1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (142 page)

Where:
The candy is available at almost any supermarket and packaged candy counter in the U.S.
Tip:
For finicky teeth, unwrap and preslice your Milky Way, then firmly rewrap and freeze it. This allows the bites to be snapped off easily.

There really is a funnel involved in funnel cakes: sweet, foamy, and eggy batter poured through a funnel directly into a vat of simmering hot oil, trickling in to form the lacy web of fried dough beloved by children of all ages. Looking like
a giant, squiggly spiderweb of a doughnut, the cake is a treat with Pennsylvania Dutch roots. The recipe, for what is basically a cruller, most likely originated in northern Europe and emigrated to America with the first Mennonite settlers from southwestern Germany. They settled in the farmlands of Pennsylvania, where the funnel cakes were initially fried in lard and served as a snack to field workers. Today, they are a standard at food festivals and state fairs around the country—and are almost always fried in vegetable oil. And they remain part of Finland’s May Day celebration, where a touch of grated lemon zest adds a bright note. While still hot, they are lavishly powdered with confectioners’ sugar, and they must be consumed immediately. Once cooled, they lose much of their crunchy, sugary appeal.

Where:
In Philadelphia
, Reading Terminal Market (on Saturdays), tel 215-922-2317,
readingterminalmarket.org
;
in Ephrata, PA
, Green Dragon Market (on Fridays), tel 717-738-1117,
greendragonmarket.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Classic Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking
edited by Betty Groff (2007);
saveur.com
(search lacy funnel cakes; finnish tippaleipa).
Special events:
Kutztown Folk Festival, Kutztown, PA, June–July,
kutztownfestival.com
; Iowa State Fair, Des Moines, IA, August,
iowastatefair.org
.

A diver sorts and crates harvested geoducks.

Without a doubt one of the world’s strangest and most phallic-looking foods, the geoduck clam is a species of saltwater bivalve mollusk native to the Pacific Northwest. Its name comes from a Native American term for “dig deep” (poor transcription forever has it pronounced as gooey-DUCK, whatever the original may have been). And indeed, these clams do burrow deep into the sandy bottom of Pacific Northwest waters. Especially common in the Puget Sound, they are also found in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, off Vancouver Island, and in Northern California’s Humboldt Bay.

Though geoducks have long been a food source in the northwest—smoke-dried by northwest Indian tribes and stored for winter consumption—for centuries they were relatively unknown elsewhere. The giant clams were largely unseen in the United States until 1960, when a U.S. Navy diver trying to recover a torpedo happened upon them on the bottom of Puget Sound. What a sight the clamshell must have been, with its large, protruding, hoselike siphon, so fleshy, wrinkled, and dark.

Although some geoducks weigh up to 15 pounds, the average weight is 1½ to 3 pounds with a siphon that’s 5 to 15 inches long. Both the siphon and the meat inside the shell are
eaten—and this is where the delicious geoduck proves itself to be more than a curiosity, with its chewy texture and a sweet, refreshing, clean, and briny flavor that bears a hint of cucumber.

In China, the imported clams are a prized delicacy, in no small part because of their physical appearance—for obvious reasons, eating
xiàng bá bàng
(or “elephant trunk,” as the geo-ducks are called there) is said to be an aphrodisiac and to promote virility. There they are an important if relatively new ingredient in one of the country’s numerous hot-pot preparations. In Japan, they are popularly served raw, pounded to tenderness, then thinly sliced as sashimi or sushi with a soy-spiked dipping or ponzu sauce.

As it became more popular around the world, geoduck’s prices soared, and eventually in Asia a sort of black market grew up around the prized clams. The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife now tightly regulates geoduck fishery, limiting it to a handful of companies that bid on the right to harvest from state or American Indian tidelands. How the tides have turned.

Where:
In Seattle
, The Walrus and the Carpenter Oyster Bar, tel 206-395-9227,
thewalrusbar.com
;
in Washington and Oregon
, Uwajimaya at four market locations,
uwajimaya.com
.
Mail order:
amazon.com (search fresh sashimi grade geoduck).
Further information and recipes:
The Fishmonger’s Apprentice
by Aliza Green (2011);
50 Chowders
by Jasper White (2000);
Field Guide to the Geoduck
by David George Gordon (2003);
Northwest Bounty
by Schuyler Ingle and Sharon Kramis (1999);
food52.com
(search geo-duck with sea beans and porcini).

Although the hard-ripe travesties of mass agribusiness are infamously lacking in color, texture, and flavor, many countries have tomatoes to be proud of. The U.S. is no exception, and you don’t have to look to the idiosyncratic heirloom varieties now popular in farmers’ markets (often more interesting in appearance than in taste) to find great American tomatoes. Several longtime varieties, the New Jersey beefsteak and Louisiana’s creole among them, are cherished for their juiciness and their deep and winey essences.

But of all native tomatoes, none is so breathtaking as the Giant Syrian still custom-grown to strict organic standards for the innovative upscale restaurants of Napa and Sonoma by Forni Brown Welsh Gardens in Calistoga. The huge, meaty, orange-red fruit nurtured there fairly quivers with succulence and an almost bloody, beefy richness—its flavor so complete, even salt may be unnecessary. If you can resist the temptation to eat the tomato as you would an apple, enjoy it thickly sliced, either on its own or as a garnish for steak; thinly sliced, it makes for the ultimate BLT.

For now, the only way to sample Giant Syrians is either to preorder them from Forni Brown and go to Calistoga to pick them up, or to order the seeds and grow your own. (Just beware of the squirrels and rabbits who’ll be raring to get their paws on the red-ripened beauties.)

Where:
Forni Brown Welsh, Calistoga, CA, tel 707-942-6123;
Mail order:
for Giant Syrian seeds and plants,
localharvest.com
(click Shop, then search giant syrian).
See also:
San Marzano Tomatoes
.

The stunning seafood restaurant at the heart of New York’s Grand Central Station.

When it opened in 1913 in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, the restaurant now known as the Grand Central Oyster Bar didn’t specialize in seafood. If it had an identity beyond its marvelous architecture—a cavernous subterranean space designed with the great Valencian architect Rafael Guastavino’s celebrated arches of interlocking terra-cotta tiles—it was as a coffee shop. Only after the place was relaunched in 1974, having been closed for several years, did the new owners decide to parlay what was allegedly the old restaurant’s best dish, oyster stew, into the cornerstone of a menu dominated entirely by the treasures of the sea.

Today, a couple dozen varieties of fresh fish are offered daily—almost all in your choice of simply broiled, steamed, grilled, or fried—as are oyster stews and pan roasts, chowders, seafood salads, and a selection of favorite seafood dishes from around the world. Here are coquilles St. Jacques, the Maine lobster roll, a bouillabaisse, and the English fish ’n’ chips.

The famed oyster stew (oysters poached in cream and butter) is a thin, milky, slurp-worthy delight. The oyster pan roast is thicker, the aforementioned ingredients spiked with hot paprika and chile sauce and lovingly ladled, usually by a hassled yet generous waiter, over a slice of good toast. They’re dishes that work thanks to the juxtaposition of the oysters’ sharp sea saltiness with the milk’s neutrality, and both are worth the price of admission—as is the quintessentially New York experience of eating oysters underground in a train station. (There’s now a Brooklyn location as well.) Take your pick of a table covered in a red-and-white-checked cloth, the long, U-shaped counters in the wood-paneled salon, or the oyster bar itself.

Best of all, of course, are the impeccably fresh bivalves for which the place is named: thirty kinds, from the usual suspects—Belons and Wellfleets—to the Beaver Tails (Rhode Island), Duckabushes (Washington State), and Lady Chatterleys (Nova Scotia) of the world’s waters. The list of beers—stout and oysters being an excellent and overlooked combo—and wines is impossibly long, and is part of why the place remains the best reason in the world to miss a train.

Where:
Grand Central Terminal, 89 East 42nd St., New York, NY, tel 212-490-6650,
oysterbarny.com
; 256 5th Ave., Brooklyn, NY, tel 347-294-0596,
oysterbarbrooklyn.com
.
Further information and recipes:
The Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant Complete Seafood Cookbook
by Sandy Ingber and Ray Finamore (2013).

Open for business since 1932.

A true American classic, the Green Dragon Farmer’s Market & Auction is a dazzling Pennsylvania Dutch country set piece. Amid neat red barns with colorful painted “hex signs” and verdant farmlands traveled with horse and buggy by the Amish and Mennonites, every Friday the wares of more than four hundred farmers, craftsmen, merchants, cookware sellers, bakers, butchers, and candlestick makers are spread out across thirty acres.

It’s a setup that dazzles the palate as much as the eye. Here you’ll find very local, German-descended specialties such as pickled hard-cooked eggs, marbled red from their beet-juice bath; garlands of sausages and slabs of darkly smoked meats; gray blocks of the fatty breakfast pork mush scrapple, meant to be fried alongside eggs; and brilliant, locally grown vegetables that, depending on the season, might include tomatoes, melons, corn, and the extraordinary Mennonite celery—small, ivory, and so tender it manages to raise the mundane salad vegetable to new gastronomic heights.

On the sweeter side, there are kaleidoscopic arrays of cookies that make one feel as though Christmas is around the corner, festive funnel cakes fried up and sugared on the spot (see
listing
), and pies stacked up to dizzying heights—the golden-brown, molasses-filled shoofly (see
listing
), crumbly apple pandowdy (see
listing
), and pies with names like Love, Sunday, Monday, Wet Bottom, and Snitz, the latter made with dried apples.