| You know summer is here when the rivers have crested and the scent in the park in the morning makes your hair stand on end. The best part of Calgary in the summer occurs about 6:30 every morning, when the dew is still on the grass and it’s still about 12 C – it offers a little respite from the intense heat of the late afternoon.
You also know summer is here when the food markets finally open after a winter of hibernation. The cherries are starting to trickle into the Blackfoot Farmer’s Market (5600 11th St. S.E.) and there are early season tomatoes at the Hillhurst Market on Wednesday evenings (Hillhurst Community Centre at 5th Ave. and 14th St. N.W.). There are some winter onions and garlic to make sauces and salads, early lettuces and even the occasional cob of corn. In two weeks, we’ll have forgotten a long winter and a sodden spring entirely.
One of the things I look forward to in the summer is late-evening reading outside. Slather yourself with insect repellent, go outside with a glass of plonk and a good book and lose yourself for an hour. And we’re lucky this summer, as two great food books have been released for our sustenance.
The first, Calvin Trillin’s Feeding a Yen, is a collection of his New Yorker essays about local food specialties, every one of which gives the reader a cool injection of pleasure. He can turn a phrase so cleverly that his trip to get some ceviche with an Ecuadorian cab driver or his quest for Chinese food in Paris turn into digressions on his relationship with his hometown of Kansas City, his children and grandchildren, or with freakily obsessed food people – such as chowhound.com’s Jim Leff or Johnny Apple of the New York Times. This is the best type of food writing – it relates the stuff we eat to the world in which we live.
There are some things, also, which will make you laugh out loud. "In Kansas City, going to a white barbecue joint is like going to a gentile internist: everything might turn out all right but you’re not playing the percentages," he writes.
A new Trillin book is a reason to break out the good stuff, which in his case might be a six pack of Pete’s Wicked Ale and a roast pork sandwich.
Much more weighty, a bit more serious and riven with many more eccentricities is Jeffrey Steingarten’s It Must Have Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything. Steingarten is the food writer for Vogue and a lapsed lawyer (he’s got a dream job, really), and his writing shows the obsession with details and the necessity to paint the whole picture, however nuanced, of a complicated legal argument.
He’s an inveterate experimenter, once trying 14 different espresso machines to determine which one produced the best crema, and making a turducken from scratch – that’s a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken, which involved four days of preparation and every ounce of strength and guile he had. He’s also obsessed with Milky Way bars and Fritos. Good man.
He can kind of get bogged down in the details sometimes, and some people might not care why ahi tuna is inferior to bluefin, or about the chemical neutrality of MSG. But I love this stuff. His passion for food seeps through everything he touches. After reading his essay on salt, you’ll never grab the Sifto again.
SUMMERTIME MEAT
The best steak I’ve ever had, bar none, was a centre-cut New York I got from one of my pals. Using contacts he has with restaurant suppliers, he’s started a home delivery business, dropping off steaks, ribs, fish and chicken from the city’s best suppliers. His steaks are 28-day dry-aged from Centennial Packers – their flavour is intense, their colour dark and they are meltingly tender. The fish is from City Fish, the restaurant community’s main wholesale fish source. Call 542-MEAT (6328) or email beefboy@shaw.ca for a price list. |
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