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 of The 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.

After years of stopping at Briar Lane on the side of the road in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and stocking up on Marjorie Wiles Sayre’s homemade jellies and preserves—treats for the winter, gifts for friends and co-workers—it was time, finally, to try our hand at making beach plum jelly. Because this summer, the sulky Prunus maritima blossomed like some 17 year locust of the plant kingdom: beach plums were everywhere. I’d always been on the lookout for them, during bike rides along the back roads of Truro and Wellfleet and while walking through the scrubby meadows leading up to the dunes. And once in a while I would spot a plant bearing a fruit or two, though usually there was already someone else there, squatting alongside with a pail.

Not this year. This year was an efflorescence of beach plums. Plums along the walk to Brush Hollow. Plums along the roads. Plums in people’s yards. They were sweet, too, when fully ripened, purple and yielding to the touch, and with their thick skins reminiscent of wild grapes except spicier, with a complex sweet-tartness. And a rather large pit.

The beach plum is about the size of a cherry, a close relative in the large Prunus family, and it grows along the eastern seaboard from New England to Virginia. Giovanni da Varrazano made the first European observation of the beach plum. Records of settlers harvesting the beach plum go back to the early 1600s. But though efforts have been made over the years to cultivate it—in the 1930s, Ocean Spray, a name synonymous with another fruit associated with New England, the cranberry, actually had a beach plum product on the market—the beach plum resists. Here’s a perfect explanation, quoted in Waverly Root’s Food:

Beach-plum jelly brings handsome prices, but it is almost always scarce because the recalcitrant bushes have baffled all efforts to grow them commercially. Cultivation seems to offend them. When planted in rich, well-fertilized soil, they grow tall but produce hardly any fruit. Even when planted in the poor sandy soil that they seem to prefer, they sulk in captivity. Apparently they need the stress and adversity that is inseparable from life at the shore.

We picked sandwich bags full of plums and decided to follow the simplest of jelly recipes in Elizabeth Post Mirel’s Plum Crazy, a wonderfully single-minded book. She called for no added pectin if the plums came from dry sandy soil, as ours did, and if the fruits were—as ours were—of varying degrees of ripeness. Alas, the jelly never jelled, leaving us with an overly sweet beach plum syrup. On the other hand, we did make a shrub, which is a very old-fashioned fruit and vinegar beverage. More on that later.

Ace gave me this can of this intriguing spice on Valentines Day. It was part of a red-themed cooking gift, nestled in a beautiful lipstick red Creuset gratin dish, and it stood out with its bold graphics. It’s yet another example of the pepper’s amazing complexity and diversity. Espelette is the name of a village—technically a commune—in the French Pyrennees, and piment d’espelette is the pepper raised in villages in and around the region, then hung out to dry in the sun in late summer. The Basque use it in place of black pepper, lending its piquant character to Piperade and using it in the curing of local Bayonne hams. Pimenton d’espelette has a dusky, lively aroma. There’s a bit of heat, about the same as paprika, and a bit of smoke. It’s zesty, but with a lovely darkness that adds an interesting depth to its flavor. Perhaps it’s that ancient Iberian sun. Lately we’ve been using it to flavor gazpacho. We make a simple, breadless gazpacho: start with three pounds or so of ripe tomatoes, plus a cucumber (peeled and seeded), a green or red pepper, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, few tablespoons of olive oil, 1-2 tsp sherry vinegar, a tsp of piment d’espelette, and salt to taste. Also a pinch of cayenne if you want the heat. Chop coarsely, blend it all, taste, adjust seasonings, and allow to chill. If it’s too thick you can thin with water or tomato juice. It gets increasingly garlicky with each hour.

It was one of those mornings that was threatening to turn into one of those days: grey, cool, the air filled with a soft middling rain. A day perfect for chowder. We scoured a few of the many cookbooks in the Pease House library and cobbled together what sounded like a simple, pure path to chowderness. Step one: gather ye clams. We gathered ours at Hatch’s in Wellfleet, seven pounds split between Littlenecks (the perceptibly smaller) and Cherrystones (the bigger ones).

Step two: scrub clams to remove grit. Enlisted daughter to do this. Seven pounds of clams took her so long, she said, it gave “her hands a headache.” But kudos to her: our chowder had almost no grit in it.

Step three: steam open the clams in simmering water, pulling each out as it opens. Once all the clams are finished, reserve liquid which is now a delicious broth. (When pouring off into a container, hold back the last tablespoon or two in the ongoing interest of grit control.)

Step four: bacon. Then onions.
Step five: Meanwhile, you’ve diced a cup or so of boiling potatoes like red bliss, and have herbs ready—a bay leaf, fresh thyme from the garden (well, if you’re lucky), and, for later, fresh parsley. So after your bacon and onions are cooked, add potatoes, thyme and bay leaf, reserved broth—bolster with additional clam broth or water to make five cups—and cook until potatoes are soft.

Step six: add the cooked shucked clams after giving them a course chop. I prefer meaty pieces, but there was some grumbling that the clams were too large.

Use your judgment. Step seven: add a cup of heavy cream and cook over a medium-low flame until the soup is warmed through. Garnish with minced parsley, freshly ground pepper, and oyster crackers. Take advantage of the day’s rain to have a nice nap afterward, assured that when you wake up the day will have improved and it’s time for the beach.

We eat salads 365 days a year, though too often of the hardy, supermarket lettuce variety. This winter, poring over The Cook’s Garden seed catalog, I was seduced by its description of “buttery, deep-green, velvet-leaved” Bistro Corn Salad listed among the Reader’s Favorites section.  Corn salad is called mâche in Europe and on most restaurant menus—this way diners won’t expect to find corn in their salad—and gourmet food shops, where the diminutive, rosette-shaped plant is sold with its roots and a moist clod of dirt attached. Other names for corn salad—and perhaps this is a rare case where the latin name is helpful, Valerianella locusta—are lambs’ tongue and lambs’ lettuce, because of the leaf’s shape; field salad, for the same reason it’s called corn salad, because of where it grows wild, next to the grains; and, by the French, doucette, an endearing epithet which translates as ”tiny sweet one.”

Most cookbooks advise treating mâche simply—a light dressing with walnut oil and squeeze of lemon or few drops of sherry vinegar. The advice is worth paying attention to. I dressed our first mâche salad with too heavy a hand; it tasted sharply of salt, champagne vinegar, and roasted walnut oil—all good flavors in and of themselves, but overpowering to the delicate leaves it was meant to complement. Essentially, the underlying leaf flavor was bland greenness. But then again, that’s how it’s been tasting when picked and eaten straight from the garden. Perhaps we’re eating it too late, our palates already attuned to delicious spring greens, or perhaps this batch just didn’t develop the nuttiness for which good mâche is celebrated.

Peas are one of those foods that, it is strongly advised, must spend as little time as possible between harvesting and eating. Which means growing them yourself if at all possible—there’s no shorter distance to the kitchen then from your own garden. Last year the rabbits wreaked havoc on our pea plants, but this year the small crop thrived:

Thrived, but, before we knew it, peaked. Peaked and then turned the corner. I watched them daily for several weeks, from the time the white flowers appeared, to the first pods, almost translucent, and the delicate vines, aka, wizard’s whiskers, curling and twisting with a pure garden lyricism, sampling a few of the sweet baby peas along the way, encouraging them to grow. Watched, and waited, and, well, waited too long.

The peas in the upper upper photo—peas that are firm, plump, tender, smooth, bursting with natural sweet pea-ness—came from the Montclair-Bloomfield CSA, part of the first delivery. So they didn’t exactly hop twenty feet from the garden, but traveled about forty miles and a full day in time.

They were shucked that same evening, put in a pot with a knob of butter and cooked with the lid on, and a few minutes later were devoured in all their deliciousness, including by a child who eats almost nothing new.

But our peas, sadly, failed. Or were failed by us, by me in particular. If they looked good last weekend, I thought, they would be even better this weekend. Full of anticipation, I picked them on Friday evening. The vines were thick with peapods. We expected a feast: pick half now, the other half on Sunday, gorge ourselves both nights. One look at the plants told the story, though I didn’t want to see it. The pods were tight, the plants appeared shrunken, the vines no longer reached out for the next level on the trellis. I tried to imagine that the pods swollen with ripeness, but they were stretched with over-ripeness, the peas inside starchy and bitter. The photo below shows Sunday’s allotment: so abundant, and so deceptive. Look close, and you can see it in how the pods are ridged, the hard little marbles within straining to burst free. What a different a week makes.

One of the unwelcome side effects of writing a book about guitars is not having much time to play the guitar. And one of the cruel lessons of this is to discover that no, folks, playing the guitar is not like riding a bike. (Please: if anyone convincingly disagrees, would love to hear from you.)

A few weeks ago I called up a friend, a teacher and professional musician and occasional drinking buddy, to come over to play. In the years that he’s given me lessons, we’d gone through three notebooks of material and many bottles of single malt. In the last year or two, though, we’ve hardly gotten together. It was always because of “the book.” Well, the book’s out, and so there we were, trying to pick it up. Not easy. First I asked him if he knew “Spike Driver’s Blues,” a Mississippi John Hurt song that’s been stuck in my head for a while. He didn’t, but with a skill that still seems magical to me, he started listening to it on my iPod and within a minute or two started playing what he was hearing. Then he chuckled. You know, he said, it’s just one chord. Great: I couldn’t figure out a song with just one chord. Granted, because it was a speeded up old recording, my friend had to play it in A flat with a capo on the first fret, so that could partly explain why I had trouble. But really, to be defeated by a song entirely in first-position G?

Next we played “Stormy Monday,” which I still knew by heart. That went ok until, as always, it was my turn to take the solo. I froze and fumbled and fell out of key again and again. It’s a completely humbling experience, and I can only imagine that this is what toddlers feel like when they’re starting to walk. Except they’re not painfully self-conscious. They just get up and plow on. I plow on and, well, you don’t want to hear it. The next morning, I found myself humming some great riffs to the song, and it occurred to me: why is it so hard to listen and play at the same time? and why, with a guitar in my hand, do I cut off instead of tap into whatever music is inside me? (Again: anyone having the same problem — or knows the solution — please write.)

After “Stormy Monday,” my friend suggested we go through the notebooks and just pick out stuff we both like to play, kind of a review. “Here Comes the Sun.” “Freight Train.” “Romanza.” “Delia” in drop D. The Jorma version of “I Know You Rider.” On and on. What’s interesting is that the notebooks show a cyclic progression. I knew enough when we originally started out that we didn’t have to start at the beginning, and my progress with him must have been pretty quick, because just a few pages into the first book were jazz standards like “Summertime” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” But it was also very clear where we pushed too hard. For example, following several arrangements from the album Kind of Blue is really easy fingerstyle stuff like “My Creole Belle.” A later page gives his hand-written formula for creating complex chords like 11ths and 13ths, followed by “Honey Pie,” a funky blues in E. Your basic advance and retreat.

And then, in the third notebook, about a quarter of the way in, is my teacher’s brilliant arrangement of “Here, There, and Everywhere.” This showed up just before work on the book took over, and though I’ve played it at least a hundred times while sight-reading, I’ve never been able to get smoothly past the middle section, and I’ve never been able to memorize it. Is it just this song, or the end of the road? Will I ever get back to my pre-book chops, whatever they were? Even more discouraging, the piece before it is a chord solo arrangement for “Moonglow.” It wasn’t all that long ago that I would have been able to read and play that piece. Now, I can’t. I’m stuck on “Here, There, and Everywhere.”

Which feels like nowhere.

This work of art was the centerpiece for a Guitars toast at the publisher’s offices. It’s an amazing piece of baking: a double-thick layer cake (from scratch!), iced with mahogany-colored frosting, and decorated with meticulous attention to detail. An edible photo of the author graces the soundhole; took it home for the kids to eat. (No Oedipal references, thank you very much.) But check out the “dots” that serve as bridge posts, the spaghetti strings, the licorice tuning posts, and, most imaginative, tuning pegs fashioned out of softened Tootsie Rolls. All made by hand by Carolan Workman. And you know what, it was DELICIOUS.

THANK YOU!

A friend writes:

The idea of a guitar under a spotlight being photographed brought to mind a very special memory of mine. After a show in Easton, Pa., Willie Nelson was greeting friends back stage. There were the usual fans who had won the opportunity from a radio station, friends of friends, some relatives, Randall Tex Cobb, and the executives from the Martin Guitar Co. who were there trying to “recreate” or maybe even duplicate Willie’s Trigger.

Now, those of us who have been to many Willie concerts, and have been backstage and on the bus, know that the minute Willie finishes playing, Trigger is whisked off, put into a special case and guarded. Not this night.

I remember being backstage watching Willie so graciously signing everything from bandannas to old records that were handed to him by the adoring fans. He was off to the side, because, sitting in the center of the stage, on a little guitar stand (like the one in our music room holding my son’s guitar) was Trigger. The spotlights were on it. The men from Martin were busy photographing it. If anyone was guarding it, I couldn’t tell because I got really close to it and took pictures also. Finally, my turn with Willie came so we asked him what was going on.

He said that the guys from Martin were trying to duplicate Trigger and they were wondering how, after all these years, it managed to sound so good with that dang hole in it. I don’t remember if Martin tried to duplicate the guitar with the hole or not, and I don’t know if they ever did. I do know that Willie had one eye on Trigger and the other on the things he was signing. I think there was a grand photo session with Willie and the guitar etc. But sharpest in my memory was that of a lone guitar sitting there with the spotlight shining on it and me thinking of how Willie had just been entertaining us with it and how he can make that baby sing, especially 1/2 hour into the show and beyond. Anyone who has ever heard Willie live will know this fact. He is an awesome guitar picker!

Guitars are shiny and curvy and difficult to photograph well. Even the old ones have enough gloss to create unexpected glare and hotspots. But then again, that’s what a good photographer is paid to do—manipulate light and shadow to make a beautiful image that pops on the page. Our job during photo shoots—and by “our” I’m referring to the book’s terrific photo editor, Leora Kahn, and myself—was a lot more physical, and for me, particularly, nerve-wracking.

On the one hand, you’re a kid in a candy store. This shoot (see image below) took place in the large, cluttered 19th century office of a stringed instrument dealer and guitar collector in Philadelphia. Against one long wall were antique mahogany and glass cases, and in the cases, two rows high, were dozens and dozens of classic Martins and Gibsons. Especially notable were his rare pre-war sunburst Martins; so rare and pristine, in fact, that the folks from Martin used his instruments to insure that the color of their sunburst reissues were historically accurate. So there you are, handling one priceless guitar after another. And sometimes, when the photographer needed a quick break to adjust a light or reload film (not everyone’s gone digital), you find a moment to sit and play. What a privilege.

On the other hand, you are suddenly responsible for millions of dollars worth of rosewood and spruce, picking out the instruments, wiping them down, waiting, one in each hand, for the next shot, angling around the furniture, the lighting stands, the white seamless backdrop, hustling to keep the schedule moving. As big as the office was, it was cramped before we arrived, and the crew plus equipment made it almost impossible to maneuver.

But the most trying moment of all was when the guitar was placed on its stand. Yes, the guitar stand would be silhouetted out in the production process. But because nothing could obscure the body, the stand we used for shooting was little more than a perch. And every guitar had to be perched just right. The second you felt it was stable, you held your breath and let go.

None of them fell. Or, I should say, none of them landed. The few guitars that tipped were caught. In every shot, there’s a hand not far off to the side, hovering like guardian angel—in this case, ready to catch a 1935 Martin 00-42.