I grew up in a small farm community in Nebraska. Our food intake relied largely on what our farm (or neighbor’s farms) produced – beef, pork, corn, soybeans. Farming culture followed a very specific food rhythm – load up as much caloric intake as possible in the morning, work all day in the fields, and then power load again in the evening at dinner. I wasn’t the biggest fan of that traditional “farm-to-table” schedule. I tend to graze in smaller portions, skip meals entirely, and snack randomly on nuts, bread or cheese. When I go out to eat, I often stress about committing to an entrée and instead opt for ordering numerous appetizers to sample.

My relationship to food wasn’t the only indication that a future in farming wasn’t likely – one of the first skills mothers pass on to their daughters in farming communities is cooking. But farm cooking held very little appeal for me. Whereas my mother saw working with the land as a puzzle to be solved, I saw it as a tedious way to have to eat more corn. As I grew up, I never expressed much interest in cooking, often opting to read a book instead of joining in the kitchen ritual each day. I’m pretty sure my mother was convinced I’d never be able to fend for myself in the kitchen.

Fast-forward forty years, and I’ve become something of a foodie. I adore cooking. It’s my favorite time of my day. Planning meals and recipes for the week is perhaps the most enjoyable part of my week. So, what happened?

Italy. Italy happened.

In the summer of 1996 I decided to spend the $1,000 I had saved waiting tables to fly to Europe for an internship program in London. In retrospect, I’m not sure how my parents dealt with this. Pre-technology like Facebook and smart phones, they literally saw me get on a plane and just had to trust that I’d come back. As a college professor who has seen how structured our study abroad and internship programs are now for students, what I signed up for was the equivalent of answering a Craig’s List ad that said “Need American college student to work in London. Will provide housing.”

I started my marketing internship (which was basically cold-calling people and asking them to sign up for meal delivery services) and quickly discovered the only benefit to the job was that if you were efficient and went through your call list quickly, you could leave. So, I started power calling on Mondays, often beating the other interns through the list so that by Wednesday, I didn’t need to come back to work for the week. Instead, I went off and explored Europe. That’s how I ended up in Italy.

Visiting Rome for the first time felt oddly like coming home. The energy, the vibrancy, the smell of the streets – something about it captured me. Shortly after arriving, I checked into my hostel and went out to find somewhere to eat. I wandered down a small back alley and into the tiniest mom-and-pop joint that smelled divine. Once the owners realized I didn’t know Italian, they simply said, “Oh, we take care of you. You will be family.” I was quickly whisked to a table, a glass of wine appeared in front of me, and a small board of cheese, nuts and fruit appeared shortly after. The wine melted deliciously into the cheese exploding across my palate. A variety of other small courses arrived – cured meats, artichokes and olives drenched in olive oil marinade, three varieties of pasta, a chicken picatta that blew my mind. All of these were perfectly paired with portions of wine that enhanced the flavor profile of each course. And at the end of it all, another plate of cheese, small desserts and limoncello. I found my food people. I was home.

I ate dinner at that little place for four days straight. I explored the Colosseum and the Vatican by day and showed up for dinner with my people. I went back to Italy three more times before returning to the States. I was blown away by Tuscany, was under-whelmed with Venice, and enamored with artwork in Florence, yet longed for that little food joint in Rome.

Perhaps that’s why so many years later, it’s still one of my favorite comforts to put together a fantastic cheese plate or charcuterie board. Yes, I understand it’s technically not cooking. But there is an art to selecting the perfect wine pairing for your board, and it’s one that I have devoted numerous hours to cultivating since my return from Europe. Plus, on busy nights, how great is it to come home and throw something delicious and fulfilling together without the fuss of cooking mess?

Enter Adam Centamore – apparently a Harry Potter-level wizard of wine and cheese pairing. His most recent book, Tasting Wine & Cheese, was a Christmas gift, and I was eager to see how my own pairing skills lined up with a master. So, I decided to run three experimental board pairings. In each case, I selected what I would have naturally chosen to pair and then also served something Adam recommended. It’s summer, and hot, so I stuck with chilled wine.

Experiment #1 – Chardonnay

I adore my Chardonnay, especially the La Crema Sonoma Coast. This wine is one of my favorites for its notes of apricot, lemon and vanilla. The oak is subtle enough that it’s not overpowering, making it a great sipping wine – especially given the retail price of about $14. One of my go-to pairings is to serve it with baked brie and bread. My favorite way to prepare it is to bake it with some kind of jam (usually apricot or strawberry), nuts (usually walnuts or almonds), and a drizzle of honey. Adam’s recommendations for Chardonnay noted that goat cheese with lemon and/or honey would be the perfect pairing.

So, I baked my version of brie and served it alongside a goat cheese log dredged in lemon peel and drizzled with honey. We also had some fresh raspberries and a white wine cured salami on hand, so we put those out too.

Results: My pairing was passable. The goat cheese was heavenly. Buttery, melty deliciousness in my mouth! My partner agreed. We may never have Chardonnay with brie again. Winner of the round – Adam.

Experiment #2 – Cava

Often called “Spanish Champagne,” Cava is a light bubbly wine that I enjoy for special occasions because the price tag isn’t nearly that of French Champagnes. In fact, the Rondel Brut Cava simply can’t be beat for the price. At about $9, you get a 90-point wine that has a lovely floral bouquet, and soothing nutty and peach flavors as the bubbles burst against your tongue. My favorite Cava match is typically an aged Spanish Manchego with almonds. Adam recommended a fuller-fat Gruyere from Switzerland with dried apricots.

We had a bit of a special occasion on hand as we celebrated both the baptism of our newborn and my parent’s 47th wedding anniversary. So, I decided to load up a plate with both options and get opinions from the entire room.

Results: My pairing was good, but Adam’s was better. True to his word, the gruyere elegantly balanced the nuttiness of the wine and the apricots added an extra beautiful burst of flavor against the bubbles. Foiled again!

Experiement #3 – Rose

I adore a good dry rose in the summer. I’m particularly fond of Provencal French style rose, which is refreshing on a hot day. Of course, my wine palate comes with a price tag. So when I discovered the Olema Rose ringing in at 92-points and a $17 price tag, I had to try it. It’s become one of my new favorites as its rosy bouquet and delicate strawberry flavor pair well with all kinds of summer food. My favorite cheese pairing with Rose is the “Winey Goat” cheese infused with red wine. Lo and behold, Adam also recommended goat cheese and a rosehip preserve. I couldn’t find any rosehip preserves at the store (because what even IS that?) but I did find this lavender infused goat cheese, so figured that would be worth a shot.

After spending several weeks diligently editing the final page proofs on my recent book (it has nothing to do with food, but if you’re interested in Shonda Rhimes, check it out), I was absolutely exhausted and needed a comfort cheese plate. So, we partnered up the two types of goat cheese with a couple of our favorite cracker varietals.

Results: My Winey Goat won the day! Excellently matched to the strawberry flavor in the rose, and a pleasing texture. The goat cheese with lavender wasn’t nearly as flavor-friendly. Yea, yea, technically he said rosehips, and lavender is different, so I can’t officially claim victory. But I will. Winning!

Overall, it’s been fun flipping through the book whenever we have some extra wine on hand and want to put together either a quick appetizer, an entire meal, or even a dessert board of cheese (I’ll often take a cheese board as dessert over any baked good). I’m particularly looking forward to exploring the red wine section once it starts to cool off in fall and winter.

Who would have known that a farm girl from Nebraska could fall in love with a far-away place so much that it completely altered her everyday practice of food consumption? I often wonder if that little mom-and-pop joint is still there, and if it is, if I could ever find it again if I returned to Rome. It has definitely served as a memory that I try desperately to recreate in the kitchen – from the beauty of the wine and cheese pairings to the chicken picatta recipe I’ve spent 20 years perfecting to the flavor profile of what I experienced there.

Michaela D.E. Meyer is a Professor of Communication at Christopher Newport University who specializes in identity research, particularly related to media. She is a self-taught home cook who enjoys lazy summer days and trashy romance novels. Ever the student, she’s currently fascinated with wine and food pairings, and actively training to become a sommelier.

Bite Club

A special series on cookbooks as cultural objects.

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I have been reading cookbooks since childhood (along with Heloise’s Household Hints, another leisure reading genre).  Much later, when I began studying anthropology, cooking and keeping house seemed like essential areas of ethnographic focus, regardless of the purported topic of one’s study.

While I did my dissertation fieldwork on a small Greek island, it was my mother who had unwittingly first exposed me to ethnographic modes of inquiry back in 1981, on our first visit with our Greek relatives.  She followed our cousin Toula around the kitchen, taking copious notes and asking questions, even though she spoke no Greek and Toula spoke no English and sometimes there was no translator in the house.  Years later, she gave me a hardcover recipe book in which she had written out all of these decidedly minimalist recipes, with no precise amounts or cooking times and just the vaguest suggestion of appropriate seasonings.

Rather than choose such a “homey” book for this blog post, I selected a professional cookbook that I have owned for decades but never used: Rembetiki Mezedes kai Lihoudies (Rembetika Appetizers and Delicacies), by Haralambos Georgiou (n.d.).  In both cases, the recipes have much to say about how Greeks approach cooking; the book’s focus on rembetika, however, also resonates with my research on traditional vocal music.

Rembetika is an urban genre of Greek popular music that arose in the early twentieth century among the Greek-speaking population of the port cities of Asia Minor, and which spread to Greece with refugees following the 1922 Smyrna catastrophe and the subsequent forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey.  This music shares many parallels with early blues in the United States, with lyrics that sing of jails, drugs, and illicit affairs, as well as love, exile, and death.  The author intended the book to familiarize readers with recipes mentioned in classic rembetika songs, as well as foods served in the tavernas frequented by rembetika musicians.  Not surprisingly, then, the table of contents stresses hot and cold appetizers and meat and fish dishes (traditional taverna food), with a very small section at the end for desserts.  In this way, the cookbook emphasizes not only the cuisine of rembetes (rembetika musicians or enthusiasts), but also their spatial milieu.

In spite of the fact that Rembetiki Mezedes was commercially published by a Greek chef, the recipes share some of the informality of those my mother collected from Toula’s kitchen.  Some ingredients are precisely measured in grams and kilograms, but others are designated by a “pinch,” “a little,” or “enough,” and other than a brief guide to cooking techniques at the front of the book, instructions are minimal.  Below are the recipes I chose, along with my notes in brackets.  While I translated these from the Greek, I have not converted the metric measurements.  During the cooking, I did quite a few conversions on the fly, with the aid of iPhone apps.

Spetsofai

Loosely translated as “Spetses food,” referring to the island of the same name, spetsofai features loukaniko, a Greek sausage fragrant with orange peel.  I discovered the dish while at a conference on Mount Pelion, one of Greece’s magically cool and shady alpine retreats.  It was 1992 and I had embarked on the first of many low-carb diets, so I was delighted to find something that contained no breadcrumbs or flour and ordered it whenever I saw it on a restaurant menu.

I always thought that loukaniko was hard to find in the U.S., but there it was, available online from Parthenon Foods in New York.  While the sausage proved tasty, (I bought one package to sample and two more for the recipe), it didn’t measure up to the sausages our cousin Toula’s husband Yanni used to order from a special sausage guy in his hometown of Amaliada, on the west coast of mainland Greece.  Those sausages were more coarsely ground than the ones from Parthenon and contained additional secret spices besides orange peel.  They continued to beguile us long after our trip was over: back in Minnesota, my mother would dream of them and wake up smelling their aroma.

Besides the special sausages, the recipe also calls for retsina, the white wine preserved with pine resin that visitors to Greece either love or despise, depending on the flexibility of their palates and the quality of the retsina.  I found 2 bottles of Kourtakis retsina at Binny’s Beverage Depot in Champaign, Illinois, and thought it tasted exactly like retsina should: light and crisp, but also sharp and pungent, the perfect accompaniment to strong cheeses and olives, and made to be served in little juice glasses, not stemmed goblets.

INGREDIENTS:

• 750 gr. small or large peppers cut into 4
• 750 gr. eggplants in long thin slices
• 750 gr. tomatoes cut in 4
• 750 gr. sausage (Pelion-Tripolis) [note that Mt. Pelion is specified here]
• Aromatics: 2 pinches black pepper, 2 pinches red pepper, 2 pinches oregano, 2 pinches coriander, ½ bunch finely chopped parsley, 4-8 cloves of minced garlic
• 125 gr. retsina wine
• Sufficient oil [“oil” always means olive oil unless otherwise specified] for frying.

PREPARATION: Fry the eggplant and peppers in enough oil and strain.  Peel the tomatoes [I didn’t do this].  Mix all the aromatics together in a bowl with the garlic and salt.  Pour the wine in a pan and spread the sausage out, then cover with the eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes.  Sprinkle with the aromatics from the bowl.  Bake on a medium-hot oven [most Greek ovens are electric; I baked this at 375F] for 15-20 minutes [it needed much longer].  Serve cold or warm [except for grilled meat, Greeks rarely eat food piping hot; they usually cool baked dishes down to a gently warm temperature].

RESULTS: This was not quite as I remembered it, since the versions of spetsofai I’ve eaten before never included eggplant.  I’m not even sure they necessarily included tomatoes (this is the hard part about making something you haven’t eaten since 1992).  In the end, it was delicious, but it reminded me of tourlou, a baked vegetable dish featuring eggplant, peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes in olive oil, with the addition of the lovely orange flavor of the sausage and the bite of the retsina.

Biftekia Scharas (Grilled Patties)

The word bifteki in Greek comes from the French word bifteck, which in turn derives from the English “beefsteak.”  In Greece, biftekia are essentially little burgers or somewhat large, slightly flattened meatballs.  I have made many versions of these over the years, as they are a favorite of my son’s.  This recipe stood out from Greek meatball recipes, which invariably call for breadcrumbs.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 kg ground beef
• 2-3 eggs
• 125 gr. tepid water
• ½ bunch finely chopped parsley
• 2-4 pinches oregano
• 75 gr. butter
• Salt, black pepper
• 1-2 lemons cut in 4

PREPARATION: Mix the ground beef with the eggs, the oregano, the salt, the pepper, and half the parsley.  Soften the meat with as much water as it will take, shape into desired form and grill.  Moisten them with butter and lemon juice, sprinkle with the remaining parsley, and serve.

RESULTS: Mild disaster.  The informality of the recipe worked against me.  I was unsure what kind of grill the recipe meant—an American-style grill?  The kind of vertical rotating grill where souvlaki is made?  The very large outdoor grill another cousin of ours uses, after making her own charcoal with wood?  The apparent power of the author, pictured on the back of the book in imposing chef’s whites, intimidated me.  Rather than frying the biftekia in my cast iron pan as I normally do, I attempted to flame-grill these in the broiler, elevated on a rack.  Unfortunately, all that water made the mixture so soft that about half of its bulk fell through the rack, and the end product tasted dry.  Greeks are not known for dry meat: they eat their meat well done, but never dry.  This is because they are unafraid of fat.  One night during our 1981 trip to Greece, my cousin Christo, then a medical student, berated me for cutting the fat off my pork chop: “You’re cutting off the best part!” he said, gesturing with his lit cigarette.  These biftekia had let my ancestors down, and violated the rembetika spirit of good, late-night taverna food, especially sizzling fatty meats that can stand up to wine and song.

These recipes proved to be an experiment in trying to follow a cookbook’s written rules.  Precisely following written rules is not really the Greek way with food, or with much else, including music.  Rembetika, which was founded upon older forms of popular music played in the cafés of Smyrna, uses the makam system of musical modes, the mastery of which a musician or singer demonstrates by performing a taksim or improvisation upon the musical rules.  This is why our cousin Toula’s recipes were so informal: when you have mastered the art of the kitchen, when you have an intimate knowledge of all your tools, techniques, and ingredients—and, crucially, when you call to mind your memories of family and flavors gone by or captured only in dreams, then your senses will guide you to delicious improvisation.

Finally, here are some links to a few of my favorite rebetika songs. Let them be a soundtrack to your next culinary adventure:

Roza Eskenazy singing Amanes Tsifteteli Ousak.  This represents Smyrna-style cafe aman songs.

Markos Vamvakaris singing Mavra Matia Mavra Fridia (Black Eyes, Black Eyebrows). This represents the period of rembetika when it reached Greece.

Contemporary singer Haris Alexiou singing Aman Katerina Mou (Aman My Katherine). This song is all about food; a man passes by Katherine’s place and smells what she’s cooking and falls in love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMvAXjiP2fw

Angela Glaros is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Illinois University.  Her research centers on the power of women’s voices in traditional music and liturgical chanting in Greece and the Greek-American diaspora.

Bite Club

A special series on cookbooks as cultural objects.

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Of all the bad habits I have passed on to my daughter, reading at the dinner table is the one I am least ashamed of.  It puts a damper on conversation, but it ensures the appropriate caloric intake, and so it goes.  Her end of the table is stacked with Harry Potter novels, Calvin and Hobbes, and Raina Telgemeier books.  My end of the table is stacked with cookbooks.  It’s been a long running joke in my family – we’re thinking about the next meal before we finish eating the one that’s on our plate. Cookbooks suit me well for the distracted, bite-sized reading I can accomplish at the dinner table, and I’ve amassed a respectable food and cookbook collection over the past few years.

Cookbooks are cultural documents, whether they intend to be or not.  My wife’s Whole30 cookbook, full of recipes completely lacking in sugar, grains, legumes, and dairy, says a quite a bit about our society’s relationship to food at the current moment.  I adore The Artisan Jewish Deli at Home because it’s full of dishes I remember from my childhood – traditional Jewish recipes that recall holidays at my grandparents’ house or Sunday mornings with my father at the delicatessen.   Food and culture are inseparable, and it’s impossible to examine food without the context of culture.

Food is also connected to location.  When I think of my hometown of Philadelphia, I don’t just think of cheesesteaks, water ice, and Italian food – but the specific neighborhoods to seek out those delicacies.  I lived in San Francisco for ten years, and my memories of the city are forever mingled with burritos, sourdough bread, and the best Chinese food I’ve ever eaten.  When I moved to Tampa five years ago, I knew I had to find the foods that make Tampa unique.

During late 19th and early 20th century, two waves of immigration brought new people and new cultures to Tampa.  Greek immigrants settled in Tarpon Springs to work in the sponge diving industry.  The sponge docks are now a major tourist attraction and the city still has the highest percentage of Greek Americans of any city in the US.  And after Vincente Martinez Ybor moved his cigar company to Tampa in 1885, thousands of Cubans followed, building a community around the industry.  Ybor City remains an ever-evolving historic neighborhood in Tampa, known for its nightlife and the free-roaming chickens descended from the backyard birds that belonged to the original immigrant settlers.  And as a result, Tampa is littered with Greek and Cuban joints in just about every neighborhood.

So in my quest to better understand my new home of Tampa, I set out to gain a deeper understanding of Cuban cuisine.  A new cookbook added to my collection, The Cuban Table: A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History by Ana Sofia Pelaez and Ellen Silverman, is my guide.   Through travels to Cuba, Miami, and New York, the authors explicitly set out to document traditional Cuban dishes from a variety of authentic sources.

The first recipe I made was pastelitos de queso y guayaba – cheese and guava pastries.  I am sucker for sweets, it’s the first recipe in the book, and it looked pretty easy.  Store-bought puff pastry, sweetened cream cheese, and guava preserves pull this simple, delicious recipe together.

Puff pastry from the freezer section of your local grocery store is the killer ingredient here.  If you haven’t used puff pastry before… you should.  It’s pretty much a cheat code for cooking. It requires almost zero effort on the part of the cook and produces impressive, crowd-pleasing results.  Thaw it on the counter for 30 minutes, unroll it, cut to size, and bake it.  One of my wife’s co-workers exclaimed my pastelitos were better than the local Cuban bakery.  I’m not ready to make that claim, but you can see the sort of praise that can accompany the mere defrosting of a sheet of puff pastry.

Now in my Northeastern Jewish mind, the Platonic ideal of cream cheese is that it exists in a state generously schmeared between a slice of lox and half an everything bagel.  Sweetening cream cheese with a bit a sugar is not a naturally occuring thought to me, but it provides an excellent creamy counterpoint to the sweet and tart guava preserves.

Guava is a mystery fruit to most Americans.  I’m not sure I’ve even seen a guava in a grocery store before I moved to Florida.   It’s difficult to identify a ripe guava, let alone figure out the best way to eat.  Fortunately for a gringo like myself, guava paste and preserves are easy to find in the Latino food section of every Florida grocery store.

With the puff pastry cut into neat squares, a dollop of cream cheese and guava gets enclosed into a triangle and finished with egg wash.  The pastries expand in the oven, and a brushing of simple syrup adds a sweet crunch to the flaky pastry shell.  The results are luscious, and it’s a bit of an amazing transformation to see such few, simple ingredients expand into something much greater than the sum of its parts.

For my next recipe, I headed back to the basics, albeit with something slightly more complicated:  frijoles negros – black beans from scratch.

Disclosure: Both my wife and I are reformed vegans.  Black beans and rice is a weekly convenience in our house.  Rice goes in the rice cooker, and two cans of beans are simmered on the stove for a nearly zero-effort meal.  Also, I have been a dedicated home cook and foodie for over 20 years.  So it’s not without shame that I admit that I have never made beans from scratch before.

Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty simple, but somewhat time consuming.  Beans are soaked overnight, then simmered for an hour with onion, green pepper, garlic, and bay leaf.  Meanwhile, a sofrito is prepared using the same ingredients, added to the simmering beans with a handful of green olives and a generous pour of white wine.  Another hour later, the beans are tender and your house smells like heaven.

It’s worth noting how onion plays a key role in flavoring this dish.  In Michael Ruhlman’s cooking and technique book Ruhlman’s Twenty, he notes that onions are particularly impressive because they have a ‘volume knob’ – the intensity of the flavor is controlled by how you heat them.  In these black beans, there are three layers of onion – simmered in the beans, fried in the sofrito, and raw as a garnish – that provide a high degree of complexity from a single, simple vegetable.

Whenever I read a recipe that starts with a description like “Every Sunday my grandfather butchered a chicken…” or “This is how my yia yia make spanakopita…,” my ears perk up.  I am intrigued by old-school, homestyle, family recipes.  This is the beauty of The Cuban Table.  The recipe for black beans is literally the author’s grandfather’s recipe.  And the rest of the book has the same feel – well-worn recipes that are at home on the table of a Cuban family, whether in Miami or Havana.  These dishes provide a window into a rich cultural history of food, where simple, everyday ingredients yield refined, complex, and richly-flavored results.

Daniel Miller is originally from Philadelphia, PA and holds a B.A. in Anthropology from New College of Florida.  Not that it ever did him much good.  He is currently a high school Social Studies teacher in Tampa, FL.  He remains fascinated by the food, music, and culture of the world.

Bite Club

A special series on cookbooks as cultural objects.

Source

Every religion has its origin myths and sacred texts; so, too, does my faith in the goodness of the kitchen. While I grew up in a family in which communal eating around a dining table was a daily event, my own involvement in food preparation began in earnest with restaurant owner Audrey Alsterburg and former head chef Wanda Urbanowicz’s Rebar: Modern Food Cookbook. While it was not my first encounter with cookbookery and cooking, Rebar created a temporal division: “Before Rebar” and “After Rebar.”

The cookbook is named after Rebar, a funky, kitschy restaurant in Bastion Square, in downtown Victoria, British Columbia. Rebar’s purple-and-green-walled interior is decorated with novelty cake moulds and its shelves are alternately lined with bottles of wine and trays of wheatgrass, mirroring Rebar’s approach to food: eat well and with balance, but let’s enjoy ourselves. Alsterberg, who moved from Portland, Oregon to Victoria in the mid-1980s, and Urbanowicz, who left Rebar in 2002 and moved first to Redwood Meadows, Alberta, then to Nanaimo, British Columbia, wrote the cookbook to inform restaurant-goers of the abundance and exciting culinary possibilities of modern cooking beyond the almond burger.

The restaurant and cookbook encapsulate one iteration of “West Coast culture,” with their dedication to plant-forward and seasonal cooking, a relaxed approach to dining, and a commitment to environmentally friendly practices. The Rebar website informs visitors that the cookbook was printed by Hemlock Printers, based out of Burnaby, British Columbia; Hemlock Printers is “Western Canada’s leader for carbon neutral, sustainable, green printing practices – a perfect fit for Rebar!” Rebar is very much of West Coast British Columbia in geographical specificity as well as culture, featuring local ingredients and an easy familiarity with culture and geography that comes from the authors’ many years of living, studying, and working on the West Coast.

In my family home, this cookbook occupies a comfortable, familiar space. My parents and I are on a first-name basis with the cookbook. A beguilingly simple phrase such as, “I think I’ll make those sweet potato things, you know, from Rebar,” conjures up not only a detailed knowledge of the dish about to be prepared, but an anticipation of collaborative cooking and a shared experience of biting into a mouthful of roasted sweet potatoes with caramelized edges, oozing melted cheddar cheese, and pleasantly crunchy pepitas. The cover and interior of the cookbook show signs of heavy use. Corners of pages are bent; many have been smattered with flecks of batters, sauces, and coffee stains; hand-written modifications or entirely new versions of recipes crowd the margins; and scraps of paper have been inserted between the pages as bookmarks and records of yet further recipe modifications.

Of course, I had owned recipe books before Rebar, but they were simple, designed for children, the cooking-challenged, and those who take no pleasure in preparing food. Their mantra was efficiency: the smallest list of ingredients, the least amount of time, the simplest preparation methods, and often the fewest calories possible: in essence, “how to cook without really cooking.” Rebar, then, contrasted these cookbooks wondrously. Here was a restaurant and a cookbook that celebrated dining, promoted a holistic connection to the foods through seasonal and local ingredients, and not only invited but encouraged creativity and playfulness in the kitchen.

The introductions to the recipes are friendly, conversational, and personal, often referring to individual Rebar employees’ favourite takes on a given dish, the west-coast seasonality of a particular ingredient, or examples of customers’ reactions to a menu item. Nearly every recipe is accompanied by a “helpful hint,” and many of these instruct cookbook users on how to lean into the seasonality of a dish. For instance, the recipe for “tomato sweet basil sauce” (a vegan recipe, indicated by a small yin-yang sign next to the title) contains the following “helpful hint”: “In late summer/early fall, be sure to visit a local farm market to purchase a box of vine-ripe local tomatoes. Make a big batch of this sauce (substitute 12-15 fresh tomatoes per recipe) and freeze it. Come the dead of winter, the fragrance of summer’s bounty will make you swoon!”

From my first visit to Rebar, it has been a mecca of enticing desserts in my mind. The refrigerated display case faces the entry, and patrons are afforded a lingering stare at the profusion of lavish cakes, pies, brownies, slices, and cookies as they walk down the small staircase into the restaurant. Perhaps the most legendary of these desserts is simply called “Rebar chocolate cake,” and while I have never eaten it at the Rebar restaurant, I have made it, repeatedly, almost ritualistically, around mid-June and late-December each year since I first baked it nearly a decade ago. I vividly recall the earliest read-through of the recipe. It was my first foray into baking multi-layered cakes, creating a chocolate and cream cheese icing, and making ganache, and it seemed daunting. However, since the first time I triumphantly presented the monstrous cake in all its opulence to friends and family, I realized that baking was in fact much less demanding than my high school home economics teachers had led me to believe. I have tinkered with the recipe, using mint chocolate and peppermint oil, bejewelling it with crimson pomegranate seeds and, most recently, indulging in my love of chocolate and orange.

Revisiting Rebar this June, and the chocolate cake recipe in particular, felt like a proper return home; I had just arrived on the West Coast after months away, and this cookbook, laden as it is with memories and rootedness in west-coast foodways, proves a powerful anchor. Although I’ve read the recipe dozens of times, I always re-read the preamble to the recipe, hovering over: “Incurable chocoholics savouring this cake share counter space with wheatgrass-gulping health nuts at rebar. You’ve gotta wonder who is having a better time…” knowing with certainty that it’s the former. I proceeded to gather the ingredients, noting the hand-written modifications that I have made over the years (such as a substitution of espresso for coffee and the replacement of a third of the flour with whole wheat flour).

The cake batter itself is a straightforward, drawing on the bitterness and tartness of cocoa powder, buttermilk, and coffee to create three layers of rich chocolate cake. Feeling the need for citrus and spice, I added ground ginger, cinnamon, and generous amounts of orange zest to the batter. After removing the cakes from the oven and leaving them to cool, I prepared the cake filling, a mixture of melted dark chocolate, cream cheese, butter, and vanilla that whips up into a version of cream cheese icing that my family adores (free from icing sugar and made with a generous amount of dark chocolate). Once the cakes cooled fully, I placed one after the other on a large platter, smothering each layer with generous amounts of the cream cheese filling. Next, I tempered more chocolate; although Rebar directs bakers to do this over a double boiler, I had been convinced by Alice Medrich (another West Coaster!) in her introduction to Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate that a bain-marie is the best way to prevent chocolate from seizing. The final step, dousing the six layers of chocolate cake and chocolate cream cheese filling with glossy melted chocolate, always feels like an indulgence in and of itself. I then dotted the surface with more orange zest, before turning to the hardest part of the recipe: leaving it undisturbed in the fridge long enough to properly cool.

 Sitting at the table in the wake of the cake preparation with the distraction of an untouched tower of chocolate in the fridge, I asked my mum what she thought about this cake: “The Rebar chocolate cake is…celebration to me. It’s indulgence.” I replied by reflecting on my Rebar chocolate cake diet: no meals, just cake, until every crumb has been devoured. I noted, too, that, while Rebar indicates the number of servings provided by nearly all of its dessert recipes, it tactfully omits this information in the case of the Rebar chocolate cake so that three people can convince themselves the cake was likely meant to make six servings (certainly not twelve to fifteen). When my parents and I finally sliced into this cake after what felt like hours of waiting, it provided the satisfying flavours and textures that the recipe, as well as memory of past cakes, had promised. We devoured our slices, dusted with cinnamon, while talking animatedly about the future variations we will undoubtedly try (fresh raspberries in the cream cheese filling! Add freshly grated ginger to the batter! Drizzle it with liqueur!).

One of the Rebar recipes that I first made with great care, and then, increasingly, with disregard for directions, is a squash and smoked cheddar tart with sage and roasted garlic custard. This recipe had seemed to me the perfect answer to my vegetarianism when Thanksgiving rolled around: sage and butternut squash struck me as ideal ingredients for an October feast, and it was such a hit with my extended family that the basic recipe has been incorporated into our repertoire of favourites. On a breezy sunny day in early June, I decided to make this recipe for my family, but with a few minor modifications. After consulting with the contents of the refrigerator and wandering through the herb garden, I ended up assembling ingredients for an asparagus, chive, parmesan, and saffron quiche.

I did not bother consulting the original pie crust recipe, relying instead on the post-it note taped into the book, on which is written, in my mum’s tidy printing, a different version made with whole wheat flour. Rolling out the pie crust between large pieces of plastic wrap, I reflected again on the sense of autonomy and adventurousness that I learned through years of cooking with Rebar, an attitude that no recipe is too difficult and no recipe prohibits experimentation.

While the crust was blind baking, I made the egg custard, using the three eggs in the cookbook but replacing the cream with Greek yogurt (what was I going to do – actually leave home and purchase cream?) and sprinkling in a few grains of saffron-infused salt. I then shaved a bunch of asparagus and, after cooling the pie crust (which had, of course, browned slightly too much while I was engrossed in gathering chives), created a dense network of asparagus spears over the crust’s surface, just as Rebar instructs you to do with butternut squash. Cutting up the handfuls of fresh chives, I sprinkled them liberally over the asparagus, then flooded the bright green filling with the creamy egg custard before topping it with finely shredded cheese.

Deciding that it was a perfect day to address my inexplicable reticence to prepare aïoli (and fueled by a knowledge that my father and grandfather, potato enthusiasts both, would be joining us for lunch), I tried a new Rebar recipe, sautéed new potatoes with lime aïoli. There is a comfort to cooking from Rebar: even when I harbour secret doubts that a recipe will work out, it always does. Just as I began to curse myself for adding the lime zest and juice at the wrong time (before the recipe had specifically stated to incorporate it), my liquidy mixture took on a soft, almost foamy quality, setting into a tangy unctuous sauce with a sharp limey tang (and perfect with crispy fried new potatoes). Everything was ready just as my family came home from their errands, and the resulting meal was delicious, satisfying, seasonal, and shared with family, just as Rebar would have wanted it. As Alsterberg and Urbanowicz write in their introduction, Rebar, “something of a West Coast institution,” is “all about a certain energy, good food and a community of people.”

Jennifer Shutek, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, Steinhardt, spends most of her time researching and writing about the culture, history, aesthetics, and politics of food and agriculture in Palestine/Israel. She returns to her home in British Columbia, Canada, every summer to reconnect with her crunchy granola West Coast roots.

Bite Club

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