautiful piece of sea bass with a new leaf--or new to me: not the tomato leaves that are my current summertime love but brussels-sprouts leaves. They're not dainty, peeled-off leaves of the sprouts themselves, as you'd think. Farmer's market regulars are by now used to the spiny, surprisingly sturdy stalks the sprouts cluster on, and might even bring one as a conversation piece and giant centerpiece, then snap off the sprouts for supper.

It never occurred to me that the big, floppy leaves farmers usually cut off before bringing the stalks to the market could have a culinary use--okay, I admit that it never occurred to me that there were big, floppy leaves. They're pretty, like cabbage leaves, and a bit more kidney-shaped. Ana blanched them and laid them flat on a towel to dry and, as you'll see in the video, used them as a wrapper for the fillets and a few of the vegetables--carrots, potatoes--the farm had sent that day, and a sprinkling of some of her favorite sweet Aleppo pepper (she sells spice blends at the restaurant, and you'll find many uses for them in her book Spice). We devoured the dish as soon as it came out of the battered pie pan she uses for individual orders, after just ten minutes in a hot oven. The leaf was unexpectedly sweet and tender, and made me hope that her husband--and other farmers, providing recipes of course--will sell it.

This is the time to look for the perfect-pupil traits Ana enumerated in her husband's vegetables. "They're alive," she told me. "There's life in them. They have good posture." Stand up straight and go straight to a market! After, of course, being inspired by Ana at work.

Julia Liked It. She Really Liked It.

We all crossed our fingers and said our prayers when Julia came to dinner. Would she actually like what we served her? Enough to eat a lot of it, rather than just say something nice--or, worse, not say anything 'tall (as she would say), out of the unfailing politeness (she was too hearty and unaffectedly American for politesse)and bonhomie that kept every dinner-table conversation aloft?

Regina Charboneau of course wondered the same then when she cooked for Julia's first visit to her hometown of Natchez. She already had proof that Julia liked her biscuits, but she'd also watched Julia be politely, firmly frank about faults she found in food others served her. She was right to worry--especially when she was cooking on the day after trying to match Julia drink for drink at a welcome reception.

Southern cooks always have something besides biscuits in their arsenal: desserts, just the thought of which makes me want to go south. The one she pulled out--everyone put on the dog, another great Julia phrase, for Julia--was beignets, which fancy guests were lapping up long before the current restaurant doughnut-for-dessert trend.

But the guarantee that nothing could go wrong was her pecan praline sauce. I live on and for sugar, so I'm not the least daunted by the pound of sugar it starts with--and neither should you be, if you have a hankering for pralines and the brown-sugar icing that I could live on and no one outside the South seems to get right. Regina added a secret that makes pretty much everything better: buttermilk.

Julia lived by the principle that everything's better with butter. I live by another: everything's better with buttermilk. And a pound of sugar into the bargain--well, if you're looking for a dessert to serve over ice cream, fresh berries, or just to eat straight from a spoon, look no farther. I sure don't plan to.

The Tomato and Potato Killer: Late Blight Hits Home

The scene at the Copley Square farmer's market, in the middle of Boston's Back Bay, was as idyllic as you could ask for on an August Tuesday: string beans of green and dappled purple, yellow and white peaches, and my favorite, the small white "saturn"--aka Donut, as trademarked by the always-pioneering Frieda's Finest, in southern California--leggy and frondy fresh fennel, snapdragons and zinnia, long fat beets. And new potatoes. But not many. And no tomatoes except yellow cherries.

I stopped first, as I always do, at the Siena Farms stand, visible from blocks away for the giant floppy sunflowers that, as Chris Kurth explains in a gorgeous shot at the end of our video, pay the bills. They might not this year, he told me. I asked which of the four baskets of potatoes I should try, as there's nothing as sweet, soft, and kind of un-potatoey as a fresh-dug potato, as I wrote in an ecstatic column with directions about the best way to keep their delicate, sweet flavor. (Also the best way to make potato salad: it's German.)

"There are always the fingerlings," Chris said. "But if you want to try the red norlands, this'll be the last. They're gone. And all of the kennebecs you were digging up." Those were the big, handsome round potatoes I was pulling like treasures from his loamy soil. "We've stopped picking them. They were the hardest hit." He meant the late blight devastating farms all over the northeast, as Dan Barber explained in his excellent Sunday New York Times op-ed.

Some potatoes are left, including the fingerlings I took home and steamed on the spot; lovely as always, and next time I'll try the small, pebbly new Idahos he recommends and I'm still skeptical about.

But the beefsteaks I was picking, still small and green, and obsessively sniffing (I'm on a tomato-leaf kick, as I explained)--all gone, and just four days after we filmed. "The late blight turned the stem black," Chris said. "And then the tomatoes. It's serious, man."

He told me that for months he'd been hearing about an infestation of the blight that caused the Irish potato famine, brought in by big-box stores that sold cheap starter tomato plants. The same university extension agents who told Barber of the origins and severity warned Kurth (his were from the University of Massachusetts, Barber's from Cornell). But he shrugged them off: "I thought some new tomato disease, whatever. We always get some tomato disease."

Then he got hit. For dramatic pictures, see the series of 23 from Martha Stewart's blog--she recently got hit too, and as always thoroughly and clearly documents how it happened. It's indeed serious. Chris estimates his own damage this year as at least $20,000, the same disastrous difference between being in the black and being in the red that farmers all over the northeast are facing. (Time to start reading about the epochal Irish famine; there are plenty of books, of course, but I like the exemplary and very readable, and now hard-to-find History and Social Influence of the Potato, by Redcliffe N. Salaman.) Naturally, I'm stepping up my sunflower purchases.

You'll still find tomatoes, at his and most any market stand, especially as the sun starts to come out (gloomy as it is as I write) after the months of cool rain that were to the blight what hot dry weather is to California brush fires. Unlike some other farmers, Chris said that a few of his heirloom varieties, including striped German and cherokee, are so far untouched (fingers crossed), and Sun Golds, those sweet small cherries, "always pull through." And, as he pointed out with a sweep of his arm, there's lots of beautiful produce available for all: the bags of Tuscan kale, potatoes, and fennel I went home with, the bunches of beets I can never resist (I had to compare two varieties), the fresh raspberries and blueberries everywhere.

"The other crops are enjoying the fine weather that's finally kicking in," he said. You can step up your purchases too.

Andy, Jeffrey, and Woody Do Julia

For years Dorothy Zinberg has regaled me with tales of the three incomparably brilliant grad students who cooked out of Mastering and changed the world. Now that Julie & Julia is out, the truth can come out too--though it's not shocking, just marvelously entertaining, a dining-out story one can endlessly dine out on.

I know two of the three main characters, and you will too--there's no way anyone remotely interested in food and health won't recognize them. But hearing of their early hijinks, done in the deadly earnest competitiveness that fueled a great deal of cooking from Julia in the 1960s and '70s, reveals how early and fully the characters we know were formed. And they did it with equal brio and brilliance and sly wit, which defined their characters too--and was too often missing from the early Julia marathons.

You might be surprised at what Andy cooked and ate in those days. You won't be surprised about Jeffrey. Just entertained, as usual.

Charm Of The Farm

You can see Chris Kurth's Siena Farms stand from blocks away as you walk toward Copley Square, the banks of sunflowers blazing before the facade of Stanford White's Boston Public Library. It's always been the nicest stand at Boston's nicest farmers' market, one of a gratifyingly large number of markets all over the city.

I take any chance to go out and see his farm, which grows vegetables and salad lettuces and herbs for many local restaurants--and most of all for his wife, Ana Sortun's, wonderful Oleana restaurant, in Cambridge, which serves Turkish and eastern Mediterranean food of such freshness that you don't need any of the Spice that is the subject of her very good book, though she makes a very strong case for the spice mixes she makes (and sells) using peppers and spices she directly imports.

I had even more fun getting to visit Chris's farm with Kevin Kertscher, of Indigo Studios (and husband of a former Atlantic colleague), in the paradisal South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Kevin makes everybody he films look good and sound smart, though in Chris and Ana and their farm, named for their adorable towheaded daughter, he didn't have to work very hard. You can see for yourself in the first of four videos we'll have on the site, in a new Farm to Table series.

Me, another matter. He did tactfully omit the jungle-gym swinging Chris and I did to get up to the rafters of his barn, where Ana and he string braid after braid of new garlic to dry--instead of a ladder, he uses a chin-up bar and jumps, so I did too. Kevin does show me somewhat compulsively sniffing a green tomato from a new crop. I've become tomato-leaf-obsessed lately. "The smell of summer," Chris poetically calls it; I thought the stem end smelled just like a full tomato sauce, and was very glad to see Harold McGee defend the use of tomato leaves in sauce, even if we've all been taught they're toxic. He takes the risk in his own kitchen, and I plan to in mine too.

I hope you'll take the video as reason to go straight to a farm stand, even if it, and the staff, aren't quite as picturesque as Chris and the Siena Farms crew. For ideas of what to cook with the abundance, consult our recipe library--and watch for the next episode, when I visit Ana in the Oleana kitchen and see her use leaves you would never imagine would be great to eat and are. Not tomato, though. She does cook for the public, after all.

Finger Food: Pretty Much Everything

Melina Shannon-DiPietro's charming post reminds me of how thoroughly I've changed my habits since reading Walter Hoving's Tiffany's Table Manners For Teenagers, which I found at my uncle and aunt's house at a tender (pre-bar mitzvah) age and which made such an indelible impression that I have given it to many children and a good number of adults too.

Then I fell into the wrong crowd. I started hanging with people who toss salad with their hands--only. Then eat it with their hands too. And why stop at salad? Vegetables, anything not with a messy sauce--Hoving illustrated a teenager holding an asparagus spear with her fingers (one of the only foods freely, unrestrictedly allowed to be eaten with her fingers), and what's wrong with broccoli too?

A lot, I found out when I was having a family meal at my parent's house in Connecticut with my brother and his then-teenaged children. Throughout Friday night dinner, the formal occasion of the week, I ate the broccoli my stepmother had made with my fingers--and without thinking.

Until the next morning, when my brother and I were having a frank and useful exchange, something we were of course seldom known to do (we shared a room growing up) but happened to be doing then, reason long forgotten. "I'll do that," he said, agreeing to whatever let's-do-this-better-in-the-future request, "if you'll promise never to eat with your fingers in front of my children again. Do you know what kind of example you're setting?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I've fallen into the wrong crowd. Food people eat with their fingers."

Thus it was and thus it will ever be--except when I try, laboriously, to mind my manners. But now we have Melina, backed by Alice Waters no less (and unsurprisingly) to point to, not just Walter Hoving and a few lovely spears of asparagus.

Julie Talks

Two voices take us through Julie & Julia: the unmistakable, swooping one of Julia Child, as brilliantly embodied by Meryl Streep; and the beginning blogger Julie Powell, as adorably played by Amy Adams and as imagined by the brilliant Nora Ephron.

The conceit of the movie is two women finding their voices through their vocations. One voice is familiar to us all, though Ephron picks an unfamiliar moment that helps us all discover the woman Julia Child was before she became the character we think we know: sensual and in love with her husband, food, Paris, and sex, in an order that probably changed by the day. The other is less familiar to us, and not just because Julia Child became a household icon and Julie Powell an early blogging heroine, in two different eras whose media defined their audiences: a mere three networks plus educational TV; the literally countless blogs on the Web. It's because the story takes up two very different women at very different points in their lives, however similar those points may seem.

Ephron's insight is to write parallel stories of newlyweds learning what and who they love, and how to balance the callings and requirements of work and relationships. Although she had source material to work from for both--My Life in France, Julia Child's memoir written with her great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, and of course Julie & Julia--her canvas was much broader and blanker for Julie Powell.

Child's life is of course a matter of recent and rich historical record: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the book that started Powell on her journey; the years of her numerous TV shows, still available on video; her kitchen recreated in the Smithsonian, on the Mall--an affirmation of national-treasure status if there ever was one. When Child first got married and moved to Paris she was 20 years older than Powell, and had been through a world war and lived in Ceylon and China--exotic now, much more exotic then. Even if she couldn't find a channel for her voice, her fresh, endlessly inquisitive and interested voice, beautifully described by the wonderful writer Laura Shapiro in a recent review and documented in her short biography of Julia, was formed. When Powell began her blog she was not long out of college, finding both her voice and her vocation--and just starting to grow up, too.

A tall order and a journey still in progress, as we're lucky to have her describe for us. With blunt wit and candor Powell reminds us what the movie is really about, and it's not what you'd think. For both Julie and Julia, food is the vehicle for the voice and the vocation, not the vocation itself. The vocation is writing.

Julie & Julia Premiere: Starry in the Right Way

The guests at last Thursday's premiere of Julie & Julia were all the ones you assume go to glamorous premieres--the stars, the producers, the people who made the movie happen--and also the ones who in an ideal world would be at every premiere and in fact every party you ever went to: the cleverest people in New York.

This was completely unsurprising, given, as Susan Spungen points out, that the guests were the extended friends and family of Nora Ephron. I was agog from the moment Martha Stewart snapped my picture from the wrong side of the red velvet rope to the moment, many hours later, when the waiters at the Metropolitan Club apologetically showed us the door.

I get to share a cameo with Alex Prud'homme and his first cousin, Julia Child Prud'homme, a professional actress in LA. Don't blink!

I leave Susan to report on the real stars, many of whom I got to greet too, including Meryl Streep, of course looking like her beautiful, blonde, ebullient self and not like the dark-haired Julia. But she does embody Julia so completely that Judith Jones, her longtime editor, said at a panel I moderated at the Boston premiere, when referring to a big picture of Julia in the lobby, "Or maybe it's Meryl--I can't tell the difference anymore." (Jones herself, who is portrayed in the movie as the farsighted and canny editor she was and is, was and is more beautiful than she gets to look onscreen.) Streep's performance is as amazing as all her friends were telling her it is and the critics have so far unanimously proclaimed--and will keep proclaiming when the film opens, this Friday.

Judith Jones's contended confusion was shared by many of the other people who knew Julia as long and as well as she did--and even longer. The old guard was in full attendance, by which I mean the literal guard: the lawyers, trustees, and friends who actively maintain the rights to her image and work. The fact that they gave their blessing to the film and wanted to come to the opening after they saw it is as strong a signal as I can think of that Ephron and Streep could not have done better by Julia.

Both Julie Powell and Eric Powell were in the same room as the actors who adorably play them, Amy Adams and Chris Messina, which led to no little tennis-style head-swiveling from the guests who met them.

I closed the joint with Julia's nephews on both sides: Samuel Cousins, an architectural designer and furniture maker in Easton, Pennsylvania who is the son of Julia's sister, Dorothy, wonderfully portrayed in the movie by Jane Lynch as the looping, tall, just-as-strong-as-Julia character she was; and Alex Prud'homme, the great-nephew of Paul Child and the author of My Life in France, one of the two books the movie is based on.

I get to share a cameo with Alex--a writer finishing work on Troubled Waters, a book on water, its taste, and its politics that will come out in the spring and that I expect to frame future discussions on the subject--and his first cousin, Julia Child Prud'homme, a professional actress in LA. Don't blink! It comes after Julia meets her two future collaborators, and accompanies them from a very elaborate mirrored powder room to the salon. Julia Prud'homme gets a speaking part, too, as a bridge teacher during Julia's What-will-I-DOO-with myself early Paris phase. I got to meet his parents, people I'd been hearing about for a long time--since 1977, to be exact, through another relative of theirs.

Alex's mother, Erica Child Prud'homme, sweetly sent a picture of Alex and me. It reflects the high, warm spirits we came in and went out with when, after 1:00, the waiters informed us with the most doleful kindness that they really had to clear our table. It was like saying goodbye to Julia--something none of us wanted to do.

Zeke Is Back, (Unwillingly) In A Tuxedo

While he's been a bit busy with "changing the game" of health care in this country, Ezekiel Emanuel has still, on occasion, been eating, and on very rare occasion at fancy occasions.

In a funny post he points out what should be obvious and somehow slips the mind of most people who pay $1,000 and up a plate: that plate will never, ever hold anything halfway edible.

I'll let Zeke characterize the quality of most catered food. But, as a longtime tie-tier and lesson-giver I'll say my pet peeve about throwing on a dinner jacket, which is inevitably what one does, late and after a long day and often an irritating trip: the suspenders, or "braces," as we're supposed to call them. The buttons! The unexpected twists at the back where you can't see! Makes bad catered food sound good.

Unlike Guests, The Camera Never Lies

I'd often seen Susan Spungen do remarkable work as a food stylist and all-around good cook in the original offices of Martha Stewart Living. "Shoot food" is a common term around food magazines and food sections, something you generally eye very hungrily waiting for the moment of need to end, which can take forever, especially when a meticulous or temperamental stylist and photographer are involved--or jockeying for primacy as a shoot progresses.

Generally every assistant, equipment handler, and passerby from adjoining offices lunges the minute the photo lights get turned off, and within a shockingly short time the beautiful plates are battle scenes.

But I had no idea of the rigors of making and styling food for a film until Susan Spungen sent in this morning's enlightening piece. I admit that I'd gotten an idea when she appeared between takes on the day I spent on the set of Julie & Julia, in a well-used apron and her hair a bit astray. But then, she'd spent heaven knows how many hours--it was mid-afternoon--styling food for a terribly chic French cocktail party where Julia Child meets her future collaborators, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle (I got to be an extra clear on the other side of the screen from Meryl Streep peering intently at a tray of soigne little hors d'oeuvres). It all looked pretty spiffy to me, but then I was agog the whole day, and happily stunned when I saw Susan appear at all--I hadn't known she was working on the movie.

But just yesterday official confirmation appeared in the paper of record, when Sam Sifton, the culture editor of The New York Times and one of my favorite writers on food in any publication, wrote about the understandably daunting task of cooking for Nora Ephron, the writer and director of J&J. He leaves the actual review to his colleagues (whom he probably edits), but he does allow himself one observation:

Opinions about movies are for film critics; I hazard them at great personal risk. (I work closely with film critics.) But I can say that the food in Julie & Julia is beautiful. (Can't I?) The aesthetic of Ephron's sole is perfect. She may be to food as Scorsese is to bar fights.

Way to go Susan! And these are just the advance notices.

Biscuits Conquer All

I love few things as much as biscuits and my friend Peggy Pierrepont, and they all come together in Regina Charboneau's introductory post.

Natchez, Regina points out fairly convincingly, is the center of the universe. I've certainly had great food when I've visited Peggy--and though I hadn't met Regina until recently (and in Monterey yet), I had long heard tales and had tasted her biscuits. As she writes, she always cooks buffets and sends friends home with the leftovers, and on one visit, surveying leftovers she'd sent home with Peggy, I dove for the sole remaining biscuit without so much as asking if anyone else might want it.

It was a different biscuit from the ones I'd learned from the Queen of Biscuits, Shirley Corriher, whose grandmother's "touch of grace" biscuits inspired one of my first pieces for The Atlantic, on pie crust, and a more recent one on scones, which require a similarly delicate technique of combining fat and flour. Corriher makes a dough so wet you have to juggle balls of it lightly in flour, aiming to handle it and add as little flour as possible. The whole process, which she describes in her masterly CookWise, is something of a feat. And a worthwhile one.

I get the sense that the biscuit queens of Natchez, who have no intention of ceding their title as biscuit capital of the world (Regina is just a bit competitive, as the piece from the local paper implies), are a bit more relaxed about their technique. The ratio of fat to flour in Regina's recipe is sufficiently high that the biscuits will be tender; I recall the stains on the paper I greedily unwrapped on Peggy's counter. And don't substitute margarine for butter, which, this being Natchez, there's plenty of too. Margarine is easier and more forgiving to work. This is a good recipe for a first-time biscuit maker, and once you get the addiction you'll keep practicing.

And watch for more Regina recipes. She's as great a cook as she is a person--and that might be the true secret to Natchez's center-of-universe status.

Coffee Glamour: Italians Do It Better

What is it with the Italians and espresso? Their coffee culture spurred a nation's reawakening, in the form of Starbucks, co-founded by our own Jerry Baldwin; Peet's, whose legendary founder, the Dutch trader and roaster Alfred Peet, had inspired Jerry and his co-founders and which Jerry went on to lead, and many other coffee roasters sell better quality coffee every day than almost anything you can find in Italy (which, to be fair, is having an artisan-roaster revival inspired, I would guess, by America).

And yet, and yet. Having run out of my bag of Peet's for my morning stovetop espresso, I broke out a can of ground coffee from Sant'Eustachio, one of two rivals as Rome espresso legends, which is now marketing its coffee all over the world, thanks to an ambitious and relatively recent owner named Raimondo Ricci, with whom I chatted at the Fancy Food Show earlier this month. When I wrote The Joy of Coffee, Sant'Eustachio was known for its gimmicky Gran Caffe, with a mysteriously healthy head of crema foam whose secret is shielded behind steel-screened coffee machines that prevent peering. (A Rome taxi driver swore he knew the secret from an ex-barista, and as it sounded plausible to me I repeated the story.)

Like Illy, the pioneer of quality coffee and glossy marketing in Italy, Sant'Eustachio now buys its beans direct from coffee farms, not from distributors, and is concentrating on international marketing; you can order the cans from gustiamo.com, the purveyor of hand-chosen, high-quality Italian foods. I remembered the quality of its espresso as, frankly, not very high, and chalked up the reputation to the water in its neighborhood behind the Pantheon. Water is, of course, the secret to pasta, pizza, and coffee too in Naples, and my favorite water in the world comes from the volcanic springs between Rome and Naples. But this espresso surprised me: gentle, unassertive, but balanced and very good. I plan to make it a pantry staple for when I can't get to my local roaster.

But then, skillful blending and roasting has always been the Italian hallmark, rather than the quality of the beans. And, of course, that Italian sense of style. As Faith writes today, seeing a uniformed barman make anything in a cocktail shaker is a thrill, and the idea that you can have something non-alcoholic but decidedly adult has its own thrill too. The drink itself might not quite live up to its name, at least not to anyone vaguely expecting a coffee milk shake: a shakerato is a sweetened iced coffee, with no milk, and, like all true Italian espresso drinks, shorter and sparer than Americans expect. But it also offers an incomparably quick and cold jolt, especially on a hot summer's day.

The cold jolt I live for is granita di caffe, shaved espresso ice, from Sant'Eustachio's historic rival, Tazza d'Oro, closer to the Pantheon and able to draw on the same, or almost the same, water supply. Many Italian espresso bars have granita in the summer, though too many of them are using slush machines of the kind you'd find at a carnival trailer. Proper granita is fine chips of ice that tingle on the tongue and provide a light bite. It's not easy to make by machine to get the right consistency, and when you find a place that has it, in a cold tin tub, you celebrate. It's easy to make at home, and better than anything you get elsewhere, because you can get the right consistency with nothing more than an ice tray and some table knives; the recipe is in the back of The Joy of Coffee.

Still, Faith has set me dreaming of being back at the Pantheon, where I always find myself several times a day to order granita con panna--a plastic cup that in fact wouldn't be out of place at a cocktail bar, filled with sweet shaved espresso ice and topped with a generous swirl of whipped cream. You fold the stiffish cream into the shavings, which hold their texture for almost as long as it takes you to sip/bite each little flat spoonful. Then you walk into the Pantheon, look straight up at the open round oculus letting in the sun or the rain, and understand why Rome will always be eternal.

Farmer's Market Mirage

Even before Restaurant Week, with it's $35.50 meals, was under way--as it is today in New York and has been throughout the summer in many other cities--my stepdaughter, Jessica, called with an enthusiastic report of the bargain buffet to be had at the Bouley Bakery, part of the small empire whose owner seems always to be changing plans and shapes.

The current format at his lower West Broadway location, with its soaring arched windows, is a retail bakery and cafeteria on one side, where you pay for food by weight, and a fancy, spacious dining area on the other, those wide windows opened to the street, where you can take your weighed and paid food and enjoy the view. The real estate alone is a bargain, and Jessica reported a more-than-decent sized portion of salmon was as well: "I had lunch for less than $6!" For young people like her, fresh out of grad school and working in offices nearby, it seems a godsend.

And, of course, she'll be visiting several restaurants this week to try out bargain menus in the low-season promotion the Zagats dreamed up many years ago and restaurants across the country have adopted with such enthusiasm that many keep prix-fixe lunches on the menu year-round. Our Terrence Henry has timed his American Food Tour visit to New York this week, and I expect reports on trying to fulfill your poll-result wishes during the annual summer Restaurant Week marathon crush.

He might be fooled by the same mirage Jessica was coming out of her triumphal Bouley Bakery bargain lunch: a gorgeous, ideal farmer's market on Duane Street with eye-popping produce and flowers. Not only a high-quality bargain lunch next door to her new job but a beautiful farmer's market, too! Plus a sign she and doubtless dozens of her friends have been waiting to see: "Want gluten-free bread? We've got it!"

Alas, when she tried to go in she found it was just a movie set and word that J Lo herself was the star and strolling the sidewalks across from her workplace were little consolation. She sent this link to a picture of the star on the set for the movie, whose working title is Back-up Plan. But, in an only-in-New-York tone of disappointment, she'd much rather run to a farmer's market when she goes for lunch break than run into a movie star.

I Love Lard, But...

Last night I had my first look at Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron's movie about Julia Child and Julie Powell that opens next month, at the studios of WGBH, in Boston, the place where it all began. Or at least the television part that "changed the world," as Child's husband Paul keeps telling her she's going to do while she's trying to finish her first book. (And I got to see myself in it: to my surprise and delight, Ephron got me dressed up as an extra the day I was lucky enough to watch Meryl Streep as Julia.)

Much more on the movie closer to the time it opens, with special contributions from many of the people who helped with it. Also, I hope, a link to the video of the discussion panel I led after the screening with Judith Jones, Child's longtime editor (a character in the movie), Russ Morash, the show's original producer, and Jasper White, a great chef and great friend of Julia's.

Alas, they didn't film the reception afterward where students from a new local branch of the Cordon Bleu--the original of which is sternly portrayed in the movie--put out many sumptuous tables of desserts I learned from Julia's books: Paris-Brest, that cream-puff-dough, whipped cream, and pastry cream dream croquembouche with its conical mountain of caramelized puff-pastry balls, Gateau St.-Honore. The students had clearly gone all out for Julia, who presided in the form of a mural-sized photograph smiling benignly over the banquet. Or maybe it was Streep as Julia. As Jones herself said, since seeing the movie she's been having trouble telling which is which.

For now, though, links to the kind of story, and competition, that Julia would have dug right into: lard vs. butter vs. shortening vs. oil in pie crusts. The discussion over dessert turned to technique, the kind of discussion that would get Julia's intense attention. Sheryl Julian, food editor of the Globe and one of the numerous guests who had often cooked with Julia in her kitchen--I did too, and we all got a little teary when the kitchen, long ago ripped out of her Cambridge house to be recreated at the Smithsonian, appears at the end--told me that she'd spent much of the past week as impresario of a pie-crust competition to see which fat produced the best pie crust. I'm on the record as a lard-lover, and one of my first columns for this magazine was on mastering the technique of working fat into flour, a lifetime's work that still continues.

Sheryl's shocking conclusion: vegetable oil made the crust that won in a blind tasting. She proudly introduced me to the crust's author, Ike DeLorenzo, who was using his aunt's recipe from a label on a Wesson oil tin. Here's her introduction, here's his piece on the "impossibly easy" crust, and here's the recipe.

I really don't want to believe this. But I know what my weekend duty is. Even if I began the discussion panel by asking "What would Julia have thought of the movie?" I don't have to wonder what Julia would have done after our crust conversation. She would have driven home, changed back into pants, gotten out the flour and fat, stayed up until 1:00 or 2:00, and called Sheryl and me at 7:00 this morning, cup of coffee in hand, with her report.

Even If You Can Stand the Heat

You don't pay to see the understudy, you pay to see the star. Grant Achatz knows this. To his surprise he has become the sort of star diners expect to see, especially after they've fought for reservations at Alinea, his Chicago restaurant.

In his last post he described the dilemma he faced in trying to promote more interchange between cooks and guests: a "mat plate," in which cooks assemble dishes in front of diners. Sometimes he's the cook. More often he's not. People get upset when he's not the cook doing the assembly. And they get more upset when they don't even get a mat--both impossibilities, first because he can't be at every table and second because he doesn't have enough mats, though he's working on that part.

Mats he can reproduce and buy, himself he can't. And that's the subject of today's post: how to stay creative and refreshed and keep a staff inspired and working at top capacity. His conclusions will be controversial. The need to stay as inventive as his series of posts on this site show him to be will not.

Forbidden Fruit

Last week I emerged from the Grand Street stop on New York's B train, the heart of Chinatown, and encountered a scene I'd never seen in this country: a stack of fresh durians, the unforgettably rusticated Asian fruit, being cut open and the flesh scooped out to lined-up customers.

Anyone traveling in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand and Hong Kong, is shown the fruit and told the mystique: elegant hotels won't let it in the kitchen, airlines won't let it in the cargo hold, the better sort won't go anywhere near it, all because of the stench it emits. That's before it's opened, when it looks like a sculpture devised by a Baroque or Mannerist architect working in wood rather than stone. It's an undeniably neat object: I've got a miniature wooden one on my mantelpiece.

But that smell. It's somewhere between sexual and sewage, which is why people are both drawn and repelled by it. The flesh, though, is something different: there's only the vaguest trace of the scent, like musk dosed in the proper quantity so it can be used in an expensive perfume and not be overpoweringly vile. It's custardy and lush, as if it's pudding with its own subtle butterscotch sauce. And it also looks like some sort of organ, which is why some delicate sensibilities just can't stomach, let alone smell it.

I developed a love of durian that went beyond the model, but a few years ago could only find it frozen, in shallow plastic trays much like the ones the vendor I happened on was scooping the flesh into. I would patiently defrost them for a few days in the refrigerator and then feast with a spoon.

Now I can have the same but much more sensual pleasure with fresh durian--but can I have it in Boston yet? I'll have to check--and welcome all reports of fresh-durian sightings.

Decaf, Caf--Is It Really All Caf?

Today Jerry Baldwin brings up one of my favorite coffee-related subjects--the way, that is, a particularly problematic child becomes your favorite. Researching "Caffeine and Decaf," a longish chapter in my Joy of Coffee, easily took longer than any other chapter, and involved reading as I recall 325 articles on caffeine--not scanning, or just reading the abstracts, but reading them.

I didn't come out a scientist, or an expert--but I did come out with an appreciation of how complex the subject is, and how it can make even the calmest researchers, shall we say, a little high-strung. Any epidemiologist has to tackle it, not to mention cancer or heart-disease researcher.

The news then, and the news recently, is pretty much all good. Whatever potential benefits claimed for drinking coffee--alertness, of course, perhaps reduced risk of stroke and certain cancers, perhaps not--no definitive harm has been shown. As for addiction, another story. I learned a lot about the definitions of "addiction" and "dependence," and the societal harm associated with them. Caffeine, so far, is not defined as a societal harm.

But an epicurean menace? Here's where Jerry comes back in. We've both spent years and years sampling different methods. I even journeyed far, far into the south of Italy to visit a usually super-secret plant that used the then-brand-new supercritical carbon dioxide method of decaffeination, which held enormous promise--promise, as Jerry comments, that hasn't been quite fulfilled.

I'm with him on general disappointment with water process, though less cross about the Swiss Water ads he mentions--ads I heard all the time on public radio on a recent swing through the Bay Area, so I understand why he grits his teeth on a daily basis. I just look for methylene chloride, the chemical process I'm convinced is safe and is the best for flavor--and, as it happens, was defending in a coffee shop at our Aspen ideas fest just last week. Maybe Jerry and I will form a Friends of Safe Chemicals In Your Food group and spend the rest of our days living it down.

Push An Atlantic Writer Around

This morning Terrence Henry announces, with a dramatic map and a dramatic flourish, the kind of road trip anyone with half a palate is dying to take: a couple months of hitting every one-horse town and shining metropolis on the map with a restaurant, truck stop, or food maker worth stopping at. It's part of the year-long early retirement he's been making pretty brilliant use of.

Terrence has assembled an enormous amount of information about places he should want to go, has always hankered to go, thinks might be worth a stop--and here's where you come in. He needs advice. Crowdsouced groupthink, call it whatever you want. But he's bold and intent on eating his up and down and across the U.S. and has got no beef against Canada:

Before each stop, we'll be soliciting advice on "must-eats" and conducting polls where you can vote on which place we'll visit. It's not limited to restaurants--we want to find amazing cheeses, innovative farmers, great distilleries, inspiring markets and forward-looking brewers. With your help, my ambition is to spend the next few months enjoying (and reporting on) the many culinary delights out there.

So help him out! Steer him toward what's true and with luck good--and you well know the difference. Feel free to contribute if you've only been to or know once place. That's the good part of crowdsourcing. We'll edit. He'll edit. You'll all have much more than enough fodder for your own future road trips.

His first stop is Montreal, and he wants to know where to find the city's best bagels. Vote below:

Tipping Really Isn't A City In China

Jim Fallows recently wrote about what strikes him most forcefully as he re-enters U.S. life after spending three years in China. The shuttle driver on the way in from the Aspen airport made clear that he expected a tip in a particularly blatant way--reminding Jim that in China tipping is so unusual as to be even insulting. Maybe, he thought, there's really no advantage to tipping cultures:

They just end up delivering the money in a way that is more demeaning all around. The driver can't have enjoyed this exercise. I know I didn't. Please! Just add the money to the fare--or the restaurant check or the hotel bill--rather than having all of commercial life colored by the haggling / hostile-servile on one end / guilty-paternalistic on the other end institution of the tip.

As it happens, I'd just been discussing this with my own shuttle driver, after Atlantic Media's Ron Brownstein and his wife, Eileen, were lured from his van by a driver sent by the hotel where they were headed--a hotel right across the street from the one where I was headed. The driver said that what his colleague done was illegal by the airport standards: one driver is not allowed to solicit, or even speak to, passengers in another vehicle. What was more, my driver wasn't supposed to have touched my bags: only airport workers are supposed to load bags into taxis and shuttles. But there were none in view, because no one enforces either rule. Two more workers expected to derive a good portion of their income from tips!

It was all enough to make me get behind the China system, as the whole business of tipping in coffee shops let alone restaurants is fairly recent and fairly vexing. It has been explored in many places, most recently a thoughtful article by Paul Wachter, and has been the subject of lawsuits in which managers haven't properly distributed pooled tips. The current system doesn't seem to please anybody, so consider this an invitation to submit solutions.

The airport union snafu reminded me of something I'd heard at this year's Fancy Food show, helpful news in this case and also a reminder of how different our culture is from China's. It was from Paula Lambert, founder of the Mozzarella Company and a longtime board member of the organizing association, NASFT. I'd asked her, as I did the other food producers I've known for a while, how they were doing in the downturn.

"We voted to release money from our reserves in I think February to help our members come to the show." This amounted to a 50 percent subsidy for what she said was the exhibitors' greatest expense by far: union drayage fees to transport from the loading dock to the Javits Center exhibition floor the contents of the crates the members send: display units, mozzarella-stick fryers, coffee makers, tea brewers, heat 'n' serve ovens, decorated mini refrigerators, panino griddles, etc., to keep and prepare all those samples being handed out. "And we have scanners!" she said delightedly, as she snatched my ID badge from its plastic envelope and scanned the bar code, ensuring I'll receive emails and publicity materials for life.

I'm not sure China offers comparable trade-union help or protections, though I think I know the answer. But I think I'm ready to change over to Chinese tipping culture, at least outside restaurants. You?

I Want What They're Having

Who hasn't seen another table getting better treatment at a restaurant? Who hasn't felt slighted as free courses sail forth from the kitchen to tempt other diners, who clearly rate special attention from the kitchen?

And what happens when the chef is a celebrity in his or her own right, and one of the main attractions of the restaurant and the experience? Grant Achatz is one of the country's biggest celebrity chefs, and people plan trips to Chicago around when they can get a table at Alinea. He's sensitive to this. He knows people want to see him, want to feel what it's like to visit the kitchen and be present at the creation.

He has begun to document his fascinating new way to bring that experience straight to the diner--prepping the course on a gray silicone mat that took months of experimentation to pioneer. He's still working out the details, and how to give more and more tables the experience at each seating.

But there's another problem, and as he says today, it goes beyond logistics. It's envy. It's wanting to feel special at what is inevitably a special-occasion meal. It's feeling slighted if someone else gets an experience you don't.

Parents know what it's like to give each child the same amount of attention and equal amounts of treats, even at different times. Imagine doing it with dozens of children every night--ones you don't know. Grant hasn't found all the answers yet. I'm fascinated--and moved--that he's looking for them.

Cookies, Cheese, and a Panda at the Fancy Food Show

Eleanor and I both visited the opening of the Fancy Food Show, at the Javits Center in New York, on Sunday. It's the trade show for anyone in gourmet food, where seemingly every cracker, sausage, salsa, and chocolate in creation is on display and available for sampling. It's somewhere between a modest trade show and a slick corporate carnival, with an almost complete range of displays from card table to mini-restaurant. I try to go whenever I can, to gauge what the larger food companies are doing (the really big supermarket brands exhibit in Chicago, at McCormick Place, for the Food Marketing Institute's annual trade show, which is as razzle-dazzle as a car show, well, used to be.) The closest I saw to old carnival tactics was a salesperson in a panda outfit handing out samples of licorice.

A typical aisle scene will have, as I saw yesterday, Chewy's rugelach and hamantaschen across from Tang's, which was giving samples of "heat 'n' eat mussels," across from Natural Garden, which featured purple and brightly colored bottles of acai and other exotic fruit drinks. "You shouldn't've eaten breakfast," a woman giving out samples told a convention-goer. She was right. The essential accessory used to be a water bottle--it's hard to eat more salt than at this show--but now water bottles are out of fashion, and there were coolers and cups everywhere.

I hadn't been in a few years, and in a quick tour was surprised by how far small companies I used to have to seek out had come: Nueske's bacon, for instance, a chef's favorite, was scenting the air behind the main entrance--prime real estate--passing out samples of bacon. DiCamillo Bakery in Niagara Falls, New York, and Almondina, of Maumee, Ohio, were opposite each other near the front with big stands--heartening, as I've long championed their quality and first wrote about them when they were further toward the card-table end of the scale.

I always went for the aisles of Italian food, and gravitated there again this year. As with the aisles of other countries, many of the little booths were barely manned, and had a stray pamphlet or two. At dinner at Salumeria Rosi Parmacotto, which I first learned about from our own Zeke Emanuel, the chef, Cesare Casella, who imports his own products (subject for another day soon) confirmed my longtime impression that governmental regions found state money to bring over food producers looking for distributors. "Try going at lunch," he said. "The stands are empty for hours--everybody's out exploring New York."

This year things were sprucer--I had the softest, sweetest cilieghe, tiny balls of mozzarella di bufala, I've ever tasted in or out of Italy, for instance. And I found my favorite chocolate in the world: the hazelnut-enrobed quarter-sized, nubbly baci di Cherasco from the elegant Barbero pastry shop, incredibly fragrant with the world's best hazelnuts. I've written about them in these pages, and they're still looking for a U.S. distributor. So if anyone wants to sell great chocolates--go to booth 2720 by Wednesday afternoon!

Bartending With and Without Booze

Zeke Emanuel reviews the newest addition to Charlie Trotter's menu--non-alcoholic drinks paired with food in a tasting menu. This new trend gives succor, release, permission, and relief to people who don't or can't drink alcohol.

Abstinence will I suspect be on the rise, as the longtime findings about the healthful effects of a modest amount of alcohol come into question--not to mention the 24-hour news cycle that the President may wryly say he's not on but the rest of us are. So hangovers of the sort Derek Brown mentions as a panel subject of a cocktail convention he's attending again this year in New Orleans are a rare treat for most of us--as charming as the notion of attending the panel in a bathrobe, as Brown did, is.

And there's a thirst for new, liquefied flavor combinations, with and without alcohol. Our own Gus Rancatore told me the other day that's he collecting them in every cookbook and Website he can, to give him more ideas for ice creams and sorbets. As summer finally arrives, herb-minded chefs like Rick Bayless, whose Chicago rooftop garden was shown as an example of how chefs grow close to the kitchen, and Charles Draghi, a Boston chef who does grow herbs at home--so many that he picked a name for his restaurant, Erbaluce, that includes the Italian word for "herb"--look for new uses, and infusions in drinks as well as sauces are the new route.

Cocktail menu pairings have been in fashion a while, as mixologists like our Brown have vied with chefs in creativity; they'll feature in the convention he's going to this year (he gets to pair his with steaks). Zeke's post points a way forward for the chef-minded mixologists like Brown, and like the many movingly mentioned in Kim Severson's interesting piece about abstaining bartenders in yesterday's Times, which also featured a lightly devilish bartender's dictionary by Pete Wells--packed with enough information and charm to keep drinkers and abstainers alike lubricated for the season.

Lobster, Lobster Everywhere

I was alarmed when I saw this story on AP yesterday, about angry lobster fishermen setting up rogue retail outlets on the back of trucks, in parking lots, and the like, underselling the retailers who have themselves been forced to drop the price to 20-year lows. Good for summer feeds. Bad for fishermen and the part of Maine I've visited every summer--Spruce Head, near Rockland, which may have a nice summer population now but when we started visiting family friends there, in the 1960s, lived on lobster and still tries to now.

Stores of lobster populations and lobster prices are New England staples, and ones that always confuse me as closely as I try to follow them. Don't sudden excess and plunging prices presage environmental and economic disaster, like the story of salmon in the Maine of 100 years ago and cod in the Georges Bank of just a few decades ago? Is this another sign of global warming and the end of nature? Will this be the last July when visitors who accompany my family for our annual Spruce Head trip come back with a year's worth of stories about the civilized-seeming people who turn into cavemen when presented with a platter of steamed shedders?

I asked Trevor Corson, longtime adjunct member of the Atlantic family and author of the lively and deeply researched Secret Lives of Lobsters, if this was indeed reason for alarm. His lightning-quick and lucid reply surprised--and relieved--me.

The problem isn't the fishery, he said--that's in good shape. Really good shape. Whew! It's the economy--and, I guess not so incredibly, Iceland and its own economic crash. The very independence and stubbornness that have made "Mainiacs" New England legends is right now working against them. The story he lays out is classic New England--but the New England of flinty, independent survival rather than shortsighted exploitation of nature, which plays just as large a role in its history.

Corson says that it doesn't look like Maine lobster will go the way of Maine wild salmon or Cape Cod cod--but, if they don't change their fishing and marketing strategies in ways he describes, they could go the way of the textile mill workers who have left such lovely, sad relics in the Connecticut of my childhood and the Massachusetts I live in now.

Cheese, Chocolate, and BBQ For "Summer"

You might have heard that it's been raining in the Northeast. You might have read a newspaper like our own Globe, which ran this page-one story about June's "washing out all over."

But hope goes on, for all those vegetables come July, for heat maybe this week. Meanwhile, Daphne Zepos gives us an idea for how to choose and pair summer cheeses with the primeurs vegetables she found at her farmers' market--even if the current weather could easily ripen any cheese and encourage mold on the ones that aren't supposed to have it. And an idea for a salad that hurries summer up even with the green tomatoes that are the only honest ones anyone can find yet. This afternoon Ari Weinzweig tells us about a new color for barbecue that's old in South Carolina--yellow.

For escapism now as we wait for heat--I almost (almost) envied my New Orleans friend Brett Anderson when he began a note yesterday, "Greetings from the Big Sauna"--Alex Whitmore takes us to Chiapas as he searches for cacao to suit not only his Fair Trade imperatives but also the flavor profile he needs for his signature Taza chocolate bar. That bar with this cacao, he says, is coming next month. Meanwhile, waiting for the chill and rain to end, I'm going to search for some chocolate to keep me alert till then.

Chicken Tip: It Starts With A Cold Knife Tip

On a recent Saturday I went to a cooking demo given by Ming Tsai, local celeb and pal of our Governor Deval Patrick, after a bike ride to demonstrate the benefits of Mass In Motion, diet and fitness program created by the Massachusetts department of health (I'd say an innovative program that should be a national model, but then I'd have to add that my spouse is the state health commissioner, so I'm prejudiced). It was a surprisingly loose, fun event that even yielded cooking tips and a recipe pretty much everyone there planned to use. Two in particular that yielded universal "Ooh"s from the crowd, and one that has had me wondering since I heard and saw it.

I shouldn't have been surprised at how professional and lively the results were. Tsai is a master of the TV demo, of course, and known to all--though I discovered him as the ambitious chef-owner of a brand-new suburban restaurant, Blue Ginger in Wellesley, that knocked out sophisticated suburban friends who tipped me off that I had to go and get the jump on what would be a major find. He quickly came to national fame on a cooking show that was in the works when he opened Blue Ginger, he told me; he has since built an empire you can read about at his Website. He also told me that we had gone to the same college and he'd been a squash star--a sport he now helps promote as an unlikely route to college for low-income students in Boston, through a group he enthusiastically told me about after the ride, Squash Busters.

He'd passed the headquarters on the bike ride, which ended in Jamaica Plain--center of the right-minded universe--at Bikes Not Bombs, which supplies donated and rebuilt bikes to students and communities around the world. As proof of just how right-minded, my friend and Atlantic contributor Bill McKibben had just given a lecture that a big poster promoted, and when I emailed him to marvel at the coincidenc--I live less than ten minutes away by foot--he told me he was crazy about "BNB," as its fans call it. (No, I didn't bicycle over--my excuse is that I'd come from a spin class.)

It provided a congenial setting for Tsai, who knows exactly how to project into any event high energy and a can-do spirit, to make a simple marinated chicken-breast stir fry with a couscous salad. He was assisted by a beaming, good-natured governor--and Deval Patrick is himself a renowned cook, though he amiably played celebrity sous-chef. The cameras were rolling, and we've waited to post this until the state was able to post its links to the video, and here it is:



The recipe itself is fresh and easy, with stuff that's usually on hand like orange juice, brown sugar, and soy sauce, and things that are easy to get: Greek yogurt, mint, and fresh ginger. Tip number one that made everyone exclaim "Oh!": peel fresh ginger root with the back of a spoon.

NEXT: The second, surprise tip.

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Why I'm Leaving the Oatmeal Wilderness

Ari Weinzweig has gotten me into a lot of bad habits. One of them is starting every morning with a bowl of oatmeal. Today's piece on his favorite Macroom's reminds that I've got to order some. Like right now. It's been years since I've had it, and I've been in the Irish wilderness of believing the handsome, sturdy British Isles industrial-revolution packaging of McCann's, the kind of box that has gold medals from London in 1851 and Chicago in 1893.

Even if McCann's is part of Odlums, which makes the only brown-bread mix I can find (and life would be impoverished without brown bread, incomparably light but nutty, every now and then), McCann's is close but not close enough to Ari's Macroom. I've just finished a bowl of steel-cut oats--the healthful, whole-grain kind, with a stamp logo of endorsement by the Whole Grains Council, a group founded by Oldways. I sure want to have whole grains, but not when after an hour of simmering they're still hard and too pellet-like, without any creaminess in the liquid.

Back to Arrowhead Mills rolled oats for now, which unlike most pasty, tasteless brands have a kind of precise oat flavor, and nice creaminess after only a few minutes. Yes, I use instant! There, I said it. And rolled oats, even if as Ari points out they look "something like the seedpods of autumn elm trees without the wings"--like they'd been steamrolled, which if you've seen an oat factory they literally are.

But Macroom's soon as Zingerman's gets them to me. And I'll heed Ari's suggestions both about thinking of savory oatmeal suppers, which sound odd and possibly yucky only because we're used to oatmeal as a breakfast; imagine if, like friends from Philadelphia or Southerners used to grits, we'd grown up thinking of polenta as exclusively breakfast food and couldn't imagine what chefs were doing putting it next to salmon and roast pork. And try to resist ordering the Muscovado brown sugar he rightly insists on. That I don't need oatmeal to polish off in about three days flat.

Yes, You Have To See Food, Inc.

Food, Inc., the new movie directed by Robert Kenner and co-produced by Eric Schlosser,opens wide this weekend--on 45 more screens--and in more cities throughout the summer, and yes, you have to see it. There hasn't been a film this important about American food production, and probably not about industrialized food anywhere.

The movie opens with a voice-over from the introduction to Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, about the incredible pace of change in the way the world's food is grown and produced. The values and spirit of Fast Food Nation inform the whole film, which began as a documentary based on it. Over the six or seven years Kenner worked on it, evolved into its own, equally powerful indictment of the savage, pitiless toll the industrial food system takes on human lives.

As in Fast Food Nation, the portraits of people make the points more devastatingly than any of the articulate narrators, including Schlosser himself, can. Kenner is a patient filmmaker with the sensitivity to wait for the telling moment--in a Washington hotel room, for instance, after we have followed Barbara Kowalcyk through the halls and offices of the Capitol on a long day of lobbying for passage of a law named after her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Kevin, who died ten days after eating a burger on a family vacation. "Kevin's Law" would give the FDA the power to close meat processors distributing contaminated meat--a power it incredibly does not have. We have seen the sympathetic, semi-distracted faces of the legislators and aides who listen to her tell the story of "my beautiful son." We have seen (several times) home moves of the towheaded boy in the water, just before he got sick.

The freshness of the speakers Kenner chooses lets them make familiar, polemical points free of cant.

Checking her laptop for news of recent outbreaks of food-related illness, Kowalcyk looks at Kenner, exhausted. She doesn't want pity, she says. That she can give herself. She has traveled far from home and devoted years of work so that the companies that could never bring themselves to apologize for what they did to her son won't have the chance to do the same thing to anyone else's.

A similar resignation and anger permeate the ravaged beauty of Carole Morison, a chicken farmer in Maryland who lost her contract with Perdue when she refused to change to "tunnel ventilation" instead of the screen sides of her big chicken houses, which were already so cramped she had to use methods she hated--methods far outside any humane way to raise animals. Morison explains the ever-more-expensive equipment Perdue and other large packers require farmers to install, putting them further into debt and progressively enslaving them--one of several farmers we meet who illustrate a main point of Schlosser's book, that farmers are "essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced off the land." The expensive barn she didn't want to build is so cramped that her thousands of chickens can barely stand--and, in fact, that's all they can do. Because they have been bred to be top-heavy with breasts that provide disproportionate amounts of white meat, the chickens can barely take a few drunken steps before toppling over.

Hunched and methodical, wearing a surgical mask to avoid breathing in feathers (but herself already antibiotic-resistant, she says, simply from years of exposure to the drugged birds), Morison trudges through the house picking up dead birds. Only when she emerges into the bright sun, throws the chickens into a tractor, and takes off her mask do we notice how beautiful she was and could still be.

Kenner uses subversively bouncy, cartoony graphics in supersaturated color to illustrate points and provide statistics and timelines. The intermittent shots of seductive, sterile supermarkets are almost menacingly vivid (the credits sequence, in which the creators appear on packaged-food labels, is especially clever). The graphics are fun to watch, as in a series of flipping business cards showing the revolving door between Monsanto and government in which lawyers and executives (people you've never heard of, like Clarence Thomas and Donald Rumsfeld, former CEO of Searle, which was absorbed by Monsanto) become officials and regulators in positions to look out for the interests of their previous employer.

They draw a sharp contrast with the grainy color videos of reality, sometimes taken with concealed cameras. We follow, for instance, Eduardo Pena, a union organizer we in Tar Heel, North Carolina, to a late-night trailer park roundup of illegal immigrant workers who kill and cut and pack pork in the largest slaughterhouse in the world. Pena tells the camera that the immigration police have been tipped off by officials from Smithfield, the giant that long ago ripped through the poor and vulnerable local work force to staff its plant (Smithfield was one of several dozen companies that refused to speak to or cooperate with Kenner--a main reason the film took so long to make). Hiring illegal immigrants, Pena says, gives Smithfiled free rein to force the immigrants to work under its own brutal conditions--and lets it easily afford to sacrifice a small quota of them to immigration officials, like a tithe.

The freshness of the speakers Kenner chooses lets them make familiar, polemical points free of cant. Troy Roush, the unprepossessing vice president of the American Corn Growers Association, matter-of-factly describes a system gone mad, in which growers can afford only to use patented seeds, are harshly penalized for trying to follow the centuries-old practice of cleaning and saving seeds for next season, and must plant vast monocrop farms with only the corn that will bring them government subsidies, effectively wiping out biodiversity.

In the central and most powerful story, Moe Parr, one of the few remaining "seed cleaners" who travel from farm to farm with machinery developed in the nineteenth century, tries to defend himself against charges by Monsanto that he is encouraging farmers to break the patent law simply by helping them save seeds. Monsanto, he learns, has subpoenaed every check he has written for the past several years. Parr stays up nights trying to understand how much data it has collected on his customers and how he can possibly avoid betraying them, even if he and they have done no wrong. They are more than customers. They are his longtime friends, from families that together faced the same economic and weather problems for generations.

At the last, we see black and white videotapes of depositions in which lawyers relentlessly name farmers who have used his services. Parr must miserably confirm that their crops were "beans only"--the seeds Monsanto says it owns. Frame by frame we watch a life being broken.

Speakers are brought in to offer hope. There's plenty of Joel Salatin, the libertarian Virginia farmer whose Polyface Farm has been made famous in articles and books by Michael Pollan (and plenty of Pollan, who serves as one of the film's narrators), to offer the example of an utterly uncompromising farmer who wants to produce the "best food in the world" and insists that it can be done as economically as large-scale farming. With his frayed straw hat and penetrating blue eyes behind big brown 1970s glasses, Salatin is a charismatic screen presence, even if on second and third viewings his plain speaking seems a bit rehearsed.

But it is the faces we don't know that speak best. Far from encouraging the comfortable conclusion that the answer to the world's problems is finding a charismatic Salatin-style farmer and buying nice local organic food, the movie shows that the same workers the system exploits are forced to eat the food it produces. Kenner follows the beautifully spoken, trapped Orozco family, Mexican-Americans in California who know and want fresh food but have neither the time nor money to eat it. Like Roush and other speakers, they are ideal for their calm lack of drama. At a supermarket, their two young daughters excitedly weigh bosc pears but find they're too expensive to take home. So is the head of broccoli their father--a truck driver whose medicines for conditions resulting from bad diet cost the family hundreds of dollars a month--eyes but must also put back.

In a terrible updating of a scene by Millet of dinnertime grace, we see the family go to a drive-through on their way home and order four burgers. The expression of sick, silent guilt as the mother passes two burgers to her daughters in the back seat, and their glazed acceptance as they carefully unwrap and eat them, tells the story of the whole movie. It's a story we must work to change.

You Thought GMOs Were A Headache?

All wine may want to be red, but not all wine drinkers want to wake up with a terrible headache--or get one almost immediately, as I have irritatingly experienced, given my love of red wine.

Now James McWilliams points out the existence of a genetically modified yeast whose developer claims that it greatly reduces the risk of a headache. You won't get any, at least not knowingly, from California or Canada, the only wine-producing countries that allow the use of genetically modified yeast in wine. And the wineries that do use it or too skittish to say so on the label, because of the failure of U.S. regulators pressured by industry to require the declaration on any label that the food or beverage within contains GMOs. And, of course, you won't get it in any organic wine, which also forbids the use (knowing, at least) of GMOs.

Suppose you want some, though, because you get fierce headaches? But you instinctively loathe the idea of permitting the use of GMOs, let alone knowingly consuming foods that contain them? McWilliams is a practiced provocateur who tells us things we need to know, even if they confuse us. And even when we haven't had a drop of wine.

Food Stamps at the Farmers' Market

A recent item in the Boston Globe gave me hope not just for my home city but others around the country whose residents live in "food deserts"--urban areas served only by convenience stores, where fresh produce is almost impossible to come by.

Farmers' markets in cities are very nice, but often in well-off areas, not poor ones. And when they are in poor areas--and pretty much any city or state farmers' market association will work hard to site them there--one simple but crucial piece of machinery has kept people from buying the fresh food they want: a battery-powered wireless card reader that allows food-stamp recipients to use their "electronic benefit transfer" food-stamp cards to buy fruits and vegetables.

When I reported an op-ed piece during the run-up to the last Farm Bill, only Iowa had taken a comprehensive approach to supplying the devices to markets across the state, and Boston had none. That was because the state of Iowa had decided to fund them, and was up to states and cities to pay for the card readers. It still is, and now more states and cities are doing it.

Here's the passage from the Globe piece that caught my eye:

To accommodate low-income neighborhood residents, many of the farmers now take food stamps, as well as senior vouchers and vouchers from the Women, Infants and Children program, thanks to the city's donation of electronic bank transfer machines that allow shoppers to swipe their food stamp debit cards at the market.

Judith Kurland, chief of staff to Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said the mayor has long pressed for healthy alternatives and has pushed to have more supermarkets and smaller grocers move into the neighborhoods.

By coincidence, our crack Food Channel producer Eleanor Barkhorn had been doing a bit of research on her own about which states had found ways to let food-stamp, or SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients, shop at farmers' markets, based on her experiences teaching in Mississippi:

After I saw the "food" my students (the vast majority of whom received some sort of federal food assistance) ate, it was impossible not to have an interest in finding out how they could have access to fresh vegetables, fruits, etc., instead of the Flaming Hot Cheetos and other processed foods that made up so much of their diets.

Unfortunately, the Delta grows very little real food--most of its farmland is dedicated to cotton and industrial corn and soybeans for animal feed--so even if MS did have a state-funded system to equip farmers' markets with EBT machines, it wouldn't help much for people who live in the region.

One good step at a time. Real food grown on sanely scaled farms owned by sanely financed families and farmers in the bye and bye. Wireless card readers in food-desert farmers' markets now. Rest of her findings from the USDA website below.

Overall summary:

As of the end of FY 2008, 753 Farmers' Markets were authorized to accept SNAP benefits nationwide, a 34 percent increase from FY 2007. While the percentage of redemptions is very little, the amount of funds going to small farmers has increased from about $1 million in 2007 to $2.7 million in 2008. Over 250 Farmers' Markets were operating a scrip or token system nationwide.

Highlights from the state-by-state information section:

Arizona: "12 out of Arizona's 53 farmers' markets are currently authorized to accept SNAP benefits. Seven wireless terminals are operating at 12 of these markets."

California: "39 of the State's markets currently use a wireless device (29 of which use scrip) and the remaining 13 markets utilize a wired device and scrip."

Iowa: "Iowa is the only State currently conducting a wireless project for individual farmers through which the State reimburses farmers for fees associated with operating a wireless terminal that can be used at multiple locations."

Maine: "The Lewiston Farmers' Market continues to be the only market using scrip in $2.00 increments and a traditional wired POS terminal. $1,019 in EBT redemptions were reported for the 2008 Farmer Market season."

Massachusetts: "In the 2008 market season, 789 transactions (61% increase from 2007) with $6,962.00 in redemptions (53% increase from 2007) used wireless POS terminals."

Montana: "2009 marks the 3rd and final year of this pilot project to establish machines that accept EBT, or Montana Access SNAP, cards. Five farmers' markets are participating in the pilot project; four of these are in more "urban settings" and one in a rural location. All of these markets, with the exception of one, are using a wireless device that accepts EBT, Debit, and Credit cards. The exception is using a wired machine that only accepts EBT, or SNAP, cards."

New Jersey: "In 2008, the state started a Pilot Program that will provide up to 25 wireless Point of Sale machines to farmers who attend farmers' markets in various locations throughout the state."New Mexico: "Some markets are using integrated wireless POS terminals that can process both SNAP and cash debit transactions while other markets continue to use wooden tokens for SNAP and debit transactions."

Oregon: "Twenty-one Farmers' Markets will utilize a wireless POS terminal."

Pennsylvania: "The Food Trust, located in Philadelphia operates 30 farmers' markets in the Philadelphia area, many of which are in neighborhoods underserved by supermarkets, grocery stores and other fresh food outlets. All of the farmers' markets accept EBT cards."

Rhode Island: "In 2008, Rhode Island had 7 farmer's markets using EBT cards and wireless card machines. This resulted in 131 EBT transactions with $2,039 in farmer's markets sales."

Washington: "Three markets use wireless POS technology and two process their transactions using a third-party processor...In 2008, the State legislature passed a bill to assist farmers and farmers' markets obtain wireless POS technology capable of processing both EBT and commercial credit/debit transactions. The EBT program will provide funds to the Washington State Farmers' Market Association (WSFMA) to purchase wireless POS devices."

Thinking of a Kegerator Party This Weekend?

Last week I needed to throw out an old refrigerator--a complicated task as anyone who's tried it lately knows. Before you can leave it on the street, you must remove the doors, for safety. Screws are by no means easy to loosen.

But I managed, and neatly arranged the doors with stray bits even more neatly taped, and we posted as inviting a sign as possible asking people to take it away--it worked perfectly! No bites.

So we looked for a local recycling site--and this being Jamaica Plain, there was a local guy who does nothing but recycle cooling equipment, trying to find needy takers and hauling it to the proper disposal site if not.

I was particularly pleased when he told me that the small, but neat, fridge was just what a friend had in mind. It was repurposing, not recycling: into a "kegerator." News to me--but not to our Max Fisher, who reports many a happy kegerator party, generally from sensibly scaled dorm fridges rather than the full-service kegerator ours is apparently destined for.

Here, in case you've decided this is just what you've needed for summer entertaining, are do-it-yourself instructions. And here's a list of recycling resources compiled by our Eleanor Barkhorn. Maybe you can find the raw material for your very own kegerator through one of these services--or maybe, following a link Max found and right in the Oakland/Oxford/Jamaica Plain spirit, you'll make art instead.

• EPA has a page devoted to the environmental hazards of refrigerator disposal and how to get rid of one safely.

• EnergyStar explains why it's good to recycle refrigerators, and also has a video showing the recycling process.

• Pacific Gas and Electric offers up to a $35 rebate to customers who recycle fridges, freezers, and AC units.

• JACO facilitates appliance recycling throughout the West but does not seem to offer services in the Northeast corridor.

• If you live in New York City, city officials will recycle your fridge for you, even ensuring safe recovery of CFCs.

• Last fall, the Department of Energy encouraged recycling with an exhibit of old refrigerators made into art.

Today is Goatsday

Goats are cute. Admit it. They're also on every hillside and mountaintop in Europe, or seem to be. But not here, mostly, unless farmers have imported them.

On the Farm contributors Bill and Nicolette Hahn Niman have cast their lot with goats, and will be trying to do for them what Bill did for beef and pork. Will they succeed in making Americans think of goat as the Other Red Meat? We'll see, and happily we'll be hearing much more about their experiences raising goats in Bolinas on their BN Ranch.

Already my own New England is starting, slowly to catch on, and this afternoon Peter Smith will be telling us about a surprising resurgence of goat-raising in Maine and new market for red meat in what he continually reminds us is a very white state.

For now, though, if you want to try goat meat, Eleanor Barkhorn has assembled a list of restaurants where you can find it; like everything that isn't factory-raised, meat has a season, and this isn't it--that'll be the fall.

And if you want to see whether you actually like goat cheese or not--if you're a cheese-lover who continually walks the line between objecting to goatiness and thinking Gee, this isn't so bad after all, in fact it's really pretty good (like me, okay I admit it), Daphne Zepos gives us a very alluring, lemony way to try it from a cheesemonger I'm eager to visit if she has other ideas that sound half so nice as this one.

Swine Flu, Avian Flu, and Factory Farms

You probably know someone who's staying at home for a week because her or his child has been come down with what is very likely "swine flu"--close enough to stay out of school, those breeding grounds of infectious diseases. I certainly do. Just last night much of dinner conversation was on this topic, and I came home to find an email that another friend would have to stay home for a work because her 13-year-old woke up with it yesterday morning.

The origins don't matter that much to my friend, just how long it will take her child to recover and how long she'll be home. But they matter, of course, to those in public health looking ahead. The link between the Smithfield processing plant in Vera Cruz, Mexico and the first human cases is fiercely disputed by Smithfield and the pork industry; and now leftist Web sites are trying to bring in possible origins at the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the world's largest slaughterhouse and the site of an affecting scene in Food, Inc.--something still extremely conjectural and sure to be yet more antagonistic to Smithfield and industry.

Pinpointing the origins are less important, Bill Niman and Nicolette Hahn Niman write, than the large and obvious underlying fact that factory farms are bad for animals, and provide easy breeding grounds for contagious illnesses and the "reassortments" of viruses we've been reading so much about. They also point out recent and un-reassuring evaluations of the origins and infection routes of recent outbreaks of bird flu--a source of current concern because of "reassortments" of mixed avian and swine flu strains.

Useful to recall that thorough cooking of meat rids it of most pathogens, and you can't catch swine flu from eating meat. Any meat. Go ahead and order pork if you like it! (Chicken, well...that's for another day, but not because of avian flu.) Also useful to recall that extremely close confinement isn't health-promoting for animals or, in my friends' neighborhoods lately, for schoolchildren.

Local Scones? For Starbucks, Not So Fast

My reverie about local baked goods appearing at Starbucks provoked this email from Maury Rubin, one of the bakers I most admire, now cross-country at City Bakery and Birdbath. Anyone who hasn't stopped at his flagship next to the Union Square Greenmarket for hot chocolate and a pretzel croissant (disregard the weather, this is too good to wait) hasn't lived.

Local and fresh sounds lovely but becomes a little la-di-dah when it comes to producing at anything like the scale Starbucks needs, he reminded me in his note, which he gave me permission to publish. He hints that he's thought this through and has some ideas for solutions. I hope he'll share them with me, and us--and news of the expansion of his all-green Birdbaths and what's happening with the Los Angeles City Bakery apres Brentwood.

Listening, Starbucks? Rubin does make good scones. But the idea of pretzel croissants in every Starbucks--now that's a dream worth fighting for.

The note:

Don't hold your breath on "local" baking being the answer to the [Starbucks] situation. I'm all for local (as I trust you know), but in this case, "local" won't trump "scale."

Starbucks scale is such that it requires baked goods be prepared at least the night before they will be sold. In real bakery time, with a bakery that's organized, I'd venture that that becomes the afternoon before. They must bake, cool, be packed, then shipped--and then still distributed to (for example in NY) more than 100 stores. Many moons ago, Starbucks talked to me about baking for its NY stores, and of course, I was interested. But the protocol to get our product into their distribution system meant we had to start baking at 2:00 p.m. the day before.

Believing as I do that our croissant should be eaten within two hours of the oven (maximum), plugging into their system meant we had to bake at least 8 times earlier than desired. I ran the other way. Why bother? And the better your product, the worse it gets: it's a long (and hurtful) way down for a lovely croissant baked at 2:00 p.m. and eaten 20 hours later. Ouch. OuchOuchOuch.

I believe there are options and solutions at hand, but it's not my place to suggest them. Maybe more constructively, I'd offer that this situation reveals something more interesting and essential about baking and baked goods and scale than it does about Starbucks. In your personal fondness for bakeries, I'm sure you can appreciate that.

Tableside Service 2.0: Beyond Guacamole

I kind of wondered where Grant Achatz had been--no one who contributes to the Food Channel really has a life unless it's registered here, of course.

Being Grant, he had whipped off a meticulously produced and technologically sophisticated book proposal for a memoir of his experience with tongue cancer; we'll be keeping it with his other posts, and reading it will only make you impatient to see more.

He'd also been reinventing the plate, and the whole concept of tableside service. Any visitor to Alinea is welcome in the kitchen, which is open to the ground floor of the restaurant but also separated by a hallway. You ask permission. You observe quietly. You're careful about talking to anyone less you disrupt the hushed, operating-room-like concentration.

Now the chefs come to you, to show you what they're doing--but in a way that goes way, way beyond mixing egg yolk and pounding anchovies for a Caesar salad or mashing avocado for guacamole in a stone mortar. Achatz and his closest collaborators wanted to bring the kitchen action to the table, literally, and, being who they are, spent years and months figuring out the right material to do it on.

They've come up with a method so odd and complicated in practice yet easy and simple in concept--a flexible sheet like a placemat that becomes a canvas they work on right in front of you--that I asked for a slideshow, which Achatz narrates in what our producer, Eleanor Barkhorn, calls his "movie star" voice.

I still don't quite get how it works in practice, and am still not over my surprise that this most conceptual and precise of cooks is letting guests, in essence, become fellow cooks for a course or two. But I know it's what a lot of curious diners ache to be, especially when they're on those kitchen visits--the equivalent of involuntarily starting to do steps while watching Fred Astaire. And that now Alinea will be even harder to get into.

The Real Mediterranean Diet

Aglaia Kremezi and I share an interest in Fage yogurt--except hers is familial, mine obsessive.

When I went to visit the idyllic farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom that produces Butterworks Farm yogurt, I developed a daily addiction to two yogurts: Butterworks, which is delicate and junket-y (think fragile pudding) and has the wonderful flavor of milk from the cows the Lazor family raises; and Fage, which was then called Total--a strained yogurt, with the thick and creamy texture or crème fraîche or fromage frais. It was, and is, hard to believe that the nonfat yogurt is really nonfat, and the full-fat tastes as rich as the (in fact richer) crème fraîche.

I still go through large quantities of each kind every day, so maybe I'll live as long as Aglaia's grandmother, who prescribed a pot of yogurt and bread for supper or a late-night snack, though I have a feeling the vaunted Mediterranean diet, as eaten when it really was the Mediterranean diet, had a lot to do with her incredible longevity.

But I've long wanted to visit the Fage plant in upstate New York, to see firsthand the differences with the farm panorama the Lazors present--if anything, more rustic and picturesque than any idealized label could portray--and get a sense of why Fage's version still seems so much subtler, tangier, and better than the various Greek brands that have rushed to copy its success. Aglaia's incredible array of recipes and beautifully written memories will get me there one summer's day soon.

Better Starbucks Food Can't Come Soon Enough

As Starbucks started hitting troubles even before the economy last year, Howard Schultz, back at the fore, announced as if it were a done deal that the embarrassingly sawdust-y baked goods would be first to go--and to get better. I was heartened. Even if you're not supposed to think about the "and' in the "coffee and" when you're a serious coffee man, you'd like a nice choice--especially if you believe that baked goods should make up an extremely imbalanced portion of the daily diet.

Alas. The profusion of locally baked muffins and scones I expected to proliferate across the land failed to appear. Just the same sawdust, from airport to airport and mall to mall. The company was too busy retraining baristas and installing single-brew Clover machines, and not removing the breakfast foods that were also part of the Schultz vows to think about baked goods.

Lost sales have a way of focusing the mind, and so, I would think, do calorie-labeling laws like New York's and the many other states, like California and Massachusetts, whose own requirements will soon kick in and show people that, for instance, a doughnut often has fewer calories than a muffin or cookie. Okay--I'll have the doughnut!

So now Starbucks will, it says, reformulate 90 percent of its baked goods, removing high-fructose corn syrup and preservatives where possible, and coming up with recipes that have tens rather than dozens of ingredients. "Food has been the Achilles' heel of the company," Michelle Gass in charge of marketing, told Reuters. Yes, ma'am!

She didn't say whether cookies and muffins will still be almost uniformly more than 400 calories or whether they will use local vendors where possible and allow them any latitude in thinking of what they'd like to make for the local market--or whether the flavor will improve. But there's 90 percent room for hope.

Highway to Heaven

Yes, it's nice to find fuel when you need it, and the Mass Pike is unusually well served with big "plazas" that provide a few of the essentials, and one of the stops even used to have good coffee, though Lavazza closed its coffee stand. Some of the food-court vendors are even local, and I've found Massachusetts-made candy and snack foods at some of the gas-station shops.

But farmer's markets in the parking lots trump all, and they've set up business again for the season all along the Pike, which runs clear across the state. En route to the Berkshires or Cape Cod you won't find a better place to stock your rental-house kitchen or motel room. Here's a charming item in the Globe, and here's the easy-to-navigate farmer's-market page from the Mass Ag site.

The Milk Is Alive

My friend Fred Plotkin, author of numerous authoritative guides to Italy and music, especially opera, sent a link to this story, about an English dairy latching on to the treat-animals-nice movement to get itself some publicity. But it's about gelato, and music, so why resist.

The dairy, in Lancashire, imported an Italian tenor imported from Germany (where he lives) to sing to its cows and produce more lilting gelato. Why would the cows do this? Apparently it worked in Italy, where singing to the cows was an important part of the technique and recipe an immigrant Italian businessman according is using in England. A sign of what multi-culturalism and fluid borders can produce--and also, of course, global publicity thanks to the Web.

If massaging cows to produce tender Kobe beef can work--that is, if promulgating the myth can work--why not music? More fodder, of course, for parodists of happy-animals-make-happy-hamburgers farmers' tales. But then, I'll go anywhere for good gelato, not to mention English (and Irish!) dairy products. Maybe even Cockshotts Farm, near Clitheroe.

My Name Is Bagel

Coming home from Italy last month I was startled to see this sign dangling above one of the Autogrill food stands that, sadly, have infiltrated Rome's Fiumicino airport--once the home, like most Italian airports, of a few independent caffès and sandwich shops. Now all but the one or two I had time to find (and, in fact, I had a lot of time, and enjoyed wheeling my bags up and down many mazelike, shop-lined corridors) are run by Autogrill, familiar to anyone who's driven on any Italian highway. If only the coffee and croissants were better! The Italian genius of croissants transformed it into something both called brioche and resembling a brioche more than a croissant not in appearance but in a less-rich, less-flaky, more-digestible dough. Not at Autogrill, where utterly bland, greasy shortening rules the bad baked goods, including fairly awful "muffins."

And now they can ruin something else. This time at least with a sense of humor, however inadvertent. Autogrill has decided that Italians are ready for the Jewish exoticism of, gasp, the bagel--something so unfamiliar that the placard has the round object introducing itself ("My name is bagel") and giving a pronunciation key in capital letters. The usual way to pronounce the word would be "bah-GEL," so this tells Italians to say "BEGOL," which still doesn't get the accent on the first syllable but does render the long "a" sound.

That's about all it will get right. We won't even talk about the fluffy, degraded, sesame-flecked rolls that pass for bagels throughout the world--this is just another one, typically with way too much yeast, way too soft a texture, and too much shortening in the dough. No surprise, really, and the sign even brags that it's "Soft." (The real surprise was a hard, tough-to-chew, slightly sour, not-enormous bagel I had at Joan Nathan's house the day before Passover--not of course that it was at an ur-maven's house but that the house was in Washington, and this was the closest I'd come in a long time to a real New York bagel. The source, she and the Gefilte Shticks said in a didn't-you-know tone, is Bethesda Bagels.)

Even I was surprised by the introductory pairing. Italians know from smoked salmon--you find it in numerous restaurants, and on antipasto platters, and chefs are even curing it themselves. Lox, maybe not so much. Cream cheese? Well, Autogrill did pick one of the closest equivalents, spreadable robiola. But for the filling? Something that kind of looks like lox but is...good old prosciutto! The cooked "Prague" kind that we, and they, get in luncheon-meat packs, not the cured prosciutto we all revere (even when faced with some startling information about the current cult object, Jamon Iberico de maybe-imported bellota). With curly lettuce yet. A bargain, at least by airport-sandwich standards, at about $6.25.

No reason Italians should demand something kosher on their bagels, I suppose, though you might think that in introducing an ethnic food with a government-style stamp saying "TRADITIONAL" they could adhere slightly more closely to tradition. It did ring a bell, one from the Episcopalian high school I went to. One night at dinner during Passover, I asked for matzoh and a worker said "We've got something for Passover!" and vanished. A minute later he came back triumphant, bearing a plate with: a bagel.

I Brake For Bakeries

That's long been my motto--I want to try every loaf and croissant and muffin and cookie in creation.

Besides drive-by sampling, one of the great purposes any bakery or coffee shop can provide is a gathering place, a community--food's noblest purpose, I've always thought. I think so even more strongly today, when no one can take any form of sustenance for granted. In an officeless, not to mention jobless, time, gathering places become yet more important.

So I was very pleased to read this story about the residents of Colebrook, a town in rural northern New Hampshire near the Canadian border, who rose up to rescue a French bakery whose owners were threatened with deportation--loss of visa renewal, really--because their business was considered too marginal for the United States to let them stay.

Yes, the Frenchy baked goods had seemed odd compared with puffy supermarket loaves, the story says. But soon the people of Colebrook became reliant on the treats--a story straight out of Chocolat, with hardscrabble New Englanders substituted for (typically, but there's my prejudice again) cold, hostile, suspicious French villagers.

Set as it is in New Hampshire, the story had--I hope--none of the movie's saccharine overtones, even if the Globe's picture of the facade does make the bakery-cafe look like a candy-colored movie set. But the ending is heartwarming nonetheless, more Frank Capra than France: battered by factory closings (Ethan Allen, the Ford dealer),the citizens began a letter-writing campaign, and it worked.

Here's the climax. To quote another French film title, Get out your handkerchiefs. And rally around whoever's making good food to keep a community together and nourished. Preferably baked goods.

"You cannot imagine what they did for me," said Verlaine Daeron, a 51-year-old former nurse-turned-bakery owner. She said her visa application folder at the US Embassy in Paris contained two pounds of letters from Colebrook-area residents and added, "It's a very, very nice town."

This week, Colebrook residents got their wish. The US Embassy reversed its decision and granted Daeron her visa, according to Daeron and the New Hampshire state director for Senator Judd Gregg, who was briefed by State Department officials on the case. A State Department spokeswoman, Laura Tischler, said the department does not comment on individual visa cases.

Yesterday, as word of the reversal trickled out and anxious residents tucked into Le Rendez-Vous, Marc Ounis, Daeron's business partner, stood smiling with arms folded over his apron and baker's whites offering the exact answer they wanted to hear: The bakery would remain open.

Take That, Paris Cafe

David Lebovitz, whom I first encountered as a tart-talking pastry chef at Chez Panisse, has not only become an accomplished writer of books on baking and chocolate but the impresario of the go-to guide for food-loving American in Paris; his davidlebovitz.com strikes the right balance between personal observation, anecdotes, and eating and shopping and staying tips you'll want the next time you go. He's also funny, a David Sedaris without the self-conscious, and sometimes self-satisfied, whimsy.

His site is where I send friends on their way for three-day see-it-all stops in Paris--and for some reason three or four days seems to be about all the time people can spare for Paris these days, maybe because of the economy, maybe because they want to be sure they'll still have jobs when they get back.

But maybe it's something to do with the coffee--one of many reasons I heretically don't pine for Paris (though I do for my beautiful niece, who lives and works there). It's not just that you can't get coffee to go, or in anything bigger than a small cup, or that it's hard to find a coffee shop at all, as frequent as cafés are--you're really supposed to get meals, or beer or wine, or preferably all that, at the average cafe. Yes, I'm an American philistine! with my to-go cups and Big Gulp-sized portions. Not really--I of course love espresso and the true caffès, happy to serve you coffee and to chat, at every truck stop and dot-sized village in Italy (what a difference an "f" makes).

No, the real reason cafés in Paris are so unfriendly and dismal is that they serve such bad coffee. Lebovitz says it exactement in this Q&A from today's Boston Globe:

Americans don't want to believe French coffee is terrible....The coffee is much better in America. The coffee here is horrible horrible horrible. The problem is, it's not just bad, they don't know it's bad. Like alcoholics, the only way they're going to get better is to admit it.

He gets to say it, because he's a certified Paris-lover--buy his funny and useful new book, The Sweet Life in Paris, generously sprinkled with recipes, to see his open-heartedness. But I treasured that bit of hardhearted observation.

What's Fresh, Anyway?

Jerry Baldwin's post this morning reminds me that the word "fresh" itself is on its way to becoming as devalued and meaningless as "natural" was in the days of organic, when anyone could define it any way they wanted and everyone's standards differed.

Jerry's definition itself is different from other people's. He's exacting. He's earned it. Yet I don't think he goes as far as the home-roasting movement, which insists that coffee isn't worth drinking if you haven't roasted the beans yourself--a messy process that, I decided when writing The Joy of Coffee, was best left to the pros, with plenty of fans and brooms to collect the papery chaff that files everywhere when you roast beans (on surfaces you didn't know you had, and might not discover for months).

Still, it's subjective. Experts I interviewed said beans were best from one to three days out of the roaster. Jerry thinks fresh is right out of the roaster. I throw out coffee beyond ten days out.

And that's just coffee--something that's easy to smell and taste, and won't make you ill if it's old, just feeling that, as Jerry says, some sort of crime has been committed. For other foods the subject is still subjective--but trickier and sometimes dangerous.

A Better--And Better-Tasting--Hot Dog

Sue Moore found her calling as a "forager" at Chez Panisse, meaning a trained cook who visits various farms to find produce and meat worthy of the kitchens. Meat turned out to be her love, and she and Larry Bain, who had worked in a ballpark steakhouses and had an interesting in promoting healthful food, decided to make nitrate-free hot dogs from grass-fed, organic beef.

They sell them from big carts at ballparks, special events, and now Hollywood openings from two carts in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco, at Crissy Field; last summer they came as far as Aspen for the Atlantic Ideas Festival, where the world's great thinkers gladly stood in line for one of their dogs, or bratwurst from heritage pork--not to mention homemade bread-and-butter pickles, sauerkraut, mustard, of course, and a secret hot sauce the pair now sells, along with a very cute (but not too cute) t-shirt I bought and wore around the campus, to the shock of colleagues.

The hot dogs are spicier than the bland standard of my childhood and, I admit, now too: Hebrew National. But I appreciate them, especially for the quality of the meat, and like the brats even better, maybe because of my loyalty switch as a non-kosher adult from beef to pork. Jonathan Gold said it most originally and best, as he unfailingly does, in an LA Weekly roundup last November:

None of this would matter if the hot dogs weren't great, but they are: taut, delicious natural-skin beauties that snap like rim shots when you bite into them, mildly seasoned, tucked into griddled buns and served, if you want them that way, with grilled onions, organic sauerkraut and an occasional mystery condiment that Moore hides under the counter like the secret stash at a comic book store.

And now, for the first time, there are actual premises, off a strip of Chestnut Street in San Francisco that is a latter-day Gourmet Ghetto, near the Marina and Fort Mason and parallel to Lombard, the main route to the Presidio and the Golden Gate bridge. On a several-block stretch between Steiner and Polk Streets there is the new Let's Be Frank, the fancy French pastry shop Miette, famiilar from the Ferry Plaza farmer's market building, and the wonderful Emporio Rulli, which I was proud to see still has a quotation from an article I wrote when it was just one shop, fairly far over the Golden Gate bridge in Marin county: "the closest thing in America to a top-flight Italian pastry shop and café." I started my visit to the Bay Area last week with an email session at the SFO location of Rulli, a boon to any traveler (in the United terminal; don't miss it). And on my way to the opening party, I encountered an Italian friend on his way from there to Rulli for what he called the only serious espresso in San Francisco (and the Bay Area--he was on his way home to Oakland).

The scene at the tiny shop spilled onto the street, with everyone eating dogs and brats, and getting their mouths and shirtfronts dirty. That included Alice Waters, an early champion of the business, and Moore, who is an unfailingly merry sight and presence; Bain is wry and conspiratorial. Everyone has fun at Let's Be Frank. Now anyone can find it, seven days a week at the same place, rather than waiting to go to a game or an event to find one of the carts. Even the hot sauce is a little less secret: they're selling it by the jar.

Taste Testing

I visited Ridgely Evers and Colleen McGlynn this week at their paradisal DaVero farm, where one year I helped (lamely, like all the guests) with the olive harvest at an annual picking/eating fest they have.

As usual, they were full of new projects. McGlynn, a trained chef with experience at Stars and other high-flying San Francisco restaurants, and she applies her energy and creativity (the couple is always in motion; Evers, a longtime software developer who still drives constantly between his Healdsburg paradise, San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley, wanted to show me the new plantings, fruit and olive trees and the vines; I just wanted to stop and smell the roses that were absolutely everywhere, as they are throughout the Napa and Sonoma valleys now--and, as you'd expect in paradise, all through the summer, a farmer casually told me when I asked how long they'd be in bloom.

McGlynn showed me one small fruit tree on a hill that, she said, provided cases of jars of the Indian Red peach preserves she makes and still has some of; those, along with the plums from a handful of other trees on the hill above their house, were the jams I had to order--and I did, on the spot. You can still find some here.

And you can find the thing she put into my mouth without waiting for an okay, because I had to try it, and boy was she right: caramel apple butter slathered on a fat fresh walnut. This was apple butter without the burnt-sugar, choking graininess much apple butter has. The consistency had a bit of fine grain and was otherwise silk, with the weight that always surprises me in simple cooked-down apples. There was a bit more zing from lemon juice than I might have chosen, and McGlynn mentioned that next year she'll put in a bit less, too; but it was absolutely not too sweet, and the caramel of the cooked-down sugar not too dark. And with the crunch and tannin of the walnut it was indeed an ideal combination.

California walnuts are an overlooked regional treasure, one I plan to devote more time to researching. For now, I asked around for a source, and a farmer at a conference I've been attending at the Monterey Aquarium--a national home of sustainability and also a rich repository of my beloved sardine culture, recommends walnuts from Haag Farm, and I even found an online ordering source, here. Get out the knives for slathering, and hope to get a look at all those roses too.

Informed Choices

Today the Massachusetts Public Health Council approved rules that will make restaurants with more than 20 locations in the state post calorie counts at point of sale, whether on menu boards or on the menu--a move similar to New York City's, as an article by Stephen Smith on the front page of today's Boston Globe recounts.

I dipped into this in my piece on cupcakes, in which I heretically implied that muffins can have more calories than cupcakes, and started on a fair bit of calorie-labeling research I'll be continuing to explore and write about. Knowing what you're about to eat makes a big difference in what you order and how much of it you consume, as anyone who's walked into a sandwich shop in New York knows--let alone a Starbucks, where the information on cookies has put many people suddenly in a sharing mood.

Both the release and the articles quote my spouse, John Auerbach, the state health commissioner, who's been working with others for a fair bit of time himself. As he was inspired by the hard work of others, I hope other states and cities will be inspired too.

City Gives up Meat for One Day a Week

I always tell people going to Belgium to get right on the train from Brussels and head for Ghent, a city I find as truly magical as others find Bruges, because Bruges intends that they be enchanted (and, to be fair, the fairy-tale architecture does lend itself to enchantment.).

But Ghent, as I wrote in an Atlantic travel piece, has that fairy-tale architecture, waffles and beer, and something more: a truly Bohemian free spirit, likely the result of its being a university city.

Now it's showing that spirit with its widely reported, and probably ridiculed, decision to encourage vegetarian eating once a week, with the city's elected leaders making the first sacrifice, er, leading gesture. The noble experiment, with the possibly too adorable name veggiedag, is to be Thursday, and today is Veggiedag One. I have no doubt the city's restaurants will be ready to help everyone wanting to follow suit:

The Tap & Tepel is just one of several restaurants that reflect both the history and the bohemian side of Ghent. Max, a posh tearoom decorated with Art Nouveau woodwork and glass from the kiosks the company long put up at Belgian fairs, serves the only waffles I've ever liked in Belgium--yeasty, slightly sour, and very light, unlike the usual Liège-style buttery ingots. At De Geschoeide Karmelied, a serene restaurant around a bamboo garden (planted by the previous owners, who had a Japanese restaurant), an ambitious twenty-five-year-old chef named Eli De Heem offers local "grandmother's" specialties, many of them beer-based stews.

Kitsch seems to be a deliberate decorative theme in Belgium--just one expression of the subversive humor that is a national trait. This is particularly overt at Pink Flamingo, a bar with a multi-tiered chandelier made entirely of Barbie dolls and walls covered with 1960s record-album sleeves and movie posters; unbelievably, it isn't a gay bar. The Koningshuis is perhaps as popular for its campy décor on the theme of the crowned heads of Europe, especially those of Belgium, as for its nice food (I had clear wild-mushroom soup full of sweet, thumbnail-sized cold-water shrimp).

The Dulle Griet tavern, on one of the city's largest squares, has all the beer-related paraphernalia any fanatic could want. More important, it serves all five of the authentic, dark and powerful Trappist beers (as opposed to the dozens of "abbey-style" imitators) that are still made in Belgium. Try Westmalle, from a beautiful working abbey ten miles away, on tap--a rare treat even in Belgium. In the back of the low-lit tavern is a brightly lit atrium with a second-floor tableau of an eighteenth-century dandy looking out a window while an elegantly dressed woman slumps in exhaustion over a sewing machine behind him. What does it mean? Ghenters seem to expect a bit of surrealism in their daily life, along with superb beer.

I'll be curious to see if other cities follow, or just make fun, of Ghent--but I know our Max will be watching! And is maybe organizing Washington now as I write.

Tea on the Train

I'm in sunny Calif for a few days, and as these things always happen, the guy riding the monorail from SFO to the car rental building turned out to be the guy right across the aisle from me on our flight out with whom I had exchanged parting pleasantries, now wheeling a giant black plastic "hard case" full, he said, of circuit board samples he was taking down to Silicon Valley.

We spoke about where he worked, south of Boston in Norwood, on a place every Bostonian knows as Auto Mile, for its rows of car showrooms. I asked if there were any coffee shops there, as I've often been in search of them myself, and he said of course there were, I just didn't know how to look--after all, the headquarters of Dunkin Donuts, as he knew, are nearby, and as was raised in India he much prefers Dunkin's lighter roast to Starbucks.

Surely, he drinks tea, I asked, and he said yes, but only at home. And how does he make it? The recipe interested me, as it was different from what I've read in books on India, though I'll of course read more now.

His wife, he said (and yes, his wife makes the tea and does the cooking), boils the tea leaves in milk a "long time," which turned out to be only ten or fifteen minutes--until the milk boiled, and then, as with Turkish and Greek coffee, she would turn down the heat to bring the mixture back to a simmer. Not two more times, though, as for coffee.

Sugar? Yes, and his wife adds it before, not after, as many of their friends do, which means that it will caramelize as the milk sugars themselves do during the boiling. Spices? Yes--cardamom and a word he didn't know was the same in "American English"--"ginger." Fresh, and grated right into the milk.

The tea was from the local Indian store, he said. I suggested he look at a local direct importer, Timeless Teas, which has just opened its own shop in Newton and sells various estate Assams, Nigiris, Ceylons, and other BOP blends. His eyes widened--he of course recognized the abbreviation for "broken orange pekoe," and vowed to remember the URL. I didn't have to vow to remember the recipe.

Coffee on the Brain

There were several pieces of news about coffee and health in this Boston Globe piece, which made delightful airplane reading, and even caught the attention of our own Jerry Baldwin.

The article is a roundup of the generally reassuring news about coffee and health that appear every few years, with the same regularity that studies linking coffee to some health scare, generally about irregular heartbeat or cholesterol or even cancer, appear. As Walter Willett, who always manages to talk in English, commented after I'd gone through the abstracts and actually read many of nearly 325 studies of caffeine and health for my Joy of Coffee, "You know how every artist has to paint a bowl of fruit? Well, coffee is every nutritional researcher's bowl of fruit."

One caveat: when the writer, Judy Foreman, cautions against drinking non-filtered coffee, she includes French press coffee, because it's steeped. I believe that the studies linking coffee and cholesterol she mentions were done with Scandanavian boiled coffee, which like the boiled tea my plane and train-mate mentioned, is simply boiled, campfire-style, and simply poured out of the top of the pot or maybe through a strainer (or in camp, a sock, with luck a clean one). Jerry's and my beloved French press does have a metal filter, or nylon in most current iterations, and I think merits an exemption. At least I hope it does.

The Week in Review

Quite a week in the food world! Eleanor and Max have been valiant, and have these weekend reminders, with comments from me [in brackets]:

We ate well this week. Starting with fresh turkey eggs and the rich cardoons of Andalusia, we got the stories behind, and recipes for, Greek bitter herbs. Ari Weinzweig told us about Spain's [yet more addictive] answer to bruschetta, and Jarrett Wrisley went far afield to find the chemistry of a great sandwich. We welcomed spring with fresh ramps [an acquired taste! and one I'll never acquire, though no one could tempt me more than Sally] .

We drank as well, in celebration of the birthday of the cocktail. Clay Risen brought us the best-kept secret in domestic whiskey, finally available in the U.S. after way too long. Heather Sperling filed a report from London on gin you inhale--though it requires some odd clothing. We explored the rich history of wine, learning a bit of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the process.

Jerry Baldwin taught us how to get the most out of coffee with proper storage. We discovered the strange, and strangely frequent, intersection between ice cream scoopers and punk rock stars. We explored the troubled relationship between vegans and vegetarians and the difference between good food and trendy food.

And, of course, we celebrated the James Beard Awards. Corby reported from the scene on his grateful surprise at winning, the cured meats that were the star of a spontaneous afterparty [people did stay up all night--this was at lunch the next day], and the touching and stirring speech by official Best Chef Dan Barber.

We also expanded our recipe library with six new additions: pasta with ramps; lentil soup with hyacinth bulbs, garlic, and mint; cardoons with almond sauce; and the latest in our growing list of vegetarian options, carrot-thyme coleslaw, BBQ tempeh sandwich, and little potato and sweet potato pancakes.

And this from Marion Nestle's post this morning on food miles especially struck me, because it so succinctly summarize where I always end up when thinking about the carbon footprint, imported and seasonal foods, and what I should let myself buy and eat:

I've always thought that the real benefits of local food production were in building and preserving communities. I like having farms within easy access of where I live and I like knowing the people who produce my food. If local food doesn't make climate change worse and maybe even helps a bit, that's just icing on the cake.

Best Chef, Best Speech

Dan Barber, of Blue Hill, won the grand prize, Outstanding Chef, at Tuesday's James Beard Foundation Awards, and ended the ceremony with sober substance and restrained, generous joy.

Ed Levine, who always gets it right, described his emotions at watching the ceremony:

I realized that what transpires at events like the James Beard Awards is a passing of the guard, from old friends to new friends, from old friends to their children, and from one generation of chefs and food industry professionals to the next.

With Dan's award following Grant Achatz's Outstanding Chef award last year (and book award this year!), an important torch has been passed--to the two leading intellectual lights of cooking, both of them dedicated to innovation and sustainability. It's noticeable that both are wiry and ferociously driven, with endlessly whirring minds that propel them through greenhouses, henhouses, slaughterhouses, and two constantly busy kitchens, Blue Hill in Greenwich Village and one at Stone Barns, in Westchester (Dan) and design studios, kaiseki restaurants, and kaleidoscopic Back of the House destinations (Grant)--though each of course very much his own man, with completely distinct styles.

Dan is a longtime and good friend, so I particularly kvelled watching him go up to claim the prize. (And I'm proud that we're linked in eternity, at least the eternity of a news cycle, in the AP photo of the awards. The beautiful, willowy woman between us is no random well-wisher--it's Aria Sloss, Dan's girlfriend.)

And I kvelled listening to him. All awards ceremonies, particularly ones as endless as this one--the New York Times inadvertently released the names of all the winners, including the big national awards that are saved for last, at 9 pm, the end of the embargo, though the ceremony still had a good half-hour to go--have many moments of drama (Maria Hines, winner of best chef Northwest for her Tilth, in Seattle, racing in breathless from the stand outside the auditorium of Avery Fisher Hall, where she was cooking for the reception to follow), tenderness, and humor.

Dan ended on exactly the right note: reflectiveness, in fact on generation to generation, and importantly on how his own friends and colleagues have reacted to the crisis that affected everyone on stage and in the audience. I asked him to send me a copy. Being Dan, he had to both reconstruct and slightly rework it, into the free verse it in fact sounded like from the stage. Here it is, for the record and for the ages.

I was sitting there thinking about my dad.

I remember telling him, reluctantly, I want to be a chef.

There was a long pause and then he said,

"Son....why?"

And I said the only thing that came to mind: You know, I love food.

There was another pause and he said, "I love books, but I don't read for a living."

I want to end on this note, a slightly larger context than me.

Six months ago the economy flipped on its head.

The writing was on the wall was for the end of fine dining.

And what we saw is that most industries, nearly every profession, dived down to the lowest common denominator.

Automobiles, advertising, fast food and big food

It's as if they've been dancing the limbo, and the bar kept getting lowered. It's amazing what we've seen here in the last half-year.

But it didn't happen in this industry.

Fine dining became no less fine.

And I credit sommeliers and general managers, and all of the rest of the people 

who work so hard on making restaurants work and work well

but especially chefs 

who refuse to lower that bar 

and who love food

and serve it with the pleasure and with the respect it deserves.

The Meat Did It, II

A friend writes--no, actually, my friend Pam Hunter tells me just now that she went to Cesare Casella's Salumeria Rosi Parmacotto, conveniently down the street from where she and I are staying (at my brother's, yet more conveniently), for lunch yesterday and came in as a table with chefs from an international voter's-choice poll of "the world's 50 best restaurants" sponsored by S. Pellegrino--recently feted in London at a fete that brought together our very own new-award-winner Grant Achatz and our Italian Abroad expert Faith Willinger in a continental exchange--was finishing a table-spanning selection of the cured meats our own Zeke Emanuel didn't try, though he liked most everything else.

"I've never had cured meats of that quality in this country," she said. "There's a very fine line of just-getting-high that Europeans know how to do and Americans don't. Cesare and those Italians know just how to walk it. What we tasted put the Californians [she's a very proud, and very knowledgeable, Californian] trying to make salumi in the shade." Which, of course, there isn't very much of in California.

Cured meats, these French, were what all the award-winners and everyone else scarfed down at the after-party across the street at Bar Boulud, the Lincoln Center-goer's best friend, where the two meats I always dive for on the justly celebrated charcuterie platter are the head cheese and, especially, the light-pink cooked ham--perfectly described by my svelte friend Ed Levine on his exemplary Serious Eats. I always knew Ed had perfect taste, so naturally he said it first: "The housemade jambon de Paris is the French ham I never thought I would be able to taste in New York." It's good any time--but especially, the crowds who cleaned the platters demonstrated, after 1 am.

Beard Awards

Boy was I surprised to hear my name at the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards last night. Not false humility: the competition was incredibly strong, and flattering company to be in. Laura Shapiro and Dorie Greenspan are not just two of my favorite people, they're two of my favorite writers. Complete list of winners here, along with links to the pieces Laura and Dorie were nominated for, and my Atlantic columns, "A Papaya Grows in Holyoke," "Beyond the McIntosh," and "Half a Loaf." My only thoughts are gratitude--and pulling for our very own Back of the House Grant Achatz's book Alinea at the Big Deal black-tie ceremony tonight.

The King of Parma Hams

One of the many good things about teaching is that your former students go on to do interesting things that give you the opportunity to keep learning from them, which is of course the main pleasure of teaching.

This afternoon I took up the invitation of Jennifer Telfeyan, a former student at the one-year master's program in communication at Slow Food's University of Gastronomic Sciences, where I teach writing, to visit a place many students in my classes write about: the beautifully restored, aging cellar of the Antica Corte Pallavicini, an estate dating from 1320, where today 5000 culatellos hang, gathering helpful molds that will turn them into the cured ham that in Italy is always served with the reverence befitting something very rare and very expensive.

Rare and expensive it is, and unavailable in the United States. (Swine flu is the topic here too, of course; an Italian call-in show I was just listening to featured an annoyed, patriotic caller who wanted to remind the world that Italy, the world capital of gastronomy, makes the world's best pork products, which have nothing, repeat nothing, to do with getting swine flu--which for all he knew and what he was hearing, actually started with a human who gave it to a pig.)

Culatello tastes and looks very different from prosciutto. The flavor is more delicate and less hammy than prosciutto, the experience more complex.

Culatello is often spoken of as the version of prosciutto per eccelenza, the most noble form that exists. And the area around Parma, you won't need reminding, is certainly prosciutto territory. And culatello is indeed a large muscle part of the pork leg that, whole, becomes prosciutto: the boned thigh, considered the most precious part. But culatello is so different in texture, size and flavor that it really shouldn't be compared with prosciutto.

Prosciutto is just salted; culatello is rubbed with wine, salt, pepper, and pressed garlic, and then wrapped in a pig bladder--the reason it hasn't been approved for sale in the United States. The casing is sewn up one side and the pear-shaped ham tied with twine in an elaborate spider-web pattern that, corset-like, gives it vertical lobes, like a casaba melon. After the first 30 days it is never refrigerated. Besides the spice-wine cure and the pig bladder, and the much smaller dimensions of the final product--it starts with less than half the full leg, and loses a greater proportion of moisture during aging than prosciutto--the difference lies in the atmosphere in which it cures. Prosciutto needs dry mountain breezes along with sea breezes, and so the huge drying rooms of prosciutto factories are built on hillsides.

Culatello needs fog and constant damp air, so the curing rooms where they age for 16 months to three years (or longer) are exceedingly damp basements near the river Po--a wet lowland known for its rice paddies and baseball-sized mosquitoes, with hot, humid summers and chilly, wet winters. Telfeyan showed me a double window in the cellar left open year-round, to make the most of the dampness, nicely illustrated by yet another in the stream of downpours that have barely let up since I arrived. ("Spring hasn't come yet," a friend remarked--I guess winters really are wet here.)

And culatello tastes and looks very different from prosciutto. It's papery where prosciutto is silken; lightly salted and faintly spiced where prosciutto is often unsubtle salted; mostly lean rounds and half the size of a standard slice of prosciutto, with pretty scalloped borders from the twined lobes (don't worry, the bladder gets peeled off after the finished culatello is soaked in wine and water for a while). The flavor is altogether more delicate and less hammy than prosciutto, the experience more complex than the standard prosciutto, if decidedly sparer and less sumptuous.

Massimo Spigaroli, the current owner of the estate, named for a prominent noble family that long had extensive property in the Po Valley reaching toward Venice, turned the profits from several generations of running a successful restaurant next door, called Al Cavallino Bianco, and also farming into what is now the most prestigious and best-publicized brand of culatello. (The family legend is that his great-grandfather was fired from being a sharecropper for the local, and national, hero Giuseppe Verdi, for killing a hare and presenting it to the Master, who became enraged and fired him; he found work as a sharecropper on a nearby farm and stayed for thirty years. Within the past 20 years the current generation has bought up the estate where their grandfather had worked and made culatello.) Spigaroli is head of the culatello consortium that gives "Culatello di Zibello" designation to just 25,000 culatellos a year, and his cellar alone accounts for a fifth of them. (Other Italian producers make non-designated culatello, and so do American artisans, but of course none of them have the endless damp of the Po valley, and I doubt any has the mosquitoes, either.)


When the Prince of Wales turned to Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, for help in turning his heritage pigs into salable cured meats, it was Spigaroli that headed a team that traveled to Cornwall, and who brought back meat to cure in his own cellars as a first test. (I can testify that he is equally at ease with royalty and any butcher who wants to talk pork.) When big-name chefs like Gualtiero Marchesi want culatellos cured just for them, they reserve them from Spigaroli's own flock of 400 Antica Nera (Old Black, a heritage breed Spigaroli searched out and helped revive; the remaining 2100 pigs a year are Large Whites, which he buys) pigs to hang, with a sign that makes the cellar resemble a cigar library or very special Cognac aging room. My favorite detail was a blackboard with "Fochon-Parigi" in decorative chalk script--a particularly felicitous misspelling of the hallowed French gourmet emporium, Fauchon, given its one-letter proximity to cochon, the French word for "pig."

He ages Parmigiano-Reggiano, too, in his cellar: four kinds, from the plains, hills mountains, and from the prized Red Cow, or Vacche Rosso, breed. And he has built six rooms that are a luxurious relays, where Telfeyan welcomed new American arrivals as we were tasting culatello, cheese, and homemade crostata in the huge and beautifully kitted-out kitchens of what will be a very luxurious dining room--hardly bigger than the kitchen, with two glass walls giving onto the Po on one side and the pretty brick courtyard on the other. Now there are sawhorses. Soon there will be tables. I'll want to sit at one.

This Week on the Food Channel

So, I'm just back and the terrific team that keeps this site refreshed each and every day, the fabulous Max Fisher, Eleanor Barkhorn, and Mara Gay, reminded me of some of our best posts this week--a great time to remind you, and a great Friday habit to get into.

Their report:

We learned the possible risks of pork, especially political. But we also learned the joys, and Corby had a particularly hammy week: bacon with everything, and, in Italy, a visit to cellars to see and taste the king of Parma hams.

In culinary innovation, Terrence Henry argued that sometimes bad science ruins good food. Grant Achatz explored food that changes mid-course. Sally Schneider wrote on how to improvise in the kitchen.

We traveled to Aruba for love, Mexico for chocolate, and the past for babka.

A vegetarian shared his experiences and his recipes. An advocate of sustainable food shared her theories on evolution and dining. And we met movie-star chickens.

We also made six additions to our ever-expanding and ever-greater recipe library! Be sure to check out our instructions for how to make black bean and jalapeno soup, roasted vegetable stock, southwestern corn pudding, vegetarian enchilada sauce, essential chocolate cake, and rhubarb with berries and candied ginger. Remember, now's the season for rhubarb. It's even coming up in the White House garden.

Bacon With Everything

I recently hogged credit for the most popular hors d'oeuvre at a superbly catered wedding: plain strips of bacon, cut into thirds. After overcoming initial surprise that the low stacks were occupying corners of very elegant trays, the guests took as many pieces as they genteely could.

Turns out that my immodesty was not only unbecoming but positively, dare I say, piggish (I certainly dare not say "swinish"). Soon after I wrote a love letter to bacon in The Atlantic, I helped plan a dinner with the same caterer, and surprised her with my request for the first course: plates in the center of each table with just strips of bacon from four American makers. The dinner was extremely elegant. The guests emptied the serving plates.

As I recall, the most popular was from Nodine's, the Connecticut smokehouse near where I grew up and where I was surprised to find bacon I liked even more than the perennial taste-test winner, Nueske's, in Wisconsin. I've since fallen for the bacon of Allan Benton, who makes what many consider to be the South's best country ham. But with its heavyish hickory smoke, it's very different from the more general, and to my mind generally appealing, Nodine's.

When I mentioned to the caterer that of course I was responsible for the surprise hit of the wedding, she with typical graciousness nodded enthusiastically. But I was wrong, and humbled to learn that at the ritual known as the wedding tasting the groom, who has his own superb taste (he arranged an after dinner bourbon tasting, with an artfully designed menu and tasting notes), asked as each dish came out for approval, "Where's the bacon?" For a jokey treat, the caterer, with approval of the family, stuck in the plain bacon at the last minute. All caterers should be so thoughtful--and in the meantime, any caterer can borrow the idea for a non-labor-intensive surefire hit.

While researching my piece, I learned a lot, as I always do, from Ari Weinzweig, who long ago fell in love with bacon and has spent hears chronicled it. He's publishing one of his populist, samizdat-inspired pamphlets soon on bacon, and a note I got today gives advance notice of a "special Anarchist Edition" to be hand-bound in time for a book fair on May 16. If you get your order in pronto (like, by tomorrow), you can get an edition I don't want to miss. It won't be your last chance, as the first paragraph reassuringly says. But given the explosion of bacon interest (not to mention the literal Bacon Explosion, which my friend Pete Wells took flak for writing about on the same day as a long and good piece on the new public-health war on sodium), you'll want to order your copy right away.

I realize that folks might be interested in a special, just-for-fun, limited edition of the Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon book we're working on. This is something we decided to do for the Ann Arbor Book Fair on May 16, so the limited edition will be ready by then. The actual, regular book--which we designed here and are self-publishing formally--comes out in late June or early July, and I think it will sell for about $30. We're only doing the limited version this one time, so now's the time to grab one! It costs $40 (plus, if you're out of town, postage too, I suppose).

Given that I like special, hand-done stuff, limited editions, and obscure collector's items, we thought we'd do this special, pre-release, Anarchist Edition to sell at the annual Book Fair. It seemed appropriate, given my anarchist leanings. As you know, I love these sorts of strange but interesting alternatives to the offerings of the mass-market world. Anyways I started telling a few folks I knew about this and they were into it and wanted to buy a copy, so realized I should share the chance to get the book with other folks (like you!) who I like.

The limited editions are going to be pretty grassroots, but pretty cool. Each book will be numbered and signed. They will be hand-assembled, with silk-screened covers (on Kraft cardboard), and there's an extra preface that goes with the Anarchist Edition, plus an extra recipe. The pages are photo copied in black and white and are hand-bound...actually, "hand-bound" is probably an overstatement. It is more likely that they will be tied with leather thongs. We're having an assembly party on the evening of May 13. These books are likely to be more fragile than a mass-produced book, so I probably wouldn't buy this version with beach reading in mind.

To make a long story short, I'm taking pre-orders on the limited edition. Totally no pressure, but we have to put the order in by Thursday, April 30, so if you or anyone you know wants one (or a few) just for the fun of it, let me know at ari@zingermans.com, and we'll add your copy (or copies) to the list. I'm actually buying a bunch to give as presents.

Either way, thank you to everyone who's helped with information, bacon, editing, insight, and support while I've been working on this thing for the last few years. Many have contributed directly and indirectly to the learning and the work, and I very much appreciate all that has been done! It's always a group effort and none of us gets very far on our own, so thank you!

In Italy, it's a One-Minute Cup

I'm in Italy for four days, strictly working you understand, and espresso here is just that: fast. In you go in the morning before work for a cappuccino--yes, you can have one then (usually abbreviated to "cappuccio"), but it ain't nothing like as big as what we usually get, let alone a latte, which is a very rare order and often for when you're not feeling well. You stir it, have a look at the paper, maybe have a cornetto--a croissant, but made with a more brioche-like dough--and you go to the office.

Maybe, if you have time between morning appointments, you go in for another, but by that time it would be maybe a macchiato, "stained" with milk foam, cappuccino being the breakfast drink. Then, after lunch, a very quick espresso or macchiato. Same with teatime pause in the late afternoon to get to the end of the working day, which is 6 or 7. Office hours are strict (I write from one now).

Several eternal Italian concepts to note: These breaks are fast, yes, but always sociable. You chat with the barista, who is often an owner--mom and pops still flourish here, and chains haven't taken over, partly as a result of small-business protectionist laws that might hobble the economy but thank G d continue to make village and even city live the festive joy it usually is here. There's often a paper on a table, and you give it a glance. But unlike Terrence's Argentinian experience, I so far haven't seen anyone pull out a laptop in a caffe (they put in the extra "f" here). That would be downright unsociable.

But, in what could be a worrying or an encouraging sign (like Terrence, I love working in cafes, and his note about laptop theft has me worried, as so far I don't worry about leaving a laptop unattended in America, perhaps foolishly), at this morning's caffe stop I saw a high table covered in red laminate with the Illy logo. There were only papers on it and, yes, ashtrays (laws are less strict than office hours, apparently). But no work reports, no one silent and purposeful, absolutely not a laptop screen. As in Argentina, home of course of a very large Italian population, coffee is still for relaxation--and for connection.

The One-Hour Cup of Coffee
By Terrence Henry

Tale of Two Dinners

Like Zeke Emanuel, I was knocked out the first time I dined at CityZen. It's the kind of place I'm often allergic to--an imposing, somber, room (just look at the picture they sent ut), in a super-luxurious hotel, with waiters who seem both attentive and scared something penurious will happen if they don't jump to your command.

The food wasn't what I expected: meticulous, yes, and carefully served, but by friendly waiters not the least bit shy about expressing their own personalities. That bold friendliness might have come from the chef, Eric Ziebold, an Iowa boy (you can read more about him here) who knew and cared about local farms--that was the part that got me, rather than the French Laundy/Spago/Per Se training that seems to wow everyone else.

The difference this time was the menus. Zeke hadn't ordered in advance, and he and several of his guests opted for the default tasting menu. It turned out to be rich in rich proteins--Japanese-style fatty beef, lobster, lamb--the kind that denote luxury and high prices (without wine, the six courses cost $95; wine in "sommelier's pairing" is $75 extra).

We both left with high opinions of Ziebold's talent, but I and my fellow guests had by far the better dinner.

Encouraged by the waitress (though we're not allowed to use that term anymore), with her alluring accent--one of our group asked if she was Brazilian, and she said "Yes, once you know the accent it's easy to recognize"--a few of his guests started admitting different preferences. Some were kosher, some preferred to avoid meat, others butter sauces (that would be me). The needs of just about every request could be met, it turned out, by the alternative vegetarian tasting menu, even if no one that I recall was actually vegetarian. Both, for illustration, are here.

We tasted freely from each others' plates, but we vegetarians-for-the-night made out better. A lot better, as Zeke doesn't quite say but explains, I would submit, his preference for his second, I-hope-I-was-wrong dinner.

As with the meat menu, many of the dishes were show-offy demonstrations of technique. But each had at least one unexpected, meticulous, and memorable flavor: the tea gelee with the marinated Japanese mountain potato, a novelty vegetable (also called yamaimo or Japanese yam, a tuber) generally used for its gummy texture even when shredded raw, as it usually is; the licorice consomme under a "navarin," or stew, of heirloom beets. The beet stew and the dish that followed, roasted savoy cabbage with Perigord truffles, duchess potatoes, and a truffle sabayon, were the most impressive because of their substance and variety. They read as main courses with heft, not decorative diversions. The beets weren't just pretty, as they often are (and semi-raw, and dull), they had real flavor, and the very lightly licorice-flavored broth pointed up their sweet, mineral-y taste. The cabbage was an unlikely triumph: rich parcels of stuffed cabbage, with irresistible mashed potatoes. One of those trompe l'oeil dishes you'd swear had meat in them, mostly because stuffed cabbage always does.

Too bad about the sticky toffee pudding, as Zeke pointed out--too much gum, too much stick, too much stodge, and no clear or fresh flavors in the desserts except in the ice creams and sorbets some of the guests ordered.

We both left with high opinions of Ziebold's talent, but I and my fellow guests had by far the better dinner. I tasted most of the courses on the menu that disappointed Zeke, and think the main error was leaving as luxurious stars several ingredients that had insufficient flavor on their own, particularly the lamb. Choosing rib-eye, and "Kagoshima Kuroge" beef, whatever that really is, means going for the tenderest, fattiest cuts--not, of course, the ones that actually have interesting taste. Even more dangerously, there were too many of those rich proteins one after another, so by the time Zeke got to the lamb he probably needed more refreshment and crisp texture than the crystallized orange and harissa oil on the lamb were able to provide.

Lessons learned? I'll be preachy, where Zeke admirably restrains himself. Moderation, variety, and balance made for his superior second recent meal, neither all-vegetable nor all-meat. And, of course, patience and giving someone a second chance, essential virtues for restaurant critics and everybody else too.

When Good Restaurants Go Bad
By Ezekiel J. Emanuel

True Bravery in Food Writing

Most every body who loves and writes food has got some kind of problem or neurosis about it. Some admit it, some don't. The habits can be charmingly peculiar, merely a bit eccentric and willful, sometimes extremely peculiar, often fodder for continually embellished stories--but always fueled by an intense interest in food. Often, of course, this leads to a condition easy to slap a label on, like body dysmorphism and its attendant complexes like bulimia and anorexia.

Samuel T. Stanley writes in painful, thrilling detail about something that in comparison can seem straightforward: obesity, and undergoing bariatric surgery to change it. The resulting change in body-image and his map of himself throws him off-balance, and takes longer to adjust to than the considerable time required to accommodate to the change in his diet and eating habits. With every post in his series, Stanley becomes franker and more specific, and thus more universal. And he makes us see overweight people as they see, and sometimes can't see, themselves.

For the Obese, Alone Even in Public
By Samuel T. Stanley

Finding a Place for Grace

Like Zeke Emanuel, my father started many meals with a blessing and as a family we often "benched," or sang grace after meals--rather, competed in our harmonic skills during it, putting in surprise intervals and flourishes my brother and sister picked up at various USY retreats. The sweetness of the moment was matchless.

I always welcome the chance to say grace before or after meals, and as Zeke points out in his thoughtful and moving post, that chance is far too rare in our non-family, eaten-out, often rushed meals--which is to say, most every time we dine. I'm glad he's made such an eloquent and simple argument to find a place for grace whenever we eat in company. He ends by asking who can write a simple, non-secular grace that will express the thanksgiving our everyday experience reminds us every day we need to express.

Any ideas? I welcome them, and will post them with pleasure.

Were You on Vacation?

It was Jerry Baldwin who first said to me, "As soon as someone starts telling me what their favorite coffee is, I stop them and ask, 'Were you on vacation?'" It's a surefire question. I've tried it on many occasions, and the answer is usually a laugh and an embarrassed yes.

This morning Jerry gives us a number of the ones he remembers, and offers a charming suggestion about just what I can do about the Peet's blend I still can't match, Sierra Dorada. It won't help in the short term, but there's always hope: if enough people protest and petition, maybe it can come back.

I didn't ask Jerry whether he'd encountered any of the ones he mentions this morning on vacation. But feel free to share with him any of your memories--on vacation or sitting in a coffee shop or, and this I'll want to hear, even in the office.

Tea, More Than Just a Political Prop

Yesterday's tea parties were many things, astroturf or real grassroots, staged or phony--but they weren't about tea, which even the most loyal coffee drinker should learn to love. "Loyal" is the right word, since it was the original tea party and boycott of tea that helped turn this country into a coffee, not a tea country, and give tea its pinkie-up rep.

But the dirty secret of many coffee obsessives is that they stash a secret love on the side--as I did while researching my own book on coffee. The one I settled on as an essential in my morning brewing (which yes, involves coffee too) is the one Zeke Emanuel has decided he can't do without: Yunnan. I mix many other teas into a blend that varies each morning (no, I don't mix any coffee in--that's a whole other daily blend), but Yunnan is a staple.

My own love affair with Yunnan was inspired by Ari Weinzweig, whose education in tea resulted in his strong dependence on it, which induced the same thing in me. I buy mine from him at Zingerman's, or, for quick replacements, from Peet's--which recently sold a deluxe, and very expensive, version called Leaping Tiger, prettily curled into the little balls called hong luo, that I might have developed a dangerous weakness for.

A Loving Water Dog Owner's Advice for the Obamas

As soon as I read about the Obama's wise choice of breed for their fabled new puppy, I thought of one of the great loves of my adult life: Stubbs, my friends Barbara and Ernie Kafka's Portuguese water dog. I was as "besotted," as Barbara says in the wonderful recollection I immediately asked her for, as she--or nearly, because of course she was a parent and I an occasional relative.

Our own Marion Nestle might be the authority to consult on the right thing to feed a dog--she is the author of one book on pet food with another on the way. But, as even she wisely admitted: "Nobody is more passionate about food choice than a dog lover."

But Barbara Kafka, as anyone who has read her books or her blog knows, is original, bold, authoritative, firm, and also flexible--as her loving parentage of Stubbs showed. I asked her to write about the Stubbs diet, for possible White House advice. I hope they take it.

The news about the new White House dog made me think of Franklin Roosevelt and Fala--and my very own Portuguese, Stubbs, named for the great British painter of animals. He was an extraordinary dog. I wasn't alone in thinking that. Almost everyone he met thought so as well. He was friendly, extremely energetic, and handsome. He was a champion in every sense of the word. Portuguese water dogs come in many colors and configurations of colors, from brown to black to dappled; Stubbs was black, with a chest fluffy with white in a way that reminded me of Grover Whelan when he used to go down to the pier to meet visiting dignitaries arriving on ships.

Like the rest of his breed, he was hypoallergenic. His coat was therefore hair, not fur, and like all hair it grew and had to be trimmed.

He hated the cages that were so prevalent in dog training at the time; but he was easy to train. Stubbs had dignity and manners. He loved to play and walk in the woods, jumping logs and racing about. He always turned around to make sure that we were there. He was just as eager to swim, especially when there was another dog to show off for. In the city, he needed a great deal of walking which more or less kept us in shape.

As you can see, I was besotted with him. I loved spoiling him and made the mistake of cooking for him every day. He was not a picky eater; but he was discriminating. If I gave him chicken two days in a row, he scorned it on the third day. It was the same with leftover steak, leg of lamb, turkey, and cooked -for-him chicken livers, as well as whatever else I could come up with. As I do, he preferred rare meat. When I shopped, I had to think about what Stubbs would eat.

Of course, he had regular dry food for dogs, sporadically an egg for his coat, and plenty of water to drink. I now have a wonderful puppy; but she will not be spoiled in the same way. Sadly, I have learned my lesson. Stubbs had a somewhat delicate digestion. The new dog has one of cast iron.

They both get (got) treats from time to time, everything from a boiled marrow bone to commercial chicken nibbles. Stubbs liked the crunchy stems of raw broccoli and an occasional carrot. He never begged; but he certainly stared intently at whatever food was being prepared or eaten. I like to think that he did what he did as a response to words and commands, because he loved us and not for the food. He certainly had a large vocabulary of words he knew and understood.

His only limitation was that as we walked down the street, it seemed impossible that he himself did not speak English. It always seemed that he was about to. He never did. We still miss him.

As you can see from the photograph, he had an inner life.

Joan Nathan's Gefilte Fish Recipe

Readers have clamored for Joan Nathan's recipe for gefilte fish since seeing her very good-natured putting up with Jeff Goldberg's and my invasion of her pre-seder gefiltathon, pictures of which she held up on a Martha Stewart show segment. There she made the fish in a bundt pan--a loaf, or more elegantly a pate, that she could cut and serve Martha with two colors of horseradish.

But, as Joan said on that show and her friends enthusiastically demonstrated when Anup Kaphle, our videographer, and I arrived last Tuesday morning, it's much more fun when you pat the dough into a quenelle shape. Something that the beautiful and talented Pamela Reeves kept urging me to do, thrusting raw fish-onion dough into my hands. But I wussily wanted the gloves another of her fellows was sensibly wearing, and besides, if I'd worked the dough one fraction too enthusiastically I would have ruined the texture and the taste she had so carefully prepared (more wuss, and though I resisted the urge to name-drop, I did give Reeves a tip I'd gotten once when working with Julia Child: get fish out of your fingers by washing them with toothpaste).

By far the hardest and most important step of this recipe is the first: finding the fish. The one time I attempted gefilte fish, influenced pre-Nathan-books by Mimi Sheraton, I haunted the classic Brookline Jewish fishmonger Wulf's for weeks in advance, ordering the fish, and as I recall I filleted and skinned it at home so that I'd have the heads and bones. Crazy. The thing to do is find a fish man like Joan's Charles of the Giant, who apparently delivered a perfect blending of beautifully filleted and ground fish ("When he knows it's for Joan Nathan..." one of the Fish Shticks, as Goldberg and I named the participants, said in hushed tones). Then the rest is just, as Goldberg kept pointing out, smelly.

As for the carp in the bathtub: a reader and friend, Sandi Brooks, wrote to chide me saying, Didn't I know about that? Of course I did, I responded indignantly. But I didn't know about this short film, made in Brussels, about preparing carp for Rosh Hashanah; I randomly found a reference to Christmas carp in Prague bathtubs. We're all from eastern Europe! And, as I pointed out, I meant that question about the bathtub. I nearly did it in my Wulf's days, and inspired by the gefilathon, might do it again--maybe at Rosh Hashanah.

Gefilte Fish

From Jewish Cooking in America (1st ed.) p 141

    •7 to 7 ½ pounds whole carp, whitefish, and pike, filleted and ground*
    •4 quarts cold water or to just cover
    •3 teaspoons salt or to taste
    •3 onions, peeled
    •4 medium carrots, peeled
    •2 tablespoons sugar or to taste
    •1 small parsnip, chopped (optional)
    •3 to 4 large eggs
    •Freshly ground pepper to taste
    •½ cup cold water (approximately)
    •1/3 cup matzo meal

* Ask your fishmonger to grind the fish. Ask him to reserve the tails, fins, heads, and bones. Be sure he gives you the bones and trimmings. The more whitefish you add, the softer your gefilte fish will be.

1. Place the reserved bones, skin, and fish heads in a wide, very large saucepan with a cover. Add the water and 2 teaspoons of the salt and bring to a boil. Remove the foam that accumulates.

2. Slice 1 onion in rounds and add along with 3 of the carrots. Add the sugar and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for about 20 minutes while the fish mixture is being prepared.

3. Place the ground fish in a bowl. In a food processor finely chop the remaining onions, the remaining carrot, and the parsnip; or mince them by hand. Add the chopped vegetables to the ground fish.

4. Add the eggs, one at a time, the remaining teaspoon of salt, pepper, and the cold water and mix thoroughly. Stir in enough matzo meal to make a light, soft mixture that will hold its shape. Wet your hands with old water, and scooping up about ¼ cup of fish form the mixture into oval shapes, about 3 inches long. Take the last fish head and stuff the cavity with the ground fish mixture.

5. Remove from the saucepan the onions, skins, head, and bones and return the stock to a simmer. Gently place the fish patties in the simmering fish stock. Cover loosely and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes. Taste the liquid while the fish is cooking and add seasoning to taste. Shake the pot periodically so the fish patties won't stick. When the gefilte fish is cooked, remove from the water and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes.

6. Using a slotted spoon carefully remove the gefilte fish and arrange on a platter. Strain some of the stock over the fish, saving the rest in a bowl.

7. Slice the cooked carrots into rounds cut on a diagonal about ¼ inch thick. Place a carrot round on top of each gefilte fish patty. Put the fish head in the center and decorate the eyes with carrots. Chill until ready to serve. Serve with a sprig of parsley and horseradish.

Seder to Easter

I love many things about Sally Schneider--her style, her way of thinking about food, a stubborn originality beautifully tempered by an incredibly solid grounding in classic training and the French, Italian, and Mediterranean foods our palates find most pleasing.

And what I love about her today particularly is that the abundant, perfect-pitch spring menu she has given us would be perfect for Passover too. Granted, the days of endless cooking are over--or, for those of us who have been making the seder rounds if not the actual seders, the endless sitting, singing, eating, and driving. But any one of these dishes (except, okay, the olive-oil cake, that'll have to wait even if the Mediterranean theme is apt) will be lovely for the remaining week of Passover--or maybe for the many families I know, mine for a long time among them, who declare by fiat the first Saturday night after the start of Passover to be seder night, to make family gatherings possible.

Also today we have the debut of our resident artisan chocolate maker, Alex Whitmore, whose magical chocolate factory, Taza Chocolates, is in Somerville, just across the Charles River from where I live in Boston. I find it particularly magical because Whitmore pays attention to what I think is most important in chocolate--the quality of the bean, and roasting it to best show off its rustic power. He doesn't conch--mix and massage his chocolate for hours and hours with added cocoa butter for luxurious silkiness on the tongue. Instead he keeps the roasted, ground beans much closer to their natural state, so you taste their graininess and the graininess of good cane sugar. That's the only kind of chocolate I'll willingly eat, and the first time I experienced it, in the form of a ping-pong-shaped brown handmade ball at a Venezuelan market, remains one of the great revelations of my life.

The flavors he describes and loves in Mexican chocolate, the ones he aims to make at his own factory, are close to what you'll find all through Central America and especially in Venezuela and Ecuador, growers of the beans most blenders prize above others. Those beans will only become harder to find and afford as the West African beans most blenders use for the bulk of their blends, generally inexpensive but dependable, themselves become high-priced if alarming news of a new bean blight continues. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the price of beans, and the experience of trying to reproduce a Oaxacan factory in Somerville.

Video: Gefilte Jinks in Joan's Kitchen

Joan Nathan is the most prolific, and certainly the most energetic and best-traveled, writer about Jewish food in this country, authoritatively researching Jewish food as it was brought to America and exploring how it is cooked now all over the world. Her many books show how central and binding food can be to a culture, and illustrate the draw of food research, which combines anthropology, history, and a curious palate.

They're all helped with a good kitchen--and Nathan has a particularly wonderful one in Washington, most recently the locus of food-world fame because the climax of a party she gave for visiting cooks at the Inauguration was having her life saved by a Heimlich maneuver administered by Top Chef Tom Colicchio. (Her wry but urgent New York Times op-ed made everyone who read it, including me, vow to learn how to administer one, beyond looking at the diagrams.)

Every year just before the start of Passover, Nathan invites over a group of women friends to make gefilte fish together, in a kind of ritual that deliberately hearkens back to their mothers and grandmothers. I got to observe because one of the members is the beautiful and accomplished Pamela Reeves, wife of none other than our own Jeffrey Goldberg, who kindly got me invited and even came along to express his opinion of the long, smelly process and to turn the very sporting and hospitable Joan into Margaret Dumont, if Margaret Dumont with a sense of humor and fun.

It was easy to joke around, especially with the ebullient spirits matching the bobbing balls of fish, which covered Nathan's big stove in incredible profusion, and especially with Goldberg around. I asked the group what they called themselves; they didn't have a name, so Jeff and I came up with Joan and Her Fish Shticks.

But I found the lively scene unexpectedly moving, too. After explaining their differing recipes with the kind of competitive edge familiar to any cook certain her mother's way was the right way (as, of course, every mother's way was), one of the women said, "When we do this our mothers and grandmothers are here. We're cooking with them."

Tracking down the traditional freshwater, kosher fish for gefilte fish--whitefish, carp, and pike--is no easy or quick task, nor is grinding it (Nathan has the apparently all-knowing Charles of the Giant do it for her), judging just how much matzoh meal to use to bind it, seasoning, and simmering it. And we haven't even discussed the broth, which should be a proper aspic that only long advance simmering with gelatinous fish frames and heads can provide. It's tedious, long, and, as Goldberg mentioned every chance he got, smells terrible. (He theorized that small Bronx and Brooklyn apartments accounted for the rise of jarred gefilte fish--women didn't want to smell up their kitchens before Pesach.)

I'm not sure many of the women there would make homemade gefilte fish every year if they didn't have each other's company, let alone Nathan as ringleader. But it gives them a chance to come together with each other and their memories of their mothers and grandmothers guiding their hands. It showed me what I knew but seldom see so vividly: what sharing food really means. Even if Jeffrey still insists he likes gefilte fish in a jar.

Update: Taxing Sugar Starts at Home

In the way of modern couples, I had no idea when writing my post on the virtues of water over soda--mentioning the possibility of taxing soda as a way to combat childhood obesity--that my spouse, John Auerbach, was preparing testimony to give this morning before the state legislature in Massachusetts, where he is the state's commissioner of public health. (Or, as the Boston Herald called him in a January editorial criticizing his efforts to mandate calorie labeling on fast-food menus--an idea that has taken hold in New York, Philadelphia, and now England--"the state's irrepressible Nanny-in-Chief"). Also in the way of modern couples, I'm in Washington, at mag HQ, as he addresses legislators on Beacon Hill.

Excerpts of his testimony below. It draws a linkage between sugary foods and diabetes and obesity, as you would expect, and also brings in childrens' oral health, costs and access of which are big issues in Massachusetts as in other states. And it gives hard numbers of estimated revenues, and the tens of millions that could go to health care and, even more important, prevention programs in a year of fearsome cuts:

Historically, items are exempted from sales tax if they are considered to be essential or necessities for survival. We can understand such a policy for milk, bread, vegetables and chicken. But candy and soda are optional, discretionary purchases without any nutritional value. And worse than that, they contribute to some of the most serious health problems in the state.

A substantial body of research in both public health and medicine demonstrates the linkage between obesity and overweight and the consumption of empty calories in items like soda and candy. Even stronger research shows the correlation between obesity and chronic diseases like high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

What effect is this having on chronic disease in the state? One example is Type 2 diabetes - which is caused by poor diet and lack of exercise. The percentage of the adult population in Massachusetts with diabetes has doubled in the last 10 years. Doubled! And diabetes is the leading cause of blindness, kidney failure, and amputation.

Sweetened, empty calorie foods like soda and candy are also linked to serious oral health problems. Adolescents have increasingly decreased their calcium and vitamin C intake in recent years in favor of soft drinks. This decrease has been linked with periodontal disease. We know that in 2008, about 19,000 MA students have evidence of dental decay with nearly 10,000 of those being untreated. Nationally, kids miss 51 million hours of school due to oral diseases. Kids with oral health problems often have difficulty focusing and learning in school; issues that will have repercussions throughout their lives.

We need to contain health care costs if our health care reform effort is to continue to succeed. One way to do that is through prevention. Chronic diseases--many of them caused or made worse by a poor diet--are responsible for 75 percent of our current health care costs. And we need new revenue sources as we look for ways to support health reform and preserve the core public health services that the Commonwealth relies on, such services as school nurses, homicide and suicide prevention efforts, and health screening programs.

We cannot afford to continue to give candy and soda consumption privileged protection by exempting it from state revenue collection. It's unjustifiable in terms of public health, and unnecessary in terms of state revenue collections. Seventeen other states and the District of Columbia already tax such unhealthy foods. The list of those states includes Arkansas, California, Texas, Virginia, Maine, New Jersey and Tennessee.

We estimate that the revenue stream from the removal of subsidies for candy, soda and alcohol purchases will generate $121.5 million in FY10, with $45.6 million going to the health promotion and wellness efforts.

I respectfully request that you report out House Bill 101 favorably, and in particular, that you support the Governor's effort to protect public health and reduce health care costs through the wellness fund and the removal of tax subsidies on junk food and alcohol.

Mourning a Lost Blend of Great Coffee

I started my morning yesterday with a cup of Peet's Anniversary Blend--and its Garuda, Espresso Forte, Decaf Mocca-Java, and Decaf House Blends. I'm still in mourning, you see for, Peet's Sierra Dorada, which none other than Jerry Baldwin himself recommend to us from behind the cash register at the grand opening of the Peet's we buy our coffee at every Saturday, in Brookline's Coolidge Corner. We asked which blend--Peet's specializes in blends, unlike other stores that mostly feature single-origin coffees--would show best in our method of choice, the stovetop moka. Sierra Dorada, he said, and for years we never strayed.

Then cruel fate forced us to. Or, rather, a marketing decision to switch up the blends on offer in any given month. It's been over a year now, and one of fruitless yearning and more-fruitful, but not happy-ending, experimentation. We aim to duplicate Sierra Dorada's mixing of African and Latein American coffees, but though we find many pleasing diversions--Blue Batak was a particular favorite this winter while It lasted--we haven't found nirvana. Jerry, if I promise to make it only in a press pot, will Peet's please bring back Sierra Dorada??

Drinking Healthy, Drinking Smart

Marion Nestle's post today on the importance of water fountains in schools echoes many of the remarks at the MIT "boot camp" she spoke at a bit over a week ago, where many of the speakers made clear that sugar is now in the sights of every food activist, and largely because of its effects on childhood obesity.

Vending machines in schools came in for the predictable amount of abuse, including in the form of polite, silent attention the seasoned health and science reporters gave a young nutritionist from Pepsi--one of the companies that in sites like these emphasizes its commitment to children's health while doing everything it can to keep its vending machines in public schools, which even before the economic crisis were becoming more and more dependent on their share of vending-machine profits.

Taxes on sugary drinks may inch and then vault up to reach cigarette levels.

Water is a subject dear to my heart, as about two years of research a decade ago made clear. More recently, I went to see Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea, at his headquarters in Chevy Chase. Goldman started his business with a strong commitment to sustainability, one he has maintained after his sale last year of 40 percent of his company to Coca-Cola. But vending machines in schools had been a frustration even in his children's public schools, he told me, admitting that even getting fruit juices in place of sugary sodas was a "Pyrrhic victory." Juices, many speakers reminded us, are just as bad for children's weight as sodas.

My own problem with sweet sodas was that they taste terrible, which had led me to Chevy Chase--I much preferred Goldman's lightly sweetened beverages to most commercially available, and, as I admitted, I not only love sugar, I live on it:

Even someone who ingests indecent quantities of sugar on a daily basis, as I do, understands that certain things can be too sweet. Specifically, sodas and other bottled drinks, which the nutrition realist Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and the new What to Eat, calls "liquid candy." Candy is one thing--especially good candy, which even Nestle, a founding member of what resentful hedonists and industry apologists call the "food police," endearingly admits to eating more often than she would like her readers to know. And I could hardly survive without my peculiar daily ration of leftover chocolate-spice frosting, which Maria's Pastry in the North End, Boston's Italian neighborhood, saves for me. Yet there's something intolerable about commercial sweetened drinks.

The problems of the speakers the other week were a lot more substantive--and, notably, they steered clear of the sucrose/high-fructose corn syrup debate I had written about, somewhat out of boredom, I thought, but mostly because their point was that sugar is sugar, and we're eating way too much of it, all over the world.

Particularly militant, and persuasive too, was Barry Popkin, UNC professor and general public-health activist and author of The World is Fat. One of his main points was that people naturally reduce their calorie intake if they eat higher-calorie foods in addition to their normal diet--that is, they notice it, including sugary junk foods like candy bars. But, perniciously and mysteriously, not when they consume those sweet calories in the form of sugary drinks. They don't feel satiety. Why? There's "tons of speculation," he said, but so far no definitive answers. But one clear need was to get rid of sodas in schools, and especially the drinks that come cloaked in health claims for children. "For me, Gatorade and sports drinks are the enemy," he said.

Water instead was also a clear and logical result, as the new German study Nestle mentions dramatically suggests. But for a while the nutrition world has been advocating the virtues of water in weight loss, as in a study in the journal Obesity of the help that water could provide people trying to lose weight:

Results:
Absolute and relative increases in drinking water were associated with significant loss of body weight and fat over time, independent of covariates.

Discussion:
The results suggest that drinking water may promote weight loss in overweight dieting women.

What's next? A movement you've started to see in New York state, and one being discussed in my own Massachusetts: taxes on sugary drinks that inch and then vault up to reach cigarette levels. Taxes, Popkin and others said, are the only real way to get people to change the way they eat--and, of course, are paradoxically even more necessary in a recession that makes people fill their stomachs, and comfort themselves, with the cheapest, sweetest calories they can find.

If I'm Eating Soy, I'd Rather Know I Am

In this review, Paul Levy makes me want to read the new World of Soy, which it turns out I've been eating even when I had no intention of doing any such thing--in chicken, pork, and all the other animals inefficiently fed on it. I'm also eager to read just about anything written or edited by Sidney Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power, particularly a "brilliant" essay, as Levy calls it, "Fermented Beans and Western Taste", that is included in this omnibus volume, which Mintz co-edited with Christine M. Du Bois. And I'll start seeking out Korean restaurants in Boston that make fresh tofu, as was the rage in New York restaurants a few years ago.

Levy, who has been writing particularly provocative entries in his own blog on the Guardian website, calls attention to the lack of the scholarly arsenals that treating such a vast topic should have. He's been an instrumental part of the Oxford Symposium, the summer meeting that has been the international cradle of food studies; as his review points out, there's a lot more to be done:

Dealing with soy comprehensively requires the attentions of historians, nutritionists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and specialists in agriculture, plant genetics - and cooks, for if we do not know how soy has been and can be used as human food, and why people would wish to eat it, we lack any fundamental knowledge of it.

I'll think about that the next time I order fresh tofu, though it will take other books to convince me to get it into the kitchen.

Up Now

A relentlessly experimental chef needs to know what he's doing, a friend who had worked at the Fat Duck was telling me last night at a soothingly familiar Italian supper (even if in very sleek surroundings and with jarring lashings of butter dressing the pasta). The Fat Duck, of course, is one of the international landmarks of pushing-the-boundaries cooking. I'll try to get him to recount here some of his stories of what he watched Heston Blumenthal, the former enfant-terrible chef and owner, put into his dishes in merry and defiant ignorance (my words, not his! and to be fair, Blumenthal has showed in his books that he too has a healthy love and understanding of classic Italian food, whatever he makes at his restaurant).

I responded with an account of how Grant Achatz is the opposite of that, with his rigorous training and experience at the French Laundry, and the concern for flavor that always comes through above the theatrics and ceremony at his Alinea. I didn't dream, though, that I'd learn as much about the thought that goes behind creating that experience, and the attention to every kind of diner, neophyte and seen-it-all professional, Achatz puts into his every plan. Today's post shows that and more, and I'm viewing his series like the reader of a Dickens serial novel, never knowing what's coming next--as, even better, Achatz doesn't know himself.

For exoticism of the kind everyone approves of and travels to find, Maggie Schmitt takes us to breakfast in Tangier, where the familiar mixes with the un- in a natural, time-evolved juxtaposition any Achatz-inspired chef can point to whenever sniffy purists like my friend and me last night start scolding. And then Carol Ann Sayle reminds us in her always-smart, down-to-earth way what's necessary to get anything onto the table: rain.

The Allergy Watch: A Good Cocoa Glaze, At Least

A charming and poignant column by my friend Pete Wells from "Cooking With Dexter," his new monthly series in the New York Times Magazine, about his son's unexpected allergies and his learning to cook around them. He's especially good on finding unexpected allies in vegans when he's a proud omnivore:

I regard vegans with wonder, and they would probably regard me with horror. But I want to write this in 40-foot letters in the sky: Vegans have made amazing discoveries in the field of eggless baking.

He concludes with what sounds like a very nice vegan cupcake with a cocoa glaze I want to try.

More important, though, why the uptick in food allergies everywhere? No telling children who break out in hives then touch their eyes after they eat a peanut that it's because they didn't have a dog--one of the practical aspects of an explanatory article about the rise of childhood asthma in our pages by Ellen Ruppel Shell.

Ellen turned up yesterday at a great conference I've been at all week sponsored by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT, where the topics have included the environment, ethanol, GMs, food inspection, whether or not there's a food crisis, and, this morning, whether farmer's markets are crazy breeding grounds for vicious kneecapping of farmer to farmer and chef to home cook. And more. Watch this space for speakers and topics to turn up in coming months.

As for the updated thinking on food allergies, it didn't come up. That's the question Pete begins with, and one that stays with him and us. Even more important, who has a good non-gluten base for that nice chocolate glaze? A new frontier.

Up Now

The silver lining to the gray cold and blustery cold of New England winter, still in chilly swing, is maple syrup -- that endangered elixir, thanks to global warming pushing production ever farther northward. As Peter Smith points out, Canada overtook production leadership long ago.

But he brings news of a new elixir I can't wait to try: sap soda, which now I look at it ought to be called sapsarilla (at least we could be sure of the origin, unlike the debate over the plant at the base of sarsaparilla). I'm always in search of new sugar sources, and one from my own home territory that promises subtle, birchy sweetness is particularly exciting. As a child in Connecticut, a Yankee godfather figure would take me and my brother and sister to a sugar shack in Stafford Springs, not far from where we lived. As my face bathed in the steam rising from the shallow rectangular metal tubs, I would wonder why I couldn't just drink some of the sap boiling away. Now I'll be able to.

Two exotic meats to try, one close to home and one far: in today's Times, Henry Alford recounts his goat-conversion experience, a moment you might have had, as I did, at a Jamaican restaurant. But now it's turning up in many New York restaurants. In yours? Tell the Nimans, who will be glad that their work is paying off. Next step will be to use one of the recipes, if you can get your butcher to supply the meat.

Not sure I'll be asking my own butcher for pork knuckle, but I'm glad that our resident world traveler Graeme Wood points out its gristly charms--particularly with the kind of brews he had on a recent trip to Bavaria. If you're lucky enough to live near a pub serving the smoked Bavarian beers Clay Risen recently wrote about here, you might even convince them to try serving what's apparently an indigenous companion.

Up Now

If you always confuse Burgundy with Bordeaux, you can't be friends with a Frenchman -- but come sit next to me. Aaron Pott, our In the Vineyard winemaker, gives us one in a series of memoirs of working in Bordeaux, including in the ridiculously named Château Troplong Mondot, something out of Waugh, as were the habits of the counts and self-styled aristos he worked for and among (watch for the maid and the talc-ed undies). Don't worry, he has lots about the actual wine coming up. But part of the raison d'etre of this site is understanding the people who make the product, so today's post goes fairly far in justifying my feelings about much French wine (even if Pott had no such intention!).

Later today we'll have an account of Sally Schneider's Mexican ramblings in Sayulita, with a recipe for tacos and roasted meat you'll want to try even if you can't get on a plane.

Meanwhile if you're anywhere near Washington or New York, you can do your own roasted-meat comparison, following Zeke Emanuel's merguez footsteps. What, you haven't seen merguez on a menu? Clearly you haven't looked at an urban menu in the past couple weeks.

I love Ari Weinzweig's writing, for its casual tone that is utterly his voice, its erudition, and the fact that he won't rest till he's covered just about every base he can think of when he picks a subject -- and his attention to historical context is as passionate and personal as it is careful, maybe because he was a history major at the University of Michigan, of which his and Paul Saginaw's Zingermans has become the heart.

His piece yesterday on bagels is about as good as food writing gets (and he credits other great writers, like Ed Levine! yet more bonus points). And it's unexpectedly suited to Lent, for reasons he explains and that I -- an equally passionate student of bagels who has made the pilgrimage to Montreal (I still have St. Viatour bagels in my freezer, I don't want to think from when) and a passionate consumer of bagels from Iggy's, modeled on but superior to the Montreal bagel and I would call a reason to visit Boston -- particularly liked learning. Now I can associate bagels as well as hot-cross buns with Lent, even if hot-cross buns, rich in eggs and butter, are an Easter bread that have become associated with Ash Wednesday. Subject for another day!

Now observers of Lent have a very pleasurable alternative observance -- and those anticipating and dreading Passover have time to get their fill of bagels.

Up Now

UP NOW It takes slight courage to admit you like, say, whoopie pies, as I'm doing this morning on TV. It takes real courage to write about a life-changing experience in the kind of frank and moving detail Samuel Stanley does in My Transformation, about learning to eat after gastric-bypass surgery. As all chronicles of deprivation do, this makes anyone appreciate the food he or she eats and take it less for granted -- but this is a very particular, unexpected form of deprivation, and I appreciate the revelation and frankness that grow with each entry.

Jerry Baldwin has always been one of my two coffee gurus, and in today's patient, wry, helpful post he lays down the law that you have to use ENOUGH coffee in your coffee -- ground coffee, if course, and a rule that simply escapes an astonishing number of people. Various marketing ploys designed to make people think they were getting more for less money are the culprit, but he gives the real scoop (a pun he admirably avoids), along with the good advice to buy a scoop that gives you the actual amount you should be using. He also gives a much better analogy to illustrate the warped, blown-up view we now have of the size of a cup of coffee, along with the out-of-control portions every other health advocate bemoans: one small "scoop" was enough when a cup of coffee was the size of "your grandmother's teacup." Now, of course, an average cup is not six ounces, as those were, but three or four times that. And you wonder why people need decaf.

Today's installment from the Yale Farm pays tribute to the guru of every New England grower who wants some winter variety, and to save money on heating, too: Eliot Coleman, Maine pioneer of "hoop houses," which miraculously allow actual greens to grow in the unforgiving New England climate all winter. Buy one of the books he's written with his wife, Barbara Damrosch, which you can find here. Then, of course, you'll want an enterprising student to build the house for you and help tend the plants. I think our Sustainability contributors can help with that.

Alice W, Michelle O, and Wall-E

The photographs of Michelle Obama and schoolchildren digging up the White House lawn on Friday must be making Alice Waters very happy, I thought as soon as I saw them. After all, Waters wouldn't stop talking about her dream of an organic garden on the White House lawn -- not for fifteen years, and not in the face of a blogosphere backlash that became ever harsher in the face of a bad economy and a general attitude of let's-get-real, who-has-time-or-can-afford-this, oh-please-spare-us-the-airy-fairy-platitudes, etc.

But the garden happened, because Michelle Obama decided to make it a priority, and thus the photo opps with the sustainability-minded chef she brought with her from Chicago, Sam Kass, and the fifth-graders from Bancroft Elementary School.

As I suspected, Waters was ecstatic. I reached her in the middle of an orange grove in Ojai, California, where she was attending a fundraiser for the kitchen at the American Academy, in Rome, a successful example of several sustainable-food projects she has audaciously undertaken in the heart of places that don't think America has a thing to teach them in the way of food (a several-year attempt at an organic restaurant for the Louvre never bore fruit). The trip had been long -- it's a six-hour drive from Berkeley, almost two hours from LAX; I didn't ask how she got there -- and she hadn't thought she would be up to it after "one of the greatest days of my life." But the smell of the "incredibly aromatic" orange blossoms and the sight of fat oranges on the same trees with the flowers revived her.

"I never in my dreams," Waters told me, "imagined the brilliant stroke of bringing in schoolchildren. It feels so authentic, so right -- so home-grown."

Part of the reason she had "spent all day long in this exhilarated place," she told me, was seeing the children in the pictures. The other cause she won't stop talking about, of course, is putting gardens in schools and trying to get children to understand how vegetables can taste, especially if you grow them yourself.

"I never in my dreams," she told me, "imagined the brilliant stroke of bringing in schoolchildren. This is the kind of ownership that makes it feel so authentic, so right. The message is so easily tainted by celebrity, by landscape architects, historic societies, and all the rest. This seems so home-grown. I don't think anyone can reproach them for planting a victory garden -- though they'll try."

I mentioned the article about to appear in the Sunday Times saying that the time for the revolution she has called for for decades might actually be at hand. She didn't know about it, or the fact that it led with a big picture of her. (Of course it was a good picture, and of her at a farmers market. Another picture of a leader of the revolution is of our very own Nutrition columnist, the matchlessly lucid Marion Nestle.



Waters was very pleased to hear it was in the business section, and unsurprisingly agreed with the premise. "I feel we're at the tipping point," she said. "It's happening everywhere. I'm full of hope."

Perhaps it wasn't coincidence that she called as we were in the middle of watching Wall-E, one of the movies everybody else has seen ("It's sweet," she allowed). The end scene (spoiler alert, but we are the last people in the country to see it) shows the free-at-last, shmoo-shaped human beings gazing in wonderment at a seedling as the captain says, "It's called farming! You kids are going to plant vegetables, fruits, and all kinds of things!" The camera shows rows and rows of seedlings as we build to the climax. I imagine Alice was feeling the same sense of liberation and coming into her own season in the sun.

Welcome, Nina and Tim!

UP NOW Wouldn't you like the Zagats telling you where they ate, what they thought, and their views of the restaurant business -- in their own, clearly pithy and witty voices, but not involving any quotation marks? I sure would, because I know how smart and trenchant they are, and what close observers of the restaurant business and economy.

I've been lucky enough to know firsthand, since I was first assigned to write a piece about them in the days when they still had a hand-scored, mimeographed restaurant survey only a select group got and filled in. One of that select group was my editor, and she sent me to talk to them for a short profile I called "The Man Who Would Be Michelin." Several decades and millions of sales afterward, Tim Zagat became that and more for the United States and many parts of the gastronomic world. And joined by his accomplished lawyer wife, Nina (they're both lawyers, as you can see in their impressive biographies), they expanded their reach, their data-collecting sophistication, and the range of subjects they cover.

I'll be counting on The Zagats to tell us what the next horizon holds -- and, when the spirit moves them, to tell us what they think about the restaurant business in these Interesting Times, as our current cover story would have it, and a very interesting trip they're taking very soon. And I couldn't be more pleased that we'll get to hear from them right here.

Up Now

UP NOW Today marks the debut of an occasional column I've really been looking forward to, even if many people on the Food Channel will wonder why. It's about the flip side of thinking about food: what it feels like when what was and should be a pleasure becomes the enemy -- a threat to your psychological well-being and a very real threat to your health. The pseudonymous author, Samuel T. Stanley, tried every diet for many years, and spent large quantities of his own money and of course time and effort trying to lose weight. Finally, facing diabetes and worse long-term risks and only in his early thirties, he elected to have gastric-bypass surgery.

What we'll be reading about are the mechanics: what it's like to undergo the surgery, and more important, what life is like after it. Stories the author told me soon after surgery -- about the way he saw himself, about the way others saw him -- came as revelations to me. In the coming weeks, I think they will to you too.

What Gets Good Service in L.A.

Several members of a group visiting and dining in Los Angeles converged at the new restaurant, Jose Andres's Bazaar, at the new SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills, which my meticulous colleague Patric Kuh recently reviewed in Los Angeles magazine. Anyone who watches television has likely encountered Andres's big, generous, irrepressible personality, and knows his passion for his native Spain and his enthusiasm for introducing the experimental cuisine of his first employer and lifetime mentor, Ferran Adria -- the cooking that has reached its zenith in this country in the hands of Grant Achatz.

Andres's Washington restaurants, Café Atlántico and Minibar, are very popular, and Atlantico spreads over three floors (my favorite of his group, Zaytinya, is more Turkish and Mediterranean than Spanish). But none of those will prepare you for Bazaar, which is an entirely different scene -- a Los Angeles scene, created by Philippe Starck and the local clubmaster Sam Nazarian.

Thus the crowds spilling over from the vast lobby/bar/design shop (operated by Moss) in the driveway. And thus the greetings that awaited us: when our advance scout went in asking to sit at the bar -- this is a vast restaurant, with as many seating areas as the Bazaar-like Spice Market, in New York's Meatpacking District -- he was told he could sit at a shared table on the patio under a heat lamp. And the waitress wouldn't really be able to get to him for a long time because she was busy. A table for the three of us? At least an hour and a half.

Then we were joined by a fourth: the stunning actress and model friend of one of our number. One look and we were shown to a table in the main dining room -- the half-empty main dining room, beside several other large, large dining areas with numerous free tables. Our new fourth happened to be on her way back from a meeting at Chateau Marmont ("Did you eat?" our scout, who had arrived from a long flight at the same time as I, asked. "Yes, but it was business," she replied. "Everything here is." "I'd say a lot of people here," he said, scanning the room, "are looking to get [lucky]." "Here, that's business," she replied immediately).

Later we compared notes with another group of four friends who had booked in advance and were actually served. Being in the trade, they wanted to keep their menus. They wanted to keep ordering tapas throughout the meal, depending on what they saw being delivered to other tables, following their sense of what the kitchen did best as they tasted through sectors of the menu. This is how critics eat. But it's not how diners are allowed to order at Bazaar. You can't keep your menus on the table -- it's too cluttered, the waitperson informed them as she snatched them all away. The wine list? Can't keep that either: we don't have enough. But, the table was told, "we'll put you in the rotation" to see it again.

Midway through that meal, one of the party was recognized by a former resident of his current hometown, someone known to the management. Hugs all around, animated standing conversation. Friend gone, party re-seated, menus and wine list reappeared and suddenly food appeared practically as soon as they ordered it.

In fairness, the food did not seem to vary by status. The greatest-hit Andres dishes like little torpedo-shaped Philly cheese steak variations, the hollow pita-like torpedoes filled with non-Cheez Whiz and covered with slices of rare beef, and deconstructed caesar salad are proficiently prepared. A pro member of our party rightly marveled at the quality control a celebrity chef could maintain over a sprawling satellite. And it was my first taste of the newly available jamon Bellotta, which is worth a trip -- well, anyplace that's doling it out by the extremely expensive slice.

But it was enough to make you head straight to the place burger lovers say is way better than In-N-Out: Tommy's. Or, of course, to line up your company before you even try to leave your car with the valet -- generally a wise LA move.

Additional photos by Lizabeth Steinhart are available at Food She Thought.

Up Now

UP NOW A cooking star is born -- because he has stars in his eyes. Romantic ones. Mike Nizza recently left his job a rising star at The New York Times to become one in Washington. Complication? His girlfriend's still in New York.

The good part for me and for us is that he works at Atlantic Media, where he has overseen the launch of this very site -- and that Friday nights are now reserved for suppers with Julie, which he starts planning well, far as I can tell, the beginning of the week. We'll be hearing about them in his charming, romantic new series, Made For Julie, which makes its debut today with an account of his obsessing over a killer bacon cheeseburger -- along with a bonus section of terrific recipes you'll want to make even if you don't own (spoiler) a meat grinder. I already had a weakness for iceberg salad with bacon, but his chile-and maple-syrup-toasted pecans have me making out a shopping list for Friday supper. Start making out yours now.

Plus Grant Achatz starts ushering us down the new creative path we'll be discovering with him; and Jerry Baldwin shows us something that even I, coffee fanatic though far less traveled, had never even heard of: quti, a beverage made from steeping coffee leaves he found in Harrar. My consolation is that he'd never heard of it either. Mike Nizza's consolation is that he's found a new word to call his girlfriend. (And watch what you say about them in the Comments section -- he oversees that, too.)

In Food Today

Compost is not necessarily the most inviting topic -- unless Carol Ann Sayle is writing about it. Her enthusiasm, patience, and charm make me want to go to Boggy Creek Farm, in Austin, a few days a week, and I'm just glad to get to go along guided by the sound of her voice.

Our man in Buenos Aires, Terrence Henry, is also a world diner with extensive Washington experience, as his thoughtful post today makes clear. If restaurant owners are to find a way out of the recession, these are some of the mildly wild ways they'll be able to do it (Watch for another opinion on this subject coming up very soon).

Do not miss Grant Achatz's cri de coeur on his growing disenchantment with what looks like a bag of tricks of food science and a term he uses only wryly and reluctantly, "molecular gastronomy." I'm fascinated with the new creative path he says he's looking for and will document with us. We're all lucky to be present at the creation.

A New Use For the King of Cheese?

Apparently Starbucks hasn't abandoned its in-store ovens, which Howard Schultz said it would do in one of the many interviews he's given about how to bring earnings back and as I among others have called for (the smell of those weird hot sandwiches).

Price points can't be ignored, and evidently the big per-store investments in those bulky steel ovens can't be either. So there's a new sandwich, with a $3.95 price tag that's supposed to change people's minds about $4 just being for lattes -- and coffee in the bargain.

More relevant, there's this helpful consideration of how to avoid those sausage smells getting in the way of coffee, as Schultz had hearteningly said he wanted to do -- customers should only smell coffee, he said, and he was right: add Parmesan to the eggs.

Starbucks's food scientists mixed Parmesan cheese with the egg to prevent the smell from seeping into the stores and overwhelming the smell of coffee.

I welcome any new use of the one irreplaceable cheese, and have a sinking feeling that Starbucks isn't using Parmigiano-Reggiano, which could help the cheese consortium's own underwater problems. But the king of cheese as an egg deodorizer rather than what I know it as, an ideal egg enhancer? Smells funny to me.

The Glory of Irish Baking

Rustic Italian bread is all well and good, and who am I kidding, I can't get through a day without it. But Irish baking is one of the world's great traditions, as I wrote after attending an American artisan bakers' conference where the star demonstration was by an Irish baker named Jimmy Griffin, a jovial young fourth-generation baker from Galway. Everything he showed us we wanted to make: barm brack, a less-rich panettone; batch bread, high squares of puffy white bread baked right up against each other; and, of course, soda bread.

That's the true glory of Irish baking -- salty and sweet, tender, well...every time I encounter it I go into a reverie, one from which I'm sharply awakened when I realize I can't make it at home:

There was soda bread, of course, that soft, sweetly nutty excuse for endless amounts of butter and the best possible accompaniment for cheddar or smoked salmon. I can eat soda bread in virtually unlimited quantities, but it's a terrific challenge to make here, where the available whole-wheat flour produces harsh, tough results. Irish "brown" flour is much "weaker" (lower in gluten) than American whole-wheat flour -- good for the delicate texture of Irish brown bread and for pastry, but not so good for yeast breads. Nothing in America is quite like it.

Determined to learn how to make Griffin's soda bread, a family recipe and a signature of his bakery, I took technical notes on the protein and bran levels of the flour he had brought from Ireland...but then I gave up and resolved to order another shipment of Odlums soda-bread mix from Ireland.

Luckily, I can find superb soda bread any day of the week in Boston -- as you'd expect. And you'd expect the best Irish bakery to be sold out on St. Patrick's Day. But no! as I learned when I recklessly paid an afternoon visit yesterday to Keltic Krust. It may be improbably named, or rather improbably spelled, and improbably situated in Newton, a tony suburb, and not in South Boston or Dorchester, the traditional Boston Irish strongholds. But for 14 years Keltic Krust has been turning out Irish breads and scones with exactly the right light texture -- something given to few, including many Irish bakeries in this country.

When you find a soda bread source, you'll stock up on Irish cheddar, Kerrygold butter, and chutney, and have lunch for life.

When I visited, far from the parade madness (for which everyone in Boston gets the day off, as this was the obscure Evacuation Day and a city holiday -- surely you remember the day the British soldiers left Boston?), the wooden slat shelves were gratifyingly full of loaves both low and neatly rectangular, both white and brown, "brown" being a light whole wheat that kind of corresponds to whole-wheat pastry flour but not really. Soda bread is usually the first thing to run out, but luckily had been treated to an unusually large morning bake, the unusually nice helpers told me. (And one of them, a professional photographer, even took my cell phone in hand to take nice pictures.)

For successful results making brown bread, you need to buy a mix. Don't try it at home! But when you do find a good source or a mix (incredibly easy to use and fast to bake), you'll stock up on Irish cheddar, Kerrygold butter, and chutney, and have lunch for life. (Ari Weinzweig, our Behind the Counter star, has long been discovering and introducing Ireland's superb cheeses and butters to grateful Americans.)

Something you can and should try at home are Irish scones, though -- far more delicate than the ones from the sawdusty bricks you're likely used to:

They sounded dainty and dull after the gorgeous trays of hot cross buns and the Celtic whiskey brack, a buttery yeasted cake crammed with whiskey-macerated fruit whose mixing was halted for a spontaneous round of shots of Jameson's. Instead they were a revelation.

And a revelation you can make at home -- easy recipe at end of piece. Or wait, of course, till you're anywhere in the vicinity of Keltic Krust, holiday or no.

Welcome

Welcome to the newest channel of TheAtlantic.com. It's about food, but like everything else in The Atlantic, it's about much more than that: politics, business, literature, the environment -- most of all, pleasure.

The people you'll find here are the ones who have shaped my thinking over the years I've been trying to understand how to eat and drink: the unfiltered voices of people who do -- who find food, grow it, make it, and shape the tastes and policies that put food in our markets and on our tables. And they're people whose voices I just like listening to.

You won't find the marvelous multiplicity of the vox populi and the comprehensive listings of many of the sites I admire and you probably do, too: Serious Eats, Chow, the Internet Food Association, Civil Eats, Grub Street, The Feedbag--the nearly endless daily feast, much of whose best and most provocative daily posts you'll find in "Today's Specials," in the left column of our home page.

Instead you'll find a tasting menu with what I hope will be just enough writing and pictures to keep you nourished but a little hungry for what's next. I've taken the approach of our debut Back of the House blogger Grant Achatz, who'll be describing a revolution and evolution in his own thinking about food, who got it in turn from his mentor Thomas Keller: after three bites you're ready to move on. Well, sometimes it's six bites -- depends which day you ask them. Here you'll find bites of many sizes.

On the right of the home page you'll find twelve departments that showcase some of the wisest and most authoritative people in the worlds of food, wine, and coffee, and many delightful fresh ones. What unites them all is passion, infinite curiosity, and openness to new tastes and new thoughts.

In the weeks leading up to this launch, I've been surprised and delighted by them day after day. Same goes for the young and snazzy crew of Atlantic producers, who make this site look beautiful and keep it, and me, running. I'm really pleased you get to join us -- and look forward to your company and your help guiding us on our savory explorations. Tell us what you think! Pack just your curiosity and hunger please.

How Could I Forget? The Right Way to Eat a Cupcake

Mimi Rancatore, sister of our Scooping Blogger Gus, reminds me that there's a smart way to distribute the general, and generally welcome, excess of icing on today's boutique cupcakes, subject of my column in the current issue: Slice the (usually vapid) cake horizontally, and use the bottom as a top layer for a sandwich.

Why didn't I demonstrate this in the video? Perhaps because I was too busy snatching at the icing, which except in too-rare cases is so much better than the cake. But this is the way to have your vapid cake and eat it too.

Cheese at Customs: Forever Cryovac

Anyone who has had a sniffer beagle stop at a piece of luggage and sit obediently and patiently knows the dread of what's to come -- or rather, of what's to go. The one time it happened to me was when I forgot to throw out the leftovers of a prosciutto panino I'd bought to eat on the plane.

But I've brought in a lot of cheese over the years, including raw-milk cheese that violated the under-90-days-of-aging rule the USDA long had in place. As Jeffrey Steingarten wrote in an article in Vogue, you'll seldom be busted, and few inspectors know or care much about the rules (and try finding them! Four searches using different terms, on both the USDA and State Department sites, brought me back to this page, which leads no place cheesy.

And now visitors to China need to worry about importing any kind of cheese at all, as Jim Fallows writes in his blog. Baffling for the reasons he gives -- China is worried about the safety of our dairy products? That's rich -- and also personally worrying: that dogs are good at sniffing any kind of cheese. Guess I'll stick to my rule: get the store to seal it in Cryovac, then free the sweaty, imprisoned cheese and rewrap it in wax-coated paper as soon as you get home.