Sugar. Vanilla. Chocolate. Sure, we all know they taste good. But what was even more important last winter was how good they smelled.
It was one of the hospice volunteers’ main duties: To bake a nonstop supply of chocolate chip cookies—not only for the patients, but also for the heart-sore family and friends at their bedsides. So what if the volunteers were scooping premade industrial batter out of plastic tubs bought in bulk from Costco? These weren’t artisanal chocolate chip cookies, not gourmet confections, and they didn’t need to be. They were literally “to die for” (a term I’ll never again use lightly).
After weeks in the Lysol-bedpan aroma of hospitals and nursing homes, that sugar-vanilla scent helped make the hospice a haven of peace for my nieces, my sister, and me. No more beeping machines and intercoms, no more rattling carts, no more nutritionists and physical therapists trying to strong-arm my brother into “getting better.” The freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies were the final touch, the stroke of genius that made it all feel homey and natural and honest.
Granted, it wasn’t just the cookies that made us (okay, mostly me) pack on a collective 15 pounds that month. We couldn’t even walk outdoors, not with snow banked up to the windowsills by a relentless series of blizzards, so in those agonizing weeks of waiting, hoping, denying, the necessity of eating provided our only escape. We desperately snatched opportunities to run out into the snow for take-out food—first dashing to the hospital’s sad fast-food court, later grabbing pallid heat-and-eats from a Stop & Shop near the nursing home. At last, it seemed like we’d hit a gustatory jackpot when we discovered near the hospice a Whole Foods, a Panera café, AND a Bertucci’s. (Whoo-hoo!) What relief it was when one of the sons-in-law burst back indoors, cheeks red from the cold, loaded down with plastic bags of dinner. We craved the caloric buzz of starches and fats—until we craved salads even more. (With chocolate-chip cookies for dessert, of course.) Comfort food, indeed.
The weekday afternoon shifts were mine. I sat at my brother’s bedside as he dozed, working my way through stacks of magazines and books, looking for this year’s Best Food Writing contenders. My brother was always a loyal BFW fan, buying multiple copies as presents for everyone he knew, and often slipping into bookstores (yes, brick and mortar bookstores—remember those?) to make sure they kept the book in stock. Now, drifting in and out of consciousness—pain meds wearing off, not yet ready for the next dose—he would ask what I was reading, hoping to distract himself from the pain.
Maybe it was those circumstances that gave me less patience than ever for fluffy food writing or glossy promotional hype—though admittedly, in the 15 years I’ve been editing this collection, I’ve never much liked the slick stuff, always focusing rather on more thoughtful, meaty pieces. But this year it particularly struck me how much food writing has matured lately, giving me a wealth of incisive, witty, in-depth, and provocative material to sift through.
How pleased I was to discover clear-eyed writers who define This Year in Food without succumbing to fads and buzz. Our opening section, “The Way We Eat Now,” is full of balanced views on 2014’s food trends, from $4 toast (John Gravois’s “A Toast Story,” page 11) to hot-’n’-spicy everything (Kate Krader, “Are Big Flavors Destroying America’s Palate?,” page 7) to bacon-mania (David Sax, “Baconomics 101,” page 26). At the other end, we close with writers covering food phenomena so out-there, they may never even turn into trends: a chef trying to put invasive species on the menu (Rowan Jacobsen, page 306), an underground of insect-eating gourmets (Daniella Martin, page 317), or a foraging chef’s mind-blowing inventiveness (Amy Gentry, page 326). Lest we get too caught up in the latest fashions, other writers put our gourmet preoccupations into historical context—Jay Rayner’s memory of his first American foods (page 2), Tom Carson’s memory of tuna fish sandwiches (page 277), Ann Hood’s ode to Laurie Colwin’s tomato pie recipe (page 296).
I also hit a mother lode of wonderful pieces questioning the equal rights of America’s food conversation—a topic that felt especially important to me, sharing my brother’s concern for social justice (as a Methodist minister, that was always a given for him). These meditations on culinary minorities come together in a new section titled A Table for Everyone (starts on page 41). It must also have been my non-foodie brother’s joy in honest real food (at least until chemo killed his appetite) that gave me special appreciation for the writers featured in another new section, Back to Basics—a hunter simply cooking his day’s kill (Steve Hoffman, page 93), a coffee obsessive’s epiphany on how little new-fangled gear matters (Oliver Strand, page 97), or an anti-gourmet foray into Asian street food (Matt Goulding, page 112).
Being with my brother—a consummate people person—helped remind me that it always comes back to people stories. Of course those have played a prominent part in Best Food Writing ever since the first edition in 2000, especially with the chef profiles that populate the section Someone’s in the Kitchen (starts on page 219). A far cry from celebrity-chef puff pieces, these are snapshots of restaurant cooks from all over the country, at all stages of their careers, from Alex Halberstadt’s portrait of the hip King of Cronuts™ (page 220) to John Kessler’s bittersweet portrait of a young chef facing mortality (page 252) to Dave Mondy’s look at an artisanal pizzamaker taking a step he never thought he’d take (page 264). And as the locavore movement has expanded the food stage, more artisans, farmers and suppliers are given their rightful place alongside chefs as essential players. In this year’s Stocking the Pantry section (starts on page 179), you’ll find a gallery of colorful individuals who make the ingredients we cook with. On top of that, I found a bumper crop of writers bringing their family stories into their cooking (Elissa Altman, page 80; Adam Sachs, page 124; Erin Byers Murray, page 128; Adam Gopnik, page 138; Sarah Bir, page 172; Josh Ozersky, page 292).
More than anything else, in those hospital-haunted days we needed to laugh. I’ve always tried to include a healthy dose of humor in each year’s Best Food Writing, and this year is no exception. There’s Irvin Lin’s tongue-in-cheek “How to Boil Water” (page 108), Molly Watson’s exasperated “How to Cook a Turkey” (page 119) or Albert Burneko’s ranting “How to Cook Chicken Cutlets” (page 166)—a trio of how-tos that are anything but Betty Crockeresque. Humor keeps us all honest, as Michael Procopio (“The Cheese Toast Incident,” page 281) and David Leite (“Because I Can,” page 286) prove yet again.
As I read bits of these stories out loud to distract my brother, I think we both knew he’d never see this year’s edition. In fact, he died in March, his suffering finally over. But as I went on reading throughout the spring, I kept judging everything with him in mind. He was my Ideal Reader in many ways—not a fussy cook or a food snob, but fascinated by the interplay between the way we eat and our personal relationships, our sense of self, and even our role as stewards of this planet.
And somehow, that perspective felt just right to me. For at its best, isn’t food writing just another lens through which to view the human condition? In a season of grief and eventual acceptance, pondering about food—and pondering it deeply—offered its own path of healing and comfort.
And if there’s a chocolate-chip cookie (or two or three) involved, even better.