When Local Food is Cheap

September 29, 2009

I work in Westchester, NY, where the average home is huge, the average income is huger, and the average cost of food is enough to just about make me gasp, which it did recently when I went into Bedford to do a little bit of shopping, and nearly had a stress-induced asthma attack.

Most people know Bedford as the place where Martha lives, and (more recently) the place where Qaddafi considered setting up digs while he was in town addressing the United Nations the other day, right before he was pelted with tomatoes. But the most important thing about Bedford that I’ve learned is that it is adorably quaint; people who live there tend to be fiercely protective of its reputation; and the residents really must love local food. A lot. Because in a stroke of utter brilliance, someone opened what is effectively a CSA/store, right off Main Street: either you can be a member and pay in at the beginning of the year (and each purchase gets deducted), or you can just go there and shop like everyone else. Because I don’t actually live in Bedford, and because there are no CSAs near where I do live, in Connecticut, that’s what I do when I’m compelled to plunk down big bucks for things like recently-dug potatoes, artisanally-made cheeses, and fresh, local meats. Most recently, I paid $5.99 a pound for a small bag of spuds which, I have to say, nearly knocked me right off my clogs.

And this is the problem, isn’t it? I mean, who on earth would actually choose to eat dreck that’s been shipped from thousands of miles away and sprayed with all manner of hell in order to survive the trip, instead of something grown and harvested locally? I wouldn’t. But the thing is, I can’t afford a lot of it on a regular basis, and neither can most people. So local food has become something of a treat for me; when I have something to celebrate, I shell out bucks for tomatoes that cost the same as my monthly cell phone bill. I once bought a local Virginia chicken (I was staying with my cousins in Alexandria) that cost $17. Sure, it amortized across three meals, but still.

That said, it nags and gnaws at me because people, myself included, inevitably have to make decisions: bills or tomato? Commuter ticket or 3 pound, $70 leg of lamb? It’s a conundrum. It’s even more aggravating when you realize that the local food you’re buying for a fortune was local to where the farmer you’re buying it from lives, and not necessarily where you live or even where you’re handing over the cash. So by the time it gets to your kitchen, it’s not really local anymore, is it?

Which is why when I had the opportunity last Saturday to eat the most local food I’ve ever had, picked with my own two hands and cooked maybe an hour later, I jumped at it. Clamming the day after Rosh Hashanah is a bit fraught, though, and with the understanding that shellfish is profoundly unkosher, I decided that there was perhaps no better way to spend the holiday: harvesting the fruits of the earth and enjoying them almost immediately, less than 3 miles from where they were picked, with people I love. 

During low tide in the late afternoon, Susan and our best friends, Lisa and Alyssa, waded out into the bay near their home outside of East Hampton; I managed not to fall in, which was a stunning development since I am a water klutz. With short-handled garden rakes in hand, we started digging and within an hour had managed to collect at least 4 dozen clams–immense cherrystones and smaller, more delicate steamers–along with at least a dozen fresh oysters. I was mystified as I dug: if I irritated a clam, would it snap shut on my fingers? Do these things happen? I don’t know. I’m from Queens, where they don’t clam much. Alyssa, who knows shellfish because she’s from Maryland, just laughed.

Back at the house, Alyssa opened some of the smaller ones and we sucked them back raw with their delicious liquor; the larger ones were plunked down directly on the grill, and then dunked into garlic butter spiked with white wine vinegar and pepper. The next day, Susan and I took home a few dozen cherrystones and made the sweetest, simple, most delicate-tasting clam sauce I’ve ever had, and which has spoiled me, forever.

Clamming, I discovered, is back-breaking work, as is the harvesting of pretty much anything. Maybe this is part of why local food is so insanely expensive; we all know the truth about who harvests cheaper food, and the fact of underpaid laborers and cost ceilings. The fact is, though, that if you want to eat local food, you’ll be faced with two choices: paying crazy sums for it, or growing and/or harvesting it yourself, and reaping the delicious rewards while also experiencing what I call Good Tired. The latter may be the cheaper way to go, although it certainly isn’t easy. 


But personally, I think it’s preferable. 

Spaghetti and Fresh Cherrystone Clams

This is one of those pastas that doesn’t keep, which is fine because once you make it, you’ll wind up eating all of it. We did. If you time it just right, it’s one of the quickest meals you can make. Use the freshest, most local clams you can find. 

Serves 4
3/4 pound spaghetti
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
4 large cloves garlic, minced
2 dozen fresh cherrystone clams, scrubbed
3/4 cup dry white wine 
3 tablespoons minced flat leaf parsley
1. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil, and add the spaghetti. Cook until just al dente, drain in a colander, and set aside. 

2. In a large, straight-sided saute pan or soup pot set over medium heat, warm the oil and butter together and add the garlic. Saute for 3 minutes, add the cherrystones and white wine, cover, and simmer for approximately 8 minutes, until all the clams have opened. Discard any that haven’t. 

3. Remove clams from their shells, and chop coarsely. Add them back into the pan with the garlic. Toss with the spaghetti and the parsley, and serve immediately, with rounds of toasted bread. 

Brisket on the Run

September 21, 2009


I’m about as religious as a potted palm, but last Friday night was the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Susan and I cooked dinner for six in my mother’s apartment. The challenges inherent in cooking a major meal in someone else’s kitchen (even, or especially, one’s mother’s) are multi-fold; on the one hand, there’s the spatial issue (it’s hard to go from a large kitchen to a galley apartment kitchen, even in the best of cases). On the other hand, there’s the spice/serving platter/cooking utensil issue: my mother has none of these things.

On Thursday night, she called to inform me that she also didn’t have enough plates.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll bring extra.”
Then she told me that she didn’t have enough silverware for six.
“I bought you flatware for eight last year,” I told her.
“I lost it,” she said.

How do you lose flatware? I didn’t ask how or where, but she lost it, so I had to bring that, too. And wine glasses. She also may have mentioned something about a tablecloth, but I was growing bleary at that point because I had 9 pounds of brisket in the oven and it was already 12:30 am. By the time I packed up the car the next day with the flatware, the plates, the wine glasses, the roasting pan, a soup pot, the soup, the brisket, the kugel, a box of matzo meal, my clothes, Susan’s clothes, two sets of golf clubs (we went golfing the following day; I told you I wasn’t religious), two pairs of golf shoes, the dog, the dog’s bed, the dog’s food, and Rocky, the dog’s stuffed squirrel, my Subaru looked like something out of The Grapes of Wrath, Volume II: The Joads Go to West End Avenue. 
Every year, I promise myself that I’m not going to do anything extreme for the holidays with my mother, and every year, I wind up getting sucked into a crazy, guilt-infused vortex that demands I reach back into my genetic memory and recreate the dishes of my — and her — youth. Who cared if my grandmother’s brisket was tough, or if her goulash was oily? Who cared if her potato kugel had the gunmetal gray tinge of Confederate victory? Who cared if her matzo balls weighed as much as a varsity shot-put? Who cared if I had to come home from work and slave, for hours, in my kitchen to reproduce mediocre food for this woman who brought me into the world, and who wraps the entire contents of her fridge in foil like a Christo installation but refuses to boil water in an aluminum sauce pan? Who cared? No one. Because honestly, this is not what holiday cooking is about, is it. 
But somewhere, deep inside the recesses of that lobe of my brain that dictates reason rather than hysteria, a switch got flipped: I decided this year to go easy on myself and make my cousin Roberta’s brisket instead of the labor intensive one that involves intramuscular injections of slivered garlic, a slow and purposeful sear in my enormous French roasting pan set over two burners, and a can of Coca Cola. Roberta once told me, as I gorged on it while on a visit to Ann Arbor, that her brisket was easy. Really, really easy. 
Good. Easy was what I wanted. I draw the line at quick ‘n simple and the Sandra Lee-isms that it implies, and the dish, which has to marinate overnight, is far from quick. But easy? I’m all over it.
Don’t get me wrong; Roberta, who is actually my cousin Lauren’s mother-in-law, is a crazy-good cook who will give the proper time and attention needed to virtually anything in the kitchen. And while this recipe (which, she tells me, hails from a cousin of hers in Toledo, Ohio), takes the usual brisket cooking time, it only calls for a base of three ingredients: chili sauce, vinegar, and brown sugar. You can doctor it, which I ultimately did, but beyond that, it’s the most user-friendly brisket I’ve ever made. While it warmed in its sauce, I had ample time to throw together Edda Servi Machlin’s Tagliatelle alla Ebraica, better known as noodle kugel.
The results were astonishingly succulent–so much so that I won’t be waiting for another year to make the stuff. Even my mother and her friends ate gobs of it, which is a good thing because it started out life enormous, even by brisket standards. 
The leftovers? Sitting in her fridge. 
Wrapped in foil. 
Roberta’s Brisket

So tender it fell apart after its pre-slice cooking, this brisket is especially delicious when prepared with what Arthur Schwartz calls the  “breast deckle”– the fattier cut that is attached to the “first cut,” which I think is too lean. You can definitely go minimalist here and just use the chili sauce, vinegar, and sugar as both marinade and additional sauce; I added an entire head of garlic cloves (unpeeled), wine, a few carrots, and topped the meat with three sliced onions. I swoon just thinking about it.
Serves 6
1 jar Heinz Chili Sauce (so shoot me)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
salt and pepper, to taste
1 5-pound brisket, trimmed
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 head garlic, broken into unpeeled cloves
2 carrots, peeled, sliced into thirds
3 onions, peeled, sliced into rounds
1. Whisk together the sauce, sugar, vinegars, and taste for seasoning. Place the brisket in a 2-gallon zip lock bag, add the sauce, zip closed, and toss to coat the meat. Refrigerate for 24 hours. 
2. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Remove the meat from the marinade and place in a medium-sized roasting pan, and pour the marinade over and around it (if necessary, make more). Drizzle with wine. Strew the garlic and carrots around the meat, and top with the onion slices. Cover the pan tightly with foil, and braise for 45 minutes per pound, or three and three quarter hours. Remove from oven and refrigerate the brisket in its pan until the meat is completely cool.
3. Once cool, slice the meat against the grain, and return to the roasting pan. Cover again with foil and re-heat until the meat is warmed through, spooning the sauce over everything. Serve warm.
Serve the leftovers on toasted challah, or shredded and turned into soup dumplings, better known as kreplach and worth their weight in gold. 

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