Steal the Menu (24 page)

Especially in dealing with Sichuan chefs who spoke no English, it was very useful to be able to point to a dish on the menu. I rapidly got used to arriving unannounced in a restaurant I had reviewed—calling ahead was useless, since the person at the other end could barely understand a simple request for a reservation. I would bring with me a set of measuring spoons and a measuring cup. Then I had to insert myself into the cooking process, so that I could get accurate measurements for the recipe I wanted to publish. Uncle Lou, the Sichuan master chef, was one of many cooks who suffered with friendly bewilderment the intrusions of the young man from the
Times
thrusting little spoons into his
mise-en-place
.

But that was the only way I could take home a recipe of his hot spicy shrimp (and all the other dishes from Sichuan I was the first person to publish in English). Then the scribbled notes would get transcribed into proper recipe form, with a list of ingredients at the top, in the order they were used in the numbered directions below, which were always followed by a “yield,” the number of servings you would get from the recipe.

Even in 1971, this recipe format had a whiff of the home-economics test kitchen about it. Julia Child had already evolved a more complex and comprehensible format, but I still prefer its
straightforward structure, especially since I worked with it every day at the
Times
.

I did my own testing then, at home. If I made mistakes, they would be my own. Also, my kitchen was a much more realistic arena for testing recipes for readers who, like me, were cooking with conventional ranges, instead of the professional-style Garland behemoth in the
Times
test kitchen.

The recipe testing made me a much better cook. And I discovered that I enjoyed the time at the stove. I especially loved baking bread, with its long periods of waiting while the yeast did its magic in the dough. I would read a novel or write a piece. Then I’d have a better loaf than I could easily buy in that era (so hard to imagine now) before artisanal bakers had put crusty sourdough on the shelves of national supermarket chains.

By 2006, anyone who wanted a classic baguette or a ciabatta could just buy one in the neighborhood. I did not mind not needing to bake myself, since I was really too busy traveling for the
Journal
. And I certainly did not regret not needing to steal menus anymore. The last time I’d wished I had stuck one in my pocket was at dinner at Pierre Gagnaire’s Paris three-star establishment in the mid-1990s, where I’d found it tiresome to be taking notes in the dark during an almost comically intricate multicourse meal. I asked for a menu to keep. The captain refused point-blank and, only after I insisted, very grudgingly agreed to make a photocopy. They had a Xerox machine in the back office. Today, like virtually every restaurant of consequence, Pierre Gagnaire has a website with a menu on it. No one any longer needs to beg or steal a copy, or try to write down a jawbreaker dish name like that recent Gagnaire soup extraordinaire:
Consommé de boeuf au Banyuls, salsifis caramélisés, topinambours à la moutarde de Cramone et glace de maïs
(beef consommé with Banyuls wine, caramelized salsifys [oyster
plants], Jerusalem artichokes with
mostarda di Cremona
, Italian candied fruit in mustard-oil syrup, and corn ice cream).

As a twenty-first-century food critic, I rarely ate a meal I hadn’t been able to plan in advance at the computer. And when I paid by credit card in the restaurant, the computer-generated receipt came with a separate little printout of every dish I’d ordered. And no waiter ever flinched if I pulled out a small digital camera and took a picture of a dish, which I could e-mail to my editor from the table for later publication.

Of all these brave new efficiencies, e-mail was by far the most important. I could file my stories instantaneously and receive back edited copy wherever I happened to be. Compare that to the way reporters filed to the
New York Times
from the field in 1971. We would call a number in New York and read our articles to a monitored recording machine, spelling every name and unusual word. And in many cases, the next contact we had with our dispatches was when we read them in the paper. Garbles and mistakes were inevitable.

The computer and e-mail changed all that.

What had happened, from my perspective as a classicist, was the elimination of scribal error. For the first time since the invention of writing, nothing needed to be copied. The text, once it had been saved as a digital document, could be moved into print or disseminated electronically with no risk of human errors being introduced, as they always had been since antiquity, first by scribes who had hand-copied every book until Gutenberg, after whom the job of copying was shifted to type compositors and their successors at the keyboards of linotype machines.

But with the computer, the blurring chain of transmission came to an end. The author’s version was, in principle, immutable and eternal. It could be revised, but the age-old need for the error-making
scribe, the meddling keystroker, the secretary generating mistakes again and again through laboriously retyped versions of a letter or a chapter was finished. And no one would ever need to cut carbons again or risk the loss of years of work when a manuscript got left in a cab or burned.

I loved the computer and I loved e-mail even more. Especially because it brought me mail from readers who told me things I didn’t know. In their passion to set me straight or rant at me, they often broadened my scope and—the best of them, anyway—gave me ideas for new columns. And a columnist is always in need of ideas for the next column.

At Cranbrook School, in the vaulted dining room designed by Eliel Saarinen that we called the carbohydrate cathedral, the standard grace before the meal was “Make us ever mindful of the needs of others.” In the reverberating din of three hundred boys reciting that prayer, some of us would say instead, “Make us needful of the minds of others.” A juvenile quip, sure, but also an essential precept for all intellectual activity, one acutely necessary for a hack with space to fill every day (or in my case at the
Journal
, every other week).

After the barbecue cover, I received a helpful e-mail from Charles Perry of Birmingham, Alabama, who claimed most persuasively that I had unaccountably neglected the barbecued ribs of his region.

He wrote: “In a small town outside of Birmingham, Cahaba Heights (now part of the suburb of Vestavia), there lies a dark, carbon encrusted pit … surrounded by a quaint brick structure with concrete slab floors and grease stained walls from years of preparing some of the best slow-cooked swine one could ingest. Miss Myra’s BBQ awaits your review …”

Who could resist such a pitch?

Perry and his friend Jordan Brooks took me to three extraordinary
shrines of the barbecue art: one in Birmingham and two in Tuscaloosa, an hour away, where they both had graduated from the University of Alabama in the previous century. Of the three ’cue temples we visited, Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, in Birmingham, was easily the furthest from those shacks in the piney woods of Dixie where this most durable and rib-sticking of our regional cuisines was born. For example, it has a sculpture collection, a veritable museum of swine art consisting of hundreds of effigies of the genus
Sus
in all its pink, piggy majesty. This enthusiasm for porcine imagery didn’t prevent the cheerful staff at Miss Myra’s from subjecting the racks of a multitude of hogs to a moist indirect heat that produced ribs better than any I had eaten anywhere up until that moment. Miss Myra’s also turned out a sublime barbecued chicken and served white sauce (spicy mayo with vinegar).

We pressed on toward Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama campus, holy ground for my hosts. “Can’t you feel your pulse quicken?” Perry asked me when we were still twenty miles away. Once there, we drove around the campus, stopping at the football stadium. “You’ll want to take your shoes off now,” Brooks announced. He was only half kidding. We paid our respects to full-length life-size statues of all the Alabama football coaches who’d had national championships, notably Paul “Bear” Bryant, in coat, tie and fedora, looking stern.

Then, like thousands of students and alumni, we went to Dreamland for ribs. The restaurant was founded in Tuscaloosa in 1958 by the aptly named John “Big Daddy” Bishop. On football Saturdays, Dreamland loyalists wait two and three hours to be served in this small but densely decorated unofficial adjunct of the university athletic department. The ribs are worth waiting for. Hickory gives them a milder smokiness than the post oak used in Texas, so Dreamland’s pit turns out a subtler taste of fire with peppy seasoning. And there is no white-boning; the ribs pull off the rack without
falling off the bone, the classic indication of ideal doneness. Getting ribs to that point requires constant diligence and lots of poking around in a hot pit.

The best place to witness this precise cooking was at Archibald’s, in a nondescript location across from a pallet factory in nearby Northport. Archibald’s was, and I say this with respect, a real, mythic ’cue shack. The green clapboard walls weren’t falling down, but the boards were definitely not plumb. The pit was a concrete-block affair attached directly to the small building. And a stack of wood sat a few feet away.

“You know the barbecue is good if the woodpile is bigger than the restaurant,” Perry said.

The ribs were very crisp outside, moist inside. Betty Archibald served them in a pool of orange, vinegary hot sauce. Their taste stood up nicely to the sauce. The side dishes here were literally on the side—of the wall next to the pit. Little bags of munchies. The ribs were what counted.

All three of us marveled at Mrs. Archibald’s intensity. She kept opening the pit’s door and fussing with racks of ribs, moving them around with a pitchfork.

That kind of hands-on, personal, obsessively careful cooking also produced my number one choices for the hot dog and hamburger covers Tom Weber had commissioned me to write for the
Journal
. Both Speed’s, the Boston hot dog genius, and Miss Ann, the hamburger dowager empress of Atlanta, operated on the smallest possible scale, following their own special method for improving on dishes served with less distinction elsewhere on a frighteningly vast scale. They both shunned publicity and showed no interest in maximizing profits or branching out. (Miss Ann was positively bitter about the assault of customers my article brought her.) I sniffed them out from various friends’ tips and from persuasive recommendations on the Internet. Similar advice led me
to dozens of other little places, but Speed and Miss Ann stood out, way out and above the others.

Speed sold his hot dogs when it pleased him in Newmarket Square, which is not some historic New England green space on the model of the Boston Common but a triangular parking lot surrounded by bleak wholesale food warehouses in the unfrilly purlieu of Roxbury. His “restaurant” was a food truck with a makeshift kitchen in it. Speed himself was a quietly gregarious older man, said to have been a fast-talking DJ in the day, whence the nickname he goes by instead of his real name, Ezra Anderson. He was friendly and leaked his secret recipe to me with a conspiratorial half-wink.

Speed confided that he coaxed such wonderful flavor out of a run-of-the-mill commercial dog by marinating the dog in apple cider and brown sugar. Then he grilled it over charcoal. Actually, this octogenarian entrepreneur let his young apprentices handle the dogs under his watchful eye. They also toasted the buns. By legend, the piquant relish he supplied along with raw onions and beanless chili to pack into his split franks was another Speed treasure made by the man himself.

Speed was palsy and open; Miss Ann ran her little shop like a tough schoolmarm. When it was full, customers had to wait on the porch until those already seated finished up and left.

Ann’s Snack Bar occupied an unpromising lot on a broken-down industrial stretch of highway. Miss Ann worked alone at her grill, patting each ample patty lightly as she set it down to cook. Her masterpiece, the “ghetto burger,” was a two-patty cheeseburger tricked out with bacon that she had tended closely in a fryolator.

Observing Miss Ann in action would have been enough of a show to take a visitor’s mind off his hunger. But while the lady demonstrated the extreme economy of motion of a superb short-order
cook, she simultaneously carried on a running dialogue of lightly sassy repartee with customers she knew.

In mid-sentence, Miss Ann would dust your almost-ready patties with “seasoned salt” tinged red from cayenne pepper. It looked like a mistake, too much, over the top. But when you got your ghetto burger in its handsomely toasted bun envelope, you regretted doubting her for one second. The big burgers stood up fine to the spice. And they just barely fit in your mouth.

Miss Ann. Speed. Betty Archibald. Did I pick them because they were colorful loners at the margins of mainstream America? Sticking a finger in the eye of the fast-food industry was never my goal, but it was inevitable that I would prefer idiosyncratic, independent cooks with a special spin on the most widely cooked dishes in American culinary life. Interestingly, all three of them turned out to be black and elderly. Each time I’d embarked on one of those cover stories, I’d been convinced the project was bogus. I couldn’t imagine that even the best burger or ribs or dogs would be worth the kind of hype a cover piece in the Saturday
Journal
’s Pursuits section would require. And then Speed and Ann and Betty Archibald would turn the whole silly business of claiming I’d found the nation’s finest examples of its favorite foods into a crusade for recognizing talent and craft.

As I traveled more and more as a restaurant critic, I saw that ambitious restaurants had sprung up in almost every city. Yes, the density of New York’s restaurant culture surpassed that of other cities, but my experiences on the road persuaded me that the dining life in Chicago offered more adventure and excitement. And that Las Vegas was a far more interesting food scene than what a discriminating traveler might encounter in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Even more surprising were the dozens of remarkable, sophisticated restaurants I started finding in “flyover” towns like St. Paul and Boulder and even Duluth.