Best Food Writing 2010 Part 8

Yet slicing, while critical, isn't the only thing a Russketeer must know. There's the fish itself: which salmon is smokier (Scottish over Irish) or the difference between true belly lox ("real lox is not smoked, it's salt-cured," explains Niki) and cold-smoked Gaspe Nova ("the quintessential New York salmon," says Niki, "thanks to its combination of the fattiness of the fish and the mild smokiness").

They also have to know what a smoked or cured fish looks like when prepared to perfection: Russ & Daughters works with a carefully curated collection of smokehouses that works to hit the freshness and flavor marks the specialty shop wants. "We pick every fish we sell, and we reject a lot," says Niki. "After being a lawyer for nine years," she adds, "my father thought, 'Oh, this will be so easy.' So he asked my grandfather, 'How do you tell a good fish from a bad fish?" He answered, 'You feel for a certain taste, s.h.i.+ne, all these things, and then maybe in 15 years, you'll be able to tell.'"

It's exactly that year-in and year-out routine-tasting, touching, slicing, bantering-that has kept Russes and customers alike coming back for generations. But there's also the meaning of the food itself. Something Niki says people get even if they don't know exactly what they're getting.

She means appetizing: "One of my missions," she says, "is to reeducate people about that. Appetizing is a food tradition that is quintessentially New York." Take their schmaltz herring, fishy fillets that are barrel-cured and salt-brined, beloved on the Lower East Side ever since the Old World moved into the New. "You're tapping into something, a primal experience," says Niki. "You're tasting history."

And at Russ & Daughters, Anthony Bourdain would probably tell you, history always tastes pretty d.a.m.n good.

PIG, SMOKE, PIT: THIS FOOD IS SERIOUSLY SLOW.

By John T. Edge From The New York Times The New York Times

Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, food editor for the The Oxford American The Oxford American, and author of the guide Southern Belly Southern Belly, John T. Edge delights in the details that make regional foods distinct-like this idiosyncratic barbecue set-up.

At 3:45 on a recent Sat.u.r.day morning-as frogs croaked into the void and a m.u.f.flerless pickup downs.h.i.+fted onto Cow Head Road-Rodney Scott, 37, pitmaster here at Scott's Variety Store and Bar-B-Q, gave the order.

"Flip the pigs," he said, his voice calm and measured. "Let's go. Some char is good-too much and we lose him."

A. J. Shaw, a college student home for the summer, and Thomas Lewis, a onetime farmer, left their seats and joined Mr. Scott in the pit room, a rectangular shed dominated by two waist-high concrete banks, burnished ebony by wood smoke, ash and grease.

Ten b.u.t.terflied pig carca.s.ses-taut bellies gone slack, pink flesh gone cordovan-were in the pits when Mr. Lewis reached for the sheet of wire fencing on which one of the pigs had been roasting since 4 the previous afternoon. In lockstep, Mr. Shaw topped that same pig with a second sheet of fencing, reached his gloved fingers into the netting, and grabbed hold.

As the men struggled, the 150 pounds of dead weight torqued the makes.h.i.+ft wire cage. When the carca.s.s landed, skin-side down, on the metal grid of a recently fired pit, skeins of grease trailed down the pig's flanks, and the smoldering oak and hickory coals beneath hissed and flared.

"I cooked my first one when I was 11," Mr. Scott said, as he seasoned the pig with las.h.i.+ngs of salt, red pepper, black pepper and Accent, a flavor enhancer made with MSG.

Working a long-handled mop, he drenched the pig in a vinegar sauce of a similar peppery composition. "You've got to always be on point, when you're cooking this way," he said.

Cooking this way isn't done much any more. This place, a couple of hours northwest of Charleston, as well as the Scott family approach to slow-smoking whole hogs over hardwood coals, appears to be vestigial.

For aficionados in search of ever-elusive authenticity, Scott's offers all the rural tropes of a signal American barbecue joint. The main building is tin-roofed and time-worn. Dogs loll in the parking lot, where old shopping carts are stacked with watermelons in the summer, sweet potatoes in the fall. On church pews under the eave, locals visit with neighbors and barbecue pilgrims commune with foam clamsh.e.l.ls stuffed with pulled pork, $8 a pound.

The cookery is simple, but the processes used by the Scott family are not.

In the manner now expected of the nation's white-tablecloth chefs, the Scotts shop local, whenever possible. They buy pigs from farms in three nearby counties. And they turn to Mel's Meat Market, in the nearby town of Aynor, for butcher work and delivery.

That commitment to local sources extends to the tools of their trade. A local welder constructs the burn barrels, where wood burns down into coals, from salvaged industrial piping and junked truck axles, the latter from a mechanic just down the road.

And then there's the issue of the wood itself. Barbecue, as it's traditionally defined in the South, requires loads of it. Some North Carolina restaurants buy surplus oak flooring from planing mills. Some Tennessee pitmasters bargain for hickory off-cuts from ax-handle manufacturers.

The Scotts take matters into their own hands. They trade labor and chainsaw expertise for oak, hickory and, occasionally, pecan. "If you have a tree down, we oblige," Rodney Scott said that afternoon, following the all-night pit vigil. As he talked, his father, Roosevelt Scott, 67, founder of Scott's, stood on the highway, negotiating with a man who had arrived with a limb from a live oak and the promise of two to three truckloads of pit fuel.

"We keep our own wood in reserve," the younger Mr. Scott said. "We've got 100 acres. But most of it comes walking in. Everybody knows we'll bring some boys and cut your tree for you, so long as we can get to it and it's not hanging over your house or your garage."

The crowd that Sat.u.r.day afternoon was typical: Half black and half white, half locals and half pilgrims.

Locals, many of whom work at the Tupperware plant, on the other end of Cow Head Road, came to pick up half-pound orders, pulled from various quadrants of the pig and tossed with sauce in the manner of a meat salad. They knew to ask Virginia Was.h.i.+ngton-Rodney Scott's cousin, the woman behind the high-top order counter-for a cook's treat of fried pig skin, still smoky from the pit, still crisp from the deep fryer.

DeeDee Gammage planned to eat her barbecue between slices of white bread, in the car, on the way home. Lou Esther Black told Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton that she would serve her take-away atop bowls of grits on Sunday morning. "I let the grease from the meat be my sauce," Ms. Black said. "You don't need b.u.t.ter."

Locals knew that if they dawdled until the serving table ran low, Jackie Gordon, Rodney Scott's aunt, would break down another pig on the bone table. They knew that, with a little luck, they might score a rack of spareribs, wrenched hot from a carca.s.s.

Pilgrims lacked the locals' foresight, but made up for it in appet.i.te. The average out-of-town order was two pounds.

In addition to pork, day-trippers bought sauce by the gallon, hot or mild. (They were probably not aware that the sole difference is how far Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton dips her ladle into the jug and whether she stirs, to loosen the pepper sediment.) At the register, out-of-towners bought quart jars of locally grown and ground cane syrup from Ella Scott, the 67-year-old mother of Rodney Scott, and wondered aloud whether any of that syrup made it into the family's sauce. (When asked, all the Scotts will say is that it has "a little sugar.") Visitors took side trips to the smoke-shrouded pit house where pigs lay splayed and sauce-puddled. They stared down into the mop sauce bucket, where sliced lemons bobbed.

They ogled the five-foot-tall burn barrels, where hunks of wood the size of footstools flame, then smolder, then break down into the coals that Mr. Scott and his colleagues shovel into the pits. They traded theories about the barrels' construction, about how the coal grates within are formed by piercing the steel barrels with a crisscross of truck axles.

"Back home they've just about gone to gas for cooking," said David Hewitt of Florence, S.C., as he waited for his order. "And they serve on buffet lines. This place is the last of a breed. If you like history, this place is full of it."

At Scott's, pilgrims like Mr. Hewitt don't often notice the bits of vernacular engineering that have become family signatures, like the two-burner hot plate, set on a milk crate, beneath the metal table where Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton doles out barbecue orders. (Those burners keep the barbecue at a temperature preferred by regular customers-and the health department.) Similarly, the flattened cardboard boxes scattered about the cement floors may seem to be just a part of the ambient mess. But that corrugated carpet, stretching from bone table to the serving table, soaks up the grease that trails from pigs in transport and cus.h.i.+ons Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton's feet.

The Scotts take pride in the traditions they uphold-and the innovations they have introduced.

"I started out working on cars in the front and pigs in the back," Roosevelt Scott said, as crowds began to dwindle after the eighth pig of the day was hauled to the bone table. "We had a pool hall and, next door, a garage." For a while, barbecue was secondary. The primary family business was what the elder Mr. Scott calls a "one door store," stocked with dry goods, and that pool hall, which opened in 1972.

"This is a business for us," he said. "We don't do it the old way. We do it the best way we know how. That means a lot of oak. That means a lean pig, which means less grease and less a chance of grease fires. No matter which way you do it, though, some folks don't want you to go nowhere."

His son echoed his feelings. "People keep talking about how old-fas.h.i.+oned what we do is," he said. "Old-fas.h.i.+oned was working the farm as a boy. I hated those long hours, that hot sun. Compared to that, this is a slow roll."

Stocking the Pantry

AVOCADO HEAVEN.

By Rowan Jacobsen From Eating Well Eating Well

Author of A Geography of Oysters, Fruitless Fall A Geography of Oysters, Fruitless Fall, and the recent American Terroir American Terroir, Jacobsen has carved out his niche covering the intersection between food and the environment. Coming from that angle, even a simple avocado can be a fascinating case study.

On a jade-tinted hillside in the lush southwestern Mexican state of Michoacan, Chef Rick Bayless held up an avocado as if it were sacred. He halved the avocado around its equator with a penknife, which is how growers check for ripeness, and discovered that this particular specimen was spot on. He could tell by the way the bright-green flesh near the skin paled to yolk-yellow near the pit. An avocado that is green to the pit will taste gra.s.sy, he told me. If it's yellow at the core, it'll be creamy as custard, rich as ricotta.

The avocado looked like a snowglobe-size model of its surroundings: green hills, yellow fields and dark-domed peaks. This fruit, here in its native land, was one with its environment. Which might have explained the look on Bayless's face. Bayless is, among other things, the chef responsible for introducing many Americans to authentic Mexican cuisine, as well as one of the strongest voices in the sustainable-food movement. As executive chef of Frontera Grill, Topolobampo and the recently opened Xoco in Chicago, some of the top Mexican restaurants in the U.S., Bayless has seen a lot of avocados in his life, which means he has seen all too many bad avocados. But he was staring at this one with something pa.s.singly close to love. And I admit, I was starting to feel it too. Because I had traveled here, with him, to find out why Ha.s.s avocados from this little corner of the world are so d.a.m.n good.

The answer was all around us. Avocados in this valley are so rich because they are born to wealth. The highlands of Michoacan, 200 miles west of Mexico City, are rimmed by towering, flat-topped volcanoes-1,350 in all. Millions of years of eruptions filled the valley with sweet, productive, mineral-rich soil, and the avocado tree pumps all those nutrients into its fruit. Most fruits are primarily sugar, but an avocado is mostly fat-heart-healthy, monounsaturated fat. A fully ripened Michoacan avocado can have a fat content of 30 percent.

Such production takes tremendous quant.i.ties of water, which isn't a problem in this semitropical paradise. From May to October, the mountains are drenched in rain. What doesn't get sucked up by the trees trickles into the porous aquifer, resurfacing in the sparkling rivers that lace the region. Cisterns in the orchards catch the water to supply the trees during the dry season.

Unlike any other avocado region in the world, avocado trees in Michoacan bloom twice, and it's not unusual to see fruit and flowers on the same tree. With temperatures softly oscillating between 50 and 80F, trees can choose their schedule; there's no killer frost hanging over the day planner. It takes an avocado about 12 months to mature, but it won't soften until picked; if left on the tree, it will continue to put on fat for an additional six months. It doesn't just stay good; it gets better. Mountainous Michoacan, whose orchards range in alt.i.tude from 3,000 to 8,000 feet, also benefits from a mult.i.tude of microclimates. Any given week of the year, some orchard here is at the peak of ripeness. This unique flexibility allows Michoacan to s.h.i.+p premium, fresh-picked fruit year-round.

Due to the drought, recent California avocado harvests have been barely large enough to supply the West Coast. Michoacan supplies most of the rest of the country. In fact, Michoacan supplies nearly half the world's avocados. More than 200,000 acres of verdant avocado orchards blanket every hill in the region. It's the kind of success you have when you grow a crop where it wants to grow-indeed, where it has grown for thousands of years. And it's a vital support for a state that in the past four decades has sent millions of people to the U.S. in search of work. Today 300,000 Michoacans are directly or indirectly employed in the avocado industry. The graceful, colonial-era cities bustle with shops and shoppers, and the tables in the street markets groan under the weight of freshly harvested fruits, vegetables, herbs and fish.

After a day spent shopping those markets, Chef Bayless was inspired to make me a batch of guacamole. It's hard to improve on the Aztecs' original ahuaca-mulli, or "avocado sauce," made of mashed avocados, chiles, tomatoes and onions, but Bayless may have done it with his roasted garlic guacamole topped with tasty garnishes like crisp bacon and toasted pumpkin seeds. The avocados he used had lovely hints of pine nuts and fennel. "Avocados don't have a bold taste, but they have a complex one," he explained. "It can be really fun to play around with different ingredients and see how they bring out different aspects of that complexity."

Bayless's comment stuck with me as I watched him cook. He used avocados to thicken salsa verde and to add richness to sopa de tortilla, a staple of Mexican cuisine. Later, when he concocted a sweet and luscious avocado ice cream it struck me that the avocado is nature's emulsifier par excellence. Thousands of years before the invention of margarine or mayonnaise, the avocado tree had already figured out how to whip healthy unsaturated oil into a stable and spreadable paste. From creamy soups to decadent desserts, it has excelled in that role ever since, allowing all of us to savor the fat of the land.

Roasted Garlic Guacamole with Help- Yourself Garnishes Roasted Garlic Guacamole with Help- Yourself Garnishes Rick Bayless's new book is all about how to throw a great fiesta, or party, and a key part of any great fiesta is the food. "I like to welcome guests with this guacamole bar," he says. "I start off with a basic guacamole made with roasted garlic and set out bowls of toppings so everyone can customize each bite." (Recipe from "Fiesta at Rick's" by Rick Bayless; W. W. Norton and Company, July 2010.) Rick Bayless's new book is all about how to throw a great fiesta, or party, and a key part of any great fiesta is the food. "I like to welcome guests with this guacamole bar," he says. "I start off with a basic guacamole made with roasted garlic and set out bowls of toppings so everyone can customize each bite." (Recipe from "Fiesta at Rick's" by Rick Bayless; W. W. Norton and Company, July 2010.) 4 cups guacamole, for 16 servings 4 cups guacamole, for 16 servings Active Time: 30 minutes Active Time: 30 minutes Total Time: 30 minutes Total Time: 30 minutes Ingredients : Guacamole 6 large cloves garlic, unpeeled 6 large cloves garlic, unpeeled 6 ripe medium avocados cup coa.r.s.ely chopped fresh cilantro, loosely packed 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice, plus more if desired 1 teaspoon salt Ingredients: Garnishes cup Mexican queso fresco, queso anejo, salted pressed cup Mexican queso fresco, queso anejo, salted pressed farmer's cheese, firm goat cheese, mild feta or romano, finely crumbled or grated cup toasted pumpkin seeds (see Tip) cup sliced pickled jalapenos cup crumbled crisp-fried bacon or cup coa.r.s.ely crum- bled chicharron (Mexican crisp-fried pork rind) 1 16-ounce bag large, st.u.r.dy tortilla chips Preparation 1.To prepare guacamole: Place unpeeled garlic in a small dry skillet over medium heat; cook, turning occasionally, until soft and blackened in spots, 10 to 15 minutes. Cool, then slip off the skins; finely chop. Scoop avocado flesh into a large bowl. Add the garlic, cilantro and lime juice to taste. Coa.r.s.ely mash everything together. Season with salt. Transfer to a serving bowl and place plastic wrap directly on the surface of the guacamole. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

2. To set up the guacamole bar: Scoop garnishes into small serving bowls and put the chips in a large basket or bowl. Encourage guests to spoon a little guacamole on a chip and top with garnishes that appeal.

THE KIMCHI FIX.

By Jane Black From the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post

Jane Black's superb food reportage for this D.C. daily paper is a major factor in keeping food policy ranked high on the nation's agenda. In this article, she blends international politics, recipe deconstruction, and restaurant reviewing-and whets our appet.i.te.

I made my first batch of kimchi the first week of October. Since then, there has been only a single 13-day period when I haven't had some in the fridge. Thirteen very long days. made my first batch of kimchi the first week of October. Since then, there has been only a single 13-day period when I haven't had some in the fridge. Thirteen very long days.

What started out as a neat addition to a dinner party menu-"Let's try something from the new Momof.u.ku cookbook"-turned into an all-out obsession with funky, spicy Korean fermented cabbage. It was terrific with the hanger steak at dinner and maybe better with steamed rice or poached eggs after a few more days in the fridge. Soon, I began to crave it, the same way most people yearn for chocolate cake. That's when I realized that kimchi also tastes pretty darn good right out of the jar.

"It's like cabbage crack," I told my fiance as we polished off one of our early batches for a mid-morning snack. Then we both burst into hyena-like laughter. We were in trouble.

My kimchi habit will no doubt be a great relief to the government of South Korea, which has made spreading the word about the country's national dish an official policy. The Korea Food Research Inst.i.tute has a traditional-foods division charged with the "scientific research of Korean fermented foods such as sauces, alcohols, and kimchi for their globalization," according to its Web site.

At first, such a policy might seem odd; Americans have a fierce love affair with hamburgers, but I'm unaware of any government program to evangelize them. We've left that job to McDonald's. But in Korea, kimchi is a national obsession. Seoul has a kimchi museum with a vast collection of cookbooks, cooking utensils and storage jars. Families around the country own special refrigerators designed to maintain the optimal temperature for the stinky vegetables' fermentation and preservation. Perhaps the most famous example of the nation's kimchi fever is that South Korean scientists spent years developing a recipe for a bacteria-free "s.p.a.ce kimchi" to accompany their first citizen's visit to the international s.p.a.ce station.

"This will greatly help my mission," Ko San, then a 30-year-old computer scientist, said in a statement quoted by the New York Times New York Times before he was to blast off in 2008. "Since I am taking kimchi with me, this will help with cultural exchanges in s.p.a.ce." before he was to blast off in 2008. "Since I am taking kimchi with me, this will help with cultural exchanges in s.p.a.ce."

Kimchi has been an integral part of Korean culture for thousands of years. The first record of it dates to the 7th century, according to Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, author of "Quick and Easy Korean Cooking" (Chronicle Books, 2009), though it is believed that Koreans have eaten it for far longer. Modern versions didn't arise until the 15th century, when the first chili peppers arrived from the new world. About that time, cooks also began to add salted seafood, which gives the dish its pungent perfume.

Traditional kimchi, the kind I've been making, uses Napa cabbage. But there are seemingly infinite varieties. In Seoul, you might find baby ginseng kimchi, while north and south of the city, eggplant and pumpkin varieties are common. Historically, kimchi was made in late fall and buried in earthen jars to preserve it during the winter. Today, it is made year-round and varies with the season, incorporating Asian radishes in winter and cuc.u.mbers in summer.

Rice-based (and occupying) cultures such as j.a.pan took a s.h.i.+ne to kimchi long ago. The food's recent entrance into the American mainstream is driven by two larger trends. The first is a new fixation on all things fermented: pickles, dilly beans, sauerkraut and chowchow are now standard at gourmet groceries and farmers markets. Why not stinky pickled cabbage?

The second is broader awareness of, and familiarity with, Korean cuisine. Over the past 30 years, Americans have embraced sus.h.i.+, pad Thai and the Vietnamese noodle soup pho. But Korean food has been a harder sell. In part, it's because the cuisine is newer to America. The largest wave of Korean immigrants arrived here in the 1970s and '80s. And it is only recently that a second, more a.s.similated generation has taken over.

I see the change at Korean restaurants. Eight years ago, when I worked near Koreatown in New York, I was relentlessly steered to the "safe" bibimbap despite my pleas for something else. Today, Korean chefs are willing to walk a newbie through a traditional menu (see: Honey Pig in Annandale). Hot young chefs, such as Momof.u.ku's David Chang in New York and Kogi's Roy Choi in Los Angeles, are experimenting with using cla.s.sic ingredients in new ways. "When chefs put kimchi in a quesadilla, they start to get the flavor out, and both Koreans' and Americans' impression that it's just too spicy starts to dissipate," said Debra Samuels, co-author of "The Korean Table" (Tuttle, 2008).

Once I fell for kimchi, I started to see it everywhere. This week the Source by Wolfgang Puck is launching a new Asian menu in its lounge including a dish of Korean short ribs with cabbage and radish kimchi. At the Bethesda Central Farm Market, Eric Johnson, who made his name as a chocolatier, turned up this month selling vegan kimchi: cabbage pickled with garlic, ginger and cayenne. (A strong believer in whole and raw foods, Johnson won't add fish sauce or salted shrimp unless he can make the ingredient himself.) Oh Pickles, a vendor at several Was.h.i.+ngton area markets, also plans to add kimchi to its line of pickled cuc.u.mbers and tomatoes soon.

"People really recognize it and love it," said the Source's executive chef, Scott Drewno. In summer, he said, when he serves it alongside a soft-sh.e.l.l crab sandwich, people always ask for an extra bowl of kimchi on the side.

These days, most Koreans buy their kimchi, says author Lee. But making it is cheap and easy-plus, you can avoid the commercial brands that add MSG.

First, salt the cabbage and let it sit overnight. That will flavor the leaves and draw out the moisture. Next, add any other vegetables: Scallions, chopped radish and mustard greens are traditional, but I like ribbons of carrots, too. Then, mix in garlic, ginger, Korean chili pepper, salted shrimp and/or fish sauce and a touch of sugar.

The amounts of each ingredient vary. I believe Chang's recipe, which calls for 20 cloves of garlic, might be addictive. But the quant.i.ty of garlic makes it awkward to talk to anyone who hasn't also been eating it. (That's why many Korean restaurants offer you strong peppermint gum after your meal.) Lesson: Make your kimchi to taste.

Many recipes make a gallon or more of kimchi. So once it's ready, there's the question of how to use it all. A Korean proverb says: If you have kimchi and rice, you have a meal. And that's certainly true. Other traditional dishes include kimchi pancakes, very fermented kimchi mixed with ground pork, scallions, flour and egg, then sauteed; and kimchi soup, which adds a few clams and fish stock or even water to chopped kimchi.

As part of its effort to globalize kimchi, the South Korean government collaborated with the Cordon Bleu to develop more Western-friendly recipes that are available at the Food in Korea web site. Some, such as sesame kimchi twists and Camembert-and-sesame kimchi fritters, sound promising. The chocolate cake with kimchi and the napoleons filled with kimchi pastry cream? Not so much.

The best fusion idea I've heard yet is Lee's Thanksgiving kimchi stuffing. Add old, very fermented kimchi to her usual bread, celery, onions and walnuts, and use kimchi juice as the liquid to bind it all together. "We used to make a traditional stuffing and the kimchi version, and after a while we thought, why bother with the regular one?" Lee said.

Step aside, bacon. Everything is better with kimchi.

SARDINES!.

By Jeff Koehler From Tin House Tin House

Author of Rice Pasta Couscous Rice Pasta Couscous and and La Paella La Paella, writer/photographer Jeff Koehler discourses on food and travel from his adopted home base of Barcelona. This ruminative essay from the literary magazine Tin House Tin House traces how he ended up there, with some fishy detours. traces how he ended up there, with some fishy detours.

Few things travel as well as canned sardines. The familiar flat tins end up on shop shelves in every dusty nook and far-flung cranny across the globe, as I discovered as a young, itinerate backpacker in some of Africa's dustiest and Asia's furthest-flung spots. During this period of discovery in tastes when food made as big an impact on me as the places and people, I feasted on sardines regularly. They tended to be strong in taste, mealy in texture, and soggy with the oil, tomato sauce, mustard, or seasoned vinegar in which they had been packed. But they were new and exotic to me, cheap, and readily available.

Many of these meals-made simply of moments spent drawing the headless and tailless fish from their packed cl.u.s.ters-remain unforgettable: on an empty, dilapidated cargo s.h.i.+p, traveling up the isolate west coast of Madagascar; in Ka.s.sala, Sudan, before joining Eritrean refugees on the week-long road to Asmara to vote for the country's independence from Ethiopia; on a local bus from Phnom Penh to the Vietnam border, hurrying to reach Ho Chi Minh City in time for the Tet celebrations; in a remote northern tribal area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border one brisk early spring.

After four years on the road, I settled into the penurious existence of a London grad student and bought my sardine supply from a Kashmiri corner shop. I ate them for lunch in my cramped residence-hall room with fat purple olives, salty Bulgarian feta, and Iranian flatbread, while studying broken-spined copies of Lorca, Gorky, and Pinter. Sure, I ate them for their low cost, but also because they carried with them the familiar light of the African and Asian roads that, especially during those dusky winter London afternoons, I dearly missed.

But it wasn't until I impetuously followed a woman from London and settled in Barcelona that I was initiated into the glories of fresh sardines.

Sardines have been popular since antiquity. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all enjoyed them, often preserved in salt. In the King James Bible, the fish that Jesus multiplied to feed the mult.i.tude are referred to as "little" (Matthew 15:34) and "small" (Mark 8:7, John 6:9), almost certainly sardines. Preserving sardines was the main industry in Mary Magdalene's village of Magdala on the Sea of Galilee; the town's Greek name, Tarichaeae, means "the place where fish are salted." These days Yonah brand preserves kosher "Sea of Galilee" sardines by packing them in oval tins.

The practice of canning sardines began in Nantes, France, in 1834. By 1860, there was a lively import market for them in the United States. When the Franco-Prussian War (1871-1872) impeded the trade, a savvy New York importer named Julius Wolff went north to scout out a local source. In Eastport, Maine, on Pa.s.samaquoddy Bay, he opened the country's first sardine factory, using the immature herring that swam off the state's coast. The first American "sardines" were sealed in cans on February 2, 1876, and in a year, sixty thousand cans had been packed and sold. The boom spread quickly. Within five years, factories dotted the coasts of Maine and nearby Canada, and, in 1896, the first factory opened on the West Coast.

Monterey, 120 miles south of San Francisco, was the center of California's industry. John Steinbeck set his novel Cannery Row among its Depression-era sardine canneries. The beginning of the book draws a lively portrait of the times: In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. . . . Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row . . . to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired . . . men and women straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical.

Monterey's production peaked with 234,000 tons of processed sardines in 1944, the same year that Steinbeck wrote his novel. But, whether through over-fis.h.i.+ng and exploitation or consecutive years of failed sp.a.w.ning, the industry collapsed as quickly as it rose, and the last Monterey cannery shuttered its doors in 1973. Today, sardines are fished in American waters almost exclusively for fishmeal, cat food, and bait for j.a.panese tuna or Maine lobster fisheries.

It's no surprise, then, that while imported canned sardines are easy to buy in the United States, it's almost impossible to find fresh ones. During a visit this summer, I found tips sprinkled throughout online chatrooms and heard rumors about one place in New Jersey, which imports them once a week from Portugal, another in Rhode Island, and a Korean place in the San Fernando Valley that sometimes carries them.

Such deep searching isn't necessary around the Mediterranean. These slender, dense packets of nutrients, rich in calcium, protein, and omega-3 fatty acids, and-thanks to being far down on the food chain-low in mercury, are eaten with great gusto not just for their healthfulness but their sublime flavor. Under international trade laws, "sardine" covers almost two dozen species of fish (for U.S. products it exclusively means young herring), though the true sardine, from Portugal, Spain, France, Morocco, and Algeria, refers to the young pilchard (Sardina pilchardus) caught in Mediterranean or Atlantic waters. They have green backs, yellowish sides, silver bellies, and ruddy-brown meat. (Atlantic sardines tend to be larger, with smaller heads and bulkier bodies.) Though commercially fished all year round, they are most abundant in markets from July to November.

I spent much of the past two years traveling around the Mediterranean, researching a new cookbook, and feasted on sardines nearly everywhere: grilled sardine sandwiches heaped with raw onion, tomato, and chopped parsley in Istanbul; liberally dusted with c.u.min and fried in Cairo; char-grilled and dashed with lemon and salt in Morocco. In Sicily I sampled the island's famous pasta con le sarde-bucatini with sardines, wild fennel, raisins, and pine nuts-at least half a dozen times, though I preferred sarde imbott.i.te-sardines b.u.t.terflied, stuffed with bread-crumbs and pine nuts, and baked. Sardines are equally beloved in Algeria. One cookbook I bought in Algiers this winter includes nine different ways of preparing them, from simply baked with bay leaves to prepared in a vinegar and oil marinade called escabeche.

Recipes for escabeche appear in two medieval Catalan cookbooks-the anonymous 1324 Libre de Sent Sovi and Ruperto de Nola's 1477 Libre de Coch. Introduced into Spain during the Moorish rule of the region that began in the eighth century, escabeche has long been a popular preparation of everything from small birds to eggplant. De Nola, rightly, indicates that the marinade is best for fish. While any type of fish can be preserved escabechado, sardines-for their size, firm meat, and bold flavor-are the traditional choice. Quickly pan-fried, the sardines are layered into a rectangular clay cazuela and covered with a hot marinade of olive oil, wine vinegar, unpeeled cloves of garlic, sprigs of thyme, pimenton (smoky, sweet paprika), bay leaves, and peppercorns. It takes a day for the fish to sing with the infused flavors, and it can be kept and enjoyed for weeks.

This was one of the first dishes I tried to work out in my kitchen by repet.i.tiously imitating versions I had eaten in smoke-stained, tile-walled bars. Reveling in having my own kitchen again, I tried to recreate certain tastes using skills that were more logical than sophisticated. I hadn't yet developed a vocabulary to name the flavors I was trying to achieve, nor the spices I needed in order to do so. I was, I can see now, a dozen years later, teaching myself to cook by taste-by working backwards from taste-just as others learn the piano by ear. Some of these dishes were good (and they tended to get repeated), others pa.s.sable. But it didn't matter. I was cooking only for myself and the Catalan woman I had followed (and then married). I had time; there would be plenty of meals.

Sardinas en escabeche became part of my repertoire, and I still enjoy it in autumn when the hues and scents of the dish feel right for the cool, clear days. Eventually, I learned to prepare sardines in many different ways. At home we like them pan-grilled and eaten with plump grapes. Or grilled and crowning a slice of toasted country bread piled with strips of roasted red peppers, eggplant, and onions. Or batter-dipped and fried with slices of acidic apple. These days, my two girls love it when I bury a mess of sardines whole under a mound of coa.r.s.e sea salt, and then bake the lot in a hot oven for 15 minutes. They enthusiastically take turns breaking open the salt crust with a wooden mallet while my wife and I scramble to dig out the succulent fish-moist and completely cooked in their own juices-before the girls crush them.