Free Best Food Writing 2013 by Holly Hughes Page A

the pleasure of the process. I can’t remember the last time I used an electric mixer. If we still have a blender, I don’t know where it is. The best thing about hand tools is that they increase your sensitivity to the physical state of the food, perhaps especially texture. They make you pay close attention. They help you understand the process better, which generally means better results. Often hand tools give more control. My hand-cranked Tre Spade coffee mill gives a more even grind with less powder than my electric coffee grinder does, and that in turn gives less-cloudy coffee whose fine flavors are easier to taste. (We could talk a long time about coffee and the different ways to make it and why.) You cannot make as delicious bread by machine as you can by hand, because the fermentation is everything to flavor, and the best fermentation requires that you check and respond to its precise evolution—another fold, a few more minutes . . .
    After you’ve cooked, “slow eating” may literally come into play. During a meal, when something on the plate is especially interesting to taste, I slow down and zero in— slow again.
    There’s one more thing: you don’t eat food without having something to drink, if only water. What about “slow drink”?
    The “slowest” drink is local water or, depending on where youlive, local wine or beer or something else, such as cider. When liquids are transported from far away—water, wine, beer, soda—there’s an environmental cost. It’s important to have a few luxuries in life, however, and I admit that for me one of them is imported wine, mostly French. At home, when we open a really good bottle, we tend to sip it more slowly than we do more everyday wine. That’s partly because there’s more to experience and partly because we don’t want the experience to end.
    It’s obvious that for ideas to surface and for any of us to do our best work, we need time to relax. And some of that time should be spent sitting down and eating with full enjoyment with other people—talking in the easy-going, open atmosphere of the table. Ideas come and information is exchanged that you might never otherwise receive: personal information, stories, unusual facts. An essential refreshment takes place that has nothing to do with the physical one coming from food and drink.

 
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    C OOKING I SN’T F UN
    By Tracie McMillan
    From Slate

    Tangled issues of food, class, poverty, and social justice lie at the heart of Tracie McMillan’s investigative journalism. As a coda to her provocative 2011 book The American Way of Eating, this essay challenges the easy assumptions that many foodies make about how Americans should cook and eat.
    I t took me until I was 33 to start cooking dinner.
    Don’t get me wrong—I was no stranger to the kitchen. I had prepared laborious, extravagant meals before, often using exotic ingredients I’d learned about in magazines. My sisters and I had bonded in the kitchen, spending visits preparing elaborate dishes together for hours. Cooking had been everything the food world told me it could be: a way to engage with a community, to travel without leaving home, to respect the local environment, to look after my own health. I nodded along with the eminences of the food world, convinced that their shared conclusion was the pinnacle of truth: Americans just don’t cook enough, and we desperately need to cook more. Our health, our civility, our culture depend on it!
    And yet, even while espousing the ideals of the communal table and cross-cultural exploration, I rarely cooked dinner for myself in my 20s. Where was the fun in that? My sisters and I would groan to ourselves when my stepmother implored us not to cook Christmas dinner. (Her reasoning: It was too much work and we could just get Costco lasagna and be done with it.) But when left to my own devices, I would feed myself almost