At a recent panel entitled The Future of Food Journalism, the future proved, once again, to be unknowable. Will it, as panelist Francis Lam over at Salon.com is hoping, look like longish format (you know, long for today’s attention span, like 500 words) experiential food writing that allows for immediacy and flexibility? For Lam, this means that one day he can post about General Tso’s chicken, because he’s thinking about it; the next day he can knock on a neighbor’s door and beg a cooking lesson, notebook in hand; then he can crowd-source, calling in recipes for a quirky contest and publishing the winners.

Perhaps the future will look more like panelist Gabriella Gershenson’s experience at Time Out: print readers who also become web readers hungry for more content; readers who crave up-to-date, hyper-local, consumable information that will allow them to go out and have experiences with food by trying a new product or restaurant or participating in a foodie event.

According to panelist Brian Halweil of Edible Manhattan, Edible Brooklyn and Edible East End, food politics and sustainable/local are the future of food writing, and those topics are booming. Edible reflects these issues in their successful business model, which has a stay-small, focus-local, grassroots mentality.

Panelist Nick Fauchald of The Tasting Table describes the future of food journalism in terms of giving readers the sex up front (a concept he laments but uses). His daily emails are short (200 words) and offer plenty of opportunities to get the goods by trying recipes, using discounts or getting in on the ground floor of the newest food and drink trends.

The worried audience members seemed to be bottom-line-focused. Who can afford to be a food writer, and what kind of food writing will sell? The democratization of the internet means that everyone’s a food writer, and this had the restaurateurs in the audience wondering who’s in charge if anyone can post a negative online review. While most food bloggers make bupkiss, moderator Andrew Smith pointed out that some, like Heidi Swanson, pull in six figures from their blogs. Then there are the issues of authority and integrity: do you know what you’re talking about when you pan a restaurant? do you accept bribes? Panelists seemed to hope that readers would continue to become more discerning while the unworthy simply lose out to more trustworthy writers and publications.

One of the more interesting concepts for me came up in observations the panelists made about tangibility as it relates to the past and future of food journalism. Once upon a time, food writing fell into two camps: there were the “home ec” newspaper food sections (often referred to as ‘the woman’s sports pages’), which focused mostly on the practical aspects of cooking; then there were long-format, well-crafted pieces published in magazines. The latter offered escapist entertainment in the form of writing about places, traditions and destinations that readers might didn’t need to experience themselves to enjoy reading about. Over time, these camps have essentially merged: readers want well-written, transporting and evocative recipe pieces, and they want to read about places, traditions and destinations that they can reach out and experience for themselves. The desire for tangibility has created readers so hungry to grab what they’re reading about that they’re unlikely to plow through a whole long mouth-watering essay on the topic.

Francis Lam began the panel discussion on the topic of tangibility as it relates to print. The late-lamented Gourmet, where Lam got his big career break, was most certainly something to hold in your hands and flip through for the sensual experience of looking at the gorgeous photography. It was a magazine with pieces long enough to read before bed, and recipes to dog ear for future endeavors. It was also hemorrhaging money, so it folded. Will its readers get over print, Lam wondered. Will the internet, with its attention-span-shortening sensory overload and endless free content, change how we enjoy food writing forever? Is 500 words the new 20,000? Or will magazines, like the gorgeously yet economically and environmentally-produced Edibles, soldier on as a respite from the noise online? Will the same urges that send us to the web to find recipes or obsessively follow restaurant world gossip also keep us loyal to magazines we can hold, take with us out of internet range, read in the tub, display on a coffee table and save on a bookshelf? Or will the vestigial habit of reading off-screen fade in a generation?

Either way, the encouraging fact remains that our gluttonous society is hungrier than ever for food news, recipes, information, inspiration, legislation… This is a thrilling time to read and write about food—and if you are interested in either activity, you’ve got plenty of company. What emerged from the panel for me is the sense that market forces will stabilize the field of food writing…eventually. Writers who have the backing—be that a trust fund, an employer, a wildly successful ad-supported blog or even just a day job and a lot of drive—will continue to create well-written, well-researched and well-tested or fact-checked food content, even without the benefit of extensive editorial and art departments. And the humbling gods of internet traffic will give and take away accordingly.

Whoever is left food writing when the dust settles will once again have a shot at making a living doing whatever food journalism becomes in The Future. Personally, I hope to see less ‘this is what you should eat right where you live right this minute,’ less ‘this is why everything you eat will kill you’ and more ‘this is how food culture makes our world a larger, more beautiful place.’ The real question though is not so much what The Future of Food Journalism will look like as when that future will arrive. Some of us would really like to know.

Photo by DerrickT

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“We’re making stone soup” is the travelers’ response to the obvious question, and they invite the villagers to join them. One by one the villagers arrive, each with a little something to contribute. In the end, everyone enjoys a great meal, and nobody eats the stone.

I re-lived this drama the other day. Searching the fridge for my morning meal, I saw lots of leftovers, including a Thai take-out box full of rice. I decided on fried rice for breakfast.

Soon my wok was full of sizzling goodies. I reached for that take-out box and found it nearly empty. Curses! Someone poached a midnight snack.

Although I had only a few grains of rice to work with, I didn’t go hungry since all the bacon, sausage, squash, peas, onions, garlic, egg and chile I had prepared to augment that rice with amounted to an adequate meal of its own. I had made the fried rice equivalent of stone soup.

Fried stone, if you will.

The fried rice most of us are used to is composed of mostly rice and just a few bits of vegetables and flecks of meat. But fried rice, like soup, is more a concept than a recipe. It’s flexible enough to handle all the leftovers and creativity you can throw at it.

There are few important rules when it comes to fried rice, and only one that need be followed to the letter. And while the other rules can be broken, they should at least be broken respectfully.

Rule #1: Traditional Chinese fried rice contains fish sauce. If you were flailing in front of your wok trying to figure out what to add next and you opened a jar of fish sauce and took a whiff, you’d probably say something like “I don’t think so.” But fried rice without fish sauce is missing something important. When you add that something, your kitchen will stink, but only for a moment. Afterward, all is good. I can’t call this an unbreakable rule because your fried rice will still be edible if you don’t add fish sauce. Nonetheless, it will suffer. If you don’t have fish sauce, consider bending this rule by adding oil from a jar of anchovies.

Rule #2: Many purists claim that fried rice must contain Chinese sausage, aka Lap Cheong, which is sweet, fatty, and mildly spiced. With all due respect to Lap Cheong, this rule was made to be broken. You can use bacon pieces. You can use shredded leftover chicken. You can use Italian sausage, pepperoni, tofu, etc. Or you can skip additional proteins altogether without much penalty.

Rule #3: The rice must be cold, ideally having cooled overnight in the fridge. This rule must never, ever be broken. If you break this rule and add just-cooked rice to the wok or pan, it will smear into a disgusting soggy goop. Cooling the rice shrinks and hardens the grains so they’ll separate gracefully, with a pleasing crunch when fried. So if you’re making fried rice and you discover you don’t have any, or very much, leftover rice in the fridge, do not attempt to make a new pot of rice. Remember my fried stone fable, take heart, and add more other stuff.

Because every batch of fried rice is dictated largely by what’s available, I won’t micromanage you with a specific recipe. Instead, I’ll give an example of how I prepared a recent batch as a guideline you can follow, however closely or distantly you like.

I began with some sausage slices: sweet Russian sausage from the farmers market and homemade elk pepperoni slices. Along with the sausage I added slices of leftover squash, so they could brown. I had to add a little oil since the sausage was lean, but if I had used bacon, oil probably wouldn’t have been necessary. If I hadn’t had leftover squash I might have browned some julienned carrots.

After browning them on one side, I flipped the sausage and squash. When they finished cooking I pushed them to the side of the pan, added another tablespoon of oil, and into that puddle I poured a beaten egg. I let the egg form a bottom, as if making an omelet, tilting the pan to pour the uncooked egg onto any vacant areas. When the egg started cooking through to the top I sliced it with the spatula and scrambled it around the pan. Then I removed the egg, squash, and sausage.

Another tablespoon of oil, and then some garlic, fresh ginger and onion. Once this had cooked a bit I added some pecans (whereas tradition dictates peanuts), frozen snap peas from last year’s garden, chopped roasted green chiles (for New Mexico-style fried rice), and a few shakes of fish sauce. I stirred that all around then added a cup of leftover wild rice (by no means need the rice be white) and a pour of sherry (because I was afraid stuff was about to start sticking). After mixing the rice around I added my eggs and browned sausage and squash, stirred it together, killed the heat, and seasoned with soy sauce.

Some cooks don’t use soy sauce in fried rice, relying on the fish sauce for salt. I prefer to use both. But while it’s better to add fish sauce early, giving its flavor time to mellow, I add soy sauce after I’ve killed the heat so it won’t burn to the bottom of the pan.

Fried rice works anytime, but I eat it most often for breakfast. Morning, obviously, is the first opportunity to fry rice that sat in the fridge overnight. And since my fried rice often contains eggs and bacon, and since last night’s leftovers are still fresh, and since it tastes very good with coffee, fried rice – or fried stone – just makes sense to start the day.

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One of small food’s biggest victories is that 2009 will perhaps be most remembered as the year gardening returned to mainstream consciousness. Much credit goes to Michelle Obama, thanks to the veggie patch she planted in her new lawn. The symbolic gesture created an instant buzz, and there are now gardens on the grounds of city halls, governors’ mansions, and other houses of leadership around the world.

According to the National Gardening Association, the number of households with gardens rose from 36 million in 2008 to 43 million in 2009. The White House garden certainly deserves some credit, but so does the recession, which inspired many people to break ground – not only to save on grocery bills, but as a form of affordable, wholesome diversion.

Ironically, the proliferation of home gardeners bears some of the responsibility for the rapid spread of a fungus called late blight, which nearly wiped out the commercial tomato crop on the East Coast. Many gardeners bought tomato starts from stores like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, nearly all of which were raised by the Alabama nursery Bonnie Plants. Plant pathologists believe the nursery sent out infected plants, which slipped under the radar of agricultural inspectors and brought the spores to all corners of the country. Unusually heavy rainfall encouraged the blight to take hold, prosper and spread. It was a case of big food in small food clothing, and it backfired. The take-home message: Buy your plant starts from local nurseries, or grow them yourself from seeds.

In addition to kitchen gardens, another beneficiary of the recession is Clara Cannucciari, a 93-year-old great-grandmother whose You Tube videos combine salty commentary about life in the Great Depression with hands-on demonstrations on how to crank out simple delicacies that average 50 cents a serving. The videos helped win Cannucciari a contract with St. Martin’s Press, which published Clara’s Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression this past October.

This discussion couldn’t be complete without an update on the activities of biotech giant Monsanto, whose year can be summed up in a single word: “chutzpah.” In April, the company sued Germany when its agriculture minister banned the planting of a type of Monsanto corn engineered to thwart the advances of the corn-borer moth. The company was unsuccessful in forcing the sovereign nation to allow its farmers to plant the corn, and recent research supports Germany’s concerns (which several other European countries shared): French scientists published a paper suggesting adverse affects of this corn – and two other types of genetically modified corn – on the kidneys and liver of rats.

While health and environmental concerns over GM crops are commonplace, in September federal judge Jeffrey White in California’s Northern District ruled that Monsanto’s sugar beets provided an economic threat to farmers who wished to grow organic or non-GM crops. Beet pollen is carried on the wind, and will pollinate chard as well as beets. In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where much of the nation’s beet and chard seed is grown, the presence of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” sugar beets threatens the livelihoods of farmers growing the non-GM varieties of these plants. It’s also likely that after a few years of Roundup Ready sugar beet cultivation in the Willamette Valley it would be difficult to get non-GM beets or chard anywhere in the nation. According to judge White, Monsanto’s sugar beets posed “…the potential elimination of a farmer’s choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, and the consumer’s right to eat non-genetically engineered food.” The ruling, against the USDA, forced the agency to complete an EIS examining the potential impacts of the GM beets on organic seed growers and consumers before the Roundup Ready beets can again be planted.

Meanwhile, Monsanto’s marketing practices have placed it on a collision course with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which this month has indicated it’s considering anti-trust litigation. Monsanto owns the rights to genetic sequences found in more than 85 percent of corn planted in the United States, and 92 percent of soy. A string of corporate acquisitions have squelched almost any possibility of competition, while Monsanto’s seed prices have risen by an average of 42 percent. When the DOJ dispatched some of its lawyers to meet with Monsanto to discuss these developments, the company hired the services of Jerry Crawford, an Iowa lawyer who is a friend and financial supporter of Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

While touting its products as safe for humans and the environment, Monsanto’s main sales pitch is based on the claim that genetically engineered seeds will increase crop yields and facilitate pest control. But last summer, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that genetically engineered seeds actually don’t increase productivity. Another study, by the Organic Center, found that since the introduction of “Round-Up tolerant” corn, soy and cotton, farmers have sprayed 382.6 million more pounds of herbicides than they otherwise would have. This is partly due to the proliferation of Round-Up resistant weeds: between 2007 and 2008, farmers increased the use of different herbicides by 31 percent in an effort to combat these superweeds. Meanwhile, Monsanto’s website promotes the seeds as a key component in “sustainable agriculture.”

While Monsanto has co-opted the term “sustainable agriculture,” retail giant Wal-Mart, already the world’s largest vendor of organic food, is now poised to capitalize on the popularity of locally grown food. It’s looking at ways individual stores can carry foods grown by area farmers. Another large grocer, Safeway, also began pushing a “locally grown” marketing campaign this year, while blatantly taking advantage of the ambiguity in the term “local.” The Portland, Oregon blog Portland Food and Drink, busted Safeway with photographs of produce bearing out-of-state stickers next to signs announcing “I’m Local!” and “Locally Grown.”

That small food terms like “sustainable,” “local,” and “organic” are becoming attractive to large corporations, arguably, is a good sign. It shows these words, and what they represent, have infiltrated the mainstream consciousness. And one of the most powerful vehicles to deliver this message has been the movie Food Inc., whose depressing-yet-important message about the American diet was the year’s highest grossing documentary.

The year closed with the anti-climactic climate summit in Copenhagen, where U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack acknowledged the huge role livestock plays in global warming – more than transportation activities by most estimates. Vilsack announced plans to build methane capture facilities at large dairy farms in order to turn that potent greenhouse gas into an energy source.

Vilsack deserves credit for keeping agriculture at the forefront of climate change discussions. But enabling the big cattle industry, while politically expedient, is short-sighted. From the atrocities of feedlots and slaughterhouses to the environmental destruction wrought by cattle, given the skyrocketing worldwide demand for meat, the human addiction to cow products is reaching a breaking point.

Thus, my prediction for next year’s hot topic: serious soul-searching on the pros and cons of all things bovine, and the differences between big beef and small beef. While hardly a new topic, it’s one that’s poised to catapult into the limelight. #

Farm photo by Nicholas_T

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As I grow into my own as a pie baker–still unpredictable and green in my early 30s–I play a behind-the-scenes roll in the updating of our family pie recipes. Time was when Crisco ruled. I’d say I cut my teeth on the stuff, but considering that the glossy white homogenized substance yields to a butter knife even when “frozen” that isn’t quite apt. In any case, I learned to make pie crust in an era before the discovery of trans fats, in a onetime-kosher family for whom solid vegetable shortening had great benefits over butter and lard. And I learned to make American pie from my Eastern European Jewish family like my predecessors might have learned to make strudel dough: Crusts were mixed with minimal water until just crumbly and barely dough-like, pounded into a disk and chilled to solidity, then finally rolled, with great determination, into the thinnest possible sheets. This combination of avoiding over-working the dough to keep it tender, then achieving the most gossamer thickness, was the ultimate goal. The Crisco made it both possible and desirable. A paper-thin, ultra-rich dough made to showcase good fruit filling, and to disguise the fact that the crust itself has no distinct flavor worth savoring. When your crust tastes like refrigerator, less is more.

Once rolled, my family pie crust has always been filled as simply as possible. The fruit, be it apples in the fall or berries, peaches or cherries in the summer, lightly dressed with lemon juice and sugar. The goal is to avoid over-sweetening at all costs. We also skimp on the thickener–tapioca for canned sour cherries, flour for everything else. And we never add seasonings–not even a whiff of cinnamon on the apples. Pumpkin pie is a different matter. Our recipe calls for heavy cream, dried ginger, eggs, a can of Libby’s of course, brown sugar, and a nice glug of Scotch. The custard bakes up with a wrinkled, often slightly cracked skin on top that is made for vanilla ice cream, and not for weird kitchen-science calisthenics designed to “solve” the crack. Cherry and other juicy summer pies get lattice crusts, apples get a covered, vented crust, and pumpkin pie naturally goes topless. The point: to use as much filling as the crust can handle. We walk a thin line.

Before the perfectly crimped beauties are slid into the oven, top crusts are brushed with milk for browning. Others might use a pastry brush for this task, but our family pastry brush has always been redolent of the garlic-and-butter baste we give chicken, so a strip of thick paper towel is used. Baking is hot (425˚) and on the bottom shelf, the semi-transparent Pyrex pan allowing the baker to check for doneness, the outer crust often covered with tin foil to slow its precocious browning. Doneness is declared when the fruit juices bubble thickly and, usually, messily (thanks to the minimal use of thickening starch) and the bottom is golden brown. Cooling is interminable and incomplete.

Serving the pie a time of gratuitous praise, a la mode, and eating is hushed, studious, appreciative on the part of everyone but the baker, who persists in self-abnegation. Too tough. Too sweet. Too juicy. Under-baked. Ruined by insipid fruit or a leak or tear in the crust. The half-eaten pie will be stored under plastic and finished with plain yogurt for breakfast.

My mother continues to churn out pies, and I make several each season as well. But now, thanks to a modern focus on flavor and a glut of cookbooks and articles with a lot to say on the topic, we use butter. I sometimes cut the butter with one third rendered leaf lard from the Greenmarket–or the new trans-fat-free Crisco–but my mother has gone wholeheartedly over to the butter side. It’s a fat, flaky side, and the risk of underdoneness is heightened. You simply cannot achieve a super-thin butter pie crust. Luckily, everyone with taste buds agrees that butter is delicious.

My own pie supremacy is somewhat hindered by my inconstancy, and for this I’d like to blame the media (and, er, food writers who write about how to make the best pie ever, ahem). I’ve read recipe after recipe, tried grating in frozen butter, counting pulses in the food processor, before or after rolling, freezing the whole damn pie before baking, brushing the inside with egg whites, the outside with cream. It’s all pretty much the same. When you apply apt pie principles, everyone praises the pie. Except you. You know there’s always room for improvement, so you should probably get off your behind and bake another pie.

photo: Changing New York / Berenice Abbott

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I notice stains around the hems of her pants. I begin to wonder where the phone came from, if it works. I get a seat. On my left, a man in brown leather Chucks is reading The New Yorker on his Kindle. On my right, a woman is tearing through a paperback called Stupid and Contagious. The woman in blue is acting like everyone else. Except no one else is acting.

This person is trying to keep up appearances. Things are slipping, and she is very concerned with not letting it look that way, I think. This might be a good approach. In any case, I find it very affecting, and I become fixated on the idea of giving her the rich plum and walnut yogurt and tiny yellow plum I have in my purse.

Would she be offended? Embarrassed? Angry? Would I turn out to have been wrong about her? Could I ask the Kindle reader what he thought? Maybe he’d help mediate. I brainstorm tactful ways to offer my breakfast up. I could stand by her, scrounge in my bag, then announce, “oh, my husband packed me the wrong yogurt-does anyone want this?” and hand it to her.

No.

I could say, “oops, I forgot, we’re getting breakfast at work today. Will you take this?” and hand it to her. Maybe?

I stay in my seat and 2 stops before mine she leaves, perhaps just to transfer to another, less crowded train. I email my husband, the yogurt and fruit by my keyboard. I decide I need a plan in case I ever see her again. I think I’ll try saying “hi.”

“Why do you want to give her yogurt?” my husband asks, and I’m surprised to realize that this is a fixation, not a universal instinct. I probably would have offended her, and just because I value a creamy yogurt cup, I need not assume she would want it. There’s nothing I can give to a person on the train who isn’t asking.

“And why is what people read so important to you?” he wonders. It’s insight into people’s inner lives, I guess. Or proof that they have them? People who aren’t reading or listening to head phones on the train, like me, and the woman in blue, are in danger of getting involved with each other.

When I get hungry and open the yogurt at my desk, the cup is less full than usual and when I dig in with my spoon for the fruit on the bottom it’s not there. Just yogurt. I’m underemployed so I email the company to let them know my walnut-plum layer is missing.

The spokeswoman gets right back to me: “It is very significant to us to know if the quality of our product does not satisfy you. Unfortunately, despite all the precautions that we took, our product was not as it was to be. We are very sorry for this situation.

Please rest assured that to manufacture a product of quality is our main objective. Also, please rest assured that we will make sure a follow-up is made with our quality control department in order to find the cause of the problem.

Thank you again for having taken the time to write to us. We would appreciate if you could let us know your address so that we may send you a coupon to compensate for the defective product in a few weeks.

Please do not give up on us.”

I don’t see the woman in blue again, and in a week, I receive coupons for three free yogurts.

Photo by urbansheep

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That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of good Jewish food out there. Many tons, actually. And even some of the not-so-good food has its pleasures. Jewish pleasures. Like challah with margarine, a staple at my in-laws. The red velvet cake of the Sabbath dinner table, the hydrogenated, over-salted slick of non-dairy “butter” substitute harmonizes with the soft, richly sweet bread and I sometimes wonder what would happen if I foreswore the salmon and the baby cut carrots microwaved with dill and just sat and ate torn chunks of challah and nothing else. Would I stop of my own accord before slumping in my chair like a huge, unconscious, over-stuffed knish in a salty, oily, bready stupor?

Feeling old and fat the other day, my husband and I recently re-routed our self-criticism, foraging among our parent’s traits for a laugh. “Aaaaahh,” I screamed, clutching my throat in imitation of my in-laws after a recent crushed red pepper in the pasta sauce incident. “Someone put a flavor in my food! Quick! Get the white fish! My tongue! My tongue!”

“Ohhhh, nnnnnn,” my husband tisked, attempting to draw his lips together as only my mother can, “this marmalade isn’t bitter enough.”

Bitter. My parents on the topic of condos in Dumbo. Or parenting books written after Dr. Spock. Or music in restaurants. It’s not just bitter of course. It’s smarts. And experience. And discernment. It’s what I was brought up on, and often-times, its the redeeming flavor on the Jewish table.

With that, I offer you my mother’s family Rosh Hashanah honey cake recipe, a tradition for the Jewish New Year. Honey is eaten, often with apples, on this happy if not “major” holiday in hopes of a sweet year to come. Coffee is a fairly typical addition, necessary, of course, to temper the sweetness. My mom’s recipe adds a bracing slug of whiskey, a nice tart green apple, and a whole navel orange. Yup, zest and pulp. The result is a balanced, nuanced cake (buttery it ain’t, this is parve baking bubbeleh) that keeps and keeps. Honey helps cakes keep, booze helps, apple helps, oil helps. This cake isn’t going anywhere.

So you make the whole thing in a roasting pan. It’s delicious enough to dress up, and I’ve halved the recipe, baked it in an 8-inch springform, then served slices with a fey garnish of creme fraiche and candied orange peel. But my ancestors didn’t suffer so I could do a thing like that to their cake. Make the whole thing. Just wait till Purim and I’ll share our recipe for 1,000 hamantaschen, with a dried fruit filling you put through a meat grinder (whole orange and apple again, too). This is a big honey cake, the inside pieces nice and moist and tall; the corners, let’s call them the Jewish mother pieces, are, let’s be honest, on the dry side, so you serve some applesauce. And black coffee.

What do you do with all this bounty of bittersweet honey cake that keeps and keeps? You freeze some, wrap some in aluminum foil and plastic wrap and send it to unappreciative college students, inflict some on your polite Italian neighbors, and enjoy the rest with pink applesauce that you make by cooking apples with their peels and putting them through a food mill with some lemon juice and as little sugar as you can get away with. This is food, not fun. Keep it straight.

I am including my mother’s ingredient list as she sent it to me a few years ago, transcribed from the illegible original written on an index card and stored in the drab little bombproof metal box that holds such things. You’ll note that my mother does not think you need to use the full amount of sugar. Enjoy a semisweet year.

Yamin Honey Cake Makes one 12-by-18 cake

1 pound honey (Bumblebee is best) 2 cups sugar (use less) 1/2 cup vegetable oil 6 eggs, separated 5 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon each nutmeg, ginger and allspice 3/4 cup strong coffee 1/4 cup whiskey Pinch cream of tartar 1  orange, pulp and zest grated 1 green apple, cored and grated

Photo: Vermont Lenses’

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And chicken we had—in pot pie, in stews, in soup, and mixed with other meats in main courses… They were depression food and if, throughout my career, I have printed more recipes for chicken than any other meat it is because it is the most versatile of viands. Although I dined on chicken at least once and oftentimes twice a day during my early years, my appetite for it has never faltered.

–Craig Claiborne

Not long ago, we, the Food Media, tended to sniff at people who ordered boring chicken as we picked the heritage pork off our delicious slabs of fat. By which I mean Good Housekeeping was helping home cooks relieve the drudgery of repeatedly serving poultry and Josh Ozersky was bragging about his cholesterol. But times have changed.

This month’s issue of Bon Appetit offers us its Top 10 Chicken Recipes culled from the very types who, a few years ago, probably would have rolled their eyes at our poultry passions as they sautéed sweetbreads: America’s of-the-moment chefs. The article claims that chicken is “the hottest item on restaurant menus” right now, and while this is not exactly earth-shattering news, since Americans have been gobbling up chicken forever, it does register a shift.

Bon App titles the piece A Chicken in Every Spot, hearkening back to the promises of the RNC (who in turn borrowed from a 17th century French concept of prosperity). The RNC ad claimed that Republican administrations had put a chicken in every pot and Hoover would continue the trend. The chickens in our pots nowadays reflect a similar wish fulfillment. Isn’t it sweet that when we go out for a nice meal these days—a splurge—we feel like sharing a simple roast chicken with someone near and dear? But I’m compelled to point out how out of step those humble, homey desires are with the considerable financial side dishes that accompany that breast and wing.

Consider: the mark-up on a nice plate of poultry at a good restaurant these days is nearing 1,000%. At Savoy, for example, offering a special chicken menu through September 5th, a roast heritage bird for two to three diners is $60 (including wine and sides). Meanwhile, over at Momofuko Noodle Bar, the $100 fried chicken dinner gets you two birds, fried different styles, and a bevy of fixins. Now these are full meals based around pedigreed birds, and they sound great, but I don’t need a chef to roast my chicken (fried two ways, maybe).

I lean more towards the $10 local bird at our food coop (no thanks on the $35 one at the Union Square Greenmarket). My hens come from a Chinese-American butcher who processes them as quickly as possible, bringing a level of freshness to the poultry case that is truly eye-opening. The breeds, White Feather and Black Feather, are incredibly flavorful, leading me to predict that heritage chicken hyperbole will soon eclipse heirloom tomato hyperbole along the lines of “you’ve never tasted a chicken until you’ve had…” or “unless it’s spring and you’re on a South Carolina poultry farm, there’s no point cooking with chicken, it’s all just cardboard.”

My Williamsburg-slaughtered chickens come “Buddha style,” and hacking off the feet and neck is a nice reminder that I eat meat. I freeze these extras, adding to them the gnawed-on bones that come back to the kitchen after dinner. This makes for a grizzly collection in the freezer, then bobbing in the stockpot (fingernail soup, anyone?) but the resulting stock reminds me why I eat meat: not so much for the hunk of flesh, that’s my husband’s bag, but for the extras. The chopped liver. The oomph homemade stock gives risotto. The potatoes and carrots I roast next to the bird.

Hot or not, haute or humble, I hope you have a source for truly fresh heritage birds. I’m sure you’ll agree that the original white meat still has it. I’m glad chefs are giving the old yard bird its due. That said, next time I make it to Momofuko Noodle, I’m ordering the roasted foie gras. To borrow a line from Forrest Gump (sort of?): eating chicken is like sex. Sure, you can go out and pay for it, but if you do it right, it’s even more enriching in the comfort of your own home.

Photo by jemsweb

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The parasite had found me many times before (or maybe I tracked down this bug). Once in the improperly cooked chicken of Melbourne’s Chinatown, again on the buses of Nicaragua when the women sold cold meat in plastic bags, another time it swam as ice-cubes in my Bloody Mary in Mexico. Most of the people who know me find this odd. Back home my stomach is infamous. It has the potential to consume and manage any cuisine produced Stateside, which, in the end, may have been my stomach’s downfall. The food in America has not only nourished my gut, but also beefed up its ego. Under the red, white, and blue my stomach knows it is impervious to parasites. (Only once did it fail to handle a dubious meat patty at Knott’s Berry Farm). Yet, like Narcissus, whose vanity and looks led to his own demise, my iron stomach is its own Greek tragedy. In a new land, my digesting organ is a tragic hero. It views itself as this great warrior capable of tackling any enemy, but falls prey to the smallest of organisms. The expression “your eyes are bigger than your stomach” is a fallacy; for me, truth lies in this statement: “My eyes fail my stomach, often.”

In Peru, where the pollo is plentiful and the ceviche daring, my eyes ruined me yet again and my iron stomach rusted once more.

It fought smartly at first, avoiding tap water and iced drinks, tepid teas and street meat. Instead it feasted on pollo a la brasa, those chickens gyrating on the spit, perspiring on the birds below until the delicate balance between crisp skin and succulent meat is achieved. I even hesitated to dip the birds, which were already rubbed with spices, cumin, and lemon, into the light green mayonnaise-based hot sauce. But not doing so would have been like going to a seafood restaurant and ordering a hamburger.

When my stomach felt comfortable in this new land, just like Narcissus did as he leaned further and further over the pond to reveal more of his reflection, my stomach moved on to ceviche, a likely culprit. There was the ceviche simple, a tender white fish just plucked from the ocean soaked in limejuice, as well as simple’s evil cousin mixto, which includes the shellfish. Iron gut dabbled in both, slurping down the soft bellies of clams and the sand-flecked orange muscle of mussels. Even the bright tones of the sweet potato, the raw red onions, the cancha (Peru’s unpopped side dish of corn), and the lime-drenched yucca that accompanied the ceviche now seem as culpable for my stomach’s demise.

Other traitors could have been the café con leches, which were notoriously milk served with instant coffee. The disease could have been in the corn tamales, which the toothless women in front of the fruit market sold while swatting away the flies and flea-infested stray mutts. Maybe the fruits were to blame, like the native pecae, a long, hard green encasement harboring twenty-something purplish-green embryonic seeds coated with a sweet pulp that looked like moth cocoons. Or could the parasite have traveled by bicycle with the pan-man, who sold fresh bread and sweets while honking his horn incessantly like a goose choked by its butcher? Was it as simple as the tap-water-washed salads. Maybe I paid two soles (66 U.S cents) for the bacteria when I purchased street-chicken sandwiches or when I bought the one sole hamburguesas (a whopping 33 U.S. cents) from a woman whose restaurant doubled as her family’s dining room. I recall now as the family watched The Simpsons, they laughed. Were their chuckles for Homer or my inevitable plunder?

Whatever the agent, my gut’s reputation lost credit. Even the antibiotic Cipro, the traveling stomach’s greatest rival, failed to help. I was in the surf town of Chicama when the turmoil began. Chicama has the world’s longest wave and as I pumped down the face of the wave, which traveled for two kilometers, I was using more muscles than just legs in order to keep my own ego intact. Sorry stomach, I said, you’re not taking us both down. On the sprints back to the hostel the wetsuit felt like a straightjacket.

Worse than the wave were the two buses from Lima, Peru to Santiago, Chile. Insult tried to meet up once more with injury. The first ride was twenty hours and it had a broken toilet. The bano on the thirty-hour journey said solo urinario. When the drivers finally did pull over, I tiptoed cautiously to the bathroom. Let’s just say by the end of the trip, I was well invested in the Chilean economy through bathroom fees alone. Every bump the bus hit was a ceviche chop, the turns were pollo punches. When the bus stopped at one of the drug checkpoints the inspectors thought it curious how antsy I was and how quickly I sprinted off after they examined my luggage. Upon my return from the side-of-the-road restroom the agents took me into the back room. Armed with latex gloves and their incomprehensible Chilean dialect they pointed at some picture on the wall of a crotch clothed in tight white underwear. They wanted me to drop my pants. Luckily it was a partial strip-search and there was no probing around in certain areas; though one of the Chilean authorities rummaged through my sack (backpack).

After finally making it to Santiago, the pharmacists there prescribed for me a new pill and though the three pharmacies I went to all offered me different instructions on how to administer the pill, they all agreed on one thing.

“Eat plain food.”

“Like rice and beans and chicken?” I asked.

“No!” they panicked.

“Fish and yucca?”

“Heavens no! Plain broth,” they instructed.

The news felt like a new sickness. A kind of death. It was the tragedy of Adam in the Garden of Eden-touching that lomo saltado or empanada will release all sorts of evil the pharmacists agreed. So I was forced into a type of exile, walking the streets of Santiago like some excommunicated sinner while the silver bodies of fish and dangling octopus tentacles beckoned for me in the Mercado Central. I felt like I was in a museum and the vendors that shouted at me were the security guards. Although I knew they were beckoning me to eat and buy, I only heard: “Step away from the exhibit.” Even the fruit stands stood like luscious ancient pyramids. The bricks of oranges gave way to apples and the avocados rose towards a pinnacle of bananas.

Later on, at a restaurant, the waiter teased my corroded stomach with recommendations never sought.

“Pastel de Choclo,” he said, showing me the Chilean version of chicken potpie, with a corn crust instead of pastry.

“No thanks.”

My stomach, like a good soldier, followed its orders and apart from its heart ordered the soup. Afterwards, my impotent stomach marched on and hoped, down the road (actually over the Andes Mountain range), it would be able to perform once more for its steak waiting in Argentina.

The post The Bungled Adventures of Iron Stomach (and his Sidekick the Traveling Foodie) appeared first on The Faster Times.

A cookbook I return to whenever the weather gets hot is Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels through the Great Subcontinent by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. I ferry home bags fetid with asoefetida and stretched with burlap sacks of basmati, dried dal, and those medieval spiked cucumbers called bitter melon. The house begins to smell exotic. I even schlep this enormous book around town, reading the description of a Nepali newborn’s first days in a fire-heated stone house 12,000 feet above sea level while I’m on the subway. Sitting in the optometrist’s waiting for my eyes to dilate, I revisit the story of Sam the Sri Lankan tax accountant until the lavish photographs blur into a swirling bazaar.

I should be studying fiction of empire since I’m trying to finish an M.A. in literature this summer, but instead I obsessively plan a menu for my dad’s birthday party:

Dad’s Dinner

Tart Green Mango Salsa Fresh White Radish Slices with Mint and Sea Salt Gujarati Mango Chutney Hot-Sweet Date-Onion Chutney Watercress and Shallot Salad Fresh Bean Sprout Salad Cucumber Raita Pakistani Chickpea Pulao Lamb Tikka Kebabs Chapatis Greens with Coconut Beets with Tropical Flavors Key Lime Pie Watermelon

On the night of the festivities, we spread a flowered tapestry over the table, then strew the surface with votives. Tiny glass spice jars, purchased to contain an overflow of culinary exotica, make charming bud vases. The guests all arrive dressed for dinner, despite the fact that it’s a blazing summer night in Brooklyn. Apparently my efforts were audible when we phoned to invite them.

As the house fills up, I get harried and allow my mother to put an apron over her finery and skewer pounds of marinated lamb. She seems not to perceive my sacrifice. The man of the house stoops in the sun on the patio, grilling the kebabs in batches on our eight-dollar hibatchi. I reach down an enamelware Ikea tray and arrange it with a collection of flowered and gilded glasses, a pitcher of fresh lime juice, chilled simple syrup, seltzer, tonic, a frosted bottle of gin, a dish of lime wedges and a container of ice.

The mango salsa and chips are under siege in the living room. I can hear my dad holding forth on the topic of Nigerian democracy, gesticulating with a beer bottle from the depths of a butterfly chair. I send a clingy guest in with the tray, the stacked glasses and bottles swaying. The ice cubes are awash in their own destruction and everything on the tray clinks. For a minute I just stand against the counter doubting. Then, like an automaton (perhaps the sort found in many Indian kitchens) I pinch off balls of chapatti dough, roll them out and slap them on the griddle. Turning and pressing as they inflate, then wrapping the warm breads in a towel, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve made an unidentifiable mistake.

The fan over our stove quickly exhausts itself and gathering smoke from the griddle heads out the kitchen door. Amid the laughter of my father’s captive audience I hear smoke-induced coughing. I roll faster and less accurately, creating irregular, continent-shaped chapatti. When someone brings the empty salsa bowl in I’m just forming the last flatbread, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a cow.

Everyone seated, the dinner set out, the scene matches the one I’d envisioned–but staged, as if by some avant-garde whim, in a smoke-filled sauna. One guest keeps making wheezy noises, but everyone else is giddy. I shouldn’t have. They’re delighted. From years spent guarding the food on my plate, I recognize the beads of greed in my father’s eyes. The multi-colored plates, each set with a jewel-like dollop of chutney, resemble a sub-continental Thanksgiving. The recipes hail from India, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, to which none of us have ever been.

I watch the bowls circulating and the plates emptying. My husband wipes his forehead with his napkin then slathers a chapatti with raita and layers in watercress, shallots and grilled lamb. We drink to my father’s health. I space out, swirling the ice in my drink and wondering what drives me to expend so much energy cooking up this kind of fantasy. When we finally throw in the towel at the end of the night, a fog from the griddle still hovers over the sweating glasses on the destroyed table.

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