Edible Long Island Debuts – Telling the Story of How Long Island Eats

The first digital edition of Edible Long Island is a celebration of summer in Nassau and Suffolk

There was once a time when I thought the idea of local food and artisanal food products just didn’t apply to where I lived. Born and raised in a place where strip malls, chain restaurants and movie theaters get a lot of attention, I thought you had to travel to discover interesting food trends, and that other people were lucky because they seemed to be blessed with an abundance of fascinating food and agriculture right in their backyard. 

Then, I opened my eyes, and I saw what was happening in my own backyard. Through exploration and the stories of “Culinary Types,” I talked to people and I tasted. I discovered historic farmland, community sponsored agriculture, heritage chickens, a proliferation of farmers markets, goat cheese, craft vodka, pioneering chefs, fresh seafood, and some amazing artisanal bread right in Nassau and Western Suffolk County. Why travel, when the eats are pretty darn good right here at home? 

That’s why I’m thrilled that the newest member of the Edible Communities, Edible Long Island has arrived with its first digital edition, and I’m a contributor helping to tell the story of how Long Island eats.

Long Island native Betsy Davidson is the Editor of Edible Long Island and has gathered a team of local writers and photographers who are passionate about the food of central Long Island. Betsy is a writer and organic gardener who lives in Huntington.

Betsy Davidson is Editor of Edible Long Island

“Nassau and Western Suffolk counties are blessed with a vibrant and diverse population that likes to eat,” says Betsy.  “We shop, cook, drink and dine out, a lot!”

Part of the fun is exploring a food culture that has previously gotten far less attention than the Brooklyn food scene or the farms and vineyards of Long Island’s East End.

“There is so much going on in the kitchens and backyards of our suburban communities along the LIE and LIRR,” says Betsy. “We raise chickens and livestock, grow kale hydroponically in the winter, and brew our own beer and kombucha tea.”

You can read the first digital edition of Edible Long Island by clicking here.   The issue is celebration of summer, and you’ll find two stories penned by me. One is a profile of The Shack (page 50) in Centerport, a venerable “joint” on the North Shore that has been serving up clams and chaos for over 30 years.  

I’ve also authored a piece on how the small business owners of the restaurants, fish markets and bars on Freeport’s Nautical Mile are fighting to come back after the destruction of Hurricane Sandy (pages 16 and 17). Photographer Doug Wynn and I made several visits to the Nautical Mile following the storm to track their progress and chronicle their stories. 

A print edition of Edible Long Island will launch in September.   I hope you enjoy the stories.  I’m proud to be a part of the team serving up our hometown feast.

©2013 T.W. Barritt All Rights Reserved   

A Giveaway: Susan Russo's "The Encyclopedia of Sandwiches"

Sandwiches are my guilty pleasure, but I’m hardly a gourmet when it comes to slapping some filling between two slices of bread. For me, it’s all about fast flavor. I like the simple preparation, the quick satisfaction of hunger and the easy clean up. Some sandwiches are pantry specials - the ingredients always within reach in a pinch. I can go for days existing on Fluffernutter Sandwiches or Tuna Salad made with Miracle Whip, and I still crave several favorites from my youth - Bologna with Yellow Mustard on White Bread or Cream Cheese and Jelly (cut in four small squares, of course).

You might say I need to expand my sandwich horizons. Fortunately, my pal Susan Russo, "The Food Blogga" has come up with the perfect answer. She's just published "The Encyclopedia of Sandwiches" with Quirk Books. Matt Armendariz provides the sumptuous sandwich photography.

Take a look inside, and you will truly appreciate the artistry of the sandwich. Susan delves into the history and tasty trivia behind some retro stacked favorites (who knew the hot dog was once called a “Frankfurter Sandwich?), and creates some new classics that take the art of the sandwich to a whole new level. Not only are the recipes lip-smacking, but it's an engaging read.

Susan is known for healthy and delicious California cuisine and fresh farmers market fare - so I tracked her down to find out what it was like to turn her culinary prowess to the archetypal finger food, in her new role as the Queen of Sandwiches:

TW: How many sandwiches did you make while researching the book?

Susan: Well, I made the 110 sandwiches in the book (some more than once), some variations and several that didn't make it. So I'd say about 200. And if you're wondering if I gained weight - yes!

TW: Do you think the sandwich has been overlooked or underrated in the past as a culinary institution?

Susan: Until fairly recently, the sandwich was underrated. Nowadays sandwiches are hot! I think the introduction of international sandwiches such as the bahn mi and Italian porchetta have made the sandwich seem suddenly sexier. It also helps that over the last several years, exclusive restaurants such as Campanile in Los Angeles have created artisanal (and expensive) grilled cheese sandwiches, thereby elevating the humble sandwich's status. And with so many celebrity chefs including Tom Colicchio and Rick Bayless opening up sandwich shops, the sandwich's status just keeps soaring.

TW: Your dedication included your husband and notes that he has eaten every sandwich in the book. Did he have a favorite?

Susan: The Muffuletta. I think he actually sang when he ate it.

TW: Was there a piece of sandwich history that surprised you the most?

Susan: Yes. I was surprised to discover that the homey PB & J was once considered a delicacy due to its high price. It wasn't until the introduction of mass-produced peanut butter in the 1920s that it became the iconic American favorite we know today.

TW: Some readers might be surprised to see our favorite "Food Blogga" including the Spamwich in the book. What's your response?

Susan: Well, since the book's title is The Encyclopedia of Sandwiches, I just had to include the Spamwich. I'll admit I'm not a fan, but I didn't let my personal tastes affect my choices in writing the book. But there are plenty of people who really enjoy the Spamwich. If you can believe it, Hawaiians love the pink stuff so much they eat an average of six cans per year. You can even find it at some McDonald's and Burger King restaurants.

TW: What's your go-to bread?

Susan: Crusty Italian. I like a muscular, chewy bread.

TW: What's your "guilty pleasure" sandwich?

Susan: A potato chip sandwich with peanut butter and pickles. I can't believe I just admitted that.

TW: What do you see as the essential ingredients for an outstanding sandwich?

Susan: I think it's subjective, so my honest answer is your favorite bread, your favorite fillings and anything else you want to squirt or pile on top!

To celebrate the publication of Susan's new book, I'm giving away one copy of “The Encyclopedia of Sandwiches” to a reader of this post chosen at random. Simply leave a comment before 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, April 23rd that mentions your favorite sandwich and you'll be eligible. Sorry, but we are only able to ship within the United States. The winner will be selected and announced on Sunday, April 24th. Meanwhile, I'm off to buy some Spam and a jar of pickles. Or maybe I’ll really go crazy and indulge in a Banana Fluffernutter!

©2011 T.W. Barritt All Rights Reserved

Eric Steinman’s Edible Hudson Valley: Chronicling the Story of a Food Region

Eric Steinman (right), editor of the magazine "Edible Hudson Valley," talks with Don Lewis, owner of Wild Hive Café in Clinton Corners, New York.

New York’s Hudson Valley region has a deep legacy of agriculture, legends and storytellers. In 1819 author and essayist Washington Irving published The Sketch Book which includes “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and “Rip Van Winkle.” Irving used descriptive prose, humor and satire to depict the people and customs of the lower Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. For the better part of this past winter, food writer and editor Eric Steinman has been preparing to join this tradition. In just a matter of days, the inaugural issue of his new magazine, Edible Hudson Valley is set to debut.

We meet at the Wild Hive Café in Clinton Corners, New York to talk about the undertaking. The café and bakery sits at the cross roads of the tiny village. There is lazy jazz music playing on the stereo and the aroma of freshly baked bread fills the room.

Steinman – who has worked for Bon Appetit and various online properties – speaks with the thoughtful candor and clarity of a writer who is quite comfortable using language to persuade and illuminate. The food of the Hudson Valley region is fertile ground for the Rhinebeck resident’s method of storytelling, but he found as editor he needed to evolve his standard approach of writing food stories with a very singular focus.

“I felt like I had to step back and look at the task at hand,” he tells me. “What I came up with were multiple, interlocking narratives – all of those telling a story about the region, and having to do with history, sociology, immigration patterns, economics and politics and honestly, problems. Social problems and economic problems in the area.”

The nationwide Edible community of magazines originated with a publication in Ojai, California about eight years ago covering local food trends. Over time, individual communities expressed interest in customized versions of an Edible magazine that would depict their local food culture. Steinman learned more about the family of magazines when he wrote a story for Bon Appetit, and was eventually recruited to shepherd the development of a publication for the Hudson Valley.

There seems no limit to food lore in the Hudson Valley region. One can find abundant apples, sweet corn, dairy and livestock production. New York State is third behind California and Washington in wine and grape production with the Hudson Valley one of several major wine producing districts. It is also home to the Culinary Institute of America located in Hyde Park. Steinman is unearthing exceptional stories of individuals who are working to innovate, recreate and reform the local food system.

The Spring 2009 cover of "Edible Hudson Valley" depicts the human element inherent in regional food.

Amy – one of the staff at the Wild Hive Café – brings us a platter of just-baked, sliced whole grain breads and describes the selection – Walnut Multi-Grain, Onion Rye and Italian Toast accompanied by bean spread made from local beans, yogurt cheese and wild ramps and a sweet, golden carrot spread.

Steinman has chosen the Wild Hive Café for our meeting because the enterprise is illustrative of many of the food trends emerging in the Hudson Valley. He features Wild Hive Café in the first issue of the magazine. All of the grains used in the bread are from local organic farms and are milled on the premises. The owner, Don Lewis, began the business as an apiary in 1982, and over time became committed to reviving the cultivation of local grain in the Hudson Valley. The shelves of the store are stocked with rustic loaves of artisanal bread and plump packages of just-milled wheat flour, corn meal, oats and other grain varieties. The grain is 100 percent local, grown just a few miles away from the café which opened onsite last November. Lewis’s business model is a radical change from traditional thinking where grain is traded as a commodity, shipped long distances and can often sit for long periods of time.

Exterior of Wild Hive Bakery and Café in Clinton Corners, New York.

“Don’s whole approach is, do not treat grain like a commodity - treat it like you would a fresh stalk of broccoli, or a plum and get it harvested and milled and used as soon as possible,” says Steinman. “His whole idea is to reframe how we think about grain, as essentially a fresh ingredient, which I think in itself is pretty revolutionary.”

As Steinman looked at the story of the Wild Hive Café, he wondered what the future might look like for the operation and what it might mean to the national discourse on sustainable food.

“It’s very inspiring what he’s doing, but I also looked at it as, well, how far can he take it? That was my initial interest in approaching the story. Okay, he could probably take this pretty far at the local level, but where does this go on the macro level? Can this model be sustained on a larger level, which is a question I think a lot of people are asking with our national food system and even our international food system.”

A sampling of breads baked from local organic grains available at the Wild Hive Bakery and Café.

“This is the beginning of the story for Don, and I think in three years it might be a different story, and I would love to pick it up in three years and see where it’s developed. Where are the problems? Where are the obstacles?”

The question of the viability of local food systems is one that seems to intrigue Steinman. He plans to revisit stories over time, and by doing so, view the region from a more holistic, long-term perspective. He intends to embrace difficult stories, and even report on failures, as all will educate and inform. It is a fundamental departure from the approach of a traditional food magazine.

“When a lot of people think about food and lifestyle magazines, they think about these sort of unyielding celebrations like, “Isn’t this an awesome plate of food!” he says. “But there are also other stories involved like, how did the plate of food become awesome, what are the problems in actually producing the food and distributing it, who has access to it and who doesn’t? My intention is to slowly unravel those stories and make them very unique to the region.”

He acknowledges that the very essence of food writing is undergoing a transformation.

“The level of consciousness has completely changed in this evolving food story and food writing,” he tells me. “We are going from a food culture that is about elitism, to a food culture that is about access and enthusiasm. It’s not limited to this erudite culture. Everyone has their food story and everyone has those aspects of food that they’re enthusiastic about.”

While Edible Hudson Valley may take a different path, there are certain aspects of food journalism that Steinman will embrace.

“There is something elegant and austere about the magazine,” he says. “There will be continuity with the rest of the Edible publications, emphasizing photography, artwork and letting pictures tell the story. But the written word is the intellect of the magazine.”

Steinman has ideas for many stories to explore. He wants to examine the relationship between the arts and food and look at children and their relationship to food. He hopes to look at local history, generational stories, foraging and root cellars, but also take a critical look at the state of institutional food in the region, from the school system to correctional facilities.

“I think there is inherent value in storytelling, because it raises the consciousness as well as celebrates what’s happening, but it also poses questions,” he says. “This is going to be in part a celebration of the region, but I’m going to endeavor to ask hard questions, that I probably won’t be able to answer about food systems and distribution and justice and whether things actually work, and who these food systems serve and who they don’t.”

Right now, the California native is focused on bringing the first issue of Edible Hudson Valley to the community. He tells me that his understanding and appreciation of the region has grown deeper with the varied seasons since he and his wife first arrived in New York three years ago. He cites the “new beginning” of spring as a fitting time to introduce this new magazine into the communal history of the valley.

“Upon coming here, it seemed like there wasn’t much going on, but it’s ever evolving,” he says. “It started taking on this form and life of a story, and my role is to try to tell that story, not just by myself, but to use photographers and artists and writers and compile it or curate it in a way to really make sense of it.”

In a way, Steinman sounds a bit like the people of the Hudson Valley community he is reporting on. For now, his role is to cultivate and nurture these interlocking narratives – this collective local story – and see how it grows. But, that could change over time.

“Right now I’m very focused on getting the magazine out, getting writers and getting stories and really contributing something to the local conversation,” Steinman says. “But, I don’t necessarily want it to stop there. If it evolves in such a way, and there’s a need there, I would totally be willing to step up and become more of an advocate and more of a voice. I come from a long line of activists. There’s part of that that’s just in my DNA.”

©2009 T.W. Barritt All Rights Reserved

The Woman Who Revived a Forgotten Food Writer

Clementine Paddleford. Her name sounds like something out of a Rogers and Hammerstein musical, but she was perhaps the most famous food writer of her day. And, when she died in 1967, Clementine Paddleford’s distinctive name and voice all but vanished from the annals of food history. Until now.

I first spot Paddleford’s intriguing moniker in a recent Gourmet article about a new biography. The “roving food editor” for the New York Herald Tribune and This Week magazine, Paddleford crisscrossed the country for decades interviewing homemakers, short order cooks, farmers, celebrities and socialites about the food on their tables. Inevitably, she would persuade them to share a prized recipe with her readers.

Paddleford was a writer who believed that people were integral to the story of food. I feel as if I have found a kindred spirit and within minutes, I order the biography and locate a long-out-of-print copy of Paddleford’s 1960 opus, What America Eats on ebay. It is a compendium of her reporting from This Week, featuring essays and recipes on everything from Election Cake to Sauerbraten and Oysters Rockefeller, all organized according to the regions of the country that made the dishes famous.

Author and food writer Kelly Alexander made it a personal mission to resurrect the intrepid food writer, once referred to as “the Nellie Blye of food journalism.” A former editor at Saveur magazine, Alexander had written an award-winning profile on Paddleford. She then teamed with archivist Cynthia Harris to write “Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the Forgotten Food Writer Who Chronicled How America Ate.”

The two women poured through Paddleford’s personal papers, now archived at Kansas State University, and spoke to dozens of friends and relatives to craft a profile of the woman behind the byline. The book is an intimate visit with a shrewd and flamboyant character. Alexander and Harris meticulously and reverently reconstruct Paddleford’s life, from her childhood in America’s heartland to her days as food editor at the Herald Tribune. Paddleford was said to have traveled 800,000 miles during her career, interviewing American cooks from every walk of life and sharing their recipes. The authors paint a vivid portrait of Paddleford, swathed in a fashionable cape with a large pad in hand, on the hunt for yet another distinctly-American recipe. If you care about food, and the central role it plays in our lives, you will likely make an immediate connection with the woman who devoted her career to chronicling how America eats.

Paddleford was sometimes criticized by her rivals for her universally positive approach to the often-basic style of American cooking, but she was not a food critic. She was a writer who celebrated food and its connection to daily life. Her critical opinion mattered less than her reporter’s ability to record the scene.

Channeling Paddleford, I do a little leg work of my own and manage to track down Kelly Alexander. She graciously agrees to an email interview and shares her insights into what motivated Paddleford, her influence on the profession of food writing and our understanding of regional American recipes, and what the pioneering reporter would think of today’s food bloggers:

Culinary Types: Why do you think Clementine was so drawn to the story of regional American food?

Kelly Alexander: I think that Clementine understood inherently that America is a "melting pot" culture; without using that cliched term, she managed to plug into the fact that we're really all immigrants whose parents or grandparents came here from foreign shores toting their own unique food traditions. When they got here, they had to make their treasured recipes with whatever ingredients they could find -- that's the basis of regional American cooking as we know it today. Clementine was attracted to telling the stories behind the home cooks of America as they endeavored to get dinner on the table every night; it was an issue she was intimately familiar with, having grown up on a farm in rural Kansas. She knew that the food that was sacred to her in her girlhood was worth celebrating, and she made it her life's work to explore the hidden pockets of great regional American food as a way to pay homage to hard working women everywhere.

Culinary Types: What did you learn about your profession as a food writer in researching Paddleford?

Kelly Alexander: Well, it's really true that nothing in the world of food is ever "new." We think of "regional American food" as a hot topic these days, but it was around as a way of eating since long before even Clementine wrote about it. Writing about Clementine was an education in food writing in other ways, though: Her writing style is not memoiristic or especially personal, as so much food writing is these days -- it's explicitly based on solid reporting and fact gathering. It's much more structured, and frankly much more informative, than a lot of the food writing I see out there today...and it was a great inspiration to me for my own work.

Culinary Types: What would Paddleford think of today's food bloggers?

Kelly Alexander: I think she'd love the Internet. One of her hallmarks as a journalist was soliciting feedback from her readers. She would often end her columns by asking her readers to write to her, and when they invariably did she made sure to respond to every single one of them -- it's a wonder she slept given how much correspondence she produced. She was an inveterate letter writer, and I think the best food blogs today are written by people who approach their blogs in just that spirit. In short, I think she would have relied on bloggers as sources for great regional American food and would have taken pleasure in the whole online world of food.

Culinary Types: What do you think was the one thing that drove her for so many years?

Kelly Alexander: She was one of those people who was just born to be a reporter; as a child she wrote letters, kept journals, pestered the local newspaper to let her write stories...her passion as a storyteller was a huge part of her personality, and her desire to succeed, to become a famous writer, nearly dominated everything else in her life. She really wanted to tell stories, and she used food as a way to do it -- and her ambition was just positively limitless.

Culinary Types: Do you have a favorite Paddleford recipe and why?

Kelly Alexander: There are several personal favorites. The haman taschen, a traditional cookie baked on the Jewish holiday of Purim, is historically significant because it marks the first time a dish of such ethnic distinction was featured in a major national newspaper -- and the cookies are delicious, which helps. But the one I'd say is probably closest to my heart is called "Aunt Sabella's Chocolate Cake." It came from a lady in the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside. It's a small, rich, moist chocolate cake -- really more like a very large, very intense brownie -- and Clementine, who had a real sweet tooth, wrote about it with such enthusiasm ("Chocolate cake -- now that's my meat!" she said) that it drew me to it. It's a simple, classic, American dessert -- I would question the sanity of anyone who could find fault with it!

Culinary Types: Do you think American regional food is viewed differently because of Paddleford's work?

Kelly Alexander: I really don't think it's overstatement to say that we wouldn't have Rachael Ray without Clementine -- she paved the way for reporters and writers and cooks to talk about food as more than just a recipe formula. She was interested in the stories behind the recipes, and she was the first person to really make those stories come alive for the American public. She is such an integral part of American food history, and I'm just happy that she's finally getting her due.

©2008 T.W. Barritt All Rights Reserved