Best Food Writing 2013 (44 page)

The Eastern Shore is 70 miles of sandy, fertile land abutting the country's best clamming and oyster-growing waters. The climate is Mediterranean, and home gardens here yield figs, peaches, and even pomegranates. No matter what time of year it is, when I'm on the Eastern Shore, I always seem to be thinking about provisioning our Thanksgiving meal. Becky and I start our preparations early, in July and August, when we and our friends put up fruit preserves, and savory pickles made from the tomatoes and okra that the area produces so abundantly.

Throughout the fall, our neighbors who hunt and fish make their contributions, too, though what gets to the table depends on luck and weather. Our neighbor Jon Moore presents us with six venison roasts, and another friend, ace oyster grower Tom Gallivan, drops off a 25-pound bluefish. I rub the venison in black pepper and cayenne, and cure it in the smoker in our backyard, then fillet and smoke the bluefish, before storing both away until November.

As the holiday draws near, our preparations intensify, peaking two days before Thanksgiving, when I embark on the annual “big loop,” an epic, daylong drive to visit purveyor friends along the shore. It's my version of the Thanksgiving harvest. The trip ranges from one end of Northampton County to the other, along back roads bracketed by creek and marsh, field and woodland.

This year, Sam accompanies me. Our first stop is Pickett's Harbor Farms, at the southern tip of the peninsula, where W. T. and Tammie Nottingham live on land W. T.'s family has farmed for generations.

They grow heirloom sweet potatoes, including a variety called Hayman that is virtually unique to this area and prized for its dense white flesh and intense sweetness. We pick up a couple dozen of them, plus a medley of other kinds for cooking into casseroles. Next, we drive north to visit James Elliott, the co-owner of A. & J.'s Fresh Meat Market, in the little railroad town of Cheriton. A. & J.'s is where we get our turkey, always naturally raised. James also makes a sage pork sausage that really sings. This year I buy some for our hominy and oyster stuffing, and, as I do every year, I ask him what goes into the sausage. He gives me the same wry answer he always does: “That is something I'm not telling.”

After that, we head to JC Walker Brothers Inc. clam house in Willis Wharf. “These just came off the grounds this morning,” Hank Arnold, the owner, says as he hands me a 250-count bag of littlenecks. Finally, before heading home, we make a return visit to Tom Gallivan, our oysterman friend, who owns Shooting Point Oyster Company in Bayford, to retrieve two mesh bags of Shooting Point and Nassawadox Salt oysters, to supplement the haul from my own oyster cages.

The next day, Wednesday, preparations really shift into high gear. While I brown the sage sausage in a cast-iron skillet for the stuffing, Becky makes a couple of sweet potato casseroles and a pumpkin cheesecake. I turn next to the smoked bluefish, making a creamy, brandy-spiked pâté. Finally, Lania and Sam prepare an old family standby, juicing lemons and chopping oranges and apples for a cranberry relish that's based on a recipe my mother, a retired elementary school teacher, coaxed from a lunchroom cook in the 1960s. Once our two refrigerators are full, Becky and I tidy the kitchen and turn in for the night.

On Thanksgiving Day, by seven o'clock, I've returned from my oyster beds with a hundred or so Westerhouse Pinks, as I like to call the mollusks native to our creek. I take them over to an old workbench, which will serve as an outdoor buffet table that we've set up in the yard. I lay out a couple dozen of my oysters on ice-filled wooden trays, alongside the ones from Tom Gallivan, then light the propane burner on the pot steamer that I'll be using to steam the littlenecks. Sam and Lania bring out some pickled okra and pickled figs, the bluefish pâté, and the cured, smoked venison, sliced paper-thin and
served with rounds of crusty bread and coarse brown mustard. At our home, the eating on Thanksgiving starts outdoors, and it starts early.

By ten o'clock, almost everyone has arrived, and the festivities officially commence. In the middle of the yard stands a towering pyre of branches, driftwood, and old stumps, fuel for the bonfire that we always light on Thanksgiving morning and keep burning into the night. This year, Sam does the honors, touching a match to the pile. Flames erupt high in the air, and everyone cheers.

The bonfire lit, it's time to shuck the first oysters. I pop open one of my Westerhouse Pinks; it's fat and sweet. Then I taste a Shooting Point Salt, which has a briny, mineral tang. My brother-in-law, Paul, the family's Thanksgiving sommelier, shows up with a case of domestic bottles from his cellar. For the oysters, we open a chardonnay crafted by Chatham Vineyards just up the road.

As morning turns to afternoon, guests beat a path between the roaring bonfire and the steamy warmth of the kitchen. The turkey—stuffed with the sage sausage and hominy, rubbed with olive oil, and seasoned with fresh parsley, salt, and black pepper—has been roasting for a couple of hours already, and it's filling the room with its aroma. Various family members pursue culinary tasks under Becky's gentle direction. Freddie and Jessica plate creamed spinach and a layered vegetable terrine. Becky pulls a pan of roasted oysters from the oven and sets them out with one relish of pickled green tomatoes and another of horseradish, beets, and cranberries. The cooks snatch the oysters right off the baking tray, and in minutes, they're gone. Just before dinner is served, Becky improvises a last-minute dessert of roasted pears stuffed with minced pear, almonds, dried currants, and raisins.

Finally, by midafternoon, all the dishes are ready, arrayed on our kitchen table. In the dining room, my late father's huge, three-by-eight-foot writing desk has been put into service as our dinner table. I head outside to throw a few more branches on the fire and then come in to grab a plate along with everyone else. It is a sumptuous spread: the freshly carved turkey; a platter of thin-sliced aged country ham; the baked Hayman sweet potatoes, incomparably luscious; the Brussels sprouts and rosemary potatoes; plus the pumpkin cheesecake, an apple pie, a boozy rum Bundt cake, and Becky's sugar-glazed roasted pears, which are destined to become a regular
addition to the holiday menu. There is no order to serving. Everyone just descends on a favorite dish.

At last, seated, glasses raised, we toast the day, and then we toast the cooks. Becky, looking tired and elated at the same time, clinks her glass with Lania's and says, “Aren't we lucky?” In no time, guests are heading back into the kitchen for seconds. Before dessert, I read aloud from
The Sot-Weed Factor,
John Barth's great novel, written in 1960, about life in the Chesapeake Bay country of the late 1600s. I select a passage that describes an imagined eating contest between the English explorers and the Ahatchwhoop Indians to choose a king:

           
[T] he rest watch'd in astonishment, the two gluttons match'd dish for dish, and herewith is the summe of what they eat: Of keskowghnoughmass, the yellowe-belly'd sunne-fish, tenne apiece. Of copatone, the sturgeon, one apiece. Of pummahumpnoughmass, fry'd star-fish, three apiece. Of pawpeconoughmass, pype-fishes, four apiece . . .”

After a few more lines I break down laughing. By the time the dessert wine and the grappa come out, we're starting to feel like the culinary combatants in Barth's book.

Once night falls, most of the rest of the family departs. The kitchen is a wreck, but it can wait. It's growing chilly, and Becky, Lania, Sam, and I return to the dying bonfire with glasses of wine. “That was a great Thanksgiving,” I say to Becky. “Let's talk about next year.”

“Let's not,” she replies. “We've had enough fun for one day.”

But I can't help thinking about next Thanksgiving's big loop, about what we'll cook and eat. Down by the creek the night herons are calling to each other raucously, and I can hear the rasp of the breeze in the marsh grasses. It is the soundscape of the Eastern Shore.

To Be a Chef

 

 

E
MPIRE OF THE
B
URNING
T
ONGUE

By John Swansburg

From
New York Magazine

Being editorial director of the digital magazine Slate should keep John Swansburg too busy to take other gigs–but the opportunity to profile hot-chef-of-the-moment Danny Bowien for
New York Magazine
was evidently too good to pass up.

T
he sun is setting, shrouding the Lower East Side in a soft evening light, but the hair and nail salon directly above Mission Chinese Food casts an unflattering glow across the stretch of pavement where a gaggle of would-be diners bides their time. As usual, the wait is over two hours. Among the crowd outside 154 Orchard Street is a pair of middle-aged guys in loafers, hemmed jeans, and pressed button-downs who are leaning on a Cadillac Escalade like they own it. But most patrons are younger and have come here on foot, with time if not money to burn. Perched on a planter that provides the only seating is a fellow with a cotton kimono, complicated piercings, and a leg cast—the result, one feels safe assuming, of a fixed-gear bicycle incident. A young couple strolls up and stares quizzically at Mission's forbidding exterior, a plate-glass window stenciled with some untranslated Chinese characters. “I thought it was, like, a restaurant,” the guy says to the girl. He's not the first to be confused. The face Mission presents to the street is not that of the hot spot it is, but rather one of an iffy purveyor of spare ribs and duck sauce.

Six steps below sidewalk level is the small foyer that functions as Mission's takeout counter, waiting area, and storage for stray 30-pound boxes of dry chile peppers. A second group of customers
clogs this room, huddled around a Rubbermaid garbage can holding a sweating keg of Narragansett. The beer is free, but the city of New York says you can't drink it on the sidewalk, and there's space for only a handful of people to sip from the Dixie cups Mission hands out. It's a self-selecting crowd: The heat emanating from the adjacent kitchen and the hip-hop throbbing from the house speakers give the waiting area the comfort level of a down-market discotheque. Getting to the beer is arduous enough that on many nights the restaurant won't kick a single keg.

Above the gratis beer hangs the kind of backlit menu board more typically found in ethnic restaurants where non-native speakers are encouraged to order by number. For the first four months Mission was in business, under that display hung a piece of tinfoil on which someone had scrawled “Please Wait 2 Be Seated” in Sharpie, as if management hadn't anticipated the demand for tables and had to hastily fashion a sign to keep people from wandering into the packed dining room. But that could hardly have been the case. Though much about the restaurant feels improvised, it arrived in New York this spring from San Francisco surfing a sustained wave of hype. The original Mission Chinese opened in that city's Mission district in 2010, as a pop-up restaurant nestled inside an existing Chinese establishment: Lung Shan, an unloved hole in the wall. But its take on Sichuan cooking—with dishes like thrice-cooked bacon and an Islamic lamb hot pot—quickly won praise from various deans of American food writing, Mark Bittman, Anthony Bourdain, and Alan Richman among them. Soon, Danny Bowien, Mission's chef, was showing America how to prepare hand-pulled noodles on the
Martha Stewart Show
and scouting for a New York location.

He settled on the first space he saw. Six months later, the restaurant he opened in its inhospitable confines is still reliably thronged, somehow simultaneously a must-visit for finance types, freelance types, chowhounds, and food critics emeriti. (“Finally made it to NYC's Mission Chinese,” Frank Bruni tweeted a couple of weeks ago. “Better even than I'd heard. Wow.”) A profile of Bowien in the December issue of
GQ
mentions the chef in the same breath as Mario Batali and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Like those impresarios, Bowien is eager to expand, and there are plans for an offshoot in Brooklyn, Paris, or that culinary capital Oklahoma City, where he
grew up. Last week, he floated the idea of a Mission Burrito on Facebook. “WTF when?!” replied one fan, presumably already packing a tote bag for her first visit.