1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (133 page)

Black walnut trees yield sought-after nuts, syrup, and wood.

Native mainly to the eastern half of the United States (and then brought to Europe for cultivation in the early part of the seventeenth century),
Juglans nigra
, the black walnut, is just as much of a taste treasure shelled and eaten out of hand as it is when used in various kinds of cookery. Far less subtle and soigné than the better-known English or Persian walnut, this darker member of the hickory, or
Juglandaceae
, family
has a somewhat brazen, quintessentially nutty flavor, at once earthy, fruity, and teasingly fresh. It retains that flavor and its firm, slightly crackling texture when frozen in ice creams or baked in coffee cakes, cookies, and brownies, and nicely grainy carrot cakes. Pressed, the black walnut makes a fragrant salad oil.

A very hard shell makes black walnuts difficult to crack without breaking the kernels, which is why the shelled nuts are expensive and not as widely available as the English walnut. (The shell is so hard, in fact, that it is ground down to become an abrasive used in polishing machinery.)

The trees themselves are highly prized not only for their nuts but also for their sap (which is processed into syrup and sugar) and for the dark, strong wood that is crafted into beautiful and expensive furniture.

In addition to all of their other delicious, desirable attributes, black walnuts are high in protein and unsaturated fat, as well as in magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, Vitamin B6, pantothenic acid, and zinc, among other nutritional goodies. They won’t make for a guilt-free brownie, of course, but where’s the fun in that?

Mail order:
Hammons Products Company, tel 800-872-6879,
hammonsproducts.com
;
nuts.com
, tel 800-558-6887.
Further information and recipes:
For Black Walnut Cranberry Pound Cake,
Jasper White’s Cooking from New England
by Jasper White (1998); for Black Walnut Bread,
The American Heritage Cookbook
by the editors of American Heritage Publ. Co. (1964);
saveur.com
(search black walnut pumpkin pie; black walnut sauce);
epicurious.com
(search black walnut cake);
blackwalnutrecipes.com
.

A properly executed bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich isn’t haute cuisine, but it may be diner food’s best chance at approaching the sublime. The lunch-counter classic is defined by its simple combination of crisp, salty meat, acidic tomato, cool lettuce, creamy mayonnaise, and crunchy toast. Which means that with so little margin for error, the BLT’s success is measured not only by the quality, but also by the precise state of its ingredients.

The bacon must be freshly fried and hot, and to such a crispness as to be just short of burned. The tomato must be juicily ripe and sliced razor thin. The lettuce should have both bite and flavor; Boston, romaine, and even peppery watercress are well suited, while iceberg is disqualified for having crunch but little else. One
should be able to bite easily through the toasted bread, so if good-quality French-style
pain de mie
is not available, Pepperidge Farm’s “Original” white will do nicely when toasted to a pale golden brown. Finally, if not homemade, the mayonnaise must be Hellmann’s, or Best Foods as it is known in the West.

The exact origin of this feast-on-bread is hard to pin down, but it’s a likely cousin of the bacon sandwiches that were traditionally served at teatime in the English countryside as early as the Victorian era; the first references to the BLT in print occur in British cookbooks published in the late 1920s. The sandwich became extremely popular in America after World War II, probably due to a confluence of events: lettuce and tomatoes were steadily available in supermarkets for the first time; women were beginning to work outside the home in greater numbers; and diner culture was dawning. It is the diner, in fact, that we most likely have to thank for creating the “BLT” short-order lingo, a charming example of how American slang has occasionally been shaped by lunch-counter jargon. Now, we even celebrate National BLT Month in April.

Where:
In New York
(for a simple classic), Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, tel 212-675-5096,
eisenbergsnyc.com
;
in Los Angeles
(for an elegant version), Lucques, tel 323-655-6277,
lucques.com
.
Further information and recipes:
whatscookingamerica.net
(search blt sandwich);
republicofbacon.com
(search perfect blt).
Tip:
It is important that the bacon be crisp and hot, so have all other ingredients at the ready before frying it.

Probably because of their somewhat plebian flavor and starchy texture, baked beans seem to cry for enriching molasses-like syrups to soften and sweeten them with a caramelized essence. This is the case with Swedish
bruna bönor
(see
listing
) as with Boston’s own legendary favorite—so iconic that the city is known as Beantown.

Historians believe that Boston’s bean fever began in the seventeenth century, when Native Americans taught early colonial settlers how to bake beans with bear fat in pits dug into the ground. Later, Puritans were said to fill pots with dry navy beans on Saturday and leave them to slowly simmer until Sunday, when they’d enjoy a dish of meltingly tender, delectably falling-apart beans without having to spoil the Sabbath with work.

It’s not clear who first added what has become baked beans’ characteristic ingredient, molasses, the touch that makes the familiar concoction so darkly rich and sweet—but in New England the timing probably coincided with the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century burgeoning of the molasses industry as part of the triangle trade between the eastern U.S. coast, Africa, and the West Indies. It wasn’t until 1853 that the city’s name appeared beside a recipe for the beans, in A. L. Webster’s home cooking manual
The Improved Housewife.
(In addition to molasses, Webster’s recipe calls for salt pork and saleratus—baking soda—both of which are now standard.)

By the 1930s, the bean dish had become so closely associated with Boston that the Ferrara Pan Candy Company of Chicago began marketing its reddish-brown, sugar-coated peanuts as Original Boston Baked Beans. Candy aside, the sweet beans—for some too sweet and thus doctored by souring dashes of vinegar—may be served as a meal or side dish and can be found in diners and any place hot dogs are served, in and out of Beantown.

Where:
In Boston
, Union Oyster House, tel 617-227-2750,
unionoysterhouse.com
;
in Boston and environs
, Jasper White’s Summer Shack at four locations,
summershackrestaurant.com
.
Mail order:
store.oysterhousestore.com
.
Further information and recipes:
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
, 13th edition, by Marion Cunningham (1996);
Jasper White’s Cooking From New England
by Jasper White (1998);
cookstr.com
(search boston baked beans).

At first blush, canned bread sounds like a gimmick straight out of the 1950s’ make-it-faster revolution of boxed cake mixes and powdered sauces, the kind of thing that might be marketed to schoolchildren or stocked on 7-Eleven gas station shelves. But there is nothing lowbrow or absurd about Boston brown bread, that bastion of regional American cooking: a dense, chewy, spongy loaf made of rye, cornmeal, and whole wheat flour, sweetened with molasses, and often steam-baked in, yes, an aluminum “tin” can. Boston’s nineteenth-century food guru Fannie Farmer was an early popularizer of the sweet bread, advising the students at her cooking school: “A melon-mould or one-pound baking-powder boxes make the most attractive-shaped loaves, but a five-pound lard pail answers the purpose.”

The hearty brown bread is indeed a useful answer to hearty appetites, but in colonial New England it met a range of needs. For one thing, the recipe made ready use of the region’s steady crop of rye, introduced to the Northeast by the British and Dutch, and a suitable fit for the cool eastern climate. It also incorporated molasses, an imported product of the dark triangle trade in rum and slaves that took place between the eastern coast, Africa, and the West Indies. But the bread’s principal purpose was to help keep the Sabbath in Puritan colonial kitchens. Before sundown on Saturday evening, Sunday’s meal was set to cook, slowly, over warm coals. This included Boston’s now legendary beans baking in a pot of molasses (see previous entry), and a partially covered tin of brown bread steaming in a hot kettle. Today, the same meal is still a Sunday staple in some northern kitchens—along with pot roast and potatoes—and you can find it in traditional New England–style restaurants, too. It’s one of those treats that fills a kitchen with an especially warm, sweet aroma and is truly best homemade, so it’s well worth trying out.

Where:
In Boston and environs
, Jasper White’s Summer Shack,
summershackrestaurant.com
.
Further information and recipes:
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
, 13th edition, by Marion Cunningham (1996);
Jasper White’s Cooking from New England
by Jasper White (1998);
epicurious.com
(search boston brown bread jasper white).
Tip:
Dried raisins, cherries, and currants all are excellent additions to Boston brown bread recipes.

Chef Boulud enjoys his masterpiece.

Daniel Boulud, the justly celebrated French chef whose U.S. restaurants have earned the highest of marks, created a spectacular hamburger for DB Bistro Moderne, his urbane bistro in Manhattan’s Theater District. Looking for all the world like a conventional large, nicely seared hamburger, its true elegance is revealed only on first bite.

It begins with pure, juicy, ground prime rib of beef. The quality of the ground meat is noteworthy in and of itself, but thee are additional succulent surprises lurking within: meltingly tender shards of braised beef short rib, a luscious glob of silky foie gras, and aromatic shreds of black truffles—more than enough to seduce even the most jaded palates.

The luxurious burger is presented on a home-baked bun sprightly with grated Parmesan, to be slathered to taste with a homemade tomato ketchup and lemony house-whipped mayonnaise. With the slimmest of crisp fries, its cost is north of $30, but aficionados claim it is worth every cent. At that price, one might do well to tuck a diamond ring into the foie gras as one high-rolling romantic did. No surprise, she said yes.

Where:
In New York, Miami, and Singapore
, DB Bistro Moderne,
dbbistro.com
.
Further information and recipe:
For a video of Boulud making the burger,
youtube.com
(search db bistro moderne burger); for braised short ribs and whipped mayonnaise recipes,
Daniel: My French Cuisine
by Daniel Boulud (2013).

Bread and butter is a food so basic it stands as a metaphor for all of our needs and concerns. We talk of earning our bread and butter, and remind ourselves of which side our bread is buttered on. But what kind of bread and which butter will do the trick? The bread must be firm-textured enough to remain intact as butter is spread over it. Besides lacking in
character, overly soft commercial white breads will tear at this stage. Piping hot, freshly baked loaves may be too soft right out of the oven, and should be left to cool for a couple of hours; those that have been refrigerated should be held at room temperature for at least ten minutes.