Excerpts

from "Paris (or What is French Food?)" in The Art of Eating no.45 ——

There are 1,500 bakers in and around Paris, and nearly every one makes baguettes. Yet hardly any baguette is a classic baguette. French bread is gradually recovering from the flavorless hell of white bread into which it descended in the 1970s and 80s, but there is something country about all this new bread, while the classic baguette is the most urban and refined — the most parisienne — of breads.

For several years, each time I’ve visited France, I’ve bought and tasted every baguette that looked as if it might possibly be good. I’ve followed everyone’s suggestions. I’ve learned the link between taste and appearance, that you can tell good white bread by the way it looks — swollen but not ballooned and tense, neither rustic in appearance nor too neat and regular, not to mention cream colored and open textured inside. I’ve also learned the wisdom of a Paris friend, who said, noting that French bakeries usually make both pastry and bread, "The quality of pastry in the window is in inverse proportion to the quality of the bread. A good baker is rarely a good pâtissier and vice versa." Occasionally, I’ve found a good baguette outside Paris, but in the capital the search was more difficult.

from "What Creates the Best Vegetables?" in The Art of Eating no.42 ——

Vegetables lend themselves to clear, simple, elegant dishes. Our era likes vegetables, and yet it’s curious that we try to do so much to them. Especially in restaurants we are drawn to invention and provocation: hot pepper in many varieties, novel spices, the "fused" flavors of diverse continents, many different things juxtaposed on a plate. We don’t celebrate the harmony, subtlety, and refinement sought by serious chefs from the 17th century to the 1980s. Those qualities begin to sound antediluvian. Old-fashioned professional cooking at its best was (and is) rational and elegant, and at the same time it sought fresh effects, just as we do today. Contemporary chefs prepare food that is more obviously complex. A course that presents a single vegetable (asparagus with sauce mousseline, for instance, in this issue) or an unadorned bowl of soup hardly suffices. The experiences of flavor are not enough; diners expect more on a plate.

In a market garden, the influence of environment, variety, and methods of cultivation (the grower) seems plain. When you add to these ripeness and freshness and think about the ways all the elements intersect — especially when you remember it is the grower who chooses the location, varieties, methods, and ripeness at harvest — then you begin to think as well about the scale of production…o the extent that good flavor means freshness, ripeness, and tasty varieties picked at the peak of ripeness for a local market, good flavor points toward small-scale, local production. A business operated on a small scale is open to a wider set of possibilities. Compared with a large company, an individual or a family is willing to take risks and make out-of-the-ordinary and even eccentric choices. An individual or a family is likely to measure success not just in dollars but in personal satisfaction and quality of life.

To the extent that good flavor means freshness, ripeness, and tasty varieties picked at the peak of ripeness for a local market, good flavor points toward small-scale, local production. A business operated on a small scale is open to a wider set of possibilities. Compared with a large company, an individual or a family is willing to take risks and make out-of-the-ordinary and even eccentric choices. An individual or a family is likely to measure success not just in dollars but in personal satisfaction and quality of life.

Large-scale growers dominate supermarket aisles because they supply the supermarket specialty, a huge consistent supply at a low price. The small-scale, local grower specializes in inconsistency — expressed in soil, exceptional varieties, close ties with the seasons and nature — all the things allied with superior taste.

from "The Caves of Roquefort" in The Art of Eating no.43 ——

When I sat with Jacques Carles [maker of perhaps the best brand of Roquefort] in his office, he was forthright but vague on certain specifics. In the cave he was completely assured, more in his element, intimate with the ripening. Upstairs he had given me all his attention, but in the cave he seemed to half-forget about me. Using his stainless-steel trier, the essential tool of the ripener, he drew out and smelled a tapering cylinder of cheese, riven with blue. He showed it to me only as an afterthought.

Carles and Migairou [his maître de cave] worry about the cheeses by habit. "He makes me afraid," Carles said. The callow white cheeses revealed nothing to me, but Migairou was concerned about a small group he had set aside from one batch. From standing on edge, under pressure of their own weight, they had begun to turn oval. "I’m afraid," Carles said again. "It’s a métier that makes you afraid." He was sure the soft cheeses were unusually moist and delicious, but the market won’t accept them. They should be round like the rest.

from "Catalan Food" in The Art of Eating no. 38 ——

Often the opening to a Spanish meal includes delicious anchovies, either plain or with the saltiness set against the sweetness of strips of cooked red bell pepper. The best anchovies, truly superior, are the anxoves de l’Escala — from the Costa Brava town of L’Escala. Inland from the old town, a street named Closa del Llop ("pasture of the wolf") has several anchovy-curing business with signs welcoming customers to come and taste. I entered the modern building of El Xillu... There was a clean smell of fresh fish, and women were busy salting anchovies in a large workroom behind glass windows. In the adjacent office, Francesc Moner offered a concise explanation of anchovy-making. L’Escala, he said, benefits from its proximity to the Gulf of Lion, which is "a paradise for fish," rich in the plankton that anchovies eat. They are caught from April to September. As soon as they are bought from the fishermen, the whole fish, minus heads, are covered with sea salt. The proportion isn’t set — "one does it."

There’s almost nothing to the process. The anchovies simply mature in salt and their own liquid, with some producers adding black pepper. The time needed for the cure depends on the warmth of the season. The anchovies caught from April through July, cured during the heat of July and August, are ready by September. Those caught in September must be cured until the following April or June. The anchovies are packed into jars by hand, and the jars are topped up with salt and brine. "In my opinion," said Moner, "it’s a 20th-century product that has the same taste it had in the 15th century. Nothing has changed." I asked if El Xillu anchovies were better than anyone else’s. No. "All the brands," he replied, "are the same."

… The anchovies bottled in oil have a firm, floury texture and a sharp, simple salty taste. Anchovies in salt have the texture of fish; the taste, curiously, is less salty, fuller, fresher.

from "In Tuscany" in The Art of Eating no. 41 ——

Most wines inside Chianti Classico… remain regionally distinctive, but that's not true everywhere in Tuscany. It troubles me, as I've written before, than economic forces drive winemakers around the world to produce wines that taste more and more alike. They aim at the same soft, ripe tannins from the skins; the same taste of new oak; the same percentage of alcohol (usually 12 1/2 to 13); the same pH; the same sense of richness and sweetness in the mouth; the same taste of fruit in the middle palate (neither the first impression on the tongue nor the last; the middle is where wine interacts with food). These qualities add up to soft, safe, food-friendly international-tasting wine.

The wines themselves are not bad: On the contrary, they're good. But they might have been made anywhere. They don't provoke; they don't make you think of the place they came from. They are not Vouvray or Bourgueil from the Loire, Gigondas or Saint-Joseph from the Rh™ne, any of a number of costly Burgundies, dry Muscat or Gewurztraminer from Alsace, Tocai Friulano, sweet Primitivo di Manduria from Apulia — from producers who do things as they were always done. The market-designed wines are the very opposite of that most cranky wine from the Loire, Coulée de Serrant.

What should wine give us? What is its reason for being? Wine, good wine, is a photograph of a particular vineyard in a particular region at the end of a certain summer. It's not a portrait of the market or the vintner. A good wine, whatever its level of price, originates in the facts of the vineyard.

But most customers like and demand international-tasting wines. Unhappily for the producers, the wines can't be sold on the basis of the individuality and character of the regions. These international-tasting wines must compete on price against similar-tasting wines from everywhere, including Chile, South Africa, Spain, Romania, and soon, perhaps, China — places where costs remain low and quality is rising.

from "Sonoma County" in The Art of Eating no.49 ——

In the northern half of the county, up a long, winding driveway outside Healdsburg, Ridgely Evers started planting olive trees in 1991. Four thousand five hundred bushy young trees now cover 22 acres in the hills above his country home. Evers is relaxed and even jokey when he talks, but he’s not casual about what he’s doing and he has a lot of solid information about olives… Colleen McGlynn, Evers’ wife, is an accomplished chef who additionally takes charge of day-to-day work at the olive company [called Da Vero].

Evers and McGlynn’s first 2,500 olive trees were imported from Tuscany, and they provided cuttings for the rest. The goal was to make extra-virgin olive oil like the best Evers found when he visited producers and tasted in Tuscany, specifically like the one of Fattoria Mansi Bernardini near Lucca. Copying that farm, Evers’ and McGlynn’s trees are 50 percent Leccino, 25 percent Frantoio, 15 percent Maurino, and 10 percent Pendolino — all Tuscan varieties.

Before Ridgely Evers and a few others, no one had tried to produce the highest-quality olive oil in California for decades, if ever. Olive trees aren’t native to California, but the state has one indigenous variety, the widely planted Mission. It is descended from trees planted from seed at the San Diego Mission in 1769. The yield of oil is high, but for all its history, Mission normally makes greasy oil with little aroma. Just four or five years ago, the first few California olive oils that aimed to be seriously good were still boring and flat, with barely a trace of the aroma and texture of good olive oil. (I was probably too generous when I recommended a source for them.) But everything is changing…

It’s essential to pick early for fruit flavor, though the yield of oil is less. But not too early. "This isn’t like grapes where there is a day," said Evers. "Typically, we start looking a month before we pick. The thing we look for is a period when about one-half of the olives have that deep purple blush skin, about one-quarter of them are blushed, and about one-quarter are still green — all of them are green inside." The normal time is mid-November, but it can be a month earlier or later, depending mainly on the warm or cool weather of the previous spring: "It turns out the most important thing is the date of bloom." So far, Da Vero olives have been picked one day and pressed the next, but the hope for next year is to pick in the morning and press that same afternoon. The sooner, the better.

from "In the Region of Cognac" in The Art of Eating no. 40 ——


	At a hardware store in Cognac, I bought a diable charentais, a "Charentais devil" — the unglazed orange earthenware pot that is the regional variant of diables used in many places as stovetop ovens, mainly for baking potatoes and roasting, so to speak, chestnuts. (One from Germany, a Kartoffelteufel, was and may still be available in the U.S.) Unlike other earthenware pots, the devil is never washed and no liquid is ever put in it. Cooking is dry. The devil saves lighting an oven, and it provides an oven for a few purposes where there is none. The devil emphasizes potatoes’ earthy taste, here and there singeing them; the effect is a step away from cooking in ashes. My diable charentais is about ten inches wide. Devils from elsewhere are composed of two almost identical halves fitted together (so top is bottom, bottom is top), but a Charentais devil is a more conventional squat pot with a small opening covered by a lid… The devil is excellent for new potatoes. It is also used for onions, shallots, and garlic — whole intact heads or a scattering of cloves among potatoes, the cloves unpeeled to reduce burning…

Copyright Edward Behr 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999