Archival photo of Alice Waters at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of CUESA

On May 18, CUESA will be celebrating the 20th Birthday Bash of the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, with special events throughout the Saturday morning market.

For $20 a ticket ($10 for children 10 and under), market goers can create their own seasonal fruit shortcakes at stations “curated” with market ingredients prepared by four top local pastry chefs: William Werner of Craftsman & Wolves, Francis Ang of Fifth Floor, Jen Musty of Batter Bakery, and Luis Villavelazquez of Les Elements Patisserie. There will also be coffee, tea, and a juice and mimosa bar filled with fresh-squeezed juices, fresh fruit and vegetable purees (don’t miss the surprisingly refreshing fennel-frond puree), sparkling water and Champagne. The market’s founders will do a presentation at 11am.

Preview of the mimosa bar

The first regular weekly markets, held in front of the Ferry Building, happened in 1993. Do you remember 1993? I do. The scars of 1989′s 6.8 Loma Prieta quake still criss-crossed the city. A post-earthquake, post-financial crash, pre-tech boom recession meant jobs were scarce but rents were cheap. But change was coming, mostly notably along the waterfront. Since 1958, the Embaracadero Freeway had sliced across the northeastern edge of the city, throwing the piers from the Bay Bridge northwards into concrete-shadowed gloom. Ferries still left from the Ferry Building, but to get to them, you scuttled as fast as possible through the building’s dimly lit, grubby passages, no more inviting than a New York City subway tunnel. Then, in 1991, the earthquake-damaged freeway was finally removed, and the City realized it had a civic jewel–the greatly underutilized Ferry Building, suddenly revealed in all its Market Street-anchoring glory–on its hands. It would take another seven years before renovations would begin that would return the Ferry Building to a modernized, food-glorying version of its original 1898 self–but in the bare stretches of concrete out front (remember, those pretty, palm-dotted, skateboard-ready plazas are still at least a decade away), a culinary revolution was getting underway, one head of oak-leaf lettuce at a time.

Aerial view of an early Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market across from the Ferry Building. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

In 1992, a small group of San Franciscans including Sibella Kraus, then a forager and produce-finder for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, writer, restaurant critic and Hayes Street Grill chef/owner Patricia Unterman, and local developer Tom Sargeant organized themselves into the San Francisco Public Market Collaborative, with the idea of reclaiming the waterfront for a public market that would connect farmers directly with chefs and home cooks–in fact, with any curious city eaters. After endless meetings with representatives from the City and the Port, they got grudging approval for a one-time-only open-air market in Ferry Plaza parking lot on Sept. 12, 1992. At the time, the Alemany Market, located near the freeways at the base of Bernal Heights, was the city’s only regular farmers’ market. If you were a chef, you relied on distributors and vendors from the wholesale produce market near Bayview. If you needed speciality items, you could swing through Chinatown, the Richmond, or the Mission, if you had time, but mostly, you talked to your delivery guys on the phone, and hoped they’d show up with something close to what you’d asked for.

The success of the one-day market took even the optimists of the collaborative by surprise. The group immediately began pressuring the city to give permission for a regular market, bringing farmers and urbanites together on a weekly basis. By 1993, there was already a few months of precedent: the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market had set up in Civic Center in early spring. Starting in May, the market slowly gained momentum, and word spread between interested cooks and farmers alike. Here was the place to come to get stuff fresh, straight from the ground. Farmers were learning, too, that these new customers were curious. They didn’t just want as many bunches for a dollar as they could get; they wanted to sniff and taste and know what it was they were seeing. By the time the summer was over, the farmers didn’t want to leave. They’d found a new outlet for their produce, one that required a lot of more hands-on time, but also could command a better price that wholesaling. And there were relationships forming, between up-at-3-am farmers from Watsonville and Guinda and city customers who were entranced at the idea of farm-fresh corn and just-picked melons showing up just down the hills from their Telegraph Hill doorsteps once a week. After yet more negotiating with the city, and the market became a year-round event.

Eatwell Farm stand in the early years–no crowds! Photo: Courtesy of Eatwell Farms

And from the beginning, the chefs came, too. In those first years, as I was learning my way around the city’s food scene as the weekly restaurant critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, every trip to the market was punctuated by running into a half-dozen other food writers, editors, cookbook authors, and chefs. It was a pretty small world, and for a few hours every Saturday morning, it really was a village. (Look, there’s Alice, sniffing the peaches!) The original core group of founders had reorganized into CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture–none of which were the food-world buzzwords that they are today. From the beginning, the market’s organizers had a larger vision: to educate minds as well as palates, and to change the way people, both home cooks and chefs, thought about the process of getting food to their tables. Meeting farmers every week, hearing how the weather or gas prices or labor issues were affecting their crops, seeing how their produce was shaped not season by season but week by week, was a living education for everyone shopping at the market. And farmers learned, too: about what they could sell, what flew off the table and what, like puntarelle, minaret-shaped romesco broccoli, padron peppers, or fuzzy-sheathed green almonds, needed a little more nudging to get piled into the chefs’ carts and make it onto menus across the city.

David Winsburg of Happy Quail Farms, who helped create the craze for padron peppers. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

As the renovations of the waterfront and the Ferry Building got underway, the market moved to accommodate the construction, from various parking lots around the building, then north to another parking lot off Green Street near the Embarcadero. It remained for several years, then moved back, now to wrap around the Ferry Building, filling the back parking lot and wrapping around the building. I can still remember one blustery December 31, a vendor calling out, “Free rutabaga with every purchase!” and the delicious rutabaga-potato mash I made on New Year’s Day. Or the blissfully sunny February days, the market stalls glowing with sunshine-colored citrus, everyone outside eating oysters, when I’d come back to visit from self-imposed exile in gray, slushy, freezing New York City and wonder why I’d ever left. (Three years away from San Francisco was all I could stand.)

Autumn market sign. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

There was a brief, unsuccessful attempt at a Sunday morning market; much more popular were the two lunchtime markets for downtown workers and weekday visitors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Innovations at the market–from the Waste Wise initiative, which brought large-scale composting and recycling to the market, to the ban on plastic shopping bags, later adopted by the city as a whole, has made a small but significant change for the better in the way we shop and eat. Hundreds of schoolchildren come through the market every year, learning where their food comes from, and how it gets from dirt to plate.

Info Booth at Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

Every day, says executive director David Stockdale, he talks with people from all over the world who are interested in learning from the market. Many of the vendors with brick-and-mortar shops inside the Ferry Building–Michael Recchiuti, Frog Hollow Farm, Prather Ranch, and soon Rancho Gordo and Humphrey Slocombe–started out as vendors in one of the three weekly markets. It’s become not just a market but an educational tool, a visitors’ destination, a fun place to go for breakfast or lunch, and a showcase for some of Northern and Central California’s best produce, week in and week out. Happy birthday, CUESA, and thank you for all you’ve done.

Do you have memories of the early days of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market? Please share in the comments section, below.

SHED exterior facade

What would a locavore’s paradise in wine country look like? For a certain type of well-heeled agrarian, a whole lot like SHED, Healdsburg’s 21st-century grange, grocery, farm store, cafe, bar and event space.

Healdsburg SHED exterior

At first glance, it looks like the prettiest airplane hanger you’ve ever been in, with its huge, boxy shape and garage-style doors, all metal and glass. Grab the handle of that spade doubling as a door handle, step inside, and the enormous space resolves itself into a luxuriously uncrowded farm-to-table playground.

But first, grab a cappuccino from the coffee bar front and center, because everything looks rosier with a foam heart in hand. Admire the spotless white marble counters, the equally pristine bunches of frilly lettuce, the baskets of fresh-from-the-farm eggs, ecru to aqua.

Tall, pale wooden shelves display crayon-bright Japanese coffee pots and Spanish earthenware casseroles. On a wide slab of salvaged sycamore dubbed the “story table,” massive flower arrangements worthy of a Dutch still life spill their blossoms over an educational display of German-made alternative beehives.

Bee Table at SHED

Afternoon sunshine lights up the Dutch and English gardening tools hanging on the walls, glowing across the copper jam pots and hand-carved wooden tortilla presses. It all feels like a Kinfolk magazine spread come to life and tastefully available for purchase. That soft-as-ricotta, brown-as-molasses yarn? Spun from gentle black sheep. The house-fermented cider vinegar? Tap it from the barrel, if you’ve remembered to bring your own bottle. Nothing is made of plastic; nothing has a plug.

Vinegar barrels at SHED

This is not make-do, duct-tape DIY; everything here, from the beakers of fruit shrubs (sweet-tart, vinegar-based drinks, infused with fresh fruit and fizzed with soda water) and bright-magenta beet kvass at the fermentation bar to the galvanized buckets of peonies and the baskets loaded with chocolate-brown loaves of bread the size of watermelons has been curated with an eye for beauty, taste, and usefulness.

Take butter, for example, so necessary with those huge loaves from M.H. Bread and Butter. (Baker Nathan Yanko used to work with bread star Chad Robertson at Tartine in the Mission, so his loaves are as close as the wine country gets to Robertson’s cult-status levains.) Some half-dozen types of butter–cow, goat, sea salted and packed into ceramic crocks–reside in the dairy case. But is that too easy for you? Then pick up a bottle of organic cream, a hand-cranked German butter-making jar, and a couple of wooden butter paddles for shaping the result into decorative pats. What else could you have to do?

Duck into the cleaning nook nearby and you’ll find all the necessaries for fulfilling those downstairs Downton Abbey fantasies: plumy ostrich-feather dusters with 40-inch handles, perfect for polishing chandeliers; crooked hand-carved broomsticks, possibly too witchy to pass muster with Mrs. Hughes but absolutely Quidditch-ready; wooden scrub brushes of which even Mr. Carson would approve, with nary an electric toaster in sight.

SHED co-owner Cindy Daniel

SHED is the vision of owners Doug and Cindy Daniel, who created it as a celebration of Sonoma’s agricultural heritage, as a place where all kinds of crops are grown and products made, not just the wine that puts in on the map. The Daniels provide much of the vegetables, flowers, fruit, and eggs on display from their own 16 acres in the Dry Creek Valley, which they’ve dubbed HomeFarm, where 11 acres are under mixed organic and biodynamic cultivation, and the other 5 as native riparian habitat. They have Rhone-varietal grapes growing for wine, French olive trees for oil, chickens, sheep, bees, heirloom-variety orchards, including curiosities like medlars, jujubes, and pineapple guavas, plus a market garden for vegetables and cut flowers. “It’s a patchwork of things that are all related,” says Cindy, much like the store she and her husband have created.

Mill at SHED

She’s particularly proud of the milling room, where small batches of locally grown, mostly heirloom strains of wheat and other grains are ground into flour every few days. (Most of the flour is sold in the shop; a portion of it goes to M.H. Butter for use in their breads.) The shop is also a pick-up point for grainshare subscribers to the Mendocino Grain Project, a CSA for locally grown grains, including wheat, oats, rye, and barley. Inspired by Native Seeds’ week-long Seed School workshop, Cindy found herself ever more interested in promoting Sonoma’s foodshed and encouraging self-sufficiency in the face of evolving climate change and energy crises. “There used to be a grain mill in Healdsburg,” she notes, glad to be reviving one of the area’s agricultural traditions, even if just on a home cook’s scale.

Larder at SHED

Nearby, the cool larder is “a room that talks about process,” as Cindy says, where customers can peer through the glass wall at wooden shelves filled with pickles and krauts fermenting, and cheeses and cured meats aging.

Hearth at SHED

It could hardly be a true 21st-century kitchen without a live fire burning somewhere, and so, of course, flames flicker in the hearth behind the open kitchen where chef Niki Ford oversees a daily-changing menu of eclectic breakfast and lunch fare. The heavy lifting of the kitchen gets done upstairs, in an additional production space off the main event room. The designer of Boulette’s Larder in the Ferry Building consulted, and it shows: the spacious, pristine kitchen is lavished with All-Clad saucepans hanging from racks above the counters, while tall woven baskets bristle with whisks as long as shinbones and massive stock pots steam on the stove.

Production Kitchen at SHED

In the morning, locals and visitors alike can perch at one of the blond-wood tables in the open cafe area, waiting for bowls of fiber-rich hot porridge slow-cooked overnight to reach a texture described by Ford as “between gruel and chewy grains,” lavished with butter, sea salt, and damson plum jam. Those that haven’t yet foresworn gluten can treat themselves to a “toast service” of thick slabs of Yanko’s bread, toasted with butter, jam by local “jamstress” Elissa Rubin-Mahon, and housemade chocolate-hazelnut spread, or dig into “Doug’s poached eggs” over toast with oregano, sea salt, and a drizzle of HomeFarm balsamic vinegar and olive oil. A Persian breakfast, inspired by the cooking of an Iranian friend of Ford’s, is a mix-and-match assortment of feta cheese, walnuts, sour cherry jam, herbs, and more of that great bread.

Fermentation Bar at SHED

Coming in at the civilized, city-brunch hour of 1pm, we’re sorry to have missed the 11am cutoff for Ford’s heirloom-grain waffles with quince jam and maple syrup. Instead, glasses of blueberry shrub in hand, we plunge straight into the savory side, with a briny bowl of clams bathed in cilantro and cream. A previous menu offered flatbread topped with nettles, cardoons, preserved lemon and local Highway 1 cheese, but today’s offering is as straightforward as any 5 year old could desire: a pizza with tomato sauce and cheese, on a pleasantly puffy-chewy crust. At the fermentation bar–which pours not only both wine and beer on tap but kefir, kombucha, kvass, and cider–we catch up with Ellen Cavalli and Scott Heath of Tilted Shed Ciderworks, who are lunching with their young son. The bar serves their ciders, and also ferments some of it into cider vinegar, using it as a base for the shrubs and offering it in bulk from a barrel on the other side of the store.

Ford, who shares a Chez Panisse pedigree (and friendship) with Suzanne Drexhange of Bartavelle, also shares a fondness for hand-carved boards laid out with savory deliciousness. Around us, many diners are nibbling the ploughman’s lunch, generous slabs of Fiscalini cheddar from Modesto, rye bread, apples, pickled onions, and chutney, or munching their way through the salads on the mezze plate, served with housemade crackers, feta, and olives. Nettle soup is greener than grass, bold as fresh money. “We want to make a lot of room for grains, legumes, vegetables, roots,” says Ford. “There’s a lot of sophistication in making vegetables.” It’s all part of an appreciation for “what we have in our hands, being thoughtful about the ingredients,” an attitude that Ford hopes the cooks will learn to share even during busy moments on the line, all deepened by the relationships they’re building with the farmers and gardeners supplying the kitchen.

The Daniels have plans for frequent events upstairs; already, they’ve hosted Deborah Madison in conversation with local food writer and author Michele Anna Jordan about Madison’s new book, Vegetable Literacy; sponsored a showing of Queen of the Sun, a documentary about the global bee crisis; and hosted a three-course, family-style Sunday Supper featuring the produce and farmers from Bernier Farms. On May 18, bring your knives and brush up on your Knife Skills with Rian Rinn. On May 26, there will be an all-American family-style Sunday Supper out on the patio with live music. And on June 8, butcher Rinn will be hosting Hog It Up, a hog butchery demo & pop-up dinner with chefs Ian Mullen and Jason Smith of Mullen & Smith.

Information:
Healdsburg SHED
Address: Map
25 North St
Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone: (707) 431-7433
Hours: Mon-Sun 7am-7pm
Facebook: Healdsburg SHED
Twitter: @healdsburgshed

First up are fava beans, those long, plump pods that stretch and swell at the first touch of spring warmth. Buy a big bag of favas. Many more than you think you need. Think of each fava pod as a Gulfstream jet–ample, cushy, and much too large for the three or four fat-cat beans reclining inside. Now, put a pot of water on to boil, and crank up something you really like to listen to. You’re going to be here a while. But not as long as you might think, thanks to the brilliance of food scientist and author Harold McGee.

Take your bag of favas and strip off all those foamy pods. Don’t worry about their pallid little raincoat skins yet.

Now, here’s the great trick: When the water boils, add about a tablespoon of baking soda per quart of water. According to McGee, “Acidity maintains the structure of plant cell walls, and alkalinity breaks it down.” So, adding something alkaline–like baking soda–to your blanching water “weakens the fava seed coats enough that many of them rupture on their own in a couple of minutes at the boil, and the remainder easily break between finger and thumb.” If you’ve ever sat around peeling favas for what can feel like hours at a time, you know what an amazing breakthrough this is. Thank you, Harold! (You can find more juicy details on McGee’s website, Curious Cook.)

Dump your de-podded favas into your alkalinized water. Let come back to a boil and simmer for a minute or two. Drain and rinse with cold water until cool enough to handle. If they haven’t already busted their coats, pinch off the now-slippery and grayish-pink outer skin and discard. (You may need to rinse the finished beans again to remove any remaining skin debris.) Drop the pretty bright-green bean halves inside into a little bowl. Yes, a little bowl. That’s all you’ll need, trust me, since your two pounds of favas will only net you about 1 1/3 cups of fully denuded beans. Slide your now double-peeled favas into a small skillet with a little olive oil, a few tablespoons of water and a pinch of sea salt.

Cook them, stirring, over low heat until tender and nutty tasting, probably around five minutes, maybe less. If you have one of those cute little mini-food-processors, scoop your favas (and whatever liquid might be around them) into the processor, add a squeeze of lemon juice, a little more olive oil and/or water, and pulse to a rough puree. Not too smooth; this isn’t hummus.

Otherwise, stamp them into a rough paste with one of those waffle-grid-headed potato mashers. (I think if you tried to chop them they’d just go slithering off in every direction all over the counter, and after all that work, you don’t have any to waste.)

Add some freshly ground pepper (preground pepper is as useless, and tasteless, as sand), and taste. Does it taste creamy and nutty and green? Good. Only add more salt and/or lemon if it tastes flat; lemon juice can really jump right out at you and that’s not what you want here. However, if you’re lucky enough to have some Moroccan-style preserved lemons sitting around, you could add a tiny bit of minced preserved-lemon rind to the fava-bean mixture, just to spark it up. Set aside.

Strip some mint leaves from their stems. Lay the leaves one on top of the other in a little leaf stack. Roll up like a cigar and cut into very fine strips. Ah, mint chiffonade. Two words like the tinkle of clear ice in a tall gin and tonic on a summer afternoon–the two words Henry James considered the most lovely in the English language. (No, not mint chiffonade, nor gin and tonic, more’s the pity, but summer afternoon. And this from a man wearing a high collar, waistcoat, suit and tie in the middle of July.)

Then you need a chunk of Pecorino Romano cheese, a firm, salty sheep’s milk cheese similar to Parmesan, and a vegetable peeler. You could use Parmesan instead, but in that case I’d look for a young Parmesan, one that’s still got a little sweetness and elasticity to it, rather than one gone all stark and aged and granular. You could also use a Spanish Manchengo, or my new favorite, an Italian Gran Cacio, a firm sheep’s milk cheese found on a quick trip to the Bi-Rite Market cheese display.

Now, cut some very thin slices of baguette. Toast lightly, which is best done on a baking sheet in the oven at around 350°F, for about 5 to 7 minutes. Rub the top side very lightly with a clove of garlic, or even better, with a juicy little chunk of green garlic.

But wait, green garlic? What is that, exactly? So glad you asked! It’s the bulb and stem of the garlic plant in its early stages, before the bulb swells and the cloves separate in the fat, familiar, papery-white bundle we know. At this moment, the bulb is barely a nubbin and the stalk is still flexible and edible. It has the texture of a young leek or extra-firm scallion and a taste that mixes the vegetal greenness of leek with a hint of the earthy warmth of the garlic to come. Basically, these are thinnings, pulled to give more elbow room to the bulbs ripening in the late summer and fall. They seem to be particularly relished (and sold) at farmers’ markets in Northern California, where they have a brief season as harbingers of spring, much like favas, pea shoots, and the first rhubarb and strawberries. Here’s a lovely green-garlic pesto recipe from Stephanie Stiavetti, my KQED colleague and fellow food-writing Stephanie.

Now, back to your baguette slices, waiting for you all garlicked up. Have you noticed how seasonal this little nibble is? How local? Everything, from bread to olive oil to favas, lemons, and mint, can come from some combination of backyard and farmer’s market. (For cheese, try Bellwether’s Pepato, a peppercorn-studded semi-firm sheep’s milk cheese made in Valley Ford.)

Drizzle or brush some good olive oil on your toasts. Return to the oven to continue crisping up and browning. You don’t want it much more than golden brown around the edges, but you do want it nice and crunchy all the way through. The oven is better for this kind of slow crisping than the toaster, which will give you fast brown edges but a chewy center.

Once your toasts are ready, spread a spoonful of fava mixture onto each toast. Don’t be stingy, baby! Swirl it on nice and thick, like icing on a cupcake. Strew a few mint shreds over the favas. Using your little vegetable peeler, add a couple sheer curls of Pecorino Romano cheese. Nicest served while the toasts are still warm, but that’s a frill.

All this work and you will probably end up with anywhere from 10 to 12 toasts, depending on how many favas you could bear to peel. What this means, of course, is that, as with fried zucchini blossoms, these should only be served to a small group of people you really, really like.

Best of all, really, is sitting in the back garden, lilacs on the table, something sparkling in your glass, toasting your good fortune with your one very favorite, most fava-worthy friend, whether sweetheart or pal. Happy Spring!

Recipe: Fava-Bean Crostini

A recipe-memory mash-up of snacks enjoyed in Tuscany and an appetizer served over the years at Delfina in San Francisco.

Ingredients
• Fava beans, about 2 lbs (in the pod)
• 1 tablespoon baking soda, for blanching
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for brushing toasts
• 1-2 garlic cloves or 1 stalk of green garlic
• Juice of 1 lemon
• A small handful of mint leaves, cut into thin chiffonade
• A small chunk of Pecorino Romano cheese
• Flaky sea salt, such as Maldon
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Half a sweet baguette, sliced thinly

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Spread baguette slices on a baking sheet. Let toast lightly in oven until just crisp, 5-7 minutes. Rub each piece, on the top side, lightly with a garlic clove or piece of green garlic. Brush with olive oil. Set aside.
2. Peel the outer pods from the favas. Discard pods. Bring 1 quart of water to a boil. Add baking soda to water. Add favas and blanch for 2 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water to cool.
3. When favas are cool enough to handle, pinch off outer skins and discard. In a small saucepan, combine favas with a few tablespoons of water, a tablespoon or two of olive oil, and a pinch of sea salt. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently, until favas are tender, about 5 minutes. Add juice of half a lemon.
4. Using a small food processor or waffle-headed potato masher, break up the favas (and any liquid from the pot) into a rough paste. Add more lemon juice, salt, and freshly ground pepper to taste. Set aside.
5. Return baguette slices to the oven until crisp and just beginning to brown around the edges, 2-3 minutes.
6. Divide fava-bean mixture between baguette slices. Top with a few mint wisps, a few grains of sea salt, and a few curls of Pecorino Romano. Serve immediately, with a glass of Prosecco or Champagne.

Kale, Broccoli, Artichoke, Blue Flowers

Assess Your Space
How much growing space can you find? How much direct sun (and wind) will you have? San Francisco, in particular, is rife with micro-climates; growing a garden in the Outer Sunset is a very different proposition from planting in the Mission. You can grow lettuces, herbs, and hardy greens, like kale and collards, almost anywhere, but warmth-loving, sunshine-demanding plants like tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers need a reliable 6 to 8 hours of direct sunshine to ripen flavorfully. Making fruit (and seed-filled, fleshy vegetables like tomatoes and peppers count as fruit) takes a lot of effort on the plant’s part, demanding a much higher level of nutrients and food (in the form of sugars produced by photosynthesis) than those needed by leafy greens. So, if your yard is a shady one, don’t break your heart by planting lots of tomatoes that won’t ripen. Stick with cool-loving plants like lettuce, chard, and Asian greens.

Lettuces like cool weather.

Don’t Skimp on the Immediate Gratification
Starting from seed is the cheapest way to get a garden going. But it’s also the slowest, and depending on how slug/snail/bird-mobbed your beds are, it can also be the most dangerous, as just-sprouted tender seedlings are the most vulnerable to pest attacks.

If you need to see some evidence to stay interested, buy some well-established seedlings instead. And fun (and tasty) as tomatoes and potatoes can be, they also take months to produce. So remember to plant some quick-to-harvest treats, like lettuce, spinach, mizuna, Asian greens, arugula and radishes, which go soil-to-table in less than 6 weeks. Beets, too, can be harvested young, when they’re extra-sweet and tender. Sugar-snap peas also grow like Jack’s beanstalk (give them a trellis to crawl up and cling to) and are wildly productive. Plus, they make a great sweet snack right off the plant.

Pea Vines

Know Your Soil
Urban soils, even in residential neighborhoods, can have less-than-pristine histories. That’s why container gardening–or building raised beds and filling them with fresh soil and compost–is usually preferable for edible plantings, rather than digging straight into your backyard topsoil, especially if you’re planting root crops like beets, turnips, carrots, radishes, potatoes. Raised beds or containers can also help discourage critters (like gophers) from digging in from below, while opper strips around the edges can keep snails and slugs at bay. Building your own beds also means you can arrange the height to suit your flexibility; if crouching and bending close to the ground is difficult, plant in barrels or build tall, crate-like beds at a more comfortable level. Sunset magazine’s website offers great step-by-step instructions for
building your own redwood or cedar raised beds.

Get Some Good Books
An invaluable resource–and one that no city grower should be without–is Pam Peirce’s Golden Gate Gardening, now in its 3rd edition. Peirce has been talking to gardeners all across the city for decades, getting their feedback on what grows best where. Her book is straightforward and readable for gardeners at all levels, and explains micro-climates, fog belts, wind patterns, and how to lay out your garden to make the most of both sun and shade, as well as listing all the best varieties of vegetables, flowers, fruits, and herbs for growing around the Bay.

The New Western Garden Book; (9th edition) is another must-have for gardeners throughout the West, especially in California. I can’t think of a gardener I know who doesn’t have a dusty, dirt-smeared copy of Sunset’s gardening bible in her shed or garage–and often a newer, more pristine copy among the inspirational gardening books inside.

If you’re limited to what you can fit in pots on your back steps, pick up a copy of A Little Piece of Earth: How to Grow Your Own Food in Small Spaces, local author Maria Finn‘s book about container gardening. Finn knows firsthand about growing edibles without a backyard–she lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, and does all her gardening in pots on her upper deck.

Feed Your Soil
Before you plant a single seed, you’ve got to get your soil right. Yes, this can seem boring; you can spend a whole afternoon hauling bags of compost or smelly chicken manure, double-digging or spreading mulch, and not have as much a sprig in the ground to show for it. But putting in your plants should be the very last step in building your garden. Skip or skimp on this step, and you’ll be fighting bug infestations, weak growth, and nutrient and mineral deficiencies in your plants the whole rest of the growing season.

Do Some Spring Cleaning
Make room for spring! Pull out any bug-infested or mildewed plants that you planted last fall or winter. Quick tip-offs that your plants have bolted and are ready for composting: Thick, bare, woody stems; heavy infestations of aphids (check undersides of leaves); normally low plants, like lettuce, shooting up and producing long, skinny flower stems; an abundance of yellow flowers on broccoli and other brassica-family plants; anything that looks leggy, overgrown, and just plain tired.

Bolted plants are concentrating their efforts on reproduction, meaning their leaves will be bitter and less flavorful. Pull ‘em out, compost them to feed the earth (anything extremely buggy should be discarded, as home compost probably won’t get hot enough to destroy insects and their eggs), and be sure to beef up your beds with fresh compost and/or organic fertilizer before planting fresh seedlings.

Strawberry Plants

Rotate Your Beds
Don’t plant seedlings from the same plant families in the same place year after year. Every plant family attracts a similar family of predators and disease-causing microbes to it. If you plant your potatoes where you put your tomatoes, you’ll be encouraging the same pests in the soil, since both potatoes and tomatoes are in the Solanum family. Think of it as changing your plants’ passwords every season. Strawberries, in particular, should be rotated around the garden frequently.

Feed Your Pollinators
You know what makes a lot of your seed-bearing edible plants productive? Pollinators! That includes not just honeybees but all kinds of native bees, wasps, and other insects that crawl from flower to flower seeking nectar and, along the way, spreading pollen to make the reproductive fruiting magic happen. Planting compatible, pollinator-pleasing plants alongside your edibles will definitely make a difference in how many zucchini, cucumbers, apricots or apples you’ll get. And they’re pretty, too! Bees are particularly fond of blue and purple flowers, so be sure to include borage (whose dainty star-shaped edible flowers are adorable on cupcakes), bachelor’s buttons (cornflowers), and lavender. Other easy-to-grown pollinator buffets include cosmos, calendula, African blue basil, butterfly bush, coreopsis, dusty miller, sweet allysum, lamb’s ear, scabiosa (pincushion flower), rosemary, and sage.

Borage and Nasturiums

Buy Local
Head up to Novato, where the Indian Valley Organic Farm and Garden, an educational farm that’s part of the College of Marin, will be holding a 2-day Spring Plant Sale, complete with farm tours, live music, sales of plants, seedlings, and produce grown on the farm, bouquet making, and tastings, from 10am-3pm on Sat, April 20 and Sun, April 21. Buying seedlings from a farm often means getting more creative choices and more variety–a great way to try out some healthy new veggies. Purple carrots? Easter-egg radishes? Tokyo turnips? Rainbow chard? Golden raspberries? Why not? And consider investing in some perennials, too, like artichoke or rhubarb crowns, which can be productive for decades once established. Go colorful and get ready for a delicious spring and summer dining in the garden.

In Santa Cruz on May 4 and 5, the apprentices at UCSC Farm and Garden program will be holding their annual Spring Plant Sale, organic plants and seedlings grown on the farm, including both annual and perennial vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs, flowers, and fruit.

Artichoke Plant

Michael Siegel, owner of Shorty Goldstein’s

First, the name. Wince-worthy as it seemed on first hearing, owner Michael Siegel came by it honestly: Shorty was the nickname of his great-grandmother, Pauline Goldstein, and no Jewish deli-meister can hope for success without paying hommage to his bubbe. Born in Tucson, Arizona, Siegel, who worked as a chef de cuisine at Betelnut for 5 years before jumping into restaurant ownership this year, grew up on the Jewish comfort food made by his Philadelphia and New York-bred relatives. Every year, “Shorty” would come visit for a month, enlisting the young Michael as her helper in rolling and stuffing the dozens of potato knishes she’d make for the family. Afterwards, Siegel’s grandmother would dole them out, one at a time, making them last.

Throughout his culinary career, through training in French, Mediterranean, and Asian cuisines, Siegel kept returning, in his mind, to the familiar briskets, latkes, and stuffed cabbages of his youth. And now, here they are, only done with a San Francisco spin, so that the cauliflower and beets are pickled in-house, the chopped chicken livers are packed in jam jars, and the rugulach are filled with apples and cardamom or strawberries and black pepper. (The small, fluffy knishes, however, are true to their originals.) So far, it’s working: open for breakfast and lunch weekdays only in the Financial District, Shorty’s has been enviably busy since its opening day.

Front counter at Shorty Goldstein’s

During the first week, the line of suits and skirts-and-heels stretched back past the door by the dozens. Always curious about the next new thing–and never one to turn down the chance of tasty pastrami without the need for a plane ticket to New York or LA–we grabbed a counterside seat next to two nice ladies of a certain age. They were the kind who, in my New Jersey youth, would have been ace rugelach bakers active in the synagogue sisterhood. Here, they were enjoying a corned beef sandwich and a tongue sandwich (a Thursday-only special), respectively. This being San Francisco, there’s just no way to relate their enthusiasm for the tongue sandwich without it sounding irredeemably but unintentionally dirty, so I won’t try, but suffice it say, it was a nice tongue sandwich, very much appreciated.

Although there’s room for tables in the wood-floored, chalkboard-walled room, seats are limited to metal stools ranged along narrow counters clinging to the edges of the exposed brick walls. Despite friendly servers and pleasant amenities–cutlery with a nice heft to it, a tall glass dispenser of spa-like cucumber-mint water–the setup that doesn’t encourage lingering, or ordering more than can fit in a single-plate line in front of you.

Chocolate egg cream and Corned Beef sandwich

According to Siegel, their house-cured pastrami is their top seller, outselling even the popular corned beef two to one. And, like the corned beef, it’s some good stuff, flavorful and moist, maybe cut a little too thick, not quite as magically spicy/fatty/umami-fantastic as Wise Sons’, but still an excellent reason to leave your desk. (They’ll also double the meat, should you need the full mouth-stretching, Carnegie-Deli experience.) If only the bread were better. This beige, fluffy stuff hardly tastes of rye, and there’s not a caraway seed in sight. Why not Semifreddi’s Odessa Rye, or Acme Bread’s New York Rye? After all, if the kitchen’s going to all the trouble to make the Fridays-only tuna salad from super-scratch, using seared fresh albacore bound with house-made mayonnaise loaded with dill, red onions and celery, it should be embraced by bread that’s worthy.

Chopped Chicken Liver, Toast and Pickled Baby Fennel

The bread is certainly better toasted, when small squares serve as a delivery vehicle for a jar of satisfyingly dense chopped chicken-liver spread, paired with surprisingly elegant wisps of pickled baby fennel.

Since the open kitchen at the back of the restaurant has only a small flattop grill, making toasted sandwiches by the hundreds isn’t an option; so far, the only hot sandwiches are the daily grilled cheese along with Wednesday’s Rachel, which Siegel describes as a sister to the Reuben, made with pastrami, cole slaw, and Swiss.

Open Kitchen at Shorty Goldstein’s

There’s a very nice looking bowl of chicken soup with matzoh balls, although we were still having too much of a matzoh hangover from the past 8 days of Passover to try it. And while Shorty’s is no Gracias Madre, there is a daily vegetarian soup (potato-green garlic on a recent visit), the aforementioned grilled cheese and veggie sandwich, a well-stocked farmer’s market salad (recently, baby lettuces, artichoke, avocado and Midnight Moon gouda, in a raisin-molasses dressing) and a pickle plate (currently, some pleasantly crisp cauliflower, tender asparagus and regrettably mushy, over-vinegared beets).

But enough of that. How’s the egg cream? An egg cream, I must point out to you kombucha-swilling West Coasters, contains neither eggs nor cream. Essentially, it’s an ice cream soda with no ice cream, made with a few fingers of chocolate syrup (purists swear by Brooklyn-born Fox’s U-Bet) and milk foamed into a frothy, bubbly drink by a powerful jet of seltzer. Seltzer that’s released, properly, from a glass siphon bottle, not a soda gun or worse, a screw-top bottle of lazy sparkling water. A real egg cream needs a sting behind it, the bubbles crisp and sharp on your tongue; otherwise, you might as well be drinking Yoo-hoo. So far, no one in the Bay Area gets it right, to my taste–they’re always too flat, too rich, too chocolatey-sweet.

Salted Caramel Egg Cream

Information:
Facebook: Shorty Goldstein’s
Twitter: @SGoldsteins
Address: Map
126 Sutter St
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: (415) 986-2676
Hours: Mon-Fri 8am-4pm

Happy Passover! The Jewish holiday celebrating exodus and freedom starts at sundown this Monday, March 25, and continues for the next eight days. The foods served during this holiday week are influenced primarily by the prohibition on eating any kinds of grains or flour.

The prohibition isn’t so much on the grains themselves, but on leavening, and if there’s one things grains do really well once they’re moistened is to interact with natural or added yeasts and –poof!–start fermenting into tasty, stretchy, airy-chewy dough (or alcohol). So, no leavening=no grains. The only allowable grain product is matzo, the crackly-thin flatbread that must be mixed, shaped and baked in no more than 18 minutes exactly. Any more time than that and fermentation can start to occur.

As a result, matzo is the only breadstuff of the holiday, and its cousins, matzo meal (coarse matzo crumbs) and matzo cake meal (the same, only finer) the main substitutes for flour. Potato starch stands in for corn starch, and ground nuts give structure and heft to dozens of cakes. I’ve already sung the praises of my breakfast mainstay, Passover rolls, and every Jewish cook I know has a favorite flourless chocolate cake (like Laurie Colwin’s bittersweet chocolate-almond cake, based on a classic recipe of Elizabeth David’s) for dessert.

Comal Chef Matt Gandin offers his own spin on traditional matzo ball soup. Photo courtesy of Comal

So, sweet or savory, matzoh is a mainstay of this week. Passover being a celebration of spring, there are also a wealth of ways to feature the beauty of the season’s first new vegetables and fruits on your table through the influences of Jewish culinary traditions around the world. At Firefly, Delfina, Comal, and Perbacco, the chefs and staff are adding special Passover dishes to the menu next week, inspired by recipes and flavors from Italy to Mexico and beyond. (Perbacco will be limited to one special dinner on Wednesday, March 27.)

Jalapeno in matzo balls? Cauliflower in kugel? Why not? Matt Gandin, executive chef at Berkeley’s Comal, offers his own spin on traditional matzoh-ball soup, making a Mexican-inspired caldo de pollo with cilantro-jalapeno matzo balls. Meanwhile, Brad Levy of Firefly makes his classic kugel colorful with roasted carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower.

Comal’s Caldo de Pollo with Cilantro-Jalapeno Matzo Balls
Adapted from a recipe by Matt Gandin.

Comal’s caldo de pollo features a rich chicken broth spiced with dried chiles and filled with shredded chicken and spring vegetables. Fresh jalapenos and cilantro add Mexican flavor to the traditional matzo dumplings.

Ingredients:
For the broth:
• 1 whole chicken
• 1 yellow onion
• 1 carrot
• 1 stalk celery
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 sprig thyme
• 1 sprig cilantro
• 1 jalapeno, whole
• Pinch black peppercorns
• Kosher salt to taste

For the matzo balls:

• 1 cup matzo meal
• 4 eggs
• 1/4 cup sparkling water
• 1/4 cup chicken fat, melted
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• Pinch ground black pepper
• 1 large jalapeno, seeds removed, minced
• 1/2 bunch cilantro, stems removed, chopped

For the soup:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 yellow onion, sliced in 1/2 inch strips
• 1 large carrot, split lengthwise, then sliced in 1/4 inch thick half moons
• 1 stalk celery, sliced in 1/4 inch half moons
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup canned tomatoes, chopped
• 2 oz tequila
• 2 dried morita chiles, toasted and ground
• 3 qts chicken broth, from broth recipe, above
• 6 large green beans, cut in 1/2 inch pieces
• 1 large zucchini
• 3 spears asparagus, sliced in 1/2 inch pieces
• 1/2 bunch chard, stems removed, leaves chopped
• 1/2 cup cooked black beans, optional
• Shredded poached chicken meat from broth recipe, above
• Salt to taste

Preparation:
1. To make the broth, add the chicken and all of the other ingredients to a stock pot, and cover with cold water. Bring the pot to a boil, then turn it down to a low simmer. As the chicken releases its fat, it will float to the top. Skim this fat off the top with a ladle and reserve it for making the matzo balls. Simmer the broth until it is rich and golden, and the chicken is tender.
2. Carefully remove the chicken from the broth. Let cool. When cool enough to handle, pick the chicken meat, discarding the skin and bones. Reserve meat for soup. Strain the broth through a fine strainer and set aside.
3. To make the matzo balls, combine ingredients in a bowl, and whisk until the mix just comes together as a homogeneous batter. It should seem a little too loose to form balls. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest. The dough will firm up as it chills.
4. With wet hands, roll the matzo mixture into walnut sized balls between your palms. Set on a tray. Meanwhile, bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil. One at a time, drop the matzo balls into the pot. Cover with a lid and simmer for approximately 20 minutes, until the balls are cooked through. They should double in size.
5. To make the soup, in a large pot, heat the olive oil, then add the onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and a pinch of salt, and sweat the vegetable over medium heat until they have softened, but are not taking on color. Stir frequently.
6. Add the tomatoes, and sauté for a minute, then add in the tequila and simmer for a minute to cook off the alcohol. Add the reserved chicken broth and ground chiles. Bring the broth to a simmer, skimming any foam that may come to the surface. When it comes to a simmer, add the rest of the vegetables, and cook them for a few minutes, until they are just tender but still have some snap. Adjust the seasoning with salt.
7. At this point, you can either take the soup off of the heat and cool it down for later use, or add the shredded chicken and matzo balls and serve immediately, garnished with chopped cilantro.

Firefly’s Matzo and Roast Vegetable Kugel
Adapted from a recipe by Brad Levy.

If you want to make your kugel even more colorful, look for multi-colored varieties of carrots and cauliflower, in hues of purple, yellow, orange.

Firefly’s Matzo and Roast Vegetable Kugel. Photo: courtesy of Firefly

Ingredients:
• 1 cup diced shallots
• 1 cup diced carrots
• 3 cups broccoli florets, cut into 3/4-inch chunks
• 3 cups cauliflower florets, cut into 3/4-inch chunks
• 10 unsalted matzohs, broken into roughly 2-inch squares
• 7 eggs, lightly beaten
• Salt
• Oil, either vegetable or olive

Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 450°F. Toss the shallots, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower with 2 tablespoons oil. Arrange on a baking sheet. Roast, shaking the pan occasionally, for about 12-15 minutes until just tender and nicely browned. Set aside to cool. Reduce oven heat to 350°F.
2. Put the broken matzo into a large bowl. Bring 1 1/2 quarts of water to a boil. Add 1 tablespoon salt. Pour the boiling water over the matzo. Stir gently for 20 seconds, then drain off the water through a strainer, shaking out the excess.
3. Beat the eggs with 1 tablespoon salt and a pinch of pepper. Add to matzo and stir gently to mix well. Let stand for 15 minutes, then stir in the roasted vegetables.
4. Coat the inside of a 9″-by-11″ casserole dish with butter or oil. Add the matzo mixture and dot the top with oil or butter. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the kugel springs back and top is nicely browned.

“Overwhelming” and “unexpected” is how smoked-fishmonger turned writer Mark Russ Federman describes the reaction to his recently published memoir, Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built.

Russ & Daughters pink-and-green neon sign. Photo: Courtesy of Jen Snow, Russ & Daughters

Wait, what’s an “appetizing” store, you ask? Let’s start with the smell.

“Push open the door at Russ & Daughters and the first thing to hit you is the store’s unique aroma. It’s a combination of smokiness from whitefish, salmon, sturgeon,and sable; the brininess of herrings and pickles; the yeastiness of freshly baked bagels and bialys, and the sweetness of rugelach, babka, chocolates, and halvah. How I wish I could bottle that singular scent–smoky, briny, yeasty and sweet.”

As Russ Federman’s description above shows, the “appetizing” store is a particularly Jewish-American category of business, specializing in smoked fish and dairy products. It arose out of kosher dietary laws, which forbid the mixing of milk and meat at the same meal or, indeed, in the same shop. So, when it came to prepared foods, the delicatessen, or deli, sold pastrami, corned beef, tongue, salami, chopped liver, chicken soup, and more, while the “appetizing” store stocked smoked and cured fish in all its forms, from pickled herring to smoked salmon, along with the dairy to serve with it: cheese and cream cheese, plus pickles, sauerkraut, and often bagels, bialys, candies, rugelach, chocolates, and dried fruit, too.

A Typical Appetizing Spread, Ready for a Family Celebration.
Photo by Matthew Hranek

Appetizing stores–and Jewish bakeries, delis, restaurants, shops, and Yiddish theaters–flourished in New York City’s Lower East Side, where Jews from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe came fleeing persecution, seeking religious freedom or just looking, like so many other immigrants then and now, for economic opportunity and a better life for themselves and their children.

The story that Russ Federman tells, of how his grandfather Joel Russ made it to the Lower East Side from a tiny village in Poland, and, with business savvy and a whole lot of grinding, day in-day out hard work, managed to go from selling herring from a barrel on the street to launching a store that remains a beloved New York landmark some 100 years later, is a classic American immigrant’s tale. But it also brings to life the lost Jewish world of the Lower East Side. My great-grandfather, also born in Poland, was a baker in the neighborhood; my grandmother, who came here as a child in the early 1900s, had stories of delivering hot rolls in a horse-drawn cart through the pushcarts crowding the tenement-lined streets.

That Joel Russ’s three daughters Anne, Hattie, and Ida would work in the family business went without saying. As Russ Federman tells it, the family motto became “Vi nempt men parnosa?” a Yiddish phrase he translates as “From where do we take our living?” The family’s living came from the shop, and so the family, all of it, worked hard to make the shop successful.

But Joel Russ also recognized that his three smiling, pretty daughters were a draw that lured customers as much as a good price on schmaltz herring, and he turned the name of the business into Russ & Daughters. Son-in-laws were set up behind the counter, too, but the third generation, including Mark, weren’t supposed to be shopkeepers. For them, the goal was college and a profession–a doctor, a lawyer, not a herring-seller.

Mark Russ Federman. Photo: Belathée Photography

As expected, Russ Federman went to law school, passed the bar, and started practicing–only to discover that he wasn’t happy practicing with a big uptown law firm. After years of being pressed into work at the shop during every school vacation and holiday, he came back to the shop in 1978 to learn the business and take some of the pressure off his aging parents. As he writes,

“My plan was to help them run the store part-time and practice law part-time. What was I smoking? The first day I took up my place behind the counter was the last day I practiced law. Even though I had worked there as a kid, I had no idea what it meant to be responsible for every piece of fish, every customer, and every employee every minute of the day.”

It wasn’t easy, stepping into the shoes of “Mr. Russ,” the public face and buck-stops-here owner. The men at the smokehouses where he bought their fish were tough, making him earn their respect, even slipping bad fish into his orders to see if he could pick them out.

Even when he had retired from active duty, after 35 years on the floor, customers who saw him in the shop thought nothing of ordering him to get behind the counter and fill their requests for lox and herring. As he writes in the beginning of the book, when one bossy elderly woman, ignoring the lines of waiting customers around her, insists that he should “make her a herring”–that is, skin, bone, and fillet a smoked herring for her while she waits, even though the case is filled with ready-to-go fillets, he loses patience and pulls rank.

I went for the ultimate weapon in my arsenal. “Lady, do you know who I am? I am Mr. Russ.” I expected my pronouncement to end any further challenges.

It took less than a second for her response. “I know you. You’re not Mistar Russ. Your grandfadder vas Mistar Russ.”

After passing on the business to his daughter Niki and nephew Josh in 2009, he found himself suddenly, if gratefully, no longer Mr. Russ. “I wrote a book, basically, to give me something to do, keep me from just potchking [puttering] around. All those years, my persona was Mr. Russ, the guy behind the counter. You can get the bends, you stop too soon,” he said in a recent phone interview.

He already had a built-in platform–the shop–for selling the book. He got an agent, then a publisher, and then, he just had to write it.

“[Calvin] Bud Trillin said, ‘Listen, Mark, you stay out of my business, I’ll stay out of yours.’ So then it was a challenge,” he laughed. “Who knew that writing could be harder than retail?”

Of course, Trillin, a popular writer and longtime fan of the shop, went on to write a heartfelt introduction to the book, updating a piece he’d written about the shop back in 1974. In the early 70s, Trillin, like my own father, was taking his daughters to the shop for their first tastes of halvah, herring, kippered salmon, and pickled lox. Now, he takes his grandchildren. As Trillin writes,

“But Russ and Daughters still looks about the same as it did when I described it, around forty years ago, as refutation of the false teaching that a store that sells pickled herring cannot have character and a clean display case at the same time…I know, because I can often be found there on a Sunday morning.”

But Russ Federman didn’t just want to share whitefish-salad recipes and funny anecdotes of famous customers like Zero Mostel and Tony Bourdain. He wanted to capture his family’s own stories, research their history, and “make the Russ family proud of what we’ve been doing for the past 100 years,” especially his 92 year old mother Anne and 100 year old aunt Hattie, the two remaining original Russ daughters. “Because, for them, it was hard work and awful conditions.”

Random House sent the first two copies of the book by FedEx to his mother and aunt in Florida, where they now live. Russ Federman opened the box with them and watched as they turned the pages peppered with old family photos. “Of course, their first reaction was ‘Why did you have to say that’? But then, they were totally thrilled. They were stopping, telling their own stories,” as they went through the book. “It took 3 years, but I accomplished my mission.”

The book also details how the store went from neighbor herring purveyor to city institution, playing an essential part in the lives of its customers even as Jews left the Lower East Side, and the neighborhood sank into drug-fueled crime and squalor in the 70s and 80s, followed by artists and then ever-increasing gentrification over the past 20 years.

Even as, one by one, the old Jewish bakeries and delis closed, Russ & Daughters kept going, even after the downtown devastation of 9/11. You wanted to celebrate a bris, you ordered a smoked-fish platter. Sitting shiva after a death in the family, you ordered babka and rugalach, cookies and dried fruit for noshing. From the Yom Kippur break-fast to New Year’s Day or just another Sunday morning, any day was a occasion made better with lox, sturgeon, smoked chub, herring salad, even caviar. The trick, of course, wasn’t just the sterling quality of the fish; it was that the Russes had the “schmooze gene,” able to remember complete customer histories, not just of their tastes in sturgeon and lox but their medical histories, their foibles, and their family trees, and able to banter back and forth across the counter so that shopping there wasn’t just shopping, it was an only-in-New-York experience, even for customers who’d long since relocated to Great Neck or New Rochelle.

Now that everyone’s got a crock of kraut going in the kitchen, does Russ Federman have advice for the next generation of would-be professional salmon-smokers and pickle makers dreaming of a storefront in Oakland or Bushwick?

Forget cutesy names and logos, he tells me. “Put your own name on the door. Because if your name is on it, every product, every bag, every thing that goes through that door has your ego, your personality, your life on it. Do that for 100 years. Then you’ll be a success.”

Beet, Apple, and Herring Salad. Photo: Matthew Hranek

Beet, Apple, and Herring Salad

Swedish mustard, which you can find at IKEA, has a sweet-spiced tang that matches very well with this combination of earthy beets, tart apple, and pickled herring.

Adapted from Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House that Herring Built, by Mark Russ Federman. Reprinted by permission.

Prep Time: 1 hour
Cooking Time: 45 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour 45 minutes, plus chilling time
Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Beets
6 to 8 medium beets, trimmed and scrubbed (about 1 3/4-2 lbs)
3/4 cup red wine vinegar
3 tbsp vegetable oil
3 tbsp sugar
2 tsp mild Swedish mustard

Mustard Sauce
3 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp mild Swedish mustard
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp honey
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tbsp minced fresh dill
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Salad
1 medium Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4 inch dice
1 small red onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice
2 pickled herring fillets, cut into 1/4-inch dice
1/4 cup minced sour pickle

1. To prepare the beets, place them in a large saucepean and add water to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer until the beets are tender, 30 to 45 minutes. Drain the beets and rinse with cold water until they are cool enough to handle. The skins should slip off easily. Cut the beets into quarters.

2. Whisk the red wine vinegar, oil, sugar, and mustard in a large bowl. Add the beets and toss to coat. Allow the beets to stand in the vinegar mixture for 2 hours.

3. To prepare the mustard sauce, combine the red wine vinegar, mustard, sugar, and honey in a medium bowl and whisk to blend. Slowly pour in the vegetable oil, whisking constantly. Whisk in the dill and salt and pepper to taste.

4. Drain the beets and cut into 1/4-inch dice. Place them in a large bowl and add the apple, red onion, herring, and minced pickle. Pour half the mustard sauce over the salad and toss to blend. Add more mustard sauce a little at a time until the salad is well coated. Taste and adjust the seasoning with more salt and pepper as necessary.

Mark Russ Federman will be talking about his book with chef and cookbook author Joyce Goldstein on March 10 at 12pm at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. The event is sold out, but the talk will be streamed live on the JCC website.

Cook’s Company

While you were sleeping or dancing, drinking or downloading, buyers from Bi-Rite, Canyon Market, Good Life, Berkeley Bowl, Rainbow Grocery and hundreds of corner groceries and fresh produce stores all around the city spent the dark hours in close communion with the food you’ll be eating today, judging and bargaining for the best deals, the best stuff at the best price.

Asparagus from Mexico

Those imported asparagus, those young coconuts from Thailand, that stiffly frilled kale and fuschia-stemmed chard grown in Winters or Watsonville, even those edible flowers babied in a backyard in Oakland: do you think about how they get to the shelves of Mollie Stone’s or onto your $11 salad in the Marina or $18 pizza in the Mission? More than likely, they came through the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market, a hodgepodge cluster of warehouses, coolers and trucking bays stretched over old streetcar tracks and city streets in one of the city’s last rumbling, remaining districts of light industry.

Vegetable Display

It’s a working market that’s been part of the city’s fabric since the early 1960s, when the old downtown produce market was razed to make room for what’s now the Embarcadero complex. Working with the city, the vendors and merchants built a new market near where Bernal Heights flattened out past Bayshore, north of Silver Terrace not far from Bayview. Stretched over 20 acres, it provides over 650 jobs, fills more than 300,000 square feet of warehouse space and moves millions of dollars of food from growers to distributors to buyers annually.

And yet, few San Franciscans know of it. In full swing at 2 or 3 in the morning, it’s as busy as a trading floor, where food is nourishment but also product, colorful money stacked up in the shape of snow peas and eggplants, radishes and apples. It’s not a place for civilians, this daunting maze of trucks and loading bays: Stand still for a moment, anywhere, and you’re bound to be in several someones’ way as they barrel past you, pushing a hand cart or manuveuring a forklift stacked high with boxes—oversized red peppers from Mexico, maybe, big and shiny as shoes, or bristling bunches of parsley, dozens to a case.

Oversized red peppers from Mexico

Luckily, our group is here under the guidance of general manager Michael Janis and customer liaison/business development representative Eddie Kapper, both genial, dedicated, fast-moving men who slide through the market as if they’re strolling through their offices, greeting workers by name, stopping to exchange a few words, shaking hands with buyers. The market is made up of more than 2 dozen independent businesses, each with its own specialty, many still family run. There’s Washington Vegetable, carrying a full line of vegetables but specializing in greens. Earl’s Organic Produce, in business since the 1970s, selling only organic produce from its spacious new warehouse, where the coolers are adjusted to the optimal needs of the produce: one cold and moist, another cold and dry. Bananas need one temperature, Meyer lemons another. Whole Foods has its own huge warehouse here, which it has since outgrown; it’s moving to a new, dedicated distribution facility in Richmond soon. Some businesses, like Yuet Cheong Produce, focus on the Asian market, others in Latino products.

Greens and more at Washington Vegetable

We skirt around an impromptu wall of limes in ten-pound boxes, hustle past a levee of net sacks, fifty pounds each of red onions and yellow onions, hefty potatoes destined for French-fry cutters from the Excelsior to the Richmond. At Cook’s Company and Greenleaf, the boxes are smaller, the products—edible flowers, exotic mushrooms—daintier. The clientele here are chefs, caterers, and artisans, who buy in smaller quantities and are notoriously picky about quality and consistency.

Here, not everyone comes with a truck. As we walk through, a trio of young men—caterers from the East Bay–are packing the back of a black Mini Cooper with pillowcase-sized bags of greens until every inch is stuffed like a clown car. At another loading bay, a smiling young woman named Fontaine McFadden is loading boxes into the back of her car. She hands us a card for her three-month-old venture, Strong Table, a paleo-diet meal delivery.

Fontaine McFadden of Strong Table at the Produce Market

It’s a tricky business, dealing in perishables. In a thick blue sweatshirt, hands sheathed in heavy rubber gloves, a worker scoops crushed ice like snow over waxy boxes lettered in red Chinese characters. Broccoli likes it cold. Leave it too warm and the stems grow rubbery, tight blue-green florets yawning into tiny yellow flowers no one will buy. Brassicas like these–Brussels sprouts, collards, kale, kohlrabi, broccoli–are the greens of winter. Cabbage will grow through snow. A good frost sweetens the kale crop, nature producing its own antifreeze in the leaves. Aphids, always a plague for organics with nooks and crannies, don’t survive in the cold.

Produce worker with boxes of broccoli

Selling wholesale like this isn’t for every farmer. Earl’s owner Earl Herrick, just back from visiting an avocado and citrus grower in the Pauma Valley, lays out what a distributor needs: quality, consistency, and reliable supply. He liked the man’s fruit, he tells us, but his avocados were too small, his grapefruits not heavy enough.

Boxes are packed and labeled by size, and every piece inside has to meet a certain standard. A 20-count peach is one size, a 16-count another, and they can’t go in the same box. Pieces that are too small or too light risk getting the whole box “kicked,” or sent back on the truck to the farmer. There’s also a matter of shelf life. Selling wholesale means the product has to last at least a week off the farm–a day or two for packing and shipping, another day or two on site at the warehouse, a day or two in the market, then however long the customer waits to use it once she gets it home.

Winter Produce at Earl’s – Citrus Season

Finally we step out of the way of the hand trucks and forklifts into the J&V Café, the last remaining restaurant in the market, for coffee to warm our chilly hands. Started by a pair of former market workers, it opens at 1am, closes at 10am. Once, the market had bars, a hofbrau, more restaurants. They’re gone now, swallowed up by the need for more space for vendors. Even the J&V is two businesses now, market workers’ café by night, catering kitchen by day. By daybreak, even as the café empties out, the big back kitchen is in full swing, busy prepping meals for businesses downtown, paper orders for banks, tech firms and brokerages taped to the wall. A man fills bowls with identical cubes of melon in tri-colored rows. A row of women are making dozens of sandwiches, lining them up on plastic trays.

The market’s moving with the times. It’s just signed a new 60-year lease with the city. There are long-term, multi-million-dollar reinvestment and capital improvement plans in development, focusing on a complete overhaul and rebuilding of the vendor spaces, with a lot more room and more up-to-date, energy-efficient cooling facilities.

As the new cottage food law comes into effect, Kapper tells us how he hopes more small food businesses will see the market as a resource. Every day, says Eddie, he gets calls from people wanting to start up some kind of new business—niche caterers, jam or salsa makers, someone with a great idea for an herb salt or a juice-cleanse biz. He’ll talk to any potential new clients, walk them through, introduce them to the right vendors, try to get them what they need from the market.

It’s part of a vision of community revitalization for Earl Shaddix, too. A longtime member of the San Francisco professional food community as a chef and trainer for All-Clad Metalcrafters, Shaddix recently bought a house in Bayview, and has organized this morning’s walkabout as a way to bring attention to the area’s businesses, and to work on how community residents can take advantage of the market’s offerings to start their own small food businesses. He hopes to start a series of free food-business classes for people in the surrounding neighborhoods. He’d also like to encourage food makers around the city to start renting their kitchen space in the southeastern end of the city, where commercial rents are still reasonable.

By now, the sun’s up. Pushing brooms, men at the end of their shifts sweep wilted lettuce into green bins. (The market has one of the city’s highest levels of waste-diversion compliance, with a composting program for green waste and a recycling program for nearly everything else it uses, from cardboard and shrink wrap down to the tough plastic straps used to bundle stacks of boxes together.) At Whole Foods, at Safeway, the day’s produce is arranged in shiny stacks. The misting jets come on, hissing gently. On Jerrold Avenue, it’s quiet, until the sun goes down and the trucks arrive again, disgorging what will feed the city.

Recchiuti Hearts in Motion. Photo by Tom Seawell.

Work in the City? Skip the lines at See’s and nip down to the Ferry Building instead to take your pick of Recchiuti Confections‘ dark and luscious Valentine’s Day boxes, made in Dogpatch by owner Michael Recchiuti. Our favorite? Hearts in Motion, a 9-piece box of Recchiuti’s signature burnt-caramel truffles, decorated with squiggly hearts on wheels. Perfect for your favorite Bike Coalition activist! There’s also the XO Box of raspberry-Framboise and heart-shaped dark chocolate truffles in a deep crimson box. Or there’s always a blindfold and the Sauce Duo, a jar each of the divine Extra-Bitter Chocolate Sauce and Burnt Caramel Sauce. Who needs dinner?

But if you do, Recchiuti’s new Chocolate Lab is offering a full prix-fixe dinner menu for Valentine’s Day, with champagne sorbet, shellfish ceviche, rack of lamb, with a lavish chocolate dessert to finish.

Aphrodite’s Delight Valentine’s Truffles from Socola Chocolatier. Photo courtesy of Socola.

There’s more burnt caramel and raspberry awaiting your pleasure at Socola Chocolatier, where the Aphrodite’s Delight selection comes in 4-, 12-, and 24-piece boxes, enough to satisfy even the polyamorous among us. This year’s box includes Hot Lava, a raspberry pate de fruit layered with champagne ganache and enrobed in dark chocolate stamped with the word “love” in many languages, paired with Burnt Baby Burnt, a dark chocolate truffle filled with burnt caramel chocolate ganache and topped with ruby grains of Hawaiian red sea salt. Both pieces are made with local E. Guittard dark chocolate and Straus Creamery organic butter and cream.

In the mood to break out the bubbly? Forget the champagne: this year, it’s all about the beer (and the chocolate). On Feb 14, from 3pm-8pm, as part of SF Beer Week, the brand-new Hunters Point brewpub for Speakeasy Ales & Lagers will be tapping four of its limited-release beers, complemented by specially chosen Socola chocolates. Both Rosamunde Sausage Grill in the Mission and Steep Brew in Potrero Hill will also be offering beer and chocolate pairings, while Blackbird on Market Street will be pouring a beer-based cocktail to pair with three different made-in-Dogpatch Barbary Brix caramels, including everyone’s favorites, the Salty Dog (Balinese sea salt) and the Morning Glory (maple and bacon). Check out the listings at SF Beer Week for details.

And speaking of salted caramels, San Francisco’s Poco Dolce, known for its sleek, stylish, salt-topped chocolate tiles, is expanding its brand this year with a luxurious Valentine’s Day chocolate basket filled with handmade marshmallows, rich bittersweet drinking chocolate, and a box each of sea salt caramels and ganache-filled chocolate hearts.

“Love to Give” from Stark Wine and Sonoma Chocolatier.
Photo courtesy of Stark Wine.

Up in Healdsburg, musician-turned-winemaker Christian Stark and his wife and business partner Jen are doing good while making good wine. Their boutique winery, Stark Wine, is partnering with Sonoma Chocolatiers to create this year’s special Love to Give gift pack, featuring a bottle of Stark Wild red wine (an “untamed” 2011 blend of Zinfandel, Grenache, and Petit Syrah) and four different salty, nutty chocolate and caramel indulgences: cinnamon-dusted chocolate-covered organic almonds, salted caramels, smoked sea-salt bites, and a dark chocolate Sonoma Bar, studded with nuts and raisins, in the shape of a bunch of grapes. Available only on their website, the box’s $49 price includes shipping within California. 10% of the profits on this (and all other Stark wines) goes directly to WaterAid, a non-profit organization that supports and funds clean water and sanitation projects in developing countries.

Cowgirl Creamery’s Valentine Collection.
Photo by Michael Woolsey.

If your honey’s taste is more salty than sweet, try Marin’s Cowgirl Creamery’s Valentine Collection, featuring their limited-edition Heart’s Desire cheese, Blue Chair Fruit marmalade, Rustic Bakery chocolate cocoa-nib shortbread (with a hint of sea salt), and cheese knives and a bamboo cheese board, all perfect for promising many Pacific Coast picnics to come. It’s almost sold out for this year, so grab it while you can! Cowgirl fans might recognize the buttery-rich deliciousness of this cheese. Named after West Marin’s Heart’s Desire Beach overlooking tranquil Tomales Bay, it’s a heart-shaped version of the creamery’s much-loved triple-cream Mt. Tam.

Bacon Crack from Nosh This. Photo by Pinckney Templeton.

And while it’s smart to fill the fridge with plenty of fresh-squeezed juice and bacon for the morning after, be sure you’ll make it to breakfast by picking up some Bacon Salted Caramels, Bacon Crack, and Bourbon Bacon Rocky Road by everyone’s favorite local baconiste, Kai Kronfield of Nosh This. You can turn those three little piggy treats into four even happier pigs by adding a jar of Kronfield’s new Bacon Salted Caramel Sauce, which Kronfield will be selling from the Nosh This workshop at 2325 3rd St, Ste 326, in San Francisco, only on Valentine’s Day. And because nothing’s better with bacon than beer (and chocolate!) Kronfield also be selling his sweet bacony goodness at SoMa’s City Beer Store at 6pm on Feb 14 during their Midnight Sun Brewing Company’s Alaskan beer tasting.

Pandora Pops. Photo courtesy of Pandora Pops.

An aphrodisiac in a lollipop? That’s the promise of Pandora’s Pops, made with all-natural infusions of va-va-voom herbs and spices. Owner Jena Chambers cooked up her first batches of sexy lollipops on a houseboat in Sausalito. Now, she’s got a full “Boudoir Collection” of sweet, heart-shaped licks. The pops come in flavors like rose and cardamom, cinnamon spice, ginger and cocoa, jasmine and cardamom, and, yes, even Fifty Shades of Earl Grey, with bergamot and black tea.

Still need a little more inspiration? Meesha Halm offers an ultimate Valentine’s Day dining guide to Bay Area restaurants, while on Tablehopper, Marcia Gagliardi tracks down some fun pop-ups and more for the day.

My latest inspiration for cold-day cooking (before our early-arriving spring banishes the chill) is Home Made Winter by Yvette van Boven, an Irish-born cook, food stylist, and writer who divides her time between Amsterdam (where she and her cousin run a restaurant and catering business) and Paris. Oof Verschuren, her photographer husband, took the pictures, which range from luscious but reassuringly unfussy food shots to misty, atmospheric photos of bare branches, shaggy ponies, winding lanes and lichen-splotched stones, in cool earth tones or snowy black and white.

A sequel to her first book Home Made, this is a charmingly stylish book, loose-limbed and deliciously idiosyncratic. As she writes in the introduction, “When I finished writing Home Made, I realized that I actually wasn’t quite done. There were still heaps of recipes, waiting wistfully, and every day new ones were added.” Lucky for us, van Boven has turned those heaps into a pair of new books–the warm-weather, French-inspired Home Made Summer comes out this spring.

Yvette van Boven. Photo: Oof Verschuren

The chapters meander, pleasantly, throughout the day, from Breakfast, Brunch, & Lunch to tea-time Cakes. Then, all of sudden, it’s late afternoon, early darkness, the streetlights are on, and it’s cocktail hour and time for Drinks. Little snacky things–homemade Salt and Vinegar Crisps (potato chips), Popcorn Rocks (with maple syrup, cinnamon, and hot pepper flakes), Beet Blini with Salmon–show up To Start, then it’s time to pull up a chair and dig into Main Courses and Dessert. Scattered throughout are hand-drawn illustrations and hand-written recipes, plus lots of DIY projects–homemade butter, yogurt and cheese, beef sausage, a sweet-spiced hazelnut-almond-peanut butter, Irish cream liqueur–and little sidetracks into holiday musings and recipes, in no particular order. In this book, Halloween (Oct 31) runs into Epiphany (Jan 6), followed by a skip back to St Nicholas Eve (Dec 5), then a leap forward to St Patrick’s Day (March 17), back to Christmas (Dec 25), and finally a grand, sparkly blowout on New Year’s Eve (Dec 31).

Illustration by Yvette van Boven

Also, there are a lot of wonderful drinks, some refreshing, most warming, from van Boven’s favorite Winter Tea simmered with fresh ginger, licorice root, cinnamon stick, orange zest, and cloves to a Mulled Wine spiked with a shot of gin. (If you didn’t already suspect there was nothing good for you in that oh-so-yummy bottle of Bailey’s, here’s where you learn that the homemade version is put together with heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk, coffee powder, whiskey, and chocolate syrup.) You can wake up with a nippy fresh Pineapple-Ginger Juice, toast with a convivial Clementine Negroni, or celebrate with a Winter Cocktail of vodka, cranberry juice, and orange zest shaken with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream, about which van Boven writes, “Snow and cranberries in a glass. It doesn’t get any more wintery than this.”

Illustration by Yvette van Boven

Not that there aren’t plenty of simple, healthy, mostly vegetarian soups, too: Spelt and Mushroom Soup, with woodsy dried porcini; Chickpea Soup with Sweet Potato and Feta Crackers; Creme of White Beans and Celeriac with Chile Oil; A Gentle Soup of Leeks and Chestnuts; Split Pea Soup with Squash and Yogurt. The vegetarian main courses are equally cozy, including Risotto with Cauliflower, a star-topped puff-pastry pie filled with celeriac and wild mushrooms, even a very British Toad-in-the-Hole whose pastry is wrapped around a roasted red onion instead of the typical sausage.

It can take some paging back and forth to find what you want (see “deliciously idiosyncratic,” above), since the recipe organization is whimsical at best, and you’re as likely to find a photograph of a contemplative rooster or a dog in the snow as a recipe for Irish Stew.

A few tips for American readers might have been helpful. Van Boven frequently calls for self-rising flour, a European staple that’s hard to find in the U.S., at least around here. (It’s more common in the biscuit-loving South.) She doesn’t give a replacement, but it’s easy to do: For each cup of self-rising flour, sift 1 cup of all-purpose flour with 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt. As for those sachets of vanilla sugar, another European mainstay, just substitute 2 teaspoons granulated sugar plus 1 teaspoon vanilla extract for each sachet called for.

Any of my fellow stay-at-home/work-from-home brethren should memorize the recipe for van Boven’s Sticky Chocolate Cake in Your Coffee Mug in 3 Minutes, which she recommends for “when you’re home alone and you suddenly have an irresistible craving for chocolate but don’t feel like doing much work,” which I think anyone working in close conjunction with a deadline or a small child would agree is pretty much all the time. Whipping up Late Night Easy Cocoa Cake, my usual go-to, is like making Thanksgiving dinner by comparison: This one is mixed up right in the mug, then microwaved (although she does give conventional oven directions as well).

That one’s for home noshing; when company’s expected, put together the cover beauty shot, a buttery cardamom pound cake with whole pears baked right in the cake. It’s no more work than poaching pears and serving them alongside a slice of cake, but the payoff–how did you do that?–is much more satisfying.

Sticky Chocolate Cake in Your Coffee Mug in 3 Minutes. Photo: Oof Verschuren

Sticky Chocolate Cake in Your Coffee Mug in 3 Minutes

Yes, for real! This is ready in three minutes. I don’t like to cook in the microwave, but in this case it’s very appealing. Especially when you’re home alone and you suddenly have an irresistible craving for chocolate but don’t feel like doing much work.

I can imagine, however, that some of you might have trouble with the idea of making a cake in a microwave. If you prefer to use a conventional oven, use self-rising flour instead of all-purpose flour and bake at 350°F (180°C) in a greased ovenproof cup for about 20 minutes.

Recipe adapted and reprinted with permission from Home Made Winter by Yvette van Boven, copyright 2012. Published by Stewart, Tabori, & Chang.

Prep Time: 2 minutes
Cook Time: 3 minutes
Total Time: 5 minutes
Yield: 1 mug-sized cake

Ingredients
3 tbsp all-purpose flour
3 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
1 sachet (2 tsp) vanilla sugar (see note)
1 egg
3 tbsp milk
3 tbsp sunflower oil
If you wish:
3 tbsp chocolate chips or grated chocolate
3 tbsp raisins
Sugar syrup, appelstroop (Dutch apple syrup), golden syrup, a dash of liqueur, or vanilla ice cream

Preparation
1. Mix the dry ingredients in the coffee mug. Add the egg and whisk with a fork. Add the milk and oil and whisk some more.
Then stir in the chocolate chips or raisins, if desired.

2. Place the mug in the microwave and “bake” the batter for 3 minutes on high. The cake will rise above the rim of the mug, but that’s fine! Let it cool for a bit.

3. If you wish, add any syrup, a dash of liqueur, or serve with vanilla ice cream.

Note: If you don’t have vanilla sugar, use 2 teaspoons granulated sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.

Cardamom Cake with Whole Pears & White Chocolate. Photo: Oof Verschuren

Cardamom Cake with Whole Pears & White Chocolate

This recipe has been published all over in magazines and newspapers, but I really don’t care; since it’s so good and it looks so cool, it belongs in this collection.

Make it, and you’re sold.

Recipe adapted and reprinted with permission from Home Made Winter by Yvette van Boven, copyright 2012. Published by Stewart, Tabori, & Chang.

Prep Time: 1 hour
Cook Time: 40 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour 40 minutes, plus cooling time
Yield: 1 loaf cake (8-10 servings)

Ingredients
For the pears:
3 medium-sized crisp, firm pears (such as Bosc), peeled but whole, with the stem left on
1 (750-ml) bottle dry white wine
1 1/4 cups sugar
4 cloves
3 star anise pods
8 cardamom pods
2 cinnamon sticks
For the cake:
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) plus 2 tbsp butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups self-rising flour (see note)
1 generous tbsp ground cardamom
pinch of salt
And further:
3 oz white chocolate, in chunks

Preparation:
1. Poach the pears: In a large saucepan, combine the pears, wine, sugar, cloves, star anise, cardamom, and cinnamon and poach for 30 minutes over low heat.

2. Take the pears out of the liquid and set aside to cool. Add 2 1/2 cups (500 ml) water to the poaching liquid and boil to reduce the liquid by half. Let cool.

3. Make the cake: Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan and line it with parchment paper. Grease the parchment paper.

4. Using a hand mixer, beat the butter and sugar in a large bowl until creamy. Beat in the eggs one at the time. Don’t add a new egg until the previous one is incorporated. Sift the flour, cardamom, and salt over the batter and fold it in.

6. Spoon the batter into the pan. Press the pears in, stem end up. Bake for 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the cake part comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan, then gently remove the cake from the pan to a rack to cool completely.

7. Very carefully melt the chocolate: Set a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water, making sure the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Stir the chocolate in the bowl until melted. Using a spoon, drizzle the chocolate over the cake and create nice stripes on top.

8. Let the chocolate dry for a bit and serve the cake in thick slices, with the reduced pear syrup poured on top.

Note: If using all-purpose flour, add 2 1/4 tsp baking powder and 1 1/2 tsp salt.