#104 | You Are What You Drink
Queen of California Cuisine
Hello!
Dad Poem X
You can’t have apples with everything, we say to our son over breakfast, but that’s not technically true. He knows this, I suspect, though his face reflects a certain understanding, as if he’s willing to negotiate. Before we moved here, I knew so little of apples, their untamed array of shapes & names: Ginger Gold, Honeycrisp, Crisp -in, Cortland, Cameo. Both Rome & Empire, somehow, which feels like it must be an inside joke between members of the committee. Fuji, Winesap. Ruby -Frost, which could be either a miracle or a plague, I can’t decide which. Paula Red is a Soviet secret agent. Envy is a deadly sin. Holstein & Ambrosia have skin like a storm on a televised map. On the ride upstate to the orchard, I recount all the types to myself in a private game. Select my prize in advance. Bags filled with Liberty & Jazz will be my aims, like any good American...
Continue reading Dad Poem X by Joshua Bennett in The New Yorker
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to EAT.DRINK.THINK., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was the New Yorker’s murky dictum, “season to taste.
Do you know someone who loves a good Widow’s Kiss? Send them this newsletter!
Roasted Apples with Cream and Black Pepper Caramel Sauce: “I love to serve this dessert when entertaining at home and put the apples, cream, croutons and caramel in separate bowls, allowing guests to dig in themselves. The divine flavors, as well as the sharing among friends, reminds me of my two-day adventure at MAD.” —Nichole Accettola, Kantine. Edible SF
📺 If You Watch Only One Thing This Week: The New York Times opdoc on Sally Schmitt, founder of the French Laundry; “one of the first California cooks to cook real California Food.” Sally Schmitt (1932 -2022) opened The French Laundry in Yountville in 1978 and designed her menus around local, seasonal ingredients—a novel concept at the time.
Related: Portuguese Duck and Sausage in Rice from Six California Kitchens by Sally Schmitt (Chronicle 2022). Edible SF
Related: Did you know you that besides hummus, you can also make tofu out of chickpeas, black beans and lentils? TikTok
You Are What You Drink: California winemakers who farm grapes using organic, biodynamic, and regenerative methods are speaking out about the ubiquitous use of the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) in vineyards.
“I’m incredibly frustrated that these chemicals continue to be used and that nobody calls it out,” said Beth Milliken, owner of Spottswoode Winery in St. Helena. She finds it “amazing” that in a place as image-conscious as Napa Valley, people are still “spraying poison.”
☠️ Vineyard managers often claim that applying Roundup is less expensive than using labor to combat the weeds, and it’s more efficient because it kills everything it touches. Still, the fact that the workforce applying the herbicide is exposed to its carcinogenic potential is mostly ignored.
People diagnosed with cancer after using Roundup have filed tens of thousands of lawsuits against Bayer, Monsanto’s parent company. Juries in the Bay Area have awarded $133 million in damages in three of those cases.
Even Napa Green and Sonoma Sustainable, which offer sustainability certifications to wineries, allow for the use of glyphosate in vineyards. {cough}
Get the full story from Esther Mobley’s excellent reporting in the SF Chronicle: How Roundup, the weed killer linked to cancer, became one of California wine’s biggest controversies.
About the Raft Wines Syrah from Weed Farms ☝️. Ain’t no spray in those vineyards. Winemaker Jennifer Reichardt notes that winemaker Sally Weed:
farms the vineyard very, very, very sustainably. It’s kind of the coolest part about the whole wine is she has coho salmon that run along the creek in the vineyard, and coho salmon are very endangered in California, and so it’s rare to see them at all, and they actually spawned in this creek, which is incredible. So anything that happens in the vineyard has to positively affect the creek, so therefore it only gets pruned and it gets mowed, but there’s no spraying on the ground, there’s no spraying on the vine. Even if you farm organically, you’re still allowed to spray things in the vineyard and there’s nothing, so I think it’s the most honest expression of terroir there is because it’s just the grapes. There’s nothing else.
🍇 You can order the Syrah from Raft Wines here.
If you want to drink wines from vineyards that have not been sprayed with Roundup, Gemini Bottle Co., a natural wine store in the Mission, is an excellent place to start {Disclosure: Gemini Bottle Co. is an Edible SF advertiser}. Owner Dominque Henderson does her best to avoid wines from vineyards that spray by quizzing the winemakers and distributors she works with in regards to their viticulture practices, but in the end, there’s no law requiring the use of Roundup to be disclosed.
Other bastions of natural wines include Ruby Wine in Portrero Hill, Bar Part Time and Terroir in the Mission. Millay near the Castro, Tofino in the Richmond and DIG in the Dogpatch. Your best bet is to ask the store staff to guide you towards bottles from vineyards that don’t use Roundup; they’ll surely have a few in mind.
On Being ‘Diasporican:’ Illyanna Maisonet on her upcoming cookbook Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook (October 2022):
I feel like almost everyone I’ve spoken to thinks that Puerto Rican is spicy. But why would it be? We do have some condiments that make things spicy, but the food itself isn’t spicy. People are always surprised about that when they dig in. They’re expecting spice, and what they get is flavor. Those are the two things I always hear: “Oh, it’s not spicy” and “Oh, it’s so flavorful.”
Beak to Foot: The infamous Claude the Claw sandwich from Birdsong now has it’s own restaurant, Birdbox, where the provenance of the crispy foot sandwich is noted as such:
The heads and feet of chickens that come from the industrial poultry complex are often so battered that they must be removed in order for the chickens to be sold “whole”. Birdbox birds are sourced with their heads and feet intact. Whole, unashamedly. While possibly intimidating at first blush, Claude the Claw is our source of reassurance and an indicator of quality. Claude is a reminder of the kind of food system we are proud to support. A kinder one. Also more delicious.
Do You Know the Baklava Man? Tolgay Karabulut’ opened Baklavastory in the Mission District just three months ago, and now has partnerships with four restaurants in the city {We peeked in on our way to dinner at Kintaro one evening and grabbed a few-highly recommend!}. He’s heading to Turkey soon to harvest pistachios when they are at the height of ripeness. San Francisco Standard
#Protip Master Class: 25 Tiny Skills to Improve Your Cooking Today. Especially this one: “Can't pry apart that frozen block of bacon from the freezer? Coil them first and have anytime slices.” America’s Test Kitchen
Don’t Eat Lobster 🦞 and Save the Whales 🐋: Sound familiar? In Northern California, the Dungeness crab season has been impacted the past couple of seasons by a legal settlement between the state and the Center for Biological Diversity that requires the department to close fishing zones when the risk of humpback and blue whale entanglement in crab traps is too high. Seafood Watch, the sustainable seafood advisory generated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, has now put lobster on its red list because ropes used to fish for lobsters and some other seafoods often entangle critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. New York Times
On repeat this week, from the archives: Don’t Give Me No Bammer Weed from the album of the same name by RBL Posse, the infamous rappers from Hunter’s Point. It’s the 30th anniversary of the album’s release.
In the fall of 1992, RBL Posse changed Bay Area rap forever. They set off not one but two of hip hop’s most recognizable and enduring genres and helped create a new vernacular, “SFC” (Sucka Free City), for the region. Plus they breathed life into forgotten funk, jazz and R&B tracks by sampling in a way that became so ubiquitous so fast it got major record labels scrambling and demanding recompense. SF Gate
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
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"Despite its artistic intentions and its many accomplishments, humankind owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." —Anonymous