Wonder at The Renwick Gallery, DC

Spur of the moment yesterday, I proclaimed that we were soon heading downtown for a family outing. It was warm, beautiful, and I've been dying to see the Wonder exhibit at The Renwick, part of the Smithsonian dedicated to American arts and crafts.

The Gallery has recently reopened after a multiyear renovation, and as part of the debut celebration asked nine contemporary American artists to contribute to Wonder, an immersive exhibit in which unlikely or unusual materials are used to create larger-than-life surprises and experiences. Each artist was given an entire gallery, and while you can't touch anything, you are encouraged to interact -laying on the floor and looking up, for example- and photograph.

It was a spectacular show! Truly magnificent and fascinating. Here's a sampling...

Weavings by Gabriel Dawe:

Can you imagine handling that much string, keeping it organized and creating such a stunning rainbow with it?

Hemlock tree rendered in reclaimed cedar by John Grade:

"To commemorate the Renwick’s reopening, Grade selected a hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle that is approximately 150 years old–the same age as this building. His team created a full plaster cast of the tree (without harming it), then used the cast as a mold to build a new tree out of a half-million segments of reclaimed cedar. Hundreds of volunteers assisted Grade, hand carving each piece to match the contours of the original tree. After the exhibition closes,Middle Fork (Cascades) will be carried back to the hemlock’s location and left on the forest floor, where it will gradually return to the earth." -The Renwick

Spellbinding woven sculpture by Janet Echelman: "Echelman’s woven sculpture corresponds to a map of the energy released across the Pacific Ocean during the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, one of the most devastating natural disasters in recorded history. The event was so powerful it shifted the earth on its axis and shortened the day, March 11, 2011, by 1.8 millionths of a second, lending this work its title. Waves taller than the 100-foot length of this gallery ravaged the east coast of Japan, reminding us that what is wondrous can equally be dangerous." -The Renwick

Afterwards, with the White House just a stone's throw away, we wandered over to it, looked around and then, on our way back to the car, came upon the White House Historical Association's open house: the White House gingerbread house was on display, as well as a number of historical relics and photographs (I love that culinary-themed mantle), and there was a craft area and pastry demonstration too.

All in all, such a nice way to explore our city. And every bit of it was free. Bravo and thank you!

Edible Memories Day 13: Food and Pleasure

When I was twenty-three, with a broken heart and a mask of bravado disguising a fragile self, I moved to New York. Manhattan. The City. The gauntlet that is one's early 20s had left me feeling battered. Intent on starting anew, I hitched my wagon to a vaguely defined position at a marketing firm and sublet the living room of a 5th floor walk-up apartment two acquaintances inhabited. Looking back, I realize I was running as fast as I could towards what I hoped would be a brighter horizon.

Life as I lived it that year was vastly different from anything I'd ever expected or experienced. In addition to New York's quick pace and insistence on independence, I found that thin was in, and meals became lonely tributes to the bevy of tasteless, fat-free fare that studded the inner aisles of my neighborhood Gristedes. I lost sight of the comfort and succor eating well provides. In many ways, this was a snub to my family and history; at its most basic, and most damaging, it was a repudiation of self.

You see, having grown up in southwest Louisiana, I knew that food doesn’t get much better than a steaming bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo, fresh Gulf shrimp or a hot link of boudin. My sister and I used to crab off the wharf in our backyard and lay traps for red swamp crawfish alongside our house where a small gully retained enough rainwater to encourage them to move in. Those ingredients, which seemed as common as water and as critical as mother's milk, spoiled me. And yet for a while, I turned my back on them all.

One evening, when my parents were in town visiting me, we went to Chanterelle, the venerable, now-shuttered, Tribeca restaurant. The Night of the Seafood Sausage, as I’ve since taken to calling that meal, provided me one of the culinary highlights of my life despite the fact that I remember only one dish: the Grilled Seafood Sausage in Beurre Blanc.

That evening, a beautiful night that did justice to Chanterelle’s towering windows, I paid no heed to presumed calorie counts, welcomed the bread basket with open arms and banished any consideration of just how much butter might be in the sauces. I simply had to have that sausage and ordered it without hesitation. 

Et voilà. One perfectly arced link: stuffed with generous chunks of lobster, shrimp, scallops and white fish to the point at which the casing began to shrug with exertion; grilled to a golden hue and slick with heat and moisture; nestled in a languid pool of beurre blanc so ethereal it must have defied laws of physics.

I smiled and gingerly picked up my fork and knife. The blade found the slightest resistance in the hot collagen’s taut skin but soon sliced cleanly through. Eyes wide, absorbing the delicacy in front of me, I speared a perfect round with my fork, pulled it gently through the pale yellow sauce and placed the bite on my tongue.

I was rendered speechless. Reflexively, my eyes shut, my chewing slowed, my taste buds thrilled with the assault of flavors from which they’d been largely deprived. My first conscious thought might have been, “I will absolutely hate to share even the smallest morsel of this with my parents.” Yet when you taste something so truly remarkable, share it you must if only so that others will believe your proclamations of greatness.

Exceptional seafood is often best when left to shine on its own: boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce; steamed crabs served alongside nothing but a bib, shell crackers and maybe a lemon; oysters on the half shell with a mild mignonette waiting in the wings. And so in some ways, ordering that sausage went against my better judgment: what if the meat was overcooked? what if the flavors of each sea creature were muddled, the whole made less than its parts?

For reasons then mystical but understood to me now, I took a leap by ordering that link. The indulgence of that sausage wasn’t simply that it was stuffed with incredible seafood or that it was literally full of calories, fat and cholesterol. I don’t remember it so clearly more than a decade later just because it was perfectly prepared.

No, the taste of that dish lingers on my lips because it was a moment of freedom in which I learned, relearned, much. I have since come to believe that enjoying food is as much about what you’re eating as it is when, how, and with whom; that if you're open to experience, life is ever so much richer; and that the joie de vivre inherent in many Louisiana families isn't something to let go of.          

I have never regretted the three years I lived in New York. There, because in Manhattan you either sink or swim, I started to become my truest self. As I winnowed through the sorts of jobs, friends, men and identities I didn't want, I gained a confidence I'd long sought. That meal at Chanterelle demonstrated to me, retrospectively of course, that even the smallest steps can shift life's tectonic plates in grand ways.

Edible Memories Day 11: Food and Tradition

With the exception of infrequent holidays spent with my father’s family in Georgia, we celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas with my mother’s family in Louisiana. The meals were always exactly the same: roast turkey and gravy, green bean bundles (wrap canned green beans in strips of bacon; fasten with a toothpick; bake in the green bean juice; serve), rice dressing and cornbread dressing (sauté the celery-onion-bell pepper trinity, add to it browned beef and then either rice or crumbled cornbread), seriously stanky garlic bread, cranberry sauce, and pecan, pumpkin, apple and blackberry pies.

For some reason, I never liked Thanksgiving but always adored Christmas, feelings which persist to this very day. That the meal was the same on both holidays didn’t matter oddly enough. On one occasion, it made me sleepy and blah, and on another, it made me sleepy but also happy.

In any case, the shining culinary stars were the blackberry and pecan pies and Nanny’s cranberry sauce. That sauce, a sweet reduction of cranberries, mayhaw juice, diced apple, chopped lemon and a good deal of sugar, was and remains, the crown jewel in our vault of food traditions.

One afternoon in my early twenties, Nanny taught me to make her cranberry sauce. It was a wonderful chance to spend time together but I also wonder if we both knew that if her cranberry sauce were to continue being an integral part of our holiday celebrations, someone needed to learn to make it, and I was likely that person.

Into her giant soup pot set over high heat went: the contents of one bag of Ocean Spray cranberries; two cups of mayhaw juice –purchased at the annual Mayhaw Festival in Starks, LA; the mayhaw is a state tree of Louisiana and produces pinky-red berries that, when pressed, produce a gorgeous pink juice; one apple that’d been cored and diced; and one de-seeded and minced lemon.

Once the berries started popping open, we added a lot of sugar and a packet of powdery Sure Jell, returned the whole mess to a boil and cooked it until the sauce sheeted, rather than rained, off the back of a wooden spoon. Rain drops meant the sauce wasn’t yet thick enough: not enough juice had boiled off to allow the sugar concentration to reach a set point. Sheeting ensured that point had been reached.

We’d ladle the thick magenta into sterilized mason jars, apply the lids and screw the bands finger-tight. While most people would recommend waterbath processing the filled jars, Nanny never did, and still we heard the happy pings as each lid vacuumed down, sealing the jars and rendering them safe to store in the pantry.

For the past four or five years, I’ve taught canning in and around the DC area. Several times, during my fall classes, I’ve taught Nanny’s cranberry sauce. I’ve also taught friends out of my home kitchen and frequently sell jars of it as others have adopted it as their own. Early last month, at a class in Virginia, two women, repeat attendees, told me it’s the only cranberry sauce they serve on their holiday tables now.

It’s hard to describe how this makes me feel, this sense that Nanny and her love and our traditions are spreading far and wide. Essentially, it is a feeling of joy.

As I’ve made the sauce over the years since Nanny became too old to do so, the recipe has evolved very subtly into my own. I’ve omitted the Sure Jell because cranberries have enough natural pectin to render the synthetic stuff unnecessary, and I can detect a slightly metallic taste when powdered pectin is used.

I’ve also had to find a substitute for the mayhaw juice which is unavailable here and awfully expensive to have Fed Exed in. Whole Foods’ unfiltered apple juice works beautifully. Apple cider, with its added spices, does not.

On occasion, I add a sprinkle or two of cinnamon. That depends on my mood.

I always waterbath can mine because while I’m not a worrier or germaphobe, why welcome the possibility of botulism or other toxins?

The thing about traditions and recipes is that the most loved ones do evolve. They’re carried in different hands, throughout different places and across different tongues. Ingredients are hard to find and so people find alternatives. Trends and equipment come and go, and with them methodology.

But the hearts of the matter remain steadfast. Nanny’s sauce is always on my Thanksgiving and Christmas tables, no matter where or with whom I celebrate. I’ll make and share it for as many years as I can, and I will hope that when the time comes, someone else with take the reins and maintain this sublime tradition for a generation more.