May 2007

While shopping for  a tiller, I met Doug and Marianne Leviton, who were leaving the western shore of Maryland for Colorado. They lived on an old farmsite near Dunkirk, formerly known as Smithville, and, when they found that I was looking for tools for a community garden, they donated not only a tiller, but hoes and shovels and stakes and rakes -- an entire truckload of goodies that we otherwise couldn't have afforded. On their property I noticed two beautiful old matching millstones, and wondered aloud what their plans were for them. I knew that George and Cecilia Holland, who have been milling corn for me for twenty years, would love to have them. A few days later, Marianne called me and offered to sell me the stones. George and Cecilia drove up from the mountains of Georgia and we hauled them onto a truck bed. They are French burr stones, at least 100 years old and probably closer to 200. I plan to research the historical records of Calvert County to try to determine their exact provenance. They most likely belonged to descendants of Captain John Smith, who owned the land prior to the Levitons. Smith was a late-17th century settler of Maryland.

Here are Cecilia and George with one of the stones. French burr comes from the Marne Valley in northern France and was very popular in the early 19th-century for its finer grinding capability. Throughout Maryland and Virginia wheat was ground into fine flour for shipment to other regions of the newly formed country. This pair of stones has found a great new home with the Hollands.

"The Splendid Table" on National Public Radio

Sally Swift, the producer of The Splendid Table on NPR, asked me to be a guest again and talk with Lynne Rosetto Kasper, the host, about my travels to Sri Lanka. Lynne pinned me down to five minutes by having me compare Sri Lankan cuisine with the cuisine of the Lowcountry. The show originally aired on June 2, but you can still listen to the show online or via podcast by visiting Hoppin'John on The Splendid Table.

Gardening

Most of early spring was spent getting ready to garden -- ordering heirloom seeds, beginning them indoors, and preparing the soil in the community garden for planting.

Here are some of the neighborhood children, Miles and Akia Randall, preparing their plot next to ours.

In addition to the sources I've listed above, I have purchased high-quality heirloom seeds of melons, squash, and chard from Heirloom Seeds. Frank Ruta, the chef  and co-owner, with pastry chef Ann Amernick, of Palena restaurant in DC, is an avid gardener as well. He recently recommended GrowItalian to me as a source of seeds. I interviewed Frank extensively late last year for articles I wrote for the Washington Post on charcuterie and cooking with whole, heritage breed hogs. When I went to the website, I was not surprised to see that it is the site for the US distributor of Franchi Sementi spa of Bergamo, Italy. They cultivate only the finest, traditional Italian seeds. If you are an arugula fan, order some of their rucola selvatica ("Sylvetta") seeds (I purchased them this spring locally from a garden center): you will not be disappointed. As my friend Elizabeth Schneider, one of the world's foremost experts on edible plants, has told me, they're infinitely better than cultivated arugula.  In gardening, however, I have noted that anything eaten the day it is picked will be much fuller in flavor. If you don't believe me, grow a pot of cultivated arugula in a pot on your windowsill, then compare a freshly snipped leaf to what you can buy at your greengrocer's.

At the James Beard Awards in May, Roy Finamore, my dear friend and editor of my "coffee table book" about Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, was awarded Best General Cookbook for TASTY, his very personal collection of delicious, down-to-earth recipes that I have cooked many times, to rave reviews. Be sure to try his Fennel-Orange Gravlax!

Mary Edna Fraser is another of my dear friends from Charleston who has been to visit me many times in Washington in these three years that I've lived here. When I lived in Charleston, I played music with her on her dock (we appeared on FoodNation with Bobby Flay when he filmed me making Frogmore Stew in Charleston [episode BF1C23]), roasted oysters in her back yard overlooking Ellis Creek, played uncle to her daughters, and laughed over hundreds of casual dinners and bottles of wine. Mary Edna is one of the world's most respected batik artists, and she and I are planning a Food and Arts Tour of Sri Lanka for February 2009 (more to come on that later!). But at heart, she is a southern girl, full of grace and aplomb, an "earth mother" in all of its best meanings.

Both of us grew up fishing in fresh-water ponds stocked with wide-mouth bass and bream. Here I am in the mid-fifties with a couple of whopper wide-mouths.  The bass are more powerful fighters, so they make for better sport, but bream are much more delicious, so they are the preferred freshwater fish of the southern table. Pronounced "brim," they are the revered southern sunfish that are also known as bluegills, redbreasts, and pumpkinseeds. A. J. McClane, writing in his seminal Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), said that the flavor can be "outstanding," and described the ideal sunfish flavor as "a sweet (but subtly so) taste that suggests fresh celery. The skin of a sunfish, unlike its larger relative the black bass, is not only edible, but to many palates an essential part of the flavor experience." Traditionally, and almost invariably, bream are dusted with cornmeal and pan-fried, and served with hushpuppies and cole slaw. I love the especially crisp fins and tails that fry up like some exotic chip. If I've been fishing alone and catch a larger one, I've been known to steam it with fresh creole sauce, but when Mary Edna visits in the spring, I go to the DC Wharf on Maine Avenue and buy fresh bream and fry them.

In most southern states the species has been protected since the 1950s. In South Carolina, nothing except farm-raised "game" and saltwater fish from licensed vendors can be sold if it comes from the wild. No mushrooms, bream, or wild cherries. Needless to say, I was thrilled when I found bream here at the Wharf. Because they are so small, though, they won't clean the fish for you. It's a real labor of love to prepare these delicious little fish.