Cooking by Feel: Central Texas Barbecue   Jordan Mackay
        The fire and smoke and slowness, the meats, the differences
         among the best Central Texas barbecue joints.

  Caviar  Jeff Cox
        The most delicious and ethical farmed caviar — now that
        stocks of wild sturgeon have been poached to the point of
        being endangered — and the distinctions in taste among
        the several kinds from different species of sturgeon.

   Two French Cabbage Recipes: Chou farci and Chou rouge au
      châtaignes  Edward Behr and James MacGuire
        Basic cabbage dishes tend to run across cultures. Here are
        French takes on stuffed cabbage and sweet-and-sour
        red cabbage with chestnuts.

  Raspberries: The Taste of Home-Grown  Lee Reich
        The very best, most raspberry-tasting raspberries come
        from some of the least common varieties.

  Quince: The Perfumed Fruit   Melissa Pasanen
        Truly delicious quince is one of the rarest of fruits, but here
        and there you can find flavorful varieties picked properly ripe.
        With a recipe for sliced quince in sweet syrup.

  Why This Bottle, Really?
        Peter Liem on Fino Inocente (Jerez) from Bodegas Valdespino
        Jon Bonné on Outis, Etna Rosso (Sicily), from Vini Biondi


  Notes and Resources
        The Art of Eating Cookbook: Essential Recipes from
         the First 25 Years

  Restaurants
        New York: Winnie Yang on Kajitsu
        Oakland: Emily Kaiser Thelin on Camino

  Books
        Michelle Dumitriu-Machtoub on Barbara Abdeni Massaadi’s
        Mouneh: Preserving Foods for the Lebanese Pantry
        James MacGuire on the Dictionnaire universel du pain
        Edward Behr on Alice Feiring’s Naked Wine: Letting Grapes
        Do What Comes Naturally and Jacqueline Friedrich’s Earthly         Delights from the Garden of France: Wines of the Loire, Volume I,
        The Kingdom of Sauvignon

Editor’s Opening Letter

We’re 25! When I began to publish a slim food letter in 1986, I had a wholly unrealistic expectation that it would achieve a big, early success and beyond that no clear notion of where The Art of Eating was headed. Success came slowly as it happened, and eventually those few black-and-white pages became a color magazine with a modest-size but influential and deeply interested audience. In a parallel evolution, I accumulated a large experience of food and drink with a particular focus on raw materials. I was driven by both curiosity and a sense of romance.

     Looking now at those early issues, I’m surprised at how fundamental and DIY most of the subjects are: making your own three-day bread, your own wood-fired clay oven, your own fresh cheese, your own sausages, sharpening kitchen knives (only the last being essential). I wrote about the importance of salt, the advantages of stone-ground flour, the first wave of American farm cheeses. But I also dug into the more refined topics of Tahitian vanilla, brioche, tomatoes, roast beef, freshness in fish, chervil, and delicate custard. From the start I was looking for the essence of the taste, the real thing, whether in raw materials or the finished dish. I asserted the importance of place, as a rule, in producing the most delicious taste.

     Twenty-five years later, we still publish articles about the best bread and cheese, written with somewhat deeper understanding, and we cover a widening range of ingredients and cuisines. The topics of those first issues, including the link of taste to place, are still fundamental to delicious food. And when we taste today, however innovative the food may be, the methods and flavors of traditional food are still the point of reference. And place remains an enormous part of why traditional food matters. The new Art of Eating Cookbook, collected from the magazine and described in this issue, honors the strength of that foundation.

     There’s a lot to celebrate about food today. Where quality once seemed on a long inexorable slide downhill, it’s now widely recognized that there’s powerful economic value in deliciousness. More delicious food often affects our environment for the better, when the higher quality is linked to sustainable farming. There’'s still plenty of bad news in the mass market and in the oceans, but an increasing number of products are made well, ethically, sometimes brilliantly. Wine, beer, and all kinds of drink are readily available in superlative non-industrial forms. And almost anywhere you go in the United States, if you know where to look you can find a quality of food that was unimaginable when I began. Amid all the complexity of food and drink, the topics we have yet to cover in AoE seem endless.

Edward Behr, November 2011