But for those of us residing in northern climes, the relationship between the calendar, the weather outside, and spring-real, honest-to-goodness spring-has a mind-bending quality worthy of M.C. Escher. In our minds, we’re frolicking bare-legged amongst the cherry blossoms; in reality, more often than not, we’re once again donning sensible shoes and tramping into work against gray skies. Even when the weather permits us to start shedding layers and smiling over the first daffodils, there’s one springtime pleasure that lags woefully behind, and it’s this lack that defines the bewildering little mini-season I like to call the Dead Zone. Because while it may look (and even smell) like spring, until it actually tastes like spring, it might as well be the dead of winter.

How do you know you’re stuck in the Dead Zone? Just take a quick tour of your local farmers market (assuming it’s open). A few root vegetables and straggling cold-storage apples, right? Dead Zone, pure and simple. (And here you were, you hussy, craving sweet baby radishes with a pat of salted butter and grilled ramps with anything. Good luck with that. Daffodils? Who cares?)

There’s only one way to survive the Dead Zone gracefully, and that way is submission. Embrace winter for all it’s worth. Go ahead and think of it as a culinary last hurrah. Just like the jaunty scarves and trenches that will soon be relegated to the back of the closet, here are a few beloved foods that, in another month or so, you won’t dream of touching. Savor them now, and before you know it, the Dead Zone will have passed.

BEEF

If you can’t make it to the beach, the garden, or the fire escape-basically, anywhere you can grill without heating your kitchen to within an inch of its life-chances are the summer will fly by without your once wondering where the beef is. The savory, robust depth of a beef stew, pot pie, or ropa vieja will be the last thing on your mind. Now’s the time for that final dalliance with a good, honest braise.

POTATOES

New potatoes and salad aside-and beloved summer staple though the latter is, it can also be an awfully heavy way to picnic-chances are you won’t be playing hot potato for months to come. Fry them, bake them, mash them up with tons of butter (yet another item you won’t spend much time missing come the hot weather)-and then say goodbye.

BANANAS

They’re an easy year-round treat, to be sure, but unless you’re of the school that likes to peel and freeze them for instant popsicles, who would ever notice a banana during the height of blueberry season? Fill up now on banana bread, banana cream pie, bananas flambée… even banana smoothies.

CITRUS

Summer wouldn’t be summer without lemon and lime-a good squeeze is essential to everything from grilled fish to salad dressing to an ice-cold gin and tonic-but the days of craving citrus as the only thing standing between you and scurvy will soon be over. So before it rejoins the chorus line, allow your favorite citrus fruit one final swan song as the soloist in a tart, mousse, or meringue pie. (Come to think of it, sticky-sweet meringue is another item you probably won’t want on your table come July.)

CHOCOLATE

Anyone who has ever lived through the humidity of an East Coast summer would no sooner eat a chocolate dessert in August than wear a fur coat to the beach. With very rare exceptions-a few shaved curls as garnish here, a luxurious sauce for ice cream there-this everyday luxury might as well not exist from May to October. Nothing says cozy hibernation like a mug of cocoa topped with a snowdrift of whipped cream. Why not toast the advent of spring with one now?

Photo by Dedolo

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Mr. Shuester: “When I was in Glee Club and we needed new silk cummerbunds for Regionals, we held a bake sale.”

Santana (Naya Rivera): “You’re joking, right? I mean bake sales are kind of bougie.”

Shue: “So hip people stopped eating delicious sugary treats?”

Brittany(Heather Elizabeth Morris): “It’s not that. It’ most of us don’t know how to bake. I find recipes confusing.”

Rachel (Lea Michele): “My family is fully committed to take-out.”

Finn (Corey Monteith): “Yeah, Mr. Shue, kids are busier than when you went here. We’ve got homework and football and teen pregnancy, lunch.”

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Now 55 years in the candy business (since he has been working in it “since birth”), Cohen knows a thing or two about Halloween, which is the biggest single holiday for candy stores, and candy companies. This is no surprise: The U.S. Census Bureau says 36 million children ages 5 to 13 go trick-or-treating each year. While there are other things to do for Halloween in New York besides candy, such as the Village Halloween Parade, Economy Candy Store alone sells some 6,000 pounds of bulk candy for Halloween. His wife Ilene has been in the business since 1978. “I met him, we started going out, and he put me right to work.” Yet even the Cohens are mystified by the tradition of giving out candy for Halloween. As it turns out, there are many misconceptions about Halloween candy.

Trick-or-Treating Is Not An Ancient Pagan Ritual There is evidence of the existence of “Halloween candies” at the turn of the twentieth century, but, according to Lynn Olver, reference librarian at the Morris County Library in Whippany, New Jersey (who has a “passion for food history”), trick-or-treating began in earnest only after World War II, a phenomenon of the American suburb.

Candy Corn Is Not The Halloween Candy There is an enormous amount of information available about candy corn from the National Confectioners Association, which bills itself as “one of the oldest, most respected trade associations in the world.” It was founded in 1884 – shortly after candy corn was invented reportedly by George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company and shortly before the multicolored concoction of corn syrup, honey, and sugar was mass produced in an elaborate process by the Goelitz Confectionery Company. (The Web site of the National Confectioners Association includes an interesting Confectionery Timeline, whose first entry is “1854 The first packaged box of Whitman’s chocolate debuts” and whose latest entry is considerably less coherent or reassuring: “1999 Sound Bites Lollipops from Cap Candies is the first radio-lollipop combination in the growing interactive candy segment.”)

Yes, it is true that many people associate candy corn with Halloween and vice-versa. It is also true that the day before Halloween, October 30th, is National Candy Corn Day, although it is not clear what one is supposed to do to celebrate, other than buy candy corn. And it is further true, according to the association, that more than 35 million pounds of candy corn will be produced this year: “That equates to nearly 9 billion pieces—enough to circle the moon nearly 21 times if laid end-to-end”

But, as the National Confectionery Association itself points out, “Candy Corn is not just for Halloween anymore. Candy makers have made Reindeer Corn for Christmas, Cupid Corn for Valentine’s Day and Bunny Corn for Easter.”

The Web site Serious Eats lists candy corn as one of the 10 worst things to hand out (or get) on Halloween: “The most polarizing candy of all. The fruitcake of Halloween; it just never goes away. If you love them, fine. But don’t subject the rest of us haters to the sickeningly sweet triangle that tastes like neither candy nor corn.”

For its part, the Goelitz Confectionery Company has renamed itself the Jelly Belly Company, and, while it continues to manufacture candy corn, it seems far more interested in its jelly beans than its candy corn.

As a candy man on the ground, Jerry Cohen can tell you, candy corn is not even in the top five of Halloween candies. “We only sell about a pound of candy corn out of every 10 pounds of candy we sell during Halloween.” So what candy do people buy for Halloween?

Hierarchy of Halloween Candy According to Jerry Cohen, the top sellers on Halloween are

Mary Jane A peanut butter and molasses flavored taffy-type candy with peanut butter in the center, originally made in 1914 by The Charles N. Miller Co. Miller’s three sons named it after their favorite aunt.

Tootsie Roll An oblong piece of chewy, chocolate candy invented in 1896 by Leo Hirshfield, an Austrian immigrant who opened a small candy shop in New York City, producing the first individually wrapped penny candy from a recipe he brought from Europe. (Some believe it was actually first made in Hoboken). The company now calls itself Tootsie Roll Industries

These are followed by Bitter Honey and Monster chocolate eyeballs. Economy also does a brisk business in gummy brains and wax fangs, but you can’t really call those candies. A surprising number of people have written their definitive list of the top ten Halloween candies — such as here and here — but it’s mostly on the Web, so it can’t be trusted.

Hierarchy Of Halloween Candies That Are The Worst For You Taffy-like candies, such as Mary Janes and Tootsie Rolls, are reportedly the worst for your teeth. It turns out, according to Dr. Sanjay Gupta — and if this does not prove the existence of a divinity, what would? — that chocolate is better for your teeth: “Chocolate dissolves in your mouth instead of getting ‘stuck’ in between your teeth as a caramel candy would. Chocolate also contains tannins, which aid in killing bacteria in the mouth.”

People Do Not Put Poison In Halloween Candy Snopes.com, a Web site that debunks urban legends, has a well-annotated article entitled Halloween Poisonings in which the author finds no evidence of their ever having been a “genuine Halloween poisoning” — one in which a child randomly has been given a cyanide-laced candy or razor-embedded apple while going trick-or-treating. A documented case of a child being poisoned by Halloween candy, on October 31st, 1974 in Houston, Texas, turned out to be a filicide — a father deliberately poisoned his son, and blamed it on Halloween. (He allegedly gave the poisoned candy to other children to cover his tracks, but nobody else fell ill.) Ronald Clark O’Bryan was convicted of the crime of murder and executed.

It’s Better To Eat Your Halloween Candy All At Once

This from an article last year on CNN: “although some parents may be tempted to space out the amount of candy their children consume after Halloween, dentists have advice to the contrary: When it comes to teeth, it’s better to eat a whole lot of candy at once than to space out candy consumption over time. Basically, the fewer episodes of candy eating, the better. “It makes sense, given that cavities form when bacteria in plaque ferments the sugars in candies and creates acid that attacks the tooth’s surface, says Dr. Clarice Law, assistant professor of dentistry at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Dentistry. “Repeated “attacks” lead to cavities, so eating a bunch of candy — for example, with a meal — and then brushing your teeth is better than spreading that candy out over time. Law doesn’t recommend bingeing but does advise that children limit their candy-eating episodes.”

Consider Bribing Your Child This advice for parents from an article entitled “Avoid Halloween’s Sugar Shock”: “Before trick-or-treating, serve a healthy meal so kids aren’t hungry when the candy starts coming in. Consider being somewhat lenient about candy eating on Halloween, within reason, and talk about how the rest of the candy will be handled before they leave the house. Buy back some or all of the remaining Halloween candy. This acknowledges the candy belongs to the child and provides a treat in the form of a little spending money. Be a role model by eating Halloween candy in moderation yourself. Encourage your child to be mindful of the amount of candy and snacks eaten — and to stop before feeling full or sick.”

A reason why none of this might work: Americans consume more than twice as many pounds of candy a year than vegetables.

Candy Makes You Live Longer “My father’s 92,” Jerry Cohen says. Unlike her husband, Ilene Cohen thought maybe it was healthier to sell candy than to eat it. Their son Mitchell Cohen, now 24, grew up as that proverbial kid in the candy store. “Everybody was so jealous,” says Ilene, “but I was so afraid that I wouldn’t keep any candy in the house.” Halloween packaging isn’t all that reassuring. A Halloween-size Snickers has 80 calories, even a small taffy has about 40, and each one of those itty-bitty candy corns has more than 3 1/2 calories. Jerry Cohen has a simple solution. “Anybody who starts reading the nutrition label,” he says, “we don’t allow them in the store.”

Photographs by Jonathan Mandell except the close-up of the candy corn, the Mary Janes and the Tootsie Roll and the bucket of eyeballs. The bucket and the candy corn pictures come from the Economy Candy Store Web site. The others come from their respective corporate sites.

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Actress and vegan Alicia Silverstone cooked up recipes from, and did signings of, her new vegan weight-loss diet book, The Kind Diet, but it wasn’t that kind of festival. Thirty restaurateurs competed in Meatball Madness, with the winner Andrew Carmellini of Locanda Verde for his lamb meatball sliders! Top Chef alumnus Spike Mendelsohn won the Burger Bash competition for his Obama Burger, which was topped with blue cheese, applewood smoked bacon and red onion marmalade. There is nothing inherently Obama-like about these ingredients; apparently it’s in honor of Michelle Obama having eaten at Mendelsohn’s Good Stuff Eatery in D.C.

Some 80 events in 27 venues occurred over four days, ranging in price from free to $500, almost all in or near the Meatpacking District. To go to more than a handful of these, I thought, you’d have to be a glutton or at least a gourmet for punishment.

I had known about the second annual New York City Wine and Food Festival for months but waited too long to seek guidance from the woman listed as the head of public relations for the event, Robin Insley. I could not reach her by e-mail or telephone or cell phone, so I walked over to her office, which was nearby.

“Wait outside,” Robin Insley commanded with a glare, before I had a chance to say a single word. I sheepishly walked back into the hallway, and Robin Insley immediately slammed the door in my face, and locked it. She had forgotten to mention that the wait she had in mind was for forever.

So, no help there. (I later Googled her name and read that Robin Insley “is a veteran of the New York restaurant PR game.” I guess she realized I wasn’t a player)

It turned out, though, that during the four days of the New York City Wine and Food Festival, you could simply walk through the Meatpacking District and stumble upon an event, such as Daniel Boulud — revered chef-owner of ten restaurants, including Daniel, Cafe Boulud, Bar Boulud, and DBGB — sitting in the middle of the street. Boulud’s chat was part of the so-called coffee talks with Ben Leventhal, the founder of Eater.com, at what I learned is now called Gansevoort Plaza.

I also stumbled on this oddity:

Is there such a thing as free-range children?

Most of the events for children were clearer, such as Churn, Baby, Churn, where the White Cow Dairy taught kids 7 to 14 the art of butter-making.

The highlight for me, though, was the farmer’s market sponsored by Basis, which is opening a retail store on 14th Street. Having recently learned about all the fresh food delivered nearly instantaneously to the restaurants and food shops in San Francisco, food town, I was proud to learn that New York need not hang its head in the sustainable food, organic food, artisanal food, food justice, locally grown food, locavore food, slow food movement. In fact, Slow Food U.S.A. headquarters are in Brooklyn!

It was eye-opening for me to talk to the farmers.

John Glebocki is a fifth-generation farmer. (although it skipped a generation; his father got out of the business; Glebocki took over the farm from his grandfather.) The 200-acre Glebocki farm, which used to grow only onions for wholesale but has diversified into a wide variety of greens, herbs, fruits and vegetables, is about 60 miles from New York City, in the Black Dirt Region of Orange County. “You know the top soil in a flower pot?” he explained. “The Black Dirt Region has 10,000 acres of soil just like that.” He is all for the local food movement. “It’s a food safety issue.” With food that comes from somewhere else in the world, “a lot can happen in transition.” Glebocki regularly brings his produce down to some 30 different farmers markets in New York City. By contrast, Haifa Amouri and her husband Zaid Kurdich started Norwich Meadows Farm in 1998 on half an acre behind their house. It has grown to 35 acres and offers, among many other things, cauliflower of many different colors, with names like Romanesco. Kurdich, who used to work for the United States Department of Agriculture, has an Eco-Halal Meat Project, and says things like: “It is only within the past 100 years of man’s brief time on earth that we have resorted to artificial and toxic means to grow our foods. As a result, we not only have harmed our health, but we have dealt a blow to the very environment that supports our well-being.”

I also met Ben Shaw with one of his nine children (a tenth on the way) who started his poultry farm with his wife Jeannette, The Garden of Spices only five years ago. He had been working as a safety officer for a construction company, but wanted to be self-employed, and having the satisfaction of working and living together with his family. His ducks and chickens, he boasted, are beyond free-range. “Free range can be in a barn. Ours are in a pasture outside on the grass.” The farm is about 200 miles away near Schuylerville, “the turning point of the revolution,” he said. He meant the American Revolution, but would it be overblown to suggest there is a food revolution going on? As Dylan said in “Tangled Up In Blue” There was music in the cafes at night And revolution in the air. Surely they served food in those cafes too.

So, ok, weak transition. But I figured the festival was called a wine and food festival, the wine came first, and yet where was the wine? I decided to go at night to City Winery, a surreal establishment that combines wine bar, restaurant, concert venue and wine education center (they make wine there too) opened last year by Michael Dorf, who had founded the hip performance space, the Knitting Factory. They offered two events in the festival, “My First Crush,” a chance to make your own wine, and Bob Dylan Wine Pairing. One of the three hosts of this event, as it happened, was Joe Bastianich, son of Lidia Bastianich herself, part of her food empire, partner with Mario Batali, and a winemaker, with vineyards in Italy and Argentina. On top of all that, he plays the guitar!

“Music and wine are very similar in a lot of ways,” he said. “They make us a feel a certain way, they bring us to a different state.” For this one night, he said, “let’s taste with our ears and listen with our palates.”

So that’s what I tried to do. We were poured a wine with a vintage no earlier than 2004 and then listened to a six-piece Dylan tribute band, Highway 61 Revisited, play Dylan songs no later than 1979. In between sets, Joe Bastianich, “musician-turned-sommelier” Jean Luc Le Du and Mike Edison, the former editor of High Times, attempted to articulate the connections so that our brains could tie together what was coming in through our ears and our palates: Dylan’s music was a response to an era, just like wine reflects a a very specific moment in time, they said. Dylan’s songs are a collection of our consciousness, they said, and in the same way wine is a collective expression of our humanity. Wine takes a long time; Dylan has been around a long time.

Sauvignon Blanc 2007 went with Subterranean Homesick Blues of 1965 (were they both a bit dry?) Rose of Pinot Noir 2007 went with Love Minus Zero/No Limit of 1965. Was that because of the lyrics People carry roses, Make promises by the hours, My love she laughs like the flowers, Valentines can’t buy her.

No, rose is a transition from white to red, just as “Love Minus…” was a transitional song in the Dylan repertoire.

The drinking and the playing and the explaining went on past midnight, and I lost track of whether Serenity Pinot Grigio 2007 was paired with It’s Alright, Ma, 1965 or Eruption Volcano Ridge Vineyard 2005 went with Hurricane, 1976, though that would make sense. The last wine was Late Harvest Riesling “SuSan’s Passion” 2004 and was poured during Maggie’s Farm, which I suppose would bring us neatly back to the wine and food festival, except the lyrics are:

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

Photographs by Jonathan Mandell except the hors d’oeuvre and the hamburgerDan

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This was Alemany Farm, four and a half urban acres that include a duck pond, a windmill, a greenhouse a few feet away from a clothesline where the residents are drying their laundry (this is after all, their backyard), and row after row of fruits and vegetables — two types of plums, three types of cucumbers, three types of lettuce, three varieties of strawberries, many varieties of apples, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, chard, kale, onions. With the help of people from the area, especially young people, the farm yields about 4,000 pounds of fresh produce every year for people in a neighborhood that previously was identified as a food desert, an area with few if any supermarkets or other places to get fresh food.

One could debate what it means to be a food town. The town of Chewandswallow from “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” might be the only indisputable food town, where food rains down like the weather. But few would argue with San Francisco’s growing reputation.

A food town is presumably a place whose restaurants are diverse, plentiful and renowned, bringing people from all over the world. Visitors to San Francisco list its restaurants as the number two reason to go there (number one is “atmosphere and ambiance”) according to the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau.

A food town is a place where people talk about food. Irina is not alone among San Franciscans who talk incessantly about food. She is a journalist with The San Francisco Appeal, videographer with Geek Entertainment Television, social media maven (she could exceed the Facebook limit several times over) and proletarian (or at least broke) socialite (“I’m inviting 1200 of my closest friends,” I overheard her say laughingly on her cell phone about a fundraiser she was organizing). None of this involves food. But she is also a self-declared foodie. Her focus on food is not because of her birthplace in Kazakstan, where her grandmother tilled the earth on a farm Irina visited every summer until she was nine. She and her parents lived in Pavlovsk, a (farmless) suburb of St. Petersburg, and when she visited her grandmother, she didn’t follow her around picking hot potatoes from the ground the way Lydia Bastianich did with her grandmother, or milk the cows, or lift a finger. No, her ability to “tell a first-rate dinner from a second-rate dinner, although I can’t exactly tell you why” and her eagerness to present strong opinions about coffee and bread are skills she says she acquired since moving to San Francisco five years ago. “It’s so easy to get a great meal here that it trains your palate.”

I’ve always thought that a food town is a place where you can walk into any culinary establishment of whatever price range or cuisine and have a reasonable expectation that it won’t be lousy; the better chance that you’ll have good food and a good experience, the better the food town. In my many trips to San Francisco, I can’t say I’ve never had a mediocre meal, but I’ve been surprised more than once by the diners and dives (but not drive-ins) that have delivered quality.

But San Francisco’s greatest claim to being a food town may be its dedication to a movement with many names (or maybe many different but inter-related movements that share a focus on food) – the green economy, the sustainable food movement, the organic food movement, the artisanal food movement, the slow food movement, the food justice movement, etc. The motto for San Francisco food seemed to be summed up on the awning of a restaurant called DeLessio: “Organic, Delicious, Sustainable.” It is hard to separate a greenie from a gourmet in the City By the Bay, since even when they are not one and the same, they sound alike:

“I think it’s accurate that San Francisco is probably the top food town in the U.S.,” said Jason Mark, co-manager of Alemany farm and the editor of the environmental magazine Earth Island Journal. “Our Mediterranean climate means that chefs have a greater flexibility if they are committed, as a growing number are, to fresh, local, seasonal foods. The strength of the sustainable food movement here means that the consumer demand for quality, artisanal products is very high. Because so many people are eager for artisanal foods, chefs and restaurants know they will have a market. Also, among the U.S.’s major cities, I think it’s fair to say that San Francisco is among the more laid back. In DC, and also to some extent LA, gourmet consists of power lunches. New York City is very fad driven. Here, people want to slow down and savor, and I think that gives chefs, restaurateurs, purveyors more confidence to be original.”

Is there anywhere else in the world where the proprietor of the most highly-regarded restaurant in the region is also the leading advocate for food justice? Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971 (and in doing so is credited with more or less inventing California Cuisine). She launched the Edible Schoolyard in 1996 in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, with a one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom to teach the students first-hand the importance of healthy food. The program has spread to the entire Berkeley public school system and beyond. I visited the latest edible schoolyard, the one at the Willie Mays Boys and Girls Club in Hunters Point in San Francisco, which is having its official opening, a fundraiser, on October 17th. For the first time, I learned the difference between a fruit and a vegetable:

The head of Hunters Point Boys and Girls Club edible schoolyard, Madeleine Van Engel, explained why she thought that, yes, San Francisco is the number one food town – “the quality of the vegetables. You can go to any restaurant and the food is so fresh, even in the ‘cheap’ restaurants.”

Krystin Rubin agreed. She is the co-owner of Mission Pie, a bakery that doubles as a vocational training ground for local high school students and another symbol of the sustainable food movement; a mural outside the bakery offers answers to the question “If you could thank a farmer, what would you say?”

“Because of the climate, there’s more fresh produce available year-round. Within 100 miles of San Francisco there are a large number of agricultural zones. Farmers are able to produce crops year-round, and local, organic, super-fresh produce is significantly less expensive in the Bay Area.

“Being in San Francisco enables us to offer a super-tasty product that’s local and seasonal. We make apple pies until the California apples run out. There’s no reason to sell apple pie with apples from New Zealand, when I can sell walnut pies instead, with walnuts that come from a farm 45 minutes away.” They get many of their fruits and vegetables from the Pie Ranch, a working farm and vocational education center co-founded by the co-owner of Mission Pie, Karen Heisler, a former environmental policy analyst at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

I don’t know what this says exactly, but Alice Waters, Madeleine Van Engel and Krystin Rubin all grew up in New Jersey. Krystin in particular sounded as if she shared my culinary background. “My mother didn’t cook much, and when she did, it was lousy,” she explained. “I was born hungry.” So this made her appreciate quality food from an early age – “I remember the first time I had real jam instead of grape jelly,” and especially appreciated family gatherings like funerals, since the quality of the food went up. After graduating with a degree in religion from New York University, and taking graduate courses in Boston, she changed her avocation to a vocation, and became a successful baker. Then, as she put it, “I burnt out on baking,” so she sold her business, and, through an exchange service called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) became an apprentice to a farmer near the Bay Area for a year. “I spent years working with food without knowing where it came from,” she said, and when Mission Pie began about three years ago, she approached it in a different way from her East Coast bakeries, as a mission.

This was all very convincing. To do my part, I decided to eat at Chez Panisse, the upstairs cafe rather than the downstairs restaurant, starting with “Blue Heron Farm Little Gems lettuce with cream, garlic and bottarga di muggine” and ending with, I thought appropriately, “Jonathan apple and pear crisp with ice cream.”

Photographs by Jonathan Mandell, except two of the pictures in the Alemany Farm collage, which are from Flickr, and the photo of Jason Mark is by Barry Jan.

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The word “meatball” appeared in a front-page headline of the New York Times recently; it’s in the title of a Hollywood movie that opens this week, “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs”; a first annual Meatball Madness competition will take place in October at the New York City Wine and Food Festival; a meatball restaurant called the Meatball Shop is soon to open on the Lower East Side; even Italians are having meatballs without spaghetti: In Lidia Bastianich’s new cookbook, the one meatball recipe is for “Meatballs in Broth” (Polpette in Umido). And suddenly all these fancy restaurants are touting their meatballs.

This was why we were sitting at the bar at Locanda Verde, eating an order of “lamb meatball sliders with caprino and cucumber” –two meatballs for $12, though they did come with tiny buns, (which is what, I learned, “slider” means.)

“If they have tiny buns, why aren’t they called hamburgers?” I asked.

“Because they’re meatballs,” Diane said.

We were on a meatball crawl. This was Mark’s idea — “it’s like a pub crawl” — but Diane picked the places. They were all fancy, the kind you read about in the food magazines.

“Aren’t there any good meatballs in regular places?” I asked.

“Just about every pizza joint can give you a meatball sub or platter,” Mark said. “But the really interesting good-quality meatballs we’ve had just happened to be on the menus of fancy places.”

“I think you just have expensive tastes,” I said.

“No,” Mark said, “that’s just the way it is. If there was a gourmet fastfood meatball, we would have polpetterias alongside pizzerias. There is no reason why there aren’t; it just never caught on.”

Meatballs certainly seem to be catching on now, though some of the attention strikes me as manufactured, in part because of the new movie.

“Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” has a somewhat misleading title. Meatballs actually play a lesser role than sardines, and hamburgers, and roast chicken, but the title would not have worked as well if it were “Cloudy With A Chance of Roast Chicken” and besides, the title is from a beloved 1978 children’s book written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett (a vegetarian!) that has sold millions of copies. It is a simple story of 30 pages, most of them filled with illustrations: Grandpa tells a tall tale about a small town called Chewandswallow. “The only thing really different about Chewandswallow was its weather. It came three times a day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner…it never rained rain….It rained things like soup and juice.”

The animated film, with the voices of James Caan and Andy Samberg and Mr. T, jazzes up the plot, adding a technological explanation for the food-weather, a father-son subplot, a romance, scenes of Times Square and Paris, special effects; and changes the locale to a small island that is known only for its sardines. A young man who has always gotten in trouble for his inventions (spray-on shoes, rats that fly) devises a machine that makes the weather produce fully cooked meals. This is welcomed by the mayor as a possible boon to tourism. It quickly and rather spectacularly gets out of hand. Meatballs do figure prominently in a pivotal scene, but they are paired with spaghetti.

Still, it was the film that led to the front-page headline in The New York Times: Seeking The World’s Biggest Meatball? Try Mexico The article was about the Mexican effort to get many entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, but the meatball in question, 109 pounds prepared by the Ritz Carlton in Cancun, was a direct promotional event for the new movie. The new record easily bested the previously ” modest 72-pound, 9-ounce meatball,” the Times reporter wrote; “the giant mass of beef was served to onlookers.”

The executive chef of the Ritz Carlton hotel in Cancun, Rainer Zingrebe, stands by his Guinness World record-breaking 109 pound (49.5 kg.) meat ball in Cancun, Mexico, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2009.

This brings up an ontological enigma, or anyway a question: Does a meatball retain its essential meatballness when it’s so big? At 109 pounds, it could just as easily be a hamburger…or a cooked cow. A far more credible meatball entry in the Guinness book was set several months earlier, when the town of Serres, Greece served up some 688 pounds of regular-sized meatballs, thousands of them, all of them buffalo meat, cooked up with 110 pounds of onions.

The town of Serres, Greece served up just over 688 lbs. of meatballs, made from buffalo meat, cooked with with 110 lbs of onions, on May 24, 2009.

With so many meatballs in the news, it made sense to me to try a second recipe from “Lidia Cooks From The Heart of Italy.” The meatball recipe was from Umbria, “the heart of Italy,” and had a lot of ingredients for a meatball that were not meat — eggs, golden raisins, pine nuts, bread crumbs, cheese, flour if you fried them, and the “zest of 1 medium orange.” I had no idea there were so many things in a meatball.

Unlike my previous, overly extended hunt for ingredients, this time, I only needed to go to three stores, the supermarket, Ottamanelli’s for the meat, and Faicco’s for the cheese.

Cooking came more easily to me than for the first recipe; I don’t know if this recipe was simpler or I was simply more adept (or had already bought, for example, the parchment and the kosher salt). I mixed the veal and beef (the recipe called for pork, but I can’t knowingly eat pork, much less cook it), poured all the other stuff on top, folded and tossed and squeezed (as instructed) and made it all into 1-inch balls (“the size of a large grape”), fried some, poached others, then heated up the chicken broth and stuck the meatballs in them. I grated some of the Parmigiano-Reggiano and put it in a bowl “for sprinkling over the top” of the soup.

This time I decided to try them out on somebody else, my mother.

She ate the soup in silence. “I would have used less zest,” my mother said finally.

I tried it. My meatballs tasted like orange peel!

(Later, I went back to the recipe and read what I had skipped over before — “about 2 teaspoons” of zest was needed; I hadn’t measured it).

“You should try Grandma’s recipe for meatballs,” my mother was suddenly saying.

“Grandma’s? I thought you said she hated to cook.”

“She had one recipe she liked, and it was delicious. It was meatballs with fricassee. Let’s see what Mimi has to say about it.”

“Mimi?”

“Mimi Sheraton.”

My family, secret foodies, at least when it came to meatballs?

I put aside my own cooking career for the moment to see how the pros did it, agreeing to the meatball crawl with Mark and Diane. In five hours, we went to five places. Oddly, the meatballs looked much different than the restaurants in which they were served, which all seemed to have red awnings, dark brown wood furnishings and doors open wide to reveal an interior where everything seemed to gleam and glow.

At Locanda Verde in Tribeca, whose chef, Andrew Carmellini, Diane has admired since he presided over A Voce, she pronounced the lamb meatball slider “soft and very flavorful”, and told a story about her grandmother that revealed how meatballs differ from hamburgers (or at least how she thinks they do.) “My grandmother didn’t get the concept of a hamburger. They were really just flat meatballs. She’d put together three meats — pork, veal and beef — with parsley and garlic.”

Our next stop was Perilla in the Village, best-known as the restaurant opened by Harold Dieterle, the winner of Top Chef. The meatball appetizer here was spicy duck meatballs with mint cavatelli, water spinach and quail egg. There were four meat balls for $13, a lower per-meatball rate. When the meatballs arrived at the bar, the bartender told us to mix in the egg. She was even willing to share some of the ingredients — chili and pecorino. To my taste buds, these meatballs turned out to be the best of the evening. Diane thought them a tie with the ones at Locanda Verde.

We agreed that the polpettine fritte (fried little meatballs) at Bellavitae, though the best deal — nine of them for $8 — were the worst-tasting of the evening, dry bread-balls. Diane, who has been to the restaurant before and found the food good, thought that it was just that she did not care for this type of meatball. I suspect she was being generous.

Bar Stuzzichini on the East Side had a couple of meatball selections on the menu, beef meatballs in tomato sauce, four for $7, and then an entree of veal meatballs. Diane insisted we should only have the appetizer. We were going to eat the meatball entree a block away at Craftbar.

“It has that traditional meatball flavor, a bit hard,” she said of Stuzzichini’s appetizer.

Most striking to me was that the menu offered three different spaghetti dishes — spaghetti with shrimp, even spaghetti with mullet roe — but not spaghetti with meatballs.

By the time we got to Craftbar, I was feeling a bit too full of meatballs…and feeling like a meatball for going along with this, especially when, to my shock, Mark ordered the hanger steak.

“We’re on a meatball crawl,” I cried.

“I’ll taste the meatballs that you order,” he replied.

“This was your idea!”

“I didn’t say it was a good one,” he said.

So Diane and I split the veal ricotta meatballs, three for $21, “but they’re huge,” Diane said, and they’re kind of the Ur-meatballs to Diane. They’ve been around for years and years, and Craftbar is owned by Tom Colicchio, the top judge at Top Chef. As she explained all this, I wondered what it would be like never to have to eat another meatball.

At the end of the evening, while walking down Broadway and trying to walk off the meatballs, I remarked that I found it surprising that none of these restaurants offered their meatballs with spaghetti. Diane acted baffled, saying something like “Why do you say that? Spaghetti doesn’t go with meatballs.”

“What are you talking about? Spaghetti and meatballs are traditional. What is served in your father’s restaurant?”

“He serves spaghetti,” she replied, creating a column in front of her with her hands. “And he serves meatballs,” she continued, moving the column up and over to her right; two separate columns, two separate meals.

“Have I entered a parallel universe? I could ask the first person who comes along and they’ll say spaghetti goes with meatballs.” I had had some wine with all those meatballs, so I indeed asked the first person who came along.

“Excuse me, sir, we’re having a debate, what do meatballs usually go with?”

The man looked at me quizzically. “Salad?”

I asked the second person who came along.

“Spaghetti,” the kid answered, and put his Ipod earplugs back in. I looked triumphantly at Diane.

“Ask it the other way around next time,” Diane said.

We met a man in front of Barnes and Noble and after the preliminaries, I asked him what usually went with spaghetti.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered, while his fingers moved to his lips as if he were kissing them, “Pomodoro, basil and parmesan.”

—-

The Meatball In Art One Meatball – Josh White

A little man walked up and down, He found an eating place in town, He read the menu through and through, To see what fifteen cents could do.

One meatball, one meatball, He could afford but one meatball.

He told the waiter near at hand, The simple dinner he had planned. The guests were startled, one and all, To hear that waiter loudly call, “What,

“One meatball, one meatball? Hey, this here gent wants one meatball.”

The little man felt ill at ease, Said, “Some bread, sir, if you please.” The waiter hollered down the hall, “You gets no bread with one meatball.

“One meatball, one meatball, Well, you gets no bread with one meatball.”

The little man felt very bad, One meatball was all he had, And in his dreams he hears that call, “You gets no bread with one meatball.

“One meatball, one meatball, Well, you gets no bread with one meatball.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlgALQRg78I&feature=related

On Top of Spaghetti On top of spaghetti, All covered with cheese, I lost my poor meatball, When somebody sneezed.

It rolled off the table, And on to the floor, And then my poor meatball, Rolled out of the door.

It rolled in the garden, And under a bush, And then my poor meatball, Was nothing but mush.

The mush was as tasty As tasty could be, And then the next summer, It grew into a tree.

The tree was all covered, All covered with moss, And on it grew meatballs, And tomato sauce.

So if you eat spaghetti, All covered with cheese, Hold on to your meatball, Whenever you sneeze.

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Premier Wen Jiabao of the People’s Republic of China has stated candidly and publicly that he doesn’t cook.

Katie Holmes doesn’t cook, she told Glamour Magazine earlier this year, although Mrs. Tom Cruise, now 30 years old, said she plans to “eventually” and that “I do make cupcakes.”

Erica Jong doesn’t cook and doesn’t plan to, and neither do the mother or the daughter of this author of “Fear of Flying” and, most relevant, “What Do Women Want?”

Beyonce and Angelina Jolie have both said they can’t cook, Kate DiCamillo, author of The Tale of Despereaux, is on record as hating to cook but loving to eat. Meryl Streep, ok, cooks, but she says she does not do it very well. It is admittedly hard to believe that Meryl Streep does anything poorly, but she says the cookbook on which her mother relied was Peg Bracken’s “I Hate To Cook.” “I remember when I was 10 going over to a friend’s house and she and her mom were seated at the kitchen table and they were doing something with what looked liked tennis balls, these big white things,” she told Parade Magazine. “They said, ‘We’re making mashed potatoes.’ I went, ‘What do you mean? Mashed potatoes come in a box.’ “

Celebrities and their mothers are not alone. There are almost 945,000 restaurants in the country, and food sales in restaurants have increased more than 1,300 percent over the past four decades (adjusting for inflation), according to the National Restaurant Association. The association also found that 69 percent of adults surveyed “said purchasing meals from restaurants, take-out and delivery places makes it easier for families with children to manage their day-to-day lives” — not proof that they never cook, but that they would prefer not to.

It’s not the first question on surveyors’ minds, but, if you look at the right government statistics, it seems apparent that only about half of all Americans cook regularly. According to one survey (American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), 53 percent of the “civilian population” engaged in food preparation and clean-up during an average weekday in 2007. (I am sure soldiers cook even less often.) Broken down by gender: 65 percent of women and 38 percent of men prepared food on an average day in 2007 — and the women who cook spent almost 50 percent more time doing so than the men who cook.

I eavesdropped on an interesting Twitter conversation between “MissMegRae” — who describes herself as Megan Brown of Butte County (California), “5th generation commercial cattle rancher. Grass fed. Pro-food. Pro-animal welfare. Foodie. Law student” — and “JamButter” — who describes himself as Rob Smart of Calais, Vermont, blogger of Every Kitchen Table whose aim is “creating sustainable pro food solutions offering great food experiences, while improving health, environment, and local economies.”

The conversation soon deteriorated into an embarrassing, well, food fight, but initially the debate was over whether greater consciousness of the evil practices of food corporations, as revealed in such movies as Food, Inc., and a spreading understanding of the benefits of “whole”, locally-grown, healthful foods, will result in more people cooking. Jambutter: “As family of 6 w/ 3 kids in soccer we still cook nightly. Its routine. Its easy. Most important, we have fun doing it together.” “I will be the norm. Things are trending toward ppl eating more real food, prepared or mostly prepared at home.” MissMegRae: “eating habits may change, but cooking habits may not. Maybe they order salad instead of fries. “Most Americans r gonna pick kfc if it’s $3 more rather then spending 2 hrs cooking…some people don’t think cooking is important.”

I don’t know who’s right, but it is interesting to note that the American Time Use Survey has only been around since 2003, but in that short time the percentage of Americans who cook has gone up two percent. Is that statistically significant?

It is significant if, at least for a day, like me, you’re one of the people who have started cooking.

So:

Having taken Diane’s dare to cook the recipe for the pasta with baked cherry tomatoes from Lidia Bastianich’s new cookbook, I bought the fresh “green and brownish” cherry tomatoes from the farmer’s market, hunted down the rest of the ingredients (including the peperoncino, pecorino, and parchment paper) and finally entered my kitchen.

As instructed, I put the cherry tomatoes into a bowl, cut the tomatoes in half, mixed in three tablespoons of Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and then sprinkled it with 1/3 cup bread crumbs, kosher salt and the peperoncino (or at least the red chili flakes).

I poured the tomatoes into a parchment-lined sheet pan, spreading them apart “in a single layer,” and stuck the pan in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I was supposed to bring a large pot of water to boil, but wait to put the pasta into the pot until the tomatoes in the oven were almost done. The hardest part was figuring out how long to wait. Bastianich’s recipe said “Bake until the tomatoes are shriveled and lightly caramelized (but not dried out), about 25 minutes in all.” I kept on looking in the oven, and they didn’t look any different to me (it’s tough to see that something’s shriveled when it’s so small to begin with), so I decided just to wait 20 minutes. As soon as I put the spaghetti in the pot, I was supposed to put 1/2 cup of the olive oil and the peeled, plump garlic cloves in a skillet, until the skillet was “sizzling” and the garlic “lightly colored,” then add some of the pasta water and chopped parsley. I had three things going on at once. The recipe explained how to combine them, and top with the basel, then turn off the heat and sprinkle with the pecorino. Then I was supposed to “toss” the whole thing — by which she did not mean throw it out, but mix it up. “Mound the pasta in a warmed serving bowl.” Then “shred” four ounces of ricotta over the top. I just used the mixing bowl, and didn’t warm it, and I didn’t know how to shred the cheese, so I just spooned it out.

“It looks good,” my mother said when I showed her the picture, “but what’s important was how it tasted.” (I told you I come from a long line of people who didn’t like to cook.) I tasted it, and was surprised at how good it tasted. At first. But then I wondered whether I put too much ricotta on the top — did that smother the other flavors? — and whether the bread crumbs tasted less crunchy than…soggy. Maybe I should have baked the tomatoes for longer, until I was sure they were shriveled and lightly carmelized. And then, something they don’t mention in these cookbooks,or show on the food shows, there were all these pots and pans and bowls piled up in my sink.

The Bastianich series so far:

Lidia Bastianich, The Italian-American Julia Child?

Tomatoes — First Ingredient, First Recipe — what an heirloom tomato is, and why people engage in a rotten tomato riot every year in Bunol, Spain.

First Recipe, Part II: The Hunt For Peperoncino

First Recipe, Finally Cooked. Or: Why Many People Don’t Cook

Meatball. A Meditation

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The proprietor, JoAnne Pelletiere, looked up at me from her chair after I made my request, having pronounced peperoncino carefully and prepared to spell it if necessary. “That’s just red chili pepper,” she said. Was she sure? “I’ve been here 40 years,” she said. “You could have asked any of the old Italian women in the neighborhood.” She got up, walked over to a jar marked “Crushed Red Chili” and scooped a little into a small brown paper bag (price: 40 cents). Because I continued to ask questions, she brought me over to a display she had on an end table — an array of peppers in front of a book called Spice that was opened to the chapter on chili peppers. There were two types of peppers on display, those from which spicy pepper was derived — hot jalepeno, hot scotch bonnets, hot habaner, hot cayenne — and then those that were mild, such as Hungarian Wax, “which is made into paprika.”

When I told Diane the story of my hunt, still a little unsure about the spice I had bought, she replied: “Peperoncino flakes, red pepper flakes, crushed red pepper flakes, red chili pepper flakes; they’re all the same thing. And if they’re not the same, they’re interchangeable. Not big red bell peppers. Small chili peppers. ino as a suffix means small. Think of those small hot pepper flakes in the shake-out container in pizzerias.”

(Later, in a book I got from the library entitled “American Feast: A Celebration of Cooking on Public Television,” published in 1999 with a foreword by Julia Child, I noticed that Lidia Matticchio Bastianich had a recipe for spicy capellini that called for “8 Tuscan peperoncini, seeded and chopped” but then she added “see note.” The note said “Peperoncini (pickled hot Italian peppers) are available at specialty shops and most supermarkets.”)

I told Diane I had gotten almost all the other ingredients, including the two types of cheeses, from the supermarkets. I asked her if it was ok that the pecorino was already grated

“ABSOLUTELY NOT!” she said, definitively.

So it was back to Bleecker Street, this time to Murray’s Cheese.

“What kind of pecorino?” the man behind the counter asked.

He must have seen I was at a loss, and suggested a choice of two. The first was Il Tortet, which, like most of the cheese at Murray’s, came accompanied by a museum-style label. “Pecorino Toscao oro antico,” the label began. “With even a remembered knowledge of Italian, you’ve probably figured out on your own that this means ‘Old Gold Sheep Cheese.’” Well, actually, I had not. “Yup, it’s pasteurized, aged for 6 months and gold refers not only to its color, but to its excellence. Firm and flaky, it has the beloved aged sheep cheese flavors sheepy, nutly and grassy.” (It’s possible I don’t remember this accurately; is “sheepy” really a flavor?)

The man behind the counter gave me a sliver to sample. It tasted like, I don’t know, cheese. He offered me a taste of a different kind of pecorino, Fulvi. The label: “Pecorino Romano. Part of the daily rations for Roman Legionaries in the first century A.D., Fulvi is still probably made from pasteurized sheep milk in the Roman countryside and is less hard and dry than its Sardinia-made counterparts.”

“This one’s much sharper,” I told the counterman after tasting the new sample.

“You want the other one?”

“No, I like sharper” — a realization I had just made. (Are they really called cheesemongers? This one seemed much nicer than the name implied.)

As long as I was there, I picked up one of the last ingredients, Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Although Murray’s is a cheese store they had choices of extra virgin olive oil from several countries. I read the labels, with their nuanced descriptions of the varying tastes, and decided I would be safest with Italian.

Since I was immersing myself in food, I thought I would finally look up what “extra virgin olive oil” meant, a term that always provided me with a little secret titillation or some suppressed tittering. I found this from food writer Margaret Visser:

“Olive oil is called ‘Virgin’ when it is the first oil to come out of the olive, that which is released from the fruit with the least pressure being applied. It is ‘Extra’ to distinguish it from merely ‘Superfine’ Virgin oil. ‘Extra’ has less than 1 percent oleic acidity…plane ‘Virgin’ or ‘Pure’ has up to 4 percent, and anything more acid than that is inedible lamp oil.”

It suddenly occurred to me on the way back that maybe I should start cooking the recipe. How long would it take for my fresh tomatoes to turn into rotten tomatoes?

“A couple days,” Diane answered. “Do they seem to be rotting or getting too soft? Hope they’re not in the refrigerator. You’ve been eating them, right?

“What’s wrong with their being in the refrigerator?” I replied defensively. “ Where should they be?”

“They should be on the counter. Cold destroys the flavor. Unless they’re very very ripe, then you can put them in the fridge.”

I fought from thinking dark thoughts. It was time to get cooking.

(Photographs by Jonathan Mandell, except the cheeses, which come from Murray’s Cheese Web site.)

The Bastianich series so far: Lidia Bastianich, The Italian-American Julia Child? Tomatoes — First Ingredient, First Recipe — what an heirloom tomato is, and why people engage in a rotten tomato riot every year in Bunol, Spain. First Recipe, Part II: The Hunt For Peperoncino First Recipe, Finally Cooked. Or: Why Many People Don’t Cook Meatball. A Meditation</a

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“Hoboken is known for two things,” Ohring said. “Frank Sinatra and the birthplace of baseball.”

“The birthplace of baseball? I thought that was Cooperstown, New York,” I said.

“The first known competitive baseball game using modern rules,” Ohring said carefully, was between the New York Knickerbockers and the New York Nine on June 19,1846 in Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Anyway, food and Hoboken will soon be nearly synonymous, Ohring was saying, now that Cake Boss, which is shown Monday nights on the TLC network, “is currently the most-watched food show on television.”

“Number one, are you sure? It didn’t even make Entertainment Weekly’s list of top 15 food shows,” I said, instantly regretting my big mouth.

“I said currently most watched,” Ohring replied mildly. “It could change week to week, I don’t know.”

The truth is, Ohring said, Hoboken has always been a food town. Even when it was largely industrial, it was the site of food companies like Lipton Tea and Maxwell House Coffee, whose immense good-to-the-last-drop dripping coffee pot neon billboard was the one recognizable symbol of Hoboken to New Yorkers right across the river. Hoboken, he said, was also the city where the Tootsie Roll and the ice cream cone were invented.

(The Tootsie Roll and the ice cream cone?!)

“It was also the home of the first Blimpies,” Ohring said.

Luckily, though, Mangia Hoboken! The Hoboken Food Tour, which Ohring started in July, does not include visits to locations that may or may not be involved in these disputed (Tootsie Roll, ice cream cone), departed (Lipton, Maxwell House) or degraded (Blimpies) pieces of Hoboken food history.

His tour, given every Saturday afternoon, focuses exclusively on current food stores that are generations old, family-run and largely Italian — places very much like Carlo’s Bakery…including Carlo’s Bakery itself, which is the last stop on the tour.

Any one of them, he believes, is colorful enough to get its own television show, and thus generate their own long, long lines. Every day now, hundreds of people line up outside Carlo’s City Hall Bake Shop to buy cannolis and biscotti and cupcakes; few if any are there to order the 400-pound cakes that the show features — in the shape of an extinct mammal, or of a fire engine with a working siren and smoke, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the entire New York Harbor, including reproductions of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and Carlo’s Bakery, each of them wired with fireworks (commissioned by the Grucci fireworks family).

“Before I started this tour, I went on food tours in Brooklyn and Manhattan,” Ohring said. “They’re not really behind-the-scenes. Here you see the coal-fire brick ovens and you meet the owners, and you get food to taste.” That is not something you are going to get in Manhattan: “They don’t even bake the bread at Amy’s Bread, and you’re not going to meet Amy.”

It’s a good pitch (as befitting a resident of the birthplace of baseball), and a few weeks later, I went on his food tour, though he was on vacation the week I went, and it was instead led by Melissa Abernathy, his fellow lifetime member of the Hoboken Historical Society.

“Sigmund Freud landed in Hoboken in his one trip to America,” she said, on our way to the first bakery.

“Did he stay here?”

“I don’t know.”

She does know that Hoboken is a food town. “At the mayor’s inauguration in July, several politicians called Hoboken Restaurant City,” Abernathy said. (Buddy Valastro, incidentally, made the inauguration cake.) But Abernathy meant the ex-mayor of Hoboken, Peter Cammarano, who resigned a month after taking office when he was arrested by federal agents, along with 43 other people, as part of an investigation into corruption — another thing for which Hoboken long has been known. (“On The Waterfront” with Marlon Brando was famously filmed on the docks of Hoboken.)

Over the next three hours, we visited, and ate, at eight food establishments. We broke bread at Antique Bakery and Dom’s Bakery Grand, then sampled mozzarella at Fiore’s House of Quality. “Fiore’s is where Sinatra and his family got their deli products from,” our tour guide said. Its roast beef sandwich was voted the best hero by the Village Voice. At the counter, there is a Sicilian salad bar with 17 choices, including artichoke and octopus.

We took a detour to visit Frank Sinatra’s birthplace (a parking lot with a plaque, and next door, the enterprising “Here to Eternity” Museum, shut down by the Sinatra family). Then we got a crazy mocha freeze from Empire Coffee & Tea Co, whose unique selections included an Obama Blend, “a smooth, confident, hopeful mix of Kenyan AA, Sumatra & Kona Hawaiian French Roast.” Empire’s original store, actually, is on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan; on its Web site, they have a whole shtick comparing the two: “As the stores and restaurants in Hoboken (the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and baseball) get newer, brighter, shinier,and slicker, Empire Coffee and Tea Company gets tastier and more relaxed. There’s a buzz of hipsters, creativists, and generally java cravin’ ne’er-do-wells in and around this place.”

We sampled mozzarrella and tomatoes at Vito’s Deli on Washington Street, which, while not the only food store in Hoboken that claims to make the best mozzarella, is the only one whose employees wear a t-shirt that says “Hoboken’s Best Mutz!”

We ate at Benny Tudino’s Pizzeria, known for the biggest pizza in Hoboken if not the Eastern Seaboard. “The pizza is so big they have to fold it to get it in the oven,” Abernathy said.

The most generous and forthcoming of the proprietors on the tour were the two brothers at Lisa’s Deli at 901 Park Avenue, Anthony and Angelo Lisa, the sons of Caterina Lisa, who founded the establishment in Italy in 1946 and moved it to Hoboken in 1971.

“Now the young generation, they don’t want to cook,” Tony Lisa was saying, in what sounded at first like a lament. “They come home from work, they don’t want to spend another hour.” So, they order from Lisa’s. “We do deliveries all over, even New York.”

The Lisa brothers made mozzarella before our eyes (“the best mozzarella in Hoboken”) “This bowl has water that’s at 180 degrees,” Angelo explained as he worked the cheese. “Then we put the cheese in this one, which has cold water. It chills the outside and keeps the inside moist.” The demonstration was so visual, with such a range of facial expressions, that it seems made for television.

I asked them about Carlo’s Bakery and “Cake Boss.”

“God bless them,” Tony Lisa said, “the place wasn’t that busy before.”

Would the Lisas do a TV show?

“Nobody approached us,” he said with a smile, a kind of open sweet-sad smile that reminded me of Charlie Chaplin’s at the end of City Lights. “But we’re going to see about doing something next year,” he said, suddenly all business.

As we approached Carlo’s Bakery, the guide was talking on the telephone, looking disappointed. “They won’t be able to give us cannolis,” she said. “They’re too busy.”

However, we did not have to wait on line in the front, which stretched to the end of the block, but rather were ushered to the back, where a group of teenage girls waited outside as if it were a stage door.

Soon, they spotted Joe Faugno, labeled on “Cake Boss” as Joey “the hothead,” married to Buddy’s eldest sister Grace. There seemed nothing hotheaded about him as he graciously agreed to autograph the teens’ t-shirts, and then apologized to the members of the Hoboken food tour for omitting the cannolis and the behind-the-scenes tour: “Our shooting schedule is very crazy. The film crew is upstairs right now.”

Business in general has so improved since the show starting airing, Joe Faugno said, that they have added a dozen employees to the three dozen full and part-time they already had, “and it’s still not enough.”

The hothead stood in the alleyway outside the bakery cheerfully telling a series of anecdotes about cake mishaps and lucky breaks, stopping only to say goodbye to a line of attractive young men and women who walked past us; these were “Mike Huckabee’s people,” we were informed; the former presidential candidate and current talk show host had ordered a cake from Carlo’s.

“If you look at the first shows we did, and look at the latest ones,” Faugno said, “you’ll see how much we’ve evolved.”

Could any of the other food places in Hoboken have their own television show, I asked.

He thought they could. “I think we’re just a microcosm of what’s here,” he said. “Surely if you got to Fiores…if you go to any of these family-run places, they’re the same.“

He thought for a moment, as a half dozen assistant bakers took a break in the back, and the line up front got even longer. “Of course, I don’t know of any of the other places that have such a big family that are all involved in the business,” Joe Faugno said, and then he rattled off a dozen names, the sisters and brothers-in-law and cousins, all of them now characters on television. (Photographs by Jonathan Mandell, except Buddy’s casino cake, courtesy TLC Network)

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