Po'boys and beignets, okra and file

Although I have eaten in New Orleans just once in my life, I have returned to its food – the variety, the intense and enticing flavors – a million times in my head.

Senior year in college, my roommate and I booked flights from Providence on a whim. She wanted to catch Mardi Gras. I was game for nearly anything. So we left New England on a Friday morning in February. Neglecting to double-check the calendar, however, we didn't realize that we would actually miss the party by a few days.

On the ground, we decided to plan our own festivities. They don't call it the Big Easy for nothing. Over the long weekend, we would eat and drink as best we could on our student budgets.

For lunch, we had muffulettas and oyster po'boys. They are casual, convenient sandwiches, proteins and carbs in the same package. The first is a meatfest topped with an olive spread, the second a showcase for deep-fried oysters.

For dinner, we had red beans and rice, and crawfish etouffee, with bold spices we seldom encountered in the dining halls. They were foods my roommate knew from her Southern childhood, foods with which I had only recently become familiar.

We sipped hurricanes in bars on Bourbon Street and treated ourselves to beignets and chicory-spiked café au lait at Café du Monde.

Piled high with powdered sugar, beignets need to be handled carefully. One shake sends a cloud of sweetness across the table. One laugh out loud and there was snow on our noses, our hair and our shirts. We went through several plates of these signature pastries, laughing into the early morning.

Chicory with coffee, I later learned, is an age-old Louisiana tradition. The French added roasted and ground chicory to coffee to help stretch supplies during Napoleonic blockades in the early 19^th century. When naval blockades cut off shipments to New Orleans during the Civil War, people in Louisiana started to add chicory to their coffee as well, and came to appreciate the nuttiness it lent to the beverage.

***

New Orleans, it seems, has always been about good food. "We not only love to eat and to cook what we eat," Charmaine Neville says in the anthology "My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy By Her Sons, Daughters and Lovers." "We love to talk about what we are going to cook and what we are going to eat. Before we finish what we're eating, we're already talking about the next meal we're going to have together."

"In spite of our differences," editor Rosemary James says in the introduction, "we have sought out each other's company over, always, the very best food, ingenious dishes created from a poor people's basics: beans, rice, okra, fish, crabs, oysters, shrimp, peppers, garlic, onions, file… And elegant desserts created from everyday things like bananas and sugar and rum. Ours is comfort food even for the aliens among us."

Traditional Louisiana cooking blends a number of cuisines and techniques. Creole dishes might have been based originally on French stews and soups, but they were influenced significantly as well by the Spanish affinity for onions, bell peppers, tomatoes and garlic, by the African use of okra, and the Native American introduction of file, finely ground sassafras leaves. Like Cajun foods, considered country cousins, they were spicy and robust.

By the 1980s and '90s, avuncular chefs such as Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse had mostly blurred the lines between Creole and Cajun cooking, popularizing both in person and in print. Lagasse, for example, incorporated them at Emeril's, his first solo restaurant venture, and in the best-selling book "Emeril's New New Orleans Cooking," developing additional recipes further influenced by his Portuguese roots.

In the months following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, eateries were among the first businesses in the city to re-open. Some places unfortunately did not survive. "Their owners were getting on in years," food writer and radio host Tom Fitzmorris says in "Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans," "or their buildings had been too badly damaged to rebuild, or they had intractable insurance problems."

But others including Galatoire's, Commander's Palace, Brennan's and K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen still thrive. Home-grown chefs such as Susan Spicer, Donald Link and John Besh also continue to play with seasonal ingredients and innovative approaches at places like Mondo, Herbsaint and Restaurant August, respectively.

Before Katrina hit, according to Fitzmorris, there were more than 800 restaurants in greater New Orleans. These days, there are more than 1,200 – big and small, casual and formal, Creole, Cajun, Caribbean, French, Italian. It is a testament to the hunger people in the city have for good-tasting food, and the lengths to which cooks will go to feed that hunger. It speaks to their commitment and hospitality.

***

Since college, I have tasted different foods and visited a number of other cities. I have bitten into fresh scones, for example, topped with strawberry jam and lovely clotted cream in London. I have had cheese-smothered deep-dish pizzas in Chicago. I have feasted on Korean favorites like bulgogi and bibimbap in Los Angeles.

Why then, I wonder, do I return often in my head, and in my kitchen, to iconic New Orleans foods?

When catfish fillets are on special at the market, I grill them Louisiana-style, seasoned with paprika, black pepper, white pepper and cayenne pepper. I like the heat. When Christmas comes, I make a festive jambalaya. It seems the right project for a celebration. And when rain threatens to dampen my spirits, I gather ingredients for chicken and sausage gumbo. I have nearly perfected my roux.

Some foods, I suppose, are a part of who I am, who we are. They are the dishes we grow up eating, whether poached whole chicken or macaroni and cheese, barbecued pork buns or fresh baked apple pie. They are the flavors we know well, offered to us by our parents or grandparents.

Other foods, however, are a part of who I become, who we become, the people we essentially grow into. They are the dishes we discover on our own when we choose to travel and broaden our palates. They are the flavors we try to re-create when we can, combinations that started for me with a weekend trip to the South long ago.

Po'boys and beignets, okra and file. They are items my parents and grandparents never ate. After immigrating to the U.S. in the 1960s, my mother spent her time and effort at the stove fine-tuning Chinese dishes that reminded her of home. She knew of nothing else and wanted nothing more at her table in California. I would inevitably learn more and need more.

Maybe that's what New Orleans means to me. It is a terrific city with an extraordinary history. But it is also among the first places I found myself, when I began to look, when I hoped to forge an identity outside of family. There is that thrill. Maybe that's the connection. And the food? Well, maybe the food is just a splendid bonus.

(A version of this essay appeared originally on www.culinate.com.)

Like liquid gold

I opened a decades-old bottle of wine the other night, wanting to see if I could drink it or if it had secretly turned into vinegar. It was months after my father's funeral, when the grief had begun to subside.


The wine was a revelation. It still is.

It was fruity and quite mellow. It tasted bright and complex. It was eye-opening. Free of the tannins that sometimes accompanied wines I had, it went down smoothly. I drank two or three glasses effortlessly. Like water from a spring. Then, of course, the alcohol kicked in. 

***

The bottle had been among those in dusty cardboard boxes inside the garage, moved not long ago from the basement of my parents' house in Chinatown to my place in the Oakland hills.


To proceed with a seismic retrofit my mother wanted, we cleared out old mattresses, tattered board games, and items from earlier renovations. We didn't know what to do, however, with cases of wine my parents had also kept there.


My brother wondered if we could donate them. But the food bank, for example, he learned, didn't accept alcohol. He considered pouring wine down the sink before tossing the empty bottles into recycling. But that seemed drastic and extremely wasteful.


He said he wasn't a drinker. What would we do with so much? I drank wine sometimes and cooked with it, too, scanning shelves at Trader Joe's for interesting, affordable bottles. My brother insisted he did not drink. Soda, certainly, and juice nearly every day. But not wine. I told him he could always start.


We negotiated and compromised the way we negotiated every little thing. I would find room for the tattered boxes somewhere in the house, I said, at least temporarily. He would not chuck any bottles down the drain just yet.

***

My father owned a liquor store in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood decades ago, commuting across the bridge six days a week. 

Growing up, my sisters, brothers and I spent summers there. We stocked shelves and worked the cash register. We earned money, but were rewarded mostly with candy, ice cream and comic books.


We began to recognize California wine labels: Almaden, Inglenook, Charles Krug. We learned spellings and pronunciations for words like Merlot, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc.


A woman on the way to her boyfriend's once asked my brother to recommend a good Chardonnay. He instinctively flagged our father over before slipping away from the conversation.


A man asked me once what went well with fish. I was no more than 13 perhaps. What could I tell him? I mean, I knew as much about varietal and vintage as the next child, which was not a lot. On the other hand, if there had been talk of Life Savers candy, It's-It ice-cream or Richie Rich.

***

Sometime in the 1980s, my father lost his lease. Rather than move the business, he retired altogether. He had worked 10-hour days for as long as he could remember. He needed a break.


He returned as much inventory as he could to distributors. The alcohol he still had at the end he brought home to Oakland. My parents put cases away in a corner of the basement.


Though it saddened my mother to close the store, she understood my father's decision. Besides, my siblings and I were high-school students then, anxious to start college. Would we even want the business? Could we handle the responsibility? We said no.

***

Years later, I returned to Haight-Ashbury, curious to see if the streets had changed. The sidewalks, for example, appeared as crowded as I remembered them, peopled, as always, by a wide cast of characters.


I entered the building that used to house my father's liquor store, happy to find it had since become a bookshop, one of the few remaining Bay Area independents.


In an instant, I flashed back to childhood. In my mind, what had once been there replaced all that was actually there. Instead of shelves filled with books, I saw shelves on my right lined with wine bottles. On my left, behind the cash register, shelves crowded with liquor bottles.


An employee, a woman in a brown T-shirt, must have noticed me standing, staring into the space. She asked if she could help me locate something in particular. Oh no, I replied. Thanks. I was just looking.

***

Growing up, I did not connect much with my father. We were not as close as we could have been. The fifth in a group of six children, maybe I got lost in the scrum. I don't know.


In the throes of adolescence, I pulled away. Or was he the one who resisted? The kind of man whose actions spoke louder than words perhaps, he kept opinions and feelings to himself.


On car rides home from school, I struggled to make conversation with my father. The radio became my salvation. I craved affection long before I knew I needed it.


I meet a man with a teen-age daughter. Separated from her mother, he tries hard to spend time with his child. I want to tell him to not stop trying, to never stop really. His daughter needs her father even if she pretends she doesn't, even when she resists. She needs him to guide her. She does.

***

A scene in the movie "Sideways" stops me cold. The DVD had been playing at my brother's place. In the exchange, Virginia Madsen talks with Paul Giamatti about her attraction to wine.


"I like to think about the life of wine," she tells him, "how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining, if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now...”


It is a terrific encounter, a quiet, genuine moment between two key characters. I grab a pen and some paper, and take notes.

***

I hadn't thought before about any of that, about what it might have meant.


The wine I opened, I realized eventually, had been one of the last things left from my father's store, a part of his legacy and my personal history.


It represented his commitment, the way he earned a living to support my sisters, brothers and me. His hard work, coupled with my mother's frugality, helped to raise a family. Their sacrifice sent me to college across the country. It sent me on my way.


For the longest time, I wondered if my father actually cared. Nonchalant, he remained a mystery. Indecipherable. I didn't know how he felt or what he felt. I wracked my brain. But maybe his love had been there all along. I just didn't know it. Maybe I simply hadn't figured out where to look.


It was there when he sided with me after I bought blue jeans. My father convinced my mother to let me keep them, telling her I needed denim for winters on the East Coast. He sided with me when I wanted dark colors, to my mother's floral-print chagrin.


It was there at his kitchen table. He read the local paper every day when I worked there after college, scanning it for articles I had done. Had he been proud? He never said.


When he went to produce markets in Chinatown, it was there. He heard I would be home from grad school in Oregon and knew I liked the way my mother cooked eggplant, stir-fried quickly with ground pork, water, soy sauce, sugar and chile paste. He asked her to make my favorite dish.


He shared other foods, too, over the years, inviting my siblings and me not only for birthdays and holidays. These we expected. They were reasons to feast. But he called us for ordinary meals as well, on random weeknights. Just because.


And it was there when he held my hand those days he spent in the hospital. When the doctors spoke, we listened. I held his hand. He didn't pull away. I watched as he rested. I cried when he died.


Maybe his love had been there all along, bottled like liquid gold. There in the basement for me to discover and appreciate when I was good and ready. It might take years, even decades. But I would learn.


It had been there all along waiting for me to uncork and savor.


(A version of this essay appeared originally at www.culinate.com.)

Down South

Defining Southern food – explaining all that it entails – can often be a tricky proposition. It is not simply one thing. It is many things. It is not confined to one place. It encompasses many places. It is both contemporary and traditional, incorporating a number of elements. It is ever evolving and rooted in history. It is inventive, inviting and honest. That Southern food cannot be easily defined is ironically among its defining characteristics.

In "Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen," Edward Lee shows us what Southern cooking can include. Chef and owner of 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky, for the past decade, he melds personal influences and professional experiences with local resources.

Lee grew up in a Korean-American household in Brooklyn during the 1970s and '80s. He watched his grandmother prepare old-school Korean dishes, he says. At his friend Marcus's apartment, he had Puerto Rican plantains over rice. He hung out with Jewish neighbors, too, when his parents were at work, learning from them as well.

After college Lee opened a Korean barbecue joint on Mott Street in New York City, attracting hipsters, "entertaining celebrities and fashionistas and selling lychee martinis by the dozens." It eventually closed: "Three years of the restaurant had gone by in a blink."

Somehow he found himself in Kentucky in 2003 on the weekend of the Derby. He has lived there since, getting the chance to reinvent himself "through the lens of tobacco and bourbon and sorghum and horse racing and country ham."

Lee took instantly to the South and it in turn took to him. The foods around him, he realized, were similar in many regards to those he ate as a child with his grandmother. "Soft grits remind me of congee; jerky of cuttlefish; chowchow of kimchi. My Korean forefathers' love of pickling is rivaled only by Southerners' love of pickling. BBQ, with its intricate techniques of marinades and rubs, is the backbone of both cuisines."

In the cookbook, Lee combines familiar ingredients in previously unfamiliar ways. For a beef rice bowl, for example, he marries Asian-style barbecue – think bulgogi – with sautéed collard greens. He tops them with fried eggs and spoonfuls of corn chili remoulade, giving the dish further spice. He re-conceptualizes bibimbap.

For pulled pork, he eschews sweet Southern barbecue sauce for a saltier version made with items such as soy sauce, black bean paste and sesame oil. He serves the meat with cornbread and pickles, or tucked into hot dog buns with spicy Napa cabbage kimchi. Savory and sour notes contrast well.

Chapters on bourbon and bar snacks, and desserts also prove innovative. In the former, Lee focuses on the distilled spirit most associated with Kentucky. "I have sipped and I have slugged," he writes. "I have rollicked in the simple joys of a Rebel Yell and pontificated on the complexities of a Col. E. H. Taylor..."

In the latter, he gets creative with buttermilk affogato, for instance, chess pie with blackened pineapple salsa, and a whiskey-ginger cake garnished elegantly with pear cut the size of matchsticks. These presentations further exemplify his novel approach to Southern flavors.

The chef arrived in the South and discovered its pleasures later in his life. On the other hand, award-winning cookbook authors Matt Lee and Ted Lee were raised in the South and have long been schooled in the area's rich culinary heritage.

In "The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen," they celebrate all their hometown has to offer. They extol its virtues, showing us "not only what it's like to grow up here and learn to cook here," they say, "but also how we are continually inspired by this place." They describe the cuisine as well as the people – farmers, fishermen, chefs and bartenders – who help to make their community whole.

As they did in "The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook" and "The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home Flavor," they concentrate on popular traditional items, including shrimp, okra, pecans, and boiled peanuts, around which they have built a mail-order specialty food business, too.

More notably, however, the brothers choose to feature several ingredients with which the region might not be immediately associated. They call attention to kumquats, for example, which grow throughout downtown Charleston. They use them to infuse gin for cocktails, highlighting their sweet-tart flavor – a mix of orange, grapefruit and lemon – in a kumquat sparkler with sparkling white wine, a kumquatini, kumquat margarita and kumquat-chile Bloody Mary.

They talk about loquats, a tad smaller than golf balls and native to China. The fruits "emerge on trees throughout the Lowcountry in April (March, if it's been a warm winter), with furry skin enveloping a shallow layer of yellow-orange flesh." They use them for a vodka infusion to concoct loquat Manhattans.

Championing vegetables they realized not long ago had been harvested in South Carolina since the 18th century, the brothers also introduce things like salsify, a scraggly carrot-like root. They peel, cook and mash it as we might potatoes to create fried salsify "oysters" reminiscent of hushpuppies or falafel. They get us excited to return to the kitchen.

The Lees break every so often with profiles of women and men in the local food industry. They spotlight folks like Celeste Albers, a poultry and dairy farmer on Wadmalaw Island 18 miles south of Charleston, and Sidi Limehouse, "a prominent character, as much for his salty opinions and spicy backstory... as his fine produce."

They give them their fair due. The brothers know Southern cooking is only as good as the ingredients to which people have access. They understand Charleston's appeal, taking great civic pride in both its thriving food scene and the hard work required to sustain it.

Like Edward Lee, and brothers Matt Lee and Ted Lee, Susan Puckett pays tribute to the South. A Jackson, Mississippi, native and former food editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she, too, has long been schooled in the make-up of the region. She knows its colorful and complicated history. ("It birthed King Cotton, the blues, and the civil rights movement.") She studies its fascinating foodways.

Her volume "Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey Through the Soul of the South," equal parts visitors guide, handy cookbook and photo essay, takes a broad look across a couple of states. Puckett begins in Memphis, Tennessee, and works her way down Mississippi toward Vicksburg. She covers cities both big and small, spotlighting a few fancy eateries but focusing mostly on mom-and-pops. These businesses keep it real.

"Travelers expecting to indulge in home-style fried chicken and fresh, pond-raised catfish are rarely disappointed," she says. "Fine examples of those Delta stalwarts – with their requisite accompaniments of slow-cooked greens and cornbread – turn up in every small town, and even in country cafes in the middle of nowhere."

Unusual items appear often as well. "From one end of the Delta to the other, old-time tamale makers wrap cornmeal cylinders filled with spicy beef or pork... to sell from roadside stands or café lunch counters. Pit masters mix barbecue into spaghetti. Convenience stores sell giant dill pickles marinated in Kool-Aid as snacks to go."

In search of popular everyday foods, Puckett explores what folks at the Southern Foodways Alliance dubbed the Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail. She tries tamales at Blues City Café in Memphis, for example, and at Doe's Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi, and Pea-Soup's Lott-A-Freeze in Indianola, Mississippi. She has her share.

Unlike tamales we get "in Mexican and southwestern-style restaurants, which can be dry and fairly tasteless," she contends, the ones found in the Delta are "savory cigar-shaped packages... dripping in oily, spicy juices." They are made in corn husks or parchment paper. And though they are sold all over the state, they are rarely seen outside of it.

Puckett also encounters Kool-Aid pickles – whole dill pickles soaked in powdered drink mix, sugar and pickle juice – in large plastic jugs. For decades, she tells us, children in poor black neighborhoods had been pouring Kool-Aid packets directly into pickle jars; they liked the tanginess. Grocers "refined the technique a bit, and started selling them along with other pickled soul-food standbys like eggs and pigs' feet."

When she can, she shares recipes from residents and restaurants as well, giving us opportunities to mimic flavors or try new dishes in the comfort of our own kitchens. In conjunction with snapshots taken around the region by photographer Langdon Clay, they help to reveal a strong sense of community.

For those of us born and raised on the West Coast, areas south of the Mason-Dixon Line can sometimes unfortunately be but a blur. (Areas east of the Rockies aren't always clear to us either.) The geography we learned in fifth grade fails us. We are simply not as familiar as we should be with that stretch of the country.

The authors, each in his or her own way, enlighten us further about the South – its food, land and people – giving visual representation to all we have imagined. They teach us about Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi.

Whether bringing multicultural influences to Southern food, offering ideas on handling unique ingredients, or collecting observations traveling from one town to another, they imbue their discussions with nostalgia. They entice us with their cooking. Through stories and recipes, they document their love for the place they call home, celebrating its generosity and hospitality.

(A version of this review appeared originally at www.culinate.com.)

Apron strings

Back in the day, cooks at home — my mother among them — wore aprons.

She wore one in the kitchen when she peeled and chopped vegetables, prepped fish in the sink, and stir-fried meats in a well-seasoned wok, the ventilation fan whirling overhead. She wore one outside the kitchen when she brought plates of food to the dining table and cleared the dishes afterward.

My mother put on an apron automatically, like a second layer of clothing. She picked up a knife or a spatula with one hand, an apron with the other. She protected her dresses from spills and splatters. She alternated among four or five aprons and washed them in the machine with the rest of our laundry.

She wore floral prints in reds and yellows, and styles with flat fronts and decorative hems. In the pockets, my mother stashed Kleenex. She sewed her own aprons, customizing them to suit her small frame. (Back in the day, people at home sewed.)

These days, it seems, cooks at home seldom wear aprons. Not the ladies on the Food Network. Not when they chop onions on a board or grill meats on the stovetop. In front of cameras, under the lights, they hardly worry about spills or splatters.

Sandra Lee, Ingrid Hoffmann and the incessantly perky Rachael Ray tend to wear form-fitting V-neck or scoop-neck tops and tees in their television kitchens. They never get flour in their impeccably styled hair. They never spill a thing on their undeniably fashionable outfits. It is, of course, make-believe.

In my local newspaper a short while back, I learn of a great-grandmother in an Oakland suburb with a remarkable collection of more than 200 aprons.

The oldest, the reporter noted, is a flour-sack apron from a century ago. (I'm not sure what that is, really, but it doesn't sound entirely flattering.) One of the newest is a full-length barbecue apron with large pockets and the words "Sexy Senior Citizen."

"Put on an apron and tie it," the collector told the reporter, as gently and sweetly as a great-grandmother would. "The tighter you tie it, the bigger the hug."

But the article doesn't tell me everything. I do not know, for instance, how the woman acquires her aprons. Does she shop actively for them or receive them as presents? (Both perhaps.) Where does she keep them? How does she sort them? By color? Fabric? Which ones does she actually wear? Most of all, what does she cook?

Aprons, I realize, have long been synonymous with domesticity. They have been linked inevitably to physical work on farms and in kitchens.

"Homesteading alongside the men," Ellyn Anne Geisel writes in "The Apron Book: Making, Wearing and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort," "women tucked their dresses into apron waistbands to clear and plow the fields, then unfurled the aprons to carry grain to the chickens, gather eggs and harvest vegetables from the garden."

In the years following World War II, the garments grew increasingly popular among middle-class housewives, Geisel notes. The designs at that time reflected "their aspirations to be modern, social and stylish. Fabrics were bold with color, and adornments became more playful."

Eventually, there were theme aprons and holiday aprons, and aprons that matched potholders or tablecloths. There were aprons that sported cartoon graphics or witty phrases. There were casual aprons made of cotton and fancy aprons made of silk, organza or taffeta. There were practical aprons, like my mother's, and not-so-practical aprons.

Most home cooks these days, I suspect, prefer function to form. They would do without trims or ruffles, selecting comfortable, straightforward bib aprons in a range of colors.

I take an informal poll among friends my age. Some have aprons, others don't. Some wear aprons, others don't.

Sunah, for example, bought a cute apron a short while ago, but seldom uses it. She doesn't want to get it dirty, she says. I laugh. It is black and white with illustrations of fish, fruits and condiments. The creases of the original folds are still visible.

Cynthia owns a couple of aprons. On a trip to Italy last fall, she says, she bought another one as a souvenir. It has different breads across the front. But alas, she seldom wears any of them.

(This from a woman who collects recipes and cookbooks religiously, who has been known to make cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, and rugelach, brownies and chocolate-chip cookies for various potlucks — from scratch. Surely, she must put on an apron then, right?)

Jamie, for his part, says he doesn't wear a thing when he, ahem, cooks in the kitchen. He's got a wicked sense of humor, I remind myself. He tries to take the conversation to a whole other place. But I don't let him.

Do many my age eschew aprons? I wonder. Is it an either/or? Do we pride ourselves on not wearing aprons, occasionally not even owning one, as if domesticity was something to be frowned upon? As if our education and experience ought to keep us away from the stove?

Our hectic lives take us inside courtrooms and conference rooms. They chain us to our desks and chairs. They make us stay in front of our computers. Work we do now is often unlike work our mothers did, and work our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did before them.

Perhaps we don't need aprons in the kitchen if we're simply taking delivery pizzas out of cardboard boxes and putting them onto plates. We don't need them if we're moving plastic containers from freezers into microwaves. We don't need them if we're eating cereal for supper.

I, for one, like to think I can have it both ways.

Like my friends, I spend decent chunks of time at a computer, reading, researching, writing and editing, working. My mind is often preoccupied. I can't be bothered with food.

On the other hand, I am like my mother. Is this what I have secretly feared? In the kitchen, when I make it there, I do my best to not be wasteful. I reuse pieces of aluminum foil if I can and takeout containers when possible.

In front of the stove, at the chopping board, I wear an apron. Always. Not the floral prints or decorative hems my mother favored, but the simple patterns and solid colors I prefer. I reach for an apron on Wednesday nights, for instance, when I carve out time to try new recipes. I rinse my hands quickly and wipe them on my hips. I turn on the radio for company.

I pull one on over my pajamas bright and early Sunday mornings, before I've even washed the sleep from my eyes or brushed my teeth, to measure flour and sugar for cobbler or coffeecake. The anticipation builds. I reward myself at the end of a busy week and the beginning of another.

I make a mess on the counter without making a mess on myself. I tie the apron tight.

(A version of this essay appeared originally at www.culinate.com.)

"Consider the Fork"

In the cabinets, there are chopping boards and mixing bowls, a colander and a salad spinner. Drawers contain wooden spoons, slotted spoons and spatulas. There are knives, measuring cups and can openers.

There is a bowl I like to use for breakfast, whether I am having cereal or oatmeal or yogurt. There is a mug I like to use for coffee in the late afternoon. And a spoon with which I like to stir that coffee. There just is.

I have favorites – pans and pots, bowls, cups and utensils I pick up often and prefer over others for certain foods. We all do.

In "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat," well-researched and thoroughly engaging, British food writer Bee Wilson looks at relationships between the tools we have and the things we make. She explores the ways in which "the implements we use in the kitchen affect what we eat, how we eat, and what we feel about what we eat."

She compares old-school diets with modern-day sensibilities. She gives us a highly accessible yet comprehensive assessment of the evolution of our cooking habits, tracing, for example, our integration over the years of fire and ice.

Wilson ("Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee") delineates in broad terms our great reliance on heat.

Once upon a time, a single fire from an open hearth "served to warm a house, heat water for washing, and cook dinner. For millennia, all cooking was roasting in one form or another. In the developing world, the heat of an open fire remains the way that the very poorest cook."

To work effectively with that fire, we forged "a host of related tools," including spits, spit-jacks to rotate meat, tongs, pot hooks, drip pans, trivets, and flesh-forks for pulling pieces of meat out of a pot. These usually had long handles and were made of heavy metal.

If we tried using short-handled stainless steel tongs or nonstick silicone spatulas - staples in our 21^st-century kitchens - in that environment, she suggests cheekily, we "wouldn't stand a chance. The utensils would melt. I would fry. The children would howl. Dinner would burn." Her wit is subtle but wonderful.

These days, we are able to utilize different heat sources. We can control fire more easily. I can adjust the flame on my stovetop with a knob, for instance, turning the temperature up to boil a kettle of water or down to effect a slow braise. Inside ovens, "vast communal chambers" in ancient and medieval Europe used to bake bread for entire villages, we make cookies and cakes for ourselves.

We also now have microwave ovens. Invented by Raytheon engineers working originally on military radar systems, they were first sold in the 1950s. They did not hit mainstream markets, however, until about 1967 when manufacturers got the price of a unit below $500.

By the '80s and '90s, microwaves had become indispensable. We use them to reheat leftovers or to avoid food prep altogether, popping in store-bought frozen entrées when we eat alone or cannot cook. What we gain in convenience we lose unfortunately in connectedness.

Like fire, ice matters, the author says. "The efficient home refrigerator entirely changed the way food - getting it, cooking it, eating it - fitted into people's lives."

It changed what we ate. Rather than rely on salted meats or preserves because we had to, we could enjoy fresh meat, milk and green vegetables whenever we wanted to. It changed how we bought food. "Without refrigeration, there could be no supermarkets, no 'weekly shopping,' no stocking up the freezer for emergencies."

And it affected other industries, giving rise to products such as Tupperware, first sold in 1946, and Saran Wrap, introduced in 1953, as well as frozen foods and beverages. Orange juice concentrate, for example, was the most successful commercially frozen product in post-war America, selling 9 million gallons in 1948-1949. We increased our eating and drinking options.

What sets Wilson's discussion apart from those of her contemporaries, though, is her additional focus on simple hand-held tools. Like Steve Gdula ("The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home"), she examines the overall design of our cooking spaces. But to her credit, she details seemingly ordinary items, too, making her book all the more appealing.

She pays significant attention to smaller things, what we generally would not even think twice about, what we have on dish racks or countertops and pick up mindlessly every day.

Take, for example, the wooden spoon. It is at heart a low-tech gadget. "It does not switch on and off or make funny noises," Wilson writes. "It has no patent or guarantee. There is nothing futuristic or shiny or clever about it." Yet it is amazingly versatile.

Study it. What is it made of? Beech or a denser maple? How is it shaped? Is it oval or round? Cupped or flat? Has it got a pointy part on one edge "to get at the lumpy bits in the corner of the pan"? Is the handle short, for children first learning to cook perhaps, or longer for adults to keep spatters at bay?

Wood, she tells us, is a nonabrasive material, too, gentle enough on pots and pans. It is nonreactive and won't leave a metallic taste in our food. "It is also a poor conductor of heat, which is why you can stir hot soup with a wooden spoon without burning your hand." Above all, it is familiar. We cook with wooden spoons because we always have.

That our workspaces contain mishmashes of old and new tools should not surprise us, Wilson says. On the contrary, eclectic collections reflect our changing personalities. Chopping boards sit alongside food processors. Melon ballers can be popular one year, handheld blenders all the rage another.

We don't necessarily want to reinvent cooking; we only want to make it easier. We learn to adapt and improve our skills over time. In most cases, "whisks, fire, and saucepans still do the job pretty well. All we want is better whisks, better fire, and better saucepans."

We might inherit some things from parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles, and receive some from friends. Others could be gifts to ourselves. As it is with the utensils in my kitchen. As it is, I suspect, in all our kitchens. So the food we make is not only a combination of ingredients, she reminds us. "It is the product of technologies, past and present." It is the result of a compendium.

(A version of this review appeared originally on www.culinate.com.)

Benefits of broth

When the weather cools, I think about soup. Not the tomato-based soups I tend to make, the ones I have with oyster crackers or crusty French bread. But the Asian broths my mother makes, the ones that simmer on the backburner in her Chinatown kitchen.

She starts a pot from scratch, building flavors with each step, each new ingredient, adjusting seasonings along the way. One day, it is a pot of watercress soup, for example. On another, it is seaweed. Some days, pressed for time, my mother works with handfuls of ground pork, slivers of tofu and cans of store-bought broth. She improvises.

In "Classic Chinese Cuisine," Nina Simonds describes the prominent place soup has on dinner tables in traditional Asian households.

"Whereas soups seem to play a rather restricted role in western cuisine," she tells us, "in China they have a much broader calling... In a family-style meal, soup is served along with the other dishes to provide nourishment and to function as a beverage."

According to cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop, in Guangdong and other parts of southern China, it is usually eaten at the beginning of the meal and helps to whet the appetite.

Growing up in Oakland, my sisters, brothers and I were always instructed to finish our bowls of soup first. Only then could we proceed with the rest of dinner. Like classmates who had to eat their vegetables if they wanted dessert, we needed to empty our soup bowls if we wanted rice.

But in Chengdu and other parts of southwest China, Dunlop explains in "Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking," soup is generally "served at the end of the meal, and its function is to cleanse the palate after the intense, heavy flavors of a typical Sichuanese meal."

Soup, Simonds says, aids digestion and improves circulation. "Some soups have been used for centuries to treat certain ailments... Stocks simmered with assorted Chinese herbs were administered for a number of maladies."

Even now, she notes, new mothers often have a "chicken soup flavored with ginger in southern China and sesame oil in Taiwan" every day for a month after childbirth in order to restore balance and energy in their bodies.

Teresa M. Chen further examines the benefits of broth in "A Tradition of Soup: Flavors from China's Pearl River Delta." She provides substantial background information.

"The Chinese soup tradition started back in the old country where people knew many lean times," she writes in the introduction. "With humble ingredients, the Cantonese prepared a flavorful soup stock, to which practically anything on hand could be added."

Stock ingredients might include pork neck bones, for example, or chicken rib bones. For vegetarian soups, bases can be made with soybean sprouts, white turnips or Napa cabbage. These items are naturally sweet.

Frugal – and smart – cooks know instinctively that seemingly ordinary things can be useful, too. "Leftovers such as the carcass of a roast duck or a roast turkey, trimmings from a lobster or shrimp shells can all be turned into soup stock," she continues.

"Wealthy households and restaurants expanded the possibilities by using a whole chicken, a whole fish or a whole hunk of pork to make stock. After cooking for hours on end, with medicinal herbs and complementary ingredients, the broth would be strained and served hot."

Chen talks also about technique and kitchen equipment, and offers a comprehensive guide to both fresh and dried soup ingredients, including seafood and seaweed, oxtails and watercress, and a variety of Chinese herbs. She makes these accessible.

She interviews senior citizens at a community center in California's Central Valley, women and men who, like my mother, understand and appreciate the nutritional value soups afford. She collects and highlights their time-tested recipes.

Nursing a head cold and a seriously sore throat not long ago in Las Vegas, I look to hot and sour soup for comfort. Miles away from my mother's extensive home cooking, I rely on a restaurant at the hotel in which my friends and I stay. I make do.

Like sweet and sour pork, for example, or beef and broccoli stir-fry, hot and sour soup has been on menus in Chinese restaurants across the country for decades. Unlike other Asian broths, though, it is relatively heavy, thickened with cornstarch. It contains slivers of meat, shiitake mushroom and tofu.

The soup, Chen explains, "was brought to Hong Kong in the 1950s" by the Sichuanese and by those "who had been in Sichuan during the eight-year Sino-Japanese War, which ended with the end of World War II." It was subsequently "brought to the United States by those who passed through Hong Kong in the 1960s" and shortly thereafter captured the American palate.

At the table, when my friends select noodle dishes and rice plates for lunch, I ask for hot and sour soup. I have one bowl and another bowl and another slowly and deliberately. It is potent and works wonders. The ginger acts as a recuperative tonic while the white pepper and vinegar deliver a heat and intensity my body seems to need.

With over-the-counter medicine my friends swear by, the cough drops I suck on throughout the day like candy and the tall cups of chamomile tea I drink religiously, they help to shock my system back into shape. They set me straight.

(A version of this essay appeared originally on www.culinate.com.)
 

"Mycophilia"

Mushroom hunting, Eugenia Bone reminds us, isn't simply traipsing through the woods after weeks of wet weather, eyes to the ground. It requires a decent amount of patience, fearlessness, skill and "knowledge both of the organism and of its habits and habitats."

In "Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms," the journalist and noted food writer sheds light on groups of fungi aficionados from around the country and chronicles her own growing interest in the field over the past decade. She introduces us to a distinct subculture.

Some people, Bone says, gather mushrooms for the thrill as well as the taste. They join mycological societies that offer "lectures on fungal biology, slideshows of mushroom photography... (and) small guided walks." They take part in regional forays and festivals.

Like her, they look forward to spring, when morels – "probably the most fetishized of all wild edible mushrooms" – can be found in abundance. Getting good ones will reward them with delicious meals afterward.

But eating bad ones can send them to the hospital. One cap of an Amanita phalloides, for instance, "will make you very sick, even do you in, especially if you exhibit symptoms within six hours of eating." Telltale signs of mushroom poisoning include gastrointestinal pain, vomiting and diarrhea.

Other mushroom people forage for the money. Commercial pickers who hunt for chanterelles, truffles and matsutakes in the Pacific Northwest, for example, are part of a thriving industry that generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They sell the mushrooms they find in the wild to restaurants or distributors, following a trail from British Columbia in the summer south to Washington and Oregon in the fall and Northern California in the winter.

Made up primarily of Laotian, Cambodian, Hmong or Mien immigrants, Latino migrant workers and "white off-the-grid types," the workforce can get competitive. Stories abound of groups "staking out and defending territory in national forests with automatic weapons," the author tells us, "robbing each other of their mushrooms and robbing the mushroom buyers of their cash." There is an inherent danger to their search.

Bone, whose food books include "At Mesa's Edge: Cooking and Ranching in Colorado's North Fork Valley" and "Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods," nominated in 2009 for a James Beard Award, also touches on other aspects of mycology in the United States today.

Talk of fungi biology and molecular make-ups, of spore dispersal (the way in which spores ensure their survival), ecosystems and parasites get fairly heady. They prove a bit much for non-academics to fully comprehend.

Likewise, chapters on psychedelic mushrooms – "the black sheep of the mycological world" – and mycotechnologies can be challenging.

The former looks at physical and psychological effects hallucinogenic mushrooms can have. Bone recalls a trip to the Telluride Mushroom Festival where she tried some; it is among the few events that celebrate psychoactive mushrooms as well.

Meanwhile, the latter tackles advances in burgeoning scientific fields where fungi are used, for instance, to remediate oil-polluted soil or agricultural waste.

For the food-inclined, however, sections about white button mushrooms are fascinating. As are discussions on cultivated criminis, portobellos, oysters, shiitakes and enokis. They are varieties with which many of us are familiar.

Grown largely in Chester County, Pennsylvania – "the heart and soul of the American button mushroom industry" – about 30 miles west of Philadelphia, the white button is by far the most ubiquitous. Total mushroom sales in the U.S. in 2008-2009 topped 817 million pounds, Bone says. White button mushrooms accounted for 802 million pounds.

Seventy farms in the area make up roughly 70 percent of the mushroom farms in the country, all of which are family-owned and operated.

Fungi farming is both labor-intensive and time-consuming. Mushrooms "must be selected for size, cut, and trimmed, each one by hand." Italian laborers from a century ago were replaced in the 1970s by Puerto Rican workers. They in turn were gradually replaced by Mexican workers. Approximately 98 percent of the labor force on mushroom farms these days are Mexican workers.

By taking mushrooms out of the kitchen and into the forest and field, Bone gives us a greater understanding of these unique ingredients. Whether foraged in the wild or grown on a network of farms, they are part of an intricate and flourishing food system.

In this sometimes too technical but overall interesting examination, she introduces us to a few of the people behind the things we eat, and the remarkable work they do every day. She helps us appreciate their efforts.

(A version of this review appears at www.culinate.com.)