About

I grew up in a small, working class town in Pennsylvania at a time when the culture of food was just starting to change. We measured summer by the height of the corn in surrounding fields, but for a special treat we ate at a shiny, strange new drive-in called McDonald’s where nickels and dimes, literally, bought a dinner of tasty little hamburgers wrapped in paper plus a bag of crispy salty french fries. Truck farmers still set up in the town’s center square on weekends, a milk man delivered milk in bottles along with eggs, fresh chickens, and, in the fall, sausages, and the local grocery stores with their creaky wooden floors kept skilled butchers on staff. Our town had one fish store—why was it always haddock?—and just one ethnic market, called Lupo’s, which served the large Italian population. Someone in our family learned that lupo meant wolf, so we called it Wolfie’s. It was a cramped storefront on a side street, and the main thing we bought was spaghetti which Wolfie sold loose out of wooden bins. The spaghetti was so long it had to be broken in half before boiling and, perhaps because of the intense pleasure it promised, I can still hear the sound it made as my mother cracked it over the pot.

We were a family with certain pretensions and among them was a dawning adventurousness in food. We were certain, for example, that we were the only non-Italian family to shop in Wolfie’s. Then sometime in the ‘60s my mother bought a copy ofThe New York Times Cookbook, undoubtedly from the Book-of-the-Month Club, and began cooking Beef Bourgignon, Chicken Cacciatore, Paella. She kept the foods of her childhood in the repertoire—apple fritters, pork and sauerkraut—but through the sophisticated guidance of Craig Claiborne, she reached out to France, Italy, Spain, China. My parents made friends with the worldly professors who taught at the local college, and their favorite other people were a Swiss couple, a fabric designer and a musician, marooned in Pennsylvania, who celebrated New Year’s Eve around around a bubbling pot of cheese fondue. My parents loved learning how to navigate the flirty rituals of lost bread cubes, or knowing that the crust of cheese that clings to the bottom of the pot is call the “religious,” i.e., the nun.

But really, this blog begins with those tall stalks of corn and silky ears that announced summer, with those butchers in the doomed mom-and-pop groceries, with Wolfie and his shop lit by one pane of sunlight as if in a Renaissance painting. It begins with the shad that came up the Delaware every spring, a fish that only fishermen ate. It begins with a magnificent smoked whole salmon that my best friend’s family received every year from colleagues in Seattle, and that took pride of place at their Christmas Eve open house. And it especially begins with tomatoes. Tomatoes were the local obsession. You need a lot of water to set the fruit, and then no water to starve it to full ripeness. Or is it the other way around? Do you stake or cage? And do you use metal, rumored to conduct mysterious beneficial currents, or superiorly neutral bamboo? At night my friends and I wandered the neighborhood and raided gardens, finding ripe tomatoes by feel and eating them whole like apples. Once we stumbled on the motherlode, something like three backyards connected into a tomato plantation. I still remember the rows of astonishing cherry tomatoes. They tasted sweeter than strawberries, and we descended on them like birds, a memory that, now that I garden, causes me to blush.

The thing is, as much as I loved my family’s aspirational tastes and put-on traditions like Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding for Christmas dinner, even at a young age I preferred a warm, whole, unadorned tomato still smelling of the vine. I can’t locate the moment when it began, this passion for foodness of food coupled with a deep curiosity for where it comes from and how to get it, but somehow, as I child, I knew where all the raspberry brambles were, I pulled sassafras roots and tried to boil them into tea, sauteed little wild field onions in butter, gathered mulberries, brought home trout and crayfish. I stalked the wild asparagus and treated my apprehensive family to lamb’s quarters and dandelion salad, and believed what Mark Twain said, though I never had a chance to pull it off: have your pot of water boiling at the edge of the field before you picked your corn. Later, I discovered that M.F.K. Fisher said the same about peas. Guess I was in good company.

An illness accelerated my food journey. Christmas was coming and my mother, recovering from a serious operation, was too weak to cook. So with hers and Mr. Claiborne’s help, I made the holiday dinner: the prime rib, the Yorkshire pudding (now nicknamed yorkies, and baked individually in muffin tins), the potatoes, the vegetable, the salad, all coming in on time, and all surprisingly delicious, the beef medium rare, the yorkies crisp on the outside and unctuously pudding-like within. From then on I cooked. Cooking was pleasure, cooking was love, cooking was competence, cooking was Zen.

Sometimes I’ve strayed as far afield as my mother, cooking ambitious, pretentious meals—a memorable low point was serving two surprised East Village neighbors plated filets of Dover sole napped in a cream sauce garnished with steamed mussels, shrimp, and crab meat—but I’ve never escaped the feeling, afterward, that the results do not justify the effort. It all seems so…fussy. The same is true, I think, for most restaurant meals. It’s the rare chef who can take it to a higher level without leaving you feeling warily impressed, overly sated, maybe a little duped.

The best meal I’ve had in years happened last summer over a two-burner Coleman stove on the porch of a friend’s cabin in Vermont. The friend, Yoav, an occasional Virgil to this blog, met me in Brattelboro. From there we went first to one of his dependable mushrooming spots to pick wild chanterelles, then returned to his garden where we dug up a potful of red bliss potatoes, so fresh they made a juicy cracking pop when halved with a knife. We cut garlic scapes from the garlic bed out back. There were two of his chickens, slaughtered and dressed earlier in the week, and I brought greens from our CSA, and, to keep us company, two bottles of an ancient-vines Spanish red grown in steep vineyards in Galicia once cultivated by Roman legions. By dusk everything was prepped and the first smells of garlic in olive oil began drifting through the air, and for the next three hours we cooked and ate.

When I think about why that meal stands out above so many others, all the reasons that come to mind settle into one simple, all-encompassing word: soul. The soul of the ingredients, coaxed to life through love. And nothing extraneous.

Food is art to artist-chefs who dazzle with ingenuity and brilliance. Food is product to the corporations who vie to feed us exclusively from birth to death. Food is identity to every homesick cook who plants a restaurant in a new land, and for everyone who eats there to taste the old country. Food is medicine and/or poison to doctors and diet faddists and lifestyle writers. Food is sport to all the competitive home cooks and wannabe iron chefs. Food, marvelous, protean food, is all of those things, and so much more. But too easily we lose sight of what food is first, and why we love it and why we need it, why it’s how we celebrate and how we remember, and how we mark ourselves, our children, our friends, our culture. Food is life, like us, and like us filled with soul, or not worth bothering about.

What’s the soul of a fresh-picked tomato? Like a Zen koan, the answer may be impossible to find in one lifetime—or as obvious as the little bit of juice running down your chin.