This piece originally appeared in SAVEUR’s Spring/Summer 2026 issue. See more stories from Issue 206.

Cookbooks get written for all kinds of ­reasons. A home cook may want to document their favorite family dishes, or a chef might long to share their professional knowledge with the world. Increasingly, celebrities get cookbook deals regardless of their expertise in the kitchen. But time and again, the most impactful examples are the books whose authors fought to make them possible.

These fights often concern cuisines that rarely see the spotlight. Many cookbook publishers insist such topics don’t sell, and while celebrity chefs and the diet du jour still dominate bestseller lists, this past season ushered in a wave of new titles immersed in the cuisines of Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, Pakistan, and El Salvador, to name a few.

Some of these titles have been written by first-­generation ­immigrants. Several are the first-ever cookbooks to be published in English about their respective cuisines, or are among the few known to exist. All include painstakingly recreated recipes. More than just cookbooks, these projects are important works of cultural preservation.

“I have a responsibility to share my culture and this ­cuisine—and a real sense of not wanting this knowledge to be lost,” says Ifrah F. Ahmed, author of Soomaaliya. Ahmed was born in Mogadishu and came to the United States as a refugee in 1996. Her book—only the third to be published on Somali cuisine since 1978—provides a detailed overview of her home country’s history, pays homage to the chefs and writers who came before her, and intersperses thoroughly researched essays about the Somali diaspora.

In My Cambodia, San Francisco-based chef Nite Yun recalls how hard it was to find Khmer cooking resources when she first took to the kitchen. Her book weaves together her own personal, often painful memories of assimilating to life in California with unapologetic renditions of the dishes that brought her closer to her family. She refuses to simplify Cambodian cuisine for American palates. Explaining the importance of kroeung (lemongrass paste) and prahok (fermented fish paste): “If you don’t have [them] when a recipe calls for it,” she writes, “I highly suggest cooking another dish.”

These projects often cross the line from cookbook to ­ethnography, buoyed by shoe-leather reporting overseas. “After a couple of years of looking for—and cooking from—recipes online, I began to hit a wall,” writes Maryam Jillani in Pakistan. “I kept finding the same Pakistani recipes over and over again…There was little to no coverage of the dozens of regional culinary traditions I had encountered during my travels.” So Jillani took matters into her own hands, exploring her home country to learn from the chefs and home cooks who are credited throughout.

Karla Tatiana Vasquez employed a similar ­community-​driven approach in her 2024 cookbook SalviSoul, which doubles as a narrative history featuring candid interviews with 25 Salvadoran women who contributed their own recipes to the project. And Omer Al Tijani, in his groundbreaking book The Sudanese Kitchen (the first Sudanese cookbook printed in English), relied on dozens of local guides, extended family members, and on-the-ground fixers during his decade-long quest to document the nation’s foodways. Part of his motivation, he writes, was to shift the widespread (and reductive) narrative of Sudan as a “troubled” nation. Instead, he honors his home country’s multicultural culinary influences, which he compellingly argues “provide ­substantial ­contributions to the art of global gastronomy.”

Celebrity and diet cookbooks aren’t going away. But the emergence of these overdue ethnographies speaks to a growing demand from readers for books that dig deep, uncovering stories that rarely get told. The fights to publish them are well worth it.

The post 5 Must-Read Cookbooks That Champion Underrepresented Cuisines appeared first on Saveur.

Spring cookbooks are, like their namesake season, all about showcasing fresh, vibrant flavors to ease home cooks out of a long winter. There are several first-time authors debuting on this list, taking us deep into cuisines from Ukraine all the way to Laos, along with the welcome return of several veteran authors, including legends like Anissa Helou and a 50th anniversary reissue of an Edna Lewis landmark. If you haven’t already, clear some shelf space for this season’s bumper crop of new arrivals, 12 of which we’re particularly excited about. 

Cuisines of Odesa: A Ukrainian Cookbook

Odesa native Maria Kalenska, who opened Ukraine’s first cooking school before relocating to Germany after the Russian invasion, revisits the foods of her homeland in this richly detailed book. Recipes range from sweet (baked curd cheesecake, chocolate eclairs) to savory (multiple borshch variations, potato and cabbage dumplings with wild garlic), and essays from European chefs share how Odesa’s foodways appear in their own kitchens. In a turbulent time for Ukraine, it’s refreshing to see Odessan cuisine—with its unique blend of Ukrainian, Jewish, Turkish, and Armenian flavors—celebrated in its own right. (Weldon Owen, February 24)

A Day in Penang: A Malaysian Cookbook

The latest in the ongoing A Day In series by Melbourne-based indie publisher Smith Street Books, A Day in Penang is exactly what it sounds like: a culinary tour of Penang’s capital city, George Town, from breakfast to dessert. Authors Aim Aris and Ahmad Salim organized the book into sections, “Early,” “Mid,” and “Late,” with recipes that run the gamut from homestyle dishes (chicken in sweet-spicy tomato sauce) to street food favorites (steamed rice noodle rolls) to professional restaurant plates (fragrant golden king crab). This charming, quirky little number also features vibrant graphic design and documentary-style photographs. Other editions cover Hong Kong and Tokyo, and the next in the series, A Day in Seoul, will be released in May. (Smith Street Books, March 3)

Lebanon: Cooking the Foods of My Homeland

Anissa Helou, one of the most prolific and revered cookbook authors of our time (her 2018 tome Feast was chosen by The New Yorker as one of the ten best cookbooks of the 21st century), turns her eagle eye to the foods of a land she knows intimately: Lebanon. A whopping 165 recipes across 16 chapters, this is Helou’s most personal work yet, with recipes spanning from baked fish with a Tripolitan tahini-cilantro sauce to rosewater-infused shortbread, plus dozens of regional variations. There’s even a chapter dedicated entirely to things “Cooked In Extra Virgin Olive Oil.” Get this for the completionist in your life. (Ecco, March 10)

My Jamaican Table: Vibrant Recipes From a Sun-Drenched Island

Andre Fowles, a Kingston native, three-time Chopped champion, and private chef to the stars (Bruce Springsteen, a client, wrote the foreword), writes lyrically about the foods of his home. Jamaican food has a fascinating blend of Indigenous, African, Indian, Chinese, and European influences, and Fowles’ recipes tap into that vibrant, multicultural energy with creative twists on classics, like sweet jerk crispy cauliflower, breakfast burritos wrapped in roti, and a fish and chips-inspired escovitch sandwich. Paired with lush photographs from around the island, this cookbook is for anyone seeking a dose of tropical flavor without leaving home. (Artisan, March 10)

A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes From an Indigenous Food Warrior

One of just a handful of contemporary Indigenous cookbooks, Crystal Wahpepah ( founder of Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland) urges readers to reconnect with Native ingredients and the land they come from as an antidote to convenience culture and the rise of corporate agriculture. In her wide-ranging book, organized into chapters like “The Three Sisters,” “Foraged Foods,” and “Wild Rice & Ancient Grains,” Wahpepah explores the environmental, spiritual, and physical benefits of dishes like sweet blue cornbread with huckleberry compote, bison ribs with blueberry barbecue sauce, and smoked turkey soup with wild rice dumplings. It’s a beautiful narrative celebrating an oft-overlooked cuisine. (Rodale Books, March 17)

I Sleep in My Kitchen: Comfort Food Recipes From My Palestinian American Home

Mariam Daud, better known to her millions of online followers as @mxriyum, uses her debut cookbook to tell the story of Palestine, where, as she puts it, “food and advocacy are able to share a home.” Her recipes, most of which center around the joy of feeding loved ones, seamlessly blend traditional Palestinian flavors (e.g. her mother’s cheese fatayer, or stuffed pastries) with more Western fare (e.g. burrata salad with steak and labneh chimichurri or tahini-browned butter banana bread). There’s a plethora of baked goods—both in bread and savory pastry form—and sweet desserts to round out an abundant table. (Clarkson Potter, March 17)

Ohana Style: Food From Hawai‘i, for Your Family

The follow-up to Sheldon Simeon’s 2021 debut text, Cook Real Hawai‘i, Ohana Style finds the Top Chef alum focusing on what it means to cook for your ohana, or family (blood-related or chosen). Partially written in the aftermath of the devastating Lahaina wildfires in 2023, the recipes reflect a true desire for community, with lots of crowd-pleasing and large-format favorites, like tteokbokki all’amatriciana, miso-peanut hibachi chicken, and furikake animal crackers. As a bonus, many include plant-based substitutions and clever hacks for complicated techniques (like crisping frozen fish sticks in a wok instead of a deep fryer). (Clarkson Potter, March 31)

Madaq: Simple and Delicious Everyday Recipes With the Flavors of Morocco

Madaq means “flavor” in Moroccan Arabic, and author Nargisse Benkabbou, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, is particularly adept at translating the flavors of her family’s home country into recipes that feel approachable for Western kitchens. Think artichoke and pea tagine pasta, chermoula salmon with quick-pickled cucumbers, and make-ahead kefta and kale couscous bowls, among other weeknight-friendly fare. This is a warm and thoughtful introduction for any Moroccan cuisine-curious home cooks. (Knopf, April 7)

Morning Baker: Recipes and Rituals for Breakfast and Beyond

In Roxana Jullapat’s first cookbook, Mother Grains, the L.A.-based bread-and-pastry whiz introduced home cooks to the joy of baking with whole grains. In her follow up, she’s developed 100 more breakfast-themed, whole grain-centric sweet and savory recipes, including buckwheat joy muffins; pumpkin spelt bread; and Swiss chard, feta, and egg pide, or traditional Turkish flatbread. Jullapat is a patient teacher with the more technical aspects of pastry (see whole-wheat croissant dough), making this a must for any serious or aspiring baker. (W.W. Norton & Company, April 7)

The Lao Kitchen: Lao Flavors and Stories Told Through Family Recipes

There are only a handful of English-language Laotian cookbooks out from major publishers, and that makes Saeng Douangdara’s undertaking—six years in the making—all the more significant. The fact that it’s written in the voice of a sassy-sweet, endlessly encouraging queer immigrant kid from Wisconsin? Even better. Douangdara has a gift for making a misunderstood cuisine feel approachable with chapters like “Children of Sticky Rice” and “The Funky Kid,” and recipes for thum khao poon (cold vermicelli noodle salad) and khanom nap (coconut-stuffed sticky rice dumplings). There’s a new delight on every page. (Ten Speed Press, April 21)

The Taste of Country Cooking: 50th Anniversary Edition

Originally published in 1976, Edna Lewis’ now-iconic cookbook was among the first to recognize and celebrate regional Southern cooking as its own distinct, worthwhile cuisine. The Table of Contents is evocative, reflecting the pleasures of Lewis’ upbringing in a Virginia farming community founded by her grandfather after emancipation: “A Late Spring Lunch After Wild-Mushroom Picking,” followed by “The Night for a Boiled Virginia Ham Dinner” and “A Snowy Winter Breakfast.” Although Lewis died in 2006, her half-century-old masterwork still feels as vital today as it did when it was first printed. (Knopf, May 5)

Cooking the Borderlands: Spice and Smoke Between Mexico and The States

With immigration issues front and center, this book from Top Chef and Iron Chef: Mexico star Claudette Zepeda couldn’t be more timely. A self-described “border kid” who grew up between San Diego and Tijuana, Zepeda has dedicated her career to learning about the unique fusion of cultures along our shared perimeter. Her deeply personal, geographically-organized book covers territory from California to the Sonoran Desert to cowboy country, with recipes like arroz poblano, tacos with vermicelli and green chorizo, and jericalla (burnt cinnamon custard) along the way. (Clarkson Potter, June 2)

The post The 12 New Cookbooks We’re Most Excited About This Spring appeared first on Saveur.

This piece originally appeared in SAVEUR’s Fall/Winter 2025 issue. See more stories from Issue 205.

The first cookbook I ever wrote was with Naomi Pomeroy, a self-taught chef whose French-inspired dishes were so elegant, you’d swear she trained under Paul Bocuse ­himself. Taste & Technique is heavy on instruction, but its most enduring lesson comes in the intro: ­Cooking should feel like a pleasure, not a chore. Naomi delivers this message with near-evangelical zeal, insisting that your mindset matters. Walk into the kitchen in a miserable mood, and chances are, your food will follow suit.

Our book is nearly 10 years old, but I’ve been thinking about that notion a lot lately—­partly ­because Naomi passed away last year, and ­partly ­because it’s been hard to hold on to joy at all. Every day, the news destroys me. I am anxious, angry, and exhausted, often all at once. In times like these, cooking—once a comfort—can feel like ­another load to bear.

I’m not alone. Several prominent cookbook authors with new releases are writing candidly about how depression dimmed their desire to cook—and about their long road to rekindling ­happiness in the kitchen.

Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal, has a new book, Feast On Your Life. Less cookbook and more, as she describes it, “daily devotional,” it chronicles her cooking and eating over the course of a year. (This technique is also employed, movingly, by the British cookbook author Nigel Slater in his seminal 2013 book, Notes From the Larder.)

In Adler’s introduction, she recalls a recent bout of “crippling depression” yet finds unexpected solace in documenting everyday delights. She writes lovingly about cinnamon toast, slow-simmered beans, and “outrageous sausages”—comforts that helped soothe the pain of election fallout, distant wars, and her own private sorrow. Beneath Adler’s graceful prose reverberates her strain as she wills herself to enjoy cooking even the simplest meals.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Adler is friendly with Samin Nosrat, her West Coast spiritual counter­part and the author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Nosrat has a new cookbook of her own, Good Things, in which she, too, speaks of prolonged “turmoil and melancholy.” To cope, she asks herself what constitutes a good life and determines that the answer involves both time and attention—for which cooking is a conduit.

In Good Things, Nosrat trades restaurant-level perfectionism for recipes that prioritize time with her chosen family. These aren’t gimmicky time-savers—her golden chicken soup and “sky-high” focaccia are all about relishing the cooking process while still leaving the reader with energy to savor the fruits of their labor with loved ones.

Nosrat’s approach also reminds me of Ruby Tandoh’s 2021 book Cook As You Are, full of affordable, accessible recipes rooted in real-life time and budget constraints. But in the final chapter, “For The Love Of It,” Tandoh offers slower, more involved dishes, such as pierogi with homemade cheese and flaky roti canai that “give you a chance to anchor ­yourself—mind and body—in the fabric of your own life.” These dishes aren’t fussy, but they do require time and focus.

These lessons may feel more urgent today, but they’re hardly new: For generations, cookbook authors have urged us to slow down, cook with intention, and find meaning in the everyday act of making a meal. When done with care, cooking remains one of the most powerful ways we have to restore ourselves—and resist the chaos around us. 

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For those of us who constantly have to clear space on our bookshelves, autumn is the most exciting time for new cookbook releases. While both spring and fall see a glut of new cookbooks, publishers historically save their heaviest hitters for the latter half of year—we’re talking big-name authors (hello again, Samin Nosrat), books packaged so beautifully you can’t not give them as holiday gifts, and cultural deep dives designed as much to educate as to inspire. This year, as always, there’s an incredible lineup of new cookbooks to sift through. Here are 12 we’re particularly looking forward to. 

Fusão: Untraditional Recipes Inspired by Brasil

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Ixta Belfrage, the author of 2022’s award-winning Mezcla and an alumni of Yotam Ottolenghi’s test kitchen, tackles her own Brazilian-English heritage and Brazil’s rich blend of indigenous, Portuguese, and West African influences in her latest. “Fusão,” which translates to “fusion” in Portuguese, sees Belfrage experimenting with flavors and form, resulting in dishes like moqueca fish burgers, picanha with coffee and chile butter, and chocolate-papaya cake. The sun-soaked aesthetic and colorful photos drive home the transportive feel.

Russ & Daughters: 100 Years of Appetizing

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Arguably the most iconic appetizing shop in America, New York’s legendary Russ & Daughters is (finally) committing their legacy to paper, with a cookbook penned by the fourth-generation owners Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ Tupper that captures a century of family history, Jewish tradition, and really good smoked fish. Beyond the standards the shop is known for (smoked salmon, sable, herring, and so on), recipes include comfort-classics like crispy potato latkes, matzo ball soup, and chocolate babka—a must-have for tourists and locals alike.

Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share With People You Love

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It’s no overstatement to say that Samin Nosrat changed the way Americans understand cooking with her 2017 smash hit Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. In her highly anticipated follow-up, clocking in at over 400 pages, she shares the traditions and recipes (125 of them) she leans on to foster a sense of community around the table. It is—somewhat unusually—organized around the idea of cooking as a ritual. We’re already bookmarking recipes for ricotta custard pancakes and “sky-high” focaccia.

Chesnok: Recipes From Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia

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Polina Chesnakova—born in Ukraine to Russian and Armenian parents from Georgia—pens a timely ode to the foods of the Soviet diaspora, focused on regional recipes from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Recipes for Ukrainian-style dumplings, Georgian tkemali (sour plum sauce), and Uzbekistan-style plov are braided with essays, family histories, and profiles of the cooks who helped shape Chesnakova. A bonus: There are separate chapters on both dessert and pastries and breads, making this ideal for the sweet-toothed.

My Cambodia: A Khmer Cookbook

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Cambodian cuisine is woefully underrepresented in cookbook format, but Nite Yun, the the daughter of Cambodian refugees and chef-owner of Lunette Cambodia in Oakland, California, is out to change all that with her deeply personal tome. The 100-plus recipes capture techniques normally passed through families orally, mixed with memoir-style storytelling, snippets of Cambodian history, and culinary tips for those new to the cuisine to master dishes like kuy teav Phnom Penh (fragrant pork and noodle soup) and amok (coconut-steamed fish in a banana leaf).

On Meat: Modern Recipes for the Home Kitchen

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Eight years after his groundbreaking On Vegetables, Rustic Canyon and Birdie G’s chef-owner Jeremy Fox is back, tackling the thematic opposite with his signature blend of professional expertise and can-do attitude. Chapters are organized by animal (with the exception of cured meats and sausages in the “Deli” chapter), and the Los Angeles chef’s 115 recipes have an emphasis on zero-waste, sustainable approaches with extensive how-tos. Expect beautiful photographs and stunning design throughout.

Six Seasons of Pasta: A New Way With Everyone’s Favorite Food

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Portland, Oregon, chef Joshua McFadden is back with a follow-up to his wildly popular Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables with this new pasta-focused spin on his time-tested formula. Each chapter focuses on seasonally appropriate pasta variations (asparagus with almonds and lemons in the spring; baked ziti with broccoli rabe in the winter), plus a section on year-round favorites, all made with store-bought dried pasta. Helpful techniques abound, including the chef’s signature build-the-sauce-in-the-skillet method.

The Korean Vegan: Homemade: Recipes and Stories from My Kitchen

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In this 400-page sequel to her James Beard Award-winning The Korean Vegan, social media star Joanne Lee Molinaro is giving us more of what she does best: veganizing Korean dishes and Koreanizing everything else. Written in her welcoming personal voice (with her own photographs to boot), the 100-plus new dishes here pay homage to the people and places that have inspired Molinaro, from the fried rice waffles that nod to her grandmother to the pesto tteokbokki that combines her husband’s Italian heritage with her own.

Steak House: The People, The Places, The Recipes

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Undoubtedly the most irreverent title on this list, Foodheim author Eric Wareheim takes his beloved blend of humor, curiosity, and a slightly gonzo spirit to that most hallowed of American traditions: the steakhouse. With documentary-style profiles and arresting photos, Wareheim leads readers on a cross-country road trip to chronicle the places, people, and the steaks that loom so large in our cultural imagination. Tangents dedicated to martinis, Parker House rolls, and creamed spinach are most welcome detours.

Recipes From the American South

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Celebrated food historian and scholar Michael Twitty (The Cooking Gene) goes deep on one of America’s most complex cuisines, with an astonishing 250-plus recipes that showcase the diversity of the region, interspersed with essays, historical lessons, and personal reflections. Fortunately, he’s a heck of a storyteller, making this gorgeously designed tome as much a pleasure to read as it is to behold. Recipes like she-crab soup and hummingbird cake reflect the influence of the slave trade, migration, and multiculturalism across the region.

Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Spread Joy in 100 Recipes

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Pastry chef Helen Goh, another Ottolenghi alum and the co-author of his books Sweet and Ottolenghi Comfort, branches out solo with her baking-centric debut, focused primarily on sweets, with some savory recipes, too. Blending her own Australian and Malaysian background, confidence with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flavors, and a dash of pop psychology, she explores not just how to bake, but also how baking connects us as people. Come for the chocolate tahini cake with sesame brittle; stay for the puttanesca galette.

Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America

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Three-time James Beard Award-winning Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman (The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen) is back with a new book tapping the rich vein of Native American foodways. Organized by region across Turtle Island (an Indigenous term for North America), the book features more than 100 recipes that promote plant-forward, nose-to-tail eating in tune with the seasons and our natural world: think wild rice-crusted walleye cakes, sweet potato soup with dried venison and chile oil, and sweet corn pudding with woodland berries.

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Of the many roadside attractions I’ve been to known to pull over for, nothing compares to “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.” The signs for this scandalous film first show up miles away, on Highway 111 in the bleached-out High Desert of Southern California, outside of Palm Springs. They beckon tourists to slow down even before the giant wooden knight appears, pointing visitors to the Shields Date Garden parking lot in Indio.

The gimmick works: Shields is one of the best-known roadside attractions in the region. And as much as the film gets tourists in the door, what keeps them coming back is the dates. Shields sells five varieties, including medium-soft and sweet Blonde and Brunettes, developed and patented by Floyd Shields and sold exclusively in Indio.

Samples are abundant and you can buy all kinds of dates, along with the usual touristy chazerai, but in this writer’s opinion, the best souvenir from Shields is one that shouldn’t leave the parking lot: a date shake.

Date shakes have become something of an unofficial drink of the Coachella Valley, appearing on menus at hotels, restaurants, and other date shops along the road. At Shields, the thick, creamy milkshakes are made using date crystals, another one of Shields’ patented inventions, which are essentially nubbins of dried dates sweetened with date sugar. For the shakes, the crystals are mixed with water to make a thick date paste, which is blended with vanilla ice cream and milk.

They’re a fleeting keepsake, especially in the unrelenting desert sun. But there’s something delightful about the act of slurping a cold, sweet drink in the middle of the barren California landscape.

Shields was founded in 1924 by newlyweds Floyd and Bess Shields, who moved east from Los Angeles to try their hand at the booming date industry in the Coachella Valley. That boom was the result of the USDA’s specially-commissioned Agriculture Explorers, aka “the Indiana Joneses of the plant world,” who brought dates from their native Middle Eastern and North African climes to the similarly hot and dry California desert. These flora explorers coincided with a wave of public interest in the Middle East, mysterious and exotic-seeming at the time, which date growers in the Coachella Valley happily played up to market their fruit.

Tourism in the area took off, as people drove out to the desert for the three-day, Arabian Nights-themed “International Festival of Dates,” complete with camel races. Floyd and Bess needed something to make their date farm stand out from the dozens of others lining the highway. So Floyd, who had trained as an engineer but proved naturally adept at date farming, began giving lectures in his back garden to describe the painstaking process of date cultivation. He eventually collected his notes into a slideshow and called it, rather salaciously, “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”

Today, the 15-minute doc plays on a continuous loop in the in-house “Romance Theater,” though a few years ago it was turned into a short film that combines the original slideshow with Shields’ narration and new footage and audio. The film is currently available on DVD and you can find it on YouTube.

In it, Shields unpacks the nuts and bolts of date farming, a labor- and time-intensive process that involves shimmying up the trunk of 70-foot trees to hand-pollinate the female palms, flooding the root systems (though they are desert plants, date palms need the equivalent of 120 inches of rainfall to thrive), and hand-picking each individual date bunch after a decade of waiting for a given tree to bear fruit.

This is an abbreviated version of the process, which involves no fewer than ten other mind-bogglingly intensive steps. When I watch it, I think of how strange it is for something as resource-intensive as date palms to thrive in the High Desert, which even today is fairly underdeveloped, boasting more than its fair share of forbidding-feeling nothingness beyond the handful of towns that thrive along the highway.

For many, the desert holds a mysterious allure. For me, it’s a reminder of the awesome power of nature to still overrule the will of man. But how delightful it is that our tiny toehold into taming the wild landscape should come in the form of date farms, and how sweet it is to take a bit of them with you in a Styrofoam cup.

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Disclaimer: What I am about to tell you is all true…ish, though names have been changed to protect the guilty. I’ve fact-checked where possible, combing through newspaper archives to find evidence that supports the claims made within. But even now, months later, I still find myself questioning whether any of this was real, or if it was some kind of bizarro-world fever dream. So take everything in the account below with a grain of salt; treat it as my attempt to record a memory before it evaporates entirely.

Cruise control is a colloquialism, but it’s also a very real setting on the convertible I’m driving down US 41, also known the Tamiami Trail, which connects Tampa and Miami by cutting straight across the Everglades. It’s empty on the road, so I’m set at 75 and cruising, top down, through the 2,000 square miles of rivers, lakes, and mangrove forests that make up what writer and environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas described as a “River of Grass.” There’s not much to see beyond blue and green, and the occasional billboard advertising airboat tours with guaranteed gator sightings!!! (Emphasis theirs.)

My unlikely companion is my mother, and we’re on our way to Everglades City, Florida, a tiny town on the edge of Everglades National Park, population 402. We happen to be visiting south Florida on the first day of stone crab season, and I’m on a mission to eat as many as possible, as close to the source as possible.

Stone crabs are gnarly bastards, and commercial crabbing is a tough gig. Big boxy traps are baited with pig feet, then strung out on lines and hauled in some 24 hours later, ideally filled with angry crustaceans whose claws are strong enough to cause serious damage to unlucky human fingers. Stone crabs aren’t killed when they’re caught; if their claws are large enough to meet state requirements, they’re ripped off by hand, and the newly-disarmed crab bodies are tossed back, where they will slowly regenerate new claws in the off-season.

The fresh “green” claws are kept in seawater, then brought to shore and cooked at 212 degrees for precisely eight minutes before immediately being chilled in cold water to prevent the meat from sticking to its shell. The next day, the claws are weighed and graded by size, then shipped off to restaurants and distributors around the country. Eventually, they find their way to customers like me, who pay a premium to greedily rip their sweet, meaty flesh from inside the rock-hard claws and dip it in honey-mustard sauce.

We’re en route to Everglades City because it is, according to the residents of Everglades City, the stone crab capital of the world. Dozens of crabbers are based there, supplying much of the country from October to May every year. Joe’s Crab Shack in Miami, arguably the most famous crab restaurant in the country, is the town’s biggest customer, and owns multiple crab houses there to ensure a steady supply.

Despite this illustrious reputation, Everglades City isn’t much to look at. It’s what a Yankee like me would call a one-horse town, a drive-by. Residents of south Florida and trivia buffs may have heard of it for other reasons; we’ll get to that in a minute. Point is, I didn’t know diddly-squat about the place except that it was filthy with stone crabs, which is how found ourselves at Triad Seafood, a rickety crab shack surrounded by funky-smelling traps on the muddy Barron River.

The start of stone crab season is kind of a big deal, and I’d called several restaurants only to discover that the first batch wasn’t yet ready, or worse, had already sold out. Triad was one of the few places in town with any left.

Mom and I are interlopers, and it shows. The middle-aged waitress eyes us suspiciously before granting us access to a rickety table with plastic chairs. The menu is printed on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, but we barely look at the thing—we’re here for the stone crab special, listed by claw size on a dry-erase board, with a side of hushpuppies and coleslaw, please.

Two men are at the table adjacent to ours, smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze over a platter of fried fish. They’re in their mid-50s, both with rawhide skin and shaggy hair, plus baseball caps and heavy working boots despite the 80-degree heat. They notice us. We smile politely but curtly, deferring to our place as both outsiders and unaccompanied women in this rough-around-the-edges seafood joint. We don’t want to talk to them—I can feel my mother’s mental ‘danger’ antenna picking up frequencies in the air. But the taller of the two comes over to us anyway.

“Y’all kin?” he asks, smiling.

No one talks like that where we’re from. People would ask if we were related, sure, but “kin” is a particular regional vernacular, and it catches us off-guard. “I was trying to figure out if you were sisters or mama-daughter,” he continues. We nod in agreement, yes, we are one of those things, and it’s clear he wants to keep talking.

“I’m 10th-generation Evergladesian, part Indian in my blood, and I can tell. I grew up here, went to high school right across the street, fished here all my life. Name’s Will Clarkson—they call me Captain Will—and I run these boat tours if y’all ever want to see the Glades with a real local,” he says, sliding a flimsy business card our way.

I’m relieved—okay, he’s just shilling his tours, no harm, no foul. I figure I should ask him about the stone crabs—how they’re caught, how they’re processed, and so forth, to see if Everglades City has fully earned its reputation. “I worked on crab boats for years,” says Clarkson, motioning to the pile of traps on the riverbank. “Let me show you how it works.” He walks me through the process, demonstrating with his hand how the crabs fall into the funnel-shaped top in search of food, then can’t get out. “It’s hard work, going out before sunrise, out there all day,” he says. His buddy laughs: “That’s why you quit doin’ it!” Clarkson tells us there are 90,000 traps in Everglades City, making it the largest producer in the U.S. Sounds right.

Our claws arrive back at the table and we figure that’s the end of our conversation. But Clarkson pulls up his chair and announces he’s going to show us how to get the most meat out of the claws. Sure, a tip from a local—this will be good for the story I’m already drafting in my head. He places the claw atop his open palm, then whacks it with the back of a spoon. The shell comes splintering off in big pieces, revealing a thick nugget of sweet, juicy meat. I thank him for his service.

Clarkson pulls up a chair. “You ladies know anything about Everglades City in the ‘80s?” he asks. I shrug. My mom, however, apparently does. “I remember reading something about the War on Drugs,” she says. This is the right answer. Clarkson leans in close.

“I have $10 million in movie rights on my name,” he says. “I ran this town. I had condos, planes, a recording studio in Nashville. I had 14 kids—not all of them biological, maybe, but I took them in as my own and supported them. Not bad for a sixth-grade flunkout,” he goes on, slapping his thigh.

It all started, Clarkson continues, when he was 16. His daddy, a fisherman, was too sick to go out on the water, and so Clarkson, who had indeed been kicked out of school in junior high for setting off cherry bombs in the toilet, was out looking for mullet in his stead. As a 10th-generation Gladesman, he knew every curve in the mangroves like the lines on his palm—all the best spots to fish, to take shortcuts through the tall grass, to catch some shade under the unrelenting midday sun.

One day, young Clarkson was out on the boat when a well-dressed man with the nicest sunglasses Clarkson had ever seen motored up to him in a little dinghy. “I need your boat,” said the fancy man. “Well, I need my boat too,” said Clarkson. “If I don’t catch enough fish to make at least $100, my daddy will kill me.” The man laughed. “If you give me your boat for 24 hours, I promise I’ll give you enough money that your daddy won’t even remember the fish.” And so, 24 hours and a manila envelope fat with Benjamins later, Clarkson was officially in the drug-running business.

It worked like this, basically: The big importers were in Miami. The marijuana was from Jamaica and Colombia, loaded onto big ships just waiting to be picked up in the Gulf of Mexico. The importers needed guys like Clarkson, who had boats and knew the knotty waterways in their blood, to run the product between the motherships and back to shore under cover of night. They did it with false-bottomed fishing boats with fast motors—on a good trip, says Clarkson, he could make it to a pickup in Jamaica and back again in 24 hours. He didn’t get involved in the sales or distribution of the drugs, but he did get his brothers, cousins and father in on the transportation racket.

Everyone in town knew about it. Clarkson (whose family name is actually Davis changed his middle name to his surname; more on that in a minute) was far from the only guy the slick-talking dealer had approached. One local policeman estimated that “250 to 300 of the 534 village residents fish for a living, with ‘half, maybe three-quarters” of them suspected of taking part in the illegal enterprise,” reported one 1982 New York Times article about the burgeoning Everglades City drug trade.

“But I used my money for good,” insists Clarkson—who is loudly talking at the restaurant in plain view of anyone who cares to listen—“I made sure the church was taken care of, the hospitals. When my neighbor hit hard times, he wanted in on the business, and I told him, you don’t want to get involved in this stuff, but here’s $40,000. Just gave it to him, no questions asked.”

The waitress walks by and rolls her eyes at Clarkson’s friend, who has returned to his table to continue chain smoking, alone. My mother and I are glued to our seats, unsure of what to make of all this. Is it complete bullshit? It has to be bullshit. There is no way what this man is saying is true, but there’s no easy way for us to get out of his story, plus, it’s pretty entertaining (albeit slightly terrifying). And so he continues rattling off a list of his material goods and properties, boasting about “never hurting nobody,” and waxing nostalgic for the (many) women he once knew and loved.

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and Clarkson tells us, fleetingly, of getting caught. He’s vague with the details of the bust itself, perhaps viewing it as a personal failure he didn’t want to dwell on. He talks about sacrificing himself so his brothers could get less time, and of transferring his many assets to his many children so his exes couldn’t bleed him dry. Ultimately, he did 12 years behind bars, in federal, state and county jail for tax evasion.

He came home after that, back to Everglades City, where everyone knew what had happened and no one talked about it. He got married, then divorced. He had some more kids. He found religion—not quite God—but a spirituality of some sort, that allowed him to never have a bad day, to let things pass through him without leaving a scar. He took a guest stint on the Netflix series “Chasing Monsters,” about fishing ugly sea creatures in the Everglades. Eventually, he started his airboat operation.

At this point, we’ve finished our crabs, and, having run through polite disbelief, shock, and awe, we’ve just about run out of ways to react to Clarkson’s tale. We’ve been at Triad for nearly two hours and we’ve gotta get out of there. Perhaps sensing our agitation, Clarkson leaves our table by staring directly into my eyes, announcing, somewhat menacingly, that he can see through me, and telling us to check out his boat tours when we’re back in town. Shaken, we skedaddle when he’s in the bathroom, not wanting him to see our license plate number.

Back on the highway, we try to process. I don’t believe anything Clarkson said, but start furiously searching “Everglades City + drug smuggling + Will Clarkson Davis,” just to see what happens. It doesn’t take long for results to start popping up: “Everglades City Shifts from Fishing to Drugs,” reads one 1982 headline; in 1983 and 1984, the DEA executed two highly-publicized predawn raids in the tiny town as part of “Operation Everglades,” which lead to the seizure of 580,000 pounds of marijuana with an estimated street value of more than $252 million, and the arrest of nearly 80% of the adult male population of Everglades City. One article details the Davis brothers in particular, noting that agents seized six parcels of land belonging to the boys: Collier County, land in Tennessee, two condos, two planes, and four boats. I exhale slowly: He wasn’t lying.

At least not entirely.

Further reading reveals that there’s a long history of smuggling in Everglades City, dating to the turn of the 20th century, when residents smuggled in endangered animals, then later rum-running in the Prohibition era, and finally marijuana, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as the National Park Service enacted ever-stricter laws on commercial fishing, the previous mainstay of the local economy.

So it’s far from a black-and-white situation: a working-class town in the middle of nowhere gets squeezed out of its major source of income; tight-knit locals turn to illegal activity to survive; everyone knows, but no one talks. Gives a deeper meaning to the word “kin,” when you think about it.

The post The Crab-Fishing Drug King of Everglades City appeared first on Saveur.

I call the Japanese ramen restaurant Ichiran “Egg Hands.” It’s not that “Ichiran” is particularly hard to say, it’s that Egg Hands is what I remember most clearly about the first time I ate there.

Let me paint the scene: It’s 2 a.m. in Tokyo. My friend Leah had just arrived from New York, her circadian rhythms flipped completely upside-down, and she was hungry. I had been in the country for a week but now was operating on Leah time and at zombie-level efficiency. Leah needed food, and Ichiran was open, so out we went. It was late, and the streets were weirdly empty, with snoozing drunken salarymen sprawled on the sidewalks after missing the last train home. We wandered the eerie city for a while and eventually found the subterranean ramen shop.

Ichiran was founded in Fukuoka in 1960, and it only makes one type of ramen: pork-rich tonkotsu. Beyond that, Ichiran is known for what they call “low-interaction dining,” in which diners seat themselves in individual ramen booths, fill out ticket orders, and receive food from anonymous hands through a curtain-covered window. In other words, it’s possible—encouraged, actually—to eat an entire meal there without seeing or speaking to another human being.

I’ve written about the rituals of food culture Japan, and how these ways of doing things are often developed in the service of creating the best eating and drinking experience possible. At Ichiran, the low-interaction setup is designed partially to enhance the experience—there’s a lot of cheerful messaging in their materials about “focusing on your personalized ramen” in your little booth. But it’s also to reduce the stigma of being alone.

In Japan, the shame of losing face is a major motivator to behave in certain socially acceptable ways. Ichiran customers, nestled safely in their own ramen booths, get a break from the face-preserving pressures of modern life—safely ensconced in a steamy isolation booth, you are free to act without fear or shame. And if you are an American visiting Japan, Ichiran provides a safe space for you to not know what the hell you are doing without embarrassing yourself.

The formula has proved popular: Ichiran currently operates almost 60 locations in Japan. And now, as of last month, it also runs a restaurant in Brooklyn.

Back in Tokyo, Leah and I were delirious, hungry, and completely unsure of how to proceed. We punched some random buttons on the machine. After a few failed attempts, we managed to successfully figure out where sit down in neighboring booths, and pulled back the partition dividing us (this is a little-discussed aspect of the Ichiran experience— you can actually share your booth with another person, should you so desire). We filled out our papers, mercifully in English, indicating how rich we’d like our broth and how firm we’d like our noodles. And then, moments later, a pair of disembodied hands emerged from the curtain before us, holding a bowl containing a single egg, in its shell, and a tiny packet of salt.

We stared at the egg. We didn’t know what to do with it. Was it cooked? It felt heavy. The ramen was still MIA. Did they go together, or was this just a random egg, emerging from the abyss, a cryptic message from the universe? We had no one to ask, obviously.

Eventually a bowl of ramen appeared from the same (or were they?) anonymous hands, and we cracked the egg—soft-boiled, it turned out—into the broth, where it bobbed around and eventually sank.

The ramen was good. Not great, but rich and salty in the way you want 2 a.m. ramen to be, with a fiery blob of housemade chile paste to wake us up. We left unsure if we did anything right, but we remember our confusing meal there fondly, and we’ve taken to referring to Ichiran as Egg Hands ever since.

Now, after several stalled attempts, Ichiran has finally expanded its operations to America, landing in a distinctly unglamorous stretch of Brooklyn’s industrial Bushwick neighborhood. Their massive space is part-restaurant, part noodle factory, and will act as commissary if and when the chain is able to expand in New York, as the company hopes it will. A year to the day after our meal in Tokyo, Leah and I decided to pay a visit.

Things were different from the moment we walked in: unlike in Japan, the restaurant here is split into two distinct rooms: one communal dining area with regular tables, the other the same partitioned-booth setup we encountered in Tokyo. There was an actual human host to greet and seat us, even as we entered the solo booth room (which also has an electronic seating chart, but it’s just for looks), and a cheerful cashier stationed near the door. The ramen booths themselves were wider and airier, and though the bamboo curtain remained, a waiter bent down to talk to me at one point, revealing his entire smiling face.

Some spects remained the same, however: the menu is virtually identical, and you still fill out a little paper ticket to customize your bowl. Waiters are summoned with a call button, and food is delivered through the curtain. The ramen itself looked and tasted almost the same as it did in Tokyo—if anything, it actually tasted better in Brooklyn. But there was one glaring difference that Leah and I could not move past: no egg hands.

“We haven’t found the right chicken to lay the right egg,” said our waiter, peeking out from beneath the curtain. “We actually have a guy in Japan dedicated specifically to finding eggs, and he’s been running tests for three months. We can’t find the perfect ones just yet. It’s something we’re working on.”

On our way out, we struck up a conversation with the manager (something that would literally never happen at Ichiran in Japan), a native New Yorker who trained at Ichiran’s headquarters in Fukuoka. We told her about our night in Tokyo and our memory of the mysterious egg hands. She laughed at us. “The egg is actually a palate cleanser. You’re supposed to eat it with the salt before the ramen arrives,” she said. We stared at her, dumbstruck. “Right now we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to get Americans to crack their own egg,” she continued. “But we hope to have them here soon.”

As a foreigner in Japan, part of the pleasure of Ichiran is in not knowing what you’re doing, then doing it anyway. Even as you’re bumbling around, it’s okay, because Ichiran is designed as a safe space to be alone, and what you do when you’re alone can’t be that embarrassing. But in Brooklyn, low-interaction dining gives way to medium-interaction dining—a necessary adjustment to suit the American audience, maybe, but one that feels inherently at odds with the very thing that made Ichiran so special and weird to begin with.

I don’t know if I’ll be back to the Brooklyn Egg Hands—it feels a little too interpersonal for me. I think I’ll have to wait until they find the right chickens, or I’ll bring my own egg.

The post Japan’s Wildly Popular Ramen Isolation Booth Restaurant Has Come to America appeared first on Saveur.

Naomi Pomeroy runs one of Portland, Oregon’s most acclaimed restaurants, Beast, but her new cookbook, Taste & Technique, is dedicated to the art of home cooking. Pomeroy is an entirely self-taught chef whose restaurant is set up essentially like a dinner party in her home (everyone sits and eats the same meal at the same time), so she felt it important that her first cookbook speak directly to home cooks.

I know, because I spent the past two years helping her write it, painstakingly recording detailed instructions for folding dough and whipping cream, trying to capture in words the physical and mental processes that good cooks use to make great food.

Even in the early stages of discussing the book, Naomi had a specific mission: to arm readers with a series of fundamental culinary building blocks to master, mix-and-match, and level-up from.

As we worked on recipes together for the manuscript, we got into far more discussions about about recipe-writing that could fit into a cookbook. What makes a cookbook really work for home cooks? What does a pinch of salt really mean? And how do you distill such a physical process into easily digestible text?

All that, and more, below:

How does someone create recipes that are both detailed and approachable?
It was challenging to explain how to do things that just feel intuitive to me as a chef. I’d start by thinking about the end volume of a given recipe—okay, I know I need to end up with two cups of this sauce. Then it’s about adding up different amounts of ingredients, measuring, tasting, and taking lots of notes.

I got really into it—I went so far as to weigh my pinches of salt (it’s about two grams, or a quarter-teaspoon, in case you’re curious), because it’s learning how to properly season is one of the easiest ways to improve your home cooking. I provide specific salt and pepper measurements instead of instructing readers to season“to taste,” so you can learn how much to actually use.

After I had a draft of a recipe, I’d make it again following my own instructions, then I’d send it off to a recipe tester and friends to see how it turned out in their kitchens. All told, every recipe in this book got tested five or six times before we went to press.

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What was the hardest part of translating recipes for home cooks?
Some things worked right away, but others needed to be explained in so much detail, in ways that I’d never thought about articulating. The souffle, for example—I had never thought as much about how to properly whisk eggs to achieve the right lift as I did when we wrote that recipe.

Or the puff pastry—I gave that recipe to my stepmom, who had never seen it before, and it was from her notes that we learned her oven was different from mine, and so we needed to tweak the timing, and include a photo of the finished puff so people knew what color to aim for in case their ovens heat differently. It’s all because I want people to walk away from this feeling like they’ve honestly learned something.

What do you wish more recipes included?
I wish more cookbooks emphasized the importance of tasting things repeatedly while you cook. Dishes evolve as you make them, and it’s important to delve into the process so you’re constantly editing yourself and making your technique better.

You need to taste so you can get to know your own cooking style and preferences. Once you’ve cooked a recipe enough times, you can stop measuring everything so carefully and start cooking to taste. Some cooks like more salt and more acid or less oil and less spice, and that’s all okay, but you won’t know if you aren’t constantly checking in with your own palate, and soliciting opinions from the people you’re feeding.

How do you read a cookbook?
The way I like to approach cookbooks is to read them all the way through, like a regular book. For Taste & Technique, I am a professional chef, but I’m also entirely self-taught, so it was important to me to write something that felt detailed but also very approachable. There are a lot of things that separate professional chefs from home cooks, but some of them are quite easy to bring into your home.

Like what?
I always recommend reading whole recipes from start to finish before starting anything, and gathering all ingredients and doing any prep work that you can ahead of time. Getting organized—both physically and mentally—is one of the biggest ways to improve as a home cook.

But the most important thing is really that you feel good about what you’re doing when you’re in the kitchen. When you’re putting yourself into the act of cooking, and working hard to create something to the best of your ability, it should create joy for you and the people you’re feeding. I know it sounds cheesy, but I can’t stress this enough—cooking should make you happy.

You taught yourself how to cook from cookbooks. What were some that were the most useful in developing your skills as a chef?
The most useful early on were the Time Life “Good Cook” books— they were single-subject (“Breads!” “Sauces!” “Eggs and Cheese!”) and very in-depth, filled with beautiful illustrations and photographs. Richard Olney edited the series, and he also wrote Simple French Food, which I read cover to cover to understand more about what to think about when cooking.

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook was a huge one in terms of theory about cooking—Judy Rogers taught me a lot about the ideas behind how things go together. And of course, Chez Panisse Vegetables, which goes through vegetables in an encyclopedic fashion from A-Z, organized seasonally, and talks a lot about timing and the ethereal nature of food. I tried to combine aspects from all of those books into mine.

The post What Does It Take to Write a Good Recipe? appeared first on Saveur.

Plenty of people have written about how overwhelming it can feel to visit Japan as a foreigner, how there are so many stimuli that your entire nervous system overloads and explodes into smithereens, rendering you a gap-mouthed sack of awe and wonder. This is true: Things are crazy in Japan! They have ramen-dispensing robots!

But really, things aren’t so crazy. Japanese culture is highly structured, and there’s an order to most everything, from the bullet trains to the bento boxes, and particularly the drinks. Be it beer, whiskey, coffee, or tea, the rules and rituals endemic to Japanese drinking turn ordinary experiences into something ineffably special, from the cocktail-bar owner who changes his glassware seasonally to the barista brewing your coffee with a chemist’s precision.

There are a few guiding principles that shape food and drink specifically, and one of the most striking is the general respect for shokunin. Shokunin translates literally to “artisan,” but in Japan, it’s more than that—it’s the people who dedicate their lives, physically and mentally, to perfecting a single craft. Knife-makers following ancient traditions are shokunin, but so too may be brewers or bartenders. Craft permeates all aspects of Japanese life.

All this time and effort shows in the quality of the end product, but it goes beyond matters of simple taste: In Japan, part of your deal with shokunin is to follow the proper way to consume the food or drink they’ve painstakingly prepared. It’s not ceremony for the sake of ceremony; it’s ritual designed to help you, the eater or drinker, have the most enjoyable experience possible.

“There is a deeply-rooted belief that you should approach making food and drink with a level of dedication and respect, and then the person receiving it will notice, and it will affect their experience in a certain way,” says Matt Goulding, the editor of Roads and Kingdoms and the author of the recently-released Japan travel guide Rice, Noodle, Fish. When everything goes according to plan, both the maker and the consumer end the experience satisfied.

It’s a lesson I took to heart while visiting Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, to see how shochu gets made. Shochu is a spirit made from grains (rice, barley, buckwheat), sweet potatoes, or brown sugar, fermented with different types of koji (inoculated rice) and distilled into a clear liquor that’s the beloved workaday spirit of southern Japan.

Shochu drunk straight, on the rocks, or diluted with hot water or lemon soda, and shochu proponents boast it doesn’t cause hangovers (a claim I’m not sure science supports). Needless to say, it too has its shokunin, called toji: master distillers who dedicate their lives to producing superior shochu, tending to giant clay vats of fermenting grains and carefully filtering and diluting the distilled alcohol into a palatable sipping spirit.

The proper way to appreciate the toji‘s work, as it turns out, is to have a grand old time while drinking their shochu. So drink I did, at hotpot restaurants and tiny izakayas and high-end tempura counters. I was assigned a seat and poured glass after glass, first with polite deference, in keeping with the unspoken rules of Japanese hospitality; and later with unfettered glee as we grew tipsy and loose.

I experienced the phenomenon of what shochu enthusiasts call “dai yame,” or being “woken up by shochu,” which is what happens when you drink a lot of it. I snacked on dried stingray strips dipped into Kewpie mayo to offset the alcohol; I gamely karaoke’d The Beatles when the night demanded it. Taken together, these activities constitute a yokaban, regional slang for, roughly, “good night out [typically fueled by shochu],” and it’s an integral part of both social and professional life in Kyushu.

By participating in said yokaban, I was nailing my role in the night-out play—the script called for me to have a good time, so a good time I would have, dammit. It’s not that drinking back home in the U.S. isn’t fun. But when you’re a foreigner unattuned to local customs, it’s liberating to acknowledge your lack of knowledge and follow a procedure designed to ease you into a good time. The end result, whether a raucous night out or refined tea ceremony, is almost always worth it.

On my last night in Japan, a Japanese friend in Tokyo took me out for a proper sendoff. We ate and drank copiously at no fewer than five separate establishments, growing hazier and heavier with each stop through the city’s labyrinthine neon alleys. At some ungodly hour, she led me to something that appeared to resemble a fallout shelter under a highway; a bar called Track.

Inside, the bar was meticulous. There was flattering low lighting and vintage movie posters in the bathroom and a DJ wearing a white lab coat, carefully selecting jazz records from a well-organized wall of shelves behind him. (Suffice it to say, to Goulding’s point, that the mood was affecting my experience in a certain positive way.) At the bar, when you order a shochu or a whiskey on the rocks, the bartender spends about 10 minutes hand-chiseling a chunk of ice into a perfect sphere that fits perfectly into its Old Fashioned glass, upon which a perfect pour of liquor is bestowed.

I ordered a Japanese single malt and the bartender began his ritual. I waited for him to slide the glass across the bar, so I could begin mine, to swirl, sip, smile, and nod. And as we followed these rules, everything came together in perfect harmony—the aesthetic, the soundtrack, the spirit, the bartender’s craftsmanship—and that same drink I’d mindlessly sipped at a hundred bars in the past suddenly tasted very fine indeed.

The post Learning to Drink the Japanese Way appeared first on Saveur.

It’s 90 degrees and humid, and I’m covered in rubber, pitching a shovel around a pool of neon-pink water to scrape a powdery white substance off its surface. While most people come to the South of France to sunbathe in Saint Tropez or frolic through the lavender fields in Provence, I’m here to harvest sea salt, shovel and all.

You might think that learning about the production of an essential mineral is a strange way to spend your summer vacation, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But every year, over 100,000 people travel to the salt ponds, or salins, in the Camargue, a vast and wild river delta that empties out into the Mediterranean Sea, to see where the Salins Group (best known for making La Baleine, the salt with the whale logo) pumps out 280,000 tons of salt a year.

Of course, these salins aren’t the only place to see salt in its natural habitat. There are major production facilities in other parts of France, as well as Spain, Brazil and California, among others, for salt has been a necessary and sought-after substance for centuries. Empires have been built and destroyed over the stuff, and it’s been used as currency (even today, the word “salary” comes from the Latin salarium, or “salt money.”) And though kings and crusaders are no longer starting wars over the mineral, it has in modern times become increasingly fetishized in the kitchen, with bespoke salts symbolizing a certain luxurious terroir—just ask anyone who shops at The Meadow, a mini-chain of upscale salt boutiques owned by Mark Bitterman, who also wrote a self-described manifesto on the subject, Salted.

Man Harvesting Fleur de Sel

Here in the Camargue, you can see the salt long before you get to the pools themselves; four mountainous piles of grey-white powder rise up above the horizon, visible from the Medieval-era gated walls of the neighboring town, Aigues-Mortes (literally “dead water,” which is unfortunate, given that the town itself is rather charming). At these particular salins, they make all kinds of salt: coarse sea salt for industrial purposes, fine and coarse sea salt for everyday eating, and the crown jewel of the sea salt world: fleur de sel, the crunchy finishing salt prized by chefs for its taste and texture.

While I’m no salt snob, it’s this last one that I’m really here to see; fleur de sel is hand-harvested every August in a process overseen by a small team of sauniers, master salt shepherds who monitor the weather and the water with a Yoda-like intensity. Making salt, you see, is really about water, wind and sunlight, so it’s good to keep a Zen attitude about the work. “My job is to observe nature,” says Patrick Ferdier, a saunier who’s been there for 30-plus years. It’s a solitary job, and one that’s less-publicized than, say, a sommelier, with just 10 men (and they’re all men) responsible for monitoring 60 kilometers worth of interlocking salt canals. “I’m alone all the time,” adds Ferdier. “It’s fantastic.”

Sea salt in the Camargue is born like this: In March, fresh water starts filtering into the canals from the Mediterranean. It spends the next six months circulating through the canals, slowly evaporating and becoming increasingly salty, as well as increasingly pink, thanks to the presence of salt-loving, microscopic shrimp swimming around in it (the wild flamingos that live in the wetlands get their hue from gorging on it). At the end of summer, when the water is at peak saltiness, it’s directed into flat, shallow salt tables, where the salt crystallizes into visible chunks.

Flamingps in South of France

Early mornings in August, a team of wader-clad salt workers—many of whom are local students working seasonally—rakes the fleur de sel off the surface by hand and piled into miniature ivory mountains in the rose-tinted water. The rest of the salt forms into a thick cake that sinks down; it’s harvested mechanically in September. It’s demanding physical work—after just a few minutes, my arms grew tired from the constant shovel-and-twist motion, while I gaped in awe at the real workers, who had been out since sunrise. (Labor starts around dawn and ends around noon every day, when it starts to get hot.)

Despite the physical realities of the job, the otherworldly allure of the scenery is hard to deny. “You learn to read the signs of nature,” says Ferdier, who shoveled plenty of salt in his day before graduating to the level of saunier. If, for example, he sees a certain kind of snake, “I know rain is coming,” he claims.

After harvest, very little happens to the fleur de sel. It’s sifted and cleaned to remove any stray debris, then packed into cute little containers (in France, it’s sold as Le Saunier de Camargue Fleur de Sel, and hand-signed by the head saunier responsible for each batch.) Visitors nearly always pick up a few containers at the salin‘s gift store, and it’s on virtually every restaurant table in the surrounding towns. It’s a tidy little way to package a natural commodity, one that belies just how low-tech the manufacture methods truly are. The sauniers like that, though—they’re not in this business for the glamour of it, they’re just the salt of the, well, you know.

“Out here, it’s a 24 hour job,” says Ferdier, scanning the sun across the horizon. “And nature is your only boss.”

Shovels on Salt in France

Where to Eat:
In Aigues-Mortes, the charcuterie Sabdes Freres on Grand Rue Jean Jaures (just off the main town square) is the place to stock up on pates, rillettes, savory pies, and tarts, all made in-house. Just down the street, pick up an airy, sugar-encrusted fougasse (flatbread) at Olmeda bakery.

Head to the quaint seaside town of Saintes Maries de la Mer for pretty Mediterranean beaches and fresh seafood galore. At the little outdoor seafood market/restaurant with the blue awning next to La Chamade on beachfront Avenue Van Gogh, try local oysters, tiny grey shrimp fried and eaten whole, and little whelks plucked from their shells with metal skewers.

Where to Stay:
Hotel les Templiers in Aigues Mortes is a renovated merchant’s house with charm to spare, including a funky contemporary art collection, lush courtyard, and small but refreshing outdoor pool. Breakfast is included; say hi to the owner’s friendly terrier, Raoul.

Where to Play:
A horseback tour on the region’s famed white steeds is one of the best ways to go deeper in the Camargue, offering the opportunity to traverse car-free roads across the wild delta. Stop in the local tourist office in Aigues-Mortes or Le Grau-du-Roi for information on hiring a local guide.

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Of all the recipes I carry from my mother’s kitchen, the one that the means the most is the one I was never allowed to eat.

All through my childhood, my mother baked Arlene’s coffee cake for other people’s special occasions. The imposing creation stays moist for days, making it an ideal bake-ahead offering for baby showers and bat mitzvahs. Our house would swell with the intoxicating perfume of cinnamon and brown sugar for hours on end whenever mom got down to business, but the cakes were strictly off-limits to me and the rest of the family. “Out, out, out!” mom would holler, brandishing a kitchen knife like a samurai sword to keep us away from the cooling counter. It was torture.

I wasn’t the only one who went gaga for the cake. It has a long history of driving people in my family crazy. Arlene was my grandparents’ neighbor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. After tasting her coffee cake at a neighborhood cocktail party my grandmother declared, “I must have that recipe!” and Arlene gamely obliged. In the generations since, the recipe has traveled down my family tree, bewitching everyone who’s tasted it, the instructions landing eventually with my mother as a newlywed in a tiny apartment in Chicago in the ‘80s. There and then, she introduced the cake to my father, who loved the cake from first bite.

When my mother would say that everybody loved the cake, she wasn’t exaggerating. She’s responsible for taking Arlene’s coffee cake public. After much urging from my father and friends, she began driving through the streets of Chicago with sample slices in tow, offering to sell the cake to any restaurant that would have it. One rinky-dink diner, Salt and Pepper Cafe, took her up on the offer, buying whole cakes for $20 each and selling them by the slice.

“I was just doing it for fun, but soon, I was baking six or seven cakes at a time in our little apartment,” my mom explained, which just about killed my father, who was no longer allowed to pick at the finished product. His saving grace came a few years later, when I was born, and mom stopped selling the cakes. But she still made them for special events, and, because she’s not entirely evil, would occasionally give in to our hounding and make one for the family, mainly, I assume, to shut us up.

Today, I have the recipe with me in New York on a frayed index card. But I’ve never attempted to make it. There’s not enough challenge to cutting myself a slice of my own cake, no sweet taste of victory after hours of scheming. Arlene’s coffee cake is a treat meant to be squabbled over, then savored—if I have a special occasion coming up, and if I have friends or family in town to torture, only then do I plan to uphold the tradition.

See the recipe for Arlene’s Coffee Cake »

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