1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (135 page)

Eventually, Cardini moved from Tijuana to Los Angeles to be closer to his core patrons, and when people began bringing bottles for Caesar to fill with his salad dressing, a cottage industry was born. (By 1990, sales of various brands of bottled Caesar dressing would reach $15.2 million.) The salad itself, meanwhile, spread across America, and by the 1950s it was a favorite in dining rooms from New York City’s Rainbow Room to Cincinnati’s Terrace-Hilton Hotel. Today, the Caesar is still a mainstay on menus everywhere, from white-tablecloth trattorias to corner pizzerias. Variations on the classic are legion, including additions of grilled chicken or tuna, and bottled Caesar dressings can be found in every supermarket. But nothing comes close to the delicious simplicity of the original, with fresh ingredients mixed directly in the salad bowl.

Where:
In Tijuana, Mexico
, Caesar’s Restaurant, tel 52/664-685-1927,
caesarstijuana.com
;
in Santa Monica
, Vito Restaurant Santa Monica, tel 310-450-4999,
vitorestaurant.com
;
in Chicago
, David Burke’s Primehouse, tel 312-660-6000,
davidburkesprimehouse.com
;
in Toronto
, Oyster Boy, tel 416-534-3432,
oysterboy.ca
;
throughout the U.S.
, The Palm Restaurant,
thepalm.com
.
Further information and recipes:
The ‘21’ Cookbook
by Michael Lomonaco (1995);
New American Table
by Marcus Samuelsson (2009);
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
, 13th edition, by Marion Cunningham (1996);
bonappetit.com
(search classic caesar salad);
cookstr.com
(search original caesar salad).
Special events:
Caesar Salad Competition, Houston, TX, October,
caesarsaladcompetitionhouston.com
.
Tip:
To have the proper mix of lettuce to dressing, sheaves of romaine should be cut in approximately two-inch-long pieces.

A fried-rice dessert with West African origins.

Now a mouthwatering brunch treat or snack with accents of winey yeast, the hot, sweet, and puffy fried rice dumplings of New Orleans were once a street food. “
Belle calas, tout chaud!
” was the call of the
calas
vendors, then West African slave women who hawked the hot, spongy rounds from their carts on Sundays. Under French rule in the mid eighteen-hundreds, Louisiana observed France’s Code Noir. Among other punishing measures, the code mandated that Sunday be the only day off for slaves. But some of the slaves used those days to sell the sugar-dusted calas—one of their native foods—and according to several historians, bought their way to freedom with the proceeds.

After the Louisiana Purchase ended French rule, the calas remained in New Orleans, particularly embraced by Italian immigrants accustomed
to
arancini
, the similar fried Sicilian rice balls. Originally derived from West African rice and pea fritters variously called
kárá, akara, kala
, or
calas
, the New Orleans version was adapted for whatever ingredients the slaves could get. Notable for the slightly tingling, fermented overtones of its yeast, the fritter’s crisp, golden crust encases a gently yielding center combining sugar, flour, the yeast, eggs, and days-old, mildly fermented rice. Served searingly hot and dusted with powdered sugar, it is a specialty on Mardi Gras.

In recent years, the fritter has found a promoter in Poppy Tooker, a leader in New Orleans’s Slow Food movement who has helped set a place for the pastry alongside beignets on several of the city’s menus. After demonstrating her calas at a cooking class, Tooker was approached by a tearful man for whom the pastry evoked memories of his mother’s New Orleans kitchen. The rest is brand-new history.

Where:
In New Orleans
, Elizabeth’s, tel 504-944-9272,
elizabethsrestaurantnola.com
; The Old Coffeepot Restaurant, tel 504-524-3500,
theoldcoffeepot.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Crescent City Cooking
by Susan Spicer (2007);
Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking
by Bill Neal (1989);
DamGoodSweet
by David Guas and Raquel Pelzel (2009);
saveur.com
(search calas fried rice fritters).

Also known as a jelly apple, and highly compatible with country fairs.

No country fair or fall festival is complete without the shining exemplar of simple pleasures that is the candied apple, shiny, red, crisp, and sweet. Key to the treat is a really good coating, thin and glassy, and the perfect crunchy-sugary compliment to nature’s more mellow confection within.

Surprisingly, the candied apple, also known as a jelly apple (and not to be confused with the caramel candied apple, with its brown toffee-flavored coating), has an actual provenance—and it’s New Jersey. In 1908, Newark candy maker William Kolb was experimenting with a Christmas window display in his shop on Orange Street. He concocted a syrup out of melted sugar, red food coloring, and cinnamon flavoring and dipped some apples into it, then placed the near-glowing orbs on his sills. Priced at a nickel each, they created an instant demand. Candied apples quickly spread to the Jersey Shore, and the crunchy sensation went on to be adopted by traveling circuses and candy shops across the country.

Not all candied apples are alike: A really excellent one pairs the sweetness of the shell with a suitably tart, very crisp apple, Granny Smith, Gala, and McIntosh being the best
choices. Speared on a sturdy wooden stick, the apple is swirled in a cinnamon-flavored simple syrup heated nearly to the “hard crack” stage (about 300 degrees on a candy thermometer), then left to cool—and sometimes to hang around for far too long. The trick to buying premade candied apples is to get one that’s fresh, and then to figure out how to eat it on the stick without dropping it or breaking your front teeth. (One technique involves turning the apple upside down, so the stick is underneath the apple in the manner of a very top-heavy ice-cream cone, giving the eater some much-needed leverage.)

Synonymous with Halloween, the treats also have international and year-round appeal. Oddly, they’ve become a popular street food in China, where they are sold by bicycle vendors; in England, they are the traditional snack on Guy Fawkes Day, which commemorates the thwarting of an attempt to bomb Parliament in 1605. As a color, “candy apple–red” is applied to everything from sports cars to nail polish, and indeed the foodstuff does leave a semipermanent rosy tint. If there’s a downside to candied apples, it’s getting the sticky coating off your face. A tip: Baby oil works every time.

Where:
In Staten Island, NY
, Philip’s Candy, tel 718-981-0062,
philipscandy.com
.
Mail order:
For ingredients and utensils,
popcornsupply.com
.
Further information and recipes:
The Joy of Cooking
by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker (2006);
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook:
, 13th edition, by Marion Cunningham (1996);
candy.about.com
(search candy apples);
food52.com
(search riff on caramel apples).
Special event:
National Apple Harvest Festival, near Gettysburg, PA, October,
appleharvest.com
. The Festival includes a booth devoted to candied apples.

Just like canning and drying, candying can be a means of preservation—coating and infusing fruit with sugar is another curing method that helps it survive past its season. But beyond the practical, slim strips of sunset-gold orange rind and burnished, brassy ribbons of grapefruit peel magically turn the simplest desserts into sophisticated confections.

Somewhere along the line, a savvy and frugal confectioner figured out that candying the peels of citrus fruits amounted to a lovely treat—the marvelously aromatic strips become tender and sweet while retaining a pleasing
astringency and a subtle bite, and they’re relatively easy to make. To rid them of most of their bitter oils, the stripped peels, trimmed of white pith, are boiled in three changes of water. Poached in sugar syrup and then rolled in granulated sugar, they are then spread on an oiled or wax paper–covered surface or a marble surface to dry slowly. That’s all there is to this fragrant magic.

Real candied citrus peels—the handmade kind, as opposed to the dried-out version usually found in supermarkets—are a wonderful and fragrant addition to holiday fruit cake, but they are especially valued as after-meal refreshers, nibbled with coffee, tea, or ice cream.

Mail order:
amazon.com (search candied orange peel france; candied lemon peel france).
Further information and recipes:
From My Mother’s Kitchen
by Mimi Sheraton (1979);
Chocolates and Confections
by Peter Greweling (2007);
The Joy of Cooking
by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker (2006);
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
, 13th edition, by Marion Cunningham (1996);
cookstr.com
(search candied citrus peel medrich; candied lemon or lime slices).
Tip:
When candying peels, it’s best to use slightly underripe fruit and to gently parboil the peel; if the water boils too rapidly, the peel may toughen instead of softening.

Few desserts are so formal and elegant as an authentic French
charlotte russe
, supposedly created by the legendary pastry chef Marie-Antoine Carême, the most famous of the nineteenth-century French cooks and a purveyor of sugary delights to Czar Alexander I. In the original and still most elegant version, a fez-shaped metal mold known as a charlotte is lined with liqueur-moistened, spongy ladyfingers and a frothy filling of whipped-cream-bolstered egg custard. Chilled until the custard is set, the dessert is topped with a layer of whipped cream.

So much for the French way. There’s a democratized American version that is equally worthy of praise, a simpler sweet that became a customary street treat for children during the first half of the twentieth century. Its special container is essential to its existence: a small, stiff white paper cuff with scalloped edges and, for a bottom, a paper disc that can be gently pushed up. A tiny round of yellow sponge cake goes into the cuff as a base, followed by swirling cloudlets of sweetened whipped cream topped with a bright red maraschino cherry—that last being beautiful to behold, but awful to taste. As children (or lucky grown-ups) walked along the street licking at the whipped cream and pushing up the disc, the contents rising to eating level with the moist cake treat left for last, it was not uncommon for the whole dessert to pop up and out onto the sidewalk, good for a laugh if it didn’t prompt tears.

One charlotte russe tradition that seems to have persisted unnecessarily: It is generally available only in winter, a holdover from times when summer refrigeration was so chancy that any whipped cream in pastries sometimes soured in the heat.

Where:
In Staten Island, NY
, Holtermann’s Bakery, tel 718-984-7095,
holtermannsbakery.webs.com
; Philip’s Candy, tel 718-981-0062,
philipscandy.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Desserts by the Yard
by Sherry Yard (2007);
All-American Desserts
by Judith M. Fertig (2003);
The Brooklyn Cookbook
by Lyn Stallworth and Rod Kennedy Jr. (1991);
capitalnewyork.com
(search charlotte russe).