Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2019 i SAVEUR

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

EDITOR’S NOTE

SO WHERE WAS I 25 YEARS AGO? Right here. Not in the same physical location (Saveur’s got much swankier digs now), and certainly not in the same position atop the masthead. No, back when this magazine launched, I manned the reception desk outside editor-in-chief Dorothy Kalins’ office. And let me tell you, my eyes and ears were open wide. I may have been hired to answer phones and fetch coffee, but what I did was eavesdrop, and watch, as this brilliant woman conjured up this groundbreaking food bible with a little help from her friends, Christopher Hirsheimer and Colman Andrews. Basically, I had a ringside seat at Saveur’s birth. It was messy, in a most fascinating and educational way. Middle-aged grown-ups passed out in office chairs after pulling all-nighters. Knock-down…

2 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

There’s an App for This?!

Even at 30, I’m a little too old to truly “get” TikTok, that video-sharing app all the young people are into these days. (It’s where Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” first caught on.) But when I started seeing strange videos of people making Chinese food outdoors, I had to know more. Turns out, the real stars of TikTok are rural cooks in China (where the app is called Douyin). And I can’t stop watching. The internet can feel predictable, right? Cats riding Roombas, your uncle’s unfortunate political opinions, engagement photos from middle-school classmates—it all starts to blend together. But as these videos ping from ingredients to techniques to finished dish in just a few seconds, I never know where they’re heading. They’re surprising, and a nice reminder of just…

1 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Instant Coffee

It’s instant. It’s coffee. What further argument do you need? I mix Medaglia d’Oro’s espresso powder with a Splenda-and-cream slurry before adding about half the recommended water to make an intense sort-of smoothie. No, it doesn’t compare to the weighed-out and worried-over Chemex brew I drink black, but if you’ve never experienced a morning when the kettle can’t boil quickly enough, I want your life. Medaglia d’Oro Instant Espresso Coffee, $2.82 for 2 ounces; walmart.com…

1 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Desperately Seeking Cédric

BACK IN AUGUST, Parisian pastry chef Cédric Grolet began teasing his plans to open a boulangerie on Instagram. By late October, when I happened to be in town, the storefront windows at 35 Avenue de l’Opéra were plastered with a larger-than-life photo of Grolet’s professional number two, Yohan Caron, as well as three other core team members: Ariitea Rossignol, Sebastien Morin, and Mathieu Serais (above, from left). The image—equal parts boy-band album art and Diesel ad—had been torn back in places, revealing a near total gut renovation within. What remained unseen? Cédric Grolet himself. Following that August announcement, the 34-year-old pâtissier has played coy with the press. Rumor had it he’d already declined a profile in a distinguised American weekly when I sent hopeful Instagram DMs to Grolet, as well…

2 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Pralines: How They Cook’Em in New Orleans

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, WHEN LORETTA Harrison opened Loretta’s Authentic Pralines in New Orleans’ old Jax Brewery building, she became the first African-American woman to own and operate a praline company in the Crescent City—a distinction she characterizes as relative. “While mine may have been the first brick-and-mortar store here,” Harrison says, “many other entrepreneurial black women preceded me.” Indeed, free women of color have been selling pralines in the French Quarter since before the Civil War. The history is, of course, complicated. Though street-vending granted these early “pralinières” a means to support themselves, it also required a certain degree of subservient posturing. In Gumbo Ya-Ya, a book of Louisiana folklore published in 1945, the authors noted that “the delicious Creole confections…have been vended by Negresses of the ‘Mammy’ type.” This…

5 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

25 Years of Saveur

Founding executive editor Colman Andrews on Saveur’s origins IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1993, I was eking out a living as a freelance writer in Santa Monica when I received a call from Dorothy Kalins, who’d given me lots of work during her tenure editing Metropolitan Home. “I’ve found us a new magazine,” Dorothy announced. This magazine doesn’t exist yet, she said. We’d need to invent it. Whole cloth. In Manhattan. Eventually, and more than a little wrenchingly, I would have to leave Los Angeles, the only city I’d ever considered home, and move my wife and two very young daughters to the East Coast. That move changed my life, as did the magazine, which was to become Saveur. I’d been an editor, in some sense, since launching a mimeographed school paper…

46 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

RETURN TO OAXACA

When my father moved our family from Oaxaca to Los Angeles in 1994, he told us we would only be there for a year. I was 9 years old then, excited to learn a new language and enamored with the America I saw on TV shows like Saved by the Bell and Full House. I said goodbye to my school friends and the neighborhood kids, telling them I’d be back soon, not realizing that one year would become 25 in the blink of an eye. Our life in Oaxaca had been simple. My dad traveled from town to town, selling his mezcal. My mom cooked, cleaned, sewed, and tended to me and my three siblings. We spent weekends and holidays at my maternal grandmother’s house in San Pablo Villa de…

18 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Our Test Kitchen Director Would Own a Berkel B2 Meat Slicer

Available in glossy black or candy-apple red, this beauty boasts the style and swagger of a vintage sports car, with a manual flywheel cutting mechanism that deftly shaves paper-thin ribbons of cured meat. Berkel also manufactures electric versions, but ham aficionados favor the slow and smooth hand crank, which minimizes friction and subsequent overheating—instant death for quick-melting pork fat. The B2 is pricey at $4,759 ($6,284 with a handsome matching pedestal). Then again, would you really want to subject a $400 leg of prosciutto di Parma to anything else? (theberkelworld.com)…

1 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Awesome Sauce

In 2015, when Hawa Hassan launched Basbaas Somali Foods, her personal history was widely covered. Hassan lived in a Kenyan refugee camp as a child before relocating on her own to Seattle, where she was discovered by a modeling scout. What often got lost amid the dramatic story telling and glamorous portraits? Just how delicious the products are. My favorite, the Tamarind Date sauce, based on a recipe from Hassan’s mom, incorporates fiery cherry bomb peppers and creamy medjool dates. Its sweet-tart-hot flavor makes for a truly excellent barbecue sauce, and a compelling ketchup alternative. I also stir it into yogurt and slather the stuff atop grilled chicken. Initially, Basbass Somali Foods sauces were available only through Hassan’s local Brooklyn CSA. Now, 27 retailers, including Whole Foods, sell the goods…

1 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Can Good Scotch Come from Seattle?

WASHINGTON STATE is admittedly a long way from the Highlands of Scotland. But when Seattle’s Westland Distillery opened in 2010, cofounder and master distiller Matt Hofmann was determined to use the greatest whiskey-making resource the Pacific Northwest provided: optimal barley-growing conditions. And he didn’t just have his sights on American whiskeys, which are typically distilled from a blend of grains. Hofmann aimed to rival the famed single malts of Scotland, traditionally made from just three ingredients—barley, water, and yeast—before being introduced to a fourth: the barrels in which the liquor is aged. Because most single malts rely on the same few strains of pale-gray barley, that barrel wood often wields outsize influence. As Hofmann explains: “In the larger whiskey industry, everything is driven by the bottom line, so low-cost, high-yield…

2 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Genever Is the Original Juniper Spirit

A great many things disappear without a trace from our cultural memory, and had there been just a slight shift in the winds of change, we might never have forgotten about genever. After all, if it weren’t for the Netherlands’ losing New York City to the English, you could very well be reading this story in Dutch. It’s this sort of happenstance that brought the spirit into being in the first place. By the 1500s, distillation had migrated north from the Arab world into Holland, where the process was used to produce brandy, or brandewijn, meaning burnt wine. That century, as increasingly harsh winters and rising prices made using grapes impractical, Dutch distillers began turning to grain and, with the addition of juniper, created genever. Their original intent had been…

6 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

My Father’s French Onion Soup

My father gave me his letters from paris. Written with a fountain pen on onionskin stationery and folded in envelopes marked Par Avion, these formative accounts were addressed to my grandmother, and mailed during the year he studied art in Montparnasse. He was 25 then, and freshly disembarked from a World War II merchant marine ship. Dad asked Nana to ship pipe tobacco and instant coffee from the States, because the French stuff was “too expensive” and “undrinkable.” He spent Sundays at museums. Bought a radio instead of paying his rent. Got engaged to someone else before meeting my mother. Ate a lot of soup when dead broke. The school my father attended, Académie de la Grand Chaumière, was anything but grand. A modest townhouse with open studios, the academy…

8 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

THE TIME OF OUR LIVES

1994 • Saveur is born! The magazine launches with an editorial staff of 11, a cover story on Oaxaca, and an editorial advisory board that includes Marion Cunningham, Sheila Lukins, and Alice Waters. • The Food Network celebrates its one-year anniversary. After lackluster reviews of How to Boil Water and Emeril & Friends, Chef Emeril Lagasse kicks it up a notch with the successful The Essence of Emeril. • Jeff Bezos founds online bookseller Amazon. Quickly expanding into new markets, the site will eventually offer everything and, in 2017, will acquire Whole Foods Market. By 2019, Amazon will report more revenue than any other internet retailer in the world. • The Flavr Savr tomato, the first genetically modified food product on the market, is approved by the FDA. Due to…

11 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

OUR ALL-TIME BEST RECIPES

If anyone should know if a recipe’s a keeper, it’s the person tasked with making sense of the original instructions—from the far reaches of Sri Lanka, say, or a famous chef who measures nothing. This might explain why many test kitchen staffers named favorites that their predecessors had tested and recommended. (Though a couple put forth recipes they developed themselves.) And while Saveur never shies away from the oddball authentic ingredient, the fare on the following pages is the stuff we cook at home, over and over again. Consider it global comfort food. Chilaquiles SERVES 6 • Total: 1 hr. 25 min. Vivian Jao and I tested this recipe with and without the chicken bouillon powder and decided that it definitely tasted so much more addictive with. We called it…

21 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

What We Lose When We Lose the Amtrak Dining Car

ALMOST A DECADE AGO, I made two good decisions. The first was to move from New York to New Orleans. The second was to get there by train. I boarded the Crescent at Penn Station, carrying a small, soft-sided cooler that contained a loaf of bread, a stick of dried Italian sausage, blocks of cheese and pâté, a bag of my mother’s chocolate chip cookies, and a bottle of Bulleit rye. I was not going to go hungry. I had purchased what Amtrak calls a roomette, an ingeniously designed closet that was, in the best possible way, like traveling in an airplane bathroom. I spent most of the 30-hour journey there, in blissful isolation. But I was equally thrilled each mealtime, when a knock came at my cabin door, alerting…

2 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Salt of the Earth

THE TOWN OF CASTRO MARIM IS TUCKED so far east into Portugal that you might hear echoes of Spanish from across the Guadiana River. Though not a famed salt mecca on the order of Guerande, France, or Maldon, England, people here have been transforming seawater into seasoning for millennia. Jorge Raiado married into this tradition 12 years ago, effectively becoming part of the second generation to operate a company called Salmarim. But any ambition Raiado had to improve the product encountered a powerful foe. The salt-making process in Castro Marim is a natural one, he explains. “Nature is always wild and does whatever she wants.” It seems simple enough: The tide runs in from the Atlantic Ocean through man-made canals, filling Salmarim’s grid of shallow mud ponds with water, which…

2 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

A New Way to Nightcap

“Through the Grapevine” Fanny Fougerat Single Cask Cognac For four generations, the Fougerat family has produced single-cask Cognac for larger, blended brands like Martell. But in 2013, 33-year-old scion Fanny—one of the French region’s few female master distillers—broke out and began selling her own undiluted Cognacs. Her most recent release, a vintage 1994 bottling from the Borderies cru, is bold and so very pretty, with layered notes of spice, candied citrus, and vanilla, and a floral, honeyed finish. Drink it on its own, or alongside buttery apple desserts. $185; 750 ml Cumbé Aguardiente Popular in and around the Andes, Colombia’s aguardiente is traditionally an anise-scented liqueur made from distilled sugarcane juice. The makers of this version, however, took a cue from the craft spirits boom by aging the alcohol for…

1 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Two Mixed Drinks That Make the Most of Genever

Pineapple Julep Adapted from the first American cocktail handbook, this Jerry Thomas drink is emblematic of the mid-19th-century, a time when pineapples were an exotic status symbol. In a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes, add 1½ ounces Bols genever, ¾ ounce pineapple juice, ½ ounce lemon juice, and ½ ounce raspberry syrup (see below). Shake well until chilled, then strain into a V-shaped wine glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with a pineapple frond, a pineapple wedge, and seasonal berries, if desired. To make the raspberry syrup: In a small pot, boil ½ cup sugar and ½ cup water, stirring frequently until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and add ½ cup raspberries. Steep at room temperature for 20 minutes, then place a fine mesh strainer over a 16-ounce…

1 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

10 Things We Learned from the Season’s Best Books

1. There’s more than one way to make a roux It may seem that fat, flour, and some patient stirring are all that go into this building block of Louisiana cooking. But Justin Devillier, chef-owner of Magazine Street’s La Petit Grocery, gives no fewer than three methods in The New Orleans Kitchen. Devillier cooks clarified butter and flour for 10 to 12 minutes to create a blond roux for soups and chowders. His brown roux—the ideal étouffée base—relies on peanut oil instead of butter, and a cooking time of 15 to 20 minutes. He leaves that mixture on the heat about 10 minutes longer to yield the dark roux gumbo requires. “No one else in the world uses dark roux,” Devillier says. “Mastering its technique is the mark of a…

5 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

Front of House

It was two years ago that Christopher Hirsheimer first noticed a for sale sign on the vacant old train station in Milford, New Jersey. She immediately asked Melissa Hamilton, her business partner, to come see the place. “This building—this building—told us it wanted to be a restaurant,” Hirsheimer recalls. “We said, ‘No, no…,’ and the building said, ‘Yes. I want to be a restaurant.’” Hamilton nods in agreement. “We have a thing,” she explains. “We go on saying ‘no’ until something makes us say ‘yes.’” Both women live nearby, in the Delaware River Valley, where they met shortly before Hirsheimer co-founded Saveur in 1994. Twenty-five years into their friendship, the two communicate intuitively, conserving words and finishing each other’s sentences as they talk about how food should be cooked, seen,…

12 min

SAVEUR|Winter 2019

NOTES FROM THE TEST KITCHEN

The Surprising Versatility of Juniper THE BERRIES OF THIS EVERGREEN LEND FLAVOR TO A LOT MORE THAN GIN AND GENEVER THE LAST TIME YOU EXPERIENCED THE PINEY, citrusy flavor of juniper was likely on the business end of a dry martini (see “Genever Is the Original Juniper Spirit,” p. 25). But the conifer’s fragrant fruit (botanically closer to a tiny, dense pine cone) pops up all across Europe in non-alcoholic fare, too. The berries are a key ingredient in choucroute garnie, that hearty Alsatian braise of sauerkraut and pork. Juniper’s used to coat the outside of cheeses, including Italy’s Pecorino Ginepro and Corsica’s fleur du maquis. And we’ve discovered that a few berries add a lovely kick to cranberry sauce—just be sure to strain them out before serving, as they’re…

8 min