SALON

Francis Lam

Wednesday, Mar 14, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

What makes sushi great?

"Jiro Dreams of Sushi" is a gorgeous film that documents a master chef’s dedication, and its darker side VIDEO

By , Gilt Taste Jiro Ono in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" (Credit: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
This article originally appeared on Gilt Taste.

A friend of mine once met a delegation of revered Japanese chefs. There was a wizened gentleman among them who was clearly the leader. He spoke little, but the other star chefs deferred to him, paid him obvious respect. My friend finally asked, quietly, “So, what does the old guy do?” The response: “He has mastered rice.”

GiltTasteTo be honest, I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know the difference between a pot of rice that I like eating and a pot that’s gluey, but there aren’t a whole lot of points between the two. And yet here is a man whose claim to fame among master chefs is that he makes rice better than the rest of them, and to accept that is to accept that there is a level of cooking that most of us will never comprehend. At some point, cooking is not a matter of skill; it’s a matter of understanding, of learning to see the differences between one perfectly good pot of rice and another, of the minute details in something that, for most anyone else, is pure pearly blandness. Truly great cooking is, in this way, first an act of learning to see, and then a striving to do. This is why, among chefs, the truism is that simple food is hard.

Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: Mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can make it. But take an impossible eye for detail and apply it to fish—Where did it come from? How long should you age it before serving for best flavor? How long should you massage it to make it tender, but still have texture? Where should you cut a piece from, and at what angle, to highlight the flavors of different parts of the muscle? Since temperature affects aroma, how warm should you let the fish get in your hand before serving it? How hard do you press the fish into the rice to form a bite that has integrity, but is not dense?—and you begin to see where a simple food is not so simple. You don’t have to buy into all the minutiae a sushi master trades in to know that the pleasures of great sushi span from the animal to the emotional and the intellectual, which is a great trick for anything to pull off, let alone a piece of raw fish on rice.

What animates a sushi master? What drives someone to be so focused, to be a god of small things?

Jiro Ono, 85 years old and counting, is a revered sushi chef who runs a restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station, and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is easily the best, most beautiful movie about sushi you will see this year, or, let’s face it, probably any other. The film is part documentary bio-pic, part food-blogger’s wet dream. (OMG, did you see the super-macro shot of that tuna??!? NOM NOM. Etc.) It doesn’t take us into the world of technique: Jiro has mastered rice, too—his rice dealer claims that he doesn’t bother to sell his best stuff to anyone else because they wouldn’t know what to do with it—but while he describes how he does it, the film never shows us the whys and what-fors of his method. (Though, as Silvia Killingsworth reports for the New Yorker, the French-American star chef Eric Ripert describes Jiro’s rice as “tasting like a cloud.”)

Instead, the movie focuses on the life of a man who is utterly devoted to his craft. Jiro doesn’t have a secret to why his sushi is more astonishing than anyone else’s. What he says, over and over, is that great sushi—and, by extension, greatness itself— is the result of hard work, of dedication, of a commitment to excellence that, in the end, trumps everything else in life.

His search for perfection is eternal.  At 85, he hasn’t stopped working; he says he hates holidays because they are too long to spend away from the restaurant. Chefs, in particular, who have seen the film don’t hesitate to call it “inspiring.” To watch the gorgeously shot scenes of him forming pieces of sushi, jewel-like and dripping with soy sauce and life, is to wish that you might one day make so much beauty. (Indeed, a film critic friend said that her reaction to seeing this was not hunger, but to want to go home and make jewelry.)

Still, there is another side to this mastery, to this inspiring devotion. Jiro has two sons, and it’s hard to tell exactly what their relationship to each other is, or to their esteemed father. The master admits to not being at home when they were young, telling a story of how one day he slept in, and his children complained to their mother that there was a strange man in the house. The younger one seemed, at first, to be the favorite, because the father helped him open his own restaurant. The older son, Yoshikazu, is still an apprentice to the father … at 50. But Jiro tells the camera, with a laugh, that when he helped his younger son open his restaurant, he told him, “Now, you can never come home again.” As he recounts his own life, leaving his home to begin his career at 9, it’s not clear that he was kidding with his kid.

With an inflection of either humble pride or resignation, Yoshikazu says that in Japan, it’s the oldest son’s role to take over for the father. He works dutifully; he has taken over the selection and buying of fish since Jiro had a heart attack 15 years before. He, not the acclaimed master, was the one who served the inspectors who granted Jiro three Michelin stars, the highest recognition in the restaurant world. And yet, Jiro’s restlessness keeps his son forever in his shadow, unwilling to let him stand for himself.

“You must fall in love with your work,” Jiro says. He refers to himself as a shokunin, literally an “artisan,” but more accurately someone who commits the entirety of himself to his work. It’s a term with gravity; you won’t find shokunin bread in the grocery store. One of his young apprentices wells up when he tells the camera of how he finally earned the term from his master. It was after he’d worked for Jiro for 10 years. He’s signed up for a life of dignity and honor and hard work. He’s signed up for the life of Jiro’s sons, men who may or may not have their own sons to mentor and pass their restaurants down to. He’s signed up for a life given—or lost?—to the making of beautiful things.

Thursday, May 26, 2011 8:45 PM UTC

Is the signature dish outdated?

A Seattle chef's duck specialty is divine but that doesn't mean it is -- or should be -- on the menu

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On the subject of duck, I confess that I am a chauvinist. There is the one, true way to prepare it — roasted, Chinatown style — and there is everything else. But the young chef Jason Franey’s version at the Seattle landmark Canlis is making me reconsider my prejudices. Brown as bourbon, the skin is like a crust, bowing over the breast, hugging it jealously. It crackles somewhere between crisp and crunch, a little like puffed rice, before dissolving into honey sweetness and black pepper heat. The meat has that deep, bass-note richness you want from duck, but is thick with flavors I can’t place: complex, swirling, delirious-making.

It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, “What makes duck more delicious than onions?” And also this: “In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won’t be here anymore.”

Franey’s cooking is elegant, muscular and ephemeral. He refers to “microseasons,” like the part of the onion season when the onion is most delicate. As a result, his cuisine is ever-changing; it’s a cuisine of creativity and spontaneity; it’s a cuisine of what’s new. It’s about a sensibility and a philosophy more than it is a collection of established “signature” dishes. Of course, Franey’s not alone in this — it’s the prevailing ethos of most ambitious young American chefs. Which is why it seems a little strange that the wildly talented Franey’s first executive chef job is at Canlis — 60 years and counting of marriage proposals, anniversaries, and meeting the in-laws. It’s a vibrant restaurant, not a museum, but it’s still known for the signature dishes it started out with, dishes that include a twice-baked potato.

Here’s a snapshot of what American fine dining was like back in 1964. On the cover of “Famous Foods From Famous Places: Specialty-of-the-House Recipes From America’s Leading Restaurants,” there is a bowtied waiter wearing a bright red sportcoat, drowning bananas in orange glop. The big, wilty magnolia blossom on the table is passing out from the heat of the chafing dish, looking like a sea monster dying to crawl back to the water. Bon appétit!

Inside, there is a section on Canlis, then 14 years old. Restaurant years being similar to dogs’, Canlis was already an elder statesman, and the book describes its speciality-of-the-house dishes: broiled steaks, steak tartar, prawns sautéed with vermouth, and, daringly, a Canlis Salad that, “with no apologies to Caesar, contains mixed greens tossed with croutons, minced bacon and grated cheese,” prepared by “pretty Japanese girls wearing bright colored kimonos.”

The meaning, the very point of a signature dish is that it doesn’t change. Rarely do chefs themselves set out to create one; it’s a designation conferred by the public, and yet, once you accept it, it becomes a pact with your diners: If you come here, you can have this thing. It’s both an honor and a bind. So how do you deal with that if your entire culinary philosophy is based on change?

Through most of its history, Canlis was considered a steakhouse. And while the ’90s redesign of the stunning mid-century modern building left a gorgeous, sleek, muted space, there is no missing its history: A massive, copper-plated grill station juts into the dining room like the prow of a mighty ship, where the Chef-cum-Captain, be-toqued and grand, would stand at the helm, meat sizzling before him.

“Back in the day,” Franey said, pointing to the grill, “the chef would call into the kitchen on a microphone for his plates. They might have all had the same vegetable, the same potato, the same garnish. He’d just put the steak on and send it out from the grill.” Fifteen years ago, Canlis made the shift to being a modern restaurant under chef Greg Atkinson, focused on seasonal Northwest cuisine, but the first thing Franey did was change the structure of the kitchen. Literally. He personally sawed down all the racks in the middle of the line so he could have his own station in there, cooking with his crew.

And this is what I mean by cooking: curing venison in pine ash. Slicing opakapaka into sashimi, serving it with fennel pollen. Spherifying a Tequila Sunrise. And also searing steak teriyaki, sautéeing prawns in vermouth, and plating massive Canlis Salads that dwarf almost anything else coming out of the kitchen.

The classics are delicious, to be sure, but isn’t their unyielding presence frustrating for a chef so inspired by newness?

“I’m not driven by my ego,” Franey said. “I work for this family, and those legacies are part of this family. Mr. Canlis said to me, ‘My name is on the door, but this place is bigger than me. It’s bigger than all of us.’ I’m here to cook for the guests. If you’ve been coming here for 30 years, and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t mess up my steak teriyaki!’ I need to earn your trust.”

It was a lovely answer, but, frankly just a little too diplomatic. Pressed, he eventually admitted that it would probably be easier to start a menu from scratch. But then he smiled and added, “But what’s the fun in that?” Learning to make really killer Peter Canlis Prawns was, too, a form of change.

We got back to talking about the duck. Even just remembering it made me a little wobbly. “What did you … do to that thing?” I could only manage to ask.

In his modest way, he said, “Well, we roast it at 450 degrees for 16 minutes.” Then he added, “We rub it in honey first.” I asked about brines or injected marinades or sorcery — what gives it that crazy, amazing flavor? “Oh,” he said casually, “and we dry age it for 14 to 24 days first.”

The aging, for which he works exclusively with specialty butcher Tracy Smaciarz, gives the duck a wild flavor, flavor you can’t make in a lab or a kitchen, flavor that is the handiwork alone of enzymes and bacteria and time. Coming out of the oven, it’s a powerful scent: the unparalleled aroma of browned bird skin, the sweetness of toasted honey, the floral perfume of the herbs stuffed into its cavity. But the thing, the thing that you can’t miss, is the funk. The funk the bird casts off like a lure, a smell like the edge of a prosciutto. If you get close enough to be impolite, it’s a bit like the part of the cheese counter where only eagles dare to fly. Woven into the taste of the meat, the funk is subtle, a backdrop of complex, floating, lingering flavors you can’t really place. It tastes deeper than duck you’ve had before, darker, weirder, and yet also somehow lighter. Less bloody and mineral, sweeter, a cheese-rind-tang rising through the fatty succulence. It tastes like genius.

“How did you think of that?” I asked.

“Well, I learned it from Daniel Humm,” he said, matter-of-factly, referring to the chef he worked for at Eleven Madison Park in New York. “And he learned it from his mentor, Gerard Rabaey.” And he probably learned it from his, and so on. It turns out that the tradition of hanging game birds to age is, well, very, very old. Medieval. Franey smiled. “Daniel said to me once, ‘We don’t really make anything new. We just do it well.’”

After I left the restaurant, I tweeted about my incredible meal at Canlis. The tweets came flooding back: “Did you have the duck?” “The duck!” and “Please say you had the duck!” I laughed. Looks like Franey has a signature dish on his hands.

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Saturday, Apr 9, 2011 1:01 AM UTC

A brilliant chef’s potato crisps

Michel Bras is a hero because he inspires me to look at simple food a new way. I hope I've done a bit of the same

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In my very first piece for Salon — if you don’t count our little Salon Food birth announcement — I wrote about discovering a hero in the chef Michel Bras. I’d never met him, never eaten his food. All I knew of him was from a movie, a decade-old documentary in which he sometimes struggles to articulate in words what it is that inspires him, but also in which he beautifully articulates his philosophy and character in the way he cooks — with respect, humility and curiosity. Watching him handle and hold the vegetables he’s cutting is a marvel; you’re watching a sense of wonder made physical.

I realize that sounds kind of laughable. But then again, how is it that a man whose signature dish is, essentially, a salad can be regarded as one of the greatest chefs in the world?

I think it’s because of his compelling sense of wonder, of his endless fascination with his ingredients — what they taste like, what they feel like, what they smell and look like. What he might be able to do with even the simplest food to make it seem new again, to reveal more of its character. I recently had the opportunity to watch him peel a carrot. (Yes, that sentence is for real, and the experience was spectacular.) He did this utterly pedestrian thing with such focus and care that when he’d cleared off all the peel and continued shaving into the carrot, beautiful, noodley ribbons curling onto his board, I could imagine the first time he did this, the first time he noticed this gorgeous shape, the first time he realized he could present carrots in a form so delicate and elegant.

So much of the soul of cooking is learning to open your eyes to the possibilities of anything in the kitchen. In my copy of his book “Essential Cuisine,” he wrote an inscription: “Nature speaks; experience translates.”

I’m thinking about this today because I hope that in my own, tiny, nongenius way, I’ve been able to help inspire your own cooking in this column. I’ve tried to share simple concepts and techniques to demystify new-to-you ingredients, or to make old ones taste new again. (For some reason, I also found it necessary to describe these “simple concepts” in 1,500-word columns. Sorry, I’m a yapper.) Whether it was to rediscover the aromatic pleasures of ginger and scallion by splashing them with sizzling oil, or to concentrate summer vegetables into a dense brick of pure flavor, to brulee and caramelize your Easter Peeps or to share the recipe for the greatest roast beef sandwich I have ever met, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading, talking and cooking with me.

If all this sounds a little bit like a soft-focus flashback montage sequence, it’s because, well, it is. Cue the waterworks: This is my last column for Salon.

What we’ve planned here is food coverage for curious people, for people who care about people, for people who are passionate about finding new ways to look at the world, whether they are “foodies” or people who think foodies’ main contribution to our society is allowing us to call wine dorks “winies.”

That’s what I said when I started, and I’m proud of the stories, essays and conversations we’ve shared here. For the last year and a half, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of discussing the issues of food with you, big and small, from wondering about the ethnic politics of shark’s fin soup bans to the taste of things too horrible to enjoy in polite company. (Wait, this is going to turn into another montage sequence. Somebody stop me!)

It’s been a wild, educational, gratifying, infuriating, thrilling, humbling, exciting time. And so it’s with gratitude and sadness that I’m leaving Salon, but I won’t be going too terribly far. I hope to still contribute some meandering thoughts, and I’m excited by what’s coming up. I’ll be easy to find, on Twitter at <strong>@francis_lam, and on the web at about.me/francis_lam. I hope you’ll say hello!

But one more thing before I go — a recipe from Michel Bras. It’s for a long potato crisp, crackly and browned like the best chips, but with a softer, more mellow heart. In his truest spirit, they’re simple, delightful and just odd enough to get you wondering what else you might do with them … other than mow them all down before dinner’s served.

Michel Bras’ crispy potatoes

Adapted from “Essential Cuisine” by Michel Bras

Ingredients

  • Potatoes, starchy, like russets. About one medium-sized potato per baking sheet tray works.
  • Good olive oil or clarified butter, as needed
  • Salt, to taste

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 275 F.
  2. Peel the potatoes and slice them lengthwise as thin as possible. I use a mandoline for this, one of those $20 Japanese babies, and cut them about 1 millimeter (a 25th of an inch) thin. In a pinch, you can improvise with a potato peeler; just use it to cut wide ribbons from the spud.
  3. Lay parchment paper or a Silpat (silicon baking sheet) on a baking tray. Brush it lightly with oil or clarified butter.
  4. Lay the potato slices in rows on the tray, overlapping the slices by about 1/3, to form long, shingled ribbons. Brush them lightly with oil or clarified butter.
  5. Bake, rotating after 20 minutes if your oven isn’t perfectly even, until the potatoes are a rich golden brown, crisp and translucent. Pale splotches are OK; in fact, they provide for an interesting textural contrast — a little less crisp, a little chewy. The only trick is to bake them long enough that the paler spots are cooked through and not rubbery, approaching crispness, about 45 minutes. When done, lightly salt them and let them cool a bit on the pan, and serve immediately or store in an airtight container. If they get a little stale, refresh them in a warm oven.
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Saturday, Apr 9, 2011 1:01 AM UTC

Michel Bras’ potato crisps recipe

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Adapted from “Essential Cuisine” by Michel Bras

Ingredients

  • Potatoes, starchy, like russets. About one medium-sized potato per baking sheet tray works.
  • Good olive oil or clarified butter, as needed
  • Salt, to taste

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 275 F.
  2. Peel the potatoes, and slice them lengthwise as thin as possible. I use a mandoline for this, one of those $20 Japanese babies, and cut them about 1 millimeter (1/25th of an inch) thin. In a pinch, you can improvise with a potato peeler; just use it to cut wide ribbons from the spud.
  3. Lay parchment paper or a Silpat (silicon baking sheet) on a baking tray. Brush it lightly with oil or clarified butter.
  4. Lay the potato slices in rows on the tray, overlapping the slices by about 1/3, to form long, shingled ribbons. Brush them lightly with oil or clarified butter.
  5. Bake, rotating after 20 minutes if your oven isn’t perfectly even, until the potatoes are a rich golden brown, crisp and translucent. Pale splotches are OK, in fact, they provide for an interesting textural contrast — a little less crisp, a little chewy. The only trick is to bake them long enough that the paler spots are cooked through and not rubbery, approaching crispness, about 45 minutes. When done, lightly salt them and let them cool a bit on the pan, and serve immediately or store in an airtight container. If they get a little stale, refresh them in a warm oven.
Wednesday, Apr 6, 2011 6:01 PM UTC

Spam four-way: Broiled, sauteed, poached and braised

Is the world's most loved/mocked luncheon meat as tasty as I remember? I run it through the gantlet to find out

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Is there a food more widely mocked than Spam? Its name was long rumored to stand for Stuff Posing as Meat. It’s synonymous with Internet junk. (No, kids, they didn’t name the canned pig after banking offers from dispossessed Nigerian millionaires. It was the other way around.) And well before there were ironic visits to the Spam Museum, comedy crossed into Spamland with Monty Python’s famous Viking Spam sketch:

But for all the mockery, I’d always assumed that we only kid because we love. I mean, everyone grew up on Spam, right?

Right?

Turns out, no. In fact, in the office yesterday we asked if anyone had actually never tried Spam … and the uninitiated doubled the deflowered. Where’s the love for tinned luncheon meat? For the meat-ish loaf that dare not speak its name?

I suppose it doesn’t help when Spam’s own website reads no more deliciously than this: “What is Spam? A family of meat products that are very versatile and tasty, which can be served in a variety of ways, such as sandwich meats, salad ingredients or to make a meaty mac & cheese food dish.”

Still, maybe it’s because I’m Asian, or because I’m the child of immigrants, but I always assumed eating Spam was like the taking of mother’s milk. The salty, porky lump is totemic, iconic. You can’t pry it out of the hands of a Hawaiian. It comes standard between soft white bread and creamy scrambled eggs in Hong Kong breakfast diners. It functioned, one memorable vacation, as the meat we had to bring with us, because my father, in love with the bounty of America, insisted that we have meat at every meal.

And I have to say, through all that, I’d always loved it. I loved its soft, creamy flavor. Its comforting squishiness. But I also haven’t had it in forever. How would it stack up now? Inspired by Mark Bittman’s column the other day about reacquainting yourself with white fish, “Broiled, Sautéed, Roasted, Poached,” I decided to give a can of Spam my own variety of treatments.

The Uncanning

The first whiff was … not as appealing as I remember. It’s the smell of Vienna sausages, of certain blander dog foods. I tap tap tapped the bottom, until it slid out, riding a wave of its jelly, making that telltale sucking sound. You really have to admire a food that gets 78 percent of its calories from fat.

Bonus first course: Sashimi

Well, if I got my hands on a beautiful fillet of fish, the first thing I’d do is slice off a little bit and try it raw, just to see it in its most unadulterated form. (I guess “alive” would count as “most unadulterated,” but I’m not going there for you.) So in keeping with the spirit of things, I took a thin slice of Spam sashimi. (It’s already technically cooked, of course.) It cuts like cream cheese, and peeling it off my knife, it’s kind of … beautiful. You can see the patterns of the fat and streaks as they were turned and folded, this meat mass that was once like dough.

It is salty. Very salty. But meaty, too. Ham-like, for sure — but if ham had its own built-in mayonnaise. I don’t think Spam sashimi is really something you need to try, particularly.

Sautéed

I seared a slice in oil, and watched it throw off grease like a 2-year-old doffs his clothes. It’s an unnerving sight for the over-30 me, and when I took it out of the pan, I drained the slice on a paper towel. Am I missing the point? Maybe! But am I ready to die? No, I am a chicken.

The edges really brown up nicely, crisping up in that ideal, hear-it-more-than-feel-it way, and the inside keeps a juicy tenderness. But then that melting quality gives way to firmer, more meaty texture. I’m reminded of the taste of scrambled eggs, even though it doesn’t actually taste like scrambled eggs. Must be some kind of pavlovian thing as I channel the spirit of breakfast sandwiches from decades ago. As I chew, it starts to taste a little metallic, but in a minerally way, in a not altogether bad way. But gah, the salt!

Broiled

Sizzling and popping in the oven, I take out my third slice of Spam to see that it’s rendered off a bunch of its fat; it’s visibly shrunken. Tiny bubbles formed on the surface, translucent and crisp, and the color deepened to a brick-ish red. Flipping it over, I see the side that sat on the pan; by the color, it’s nearly burnt (oops), but it’s amazingly crisp, almost like a chip, in the way that bacon gets amazingly crisp.

I would have feared that overcooking the Spam would dry it out, but 1) “fear” is overstating it, since the pool of rendered fat in the broiling pan is now kept away from my body and 2) science has ensured that it is impossible to dry out Spam. Sure, it’s a little chewy, but in a satisfying, jerky-like way. (In Spam, Hormel has made the ur-meat.) Once I detect the vaguely smoky flavor from the intense browning, I realize what my reaction is: This is what people love in bacon. Yes, it’s aggressively salty, but with less mass, it feels more appropriate. And it’s not like there are juices that keep the salt coming in waves.

Poached

Yes, I poached my Spam. If that sounds pretentious, I can tell you I boiled it. Either way, I’m sorry, but this is delicious. This is a flavor of my childhood, and I can’t ever forget it. I grew up on big bowls of chicken broth full of macaroni elbows, diced boiled Spam and canned corn. (Try it. Really.)

But aside from nostalgia, boiling actually accomplishes a few things. One, most important, it washes much of the saltiness away (mostly if you cut the Spam up into small bits; if you’re going for big chunks and slices, it’s still salty as hell). The heat and moisture keep the Spam soft and supple, with just enough to chew on. That creamy, fatty flavor comes to the front, round and rich. Remember when I said earlier that Spam tastes like ham that comes with its own mayonnaise? This makes Spam taste like mayonnaise that comes with its own ham.

Braised in white wine

The beauty of braising is that the long, slow cooking is the cook’s alchemy. It can take tough meat and turn it tender. It takes different ingredients, extracts their flavors into the sauce, marries them and then changes them, rounding them off, concentrating them, turning them into an intense form of something just a little bit other. So I seared off a slice of Spam and braised it down in white wine, applying the most magical technique I can muster to the science of Hormel. I’m pretty sure God never intended for this to happen.

At certain points, I opened the lid to find the Spam bloating up like a giant bubble. At other points it would deflate. The wine thickened with juices pulled out from the fatty Spam, and wrapped its tartness around the meat. I was sure something was going on in that pot. Maybe not something good, but something.

But then I took a bite. And after I got past the intense flavor of reduced wine and got to the potted essence of the Spam itself, I was both stunned and comforted by what I found. Nothing. Nothing changed. After all that, Spam remains Spam.

 

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Saturday, Apr 2, 2011 1:01 AM UTC

Lemon icebox pie: A gift from the fates

I didn't deserve it, but the universe saw fit to send me this recipe for smooth, cold, lemony, creamy goodness

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There are some recipes you work for, that you earn — the ones you butter up a neighbor for, that you learn while getting hammered on the line at a restaurant. There are ones that are your cultural inheritance, and the ones that come through your bloodlines (which, depending on your family, might also mean that you suffered enough to deserve them). And then there are the ones that come to you like sweet destiny, like a flower borne in air, like a sudden, raunchy late-night call from someone you thought you’d never get to make out with again. You didn’t work for it, you might not even deserve it, but here it is and there you are.

Martha Foose’s Lemon Icebox Pie is that recipe for me.

Some time in 2008, when I was at the height of my Mississippi powers, living part-time on the Gulf coast and chatting up cooks and shrimpers and such, a group organizing a conference panel on culinary tourism asked me to come speak. Flattered and hubristic, I said yes. And only then did I proceed to ask myself, “What the hell do I know about promoting culinary tourism?”

The answer, of course, was, “Not a whole hell of a lot.” So I talked about it with my friend Google, jotted down some notes about magazine advertising rates or something, and showed up confident I could avoid sounding like I was just there for the free drinks at the reception.

I took my place at the panel, flashed a flirty smile at the (very beautiful, it turns out) woman who invited me, and heard the introductions of the other speakers. One was a culinary tourism promoter who’d been in the game for roughly three quarters of my life. The next was a woman who’d basically invented the term culinary tourism, who could tell you the name of every person to visit the great states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida and Montana from the years 1984-2007. And then there was me. With my notes. From a 20-minute round of Googling.

The rest is a little too painful to go over, but suffice it to say that I learned a few very important lessons that day:

  1. If you actually, literally ask the audience to laugh at your next joke, they will. But they will not actually be amused.
  2. Self-deprecating jokes from the stage are funny. Unless you’re bombing. Then they’re just depressing.
  3. No beautiful woman will be impressed with a flirty smile if you are obviously, appallingly incompetent.

Anyway, my time finally ground to an end, and I booked it out of that conference like my house was on fire.

On my way out, though, one of the organizers caught sight of me and, bless her heart, made sure I took home one of the thank-you gift bags. I wanted to protest. I wanted to give it back. I didn’t deserve it. I got home and opened it up, full of all manner of shameful reminders of my humiliation. I wanted to put them all out of my sight — the tumblers, the cooler bags, the aprons. But then I pulled out “Screen Doors and Sweet Tea,” Martha Foose’s cookbook.

A proud daughter of Mississippi, Martha left for a spell to train with some of the most renowned pastry chefs in France, and then returned home to cook, bake and teach up in the Mississippi Delta. I knew her from a random, wild-eyed moment years earlier, when I ran up to her after having a taste of her signature Sweet Tea Lemon Chess Pie, a pastry that will forever change the way you think about Mississippi, France, iced tea, pies, unicorns and ligers. I don’t even remember our conversation, but that there was some wary smiling and the word fraisage floated in the air (which is French for “smearing the crust dough in little circles and then stacking them all back on one another so it’s ridiculously flaky”), and I walked away hoping that I didn’t scare her too badly.

So then, in the comfort and social-awkwardness safety of my home, I opened the book to smashing success. The first page I opened to was banana pudding, which is as good a sign as there is in cookbooking. Four pages later, and I was in the promised land — “Lemon Icebox Pie: The Wonder of Sweetened Condensed Milk.”

I am a great lover of lemons, any food that includes the word “icebox,” and most of all, of the gooey ambrosia that is sweetened condensed milk. My feelings of shame and embarrassment gave way. I fired up the oven. I ground up graham crackers to make crumbs. And soon, spoon deep in its tart, creamy goodness, I started to thank fate for sending this recipe my way.

Martha Foose’s Lemon Icebox Pie

From “Screen Doors and Sweet Tea.” Used with permission, except for the stupid commentary, which is my own.

Makes one 9-inch pie

Ingredients

  • 1½ cups graham cracker crumbs (Whirl the graham crackers in a food processor for crumbs.)
  • ¼ cup granulated sugar
  • ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon (Cinnamon? In a lemon dessert? Yes. Just do it. You’ll thank Martha later.)
  • ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
  • 2 14-ounce cans sweetened condensed milk
  • 4 large egg yolks
  • 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest (I actually like a little more than this)
  • ½ cup fresh lemon juice (And I like a little more juice than this too, but taste it before baking and add to taste.)
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • 6 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
  2. In a medium bowl, combine the crumbs, granulated sugar, cinnamon and melted butter. Pat into a 9-inch deep-dish pie pan and bake for 6 to 8 minutes, or until slightly browned. Remove to a wire rack to cool.
  3. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, whisk together the milk, yolks, lemon zest and lemon juice. Pour the lemon filling into the cooled crust. Bake for 10 minutes, or until set. Cool on a rack. Chill the pie for 30 minutes.
  4. When the pie is completely cooled, whip the cream with the confectioners’ sugar until stiff peaks form. Mound the whipped cream on top of the pie and chill for 1 hour. (The chilling together isn’t strictly necessary, but it does make the whipped cream bond to the pie in a sort of fabulous way.)
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Francis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. In past lives, he was a Senior Writer at Salon.com, a Contributing Editor at Gourmet magazine (RIP), and his work has appeared in the 2006 - 2010 editions of Best Food Writing.

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