At the tip of Cape Cod, on a narrow strip of land 60 miles out to sea, lies Provincetown, Massachusetts—the end of the world (or, at least, New England), and the place I’ve called home for close to two years. Locals might call me a “washashore,” but I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

That’s because Ptown is (per capita) the queerest town in the country and one of the most sought-out vacation spots for anyone on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. It’s a place of extraordinary natural beauty (the dunes! the beaches! the gardens! the architecture!) as well as a playground for freedom and pride. The main drag, Commercial Street, runs the length of the town along the bay side and is home to the majority of the restaurants, clubs, shops, and galleries. During the summer, it overflows with people of all flavors of gender expression, kink, and sexuality.  

I landed in Ptown after 20 years in professional kitchens ended in epic burnout. In 2021, mid-pandemic, I sold Willa Jean, my restaurant in New Orleans, and headed north. Love was waiting, as was eventual heartbreak and, ultimately, recovery and healing in Ptown. 

I’m not sure if it was the sunset G&Ts with friends on the beach, the impromptu clambakes, or the slices of pizza I devoured in the street after raucous nights out, but eating my way through the city has taught me that to be a queer person in Ptown is to be part of a community. Every restaurant and bar contributes to this spirit, and these are some of my favorite places.

Nor’East Beer Garden

206 Commercial Street

The Nor’East Beer Garden is an unassuming outdoor space on Commercial Street that serves some of the best food and cocktails in Ptown. That’s because you never get bored: The culinary “theme” changes each season; this summer, it’s “light Italian,” which means you can savor dishes like mushroom pâté, burrata with fried dough, and minty brown-butter mussels. 

Sal’s Place

99 Commercial Street

Sal’s is by the water in the West End, which makes for spectacular views. Cash-only and often difficult to reach by phone, Sal’s is worth the trouble of getting a reservation, whether you’re booking dinner with friends or a date. Don’t skip the cauliflower Caesar with baby romaine, which I love to order alongside the charred octopus with garbanzo beans and smoked chile oil.  

Relish

93 Commercial Street

This inviting little bakery in the West End makes a variety of breakfast and lunch sandwiches—great for a handheld meal while strolling about, or as beach picnic fare—but I always go for the pastries. Spring for a wedge of key lime tart, or grab a cookie or a slice of coffee cake.  

Tea Dance at the Boatslip Resort

161 Commercial Street

Shirtless muscle gays, margarita-sipping drag queens, straight vacationers who love to party—Ptowners of all stripes congregate every afternoon at the ultimate pregame called Tea Dance (or just “Tea”), held at the Boatslip Resort from 4 to 7 p.m. The legendary bartender Maria reigns over the right side of the bar, the end closest to the water, and will happily start you off with the Planter’s Punch, their official cocktail. 

Strangers & Saints

404 Commercial Street

After Tea, many revelers flock to Strangers & Saints, housed in an incredible 1850’s Greek Revival homestead. The Ken Fulk-designed interior, and well-made cocktails make for a dependably enjoyable second stop. The food goes well beyond basic bar snacks with dishes like meatballs with salsa verde and cucumber kimchi (my go-to dish), which pair nicely with the charred shishito peppers or spicy Moroccan carrots. Eating at Strangers & Saints feels like being welcomed into the home of someone with impeccable taste who loves throwing dinner parties.

The Mayflower

300 Commercial Street

Long before Provincetown was an LGBT+ mecca, it was a Portuguese fishing village. Remnants of that past can be found at the Mayflower, where traditional Portuguese flavors endure in dishes like the Portuguese kale soup, made with spicy linguica sausage and red beans. Its obligatory sidekick is an order of garlic bread, and if you’re still feeling peckish, a dozen steamers, a Cape classic of brothy soft-shell clams that you dunk one by one in melted butter. Family-run with a no-reservations policy, the Mayflower has an old-school diner feel with a down-home friendliness to match. They also happen to make the best Manhattans in town.  

Irie Eats

70 Shank Painter Road

Provincetown has a large, vibrant Jamaican population—many first arrived as seasonal workers and wound up making Ptown a year-round home. A little off the beaten path is Irie Eats, which offers spicy Jamaican food that fuels my summer season. My favorite dishes in the regular rotation are the curry goat, jerk chicken or pork, salt fish, and oxtails—all of which come with rice and red beans, and slaw. It’s a grab-and-go vibe, but they do have a small outdoor seating area to soak in the sun (and the flavor). 

Pop + Dutch

147 Commercial Street

My personal “best sandwich shop” award goes to Pop + Dutch. Their slogan is “Sandwiches. Salads. Lube,” and their tiny market selling vintage, often slightly titillating textiles and art only adds to the appeal. The shop carries everything you need for a day at the beach or pool, including sunscreen and, yes, lube. The fridges are stocked with fresh potato salad, pimento cheese, chicken salad, dolmas, and a variety of drinks including a great Arnold Palmer. But the sandwiches are the main event (lately, I’ve been loving specials like turkey topped with Cool Ranch Doritos and ranch-flavored mayo). In the morning, they make a mean scrambled egg sandwich on brioche, but slugabeds be warned: It’s only available from 9 to 10:30 a.m.

Crown & Anchor

247 Commercial Street 

The grande dame of Ptown is Crown & Anchor, an entertainment venue that sits in the center of town. Housing six bars and entertainment venues, a restaurant, a pool club, and a hotel, it caters to visitors and locals of all types. In 2021, it got new owners who were determined to turn the complex into a safe (and profitable!) space for queer artists, musicians, and chefs, among others. The restaurant concept changes daily, while the oyster bar is open seven days a week. Brunch (Thursday through Sunday) is hosted by yours truly and features a New Orleans-meets-New England menu. Expect my famous biscuits and gravy, plus live drag performances fueled by talent and fantasy. 

Lobster Pot

321 Commercial Street

The bright neon lobster sign, one of the Cape’s most recognizable images since 1979, welcomes stampedes of seafood lovers to the Lobster Pot. Tanks of fresh lobsters? Check. Ocean views? check. Consistently friendly service? Check. The plan of action here is to venture upstairs to the “top of the pot,” snag a seat at the bar, and kick things off with a perfect bloody mary. Then, it’s lobster rolls all around—or, for the lobster-averse, a wide-reaching menu of all sorts of fish and shellfish that you can order pan-roasted, grilled, stuffed, baked, blackened, fried, and more. There are also to-go dishes around the corner at Lobster Pot Express (5 Ryder Street). 

The Red Inn

15 Commercial Street 

Happy hour at the Red Inn is peak Ptown. From 2 to 4 p.m. daily, you can enjoy a raw bar menu, cocktails, and wine specials—all on a deck overlooking the beach that’s blessed with the best natural light in town. If oysters won’t cut it, chase them with heartier dishes like panko-crusted shrimp with sweet chili sauce, bacon-wrapped oysters, or shrimp remoulade salad. 

Helltown Kitchen

338 Commercial Street, Unit 3

Legend has it that Provincetown, because of its remote location, used to be a hideaway for smugglers and pirates. That’s why Puritans began calling it Helltown, a nickname that inspired the name of this restaurant that blends international flavors with New England ingredients. There’s truffle-scented, South American-spiced lobster risotto studded with peas and mushrooms. And if lobster isn’t it for you, Helltown does an incredible pork vindaloo that comes with mango chutney, basmati rice, and naan to sop it all up. 

Provincetown Brewing Company

141 Bradford Street 

Provincetown Brewing Company is fueled by community activism, and its business model reflects that. Not only does the brewery donate 15 percent of proceeds to LGBTQIA+ and Outer Cape causes; it also buys from queer-owned businesses and farmers. I’m big on their artichoke-cheese dip and jerk chicken sandwich, which I wash down with a flight of whatever PBC beers happen to be on tap. Keep an eye out for themed parties, trivia nights, “fag-out Fridays,” women’s night, and even a “yappy hour” for dogs. 

Atlantic House

6 Masonic Place

If Tea is where the party starts in Ptown, the Atlantic House (aka “A-House”) is where it ends (or at least where last call happens). Most patrons have no idea that the establishment is a contender for the oldest gay bar in America, having been in continuous operation for over two centuries. It draws the biggest crowd of any bar in Ptown and has three spaces: little bar, macho bar, and the dance floor, where the lights are low, the music is loud, and little by little the clothes seem to disappear. 

Spiritus Pizza

190 Commercial Street

Spiritus pizza is an old faithful and has become the staple stop between the party and the after party—so much so that the hour from 1 to 2 a.m. is called “pizza dance.” Spiritus is the only late food option in town, and after last call at the bars, the pizzeria fills up with hungry crowds, who overflow onto Commercial Street to revel in what’s essentially a nightly pizza party. There are three New York-style slices: cheese, pepperoni, or Greek (cash only!).  

Chalice at the Land’s End Inn

22 Commercial Street

Chalice is a new favorite wine and beer bar on the manicured lawn of the Land’s End Inn, which sits atop the tallest point at the end of the Cape. Complete with a fire pit and stunning views of Provincetown and beyond, it makes an ideal pitstop on your way to Tea or pre-dinner cocktails.  Look out for the pink martini flag: If you see it flying, then Chalice is open and well worth the uphill walk.

The post Where to Eat and Drink in Provincetown, Massachusetts appeared first on Saveur.

When I was in my teens and starting my life as a chef in London, before adulthood’s small luxuries had come to roost, I arrived home to Dundee by train, the last few minutes of the journey spent barreling over the great Tay Rail Bridge spanning the vast estuary of the Firth of Tay. As the train rolled into the station, there stood Mum and Dad as always, all waves, hugs, and great excitement. 

In later years, with my 20s behind me, and now a head chef in restaurants, I would splash out on a flight from London City Airport to the small strip on the north bank of the river, that bit further out from Dundee. The feeling was akin to that of an old film. As the twin propellers stopped turning, the falling silence was broken with whoops from folks waiting to scoop up their disembarking loved ones. 

And then we were on the road home, to a house filled with the scent of a pan of lentil soup simmering on the stove, a loaf of bread still warm from the oven, and the memories of countless dishes prepared and scoffed at through our childhood that we now craved as grown-ups returning home. Drinks were poured amidst the bustle, chatter and all the usual hoo-ha coming home entailed, while Mum wove a path through it all, readying the table to feed her brood. 

When the excitement had finally blown itself out—and between spoonfuls of our favorite brew, ladled from the great pan of lentils—talk turned to what was in the cards in the coming days. Visiting gardens, markets, and bookshops were mooted, as well as perusing the familiar bakers, butchers, and fishmongers. Was there anything new to explore? No, of course not, with many of the usual suspects still trading—if perhaps not thriving—as is the way on the east coast of Scotland, a place where the hands of time seem to turn so very gently. 

At the forefront of the many thoughts and suggestions bandied ’round the table were those of lobster. Partly due to conscience, though mostly availability, I only ever ate lobster on these rare occasions while visiting my folks. These beautiful crustacea, caught locally, could only be had with a phone call first to make sure that the guests of honor were in the tank, abutting the pier in Crail on the East Neuk of Fife. 

The prize lay at the end of a fair drive from the hills in Angus where we lived, across the River Tay from the county of Angus where lies the Kingdom of Fife, home to the ancient and venerable town of St. Andrew’s. Beyond the university and ruins of castle and cathedral sits the East Neuk of Fife, a coastline with small fishing ports once home to great fleets of trawlers that fed a vast herring trade. For the great part, the fisheries are the stuff of legend, the silver darlings now but memories. That said, the ancient, small, and rather lovely harbors remain—Anstruther, St. Monans, Pittenweem, and Crail—unchanged in appearance except for the lack of hubbub. 

A modest but healthy fishing trade persists there, but always in Dad’s mind was the tank at the bottom of the steep road to the harbor in Crail. When the call was made to ensure lobsters were to be had, and a great “ah!” of success was uttered: The adventure began. For, yes, indeed, within the tank were lobsters, their shells of a darkly hued deepest indigo, their claws bound with rubber bands to prevent any untoward mishap befalling the unwary. 

My parents loved these adventures, piling my sister and brothers into the car and heading off to find some marvel from among the many delights the east coast has to offer. Scotland’s seaboard has much to recommend: Its game, meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, and of course shellfish, add considerably to the magnificence of the local larder. 

Lobsters acquired, Dad, ever a spirited driver, made for home. In the kitchen, potatoes were peeled and cut to fry golden and crisp. Wine was chilled. Was it warm enough to lay a table outside? Such thoughts I left to my folks, who had their ways, while I busied myself with the lobsters, each just shy of a pound in weight—the meat of slightly smaller lobsters always a bit sweeter and more delicate. 

Necessity demands shellfish remain alive with vigor until just prior to cooking. I could pull a discreet veil over the dispatching of lively lobsters, but I prefer to be frank about the practicalities—a deft, swift piercing and confident downward thrust cleaves the crustacea in two and does the job. Then, with a flick of the knife inserted at the joint, the claws are detached and cracked, and the lobster is ready to cook. 

Such purity of produce requires but the simplest of cooking. The parts are laid in a deep tray. Shallots are peeled and finely diced. The herbs are picked and finely chopped. Then the lobsters are lightly seasoned with sea salt and freshly milled pepper, anointed with olive oil, and roasted swiftly, before they are placed on a handsome dish. The sliced shallots are added to the still-warm pan over gentle heat. After a few minutes, the wine is added, and a minute later the herbs and lemon juice. The rising scent beguiled me, reminding me why I never ate lobster anywhere else but home in Scotland. 

And even though a bowl of chips was served, they were often cool from neglect as every last morsel of lobster was picked from the shells, while chatter and wine flowed. My parents took affront at any such waste, this being a dish as cherished as these times at the table together. 

Though I miss my folks hugely, I am blessed with friends who love to holiday on the Western Isles as much as I do and visit one of the Hebrides each summer. When fortune smiles and a fisherman lands his catch, and when the filled lobster creels and crab pots are decanted and we have chosen our beasties, we hurry home and set the fires to cook. While we feast splendidly on Scottish lobsters, I smile with old, happy memories of the east coast mingling happily with new ones made in the West. 

Recipe

Shallot-Roasted Lobster

Get the recipe >

The post A Scottish Lobster Recipe That’s Worth the Wait appeared first on Saveur.

Welcome to Gut Check, our column dedicated to the complex, ever-evolving relationship between food and our bodies. Whether you’re curious about mindful eating or want to understand what makes picky eaters picky, read on and let award-winning journalist Betsy Andrews answer all your burning questions. 

The last time I ever ate at one of my old, go-to lunch spots, a Manhattan restaurant favorably reviewed in the The New York Times, I ended up desperately ill. I blame the aïoli that came with the roast chicken, which I loved so much I always asked for extra. The cashier would scoop a handful of unrefrigerated plastic ramekins from a tub behind the register and dump them in my bag.  One day, that sauce laid me flat for 48 hours, in between bouts in the bathroom. My partner considered taking me to the emergency room. 

It was the second-worst case of food poisoning I ever had, and I tell you about it because, really, food poisoning can happen anywhere. If conditions exist for the growth of food-borne microbes that your body has few immunities to, you can get sick thousands of miles away or in your own hometown. 

That’s why it’s unhelpful to stigmatize places like Mexico, where I had a run-in with E.coli. I was in a village near Puebla researching mole poblano and made some traveler’s mistakes, including drinking Hi-C made with tap water and spooning fresh salsa onto the mole. I knew better, and I forgot myself in the thrall of reporting. 

That’s the kind of harrowing food-poisoning experience American travelers are quick to recount upon returning from far-flung vacations. But as I learned from medical experts who specialize in gut health, food-related illnesses are often worse for people coming to the U.S. than for Americans going abroad. We should be cognizant of that when feeding guests from afar, but we also must be aware of ways to protect our own gut when we disrupt our routine by taking a trip. 

When we travel, our diet inevitably changes, explains gastroenterologist and author Dr. Shilpa Ravella. New micro-flora and -fauna, different standards of hygiene, lack of exercise and sleep, and even travel stress, she says, can negatively affect the gastrointestinal tract. No matter where we’re from or are headed to, shit happens—or, disconcertingly, doesn’t—when we travel. But the precautions are basically universal. With summer travel upon us, and my checkered past with food poisoning haunting me, I figured this was a good time to ask the experts for their best advice on maintaining and restoring good gut health on culinary adventures near and far.

What to Pack

Eat right, get sleep, hydrate—the most important gut-healthy behaviors are unsurprising. Still, says registered dietitian, podcaster, and cookbook author Desiree Nielsen, “if you’re on vacation, you’re on vacation,” a mindset that makes most of us less diligent. To go all in on the local cuisine, it’s wise to carry digestive aids lest our moveable feast goes awry.

To that end, Dr. Kéra Nyemb-Diop, the food scientist behind the platform Black Nutritionist, packs an anti-diarrheal, such as Immodium; a laxative like Metamucil for constipation; and an antacid, such as Pepto Bismol, to relieve indigestion and heartburn. For those with particularly touchy tummies, she also suggests a consultation with a travel medicine specialist. Along with giving vaccines, these practitioners can prescribe appropriate antibiotics for use if you do get sick. Whether you choose to hire a specialist, make an appointment with your primary care physician, or wing it, it’s worth researching the digestive risks of your destinations through the Centers for Disease Control and prevention website. 

For her part, Nielsen keeps regular on the road by snacking on nuts and other nutrient-dense, high-fiber foods. I wish I had been so smart last winter in Rome. I was hungry after our flight and dinner was still hours away. My partner offered a granola bar from her bag, but I insisted on eating something local: a snack-shop tramezzini stuffed with tuna salad so foul that I gagged. That night, I wound up hugging our house-swap toilet while my partner ran to a nearby pharmacy. She returned with liquid probiotics, which I guzzled down, desperate for relief.

I’m not sure they helped. The sickness lasted through the next day, and opinions are mixed on probiotics for either remedial or preventative use. When Nielsen carries them, she first consults USprobioticguide.com. It uses peer-reviewed research to determine the effectiveness of specific brands and dosages for curbing or preventing conditions like traveler’s diarrhea. The website is easy to use, but it’s a clinical tool meant for professionals, so you should double-check probiotic suggestions with a doctor. 

To help digest a range of foods, Nielsen also packs enzymes like Beano and FODZYME, though she draws the line at papaya enzymes, a popular health food store supplement. “I recommend eating fruit, including papaya, but the research on papain (a natural enzyme) in papaya is almost exclusively animal research, so I wouldn’t make claims about it for digestion,” she says. 

In places where drinking water is iffy, Dr. Mark Pimentel carries a choice piece of gear: a purifying water bottle. Pimentel is the executive director of Cedars-Sinai’s Medically Associated Science and Technology (MAST) program, which researches treatments for microbiome-related conditions, and he’s wary of the systems some hotels use to sanitize their water. “Reverse osmosis does remove pathogenic bacteria, but all water treatments require maintenance. This is where things can go wrong,” he says. Iodine tablets work, but they make water taste bad. Bottled water is generally safe, but it’s a source of plastic waste. Purifying water bottles don’t come cheap, but ones by brands like Grayl are a good investment. “You can use it over and over,” says Pimentel.

Finally, pack self-forgiveness. There’s no shame in farting, for instance. “We all have normal amounts of gas in our intestines, and it’s normal to pass gas,” says Ravella. “Particularly because gut health is a trend, we over-pathologize being a bit bloated or constipated,” Nielsen concurs.

But if you treat it with care, a healthy GI system will eventually work things out. “Your gut can adapt to new foods and environments with time,” says Nyemb-Diop. “Be patient.”  

Getting There

I always work on airplanes. Now as I type, I’m on a long haul to Tokyo from London, where during a lengthy layover, I caught the tube to the town of Hayes for lunch. I ordered dal makhani at a Nepalese restaurant. It’s a dish I love, but it’s lentil-based, and legumes, dear reader, blow me up. Gas can become more acute on a plane. “When an airplane is climbing, cabin pressure falls,” says Ravella. The lower air pressure, she explains, slows down your muscle contractions, which in turn slows your digestion. 

Also, on an airplane, says Pimentel, “you expand because the pressure outside your body is lower than the pressure inside. If you’re eating things that have or make gas, that’s just a whole lot more fun.” Airlines didn’t get the memo. “The flight attendant gives you hummus, chips, and soda, and you’re bloated out of your mind because soda is gas and hummus gives gas to everybody,” he grouses. 

Add to that the sitting for hours, the seatbelt squeezing your middle, and closed quarters you don’t want to fart in, and you’ve got a recipe for bloat. Planes are dehydrating to boot. “When you’re dehydrated, one failsafe of metabolism is it can harness water from the gut, which means your stool becomes drier and harder to pass,” notes Nielsen.

Research by gastroenterologists suggests the body reacts similarly when you visit a mountain destination like Cuzco or Denver. “High altitude is hard on your body, so it tells your body to take energy out of your gut and put it elsewhere,” says Nielsen. To counteract the effects, she suggests eating lighter things that are easier to digest— smoothies, oatmeal, rice bowls, nothing too fibrous—until the bloat subsides.

To keep your gut limber during long hauls, start ahead. In the days before your flight, tank up on water and eat high-fiber foods. Pack low-FODMAP snacks to eat on board. Familiar to sufferers of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), these foods have fewer fermentable carbohydrates than others, so they don’t generate as much gas. Bring a bottle to fill at the airport with water—not the bubbly kind. And if you like sipping an onboard bloody Mary, be careful not to over-indulge because alcohol is dehydrating. 

Finally, dress for comfort and don’t just sit there. “I have IBS, and I wear a long, flowy dress with no waistband because tight waistbands contribute to bloat,” says Nielsen, who adds, “Movement begets movement. Take a few laps around the terminal, and book an aisle seat so you can stretch your legs and go to the bathroom easily.”

When You Can’t Go

Constipation is a travel hazard. “After a night’s sleep, most of us have a strong urge, called the gastrocolic reflex, to have a movement because the digestive tract runs on a circadian rhythm,” explains Nielsen. Jet lag throws it off. 

The solution, says Ravella, is to sync your rhythm to your destination: try going to bed at a reasonable hour and waking with the sunlight. “It’s a cue to your gut that you’re in a new pattern.”

Set your meals to local time, if you can, and as you did before your flight, lube up your insides with H2O. At least until you get over your jet lag, you might want to avoid fatty, fried, or processed foods that slow your gut, and instead seek out fiber from whole plants. “If you’re cooking where you’re staying, try to make your first stop the farmers market or grocery store,” says Ravella, grabbing any local, seasonal produce you can find, as well as probiotic-rich foods that help your gut adjust. “Every culture has some version: fermented dosas, sauerkraut, kombucha.” 

Walk to and from local destinations, when possible. Staying active helps move things along in your gut by increasing blood flow to your digestive tract. When dining out, avoid overeating, which can cause indigestion. 

Follow these pointers, and you should get regular quickly without resorting to dicier means. “If you’re drinking coffee to alleviate constipation, it’s also stimulating,” Ravella points out. In addition to exacerbating jet lag, “it speeds up digestion, and then you’re more prone to getting diarrhea.” 

When You Can’t Stop Going

Like coffee, alcohol and soft drinks can be irritants, but in some locales, they’re safer to drink than tap water. That’s due to four main digestive pathogens. “The path of physiology is related to the equator. Hot locales south of the U.S.-Mexico border—Mexico, Central America, and northern parts of South America—have more E.coli. Asia has more campylobacter, which is harder to treat. Campylobacter is also in the U.S., but it’s not as common as in Southeast Asia. Salmonella and shigella can be anywhere,” says Pimentel. “It also has to do with regulations. Some countries don’t have inspection systems.” In risky locales, only drink water if it’s treated or in a clean, sealed bottle. Skip the ice, which might have been frozen from the tap. 

Even if alcohol is safer than the local water supply, you still should be careful not to overdo the booze, especially at the beach. Stay hydrated and under the umbrella. “Sunstroke can cause diarrhea because it’s stressful on the body and alters electrolyte balance,” says Nielsen. A sports drink can help. “Coconut water, on the other hand, is not as effective as the Internet would have you believe. It does have electrolytes, but it’s primarily potassium. You want sodium.”

Eating intentionally to avoid gut imbalances is trickier. “While street food can be tempting, always ensure it’s prepared and served in clean conditions,” says Nyemb-Diop. Easier said than done: A vendor might be immune to the local bacteria, so things can look safe when they aren’t. Few of us are turning down a tour of Singapore’s hawker stands or Oaxaca’s taco stalls, so Nyemb-Diop has a simple guideline: “Prioritize cooked foods. Uncooked and raw foods pose a higher risk of harboring harmful bacteria or parasites, potentially leading to food poisoning or diarrhea.”

Remember, food poisoning—when your body gets sick from eating contaminated, spoiled, or toxic food—can happen anywhere. “The all-you-can-eat buffet is the worst,” says Pimentel. “My friend the infectious disease doctor always dips the serving spoon where the burner is and not at the edges of the steam tray because the edges are at room temperature, which is great for growing the bad stuff that will ruin your vacation.”

Be wary of premade salads and condiments. “Potato salad is particularly problematic,” he says, so you might think twice about grabbing that random tub of it in the quick mart. As for one of my own culprits, studies have shown that salsa, which is often unrefrigerated, is a ripe environment for stomach bugs both north and south of the border. If you do eat fruits or raw vegetables when traveling in a place prone to gut pathogens, buy them whole and prepare them yourself by rinsing them in clean water and peeling them yourself, advises Ravella. (And be sure to wash your hands.) 

If You Do Catch a Bug, Like I Did

One bite of spoiled food can affect you for life. I’ve just come from Spain, where I toured the pristine kitchen of a two-Michelin-star restaurant that served me medium-rare pork. Under less-controlled conditions, undercooked pork can contain a parasite similar to the worm said to have died in the brain of a certain presidential hopeful, perhaps affecting his cognition. Food-borne bacteria can have long-lasting effects, too. “It changes the types of microbes you have in your gut,” says Ravella. “You can develop post-infectious IBS.”

Prepared with care, the pork was just fine. But the mussels en escabeche from a highly recommended tapas bar made me sick the next day: nausea, chills, and the runs. I had no antibiotics, but I wasn’t desperate enough to go to a clinic. Pepto Bismol and Immodium might have soothed me, but I hadn’t packed with my gut health in mind. So I took what I had, which was Advil. It provided some relief so I could sleep, but it wasn’t the best course of action. “Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, so the effect you had is expected,” Pimentel wrote when I emailed him. “But it can cause ulcers in the long run. Even one dose can cause gastritis, so Tylenol [i.e., acetaminophen] would be better for the fever.” Now I know.

After downing as much water as I could, I was back to eating lightly the next day. “If you do get traveler’s diarrhea, hydration is critical,” says Nielsen. “Be extra careful with your food choices. Stick to simple, well-cooked, easily digested foods, like grains.” 

I should have sought a pharmacy for a rehydration solution, such as Pedialyte. But in the absence of bloody stool or severe stomach pain—symptoms indicative of a more-severe problem—I was in the clear. “Most infections are self-limited to a few days, and your body will re-adjust after it expels the germs,” says Ravella. 

The Larger Perspective

My latest run-in with food poisoning happened not in an equatorial locale but in Santiago de Compostela. “Travel-related digestive issues often carry a stigma, with certain destinations or cuisines being unfairly labeled as riskier for gut health. However, these issues can happen anywhere, including in highly developed countries,” says Nyemb-Diop. Ultimately, most stomach bugs caught on vacation are temporary. 

Many people who come to the U.S. discover that the American diet is no picnic for them, in return. For those who stay, the dietary issues can be ongoing. A Burmese expat whom my partner and I once interviewed for an article about refugee gardens bemoaned, “Sandwich, sandwich, sandwich! All you Americans eat is a sandwich!” He was growing vegetables to feed himself more nutritiously but blamed his bad belly on our deli food.

Science may back him up. “Recent research shows that U.S. immigrants from countries like Thailand, Mexico, and Haiti who adopt a Westernized diet after migrating often experience significant changes in gut microbiome composition and function,” Nyemb-Diop notes, including a loss of microbiome diversity and an imbalance in gut bacteria. “This finding is a reminder that the Western world can learn much from other cultures, especially those that emphasize whole foods, more dietary fibers, and less fat.”

“A lot of diets—the Mediterranean diet as practiced years ago in Naples, the Ayurvedic diet in India, traditional Mexican and African diets—are wonderful for gastrointestinal health and also pleasurable,” Ravella says. But our appreciation of them when we travel depends on how we approach them. “People want to experience new cuisines. But balance is key. If we are doing the right things when we travel, we can experience the food as it’s meant to be experienced, exposed to a new way of eating that’s actually incredibly healthy.”

My latest bug came after a week of heavy, wine-fueled meals. Who knows what was going on behind the scenes at that tapas bar, but no matter where in the world I am, I’m responsible for my own choices. I should have moderated the indulgence with lighter, plant-based eating. I know my GI tract was overtaxed. In the end, digestive health isn’t just about being cautious and taking the right meds; it’s also about listening to your body and learning as you travel. As Nyemb-Diop says, “Trust your gut!”

The post Is Travel Actually Bad for Your Gut? appeared first on Saveur.

Though I’ve lived abroad most of my life, Gaza is where I call home. It’s where my parents were born and raised and where I spent summers as a child. Whenever we’d return, we’d be welcomed back by our large extended family. First among them was my aunt An’am Dalloul, whom we called Khalto Um Hani: “mother of Hani,” her eldest child and my cousin. She’d always arrive bearing a bowl of sumagiyya, Gaza City’s signature meat stew with chard, sumac, and chickpeas—and my father’s favorite meal.   

Um Hani, along with my cousins Hoda, Wafaa, and Hani, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in their residential Gaza City neighborhood in November 2023.

In an instant, the household perished, my cousin Nael later told me. Only a skeleton of the building was left. He recounted the horrific scene over WhatsApp—how he gathered their remains in his arms and buried them in a mass grave under heavy Israeli bombardment, how he failed to retrieve the corpse of one of his sisters, and how his brother bled to death before paramedics could reach him. Nael, like 90 percent of Gazans at the time of writing, is displaced, fleeing with his children from one city to the next in search of shelter, food, and some semblance of safety. He has been surviving on canned beans for more than three months.

Nael’s news shook me to my core. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I was overwhelmed with a profound sense of helplessness and despair. Was it only a matter of time before the rest of my family in Gaza would perish? 

As I read Nael’s texts, the memories came flooding back. Of Um Hani cooking in her bright, breezy kitchen wearing the traditional white hijab and light blue jalabiya. Of the birthmark on her face and her soft olive skin. Of her husky voice and the gentle laugh that masked the fierce and determined woman underneath.

Um Hani was an anchor to me, a link to the paternal grandmother I never met and to a city I often felt estranged from. She was a repository of memories, a key to the fragmented world to which I belonged as a Palestinian. She taught me to make the near-forgotten dishes my grandmother loved, the ones my father grew up eating such as adas wi batata (lentils and potatoes cooked in a clay pot with lemon and fried garlic) and samak il-armala (“widow’s fish,” or fried eggplants with chiles and ribbons of fresh basil). But as fate would have it, she never got the chance to show me how to make sumagiyya—her specialty, brimming with lamb and spiced with dill seeds and cumin.

In Gaza, sumagiyya is synonymous with weddings, family gatherings, and Eid Al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan and its 30-day fast. The dish is always made for a crowd, simmered in large pots and enriched with nutty roasted “red” tahina, then ladled into bowls for friends, family, and neighbors. 

I felt that sense of community whenever I was in Gaza, but not so much in Saudi Arabia, where I spent most of my childhood in the 1980s. My parents were medical professionals, too busy securing their children’s education and futures to labor over traditional dishes. The first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, was raging back home, and beyond making sure we had degrees (the stateless Palestinian’s safety net), their priority was ensuring we didn’t forget our history (“so history won’t forget us,” they said). Food got lost in the shuffle.

My mother was raised in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, in the company of her Kurdish-Syrian grandmother. Consequently, her culinary repertoire was more Damascene than Palestinian—until she met my father. A native of Gaza City, he often yearned for the flavors of his childhood, which put my mother in a bind at first. But Um Hani happily came to the rescue, sharing her comfort-food recipes over the phone.

On Eid, Baba (Dad) always requested one dish in particular: sumagiyya, which Um Hani taught my mother to make. As a girl, I remember coming home from school to a house thick with the smell of simmering lamb, allspice, cardamom, and tart, fruity sumac berries (for which the dish is named). 

Even then, I was intensely curious about Gazan food and the stories it told: of villages erased from the map, of places I’d only heard about, of people I’d never met. Recipes were a sort of  treasure map to a largely invisible, or invisibilized, world of Palestinian history going back well before the 1948 Nakba, the year Palestinians refer to as their “catastrophe,” or mass expulsion and dispossession. After finishing college in North Carolina, I followed that map to Gaza, where I lived, worked, and raised my firstborn. 

It was there that I realized my hands-on culinary education from Um Hani wasn’t unique to me but rather quintessentially Palestinian. Ask any Palestinian how they learned to flip a pot of maqlooba, and they’ll likely tell you it was through an elder’s patient instruction, not a cookbook or YouTube video. Israel’s checkpoints, separation walls, and roadblocks may have physically separated our families, but they could not eradicate our culture. To quote Jerusalem-born Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi, “Recipes transcend mere culinary instructions; they encapsulate narratives, memories and serve as a testament to the resilience of those who have entrusted them across generations.”

Teaching the next generation of Palestinians how to make a celebratory stew may seem trivial,  inappropriate even, in light of the deliberate starvation and plausible genocide facing Gazans right now. But food is as integral to our identity and rootedness to the land as our centers of cultural knowledge, such as archives, libraries, theaters, and schools, which are also under attack. Israel’s assault is eliminating entire bloodlines, and with them, all of the memories and knowledge they possessed. 

I live in the United States now, and I’ve cooked sumagiyya more times than I can count—even if it never tastes quite like Um Hani’s. One occasion stands out. It was May 2021, and Gaza City was being pummeled in what was the fourth major assault by Israel on Gaza in 14 years. The attack coincided with Eid, and as I watched on my screen in Clarksville, Maryland horrific images of air raids and grief-stricken mothers, I suddenly felt the urge to make a pot of sumagiyya. Serving it to my family and friends that night, despite the unfolding tragedy, was unexpectedly liberating and affirming.  

Last month, I again found myself in tears chopping onions and chard for sumagiyya, but this time I was making it to honor Um Hani’s memory. Like in 2021, I couldn’t look away from the news: The park where I used to take my son for evening strolls, the beach promenade where I drank sage tea with my mother, the university where I gave guest lectures—they were all unrecognizable piles of overturned dirt and warped wire.

While the pot bubbled, I rifled through old notes. I was looking for an interview with Um Hani that I conducted for The Gaza Kitchen, the cookbook I co-authored. Reading the transcript, I was immediately transported back to her kitchen table in Gaza. Our conversation, which unfolded during Ramadan, covered everything from struggles with water contamination to chronic power outages to the rising price of fish due to limits imposed by Israeli navy gunships. Um Hani began the interview describing how my grandmother loved watermelon and taking sumagiyya to the beach on Fridays. Then she spent hours showing me pictures that only she had of my father’s childhood in Gaza. “Do you see how beautiful I am in this yellow dress?” she mused. 

Nothing remains of those pictures, or of that kitchen, or of that house. I was too hot and too impatient and too hungry to make copies of the images. “Let’s get to the cooking,” I kept pressing, trying to stay on track. (I weep as I write this. If I could tear a hole in time, I’d wrest the pictures from her hands and keep them with me forever.) 

The interview ends like this: “I can teach you how your grandmother made sumagiyya …”

“Another time,” I fired back, exhausted from the long day of fasting. Another time never came, and never will. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I would go back to, and what I would find, if I returned to Gaza. Most of the landmarks have been destroyed. Gone too are many of the people I cherished. But with Ramadan fast approaching, and with no end in sight to the bombardment, it feels like I am the torchbearer now, the family’s keeper of treasured recipes. Like Um Hani, I will cook and I will teach, connecting the next generation of Palestinians to our homeland.

Palestinian Lamb Stew with Sumac, Chard, and Chickpeas

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Palestinian Pantry Staples We Live For

Falastin: Equal Parts Cookbook and Conversation Starter

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Welcome to Gut Check, our column dedicated to the complex, ever-evolving relationship between food and our bodies. Whether you’re curious about mindful eating or want to understand what makes picky eaters picky, read on and let award-winning journalist Betsy Andrews answer all your burning questions. 

So many comments were vicious. Last spring, a lifestyle account posted a one-minute video on social media in which they were “helping” a life-long “picky eater” to “expand her palate.” Carrots, celery, baba ghannouj, raw onion, roasted salmon—the woman tried each for the camera and pretty much rejected them all. Followers called her a “fucking child.” They declared, “I despise her,” and, “Picky eaters are a major major turn off.” Yet, watching her attempt to bite the carrot then saying it “feels wrong,” I found myself thinking, along with a handful of other commenters, about food sensory issues. 

“Picky eater” is a label, not an explanation. There are many reasons someone might have more restrictive eating habits than another, food sensory issues among them. I thought the video, done another way that explored the reasons behind her diet, could have jump-started a real discussion about personal needs and wants in eating, and the compassion we should have for others around that. Don’t we all need to respect a “No, thank you” to food, just as we should respect it around anything else having to do with bodily autonomy? How does our negativity toward “picky eaters” affect them? 

Reading through the comments, I considered my own biases toward food restrictions. As a journalist, I go out to dinner a lot, and there’s always this question: “Any allergies or dietary restrictions we should know about?” I have to confess, when I respond, “Nope!” there’s a hint of pride in it, like I’m not one of those people whose difficult needs will inconvenience you. What a privilege it is to think this way, and how unfair. Like the negative commenters, I’ve been making value judgements, pitting my no-holds-barred eating against others’ limitations. I don’t know what it is like to live in a body with dietary restrictions, so why should I take pride in not having them? Determined to deconstruct my biases, I decided to talk to some folks who knew more about all this than I did. I started with my niece.

“I’m on the spectrum. That’s the biggest thing that affects my eating,” Rachel told me. Texture, smell—she’s sensitive to these. At 22, her diet is restricted to cheese pizza and a dozen other foods. She has been through intensive feeding clinics. She has tried, and sometimes succeeded, in adding new foods to her diet. When she does, like recently with buttered bagels, she is proud. That type of perseverance should be honored, but so should her needs around food to begin with. 

“I hate telling people I’m a picky eater or even on the spectrum because I feel like I’m going to be judged,” she says, “but if people want to go into depth, I will talk about it because people should have an understanding that it doesn’t matter what I eat. It’s my personality, what I do, who I am as a person that matters.” A senior in college, Rachel has found her community of support. “Some people are shocked but most understand. My friends are accepting of it. They don’t care.”

Who should? “How bad can it be that I have a daughter that is only extremely limited in her diet, but all her physical tests show that she’s healthy?” says my sister Jane. “Rachel’s an adult and in control. She makes it work. Why fix what’s not broken? That’s where we are.”

Morgan Blair, a licensed clinical counselor who writes the Psychology Today blog “Eating Disorders Among Gender-Expansive and Neurodivergent Individuals,” would agree with that approach. “If a person’s restrictive eating isn’t causing distress or impairment to the individual, then it doesn’t have to be a clinical concern,” she says. “My ultimate goal in treating neurodivergent individuals with eating struggles is to help them allow themselves to interact with their environment in a way that makes them feel content, happy, and fulfilled.” 

In other words, not everyone with food sensory issues has a disorder. Though there is a correlation between neurodivergency and eating disorders, there is also confusion among doctors, who might misdiagnose the eating style of a person on the spectrum as a disorder. Food sensory issues result from differences in processing sensations as well as a need for safety in a world made for neurotypical minds. Labeling people on the spectrum as “picky eaters,” says Blair, “creates an unfair and stigmatizing assumption that their struggles are superficial or created out of personal choice.”  

Rachel is fortunate. Her mother struggled with trauma-related bulimia as a teenager and is attuned to the difference between a disorder and a manageable sensory issue. “When Rachel was younger, I was constantly having to justify my child’s eating behaviors to other parents,” says Jane. “People judged me as being an enabler.” 

Stigma can follow people like Rachel throughout their lives. “I have seen time and time again neurodivergent individuals with food sensory issues be pressured, bullied, and stigmatized,” says Blair. People push them to eat, call them rude for not trying, or leave them out of gatherings around food. “I have also seen how this can then lead to the neurodivergent person suppressing, withdrawing, or masking their struggle to avoid those negative responses.” 

Yet, as anyone with a food allergy or intolerance can attest, neurodivergent people aren’t the only ones dealing with social pressures around food. A registered dietitian specializing in autoimmune conditions and eating disorders, Danielle Crumble Smith has suffered painful, food-related symptoms from Celiac disease, Lyme disease, SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth), and hypothyroidism. “It can be quite a psychological burden. It becomes very isolating if people are not accepting,” she says. “At the same time, I’ve had people graciously try to make things for me to eat without fully understanding that that can be a stressor because I feel obligated to eat it.” Family members often push Smith’s patients with, “You can have a little bit.” But, though they might mean well, they are inadvertently causing problems. Even a bite or two of the wrong food can create inflammation in a body intolerant to it. 

The medical community should be driving public understanding, says Smith, but despite the estimated 20 percent of people who suffer food intolerance, physicians have long failed to examine the problem. “Doctors would say, it’s in your head, you’re stressed, you’re picky,” Smith says. With new research into the microbiome—the microorganisms living in our bodies that profoundly affect our health—“doctors are starting to see that these reactions are real,” says Smith. The paradigm shift is seeping from medicine into the wider culture. “It’s easier nowadays. I can call restaurants and ask specifically what I can have and how it’s prepared.”

Social media, says Kate Scarlata, can be both harmful and helpful. A registered dietitian and author, Scarlata specializes in the low FODMAP diet, a regimen of elimination and reintroduction of foods rich in short-chain carbohydrates that many bodies can’t digest. The bulk of her clients suffer from IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, a group of painful intestinal symptoms. Affecting up to 16 percent of people, IBS can be so debilitating that one survey found patients would sacrifice 25 percent of their remaining life for relief. But research on it is underfunded, says Scarlata, perhaps because it mainly impacts women.

“There has been a fair amount of medical gaslighting and stigma,” she says. “There’s embarrassment. They feel alone. ‘I’m having diarrhea. Pass the nachos.’ It’s not exactly cocktail party conversation.” In response, she started the hashtag #ibelieveinyourstory. Sufferers DM her, and she shares the science with them. “Part of my job is advocacy, giving them tools to talk to friends, neighbors, doctors, whoever.”

Social media campaigns like hers are making IBS a hot topic. “The poop emoji has been a star in breaking the taboo,” she adds. But as the “picky eater” video illustrates, social media is a double-edged sword, and its dangers go beyond intolerance to have a negative influence. “With eating disorders, increased social media use is a risk factor, and people with food-related special diet needs are at higher risk for developing disordered eating.” That does not mean your friend on a low-FODMAP diet is at risk for anorexia. “If you’re concerned your friend’s diet is so limited they can’t meet their nutritional needs, and it’s affecting their psychosocial functioning, that’s when you encourage them to get help,” Scarlata advises. 

It’s an entirely different thing, though, to pressure someone with food intolerances to have just one bite, or worse, to deride their diet. In a survey of food-allergic people in which 93 percent were children, nearly a quarter reported being bullied, teased, or harassed for their allergies. The bullies are spreading a culture that’s intolerant of food intolerance. “Parents say, ‘I wish we could just have peanut butter at the party.’ Kids hear that and may project it onto the kid with the allergy in their class.”

As our understanding of restrictive eating evolves, my niece Rachel clocks increased awareness. “It’s been a while since someone has interrogated me,” she says. That gives her breathing room to talk about more than her dietary habits.

I wish I’d had the wisdom to give such breathing room to my son, Harper, when he was little. A kid from Maine, Harper’s favorite food was clam chowder—until he was diagnosed with a shellfish allergy at nine. In the year that followed, he refused to eat restaurant food. I fretted over this. I’m a food writer. Dining out is what I do, who I am. How could my partner and I just stay at home and cook for this kid forever? Months later, a psychologist put things in perspective when he reminded us that Harper’s response was rational. “The wrong food could kill him,” the therapist said.

That sunk in. Before my kid was diagnosed, I was one of those parents who rolled their eyes at the school’s no-nuts policy, the type of behavior that might make my child think his allergic classmates were weirdos. Because of my own need for control around food—to eat whatever I want wherever and whenever and to have those around me join in—I resented others’ food restrictions. Writing this story has helped me realize: I’m still evolving that mindset.

What I’m saying is, if you’ve had your own moments of ambivalence over “picky eating,” I can relate. Food is a vessel for our physicality, our experiences, and our feelings. That could include some negative feelings over someone else’s relationship to food inconveniencing you. But maybe we should all take a note from Rachel. After all, she’s been nothing but respectful and patient with us non-picky eaters all these years. At family gatherings, she sits gracefully, usually not eating but happy to be there. Personally, I’d like to do unto others as Rachel does us.

The post What Everyone Gets Wrong About Picky Eaters appeared first on Saveur.

Nancy Huber doesn’t feel the need to raise her voice. It carries clearly enough above the clank of the old cane press’s spinning shafts and rattling chains, which are currently wringing the juice out of sorghum stalks. But as I feed another bundle of stalks between the rolling metallic cylinders, I can make out her saying, “If your hand gets in there, you’re finished.” Sheave by sheave, I’m careful not to become some cautionary tale. I keep my sleeves well away from the mouth of this press, which has surely milled fields upon fields of sorghum cane in the century since it was manufactured.

None of the Huber sisters—not Nancy, Elva, Elizabeth, or Mary Ellen—speak very loudly. They all taught at the local Mennonite schoolhouse at some point, and recite their instructions the way a teacher might: kindly and matter-of-factly. But today, it’s me—a millennial farmer from outside the Anabaptist community with little sorghum know-how—who is their student. I’ve come to learn how to raise, harvest, press, and cook sorghum, a staple food here in Northeast Missouri. Judging by the stream of neighbors who show up while we work to buy a gallon or two of syrup, it’s clear the Huber sisters are known for making the good stuff.

In this largely rural region, it’s not uncommon to pass by small plots of cane sorghum, distinguished from grain sorghum (also known as milo) by their lengthy, corn-like stalk and thinner, smaller seedheads. Though cane sorghum isn’t as popular now as it was in its heyday, the crop maintains a foothold in this region, where homesteaders cultivate it as a means of self-sufficiency. The Mennonite and Amish communities consider sorghum syrup not only a practical and reliable sugar crop—resilient even amidst drought and other environmental extremes—but also a link to family and community far and near, past and present. 

Sorghum syrup became common in the American South during the Civil War, driven by tariffs on imported cane sugar, embargos on supplies moving along the Mississippi River, and Northern abolitionists’ boycott of the sugar trade for its reliance on enslaved people’s labor. Propelled further by advances in seed breeding, the sorghum plant—which could be turned into syrup, grain, textiles, and even broomsticks—surged in popularity. However, not long after the necessity of subsistence agriculture faded during post-Civil War urbanization and industrialization, so too did sorghum. Despite its adaptation to northern climates, it still required more labor than cane or beet sugar, and was less productive. Not to mention, sorghum syrup has what some might consider an acquired taste.

This syrup isn’t quite like the floral, vanilla-y nectar that comes from maple or agave. The muddy, green pressed juice, when cooked to a caramel brown, is sweet, but with notably grassy, smoky undertones. It cannot be refined to a granulated form, so the finished product resembles a gooey treacle, with a green-brown hue. The first time Elizabeth Huber tasted it, she wasn’t an immediate fan. “Our uncle down in Kentucky brought up a barrel of stuff he overcooked. It was dark and burnt,” she recalls. But at the time, the Huber family was trying to eliminate white sugar from their diets. After a few years of purchasing their uncle’s syrup, they decided to start producing it themselves. Many Amish and Mennonite families incorporate the syrup into cookies, cakes, and quick breads, which infuses the desserts with herbaceous, earthy depth of flavor. People drizzle it on biscuits, popcorn, and oatmeal, or mix it with cream cheese and peanut butter for a rich, nutty dip—which the Huber sisters offered me alongside their famous homemade pretzels. It also finds its way into ham glazes, baked beans, barbecue sauces, and other cornerstones of heartland cuisine. 

Today, sorghum production is stewarded almost entirely by Anabaptist communities—who value the thrift and self-sufficiency of making sweetener from scratch—throughout the South and Midwest. Local sorghum production in Northeast Missouri, once buoyed by robust agrarian communes like Sandhill Farm and small-scale home producers, is today just a shell of its former stature. The old cane press up at Sandhill has not crushed sorghum in years, and the fields that once bustled with teams of machete-wielding harvesters are now quiet tracts of dormant grass leased for hay. My neighborhood food cooperative got a five-gallon bucket of Sandhill’s last batch, and after stretching it out among numerous home-canned tomato sauces, stir-fried dishes, and pancetta and guanciale cures, there’s barely an inch left in the last pint jar. Increasingly, I’ve feared losing this sweet and humble provision.

And so I’ve come to help out the Huber sisters with their sorghum harvest, in hopes of learning how it’s done. As I walk the rows with a sharpened stick stripping the leaves from each plant, I trail three Mennonite girls—children of one of the Huber sisters—and can scarcely keep up. The diminutive Nancy comes over and demonstrates the proper technique: With one swift up-and-down motion, she deftly and firmly severs each leaf from the stalk. “If you’re smart, you can sometimes do it all in one movement,” she says, twisting the cane so the leaves line up. With one fluid strike, several leaves fall to the ground in unison.

Thrashing through the field, I do my best to stay in earshot and learn about when the sugar is ripe for harvest, how to best space the planting, how to properly weed, and other practicalities of sorghum cultivation. When I stop to catch my breath, I spy through the foliage (which is progressively thinning as we continue to work) a three-story brick house with an attached bakery and sewing-machine repair shop. In addition to producing sorghum, the Huber sisters drive the Amish school van, bake the best pretzels in the area, perform seamstress work, sell books and bibles, adopt children, practice midwifery, and apparently build homes and cabins. When I ask how old the brick house is, Nancy replies that she and her sisters built it in 2005: “We laid all those bricks ourselves.”

On harvest day, an Amish neighbor with a team of horses runs an old cornbinder through the field. “I saw he had one, and when I asked if he’d be willing to come harvest our sorghum with it, he perked right up. He said he’d been looking for some sorghum,” Nancy tells me. As the horses trot through the field, occasionally craning their necks to bite a juicy stalk, their driver perches carefully atop the clanking implement and reaches back once in a while to push heavy bundles of cut stalks off the back to be collected later. Once the cutting is complete, we heave the bundles into a wagon, trim off the seed heads, and haul the harvested sorghum away in carts. Some hours later, the Hubers realize this might be the heaviest yield they have ever raised.

As an ecology-minded farmer with a keen interest in crops that can handle increasingly hot, dry Midwest summers, I am impressed with sorghum’s climate resilience. Long known among farmers around the world for its tolerance of extreme heat and extended dry periods, sorghum also handles periodic inundation from heavy rains, suffers from fewer pests, and requires substantially less fertilizer than most other crops. In recent years, a growing number of agronomists and scientists have set their sights on sorghum as a climate-smart crop. As Nancy puts it, “it’s something nice to rely on.”

When I came to Northeast Missouri over a decade ago, our local dry-goods store always carried at least a few different options of sorghum syrup. Since then, many of the old brick buildings that once housed family-owned businesses have collapsed, and the available syrup is only stocked at stores further afield. Now, standing near the rapidly boiling pan of green juice in the Hubers’ sugar shack, where the autumn air is laced with caramel and woodsmoke, I am eagerly anticipating refilling our syrup pail. “You’ll see how the bubbles go from being foamy to getting thicker,” says Elva, advising me on how to use my senses to determine when the syrup is ready. “And it starts to sound different, like a buzzing.”

I’ve been having a hard time watching this process die. Our county still has no stoplights, but it is modernizing in other ways, like two recently opened Dollar General stores. These changes are an ever-creeping reminder that the old times are gone, and along with them, the need to provision our own sugar; it’s simply too easy these days to procure refined sweeteners imported from countries where labor and resources are cheaper. Every year, fewer and fewer weedy patches of sorghum cane spring from the ditches. Resplendent and pale green on the edges of cornfields, sorghum tends to get planted by seed-carrying birds, and a patch or two on some remote road usually signifies there was once a field of it nearby. Filled with sweet juice ‘til the day they are cut, sorghum stalks keep clinging on in the Northeast Missouri landscape.

When I ask the Huber sisters why folks aren’t raising and cooking sorghum as much anymore, Elva considers the question. She finally says, “I guess it’s too much work. My sisters want to keep on with it, but I don’t know if they can, once my kids leave.”

As the local-food movement continues across the U.S., I’m hopeful that more and more growers and eaters alike will seek out what remains of this precious tradition. Still, I’m mindful that it will take a significant surge of demand—and a wave of farmers willing to pick up the torch—to revitalize syrup production.

Before I leave the Hubers’, Nancy offers me some seeds. I can’t say if I’ll ever become as adept a sorghum cultivator as they are, but I do know one thing: come springtime, I’ll be sowing them along those backroad ditches.

Recipes

Caramel Corn with Sorghum Syrup

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Sorghum Crinkle Cookies

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Sorghum Wacky Cake

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The post The Anabaptist Community Taught Me Everything I Know About Sorghum Syrup appeared first on Saveur.

As soon as I saw the illustration of myself, my eyes welled up with tears. I had just received my copy of For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food, and while it was exciting to see my face in print, it was also unfamiliar and jarring. As a journalist, my job is to illuminate stories about other people, so I’m rarely in the position to share my own. Author Klancy Miller had interviewed me two years prior, and I couldn’t remember anything I said. I had only a vague recollection of discussing my work and my hopes and dreams from my desk in my one-bedroom apartment amid the lingering uncertainty of the pandemic. But there I was on the page, my words and thoughts alongside those of so many Black women and femmes I admire in the food world.

I spent the next hour poring over the other interviews with Black women-identifying chefs, writers, bartenders, bakers, and more. Page after page gave me glimpses into the lives of people I look up to in the industry and answered my burning questions about how they got where they are, how they care for themselves, and what they love to cook.

I would later find out that these were the kinds of stories and gems of wisdom Klancy Miller was searching for when she was a young culinary student. “Looking back I wish I’d had more sisterly insights to accompany me on my path,” she writes in the book’s introduction. Miller founded a magazine by the same name, For the Culture, in 2021 because “Black women have shaped cuisine in the United States and in many countries, and our stories about our expertise in food do not receive enough attention or admiration.” In that magazine, much like in this book, Black women are not only the subjects but also the writers and photographers bringing the stories to life. Both show what food media could look like if these voices were highlighted regularly.

That’s one of the paradoxical elements of Black women in food. The work of our ancestors is visible in so much of American cooking, from long-simmered pots of greens and starchy batches of rice to golden fried hushpuppies and mush, and stewed black-eyed peas laced with tomatoes and herbs. All of those foundational dishes would not be possible without the cooking techniques and agricultural labor of enslaved Africans. Meanwhile, fine dining—and the hospitality industry in general—would not be the same without the contributions of the formerly enslaved, whose limited post-Emancipation opportunities often left them no choice but to work in restaurants. And yet, it’s still rare to see Black faces, and Black women in particular, heralded as innovators of cuisine and hospitality today. 

For Miller the way forward is to make sure these past and present matriarchs of the food world get the recognition they deserve, starting with the nearly six dozen Black women she spotlights in For the Culture. “There’s no way to include every single phenomenal Black femme that’s made a mark on food,” Miller says. “The book is not meant to be exhaustive, but instead a robust reflection of Black femmes in food.” And that can be powerful. As I’ve been talking to other Black women who are featured in the book, we’ve all commented on how we teared up seeing ourselves and our peers in For the Culture’s pages.

“I just think it’s so beautiful,” says Zella Palmer, director and chair of the Ray Charles Program in African-American Material Culture at Dillard University in New Orleans. “I love that it’s not only people who are working today, but it’s also thinking about the pioneers and showing Black women lifting each other up.” The fact that For the Culture exists speaks to how far the food world has come, adds Jamaican chef and author Michelle Rousseau, who is featured in the book alongside her sister Suzanne. “A book like this shows a shift in the narrative and that there’s space for all of us.” For Sarah Thompson, a former Philadelphia chef who contributed her grandmother’s rice and peas recipe to the book, For the Culture acts as both a time capsule and a mirror. “My grandmother has since passed away, but she really nurtured my love of food and my connection to my identity,” Thompson says. “Being given the opportunity to be in this book really gave me a chance to see myself.”

All the interviewees in For the Culture “carry on a rich, sacred tradition that Black women have been at the center of—stewarding the land, educating people about what they cook or imbibe, cooking meals that bring people together and allow our humanity and love to be shared,” writes Miller. And this is just the beginning. As I spent more time with For the Culture, I found myself wanting to learn even more about the women featured and started doing my own research into their careers. That led me to names of Black women in food that aren’t in the book, and their stories of persevering in an industry that sometimes feels as if it doesn’t see us. It made me feel hopeful, knowing that other readers might be inspired to do the same thing, which could then lead to more inclusion and mentorship in the future. And in that way, For the Culture isn’t just a collection of voices and recipes. It’s a dream dinner party, and everyone’s invited.

Get the Recipes

Zella Palmer’s New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp

“I wanted to highlight local shrimp and the importance of Black fishermen in New Orleans. There’s such an abundance of seafood from the Gulf Coast.” —Zella Palmer

Get the recipe >

Sarah Thompson’s Rice and Peas

“When I was first asked to contribute a recipe, I thought about doing something complicated but came back to this simple dish that is the backbone of so much of my life. Rice and peas was a staple in my grandmother’s kitchen in New York. It’s familiar, comforting, and simple.” —Sarah Thompson

Get the recipe >

Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau’s Island Greens with Avocado, Mint, and Mango

“This dish is one of the first salads we ever did for a client, and it has become a signature. It really speaks to our style of cooking: Jamaican ingredients served casually, a sort of green cuisine.” —Michelle Rousseau

“We wanted to create a recipe that shows the abundance and diversity of fruits and vegetables in Jamaica. People don’t think of Caribbean cooking as vegetable forward, but we do because that’s how we eat here.” —Suzanne Rousseau

Get the recipe >

The post My Dream Dinner Party Guest List: Every Black Woman in Food appeared first on Saveur.

Welcome to Gut Check, our column dedicated to the complex, ever-evolving relationship between food and our bodies. Whether you’re curious about mindful eating or want to understand what makes picky eaters picky, read on and let award-winning journalist Betsy Andrews answer all your burning questions. 

This past July, I turned 60, and I started thinking more about my health. To me, the idea of healthy eating has always been a drag. I’m from Philadelphia. I want my cheesesteak. The aroma of caramelized meat and onions, the luscious goo of the Whiz, the burn of the long hots, the pillowy heft of the roll. Popping statins to quell my cholesterol, I’ve long eschewed diet culture in favor of truly enjoying my meals. 

But recently, something changed. The cheese and long hots are gastrically challenging, the bread is bloating, and the meat is a climate-damaging guilt trip. How, in that context, can I continue to love my cheesesteak? I am a food writer. Pleasure is ostensibly my subject and privilege. Yet I wonder how often I actually enjoy my meal, being prone to scarfing down lunch at my desk by day, then posting photos of fancy restaurant food by night. When I worked at SAVEUR in its onsite days, all the recipe testing, product samples, press meals, and long hours fueled by expense-account pizza meant weight gain. We called it the “Saveur 30.” We were privileged eaters, but I’m not so sure we were pausing to actually savor our meals.

In recent years, nutritionists and dietitians have started centering the idea of savoring—the pleasure of tuning in—as a way of improving our relationship to food. Many of them work with people who’ve cycled on and off diets all their lives. Is there something for non-dieters like me to learn? Can I have my cheesesteak and eat it, too? 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines savoring as, “In modern use, to taste with relish, to dwell on the taste of, also figuratively, to give oneself to the enjoyment or appreciation of.” With eating, the enjoyment is both figurative and literal because it is not a simple act. “People don’t eat nutrition; they eat food,” says registered dietitian and wellness and nutrition expert Tamara Melton. “They’re looking for flavors, textures, temperatures, sounds. Pleasure hormones in our brains get turned on once we start eating.”

Beyond that hit of dopamine, lots more happens. In Gastrophysics: The New Science of Food, psychologist Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford, invites us to imagine eating a peach. “Your brain has to bind together the aromatic smell, the taste, the texture, the color, the sound as your teeth bite through the juicy flesh, not to mention the furry feeling of the peach fuzz in your hand and mouth.” 

Your thalamus processes that information and filters it to your cerebral cortex, where it’s connected to a slew of associations and memories. If you pay attention as you eat, slowly savoring each bite, those random thoughts organize themselves into a deeper enjoyment of your experience. As Spence told me when we spoke, “It’s like the pleasure of standing in front of a work of art and the transformative moment when you understand it and cry, ‘Aha!’”

That’s precisely the type of pleasure chef and psychologist Caroline Baerten promotes. Founder of Brussels’ Centre for Mindful Eating and Nutrition, Baerten is a disciple of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who popularized mindfulness—being present in the moment—through books like 2014’s How to Eat. During retreats, Hanh guides attendees in eating a single raisin. “Thanks to 100-percent attention to what I was doing, I was blown away. I had never tasted a raisin in such a profound way,” says Baerten. Stopping to savor a single raisin is likely a laughable proposition to the 39 percent of North American workers who basically never break for lunch (despite 94 percent saying they’re happier when they do). Mindful eating, then, is triage. You do what you can, taking a moment or two during eating to focus on your sense of smell, taste, or touch, checking in with how you and your body are feeling. 

After work, mindfulness can mean turning off the television and setting the table to essentially feel like an invited guest in your own home. “It creates this almost sacred moment where we can find this pleasure while we are eating, through the senses,” says Baerten.

A growing body of research points to the long-term psychological benefits of mindfulness. It’s an antidote to “an epidemic of stress,” says Dr. Lilian Cheung, director of mindfulness research and practice at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and author, along with Hanh, of Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life. The research backs her up. She also cites studies showing mindful eating’s association with decreased binge eating and a higher-quality diet. 

That doesn’t mean, nor do studies show, that mindfulness works for weight loss. “Viewing mindfulness and savoring through the lens of diet culture is problematic,” says clinical psychologist Alexis Conason, author of The Diet-Free Revolution. “I’m about tuning people in to what feels good and doesn’t. Allowing ourselves to have food is a radical act when we’re told most of our lives that our pleasure is gluttonous.”

Proponents of intuitive eating, another anti-diet approach, are even more explicit about the need for pleasure. As Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the method’s co-founders, write in Intuitive Eating, “When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content.” You can use satisfaction to achieve balance, whatever the size of your body, so that your enjoyment of food is the driver behind experiencing a comfortable level of both hunger and fullness. 

Savoring your food, ultimately, helps you savor the rest of your life. Indeed, intuitive eating’s connection to “numerous adaptive psychological constructs” has been asserted in studies. “People have better moods, self-compassion, and they’re less connected with eating disorders and pathology,” Tribole notes. “They’re able to engage in life.”

Yet, savoring doesn’t have to be an all-in process. Intuitive eating dietitian Christy Harrison, host of the Rethinking Wellness and Food Psych podcasts, notes, “For people who are restricting or binging, savoring can be overwhelming. Distraction—looking at their phone, being out with friends—can be helpful.” Savoring doesn’t have to be, and for some people shouldn’t be, a solitary act. Meals with friends and family, if uncomplicated, can help you really connect with yourself, with others, and with the food you’re eating..

The social context is how Melton, co-founder of Diversify Dietetics, a non-profit promoting diversity in the field, approaches savoring. “Think of a group of friends sitting around eating. They all dig in and go ‘Mmm.’ Social pleasure comes from that collective experience,” she says. 

For Melton, whose father is Trinidadian, an essential part of helping people savor their food is honoring the culture it came from. “Often food is the one thing people can experience from home multiple times a day,” she says. “Let’s take away the stigma that what you are feeding to your family is not healthy just because mainstream culture says it’s not. What do you like to eat? What memories is it bringing back? Celebrations, family, customs—Is there a reason why you are craving this kind of food?”

Where does all this leave my cheesesteak and me? Well, I’m biologically programmed to crave it, for starters. “From an evolutionary perspective, there must be a reason we have dopamine,” Baerten said. “Pleasure pulls us toward something. The question is, what gives you not just superficial pleasure but profound, soul-based pleasure? That has to do with connecting with deeper layers within yourself and others.” She wasn’t talking about cheesesteaks, of course. She was thinking of the way you savor broccoli from a grower you come to know at the farmers market. But I certainly feel connected to my family and my community when I’m back in Philly and eat my hometown sandwich. 

The next time I order a cheesesteak, I will tune into what feels good and what doesn’t, as Conason says, and not eat it with so many gut-challenging long hots. I’ve also been thinking about something Cheung suggested: “We’re in the habit of saying, ‘I don’t have enough time for lunch, so I’ll eat while meeting the deadline,’” she said. “One way of savoring your food is spending 10 minutes doing nothing but eating. If you’re in a hurry, save the rest for a snack. You’ll get hungry later, and you can have the food again and appreciate it.” Then she mentioned how on Okinawa, one of the planet’s so-called Blue Zones, where people live to be in excess of 100, they make sure to eat to only 80 percent fullness.

I’ll eat my cheesesteak, not like I normally do, while driving. Instead I’ll slide into a booth at the local joint, unwrap the sandwich carefully, ponder the sensations of the meaty, melty filling and its sturdy roll as I eat it, until I feel I am just this side of “Oy, I am stuffed.” I’ll rewrap what’s left contemplatively, and look forward to savoring it the next day, when I feel hungry again.  

The post The Science of Savoring appeared first on Saveur.

It’s that time of year. The days are getting shorter; we’re saying goodbye to tomatoes and corn; and apples and squash are front and center at the market. Which also means that around every corner and in every shop is something flavored with pumpkin spice. 

Pumpkin spice lattes. Pumpkin spice candles. Pumpkin spice popcorn. Pumpkin spice soap. 

While the relentless ubiquity of pumpkin-spiced everything can get a little overwhelming, I’m not mad about it. It’s warm and cozy, like pulling on a flannel, a sweater, or a favorite beanie.

According to McCormick & Company, the fall season accounts for about 80 percent of the company’s retail sales of its signature Pumpkin Pie Spice, which debuted in 1934. By 2019, the blend was the brand’s fourth best-selling retail spice from September through November. But how—and why—did the combination of ground cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, and ginger come to so thoroughly signal the start of autumn?

Many credit Starbucks. 

The Seattle-based coffee empire unveiled its Pumpkin Spice Latte (aka the PSL) some 20 years ago, and in doing so, inspired a flavor profile that famously heralds the incoming season. 

Much like spring, autumn signifies change. As we emerge from the heady days of summer, we enter a season marked by routine and tradition. The start of the school year; for many of us, freezing temperatures; and attempts to enjoy the outdoors while we still can. There’s also the steady stream of holidays, each with its own set of traditions. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Al-Mawlid Al-Nabawi lead into Dia de los Muertos and Halloween, which give way to Diwali and, in the U.S., the biggest pumpkin pie holiday of the year: Thanksgiving. 

While Starbucks may have invented the PSL, and McCormick may have popularized the blend, neither really invented pumpkin spice. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery (1796)—purportedly the first American cookbook—includes two recipes for “pompkin” pie, both of which incorporate many of the spices we associate with the dessert today. The spices that make up the pumpkin spice blend have, of course, been around and similarly combined for ages. Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves are native to Asia while allspice is native to the West Indies, Mexico, and Central America. All were introduced to North America centuries ago via colonialism and trade.

It’s likely that pumpkin spice blend entered the retail market as a response to the introduction of Libby’s canned pumpkin in 1929. Let’s be honest: pumpkin isn’t the easiest ingredient to prepare, so shelf-stable canned pumpkin not only made life much easier for the home baker—it also made a once-seasonal ingredient available year-round.

And pumpkin spice? In an era of convenience and financial hardship, buying a single jar of spices (rather than four or five) was a wallet-friendly convenience, and McCormick answered the market’s demand.

Which brings me to pumpkin spice-flavored things. While some might feel pumpkin spice mania has gotten out of hand (a quick search for “pumpkin spice recipes” turns up over 100,000,000 results), I prefer to embrace it. For freshness, I like to make my own homemade blend, then have fun with it. I add my DIY pumpkin spice to everything from my morning coffee (why mess with a good thing?) to roasted fall vegetables (think carrots and squash and, yes, pumpkin). I might add some spice to a quick chicken marinade or fluff some into rice with raisins and nuts. Any number of soups and stews would benefit from a scoop of pumpkin spice—especially with a kick of chile and a little salt to make it more savory.

At the end of the day, though, nothing beats a really great pumpkin-spiced dessert—like these sweet-as-pie pumpkin spice snickerdoodles. Soft, spiced, and everything nice, these cookies have a crackly surface and a bit of tang from cream of tartar, which is cool and fun. They’re also cakey and cute, and I guarantee you’re going to eat one, then another, and by the time the day is over, you will have had at least five and go to bed with a slight tummy ache. But it will be worth it.

Recipe

Pumpkin Spice Snickerdoodles

Get the recipe >

Pumpkin Pie Spice

Get the recipe >

The post Pumpkin Spice Is Here to Stay—Let’s Embrace It appeared first on Saveur.

I wish I could remember eating my first BLT. That first bite into its toasted bread slathered in mayonnaise sandwiching crisp lettuce, thick, streaky bacon, and perfectly ripe—and perfectly seasoned—tomatoes. The juice from those tomatoes running down my forearms and dripping onto the table before me. The way the toasted bread grazed and cut up the roof of my mouth, leaving me with a raw souvenir for my tongue to caress for days after the sandwich was long gone. 

But I can’t. And while I may not remember my first, I have long known that the BLT is the ultimate sandwich. I’ve worked as a chef for almost 20 years, in restaurants, private homes, and test kitchens, and still, making—and eating—sandwiches is one of my top pastimes. The BLT is by far my favorite, so I make the most of eating them every year while tomato season is at its peak. Nothing beats a late-summer tomato, so you likely won’t see me partaking in a BLT outside of late July through October. 

Ok, that’s an absolute lie; I’ll fuck with a BLT year-round, but will most likely complain about the mealy tomato as I down it.

It’s often said that sandwiches were invented in England in the late 1700s by John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Of course, sandwiches existed long before that—at least since the first century BCE, when Rabbi Hillel the Elder sandwiched lamb and herbs between sheets of unleavened matzoh during the year’s Passover Seder. At best, we can attribute the name “sandwich” to the eponymous Earl, who some suggest popularized the lunchtime fixture while in the midst of a winning streak at the gambling table. It’s said that, rather than interrupting his lucky run with the typical plated meal, he was presented with a dish requiring no utensils: a bit of beef, sandwiched between two slices of bread.

For those of you living under a rock, BLT stands for “bacon, lettuce, and tomato.” As a kid, I was a nerdy smarty pants who would argue to anyone that cared enough to listen that the BLT should actually be called the BLTMB, because *pushes glasses up on nose* technically it ain’t a BLT without the bread and the mayo (and you better not forget to season that tomato with s+p). 

The abbreviation is believed to have come about in the U.S. in the 1940s with the rise of diners, where waitstaff often used shorthand to quickly convey orders to the kitchen. The BLT then grew in popularity after World War II, when supermarkets began popping up across the country and seasonal ingredients, such as tomatoes, became more readily available year-round.

Any discussion of the BLT’s origins merits a nod to its sister-cousin, the club. New York’s Saratoga Club in Saratoga Springs claimed to have invented the multi-layered club sandwich (which is a close second to the BLT on my list of favorites, TBQH) in 1894. One of the first written club sandwich recipes appeared soon after, in the Good Housekeeping Everyday Cook Book (1903). I truly have no idea how the club (which typically also includes turkey or chicken and an extra layer of bread) morphed into a BLT, but not everything has to have an answer. 

Let’s also take a moment to acknowledge the assorted BLT deviations, which incorporate other ingredients, such as a fried egg (the BELT), avocado slices (the BLAT), or even avocado AND sprouts (the BLAST). Meh. When it comes to sandwiches, I’m a traditionalist. What really matters is this: The allure of the BLT lies in its simplicity. Since its ingredients are so few, and since each component is as important as the next, it’s wise to ensure that you take care in choosing (and preparing) the best versions of those ingredients you can find.

The Bread.

We begin our BLT journey with bread, the foundation of any good sandwich. Simple flatbreads date back more than 20,000 years, though the first known leavened versions appeared around 1000 BCE in Egypt and Mesopotamia. 

The far more modern squishy white sandwich bread is the common diner enclosure for a BLT, but I recommend you take a bit more pride in your homemade version. Get yourself a good loaf from your local baker or hit up that neighbor who took up sourdough baking during the pandemic. Slice your bread thick—but not too thick. I suggest around ¾ of an inch. 

And sure, you could throw those slices in the toaster and get to cooking your bacon on the stovetop, but have some respect for the bread and for yourself, for god’s sake. Instead, heat up equal parts ghee and some good olive oil in a cast-iron skillet. 

Ghee (or clarified butter) has a higher smoke point than butter while still adding plenty of excellent buttery flavor, but you can also use butter if you’re so inclined. The olive oil will help cut through some of the ghee’s rich flavor. Frying your bread in a skillet as opposed to the toaster is a game changer. I don’t even own a toaster anymore, that’s how strongly I believe in toasting bread in a skillet (also, I live in an NYC apartment and counter space is a luxury). Melt the ghee with the oil over medium heat in the skillet and toast the bread, flipping once, until golden and crisp, about 2 minutes per side, et voila! Bread perfection. (I also season the bread with a pinch of flaky salt afterwards.)

Anyway, let’s move on to the real MEAT of the sandwich.

The Bacon.

(You see what I did there?)

Bacon dates back to about 1500 BCE, when the Chinese first started preserving pork belly using salt from the mines in Zhongba, in the Three Gorges region of China’s Yangzi River valley. Still made today, the chewy preserved meat, known as lap yuk in Cantonese, is frequently eaten around the Lunar New Year. 

The word “bacon” comes from the Middle English “bacoun,” a salted, pressed, and dried—but unsmoked—pork product made in Medieval England. During the 17th century, they were finally smoked, resulting in a version of bacon similar to what you know and love today.

Some might advise you to cook your bacon in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, arranged neatly on a cooling rack set over a sheet tray, until crisp, for anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes (depending on the thickness). But why on earth would you want to turn your oven on in the summer? Cook those slices right there in the skillet over medium heat; it’s gonna be just fine (although you may have to give your stovetop a bit of a wipe afterwards). 

You’ll want to be sure to start the bacon in a cold skillet; this allows the fat to render more slowly while also ensuring you get super crisp bacon. Either bust out a second skillet, or just cook the bacon first then wipe out the grease before toasting the bread.

And now, lettuce talk about the greens of the BLT 

The Lettuce.

(I’m on a roll, aren’t I?) 

As early as 2700 BCE, murals depicted Min, the Egyptian god of fertility, eating lettuce for increased stamina in the bedroom. Eventually, the Egyptians began cultivating the leafy greens for food. 

Some people prefer iceberg on their BLT. While I love iceberg on a turkey club or in a cold wedge salad, I find that green leaf lettuce adds a nicer color and texture to a BLT. Besides, the bacon and bread bring all the crispy crunch this sandwich needs.

Moving on to…

The Tomato. 

It’s believed tomatoes were first cultivated in what is now Peru. From there, the fruit eventually made its way up to the Aztecs and Mayans in Central America, then on to Europe via Spain’s conquistadors in the 16th century. Initially, many Europeans feared the tomato,  which was primarily cultivated as a decorative plant and many believed to be poisonous. The fact of the matter is that European aristocrats ate off of pewter plates, which had a high lead content. In all likelihood, the otherwise harmless tomato’s acidity leached lead from said servingware, resulting in its deadly reputation. 

I’m sure your knife is not sharp enough to slice through the skin of a ripe tomato (and if it is, give yourself a pat on the back right now—you are an exceptional human being and deserve it). The rest of us mere mortals, who rely on knives as dull as this article, should use a serrated blade to slice a tomato. I love a Jersey beefsteak or another heirloom variety from the farmers market, but I’ve also grown some cute little cherry tomatoes on my roof this summer, and, thinly sliced, they have been a real treat on a BLT. Whatever variety you use, you’ll want to slice the tomato about ¼-inch thick, and don’t forget to season with salt and pepper.

The Sandwich.

Ok, you’ve made it this far; it’s time to talk assembly. (I won’t argue with you on mayonnaise brand—that’s another story for another time.) First, slather one side of each of your toast slices with mayo, then top one slice with some lettuce leaves. I like to add the tomato next, followed by the bacon, and then another slice of bread. We all know that if you make a sandwich with the bread touching the tomato, the juices will turn that bread soggy. Nobody wants a soggy sandwich after all that work. So please, PLEASE, layer your sandwich with the tomato in the middle, then call it a day.

With its fuzzy origins and few ingredients, the BLT will always hold the top place in my heart. It remains one of the most popular sandwiches in the U.S.—and with good reason. You can go to any restaurant or diner with a BLT on the menu and nearly always sit down to a sandwich that will make you happy. There is, however, no pleasure greater than making one yourself, using the ideal bread, bacon, lettuce, and tomato—and also sharing the love with someone special (because no sandwich tastes better than one made by someone who cares). This one is uniquely satisfying and gorgeous… and worth cutting up the roof of your mouth for.

The post The Complete(ish) History of the BLT appeared first on Saveur.

Rise & Dine is a SAVEUR column by Senior Editor Megan Zhang, an aspiring early riser who seeks to explore the culture of mornings and rituals of breakfast around the world.

When I first started trying to build a short meditation routine into my mornings, I quickly learned that it clashed with another, already entrenched, daily habit. The quick onset of a caffeine jolt from a cup of coffee, effective as it was at jump-starting my energy, interrupted the calm stillness I was attempting to embody. For a novice meditator like me, quieting the mind was a hard enough task, and it didn’t help that this erratic fidgetiness left little room for reflection.

But on a recent trip to Kyoto, I learned that meditation and caffeine have been intertwined in Japanese monastic culture for centuries—with tea at the heart of it.

To learn more about the art of mindfulness, I spent a stormy afternoon at Shunkoin Temple, a centuries-old Zen Buddhist site, one of dozens in the sprawling, pine tree-lined Myōshin-ji temple complex. Reverend Takafumi Kawakami, the head priest, greeted guests with a tea ceremony and cups of cold-brewed sencha, a cooling balm perfect for the hot, muggy weather. As we sipped, he explained that the combination of tea’s stimulating caffeine and calming L-theanine (the latter helps mitigate the excitatory effects of the former, and their union can help bolster attention and curb distraction)assists the pursuit of “mindful tranquility and self-exploration.” After we set down our empty cups, Kawakami led us through a meditation practice. Seated cross-legged on the floor in that serene temple, I felt a mild lift in energy from the sencha—and was surprised that my thoughts wandered less than usual, and that my mind refocused quickly when they did.

It was Buddhist monks who first brought tea from China to Japan around the 8th and 9th centuries and began disseminating tea culture, explained historian Robert Hellyer, author of Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups. For centuries, it remained a scarce and precious commodity. “On imperial land and in Buddhist monasteries—those were really the only two places, at this early stage, where tea was being grown,” he noted. While tea was offered to the Buddha and the deceased during monastic ceremonies, it had another practical application for monks themselves. “It kept them clear-headed,” added historian and University of Hawai’i professor Nancy K. Stalker, explaining that monks would often turn to tea for a little invigoration ahead of their meditative and ceremonial practices.

Tea eventually spread to the societal elite, and finally to the masses. “Starting the morning with tea is, I think for many, a moment to relax and focus your thoughts for the day ahead,” said Yasunori Iwata, a chef based in Nara, a city about an hour south of Kyoto. Though tea-loving tourists tend to flock to nearby Uji, which is regarded for its matcha production, Nara, as Japan’s first permanent capital, has one of the country’s longest traditions of tea cultivation. The city also has an enduring morning tradition of not only drinking tea but eating it, too.

As Iwata watched a pot of water simmering on the stove, he explained that, according to local lore, a tea porridge called chagayu became widespread in Nara as a way to stretch leftover rice, and it eventually became a hallmark of the local cuisine. Though the dish is similar to ochazuke, a simple porridge common throughout Japan that requires pouring brewed tea over cooked rice, chagayu calls for the cook to simmer cooked rice in tea on a stovetop—a vital step that more potently perfumes the grains with tea aroma.

As the chef gently stirred the hojicha, a roasted green tea, I peered over his shoulder and breathed in the smoky warmth of the steam. There was something almost meditative about getting lost in this peaceful, repetitive motion—it invited me to notice the delicate scent of the leaves, and the soothing warmth ascending from the water. My mind emptied as I watched the grains swirling slowly in the pot. “Notice when the texture starts to change,” said Iwata, quietly summoning me from my trance as he pointed out the slight thickening of the rice. He ladled the chagayu into a small bowl with some umeboshi, or pickled plums, on the side. After several nights of restless, jet-lagged sleep, the light flavors and gentle aromatherapy were restorative. 

Though I’ve cooked and eaten countless rice porridges, none had delivered a subtle energy boost and undertow of earthy fragrance quite like chagayu. But many Nara visitors likely won’t encounter it, local tour guide Atsuo Itsuji told me, as the breakfast is usually simply prepared at home. Luckily for fans of the dish, it’s easy to recreate.

If coffee is the alarm clock that stuns the drinker awake, tea is the sunlight streaming in through the window, gently nudging one toward wakefulness. As I learned in Nara, even the process of preparing it creates space for a bit of slowness. And with a warm bowl of chagayu, we might have our meditation and eat it, too.

Recipe

Chagayu (Tea Porridge)

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The post Seeking Mindfulness in a Bowl of Japanese Tea Porridge appeared first on Saveur.