Regional Resurgence

Years ago, when I was just a couple years into blogging, I wrote a series of posts (here, here, here, and here) lamenting the promotion of global cuisine and flavors over regional ones. The posts were written between 2006 and 2008, a time when, it seemed, the notion of global cuisine was eclipsing regional foods - and some of those local foods were in danger of disappearing altogether.

By 2008, "local" had become more of a buzzword in food culture, though at the time, it had more to do with producers than with flavors. But even then, there were regional movements bubbling under the surface, especially in the south.

Also in 2008, I linked to a map that focused on disappearing regional foods and the power of food regions as a whole. In 2010, I wrote about how psyched the Woodberry Kitchen staff was after I ordered scrapple at brunch.

And in 2012, I wrote a long post about how the rise of southern cuisine's popularity represented a shift in the local/global preference landscape.

Consider this an addendum to that post, a few years later.Today, it's not just southern cuisine that's on fire - it's anything and everything hyper-regional. It's Southern Foodways Alliance gone national. We've come full...half circle. Done a 180 on the global/local front.

This was cemented, for me, a week or so ago, when I read Bill Addison's Eater roundup of the 38 essential American restaurants. Addison includes Woodberry in the mix - which feels right to me, especially since he groups the restaurant with a handful of other places that best represent "Regional Americana." 

There are several in the south - but not all. The Pacific Northwest and New England both make appearances. Probably the southwest could use more representation (the lack of Arizona on the list is a complaint of many commenters) and the Midwest, with just one Minneapolis restaurant, is definitely underrepresented. 

But still, it's nice to see that in there at all. 

Chesapeake Reads

I always get a little thrill when I read something about the Chesapeake Bay - or someplace Bay-adjacent - in the national press. This month has been a good one for that.

First, in the November issue of Food and Wine, there's a solid article about Bay oysters and the Croxton family's work, through their family business, Rappahannock Oyster Company, to revitalize the local oyster industry. The article's not online yet, which is a shame - it's good, though I had a couple quibbles.

The article does makes it sound like the Croxtons are solely responsible for the resurgence; while they are important figures, that gives short shrift to other players. Also, there's no mention of Maryland in the article - ah, clearly an oversight? We have oysters, too! And, finally, there's a rockfish recipe included but no notes indicating that Bay rockfish are stripers in other parts of the country. That gets confusing for some people.

******

A couple articles in the most recent Garden and Gun also caught my attention. I loved reading about the Leakes, a father and son team in South Carolina, who build custom cellarets, which are like little wooden bar boxes on legs.

The cellarets are gorgeous - and have Chesapeake roots themselves. The designs the Leakes recreate were originally popular during the 18th century, especially on the coast, from Maryland down through the Carolinas.

Right now, we divide our booze between an antique sugar chest (upstairs) and the wine cellar (downstairs). Oh, and the freezers (upstairs and downstairs). But I would happily make room for a cellaret, as well. It's about history, after all.

*****

The same issue of G and G spotlights Jim Banagan, a St. Mary's County native who's spent his life collecting oyster cans. He's in his eighties now and his collection is upwards of three thousand cans - and he continues to buy and sell (he's also branched out in clam cans).

I love old oyster cans partly because they look cool - Harris Crab House does a great job decorating with them - and partly because they're a prop that illustrates a big chunk of the history of Maryland. The article does a nice job summarizing the way oysters and canning intersected here - it's succinct and informative.

And Jim Banagan? He just seems like a good guy. With a great collection.

The Local-Global Pendulum Meets Southern Cuisine

A couple weeks ago, my whole family got together at my parents' house to celebrate my dad's birthday. We were talking about food (because what else do you talk about?) when the conversation descended into a  "Who's on first?" style mess. My sister-in-law asked me if I'd ever been to Charleston, commenting that after reading the recent Washington Post article about Woodberry Kitchen, she got the impression that WK is a lot like Husk.

I haven't been to Husk, or to Charleston, but I had read the article and, based on what I've heard about Husk, I told Cail I thought she was right. Then my mom chimed in with a confusing comment about a neighbor who doesn't really care for Charleston because she thinks the food is "too rich" and my brother expressed surprise that I'd never been to Charleston - but I was sure he knew I hadn't been there.

As it turns out, he did know I'd never visited Charleston - the city. Cail and I were talking about the Holy City, while my mom and brother were talking about Cindy Wolf's famously fancy and, yes, rich, restaurant here in Baltimore. (Though I haven't actually been there, either.)

All that talk about Charleston and Husk and low country flavors in Baltimore - topped off by a late-night viewing of Shag - got me thinking. These days, Southern cooking is on quite a pedestal. And Southern flavors are steeped in so much history that it's easy to forget that not so long ago, regional cooking - in the South or anyplace else - wasn't exactly front-page news.

Back in the early days of M&G, I wrote a handful of posts lamenting the demise of regional cuisine (most notably here and here). The first post I wrote was triggered by my sister's college graduation dinner at the Southern Inn in Lexington, Virginia...which, despite its name, was not very southern at all. The dinner was OK, but I was disappointed that it lacked any regional distinction. I could've eaten the same dinner in California, New York, or the Midwest.

I wasn't the only person concerned back then, either. A year after my post,  an essay by Salma Abdelnour called, "The Insidious Rise of Cosmo-Cuisine," appeared in the May 2007 issue of Food & Wine. Abdelnour observed that the best chefs of the day lacked a culinary connection to their hometowns, with menus borrowing from cities all over the world, but not necessarily from their own backyards. That essay got a lot of attention; it also appeared in Best Food Writing 2007.

At that time, eating locally was a hot topic - "locavore" was the OED word of the year for 2007 - but that was more about where to buy ingredients vs. flavor profiles. In those days, the most celebrated food in the world was coming out of Spain (specifically, out of Ferran Adria's head), but it wasn't lauded for its Spanishness so much as its edginess. Technique was king. Top Chef viewers were talking about Hung's knife skills and Blais' wild ideas and careful execution, but not nearly as much about how their backgrounds might have influenced their cooking choices. Local food was on the rise, from a logistical standpoint, but from a creative perspective, we were all thinking global.

And then something shifted.

Today, El Bulli is no more and the Top Chef judges have seen waves of regionally-focused cheftestants. The Southern Inn, which inspired my first post on the subject, touts fried chicken and country ham all over its menu. And Charleston's Husk, described on its own website as "a celebration of Southern ingredients," is widely considered the country's best restaurant.

What happened? Something natural and cyclical, I think - though I don't know that we're experiencing a resurgence of American regionalism so much as a burst of interest in Southern flavors in particular. Here on M&G, the first mention of Charleston - which seems to be at the heart of this Southern food revival - was in April of 2009, when I wrote about Elle Decor's profile of the city.

In July of that year, the Baltimore episode of No Reservations aired and one of the show's (few) bright spots was Bourdain's smart identification of Baltimore's southern culinary roots, on display via lake trout and pit beef.

In November 2009, I considered pimento cheese super trendy and the following month, I sang praises for Kevin Gillespie's mission to cook food that "has a sense of place" (that place being, of course, the South). A rise in Southern flavor profiles was one of my predictions for 2010. By May 2011, when Garden & Gun (which launched in April 2007) won the National Magazine Award, the Southern revival was so firmly in place on a national level, the magazine could launch a semi-regular blog all about finding the South in New York City.

A few days after my father's birthday dinner, Alicia gave me a magazine her parents picked up on a recent trip to Charleston (Alicia's dad, Big G, is a Citadel alum). The magazine, called The Local Palate, bills itself as covering "food culture of the South," though it's mostly about food in Charleston vs. the region as a whole. Either way, its mere existence goes to show that regionalism is alive and well, at least in certain pockets of the country. The cover refers to "The Second Coming of Southern Cuisine" and on the inside, one of the most intriguing pieces, "Southern Revival" by architectural historian W. Barksdale Maynard, carries the lofty subtitle, "Living in the Golden Age of Southern Cuisine."

I can't find the article anywhere online (the rest of the issue is here) and that's really a shame because Maynard does an excellent job tracking the peaks and valleys of popularity experienced by Southern cuisine. His conclusion is that, "the long decline is over: traditional Dixie cuisine is back," and he quotes revered Southern food historian/champion John T. Edge, poo-pooing those who fret that the South has grown less "Southern" thanks to homogenization and Northern migration. Edge insists, "That concern is cyclical and maybe even permanent, this notion that Southern food is in peril." In other words, every generation worries, but the world keeps on spinning.

I suppose I should take those words to heart, too. After all, it was only five or six years ago that I was dramatically mourning regional cooking. And look where we are now: regional cooking, in the South at least, has risen again.

Why I Love August

Last night, Kyle and Bill came over and we had dollar crabs from Conrads...among other things. We started with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. The mozzarella was from Ceriello, the basil from the yard, and the tomatoes from Mary's family's farm in Pennsylvania:

It's just perfect tomato time.

After the tomatoes, we moved on to steamed shrimp with onions:

Shrimp aren't that pretty to photograph, but they really did taste great. They usually do when they're packaged in foil and styrofoam.

Next, we set up the table outside and pulled out the mallets and knives:

Everybody wore their best this-can-get-dirty gear. Especially Bill:

This, to me, is what America is all about. So many choices, so much freedom:

And the crabs themselves:

Dollar crabs are smalls, but these were heavy. And hot. And nicely seasoned. And, as Cooper pointed out, they weren't hot because they'd been reheated - they were freshly steamed, which makes them so much better.

Finally, just because, here's Mia, the newest addition to Kyle and Mary's household:

She's pretty cute.

It was a great meal - the kind that ends because you can barely move anymore, both from picking and eating. A perfect late summer night all the way around.

I Heart Jonathan Adler

I love him anyway, but this, from August's Bon Appetit, makes me melty (even though he's not actually from Maryland):

"Are there any foods that remind you of home?

"Steamed crabs. I'm from southern New Jersey, near the Chesapeake Bay, and we always had them with Old Bay seasoning."

Too Soon?

I think that I'm jumping the gun on tomatoes this year, but I can't help myself. Look at how great these tomatoes (from Planet Produce) look with Ceriello mozzarella and basil from the backyard:

We had these for dinner last night, with just a little drizzle of balsamic. It might be early in the season, but they were fantastic.

Plus, I was inspired by this crab and avocado salad Cooper got at Mari Luna last Saturday:

Speaking of Mari Luna, has anyone had a bad meal there ever? It's fantastic and so consistent. Plus, loud enough to be totally kid-friendly.

But I digress. Tomato season might not have officially started in these parts, but it has started at my house. I just can't resist.

[Crab salad photo by Alicia Barger.]

Bloggers Are Cool

LoveFeast Table, which is one of my favorite local (OK, half-local) food blogs, has started doing something so cool I almost can't handle it. They call it "love bombing" and this is how they define it:

It’s the act of making, serving and sharing a meal for unsuspecting people. Especially people not in your typical circle of friends.

They actually started doing it last fall, but the linked post is to a recent expedition. The experience is amazing to read about and I bet it's even better in real life.

Report from the Field: Toigo Orchard Bourbon Peaches

A long, long time ago - last summer, in fact - I found myself obsessed with the idea of bourbon peaches. I saw a Food & Wine blurb about the peaches made at Toigo Orchard in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania (not so far from here) and I was positively compelled to order them.

Which is weird, really, since Cooper and I share a serious aversion to bourbon, thanks to our bourbon-soaked years in college in Virginia. But the peaches sounded so good. I wanted somebody to try them.

Fortunately, not only does our friend Clancy love bourbon (he went to college in New York, so he wasn't ruined like we were), his birthday happened to be about a week after bourbon peach fever hit me.

So I got online and shipped Clancy a jar of peaches. An hour or so later, I got an email from Toigo Orchards asking me for feedback and telling me that I was the very first person to order something from their website. Kind of cool, right?

Anyway, this is a long way to get to the punchline: Clancy and his wife, Suzanne, finally ate the peaches last week. This is what he had to say:

Suzanne and I just inhaled those bourbon peaches you sent....They were legit....a sweet bourbon taste without that harsh hard-liquor taste....So, as I said, I'm sure this is so last years news, but I thought the least I could do was give you the down low from us.....

So there you have it. If you like bourbon, the peaches are good.

Freakonomics & Locovores

Two totally trendy mouthfuls of made-up words.

But interesting anyway. A reader writes in, asking if it's more resource-intensive to grow your own food, as is the current uber food snob trend, than to buy food from "experts". The reader first posed this question to Michael Pollan, who said he didn't know and that she should ask the Freakonomics guys.

I knew the answer before I even read it. Of COURSE it's more resource-intensive to grown your own food. The reasons people grow their own food have more to do with emotional benefits than anything else. Oh, sure, I probably do save some money by planting herbs (fresh herbs aren't cheap at the store) but in my case, the opportunity costs are low - Cooper spends 30 minutes planting and I do a little watering every day, but that's not enough time to cost a lot. But for the most part (and yes, I'm going to make a huge generalization here), if you're spending a lot of time growing your own food, you're getting something out of it beyond just the food.

Two other quick points:

- This connects with something I read someplace last week about the relationship between organic farming and world hunger. The post (wish I could remember where) suggested that organic farming is somewhat irresponsible, since it requires more land than non-organic, and that extra land could be used to increase food supply. Interesting.

- The commenters at the Freakonomics post...hilarious. Granted, the Dubner post wasn't perfect. There were some connections that could've been tighter. But the locovore lovers definitely came out to play on this one.

Last Night's Dinner: Potato and Leek Soup with Fresh Herbs

This dinner was actually Monday and Tuesday night's, not last night's, but I think I deserve a little leeway since I'm sick. I haven't been feeling great this week, but since we have a wedding to go to this weekend (and I looove weddings) I am unwilling to let myself succumb to my cold. Instead, I'm Zicamming it up all over the place, and cooking totally unseasonable things. Like soup.

When I woke up on Monday with a stuffy nose and sore throat, I knew I had to make some soup to get myself back on track. At the same time...it's hot out. So I compromised and found a sort of light soup - this potato and leek soup with fresh herbs. It's got only a little bit of cream in it, so it's not heavy at all.

I thought the consistency was perfect and that it had great flavor (both on Monday and when I had it again on Tuesday). Of course, I can't taste much, and the Zicam ruins the taste buds I still have working.

Cooper, on the other hand, thought the soup wasn't nearly hearty enough (he passed on it Tuesday night and had a Tarte d'Alsace from Trader Joes instead - they are amazing).

With that in mind, I probably won't make this again but, really, if you're not feeling well and want a sort of light, but filling soup...try it.

In other recent dinner notes, this week kicked off our summer/fall of CSA membership. Tuesday, I headed to the little farmers' market outside the Kenilworth Atwaters to pick up my first order from One Straw Farm. I decided to just do half orders this year, to see how much we use and how everything goes.

Last night, I made a quiche with fontina, baby portabellos and fresh spinach from One Straw Farm - our brand new CSA. Delicious, not surprisingly, as were the (also CSA-provided) strawberries we had with pudding and puff pastry for dessert.

Unfortunately, the salad I made with the quiche was a disappointment. When I saw this recipe for creamy horseradish vinaigrette, I was excited - it's exactly the kind of thing I love. Plus, I thought the soft texture of Boston lettuce and the crisp coolness of the cucumber sounded pretty ideal. But...it was totally blah. Not nearly enough spice for either one of us. But, we live and we learn.

Tonight I'm going to use the CSA-provided asparagus (probably the last of the season) alongside some sort of eggs benedict dish. I've never made that before and I don't actually eat eggs with my benedict (never have and, yes, I know it's not normal)...so we'll see how it goes.

Already, I'm pretty into the whole CSA thing. Besides the smugness I feel thanks to the whole supporting local farmers thing, I kind of like having some constraints around which I can plan meals. If I know I've got certain things in the refrigerator, I'll be a lot more creative and interesting in what I put together for dinner.

Plus, again, the smugness factor. It's great.

Trendy Monday: Michael Ruhlman's Readers Weigh In

Last week, chef Michael Ruhlman asked the readers of his blog to give him their opinions regarding up and coming food trends for home cooks. And oh, did they.

There are a lot of comments, but a skim through is worth it - it's interesting to see what other people are thinking. Although, it won't be surprising to anybody who's even slightly followed food trends lately. There's a lot of talk of local/homegrown/DIY/etc, both in relation to quality and the economy. Several commenters riff on the economy even further, saying they expect more of a return to "cheap cuts" - though others talk about highly specialized or unusual spices making their way out of the restaurant and into home kitchens.

The two things that most interested me were speculation about a rise in South American flavors, which I totally see and am happy to see, and an interest in raw milk and raw milk cheeses. Just in the past couple of weeks I've been hearing inklings of a raw milk revolution, at least among foodies. Hey, if you know your dairyman, why not?

That said, there was also a fair amount of discussion about whether the trends mentioned are just foodie trends, or if they're likely to trickle down to the rest of the population. My take is that the trends always start with the people who are most engaged. It really wasn't that long ago that only those seriously in the know were eating salsa.

I think that the local movement is most likely to trickle down. More than raw milks or home sous-vides, at least. Really, economically, local eating can make a lot of sense - so there's that. Plus, the movement's got critical mass - you can't open a magazine or the newspaper without seeing something about local eating. All it would take is one major restaurant chain to make a commitment to local purchasing - and they could do it, though they might have to bump prices a tiny bit - and the movement would officially be mainstreamed.

It's a long thread of comments, but worth it if you're into that sort of thing.

(Thanks to French Laundry at Home for pointing me in the right direction.)

Philadelphia

Philly is popping up all over the place for me this week. Yesterday, I emailed a bit with one of the contributors to this blog, a really nice comprehensive resource if you're interested in local food in the Philadelphia area (side note: if anybody in Baltimore wanted to start a site like this...I'd love it!).

Today, I just got back to my email after lunch with my sister to find a note from Erin's friend Libby (of Untergunther article fame). Part of her job at work involves marketing the city of Philadelphia to people who might like to come stay. Baltimore's close, so obviously we're a hot market for the city.

In case anyone's thinking of taking a little overnight trip up 95 sometime soon, you might want to book sooner rather than later. Here's why:

GoPhila has a really good deal on a hotel stay, but you have to book by Wed. January 9th (as in tomorrow by midnight!). You can get a 50 dollar discount on any hotel room over $150 dollars (that's 30% off), but you have to do it through the site. It says that you need to redeem by January 9th, but you can redeem it anytime as long as you book by January 9th.
http://www.gophila.com/holidays/ (use the travel widget on the right).

Libby also mentioned that Philly's full of great restaurants and some cool foodie-ish "destinations" (my marketing-speak is showing), like Reading Terminal Market and the Italian Market.

So if you're thinking about a little trip...now's a good time to get on it!

Trendy Monday: The Best Lists of 2008 Food Trends

And welcome to the first edition of "new school" - my weekly look at what's new and interesting in the food world.

Could there be a better time to start a feature like this? Food sections the world over are bursting with annual lists of the hot new trends that are just sure to define our diets in 2008. I've read quite a few of them, and my two favorites are Baltimore Sun critic Elizabeth Large's posts about the 194 "hot or not" trends, as defined by the chefs of the American Culinary Federation, by way of the National Restaurant Association, and Epicurious editor-in-chief Tanya Steele's predictions for the 10 trends that will "take hold" in 2008.

Both lists give some love to "local" this or that and the word "organic" is, of course, featured prominently on both lists. But these lists transcend the zillions of more generic articles out there. Large's chefs' list is interesting because it doesn't just predict what'll be cool in 2008 - it looks at a huge number of trends (194, to be exact) and shows which chefs think are "hot", which are "passe" and which are basically mainstream ("perennial favorites"). Because it's a survey of a broad spectrum of chefs, what tops the list doesn't reflect the newest of the new and, as some commenters point out, there are sure to be regional differences in chef answers (the trendiness of Cuban food was cited as an example). But it's thought-provoking nonetheless.

Steele's list, on the other hand, drew my attention for the opposite reason. Where the ACFC list is all about generalism, this one, to its credit, doesn't try to be all-encompassing. The trends listed are narrow permutations of broad trends. For example, #1 "Farmers are the new celebrity chefs" is really a less broad, but deeper offshoot of the local food movement (#2 on the ACFC list).

Together, the lists give us a fine look at what 2008 will likely bring to our tables. To me, it looks good.