1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (157 page)

Regenerating stone crabs are only available from October to May.

Delicious stone crabs (
Menippe mercenaria
) are among the most rarified delicacies of the sea, in no small part because nearly everything about them is limited. Their season is short, running from October through May, and their only edible parts are their claws—unlike other crabs, stone crabs have no backfin meat. They can be found along Florida’s Gulf Coast and up the Atlantic coast to North Carolina, but the mercurial and elusive creatures move around a lot, and it’s not uncommon for fishermen to go for days without seeing them and then to hit a mother lode.

The good news? When claws are removed from the crab, the crab naturally regenerates them within eighteen months. In order for it to do so properly, the claw must be cleanly snapped off—a feat that requires supreme precision and experience, not to mention knowledge of the law: The state of Florida dictates the length of claw that may be taken, and also requires that any egg-bearing female be thrown back entirely unharmed. Every stone crab must be immediately returned to the water after its claw is removed, or held in a shaded place and wet down every half hour before being thrown back.

Though a few large-scale fishermen catch many thousands of pounds of stone crab per season, the crabs are mostly brought in by a small coterie of fishermen who own their own boats. There might be easier ways to get at the stone crab, but so far, attempts to farm-raise them have failed.

Decidedly within the rights of the consumer are the ways in which stone crab is prepared. Canny cooks long ago figured out how to boil and quickly chill the claw, enabling the meat to effortlessly slip from the shell instead of sticking,
and also ensuring the finest, cleanest flavor, the meat so firm and toothsome that it bears resemblance to a lobster tail. Dipping the cold meat into melted butter is a rare pleasure, but better still is the claw’s traditional dipping sauce, said to have been invented at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, in Havana, Cuba (where the same stone crab is called the morro crab), in the 1930s: a mustard-based affair spiked with mayonnaise, vinegar, and sometimes a little horseradish that does much to enliven what’s already a pristine and luxurious experience.

Perhaps the most famous stone crab restaurant, Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach, began its life in 1913 as a lunch counter owned by Jewish immigrant Joe Weiss; to this day, the restaurant remains open from October to May each year, with guaranteed lines out the door. Stone crabs may be the main draw, but the sweet potato fries and Key lime pie have legions of fans, too. They’re worth the wait.

Where:
In Miami and Washington, DC
, Joe’s Stone Crab, tel 800-780-2722,
joesstonecrab.com
;
in Longboat Key, FL
, Moore’s Stone Crab Restaurant, tel 941-383-1748,
stonecrab.cc
;
in Florida, Texas, and California
, Truluck’s Seafood, Steak & Crab House,
trulucks.com
;
in New York
, Grand Central Oyster Bar, tel 212-490-6650,
oysterbarny.com
;
in Brooklyn
, Grand Central Oyster Bar Brooklyn, tel 347-294-0596,
oysterbarbrooklyn.com
.
Mail order:
Joe’s Stone Crab, tel 800-780-2722,
joesstonecrab.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Eat at Joe’s: The Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant Cookbook
by Jo Ann Bass and Richard Sax (2000);
saveur.com
(search chilled stone crab with mustard sauce; joe’s stone crab pot pie; baby spinach and stone crab salad).
Tip:
A frozen crab is a ruined crab, so spring for a plane ticket or the delivery fee for fresh crab, or skip it entirely.

The annals of the American menu hold countless iconic meals. There are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for childhood lunches, steak and potatoes for grown-up dinners, roast turkey and pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, cheeseburgers and fries any time at all, and many more. With stacks of syrup-drenched pancakes, piles of crunchy fried bacon, miles of hash browns, and eggs any which way, the country particularly shines in the breakfast category.

But not all American breakfasts commandeer the griddle. For New Yorkers, the morning meal of champions is a treasured Sunday ritual involving lox, cream cheese, and bagels—a simplified description of a complex spread that
may include dark bread and bialys (see
listing
), as well as creamy whitefish salad, eggs scrambled with lox, and blintzes (see
listing
) or slices of authentic Russian coffee cake.

It’s a menu made up of delicacies traditional to the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe. They came from cold places and hard times, so their favored foods were filling and preserved for ready availability in winter. These days, high rollers may opt to replace the lox with sturgeon, those caviar spawners that have a gorgeously salty, toothsome bite when smoked; with the silvery, fatty whitefish (see
listing
); or even with the buttery, pink smoked salmon known as nova (and sometimes mistaken for lox) which is cured in brine and then cold-smoked. The lone inedible but essential accessory is the Sunday edition of
The New York Times.

Where:
In New York
, Barney Greengrass, tel 212-724-4707,
barneygreengrass.com
.
Dine-in, retail, and mail order:
In New York
, Russ & Daughters Cafe, tel 212-475-4880,
russanddaughters.com
; E.A.T., tel 212-772-0022,
elizabar.com
; Zabar’s, tel 212-787-2000,
zabars.com
;
in Ann Arbor, MI
, Zingerman’s, tel 734-663-3354,
zingermansdeli.com
.
Tip:
For locations of kosher and kosher-style delis in more than fifty countries, see
shamash.org/kosher
.

Peach seeds came to the New World with Columbus.

The lyrical Sweet Georgia Brown may have inspired many devotees, but so did the state’s equally sweet and seductive peach. With yellow-gold flesh and a sweet, floral fragrance that almost recalls freesias, the large, tender fruit is free-stone, meaning it can easily be split by hand and comes away clean from the pit, to reveal a red-speckled center.

Ripe Georgia peaches lend themselves to the most luscious shortcakes and cobblers, and they make wonderful flavorings for ice creams and sorbets. Poached and napped with pureed raspberries and ice cream, they become the dish known as Peach Melba (see
listing
). Split in half and topped with crushed macaroons and grated dark chocolate, they can be baked with a little red wine and served warm under a splash of cold, heavy sweet cream. But the peaches may be best appreciated on their own, whether eaten out of hand or more gracefully consumed with knife and fork. (Either way, be prepared with a bib or napkin to catch their delicious, honeyed juices.)

Peaches came to the New World as seeds, with Columbus, but they originated in China, where they are still highly prized as gifts and for special celebrations. The European seeds Columbus brought did especially well in the rich red soil of Georgia, after being introduced along the coast by Franciscan monks in the mid-sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, a farmer named Raphael Moses began shipping Georgia peaches to other parts of the country, primarily along the East Coast.

Although the once celebrated Elberta peach is no longer commercially grown because of its relatively short shelf life, several of the forty or so Georgia-grown varieties come to upscale East Coast markets from June to early July. Georgia now ranks third in peach production after California and South Carolina. Both Georgia and South Carolina are excellent peach terrain, and have few competitors—save only perhaps Fredericksburg, Texas, where practically all of
the superb limited early-summer crop is consumed within its big and hungry home state.

Mail order:
Pearson Farm, tel 478-827-0750,
pearsonfarm.com
; Hale Groves, tel 800-562-4502,
halegroves.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking
by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart (2012);
Peaches
by Kelly Alexander (2013);
cookstr.com
(search peach cobbler venable; poached peaches in red wine; fresh peach dessert sauce).
Special event:
Georgia Peach Festival, Fort Valley, GA, mid-June,
gapeachfestival.com
.
Tip:
Peaches are ripe when their skin shows a slight blush and they give slightly to light pressure. Overripe, they become spotted or mushy. To ripen unripe peaches, leave them on a kitchen counter away from sunlight for a day or two. Avoid stacking ripe peaches to prevent bruising.

Once upon a time in big cities, sweet potatoes were a standard type of street food, baked by vendors in makeshift ovens stoked with hot coals, then wrapped in newspaper. The intensely moist and sweet root vegetable (
Ipomoea batatas
)—often mistakenly referred to as a yam—is one of the defining ingredients of the American South, where the vast majority of those harvested in the U.S. are grown. A member of the morning glory family, it is native to Central America, where it has existed since prehistoric times.

The root vegetable was initially brought to North America with the first settlers, prized because it fared well in the South’s warm, arid soil, could be stored for months at a time in a simple mound of dirt, was thick-skinned and thus easy to bake directly on a heat source, and came packed with nutrients. (The sweet potato boasts large amounts of vitamins A, C, and E, in addition to iron, calcium, copper, and fiber.) Early cultivated sweet potatoes were white or yellow inside—it wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the now ubiquitous orange-fleshed sweet potato, high in beta-carotene, was introduced to southern U.S. soil. To differentiate the new variety from popular yellow or white versions, the orange potato was referred to by farmers and marketers as a yam (from the African
nyami
, a fibrous, tubular root vegetable of the
Dioscorea
genus that tastes very much like a sweeter version of the sweet potato, but is rarely grown in the U.S.).

Now synonymous with Thanksgiving, the sweet potato is festively baked into pies, or
mashed and dressed as a casserole topped with a layer of marshmallows drizzled with melted butter and brown sugar—the latter sickeningly sweet to some, wildly addictive to others. But in recent years, cut and fried as an alternative to the traditional French fry (a favorite at Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach) or baked and served plain, it shows up more and more on restaurant menus as a side dish. Plainly roasted, drizzled with a little butter, and sprinkled with salt and pepper, the sweet potato is a distinctively earthy, homey, naturally sweet delight that’s enough to make anyone homesick for the South.

Where:
In Miami and Washington, DC
, Joe’s Stone Crab, tel 800-780-2722,
joesstonecrab.com
;
in Chapel Hill, NC
, Mama Dip’s, tel 919-942-5837,
mamadips.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Eat at Joe’s: The Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant Cookbook
by Jo Ann Bass and Richard Sax (2000);
Hoppin’ John’s Low Country Cookbook
by John Martin Taylor (2012);
The Sweet Potato Lover’s Cookbook
by Lyniece North Talmadge (2010);
epicurious.com
(search sweet potato and yam galette; candied yams; mashed potatoes and yams garlic parmesan);
saveur.com
(search sweet potato french fries).
Special events:
Ham & Yam Festival, Smithfield, NC, April or May,
hamandyam.com
; Vardaman Sweet Potato Festival, Vardaman, MS, November,
vardamansweetpotatofestival.org
.

San Francisco has long been at the forefront of inventive California cuisine, but food-loving visitors to the stunning City by the Bay are missing something if they bypass a sampling of its historic culinary past. The very best place to do so is the century-old Tadich Grill, a sprawling, masculine spot in the heart of the city’s financial district. It stands close to its original home, but a long way from its beginnings in 1849, as a coffee stand for forty-niners mining for gold.

In the old city tradition of men’s clubs, the handsome wood-paneled eatery boasts several half-private alcoves that are especially suited to small lunch or dinner meetings. From any of the available vantage points, whether you’re seated at the huge bar, at one of the wide tables, or in a coveted alcove, you can sample superb versions of San Francisco classics like the tomato-based seafood soup-stew called cioppino (see
listing
). Also memorable are the delicately slim fillets of flounderlike sand dabs and the silky rex sole—both best pan-grilled—and the local oysters and crabs. Seafood is the specialty, but for non–fish eaters Tadich has always excelled at grilled lamb chops. The restaurant’s most historical offering is the delicious hangtown fry (see
listing
), said to have been invented by cooks in gold-mining camps—an omelet with thick strips of bacon folded around crunchy fried oysters.