On the Shelf

New cookbooks cater to every taste

By Greg Cahill and Marina Wolf

The Rose Pistola Cookbook Broadway; $35 By Reed Hearon and Peggy Knickerbocker

SINCE ITS OPENING in 1996, the Rose Pistola in San Francisco has been a focal point of the burgeoning North Beach cafe and restaurant scene. Everyone from the New York Times to Gourmet has sung the praises of this fine Italian eatery (which garnered a prestigious James Beard Award in its first year). Chef and restaurateur Reed Hearon offers 140 Italian recipes that reflect his simple adaptations of Genoese and Ligurian cuisine. The entertaining (and let’s face it, cookbooks are mostly about entertainment) and informative aspect of this unpretentious volume are the interspersed profiles spotlighting such Bay Area food producers as Sue Conley of the Cowgirl Creamery at Tomales Bay Foods in Point Reyes Station and organic farmer Warren Weber of Star Route Farms in Bolinas, as well as a hundred and one tips on keeping it simple. G.C.

Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special Clarkson N. Potter; $35 By The Moosewood Collective

I STOPPED USING my Moosewood cookbook a couple of years ago. The back index pages were falling out, and I was getting a little tired of cheesy casseroles and beans, beans, beans. But the newest offering in the Moosewood Restaurant library (there are eight books so far, not including Mollie Katzen’s solo efforts) may be just the thing to bring me back to the meat-free fold, at least for lunch. The collectively owned and operated Moosewood Restaurant has been serving up mostly vegetarian fare for more than 25 years. The collective’s efforts recently earned Moosewood a place in Bon Appetit‘s list of the most revolutionary restaurants of the century. Never has the collective’s dedication been so delicious–and accessible–as in Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. The book offers close to 300 recipes that form the backbone of the restaurant’s lunch menus. Here there are soups enough to drown a horse, and salads of all sorts to revive it. The offerings span the globe, from Algerian Tomato Soup with Vermicelli to Westphalian Vegetable Stew, and the presentation spans the spectrum of dietary requirements–vegan, low-fat, low-carb, quick-n-easy. Each recipe is accompanied with a string of possible accompaniments, following Moosewood’s simple tradition of the daily special: soup and a selection of salads. M.W.

Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home Knopf, $40 By Julia Child and Jacques Pepin

DO TOO MANY cooks spoil the broth? Not if the cooks are TV chefs Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, whose opinionated approaches to good cooking are as delightful as they are different. The PBS television show featured the two master chefs engaged in unscripted discussions about all of their favorite foods and ways to make them. Predictably, the resulting show was a bit, er, lively at times, but hey, a vigorous exchange of views can only benefit the art. The companion cookbook has captured much of the vibrancy of the television show, with each concept, ingredient, and recipe flanked by comments from both chefs. In this book, even simple salads merit the full focus of Julia and Jacques’ attention, and the resulting dialogue is full of good flavorful hints at what cooking can and should be. Don’t let the detailed photography and simple layout fool you: this is not a book for beginners, who may not be able to deal with the ambiguity and diversity of views that are inherent, perhaps even essential, to the book’s structure. However, it is the perfect tome, weighty and filled with some of the classics from French and American cuisine, for the home cook who is reasonably comfortable with sharp knives, multistep recipes, and special orders at the butcher counter. M.W.

The Northern California Best Places Cookbook Sasquatch; $19.95 By Cynthia C. Nims and Carolyn Dille

YOU COULD ARGUE about the exclusion of some very fine restaurants from this anthology of recipes and essays, but there’s no denying that the folks who made the cut are all worthy. This Seattle-based publisher is known for its culinary guidebooks, and this is the first attempt to cull those collections for the firm’s first cookbook. There are a few challenging items included here, but for the most part the authors have kept their offerings mercifully simple. And you’ll recognize several North Bay names, including Hemenway’s in Santa Rosa, Belle de Jour Inn in Healdsburg, Huckleberry Springs Country Inn in Monte Rio, Glenelly Inn in Glenn Ellen, the Gables Inn in Santa Rosa, Brix of Yountville, Half Day Cafe in Kentfield, and the Wine Spectator Restaurant at Greystone in St. Helena. And while you may find the braised Napa cabbage and Beaujolais sauce from Left Bank in Larkspur too daunting, the tequila-marinated Cornish hen (from Las Camelias Mexican Restaurant in San Rafael) is a walk in the park. G.C.

From the November 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Blurring the borders of regional food. Or just what the heck is wine country cuisine?

By Marina Wolf

CERTAIN regional-based food fads have come and gone–from blackened Cajun everything to red-hot Southwest machismo–yet the hyper-awareness of American regional food is reaching an all-time high. Regional showcases, symposiums, and culinary tours–including the Fine Cooking tour hosted recently in Sonoma County–are sprouting up around the country. Saveur magazine (“A World of Authentic Cuisine”) is running stories about Baltimore crab soup, East Hampton fish bakes, and St. Louis’s Little Italy. Upscale restaurants in Nashville serve pork marinated in balsamic vinegar with bourbon gravy, and chefs in New England are talking seriously about “New Maine Cooking.” Meanwhile, the old-but-new California cuisine is queen of kitchens up and down the Gold Coast, and a strange newcomer called “wine-country cuisine” is creeping into the parlance.

Forget melting pot. The metaphor for our contemporary culinary culture is a varied buffet with several hundred little platters.

Observers ascribe the increased interest in regional-based fare to an overall heightened interest in foods.

“People aren’t just interested in recipes anymore,” says food historian Sandra Oliver. “They want the story behind the story. Once you start looking at the history of your food, you’re bound to run into regionalism.”

Louis Osteen, chef-owner of Louis’s in Charleston and a leading proponent of deep-South cooking, agrees. “People are catching up to European interest in good food,” he says. “And when you talk about really good food, you have to talk about regional food.”

The question is, how much of the talk about regionalism is an authentic interest in the expression of place and how much is restaurant hype?

And how much further can it go?

Hype or Help?

IN GENERAL, chefs and restaurateurs have been fairly upfront about the value they place on regional cuisine as a marketing hook in an ever-competitive and sophisticated business.

In the February 1993 issue of Nation’s Restaurant News, Osteen says of his cooking, “Low-Country cooking [of the coastal Deep South] is geographical, traditional, cultural . . . and it’s a real good marketing aid, too.”

John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, is another proponent of Southern food traditions, combining an academic point of view with the enthusiast’s appetite. He has little patience with the faux Southern specialties that have ended up on the menus of national restaurant chains.

Yet even he is able to look upon the p.r. buzz about regional cuisine in a fairly calm manner. “I think right now there’s a good mixture of both [marketing and authentic cuisine],” he says. “The thing is, if you can sell people Low Country or Mississippi Delta or some subregional variant, then they’re going to feel like they’re having a special dining experience.

“I think it’s very smart marketing.”

The South, of course, is struggling with particular culinary stereotypes–“grits, greens, and grease,” as Edge so eloquently puts it. But other regions have found equally compelling reasons to establish their own regional style. In Hawaii, for example, local chefs and promoters began organizing such chef events as “The Great Hawaiian Cook-Off” and “A Taste of Paradise: Dining with the Great Chefs of Hawaii” to spiff up resort-town offerings for a new wave of food-savvy tourists.

“Now we’re more concerned with not hiding the flavors of the natural ingredients, whether it’s the fish or the produce. That notion comes from mainlanders. The locals, they don’t really care,” says Keith Cevoli, executive chef with Celebrations Catering and creative partner with Beverly Gannon, one of the leading promoters of what is now called “Hawaiian regional cuisine.”

Even “California cuisine” has emerged as an eminently marketable catch phrase, used both inside and outside of California’s geopolitical boundaries to sell a certain concept. Its use has become an issue for even the most seriously committed California-style chefs, some of whom are beginning to be a little leery of the phrase’s overuse. “It doesn’t mean that much anymore,” says John Ash, culinary director at Fetzer Vineyards in Hopland, whose John Ash & Co. restaurant helped define the term.

“It’s just a phrase. The term California, anything California, has this special cachet to it. It’s the golden land, the beautiful people. Its value for a lot of people, as much as anything, is its marketing cachet.”

Indeed, for every region whose gastronomic identity has recently emerged to public recognition, you can find a chef from that region who refuses to be pigeonholed. Caprial Pence, for example, is an acknowledged pioneer in what is called “Pacific Northwest cuisine,” which generally means an elegant and satisfying blend of local products with an Asiatic flair on the plate and/or palate. But Pence is quick to dismiss the very field that she leads. “I think it’s just somebody wanting to put a name on it, I really do,” she says. “I did some work with a woman who’s doing her thesis on Northwest food, and she kept asking me if there was a Northwest cuisine. I said no. I think a cuisine is dictated by specific dishes that have been made for years and years, and there just aren’t dishes like that here.”

California Dreaming

BY PENCE’S strict definition of cuisine, few regions in the United States would have their own cuisine. Certainly not California, a state that has existed for just 151 years. There are vinegars in Italian attics that are twice as old. But many chefs will testify that California cuisine is an established tradition. “To me, California cuisine describes something very specific,” says Mary Evely, executive chef at Simi Winery in Healdsburg.

“It means fresh, seasonal foodstuffs, quick cooking, and bright, fresh sauces and seasonings.”

California cuisine is widely considered to be the child of chef Alice Waters and her groundbreaking food at Chez Panisse in Berkeley in the early ’70s. Her showcasing of absolutely fresh seasonal foods in simple preparations was a masterful amalgamation of then current trends such as vegetarianism and nouvelle cuisine.

But in some ways, she was simply continuing and magnifying an already existing style of California cooking, says Janet Fletcher, a Napa-based food writer and author of a book on California cuisine forthcoming from the Williams-Sonoma publishing company. “They didn’t call it California cuisine, but there was already an identifiable Cal way of entertaining [in the ’40s and ’50s],” says Fletcher.

“A lot of it was outdoors. There was grilling even then. There were Asian influences on the food, and there was much greater use of fresh vegetables than in other parts of the country.”

What about the new phrase “wine-country cuisine”? That’s a little too new, even for these winery chefs. It’s true that in most wine-growing regions of the world, the food has developed alongside the wine. But American wine country is still too new for it to be a useful descriptor, says John Ash. “In California we’re still very much in the adolescent stage, where we’re finding out what works with what wine,” he says. “It’s complicated by the fact that food styles and wine styles are changing so quickly that there’s never been a gestation period for them to kind of perk along together.”

But lack of a distinct, dish-based orientation hasn’t stopped California cuisine from spreading as an attitude or strategy, asserts Daphne Derven, curator of the American Center for Wine, Food, & the Arts in Napa. “One of the hallmarks of what we call California cuisine is taking a tradition and exploring it,” says Derven. “You could almost say it’s a metaphor for American cuisines. We take a traditional ingredient or technique or preparation, and modify it to fit the current circumstances.”

Other parts of America, though, have had the relative isolation and specific ingredients necessary to establish a cuisine in the traditional sense. In the South, for example, barbecue is a close contender. “Someone observed once that barbecue in the South is the closest America has to the regional cheeses and wines of Europe,” says John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

“You drive 50 miles and it changes.”

In the Northeast, island communities such as East Hampton, the region covered in the September/October 1998 issue of Saveur, have been farmed and fished for nine or 10 generations, with a simple style of cooking that has seen little change over the past 300 years.

Food in the Future

WHERE DOES that leave us? Even when we stipulate that regional cuisines do exist, at least in the homes of the people of the region, and that even though California cuisine isn’t 400 years old, it does have some meaning in the collective mind of the food world, we are still left with sorting out the complicated nomenclature and indistinct future of American regional cooking.

The first problem stems primarily from media and restaurant abuse of phraseology, which, it would seem, is a necessary hazard of the business. Mary Evely of Simi Winery recalls visiting a Southwestern restaurant where the food was described as “elemental American cuisine.”

She and her dining companion spent a good hour before dinner trying to guess what such a cuisine might entail, and arrived to find it merely the California cuisine concept–fresh, local, seasonal–prepared with Southwestern ingredients.

“The chefs are just trying to define their cooking to the prospective customers,” says Evely. “It’s hard to intellectualize what is essentially a sensory experience.”

And however difficult or pervasive the use of regional cuisine as a hook, it’ll never catch up with reality.

California cuisine has spread over the land, even changing itself as its practitioners begin integrating Asian influences more fully into their techniques. Southern food, which many people think of as static since before the Civil War, is evolving as new influences have come in with recent groups of immigrants; some neighborhoods on the Mississippi Delta now boast as many pho noodle shops as fried-chicken shacks, says John T. Edge.

It’s the story of food. “Blurring boundaries is inevitable. It’s the story of cuisine over millennia,” says Janet Fletcher. “People move and ingredients move, and therefore ideas [about food] move, too.

“It would be impossible to stop.”

Paradoxically, even while American regional cuisines are shifting in fusion, they are being split into ever smaller and more place-specific parts. Call it the opposite of fusion cuisine: fission cuisine. Chefs, ever on the lookout to spiff up the menu with esoteric ingredients, do the next best thing and elevate simple ingredients–duck, lettuce, peaches–by slapping a geographic label on them, the more specific the better.

Increasingly the word terroir is being used to describe produce and food products. In winemaking, terroir refers to the different climatological, hydrological, and geological influences on a particular patch of land, and the differences those influences make in aroma and flavor of different bottlings of the same varietal of wine. It stands to reason that grapes aren’t the only fruit that would vary with changes in the environment.

For other chefs, micro-regional eating is as much a matter of gastrology as it is of gastronomy. Take Ralph Higgins of the award-winning Higgins Restaurant in Portland, Ore., whose devotion to eating locally takes on an almost macrobiotic air. Higgins believes that there are actual physical benefits to be had from eating from the place you’re in. “If you eat faithfully what’s available in that region at any given time of the year, you’ll automatically be getting more nutrition,” says Higgins.

“Your body goes through cycles where it adapts to climactic changes, and the plants and animals [in that same area] are following those same cycles.”

Home Cooking

NUTRITIONAL analysis aside, it’s entirely possible that Higgins’ brand of micro-regional cuisine will indeed be the wave of the future in regional cookery in American restaurants. Restaurants have good reasons to foster this attention to detail. It creates a strong unified statement to customers. It supports local producers.

Regional cooking may even be the catalyst of a return to a region’s roots. In the south, chefs have dressed up many down-home classics of the Southern kitchen, which has in turn increased appreciation of the food in the general population.

“Rediscovery of Southern food by restaurants has changed Southern culture and Southern cooking more than anything,” says Edge. It’s turned the Southern-food stereotypes on their ear, and what’s more, it’s changed the way Southerners see themselves. “In some ways it’s emboldened Southerners who may have had a chip on their shoulders about their own food,” Edge says. “They’ve figured out that if cornbread is worthy of a mahogany inlay table, it’s worthy of their tables at home.”

Clearly, then, the reinterpretation of regional food by restaurants is a powerful act. If we have scorned our food roots, the respect that food gets by being on a white tablecloth bridges the alienation. Scattered by time, tide, and interstate transportation, we can return to our homelands, at least in our minds and in our stomachs, with a single bite.

That is an elemental magic, and essential to feeling at home in the world, according to Daphne Derven.

“In the world today, we have become so global,” she says. “To feel like we’re really here, we need to celebrate the spot we’re in . . . and regional cuisine helps us do that.”

But when chefs–and mea culpa, writers–take poetic liberties with the naming of cuisines, we may be stirring up the already murky waters, clouding the regional heritage that is already hard enough to find.

“It seems like such small stuff, but little by little it’s being picked away,” says Sandra Oliver with a sigh. “If you’re not aware what your regional foods are, it’s hard to defend them.”

From the November 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Some like it hot: Tierra Vegetables is a little on the chili side.

Burning Desire

Tierra Vegetables champions the chipotle

By Marina Wolf

“OH, NOW LOOK at those!” says Lee James of Tierra Vegetables, reaching into the low-lying tumble of pepper plants and plucking out a reddish-purple fruit. “They look even prettier all piled up in a box,” she says as she rubs off the field dust and takes a bite. “People think the field must be pretty, too, but when it’s later in the season the plants fall over and the weeds come in . . .” Then she notices my stare and stops mid-stride. “I didn’t even think to offer,” she says and rummages again for a pepper. “Do you want one?”

I do, but I feel hesitant about biting right in the way Lee does. What she eats like apples could be incendiary devices to mortal folks. After all, Lee, with her brother Wayne James and his wife, Evie Truxaw, are the people who helped put chipotle chilis on the North American map. Tierra Vegetables’ seven varieties of smoked chilis were recently dubbed an endangered American foodstuff and brought on board a metaphorical food ark by Slow Food, a global organization dedicated to good food and traditional foodways. Sure, Tierra grows regular garden stuff at three sites around the county, but Lee, Wayne, and Evie love chipotles first and foremost. Hell, even their hordes of shelties love chilis.

Lee is quick to assure me that this pepper is a sweet pimiento, but I still hesitate, rubbing the dust off as an excuse to look around. The field looks like any other well-used piece of farmland in the middle of the harvest season. Watermelon rinds from the failed melon plantings lie in little heaps at the end of the rows. Tractor ruts provide a rough track for Wayne, who walks barefoot everywhere–damp fields, gravel driveways, a chicken crossing–and now uses his calloused toes to poke at the first plant in a row of greens. “These white-top beets aren’t doing so well. Since when do we get leaf miner in October?” he exclaims, glaring at the leaves that are withering up brown and dry along the edges of the pale tender leaves.

Wayne’s barefootedness is just another example of Tierra’s laid-back atmosphere. The buildings are weather-beaten, the flowers out front are spent in the fall heat, brown and trodden upon. The James don’t have time to prettify their farm. They’ve got 60 people to fill produce boxes for, and they’ve got chilis to smoke.

“You can’t grow a chipotle; it’s a process,” says Lee later at her house in Healdsburg. “People still can’t figure that out. They’re always asking for fresh chipotles. But it’s a smoked, dried thing. You don’t pick them like that.”

Lee is leaning on a key part of the process: the homemade smoker. Over the 10 years that Lee, Wayne, and Evie have been picking their peppers, the smoker has seen several incarnations, from an old refrigerator with holes poked in it to the current model, a cement-and-brick behemoth sporting two chimneys, an automatic fan system, and shelving space for up to 400 pounds of fresh chilis at a time. It’s not as picturesque, perhaps, as the traditional chipotle smoking in Oaxaca, where the peppers cure above an open fire for days. But it’s definitely a step up in terms of quantity and quality control, and it gets the job done.

No bed of roses: Brother and sister team of Wayne and Lee James have established a red-hot business built on their locally grown chilis.

The beginnings of Tierra’s chipotle empire are equally unromantic. I expected a tale of mysterious scents, a glimpse through a shaded southern courtyard, a sizzle on the tongue from that first memorable taste. But in fact, the whole thing started simply enough when a customer at their booth at the Marin Farmers’ Market asked for chipotle peppers. Up until then, none of the Tierra folks had tasted chipotle, and Lee remembers her first encounter with the smoky chili as not very inspiring. “It was terrible,” she says straight out. “It tasted like creosote. So we said, ‘We could make it better than that.’ ”

And so they did, after years of tinkering with the factors that go into making a smoked, dried chili: heat, air, smoke, time. The formula that Tierra has settled on is deceptively simple: five days in the smokers, followed by up to two weeks in a dryer if the chili is a jalapeño or some other pepper with thick flesh or high oil content. The firebox burns dry logs of prune and other fruit woods, which give off a clean, pure-smoke smell, like a well-built campfire.

I had half-expected the air to sting with the pungent aroma of toasted chili. But these peppers are not cooked, only air dried in the smoker. “You don’t want the temperature to get too hot or you’re going to lose all the flavor,” says Wayne after inspecting the height of the flame hovering over the one log inside. Another secret to the incomparable Tierra aroma: dried basil stems on the fire. I jerk my head up and sniff at the smoke, the aroma of which has changed from campfire to college dorm room. “That smells like . . .”

Wayne and Lee grin knowingly. “Yep,” says Lee. “It smells like another green herb that you smoke.”

In such a relaxed atmosphere, it’s hard to get worked up about anything. But I’m still curious about something. Getting picked for the Slow Food ark is both an honor and a warning. Is it true that chipotle making is an endangered art?

“Well, there will always be chipotles,” says Wayne as he closes the lid on the firebox. “There will always be commercially produced chilis.”

Lee nods her head in grim agreement. “It’s the process that’s being lost.”

From the November 4-10, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Talkin’ Turkey

Select the ‘perfect’ wine this Thanksgiving

By Bob Johnson

‘TIS THE SEASON. No, not that season. Not quite yet, anyway. ‘Tis Thanksgiving season. So let’s talk turkey. And stuffing. Not to mention mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, candied yams, and corn bread. Selecting a wine for the Turkey Day dinner table is akin to selecting a wine in a smorgasbord. In a word, it’s impossible. Take away all the side dishes and you still have a challenging decision to make. A roast turkey with corn-bread stuffing and a cream gravy calls for a chardonnay or sauvignon blanc. But that same formerly feathered friend with a sausage stuffing and pan gravy would be better complemented by a red wine such as syrah or zinfandel.

Toss in the flavors and spices and textures of the aforementioned sides, and you have a sensory explosion that no single wine could possibly stand up to. As this realization has solidified in my brain over years of fruitless searching for that “perfect” Thanksgiving wine, I’ve learned to think plural, as in multiple bottles of vino.

And since Thanksgiving is about family and hearth (not to mention girth), I also like to open homegrown wines on this special day.

See if this strategy would work for you . . .

Start with one bottle of white wine and one bottle of red. I recommend chardonnay and pinot noir because most people like these varietals, and some outstanding examples are crafted in Sonoma County.

Among chards, you can’t go wrong with (in order of ascending price) Belvedere (Sonoma County), Geyser Peak (Russian River Valley), Sapphire Hill, Armida Reserve, Sonoma-Cutrer (Les Pierres Vineyard), or Kistler (Sonoma Coast).

For a pleasing pinot, look for Mark West, Alderbrook, Davis Bynum Limited Edition, Stonestreet, or Williams-Selyem.

Since the Thanksgiving meal is protracted, to say the least, figure on one bottle of wine for each two diners. If two bottles won’t suffice, add two more, a sauvignon blanc and a zinfandel.

Superb sauvignon blancs are made by Taft Street, Quivira (the Reserve rendition is striking), Dry Creek, and Hanna.

Zesty zins from Sonoma County are too numerous to mention. A short list would include Seghesio, Rabbit Ridge, Murphy-Goode, Fritz, Nalle, and Deerfield Ranch. (Tip: If it says Dry Creek Valley on the label, chances are there’s tasty juice inside the bottle.)

Wine Time: A can’t-miss holiday four-pack.

IF YOU DREW the short straw and also are hosting the in-laws, you’ll need still more wine. The next types to add would be a gewürztraminer and a syrah (a.k.a. shiraz).

The best gewürz in the county is made by Alderbrook, a contention supported by the sweepstakes award bestowed upon the ’98 vintage at the recent Harvest Fair competition. Need more incentive to try it? You can buy it for less than nine bucks.

Syrah/shiraz shoppers should seek out releases by Cline (a Harvest Fair gold medal winner), Geyser Peak (always dependable), or Clos du Bois (which just released a Reserve Shiraz that is wonderful).

What about merlot? you ask.

What about it? I retort.

Yes, merlot is extremely popular right now. Yes, some people drink it daily. And, yes, local vintners (Mietz, Pezzi King, Lambert Bridge, St. Francis, and Matanzas Creek, among many others) do an excellent job with it.

But because it has become ubiquitous, it has lost some of its specialness. And the Thanksgiving table deserves to be populated by special wines for the special people who will be consuming them.

Need yet another red? Try a petite sirah, a grenache, or a mourvedre.

Still lacking a sufficient supply of white wines? Add a viognier, a chenin blanc, or a Riesling. With a little shopping, you can find local renditions of all three varietals, not to mention some enticing blends.

So when you set the Thanksgiving table, put two or three wine glasses at each place setting, uncork all the bottles you’ve selected, and let your diners have at it. Take the pressure off yourself, and let them make the food-and-wine pairing decisions.

And if you get any complaints, you’ll know who not to invite next year.

From the November 4-10, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.