Joyce Kutty likes wicked sharp knives and catch-of-the-day dinners. 

As a child, the 33-year-old metalsmith learned to fish the waters off Point Judith, Rhode Island, and helped her mother prepare Tamil- and Malayali-style curries in their kitchen in East Providence. Now, after a stint crafting Harmony engagement rings for Tiffany & Co., Kutty has moved on to more utilitarian objects inspired by the ancestral housewares her father carried home after visits to family in Kerala, India: Hand-forged spice spoons, hammered thali bowls, nadan kathi knives, and koduval coconut cleavers.

Her own boning and filleting knives reference the same graceful curves of these more traditional South Asian blades. “Both my parents are from coastal states,” she says. “So we eat a mostly fish diet. Making knives that can carve into fish and the things we grow stems from the root of my culture and upbringing.” Providence chefs Scott LaChapelle of Pickerel and Robert Andreozzi of Pizza Marvin are fans of her designs (Andreozzi is her occasional fishing buddy). “Part of my practice is to get out on the ocean and harvest seaweed from secret fishing spots [to create] a saltwater patina on bowls.”

On days away from her studio, she rises before dawn to cast for bluefish, stripers, and bonito. Oily mackerel is a particular favorite for those family curry recipes, which mingle deeply oceanic flavors with the sting of chiles. With every fish she brings home, Kutty also slices off a little piece for crudo to taste its essence. And the ones that get away? “Some for us, some for others, some for next season.”

Recipes

Keralan Fish Curry

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Sri Lankan Fish Curry

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The post Meet the Knifemaker Inspired by South Asian and New England Fishing Traditions appeared first on Saveur.

The Pope didn’t invent Fish Fridays. But the practice did grow out of a tradition of fasting during the Middle Ages, when the Christian calendar was crammed with holy days requiring keepers of the faith to avoid eating meat, or three square meals altogether. Since then, the Catholic Church–as well as adjacent Christian faiths–have certainly spread the gospel about eating fish at the end of the week, leading to a multitude of fish-and-chip shops in the U.K. and annual firehall dinners in the Midwest. And it’s not all fried. In Jamaica, the most popular Easter week dish is an escovitch of king fish or snapper. Cape Town favors pickled fish curry with a side of hot cross buns. The Spanish introduced dried and salted cod to Ecuador, where it was added to fanesca, an indigenous vegetable soup, which is now almost exclusively reserved for meals during Lenten week.  

And then there are the special dispensations. In Louisiana, Cajuns have been known to argue whether the fried alligator bites at Middendorf’s count as fish after Mardi Gras. Last year, Boston’s Archbishop Seán Patrick O’Malley granted a Hail Mary for corned beef when the Feast of St. Patrick fell on a Friday during Lent. Other historical exceptions have included capybara in Venezuela, muskrat in Michigan, and beaver in Quebec. (To be fair, rodentia are pretty much off the menu these days.) We also have Fish Fridays to thank for the invention of McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish in 1962. (There’s a tempting joke to be made here about fasting for Lent and fast-food chain fish sandwiches, but we really don’t have to go there.)

Here are dishes from six chefs and cookbook authors around the world who celebrate the end of the week with their own fish traditions.

Blanquette de Poisson (Fish in Cream Sauce)

Amaury Bouhours
Chef, Restaurant Le Meurice, Paris, France

 “This dish is an accommodation for fish on Fridays,” says chef Amaury Bouhours, who oversees a palatial dining room in Paris, but remains rooted in cuisine de grand-mère, the simpler meals he learned from his 88-year-old grandmother, Simone. During Lent, Simone prepares a weekly fish dinner smothered in a creamy sauce with a distinct hint of nutmeg, at her home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb southwest of the city. A traditional blanquette, or white ragoût, usually accompanies veal or lamb, but her version is adapted for fasting days. Madame Bouhours pairs pollock and steamed rice with champignon de Paris, a variety of white button mushroom reportedly first cultivated at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV in the 17th century. The fillets are poached in a steamer basket or on a rack inserted above a “fait tout,” the everyday saucepan found in most French kitchens. “For my grandmother, rice is rice,” says Bouhours. “But I prefer basmati, because it blends well with the blanquette.” While the adults serve themselves from family-style platters at the table, Bouhours recalls that, during childhood, he and his brother mashed all the ingredients into a comforting porridge, even though “it doesn’t make the best presentation. But I still crave it this way.”

Get the recipe >

Baked Fish with Chermoula and Onion Farofa

Manoella “Manu” Buffara Ramos
Chef, Restaurante Manu, Curitiba, Brazil

Chef Manoella Buffara Ramos has an affectionate nickname, which she gave to her eponymous restaurant, Manu, in the southern Brazil city of Curitiba. She cooks for five tables a night, offering a plant-focused tasting menu that high-flying dinner guests cross oceans to eat. But she also belongs to Mulheres do Bem, a group of women chefs who prepare weekly lunches for houseless individuals. The mother of two young daughters, Buffara sources sea bass from coastal Brazil when she cooks for them at home. “This recipe holds a special place in our family, especially during the Lenten season,” she says. “My mother has always had a deep connection to the sea, tracing back to the years her family spent in Paranaguá, a coastal town in our state. As a result, fish dishes like this one are a staple in our household.”

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Udon Palabok

Abi Balingit
Author, Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed, Brooklyn, New York

Abi Balingit grew up eating pancit palabok, a Filipino noodle dish with a luscious shrimp sauce, at family celebrations. “This dish is meant to be shared with a lot of people. My auntie’s palabok was perfectly savory and super fragrant, with a fishiness I looked forward to smelling. She lived in SoCal, and we’d go visit, a six-hour drive from Stockton, on special occasions.” Balingit is better known for her inventive take on Filipino American desserts, and while baking remains her biggest passion, she recently started tinkering with favorite childhood dishes in her Brooklyn apartment. “Traditionally, palabok is made with thin rice noodles, but I love the chew and texture that you get from thicker udon. Adding salmon roe is like popping boba.” Her version is also topped with crunchy chili-lime chicharrones. “I grew up very Catholic. So on Fish Fridays, I’ll serve this for a party, but leave off the pork.”

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Caldo de Cabeza de Pescado con Chochoyotes (Fish Head Soup with Masa Dumplings)

Obed Vallejo
Chef, Maíz de la Vida, Nashville, Tennessee

Born in Yucatán, chef Obed Vallejo moved to Florida as a kid. His grandfather had a cattle ranch there, so he dreamed of being a cowboy, but seafood has remained a favorite family meal. (Not surprisingly, he’s in charge of developing the fish program at Maíz de la Vida in Nashville.) “My parents were Seventh Day Adventists, so they did fish on Friday, usually something brothy to start the Sabbath, a special once-a-week meal.” His mother, Beatriz Contreras Xan, was a frugal cook, but could work magic with modest ingredients, creating a soup out of nothing more than tilapia heads and bones. “This was a struggle meal,” he says. “It represents to me that even though we didn’t have a whole fish, my mother was in effect making fumet [concentrated fish stock], literally taking trash and turning it into something beautiful.” Vallejo stays true to what his mother taught, and pairs his broth with traditional chochoyotes (dumplings) of fried fish bones crushed to a paste and mixed with masa. “If you don’t like fried bones, you’re missing out.”   

Get the recipe >

Hong Shao Yu (Red-Cooked Fish)

Tony Tan
Author, Hong Kong Food City, Melbourne, Australia

One of Australia’s revered experts on Southeast Asian cooking, Tony Tan says he grew up in Pahang, Malaysia with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt. “Eating fish on Friday only came into being when I was baptized at Catholic school. My parents were Buddhists with Taoist elements thrown in for good measure. They didn’t quite get me, but went along with my faith so long as I went along with ancestral worship.” Tan’s mother, Lim Heng Kiow, worked as the cook at one of their family’s group of hotels, which catered to British colonials until Malaysia gained independence in 1957. He remembers the dishes she prepared for both guests and family, including a spice-infused meen molee, or fish curry, introduced from Kerala. “She used to call it woo molee, because woo means fish in Hainanese.” One of his Friday favorites, which he still prepares at his cooking school in a suburb of Melbourne, is her cinnamon and anise-infused hong shao yu, whole fish braised in a red sauce. “As an eight-year-old, I couldn’t connect why we could eat fish but not meat. My godparents told me it was a form of penance for the sins we commit. But in all honesty, eating fish, in my opinion, was delicious. What is the sin in this?”

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Grilled Catfish with Beurre Blanc and Maque Choux

David Guas
Chef, Bayou Bakery, Arlington, Virginia

When he was 10 years old, chef David Guas was given an Ugly Stik fishing rod, and at every chance, he sneaked off to drop a line in Lake Willow, just outside New Orleans, where he used grass shrimp as bait for bass, and day-old Bunny Bread for perch. “You could put anything on a hook for a perch, and it would bite,” he says. “Bless my mom, as I would come home with 30 perch in a massive bucket probably three times a week. She scaled, cleaned, and took the heads off, then fried them. It was my first real experience harvesting fish and then eating them.” Playing hooky during childhood was the genesis of his advocacy for sustainable seafood, both on the Gulf Coast back home, and now extending to the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, where he sources wild blue catfish to serve at his restaurant in Northern Virginia. “Blue catfish are an invasive species and incredibly destructive. They taste like blue crab, as that is what they feast on. And what is Maryland known for but their crabs?” Guas, who bakes thousands of king cakes for Mardi Gras, pays homage to his Cajun upbringing when he serves shrimp jambalaya, a crawfish boil, or grilled catfish fillets as Friday specials.

Get the recipe >

The post Fish Friday Around the World appeared first on Saveur.

Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone.

“I save all my scraps,” says textile artist Chantal Galipeau. “Collect them at yard sales, thrift shops, and get tons of donations from people’s closets.” In 2015, Galipeau received a fine arts degree from the Pratt Institute, where she minored in sustainability practices. At the time, she wasn’t sure how that would translate into a career, but Galipeau did know she liked to mend things. “As a broke college student, I couldn’t afford nice fabric, but then fashion upcycling started to take off, and as we all know, there’s so much textile waste in the world.”

She took the scraps and deadstock she collected, and by stitching whimsical motifs onto vintage garments or thrift store finds, turned them into one-of-a-kind pieces. When she posted them on Instagram, Galipeau’s reimagined clothes, from a sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “Oysters” to a button-down adorned with wine glasses, quickly sold out, and custom commissions poured in. On her website, she states: “The process may include patching holes, covering stains or hiding the team logo on the front of a crewneck. The hope is to inspire us to care more for our clothing, while offering a solution for the pieces we no longer love. It’s up to us to take care of each other, and the spaces we inhabit.” Word then spread from loyal customers to some chefs in Providence, Rhode Island, where she now lives, and that’s how Galipeau met Pickerel owner Scott LaChapelle, who didn’t want to toss out a tattered but treasured pair of Japanese selvedge denim jeans.

A new kitchen apron was born.

We already know about food waste solutions—both fine dining restaurants and fast food chains have hyped virtuous policies to cut down on trash, including biofuel reuse, composting, soup kitchen donations, and sharing scraps with livestock farmers. Some conscientious snack food companies seek certification for qualifying products from the Upcycled Food Association. Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns has been a particularly vocal advocate of “rescued” ingredients and zero-waste kitchens. He has even doubled down by collaborating with ceramic artist Gregg Moore, who upcycled the femurs of grass-fed cattle raised specifically for Blue Hill, transforming shards into phenomenal bone china serving pieces. Moore also ground up broken and chipped china from Barber’s dining room and created new dinner plates, an elegant expression of circular economy theory driving regenerative culinary projects. But what about the food world’s other waste streams? 

Namely, where do all those stained bar towels go to die?

The amount of clothing and other non-durable goods dumped in landfills was last estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency to be about 17 million tons annually. Worn out staff uniforms, table linens, aprons, wipes, mop heads, drainage and safety floor mats are part of that trash pile. But it doesn’t all have to wind up there. Surprisingly, McDonald’s and Subway have been early adopters in the U.K., commissioning “closed-loop” uniforms made with recycled fibers and plastics. (Closed-loop systems use discarded materials that wind up in new products, keeping textiles in circulation for as long as possible.) Cintas, one of the largest workwear apparel manufacturers supplying the restaurant sector, has partnered with Leigh Fibers, a textile waste and reprocessing company, to create a recycling program for out-of-service gear here in the States.

Then, there are micro-initiatives like those by Galipeau and LaChapelle.

“There is such a high standard for sanitizing things in restaurants, that’s why so many are pressured to have a linen service,” says LaChapelle. “But we’re so small, and don’t have an apron service. We tend to our own, and make sure they’re clean. Another chef has an apron from Chantal, too. We’re trying to cut down on the waste that way.” Major restaurant groups typically resort to professional rental services that collect dirty linens and deliver freshly laundered ones in their place. It’s a costly aspect of doing business for young restaurateurs starting out, and the white-tablecloth aesthetic may not match their dining concept. LaChapelle began his career working in a pizza shop, where his boss insisted on leasing cheap polyester-nylon aprons. He hated them. When LaChapelle opened Pickerel, his 21-seat noodle bar in Providence’s Luongo Square, he finally got to wear whatever he wanted.

“I had these old jeans and wanted to do something with them,” he says. “A pair of Samurai that I bought on a trip to Osaka. I spent so much time breaking them in from brand new, when they were so stiff they could stand up on their own. It seemed a shame to just toss something like that.”

He commissioned Galipeau to give them another life.

“Every piece of mine is one of a kind,” she explains. “Or produced in small quantities. I asked him, ‘What do you need in your daily life, and what could we do to repurpose this, so you don’t have to part with those beautiful jeans?’”

Galipeau re-cut the fabric, mended and patched holes, added pockets for LaChapelle’s essential tools, which include a Sharpie and a tasting spoon, and backed the reclaimed denim with deadstock canvas. “He wears it all the time,” she says.

“For a second project, Chantal just made me a knife roll,” says LaChapelle.

If you need a pair of tattered denim reimagined for your kitchen, Galipeau might be your gal.

Please consider using a recycling service like Retold to dispose of your own worn out kitchen textiles.

The post How to Save the Planet, One Apron at a Time appeared first on Saveur.

Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone. ​

“This is food that’s nourishing, but also spiritually supportive,” says chef Ben Jacobs, who this fall started Seed to Soul, a ready-to-eat meal program for Native American communities. A member of the Osage Nation, Jacobs co-owns Tocabe, a fast-casual restaurant serving an Indigenous menu of ethically sourced ingredients in Denver. In May, he and his partner Matt Chandra converted their second restaurant location into a production facility for an online Indigenous Marketplace venture and a direct-to-tribe “food as medicine” nonprofit that delivers traditional nutrients—bison, manoomin (wild rice), tepary beans, blue corn mush, wojapi (berry sauce)—to people who consider these foods an intrinsic aspect of their cultural heritage. Jacobs explains this initiative was born from a frustration with major corporate donations provided to tribes, food he describes as “usually lower quality, at the tail end of its shelf life.” Truckloads of junk food, or supermarket produce verging on spoilage. “It’s perceived as dumping trash into a community. Instead, we’re providing something that’s meaningful and comes from other Native hands.”

Jacobs’s intent is to rebuild Native pantries in rural settings where groceries, especially those that sell fresh and traditional foods, are far and few between. At the same time, he wants to contribute to a sustainable supply chain of tribal producers, farmers, and ranchers. Seed to Soul partners with a cohort of notable purveyors across North America, familiarly known as Turtle Island, like Sakari Farms in Oregon, Séka Hills in California, Navajo Mike’s in Arizona, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Farm and Ranch in Colorado. Tocabe has also teamed with Red Lake Nation Foods in Minnesota to invest in Arctic Circle Wild Seafood, a Native company that supplies wild-caught salmon out of the Iñupiat trading village of Kotzebue, Alaska.

Food sovereignty remains tenuous for many in Indian Country, particularly among elders, who are at greater risk for developing diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure. The ancestral diet, which contained more complex carbs and fewer fats, centered on whole grains, squash and beans, and wild fish and game. This was before first contact with European colonizers, forced assimilation and relocation to reservations, and intentionally destructive practices by the federal government to eliminate customary food sources. Consider the bison. Slaughtered to the verge of extinction by the late 19^th century, a tactic condoned by the U.S. Army as a means of eradicating the “Indian commissary.” Crow Nation chief Alaxchiiaahush (1848-1932) said: “When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere.”

But the buffalo did come back. To be precise, “buffalo” is a loan word introduced by Europeans; the American bison is a distinct bovine species. Alaxchiiaahush most likely would have used the Apsáalooke word bišée. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns recently traced its history and recovery for his new PBS series The American Buffalo. Jacobs now sources bison for Tocabe from Cheyenne River Buffalo in Mobridge, South Dakota. The Sioux-owned ranch is a regular stop on monthly delivery runs north from Denver, when Seed to Soul meals are dropped off at the Spirit Lake Dakota Reservation. “Bison is synonymous with the Plains tribes,” says Mary Greene, director of the reservation’s food distribution program. “All of its parts were used in multifaceted ways.” About 7,500 enrolled tribal members reside on Spirit Lake land, which encompasses approximately 405 square miles. The North Dakota reservation has only two convenience stores, and a grocery connected to its casino. The nearest big-box store is a 120-mile drive, one-way, from the tribe’s most populous town. “We’re very isolated here,” says Greene. “And it gets tougher in winter. Having traditional heat-and-eat food is a great resource, especially for our elders.” Greene applied for a local food purchasing grant through the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, which allowed her to bring donations from Jacobs and Chandra to the table at the beginning of this year, and now that Seed to Soul has launched, her community receives over 1,000 prepared meals a month. “Any opportunity to offer additional sustenance is a bonus for our community. It helps out those most in need,” says Greene, who first met Jacobs and Chandra after stopping in for a meal with friends at Tocabe in Denver. “Ben and Matt are outside-the-box thinkers.”

Seed to Soul is already widening its reach. In January, meals will be delivered to the Denver Indian Center and pantry goods to the Osage Nation, in partnership with Oklahoma State University’s Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy. According to Jacobs, the two most popular prepared dishes sent out as donations are his Sonoran Bowl—a creamy blend of wheat berries and tepary beans, Navajo-grown pinto beans, squash, and fire-roasted green chili nopales—and his Posu Bowl, with purple sweet potatoes, Great Northern beans, fire-roasted corn, and Red Lake wild rice. (Posu means wild grass in the Osage language.) Both are paired with slow-braised bison meat, the exact same portion offered to Tocabe customers.

Sharing that generously is good for the soul.

Contributions to Seed to Soul are funded through Tocabe’s Indigenous Marketplace. The more products you buy, the more the nonprofit can donate. Also please consider supporting two new cookbooks by Native American chefs this season: Loretta Barrett Oden’s Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine and Lois Ellen Frank’s Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky: Modern Plant-Based Recipes Using Native American Ingredients.

The post Why Osage Chef Ben Jacobs Launched a Direct-to-Tribe Meal Delivery Service appeared first on Saveur.

The weather gods have not been kind to the Hudson Valley this summer. Waterways flooded, roofs ripped off, trees downed, crops flattened. Radar maps splashed with streaks of red like tomato sauce stains on an apron. Some people might be tempted to quit; then again, what is it they say about farmers being the ultimate optimists? It requires a certain resilience to grow what is meaningful to a place, let alone create a prize-winning whisky that is finally about to receive a designation of origin from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Tax and Trade Bureau. It’s the kind of game-changer that might give the old guard of the brown spirits world restless nights.

On sunnier days while driving down certain winding stretches of New York State’s Taconic Parkway, the Berkshires heave into view to the east, and then a few miles farther down the road, the Catskills appear across the Hudson, where the westerly peaks turn purple in the low light of dusk. This almost absurdly romantic backdrop enraptured mid-19^th-century landscape painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, and spawned an art movement known as the Hudson River School.

Since childhood, the vista has always caught my breath. The temperate valley between these two old mountain ranges certainly catches rain clouds. The region has a long history of agriculture, dating back to early Dutch settlements in the 1660s, with first crops like wheat and rye, hops and barley, grapes and apples. An obvious byproduct was booze: applejack, hard cider, brown spirits, beer. A wealthy brewer founded the college I attended in Poughkeepsie—on Founder’s Day every year, it was customary for the president of Vassar to chug a pitcher of beer, although I hear the practice has since gone out of vogue. (Shall we say the legal drinking age was lower back then?) More recently, with the passage of state liquor laws that incentivized microbrewers and distillers to launch projects here, the Hudson Valley has seen a new boom in production of small batch beverages.

“Our whiskies and beers taste like here,” said Dennis Nesel, owner of Hudson Valley Malt, based in Germantown. A retired financial adviser with a grizzled goatee, he now favors overalls and wields an old-fashioned malt rake. “We call it re-localization. There was a time when the grains were grown here and shipped downriver by sloop, but after Prohibition all that stuff moved West, so we’re bringing it back, trying to make the supply chain grown here, harvested here, distilled here.”

That aspiration has shaped a three-way collaboration. The others include a third-generation farmer, as well as one of the newest distilleries in a pocket valley near the Massachusetts border, where the family behind Tenmile Distillery is gambling on a rising demand for American single-malt whisky. Note: no “e.” We’re not talking bourbon or rye, but closer in spirit to uisge beatha, Scotland’s original water of life.

A few weeks before the valley was swamped with torrential rains, I climbed into a utility truck with farmer Ken Migliorelli to look at one of his fields planted with winter Scala barley. “We’re about a week away from harvesting,” he said, as we parked along the rural road near his crop outside the town of Tivoli. It’s a pretty grass, with a spiky seed head on a long stem that turns from emerald green to platinum blonde as it dries in the sun. Migliorelli took to farming when he was a teenager, and eventually expanded his family’s vegetable business, adding a fruit orchard, farm stands, and weekly market stalls, including Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. He still grows the same variety of broccoli rabe his grandparents brought over when they emigrated from the Lazio region of Italy in the 1930s. Citing the new demand for spirit grains, the 63-year-old farmer has almost 350 acres of barley and another 50 acres of rye in cultivation, despite the challenges he faces growing these crops in the Hudson Valley.

“In 2021, that was a rough July,” he said. “It just started raining and wouldn’t stop. I lost the barley that we were combining because it pre-germinated out in the field. I could only sell it for animal feed.”

The vagaries of weather are a standard risk for any farmer; however, this spring a half-acre barn went up in a blaze, and Migliorelli lost 15 tons of barley, hay, tomato stakes, and a lot of equipment. His neighbors and loyal customers launched a fundraiser to help rebuild. He gazed out at his waves of grain, undaunted. For him, it’s one crop out of dozens during a year that starts with tender greens and crescendos with apple picking season.

When harvested, Migiolrelli’s grain heads to the malt house, less than ten miles away, for the next step in the process. “It’s a pretty tight circle from here to Dennis, and then down to Tenmile,” he said.

On a good day at Hudson Valley Malt, Nesel and his wife Jeanette Spaeth load 6,000 pounds of malted barley, rye, or wheat into a kiln. By hand. That’s the last step after the raw grain has been steeped and raked in a thin layer on a smooth concrete floor to germinate and develop the sugars that will convert to alcohol. “Floor malting is a craft and an art,” he said. “We do it old school, the way it was done in the 1850s. It’s definitely not glory work.”

Nesel and Spaeth both grew up in the Hudson Valley. After retiring from corporate life, they decided to convert their horse barn instead of downsizing. In 2015, they recognized that area distillers needed a local malting operation. (They have a hopyard as well.) “It would be too easy to go south, but we’re not snowbirds,” he said. “I was looking for a way for our farm to be more sustainable.”

The turnoff for Tenmile Distillery is a shunpike called Sinpatch. An apparent allusion to the area’s checkered past, it leads to the repurposed barn complex with a tasting room and a dining patio next to a parked vintage Airstream that belongs to Westerly Canteen, a restaurant popup serving a seasonal snack menu sourced from Hudson Valley producers. While in residence, chefs Molly Levine and Alex Kaindl celebrate summer with floral infusions, delicate crudos, and heirloom vegetables. In addition, chef Eliza Glaister of Little Egg favors wild game for her popups and occasional private tasting dinners.

When the couple delivers a load of malt, Tenmile’s master distiller Shane Fraser takes over. He walked me into the darkened cask warehouse where his single malt rests in French oak barrels that once held sherry, bourbon, and California pinot noir. (Tenmile founder John Dyson, who formerly served as New York State’s agricultural commissioner, also owns Williams Selyem Winery in Healdsburg.) Born in Aberdeen, Fraser learned his trade at several marquee distilleries, including Royal Lochnagar and Oban, before taking on the lead role at Wolfburn, a startup in the far north. Almost no one who achieves the elevated title of master distiller leaves the job security of his peat-and-heather homeland, but Tenmile presented Fraser with a challenge almost unheard of back in Scotland: creating a new brand of single malt. His first batch of fresh New Make—what we call moonshine or white dog—was barreled in January 2020. He also experimented with unorthodox cask woods, including smaller Italian cherry and chestnut barrels typically used for aging balsamic vinegars, because regulations remain fluid in the States for now. Fraser patted one on a rack. “That’s the thing with the new designation,” he said. “You have to be careful to make sure that it will be defined as American single malt. Because when those rules come out, you can’t use cherry.”

Currently, single malt producers in the States number fewer than 100, which means it’s still an exclusive club, but not the stuffy kind full of tufted leather chairs and cigar smoke. Establishing a formal standard of identity, and having that recognized at the federal level, will give distilleries here a better chance to compete against the global establishment. Single malt no longer means it has to taste like a burned-over bog.

Fraser pointed out another 140 acres of Ken Migliorelli’s ripening spring barley planted beyond a formal apple orchard and beehives. Then we entered the whitewashed brick dairy, where copper stills imported from Scotland have been installed behind a glass curtain wall in the converted great room. The bar, at the opposite end, has a full cocktail program designed around the distillery’s gin, vodka, and whisky.

Fraser and I sat down in the wood-paneled tasting room, and he poured a cask strength dram of Little Rest, Tenmile’s first edition bottling, into my tumbler.

We lifted glasses to our noses.

“I get tropical fruits coming through,” he said. “Some chocolate notes, and once it sits awhile on the tongue, there’s a bit of spice, almost like cinnamon. Every time you go back to it, you smell something different, because it’s so young and still got a bit of life to it. Some of the older whiskies, when you smell them, it’s like, well, whisky.”

I took a sip.

The Little Rest was released this April, after three years and a day in barrels, the minimum to be officially characterized as whisky. Comparably light in style, more like a subtle Speyside than a peaty Islay.

“You can see what a little rest does,” said Fraser.

He told me that someone else compared the flavor to a green Jolly Rancher, and sure enough, it did have a perky apple note. 

Rain or shine, it tasted like home.

Recipe

Paper Plane

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Clover Club Cocktail

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Tuna Crudo with Chamomile Oil, Cucumber Salad, and Pea Shoots

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Braised Rabbit with Pan-Fried Radishes and Creamy Polenta

Get the recipe >

The post Our New Favorite Single Malt Whisky Comes From … New York? appeared first on Saveur.

“I spent so much time in my grandmother’s kitchen growing up,” said Charleston, South Carolina-based chef Amethyst Ganaway. “A lot of it was out of necessity, but I was also a greedy kid. She taught me how to make the ‘for real’ shrimp-and-grits, and my great-granny Adele’s coveted banana pudding from scratch, sitting and stirring the damn custard on the stove.”

On a recent spring day during the Charleston Wine + Food Festival, Ganaway stood next to another stove, in a former rice mill overlooking the Ashley River, stirring the roux for brown oyster stew in a commercial-grade stockpot. Around her, an all-female crew of volunteers hustled to chop greens, grill shrimp, whip up cornbread batter, and season quail before a celebration dinner honoring their elders. Local suppliers deposited heritage ingredients on steel prep tables—Sea Island red peas, Peculiar Pig Farm pork chops, Carolina Gold rice, sorghum syrup, loquat jam.

As the afternoon progressed, the beats and laughter amplified, while everyone navigated between hot stations with the grace and ease afforded by old friendships. “Food is a big part of our culture,” said Ganaway. “And it hit me hard when Miss Martha Lou [Gadsden] died, and her restaurant closed down. Even before moving back home I noticed the lack of female representation in the Charleston food scene, and this dinner is about giving Black women the respect they deserve at the end of the day.”

In the Carolina Lowcountry, the conveyance of culinary traditions is particularly strong in Gullah Geechee communities, where knowledge keepers—some in their late 80s or early 90s—have preserved such canonical dishes as deviled crab, okra soup, chicken bog, and red rice. They are the living links to the foodways of enslaved ancestors, and their cooking skills are intrinsic to one of America’s oldest regional cuisines. These women are fondly considered matriarchs. They feed everyone who walks into their kitchens, bring prized pies and layer cakes to church picnics, treat thirsty neighborhood children to ice-cold chilly bears, and teach daughters and granddaughters how to season a dish without measuring spoons.

Perhaps the best known is Emily Meggett, bestselling author of Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island, and a beloved “other mother” to so many. “As you grow up and realize that people are getting older, you look at them differently,” said Ganaway. “These ladies are leaving a legacy for their families. And I’ve been thinking about the legacy my grandmother is leaving for ours.” For a cooking culture that has largely passed down techniques orally for most of its history, guardians of Gullah recipes bear great responsibility for passing the torch. (And the kitchen matches.) Ganaway and her young crew represent the generation who will carry it onward. 

As guests arrived, the chefs pulled yeast rolls from the oven, gave a final stir to the okra-and-shrimp purloo, and topped Emily Meggett’s recipe for sweet potato cake with a swirl of frosting. Ganaway offered last-minute tweaks on the pass. Her intention was to serve each course family-style, in hopes of sparking conversation among strangers at the long tables.

Meanwhile, artist Natalie Daise unveiled her portraits of the mothers being celebrated, including Albertha Grant, founder of Bertha’s Kitchen, chef Sara Green of Gullah Grub on St. Helena Island, and cookbook author Sallie Ann Robinson from Daufuskie Island. Embraced by dark green collard leaves, each woman is depicted wearing a brightly patterned kitchen apron and a halo of woven sweetgrass. Then, Meggett, dressed in a matching black suit and bedazzled hat, was seated at the head of one table. (No one knew that night, but it would be the Edisto matriarch’s last public appearance. Meggett passed away on April 21.) Ganaway’s own grandmother sat beside her. And just before hot platters hit the tablecloth, A$iahMae, Charleston’s poet laureate, recited her new poem “Benefaction.”

The first time I ever prayed it was at a kitchen table/God bless the
hands that prepared the food/thank you for the love in them/the love
that labors/cradles cheek and ladle/seasons & pinches with senses….

and before we partake/we give/praise be to the
chefs/and praise to the spirit of nourishment that moves through
them that my grandmother named God/and we respect it/by cleaning
our plates.

Plates were certainly cleaned that night.

Recipe

Lowcountry Brown Oyster Stew

Get the recipe >

The post A Tribute to the Matriarchs of the Lowcountry appeared first on Saveur.

Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone. ​​  

“These are vanilica, a butter cookie with jam inside,” says Mersiha Omeragic, the 47-year-old owner of Yummilicious Café & Bakery in Upstate New York, as she opens a tin filled with the sugar-dusted pastries. “These have rosehip from the Bosnian store,” referring to one of many corner grocers that supply specialty goods in her community. Every winter, Omeragic spends the last few weeks of the year ardently baking hundreds of Balkan-style cookies for her customers. Zerbo kocke, kresenti, oreshki, oblatna, mađarica. (To be inclusive, she even whips up tricolor rainbows, as some residents in her culturally diverse neighborhood are of Italian American heritage.) “Cookies were always a tradition for winter holidays,” she says about her hometown of Travnik in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Doesn’t matter what religion, everyone will have some of these on the platter. The whole Balkans—Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia—starts baking at Advent so they can have not just for the house but to share with neighbors. That’s what I loved before the war.”

As a teenager, Omeragic fled Bosnia with her mother and younger sister in 1994, at the height of a brutal conflict that devastated her homeland. The family found sanctuary through the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in Utica, New York, a scrappy manufacturing town with an aging population that didn’t exactly welcome newcomers. She admits struggling with the intolerance much of the region’s burgeoning immigrant population encountered at the time. (In the ensuing decades, refugees have transformed the local culture and revived the city’s arson-scorched neighborhoods.) “My grandma was still alive then,” says Omeragic, who worked factory jobs before earning a college degree and teaching English as a Second Language courses at the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES). “She survived two wars. And she was a very wise woman. I told her, ‘People here keep screaming at me to go home, saying stuff about my accent. I can’t handle it.’ And she said, ‘What? I thought you were a tougher cookie. Build your life.’” 

Recalling her grandmother’s advice, Omeragic adjusts her flour-dusted apron and holds her palm over her heart. “Once you leave your country, it’s a constant fight to prove that you’re worth something. You are a refugee and you always will be a refugee. You have that label, it doesn’t peel off, just like the sticker under the plate. And that’s something that we all deep inside deal with—trying to find your place, you know?” She gestures around the dining room, a cheerful space with walls covered in silk flowers, suede café chairs, and a mannequin wearing a festive pine bough skirt studded with glass ornaments. “But this is our place and this is representing us.”

Cookies first came to America in the late 17^th century, when Dutch settlers introduced decorative pastry molds and cutters from Holland. (The word cookie is derived from the Dutch koekje, or little cake.) The English carried jumbles and gingerbread across the Atlantic; Scots brought shortbread; Moravians came with their Nazareths, or sugar cookies; enslaved Africans baked benne (sesame) wafers and groundnut cakes. (Later waves of immigration would result in the proliferation of rugelach, mandelbrot, pizzelle, polvorónes, fortune cookies, and hojarascas.) Early Americans quickly developed the practice of exchanging cookies during holiday celebrations; in 1796, a recipe for “Another Christmas Cookey” appeared in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons. And all varieties eventually became a vehicle for supporting social change—perhaps most famously in December 1917, when the Girl Scouts’ Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee, Oklahoma first baked sugar cookies to sell in their high school cafeteria as a service project. Now, many organizations engage in nationwide cookie drives.

Throughout the year, Bakers Against Racism mobilizes a national baking force for awareness-building actions—including voting registrations and women’s rights marches—with sales of snickerdoodles, chocolate crinkles, and espresso-black pepper shortbread. During this busiest cookie season, many regional organizations also raise funds for food-based initiatives. Volunteer bakers Kabriana Kendall and Jacky McNiff-Beattie piped buttons on grinning gingerbread men for the People’s Kitchen Philly, a collaborative that distributes free meals to underserved neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Lets Make a Change held the first annual Christmas Cookie Walk in Euclid, Ohio to support its Youth Culinary program, which teaches pre-school children life skills. Goldie’s Rotisserie food truck on Martha’s Vineyard raised awareness for Friends of Family Planning with their holiday cookie boxes. And Homeboy Bakery in Los Angeles, a social enterprise that advocates for formerly incarcerated and gang-involved individuals, sold out their entire stock of almond horns and coconut macaroons.

In Utica, Yummilicious is a result of the Omeragic family’s resilience. After applying for a mortgage and maxing out multiple credit cards, Omeragic and her husband Hajrudin, a professional cook, opened the doors of their bakery one month before the pandemic hit in 2020. They survived the worst of lockdown by taking orders from customers who discovered her celebration cakes on social media. More traditional pastries and desserts, based on recipes introduced to Balkan countries during centuries of occupation by the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, now fill the bakery’s display cases. Strudel, custardy krempita, baklava, krofne (donuts), uštipci (fried bread), poached apple tufahija. Omeragic’s favorite is the dainty walnut-stuffed hurmasica cookies soaked in syrup, a legacy of her grandmother, who passed away in 2015. “Hers were perfect,” she says. “Crunchy, but melt in the mouth.”

Omeragic always donates cookies to local chapters of Hospice, Ronald McDonald House, and the Bosnian Association of America, and also informally helps out new arrivals who might need a welcome treat during their first frosty upstate winter. “We use the word ‘halal’ for giving something without accepting anything in return,” she says, surrounded by tubs of cookies ready for cellophane wrap and ribbons. Her husband cuts the slabs of mađarica and rainbows into neat rectangles, while their four children stack dozens on overflowing trays. “My grandma used to say whatever I give in halal, it will come back ten times more.” 

For so many around the world, cookies symbolize that spirit of giving. In all shapes and flavors, they’re a bite-size emblem for generosity, solidarity, and seasonal joy.

Here is the recipe for the first recorded American Christmas cookie. The new Taste of RAICES cookbook shares recipes that keep us rooted even when far from home. Please consider donating to a food bank near you this holiday season.

The post Why Cookies Are the Ultimate Symbol of Seasonal Goodwill appeared first on Saveur.

Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone. ​​  

“It’s like cooking for your grandparents and their friends,” says Helen Nguyen of Saigon Social. The Vietnamese chef is spending her Thanksgiving preparing 300 meals for food insecure New Yorkers through Heart of Dinner and Feed Forward’s More Than a Meal delivery programs. She’s also serving another 500 culturally friendly meals for a diverse population of seniors and young families in low-income housing two blocks away from her restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “There’ll be roasted chicken marinated in five spice and lemongrass, mashed potatoes, baked sweet potatoes and Korean yams. We’re also braising salmon in tomato sauce to go with steamed Napa cabbage over rice.”

Nguyen is not alone. Both professional chefs and home cooks are working overtime this holiday to sustain hungry neighbors. “One thing that brings everyone together is food,” says chef Benjamin Tyson, founder of Patchwork Nashville, who stepped away from fine dining to focus on cooking homey, nourishing meals for the underserved in Tennessee. This week, his kitchen crew of three (and loyal volunteers) will share 1,750 regular meals, as well as host two complete Thanksgiving dinners at a homeless encampment within the city limits. “We’ve found not everyone loves turkey, but figured roast chicken with cornbread-sausage stuffing is just as nice,” he says. “We’ll be making a fruit cobbler and cookies, too.”

On the day Americans traditionally celebrate abundance with friends and family, so many lack both; a hot turkey dinner, or any hot meal at all, too often represents an elusive comfort. The following local initiatives strive to support their communities every day and, during the holiday that centers on giving thanks, are putting dignified food on as many tables as possible—through pie drives, turkey donations, meal kits, and home deliveries. Please consider sharing your bounty with one or more listed here. And since Giving Tuesday is right around the corner, we’ve included several food drives taking place then as well.

Amor Healing Kitchen

Based in Charleston, South Carolina, this non-profit promotes healthy eating as part of recovery from surgery and other life-impacting illnesses; plant-based meals are prepared by teen chefs and their kitchen mentors.

The People’s Kitchen

A collaborative of chefs and students that grows produce and cooks free meals for their Philadelphia community is hosting a pie drive with drop-offs at community fridges this week. Bake two, share one.

El Pasoans Fighting Hunger

In collaboration with West Texas pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters, this food bank provides weekly meal assistance and deliveries to El Paso residents.

SODO Community Market

This no-cost Seattle grocery store provides fresh produce, grocery staples, and a variety of healthy food options to those in need.

Miry’s List Friendsgiving

This non-profit that focuses on resettling refugees in Southern California also organizes regular supper club fundraisers.

Let’s Eat

Activist and cookbook author Grace Young is partnering with Welcome to Chinatown’s Let’s Eat Fund to support legacy neighborhood restaurants and distribute meals to members of the community. 

Hawaii Meals on Wheels

Every year, the Five-O chapter of Meals on Wheels delivers nutritious holiday dinners to Hawaiian island kūpuna (elders).

Rescue Mission of Utica

Founded in 1890, this charitable organization accepts local turkey and pie donations for the holidays, but also has an ongoing meal service for residents of Upstate New York’s Mohawk Valley region.

Brother Jeff’s Cultural Center

A free Thanksgiving dinner delivery for residents of the Five Points District in Northeast Denver has the donation slogan: “No One Should Be Hungry, Period.”

North American Traditional Indigenous Food Services

Native Americans consider Thanksgiving a day of mourning. To acknowledge ancestral foodways, chef Sean Sherman founded this non-profit to re-claim pre-colonial North American ingredients at the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis.  

The post Help Fight Food Insecurity on Giving Tuesday (and Beyond) appeared first on Saveur.

I came for the cake. When Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened his eponymous dining room on the ground floor of the brassy Trump International Hotel and Tower in early 1997, it was the most desired reservation in Manhattan. The launch catapulted the Alsatian-born chef to stardom and soon after he earned a four-star rave from restaurant critic Ruth Reichl. Every night, stretch limos lined the curb outside the front door, while celebrity sightings and opulent flourishes were delivered tableside. Poached foie gras and creamed morels, rack of lamb in a green garlic crust, Muscovy duck with Chinese five spice were all tempered with Vongerichten’s signature vegetable broths and emulsions.

When I first sat in one of the sleek leather banquettes with a view of Columbus Circle, Mike Tyson and Donald Trump were in the house. (The combover was weirdly bad even back then.) I don’t remember much about the meal, although thankfully, someone else picked up the tab. But the finale? The dessert menu’s pièce de résistance had such an underwhelming name. “Warm chocolate cake.” It arrived at the table embarrassingly under-dressed for a restaurant with a no-jeans dress code. A fluted mold baked good, dusted with confectioners’ sugar. A quenelle of plain vanilla ice cream on the side. And yet, one swipe with a dessert spoon released the molten flow of bittersweet Valrhona chocolate, oozing from the soft center like lava escaping Kīlauea on a moonless night. No wonder everyone ordered it. Luxe in a Y2K fin de siècle way. I may have licked the plate.

Like any viral culinary creation, this cake came with its own disputed origin story. In 1981, French chef Michel Bras invented coulant au chocolat—cookie dough with a creamy ganache center—inspired by the après ski hot chocolate. Vongerichten also claimed ownership, after he accidentally pulled a runny chocolate sponge from the oven a little too soon in 1987, during his residency at Restaurant Lafayette in the Drake Swissôtel on Park Avenue. Eventually, variations appeared on menus all over town, and then all over the world. One bastardized version even wound up trademarked as Death By Chocolate at Bennigan’s, the fast casual Irish pub-themed chain. Still another can be microwaved in a coffee mug. Sadly, warm chocolate cake soon lost its exclusivity, and as the millennium turned, other swanky desserts sang a sweeter siren song.
Enough time has passed that I almost miss that retro cake. Not that I would ever order it again, or be caught dead in a dining room owned by a chef who admitted in a recent memoir that he lost his cool and beat up a dish washer in the walk-in. But maybe I’ll bake my own, minus the dark gooey history.

Recipe

Molten Chocolate Cakes

Get the recipe >

The post You Don’t Have to Apologize for Loving This ’90s Dessert appeared first on Saveur.

Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone. ​​  

“Until the weather cools down, we’re focusing on water bottles, and food like apples and potatoes that are more shelf-safe,” said Kyandra Noble, founder of Austin’s ATX Free Fridge Project. “We don’t want things that can be quickly spoiled in 100 degrees.” A graduate of University of Texas, Noble works as a costumer in the film industry, but when production slowed down during the pandemic, she found herself with time on her hands and began looking around for tangible ways to improve her hometown. She discovered In Our Hearts NYC, a mutual aid project with a network of fridges housing free donated food across the Tri-State area. They advised her on how to set up fridges and connected her with people doing the same in other cities. “Then I posted on Instagram, ‘Hey, anyone want to help me here in Austin?’”

Two summers ago, the first free fridge opened outside Nixta Taqueria in East Austin. Since then, three more food donation sites have opened in other neighborhoods.

Right now, the challenge of feeding people in the Texas capital is further complicated by climate change. The heat soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a record-breaking streak this summer (July was the hottest on record). More than 50 migrants died of heat exhaustion when trapped in a sweltering tractor-trailer abandoned on the outskirts of San Antonio, about 80 miles south of Austin. Electronic signs on Interstate 35 warn motorists not to leave children or pets unattended in cars. Even walking a few blocks to pick up groceries can be hazardous. “There are some parts of the year where water is the most important thing people need,” said Noble. “So when it’s hard to keep the fridges cool enough for certain types of food, we buy bottled water at H-E-B and it goes at a fast pace.”

Unlike food banks and free pantries, which typically focus on dry items and canned goods, fridges are often stocked with dairy and fresh fruits and vegetables. They are also accessible any time of the day or night. Urban gardeners donate. So do food stylists, barbecue pitmasters, meal delivery services, and homeowners about to go on vacation. The idea is to provide an anonymous resource for those facing food insecurity without the added layer of socioeconomic disparity that complicates other forms of community service. The ATX Free Fridge motto is “solidarity, not charity.”

The four fridges in Austin are a plucky contribution to a global movement. Freedge is a UK-based network that connects similar initiatives in over 400 cities around the world, with locations in coffee shops, bodegas, churches, parking lots, schools, community centers, front yards, and even an auto body shop. These fridges have become particularly welcome in regions where summers are getting hotter and drought seasons are lengthening–or anywhere the climate is increasingly unpredictable. (Who could have guessed a heat wave earlier this summer would cripple the historically damp and chilly parts of Europe, let alone drain rivers like the Rhone and Seine?) Although fall approaches, the dangerously high heat index goes on and on in other cities across America: Phoenix, Sacramento, St. Petersburg, Las Vegas. 

But even with refrigerators, rising temperatures still pose hurdles for keeping food fresh. Noble quickly discovered that the original ATX Free Fridge equipment couldn’t handle the heat without physical shelters to shield them from the relentless Texas sun. “We had to get new fridges to deal with food safety in these temperatures. People offered us second hand ones, and it would be great to take donations, but now we’re focusing on garage fridges, which are better than the ones in your house.” Noble explained that the Nixta fridge is best prepared for extreme weather events. 

A friendly invitation is taped next to the stainless steel commercial unit outside the city’s popular taqueria: “Take what you need. Leave what you can.” More donation messages encouraging people to do their part are fixed to the sides of napkin holders on each of the tables on the outdoor patio. (The placement of these calls to action is pretty genius given how deliciously messy chef Edgar Ulysses Rico’s juicy duck carnitas tacos can get.) Noble reached out to Rico’s partner, Sara Mardanbigi, to help set up the pilot program, because she was already spearheading Nixta community outreach. 

“As small business owners, it’s our responsibility to think about the greater good, and how, on a micro-level, we can enact sustainable change,” Mardanbigi said, who estimated that almost 100 people drop by daily to use the fridge. “The majority are our neighbors, but we’ve seen a wide array of participants from all over the city.” Mardanbigi explained that the kitchen contributes “oopsie orders,” as she refers to the extra tacos made by accident. The restaurant also handles fridge maintenance and grocery runs underwritten by cash donations, as well as liaising with other restaurants and organizations dropping off supplies. According to Mardanbigi, prepared meals are the most popular.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, the fridge was filled with chicken pot pies donated by The Cook’s Nook via a church food bank. “It’s whatever we have left over,” said volunteer Sarah Pernell, hauling boxes from her car. “Every week, it’s something different.” Her granddaughter Brianna swiftly stocked the shelves with individual plastic containers of pre-cooked peas, carrots, meat, and gravy under a biscuit crust. “You don’t have to heat it up. You can just eat it cold.” The two women finished and shut the fridge again. “And it’s gone so fast.”

Please consider contributing to a free fridge near you. To get started, here are maps for NYC and Atlanta and Los Angeles.

The post As Temperatures Soar, Food Fridges Come to the Rescue appeared first on Saveur.

Diana Kennedy suffered no fools.

With her passing, we are almost at the end of the expat expert era. The author of nine books on Mexican cuisine, Kennedy relished her outsized reputation as a culinary anthropologist. Her gun, pickup truck, penchant for leather pants, collection of pre-Columbian ceramics, adobe house in Zitácuaro, Michoacán. Her grudges and blood feuds. Yet, she will also be remembered as a champion of rigorous research and accreditation, as well as a proponent of authenticity whose dedication bordered on obsession. She was not kind to anyone who diverged from her canon; she dismissed the food of whole regions and diasporas. Heaven forbid if you put garlic in guacamole or substituted cayenne for chile piquin in pico de gallo.

The inherent quandary of Kennedy’s expertise, as some critics point out, was choosing a cuisine not of her birth, which is why she was so often compared to Julia Child, who also had a reputation for zealous guardianship. But let’s remember that Kennedy needed a paycheck after her husband Paul, a New York Times Latin America correspondent, died in 1967; back then, career choices for single women in their mid-forties had a much lower glass ceiling. Mexico turned out to be the place she loved most, and it gave her a purpose that shaped the rest of her long life—Kennedy’s legacy will be the English-language documentation of the country’s complex and historic dishes. In her book My Mexico City Kitchen, Gabriela Cámara, owner of the restaurant Contramar, devotes an essay to Kennedy, in which the brilliant contemporary chef acknowledges the British-born author as an invaluable reference for traditional Mexican cooking. As the flavors and poetry of this food evolves and travels outward from its homeland, many cooks can thank Kennedy for sharing some of the nuances of this cuisine with a global audience. A few dishes treasured at SAVEUR include a bright salsa de albañil with tomatillos, avocado, and queso fresco; and frijoles de olla, stewed pinto beans served with crema and blistered serrano chiles.

Before she died, Diana Kennedy sold her collection of personal papers, photographs, and other reference materials to the University of Texas, San Antonio. The contents rest in the climate controlled vaults of the Mexican Cookbook Collection at John Peace Library. Most importantly to culinary historians, she gave twelve antiquarian books on Mexican cooking, including the first volume on the topic, Arte Nuevo de Cocina y Reposteria Accomodado al Uso Mexicano, published in 1828. It’s incredibly rare. Only one other copy is known to exist and that remains in private hands. But now,  everyone interested in the roots of Mexican cuisine can access the digital version, and that’s a gift for the ages. 

Vaya con dios, Diana.

The post Diana Kennedy Dies at 99 After a Lifetime Documenting Mexico’s Culinary History appeared first on Saveur.