Introduction 7 MEATS 119 SNACKS 11 FRUITs & VEGETABLES 149 BAKED GOODS 25 CEREALS, GRAINS, & POWDERS 189 DAIRY PRODUCTS 47 DEssERTs & CONFECTIONS 201 FISH & SHELLFISH 75 CONDIMENTS 233 DRINKS 263 POULTRY 109 Directory of Producers 274 Index 282 SNacKS BARBECUE POTATO CHIPS 12 BLacK WALNUTS 13 BOILED PeaNUTS 14 CHeeSE CracKerS 15 CHeeSE STrawS 16 CORN CHIPS 17 CracKLINGS (FRIED PORK RINDS) 18 MacaDamIA NuTS 19 OLIVES 20 PecaNS 21 PISTacHIOS 22 POpcORN 23 OLIVES PECANS The first olive trees in California were planted olive groves were moved north to Lindsay, in 1769 by Franciscan priests at the Mission in the San Joaquin Valley, but the olives of San Diego de Alcalá, in what is now San are still packed in Graber’s original home Diego. They turned out to be very well suited town. The Grabers grow two of the earliest to the local climate, and quickly spread north. California varieties, Manzanillos and By 1892, when the entrepreneurially minded Missions. Hand-picked, they are cured C. C. Graber headed west from Clay City, and packed without artificial treatment. Indiana, to Ontario, due east of Los Angeles, California black olives are oxidized to they were thriving in much of Southern that color; Grabers retain their natural hue, California. Graber may have had thoughts a color that must be described as, well, olive— of farming citrus, but he sampled cured olives sort of a yellowish-brownish green. They are made by his neighbors and liked them well rich in flavor, with a silky texture and a nutty enough to try to figure out how to make his flavor that seems purely, elementally olive. own, and make them better. They’re quite possibly the tastiest of all He planted olive trees and went into California olives—and the surprising thing business in 1894, and his family still farms is that they’re sold not in bulk or in glass and packs olives today. In 1963, the Graber jars, but in cans. According to an old joke, a proper Bostonian a buttery, slightly woody flavor, often tinged once asked a Texan if he called these native with bitterness—which may explain why they American nuts “PEE-kans” or “puh-KAWNS.” are so often encased in caramelized sugar for “Well, ma’am,” the Texan replied, “where I pralines (see page 227) or drowned in corn come from, puh-KAWNS grow in the front yard, syrup for pecan pie. and the PEE-kan’s out back.” Ba-dum-dum. Pearson Farm in Crawford County, in The pecan tree is a native of North America, west-central Georgia, is a fifth-generation growing wild particularly in the southern family-run enterprise best known for its Midwest, the South, and parts of Mexico. peaches and its pecans. Al Pearson and his Related to the hickory, it takes its English sisters, Ann and Peggy, took over the farm name from the term pacane, an interpretation from their parents in 1973. In 2008, the sisters by French explorers of the Cree word pakan, retired and Al’s son, Lawton, came into the meaning a hard-shelled nut. Though Americans business. The Pearsons grow two varieties of have enjoyed the fruit of the pecan tree for pecans, Desirable and Elliott. I actually find centuries (and Thomas Jefferson propagated the latter more, well, desirable; they’re a little pecans at Monticello), it wasn’t cultivated smaller, though still meaty, and may be slightly commercially until around 1880. The nut is sweeter than the Desirables. grown today in parts of South America, South Just as an aside, since it’s a different kind Africa, Australia, and China, but most of those of product altogether, I’m also very fond of eaten in the U.S. come from Georgia or Texas. Oren’s Kitchen Smoked Paprika Pecans, made Pecans are unique in appearance when in El Cerrito, California, just north of Berkeley. shelled, rectangular with rounded corners I don’t know where proprietor Arnon Oren and two furrows running down their center gets his nuts, or what variety they are, but (I’ve always thought they looked a little like he slow-roasts them with sea salt and Spanish miniature loaves of artisanal bread). They have pimentón (paprika), and they are mighty good. 20 The Taste of America Snacks 21 Sheep’S MILK YOGURT STRONG BLUE CHEESE The first time I visited the Old Chatham growth hormones and receive antibiotics only Sheepherding Company—in Columbia County, if they’re ill. The Old Chatham staff of five New York, southeast of Albany, between the employees and one border collie (Reggie) work Hudson River and the Berkshire Mountains— seven days a week; between three and four it was a tiny country inn with an excellent hundred ewes are milked twice daily, and the restaurant and a barn full of sheep on the milk is processed in state-of-the-art facilities. side. The owners of the bucolic 600-acre Sheep’s milk is higher in calcium, protein, (240-hectare) property, Tom and Nancy vitamins, and zinc than cow’s milk, and it is Clark, closed the inn and restaurant in 1999 more easily digested as well. It also converts to concentrate on the sheep and specifically splendidly into more complex products. on making cheese and yogurt from their milk. Old Chatham’s cheeses are excellent (their They now tend more than a thousand East Camembert is particularly good), but their Friesian purebred and crossbred ewes, and yogurt is unparalleled. It is made solely from claim to have the largest sheep dairy farm pasteurized sheep’s milk and active cultures, in America. with no stabilizers or thickeners added. There Sheep have fascinated Tom Clark ever since are several flavored varieties, including one he won a blue ribbon for his Hampshire sheep with pure maple syrup added and another at the Dutchess County Fair as a ten-year-old accented with crystallized ginger. The plain rural New York farmboy. He and Nancy version, though, is so full of flavor, with an are directly involved in every aspect of appealing creamy richness and a tangy sour their operation. Their fields are organically bite, that variations, however good, seem Maytag Blue—yes, that Maytag. The washing different in flavor, consistency, and even managed, and their animals are raised without beside the point. machine folks. At least, the same family. In color from Roquefort, but it became an 1941, in Newton, Iowa, the original home of American classic—and while there is plenty the Maytag Corporation, two young men named of competition these days (see, for example, Fred and Robert Maytag—grandsons of the page 60), it is certainly a blue cheese worth appliance company’s founder, Frederick Louis mentioning alongside just about anything Maytag I—began producing this cheese, using in that category made anywhere else in milk from a herd of award-winning dairy the world. cows kept by their father, E. H. Maytag. As with Roquefort, Maytag Blue—before (They later inherited the dairy from him.) it becomes blue cheese—is inoculated with The Maytag brothers were inspired to under- Penicillium mold, then aged in cool, damp take their project when they learned that, chambers, where the mold spreads throughout several years earlier, a couple of microbiologists the cheese, giving it its blue-green veins. at Iowa State University had developed Though the Maytag dairy no longer maintains a new technique for making blue cheese. its own milk cows, it does buy fresh milk The researchers had long been attempting from farmers in the surrounding area, and to make an American version of France’s the cheese is still made the way it was at first: esteemed Roquefort—one of the world’s great by hand, in small batches. It is a creamy rather blue cheeses, based on sheep’s milk—and had than crumbly blue, and has a forthright, tangy developed a way to produce what they believed flavor, though it is not as mouth-puckeringly was a similar product from homogenized cow’s intense as some blue cheeses. It goes very milk. (Among other things, they added an nicely with, among other things, full-flavored increased amount of rennet—the coagulating beer—for instance, Liberty Ale, from San agent in most cheese—and ramped up the Francisco-based Anchor Brewing, headed temperature at which the milk was allowed until his recent retirement by Maytag Blue to set.) Maytag Blue turned out to be very co-founder Fred Maytag’s son, Fritz. 66 The Taste of America Dairy Products 67 DUNGENESS CRAB This superbly tasty creature is named for wedges and the appropriate implements. Dungeness Bay, at the top of the Olympic Hardly a word was spoken as we all dug Peninsula in upstate Washington, and is the into this great treat. official state crustacean of Oregon, but as Among the merchants who will ship a native Californian I can’t help associating Dungeness crab, both live and cooked (and it with my home state and specifically with the in the form of extracted meat, though that place where I first encountered it: Fisherman’s takes away half the fun), is i love blue sea, Wharf in San Francisco. There, at least when a San Francisco-based company that bills I was younger (I haven’t been for a while), itself as the only online source for 100 percent the big seafood restaurants that line Jefferson sustainable seafood. Its founder, Martin Reed, Street and other nearby thoroughfares all says that it wasn’t until he left his native had sidewalk stands where you could buy Northern California for college in Tucson a cardboard container full of Dungeness that he realized how little good fresh fish and crabmeat, with cocktail sauce, to eat while shellfish was available to most of the country.