Fruit at the Dinner Table
Welcome to Gourmet magazine, an independently owned digital food magazine that’s not affiliated with the Gourmet magazines of yore. Our Thursday editions are where we feature a great new recipe. Tuesday is for features.
IN THIS ISSUE: A recipe for Iranian sour cherry rice with dozens of diminutive meatballs, a reader recommendation for a kids’ book about sour cherries, this season on Bear, and Cale gets affordably drunk at PDX.
Appetizers
Cherry Balm
It’s a wonderful surprise to learn that our readers actually pay attention to the “NEXT ISSUE” preview at the bottom of our newsletters. Friend of Gourmet (FRoG) Sari-Rose B. wrote in:
I saw that the next issue will include sour cherries and I wanted to share a picture book with y’all. We just happened to check this out recently, and it’s a nice book—Sour Cherries: An Afghan Family Story written by Dezh Azaad, illustrated by Nan Cao. I’m a huge fan of picture books and I wanted to share a few other food books I’ve enjoyed with my kid:
- What’s That written by Karen Chan, illustrated by Basia Tran
- Bread is Love written by Pooja Makhijani, illustrated by Lavanya Naidu
- The Café at the Edge of the Woods written and illustrated by Mikey Please
And then there are obviously classics Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Blueberries for Sal, but I was thinking of more recent ones.
I’m curious if other readers might have favorite food-oriented picture books they’d recommend.
I read Sour Cherries and was delighted—it even includes a recipe for sour cherry tea at the end of the book. Kids deserve good food writing too! —Nozlee
The Sound and the Furry
Je refuse to invest any attention in the final season of a certain godforsaken chef-show-that-shall-not-be-named. Instead, I plan to hit the beach with a copy of Bear, Marian Engel’s 1976 novel about “a lonely archivist sent to work in northern Ontario, where she enters into a sexual relationship with a bear.” If that’s too much for you—grrr!—enjoy writer Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 reappraisal of the book in the London Review of Books: it too is a much better use of your time. —Alex
[Editor’s note: I can’t recommend Bear enough—and it’s not not a food book. The audiobook clocks in at under four hours and is great too. —Nozlee]
Law and Bored-er
There’s nothing quite like reading the words “flight delayed” to remind you that drinking is one of the only good pastimes at an airport. I found myself at Portland International Airport last week as thirty minutes to spare cascaded into six hours of idle hell. I began this oh-so-long delay at a post-security establishment that could only exist in PDX: a coolly-lit batched cocktail bar called Straightaways blaring the absolute worst techno you could imagine. The cocktails, poured from cans into a Nick and Nora, were takes on classics like Manhattans and Mai Tais, but what caught my eye was the price: twelve dollars. That seemed very un-airport-like. Two cocktails went down the hatch, and the bartender Erin (a gem) snuck me some pity bar snacks. The delay lengthened: a change of scenery was in order. Where else to go but Henry’s Tavern—a fluorescent lit “pub” (much airport-ier!)—which also advertised oddly low prices. There wasn’t a twenty-two-ounce craft beer on the menu that exceeded eleven dollars! If this were JFK, a Natty Ice low-boy would’ve set me back a good twenty.
It was then that a friend flabbergasted me with this fact: PDX has a strict “street price” policy. All products sold inside the airport’s walls must match the price they would be at any outside establishment. What a concept—fair pricing! I spent five hours at the airport bars, ultimately spent a little over $40, and let-me-tell-you, I was not sober. I do not consider myself an emblem of juridical obedience but this experience made me consider that perhaps some laws are good. —Cale
Fruit at the Dinner Table
Flexing one’s culinary vocabulary
Why do I feel the need to write about Iranian recipes so often? I don’t think these are the only stories I have to tell or recipes I have to cook. There’s plenty of food I make a lot, or feel strongly about—pie crust, salade Niçoise, Sichuan beef with celery. I don’t have any unique authority from which to gatekeep Iranian cuisine, and don’t feel any weighty obligation to share it with the world. Adjudicating who’s allowed to talk about a recipe because of their personal characteristics makes the world seem small to me; I certainly don’t think anyone needs permission to write about Iranian food if they love it.
Maybe it’s as simple as wanting to flex the full range of my cooking vocabulary. Much has been made of words that don’t exist in other languages: there’s no at-hand word for “love” in Farsi (the options go straight from “like” to flowery poetry), just as English lacks a word for “tahdig,” the prized layer of crispy rice at the bottom of the pot. I think better with more words to match what I see in the world, and I cook better, too. It takes two languages to tell you that I love tahdig.