Dairies, Travel & Chianti

[lsanderson]

The Dairies Are Half-Pint, but the Flavor Isn’t
By MARIAN BURROS

ANNE SAXELBY had what she calls an “aha moment” a couple of years ago when she drove upstate to try the cultured butter made by Evans Farmhouse Creamery in Chenango County. Ms. Saxelby, who owns Saxelby Cheesemongers in Manhattan, said that for all the butter she had eaten in her life, “I had really never had butter before — this is butter.”

More and more people across the country are being treated to the same aha experience as they find a burgeoning variety of fresh dairy products made in small batches on little farms and in small creameries. And it’s worth the extra money. More

Life as a Repast, Not Yet Complete
By MIMI READ

NEW ORLEANS

IT was two days after Fat Tuesday, and this city had begun the annual jag of repentance known as Lent. But Kim Sunée, a Korean-born writer, was experiencing powerful food lusts, as she often does. These cravings propelled her out of her hotel room and into Rio Mar, an unassuming fish house in the warehouse district that feels like some dim, delicious corner of Spain.

Ms. Sunée, 37, was back in the town where she was raised, on a whirlwind tour for her first book, a compelling, confessional memoir entitled “Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home” (Grand Central). Wearing a fitted brown velvet coat with a confetti of appliqués, she looked more Paris than Big Easy. She settled into a dark corner, gracefully slipped off her very high heels and, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, ordered roughly half the menu.

Boquerones, or grilled white anchovies in vinegar. Drum seviche with habanero peppers. The burnished half-moon of a tuna empanada in an almond-rich romesco sauce. Crispy rouget fillets crowned with caper-tomato-shallot confit. Enormous garlicky shrimp, octopus with paprika, a pair of nearly black blood sausages.

“You wouldn’t have any razor clams, would you?” she asked the waiter as he struggled to arrange the plates eclipsing the tabletop. He did and brought them. Then, as if this untouched feast were the Eiffel Tower or a friend’s face, she whipped out a camera and lovingly photographed it.

“Some people travel to see monuments,” Ms. Sunée said. “I travel to eat.” She keeps a food blog and is also the food editor of Cottage Living, a magazine based in Birmingham, Ala., where she lives in an apartment with virtually nothing on the walls, one nine-foot-long table, one bed and many unpacked boxes of books. More

Chianti Steps Out of Its Straw Skirt
By ERIC ASIMOV

THE Chianti region in the hills of Tuscany is the spiritual home of the sangiovese grape. With its black cherry and violet aromas, its earthy mineral flavors, its lively acidity and its sometimes dusty tannins, sangiovese speaks directly from the Italian soul.

At least that’s the idea. Unfortunately it has rarely worked out that way. Like a family constantly at odds, Chianti has seldom been able to present a unified face to the world, except, alas, for those straw bottles that were once emblematic of Italian wine.

A good deal of Chianti’s troubles have been self-imposed, as Italian wine bureaucrats have veered wildly in the past 40 years trying to define and redefine what makes a Chianti, generally at the expense of sangiovese.

Nonetheless, the greatness of the sangiovese grape is winning out. In a tasting of 25 bottles from the Chianti Classico territory, the heartland of the Chianti region, the wine panel found many satisfying bottles. The good ones seemed to speak not only of the grape itself but of the Tuscan hills where sangiovese vines flourish as they do in few other places in the world. More

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Cue nostalgia for the 60s, when Dad traded piano lessons to farmers for fresh eggs and whole milk. We got cream from the milk, and for a while we had a hand churn that was attached to a gallon jar. Alas, when the jar broke, we found that no other jar fit the lid.

I didn't see any sign of the remaining part of the churn when I was helping pack up their house in Texas. They probably tossed it years ago.