Scene 1
“What do you think?” asked Mary Jo.
“About what?”
“About everything. The village.”
We had just completed our first tour of Autignac, population eight hundred, burrowed deep in rural Languedoc. This was home for the next six months. This was home for the next six months. This is where our two kids—Eva, fourteen, and Joseph, nine—would go to school. This is what we had picked, of all the options available.
Here’s how ready I was to disapprove of Taco Bell Defy.
I had just eaten a lunch of nettle-ramp soup, foraged from my own yard in Shoreview, Minn. I was also — and you’re going to think I’m making this up, but I’m not — scheduled to leave the next day on a flight from Minneapolis to San Francisco, in order to, among other things, make an anchovy-vinaigrette salad for Alice Waters. That really happened. You can ask my wife, Mary Jo.
Anyway, that gives you some idea.
My first encounter with anchovies was a caper, anchovy and olive pizza that was so eye-wateringly salty that it ended my relationship with anchovies before we had a chance to get acquainted. Generally, a food accepted as edible by some fraction of the human race is something I can find a way to eat. But I couldn’t finish that pizza.
The Rhône river, like our Mississippi, divides the southern coast of France about equally into east and west. East leads to Provence and then the Riviera and eventually Italy; west, to Languedoc and then Roussillon and eventually Spain. Because more people have heard of Marseille, Saint-Tropez, and Monaco than have heard of Sète, Agde, and Collioure, the eastern half of the coast is blessed, and to an equal degree beset, by visitors and their money.
It was generally understood, growing up Catholic in St. Paul, that you ate fish on Fridays as a form of sacrifice. For one day, you were to set aside the self-indulgence and the faintly sin-sullied physical satisfactions of dripping hamburgers and bleeding steaks for the prim virtues of a fillet of fish.
There were still dangers, even then. There was a smell we called “fishiness,” with distantly poisonous associations. And there was, of course, the widely acknowledged scourge of asphyxiation by tiny translucent bones.
Marc Lanza looked at his watch. “I hope they haven’t forgotten me,” he said, although it was not yet ten minutes to noon.
The dining room table next to us was set with an unfussy, candlelit care. In a shallow marble basin, like a sort of altar, a decanter of brick-red wine sat next to the bottle from which it had been poured.
Marc wore his hair, black like marinated olives, pulled back into a tiny bun. A man steeped from the cradle in the traditional cooking of Provence. Standing straight, I could tuck his massive head under my chin, but he had a burly topheaviness that suggested a wrestling match would likely go his way.
I’d like to end with a final thought before we go eat and drink and talk some more. I think tonight’s subject is important for a lot of obvious reasons. Talking more about food, knowing more about the food of your region, eating more food made by people you know, are all ways to eat better, and eating better is, in my world, a path toward living better. But there’s something else about food, and if you’ve sensed any kind of agenda behind my contributions to the conversation tonight, that agenda has been toward trying to find an inclusive definition for Northern Food, which has traditionally been a very narrowly defined thing. Here’s the reason. We are living in a time when otherness is seen, more and more, as alien, and threatening, and sometimes criminal. It is suddenly possible to imagine the unimaginable: That our greatest gift as a species—communication—will fail us. That we could reach a point in our lifetimes where people on the other side, whatever the other side is, will simply become unreachable. That our arms will never be long enough to gather them back in.
Winner: 2019 James Beard MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award
Consider this: In the past two years, 23 James Beard Award semifinalists have come from Minnesota. Their names are Boemer, Brown, Malone and Roberts. Their names are Guzman, Kim, Nguyen and Yang.
When the Super Bowl came to Minneapolis earlier this year, Esquire called the city “the food world’s best kept secret.”
In an article entitled “Where to Travel in 2018,” the Wall Street Journal suggested 10 destinations to its readers. Go to Shanghai, it said. Go to Montenegro. Go also, it said, to Minneapolis.
Why Minneapolis? For its food.
On Dec. 11, a tiny electric spark of a woman named Lucie Peyraud — Lulu to all who know her — gathered four generations of family around her in a Provencal farmhouse and celebrated her 100th birthday. I’m going to come back to her in a minute, but it’s worth noting for now that the event was largely lost amid American headlines about an Alabama Senate race and California wildfires. Lulu is not the woman most of us think of when we think about how French food came to America. For that, there is an official story.
A good cook has secret ingredients. Yes, there is a virtue in simplicity, and much to be said for what might be called the Chez Panisse school of contemporary American cooking that implores us to get our hands on in-season ingredients, grown well, and in a state as nearly alive as possible, and then more or less to get out of their way. A perfect peach needs no translating, says Alice Waters. It is its own language. In such a cuisine, salt, pepper, olive oil, and maybe a little lemon and garlic, can see you, with few regrets, through weeks of elegant, soft-spoken meals. And yet.
Chef Thomas Boemer’s eyes are watering. He’s standing in front of an improvised outdoor kitchen, made up of a cinder block fire well, with a steel-mesh grate laid across it for a cooktop, and a two-course block wall stacked on top of that for a windbreak. It is so rough-hewn and brawny looking as to be almost a parody of a certain kind of unrepentant male culinary energy. Yet a gusty December wind keeps lashing Boemer’s eyes with little stinging whip cracks of hardwood smoke.
They are six. They are American. They are at the height of their powers in the middle years of the 20th century. They are all entranced in some way with Paris, and they all write about it. Their cumulative work will change the way Americans think about food, and the way you and I eat, whether we’re aware of it or not. Justin Spring is a biographer and former National Book Award finalist with roots in southern Minnesota, with family in St. Cloud, and who has spent many of his Christmases here in the snow among us. His latest book, “The Gourmands’ Way: The Story of Six Americans in Paris Who Changed Our Relationship With Food” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 383 pages, $30), has just been published.
Developing the dishes for a new restaurant menu is a little bit like giving birth. There is the initial joyful conception. There is a long and sometimes painful gestation period, and there is the final delivery into the world of something that is both part of its creator, and that will ultimately have to interact with the world and be judged on its own merits. Tonight, Adam Eaton, head chef at Saint Dinette, is introducing us to a few of his children, and, like most new fathers, he looks just a little bit nervous.
We have done wrong by cranberries. North America has few enough true native fruits; the Great Lakes north country even fewer. Yet here we have not just a native fruit, but one of the original native fruits. The fruit that fueled and healed Native Americans for centuries. The fruit that was served at the first Thanksgiving. The fruit that Thomas Jefferson requested of James Madison, as one of three items from home he especially missed while in France: apples, pecans and cranberries. The fruit that effectively made the fur trade possible, because its acidity, when pounded into venison pemmican, prevented spoilage and made for one of the first transportable meals on the continent.
The problem with most game and fish cookbooks, somewhat paradoxically, is that they are written by guys who hunt and fish. That is to say, they are written by guys whose primary interest in hunting and fishing is the hunting and fishing part. Their cookbooks, as a result, tend to be filled with a disheartening collection of half-considered recipes that take more or less successful stabs in one direction — at a kind of down-home, open-fire manliness — and more or less unsuccessful stabs in the other direction, at complicated fine-dining sophistication.
We live in a world saturated by the pursuit of brand and audience. Social media has turned us all into intimate personal entrepreneurs marketing the product of our curated selves. We present to the world evidence that we lead enviable lives, and that we command a following, more or less loyal, that is supposed to translate into some kind of clout, which is assumed at some future time to be exchangeable, like currency, for something of value.
Yia Vang has a set of classic stories he loves to tell. He’s just told me the one about the guy who comes up after a Hmong cooking demonstration, cups Vang’s big right hand in both of his, looks up earnestly into Vang’s eyes, and says, “I just love Thai food." “I mean, dude, I just spent an hour telling you how Hmong food isn’t Thai food,” Vang giggles. “You know, I get it that you toured Bangkok last year, but can we listen a little bit?”
Danny King asks me to button the top button of my sports coat, which I inherited several years ago from my father-in-law, a barrel-chested man approximately two inches shorter than I. I’m standing in the middle of the studio floor at King Brothers Clothiers, surrounded by racks of expensive-looking fabric, leather furniture, and a drink cart stocked with amber whiskey.
She has just answered a question by, in fact, not answering it, and instead deflecting the question to Alan, who adjusts a pair of black, rectangular wire rims and offers a serious, thoughtful response. Let’s not confuse this for what it might look like—a demure kind of deference on Jamie’s part to a male cohort. Jamie is perfectly in charge of this moment, and, as the rest of the evening will prove, as perfectly comfortable commanding a busy kitchen as raiding a Pinterest board for the perfect shade of water glass.
If you’ve ever gotten used to the taste of Folgers coffee—as I have, intermittently, during life’s dark stretches—and then opened a bag of just-ground, freshly roasted coffee beans, you will understand my state of mind last Friday, as I walked into the production room of Baker’s Field Flour & Bread, in Northeast Minneapolis’s Food Building.