It's that time of the year again. Shorter days, colder nights and the realization that yet another year is slipping away.

For those of us who clutch to whatever hope we can find, it's also the time to begin thinking about all the promises ahead for 2008. To help mark the months, calendars that inspire and move me are a basic necessity. How else to make the wall over my desk a place for change rather then an endless list of tasks?

For the third year in a row, I'm ordering a copy of Celia Roberts' wonderful calendar celebrating farm workers across the country. Fully bilingual with Spanish and English text, this year's calendar, Gracias por los Campesinos, describes the daily labor of immigrants with honesty, respect and quiet gratitude.

Next year's calendar is especially close to my heart, for Celia came to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market while I was still teaching in the kitchen there. She helped me welcome the women from Las Salsitas the day they demonstrated recipes from their cookbook, and while she was there, she snapped a photo of Carl Rosato from Woodleaf Farm. If you flip to December in the 2008 calendar, you'll see him helping some customers as they pick out peaches at his booth.

Every year's calendar has a different visual theme, but the feeling is always the same: thanking community members for their valuable contributions. One of my favorites was last year's collection of photographs, Gracias por los Abuelos, when Celia honored grandparents.

I highly recommend this year's calendar for offices or kitchens where eating and cooking has become the mere stuff of work. It's a warm reminder of the faces and lives and stories that bring us our food.

"King Corn" is a new film that premiered in the Bay Area this past weekend. In it, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis --best friends from college -- plant an acre of corn in Iowa and attempt to track its path into the food chain. I caught up with director Aaron Woolf, whom I knew of from our undergraduate years at a small college in Vermont.

Meghan Laslocky: Can you give us a "before starting the film/after starting the film" picture of your dietary habits?

Aaron Woolf: Before I started working on "King Corn", I don't think I really understood that there was a connection between the way we grow things and the fact that we aren't eating well in this country, which seems pretty obvious now. I came from a family that always ate well, but the way people eat now, like Curt, my cousin [producer and on-screen talent in "King Corn"] who is a generation younger, versus how people ate when I was a kid, is so different. When I was a kid, we went to the wholesale seafood market, mussels were 17 cents a pound because Americans didn't eat them, and we got our meat at a butcher, Mr. Olishefsky, who wore a white gown covered in blood. Behind him in the walk-in cooler were sides of beef. It wasn't a mystery to me as a child where meat came from -- I knew it was a cut-up animal. But I think if you grew up in Curt's generation, the disconnect is pretty major. I think that's one of the lessons of the film: that Curt and Ian are of the cornfed generation, and I am less so, and it took so little time -- the sixteen years that separate us in age -- for that major shift to happen.

Initially, when I started this film, when people asked me about how making the film has changed my eating habits, I'd say, "It's changed the way I wish I ate." But now that the film is done, it's definitely changed the way I eat, and I don't eat fast food. It's instinctive now. What we choose to eat is such a combination of knowledge and religion and training. It's hard to change your diet simply because it's better to do x rather than y, but after seeing feedlots with 100,000 head of cattle -- that's something that's hard to get out of your mind when you look at a hamburger.

Now I try to eat food that lived a life. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't make much of a distinction between an animal and a vegetable. We derive our life force from eating living things. It's more the way that they lived. For example, I think that eating something that lived in an undignified setting, like pork in confinement that never saw the light of day, is spiritually unhealthy. But the same is true for an asparagus spear that was raised industrially. I wish I could just eat things that were raised in a dignified way that that we would want to incorporate into our own bodies.

ML: Knowing what you know now, what's your take on the rising consciousness of where our food comes from?

AW: I see the benefits of having convenient things to eat, and I still think that's true on some level. And there's a lot of snobbery in the upscale movements, people make a lot of assumptions about other people's ability to choose good and fresh food, even about if they have access to it.

ML: What came as a surprise to you as you did research for the film?

AW: It was a surprise to me how much we have almost consciously created a fast food society, in terms of the Farm Bill and the shift in policy in the 70s. I don't think there is much true evil in the world. I don't blame Earl [Earl Butz, President Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, whose policies supported large-scale agribusiness and who is interviewed in the film]. I don't blame corporations, but we have gotten to a place where the idea of having more isn't always the best thing.

ML: In the film, you use these great vintage Fisher Price farm toys and kernels of corn to illustrate how the Farm Bill works. What's the back story there?

AW: We were looking for a way to describe obtuse concepts like agricultural subsidies. People are paying to see this film, so we had to come up with something that was at least palatable. We bought one of the Fisher Price barns at Chuck's farm during the auction [see the film for a touching farm auction scene], and the other barn is one that Curtis played with as a child, and probably me as well. Part of the point was that children still play with those toys, but now they're part of a perpetuation of a myth about farming that just doesn't exist. Plus the Fisher Price toys look like food labels on processed foods -- the idealized barn, the livestock -- for a product that contains hog meat from an industrial farm. There was something poignant about that, toys perpetuating a notion about the American heartland that is less and less real.

ML: Has making this film changed your life?

AW: I've made a lot of films, but never before has a film that changed the course of my life as this one has. I'm opening a grocery store in, called Urban Rustic, that incorporates documentary into it, so buyers know where their food comes from. I'm doing this with my partners, Dan Cipriani and Luis Illadeas. On the shelves, there's an LCD or a viewmaster, and you can see where everything comes from. Much in the same way in "King Corn" we've explored where our food comes from, in Urban Rustic, we want people to know where the food comes from. In the store, people even know where the wood flooring comes from -- it's from trees we cut down ourselves on my family's land in the Adirondacks. It's an attempt to take back what the industrial food system has obscured from us.

"King Corn" is currently playing at the Shattuck in Berkeley and at the Red Vic, and it will air on PBS's Independent Lens in the Spring. It was produced with support from San Francisco-based Independent Television Service [ITVS].

Read a review of King Corn in KQED Arts & Culture

In London's Victoria and Albert Museum is a small, silver sugar bowl from the late 1700s, complete with a tiny latch for a tiny lock. The mistress of the house would have kept the key herself, as sugar was far too precious to leave unprotected.

Today, sugar flows freely at every table. No longer spice or medicine, no more exotic or expensive than salt or pepper or clear tap water, sugar is now a basic and powerful commodity. It rarely concerns anyone who's not worried about calories, insulin or childrens' attention spans. With corn syrup currently wearing the black hat and ethanol a favorite of politicians, cane sugar has suddenly been rehabilitated. What sugar blues?

But Bill Haney and his documentary, The Price of Sugar (opening this weekend at the Opera Plaza Cinema) are here to show us exactly what it takes to bring us that stuff of sweetness.

I know, you're already rolling your eyes or reaching for your mouse. Who wants to add sugar to the growing list of politicized food? Chocolate, coffee, corn, every fish and fowl and four-legged creature under the sun, and now this? Is nothing safe for the conscientious eater to enjoy?

If it makes you feel any better, know that centuries ago, cooks and diners were wrestling with these very same issues.

"EAST INDIA SUGAR not made by SLAVES"

In 1791, abolitionists in the United Kingdom declared a boycott on sugar from the West Indies, where sugar plantations flourished with the help of the burgeoning slave economy. Diaries from the period mention how troublesome it was to entertain guests who were boycotting sugar, while Punch cartoonists poked fun at "anti-saccharrite" families that refused to offer sugar at teatime. There were valiant attempts to hold awareness-raising bake sales with cakes and cookies prepared without sugar or else only with sugar from India. (Thanksgiving cooks everywhere can empathize--how to fit the tofu next to the turkey?)

An ambitious little pamphlet, "Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West Indian Sugar and Rum," written by Thomas Clarkson, set a publishing record for the time: 50,000 copies were distributed in the UK in only four months.

On the back of this anti-slave sugar bowl: "East India Sugar not made By Slaves. By Six families using East India, instead of West India Sugar, one Slave less is required."

The slave-free sugar movement faced much greater opposition in the US, where rum was filling the new nation's coffers. While Clarkson and his followers helped turn the tide against slave labor in the UK (an estimated 300,000 British families boycotted West Indies sugar) American abolitionists had another century of fighting before slavery was outlawed in the US.

But here's the problem: Slave labor is not a thing of the past.

Ships no longer ply the Middle Passage, but we still have human trafficking in containers and vans. If trapping entire families on plantation land to work their whole lives, guarding them with rifles day and night, stringing barbed wire over their ceilings so they can't escape, paying with vouchers for the company store or not bothering to pay at all, and enjoying the full support of governments do not all add up to institutional bondage -- or slavery -- then someone needs to rewrite the dictionaries.

In the US, the major sugar-cane states are Florida, Louisiana and Texas. A long-growing crop with intensive irrigation requirements, heavy chemical inputs and back-breaking, hand-maiming occupational risks, sugar cane is not an easy crop to grow. Increasingly, American growers depend on a mechanized harvest (especially after a lawsuit was filed in the mid-1990s demanding that companies pay their guest workers the contracted $5.70 a ton rather than merely $3.70 a ton.)

However, environmental devastation is still a serious issue. As sugar cane is re-framed by politicians and growers as an eco-friendly source of energy here in California, we need to keep a closer watch on the discussion. Close ties to Washington help big sugar companies maintain generous subsidies, while import restrictions keep domestic sugar cane prices artificially high.

So yes, there's still a long way to go. Luckily for us, courageous and determined individuals continue to lead the way. Person by person, family by family, nation by nation...changes will happen.

THE PRICE OF SUGAR
Directed by Bill Haney
Landmark's Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness Avenue
(415) 267-4893

The documentary really should be titled "The Life and Work of Father Christopher Hartley" since this Catholic priest, who compares himself to Mother Theresa, stars in the film. Father Hartley fought for years to improve the horrendous living and working conditions of undocumented Haitians on the sugar plantations of the Vincini family, powerful players in the Dominican Republic. The family has tried blocking the release of the film, and both the crusading priest and the director have received death threats. The film depends more on slow motion and plaintive music than data or historical context to make its points. In the end, though, I came away with an understanding of the human side -- both the good and the bad -- of this complex issue.

SMALL STEPS TO GOOD SUGAR

There are no easy answers. The US produces 80% of the sugar it consumes, so international free-trade sugar, already a small fraction of the industry, is just one part of the solution. Domestic sugar's impact on ecosystems, energy production, public health and political power are other important considerations.

• Awareness and education are the first steps. Seeing the above documentary is one way to begin. There are many resources on the internet for anyone curious and committed. I've included a few links at the end of this post for those who'd like to read more. Taking on all the issues is overwhelming. Instead, choose subjects already close to you and learn how they relate specifically to sugar production and consumption.

• Spend your money wisely to express your desire for a better world. Do what you can when you can. Buying fair-trade sugar supports companies and cooperatives that meet international standards for worker rights and environmental sustainability. Go for little but consistent changes for the long haul. Our small individual acts really do add up.

• Spread the word. While you might not have a sugar bowl that speaks for you, there are many opportunities to influence others, whether it's the office manager who stocks your company's break room or the grocery store in your neighborhood or the bakery that's going to craft your wedding cake. Ask if fair-trade sugar is an option, and if it's not, ask why not.

• Finally, one of the most important things we can do is to fax or call our elected representatives to remind them that we want an agricultural industry in California that is environmentally sustainable and fair to its workers. The California Coalition for Food and Justice offers several different sample letters as well as a detailed tip sheet on how to meet your respresentatives in person. Join the coalition or sign up for their newsletter to keep in touch with food policy issues in California. You can adapt their language to your own specific concerns. Encourage your friends and family to write letters, too.

Look for these marks of fair trade certification on sugar that you buy.

SUGAR LINKS

If you're interested in learning about the sugar cane industry, especially a little closer to home, here are some online resources:

• Sugar Knowledge International offers a basic description of how cane sugar is processed.

• Fair Trade Certified provides a fact sheet on fair-trade sugar.

• Read about the call for growing sugar cane in California's Imperial Valley to provide energy and ethanol.

• Environmental Entrepreneurs estimates

how many megawatt-hours of electricity might be converted from cane sugar fiber in California.

• The Center for Responsible Politics describes the electoral politics of sweeteners in "Iron Triangle of Beet Sugar, Cane Sugar and Corn Syrup."

• For a historical view of Big Sugar from, of all places, The American Conservative, this critique of guest worker programs for the US sugar industry describes how growers take advantage of their workers.

• In its National Wetlands Newsletter, the Environmental Law Institute discusses how growing sugar cane in the Florida Everglades affects the ecosystem and taxpayers.

• Alter Eco, based in San Francisco's Mission Bay, distributes fair-trade sugar. Their controversial financial model, melding the business structure of a corporation with the social mission of a nonprofit, helps them pursue their goal of mainstreaming free-trade products into supermarket chains.

Every year, on the first Sunday of November, tens of thousands of Sikh from across the U.S. and Canada travel to Yuba City for the largest gathering of their extended community in North America. It's the only public festival I've seen in this country where not a single piece of food is sold, yet I still managed to eat and drink for six hours straight.

Food is offered free to all who come: Every single one of the 60,000 Sikh (give or take 20,000 in any given year) who take part in the festival, and the few hundred curious folk like me who show up for the food.

Cauliflower pakoras fresh from the oil.

All along the side of the parade's path are stations of Sikh men and women rolling roti, frying pakoras, stirring curries, and cutting sweets. Everything served is vegetarian, to be as inclusive as possible. Friendly, young men offer fresh fruit, water, juice, and hot chai to all who walk by -- even the Christian evangelists with their placards and flyers.
A line of women roll fill bread with potatoes masala while a two-man team shares dipping and frying duty.

Men from the Punjab region of Northern India were among the earliest immigrants to the Pacific Northwest and then the Central and Imperial Valleys of California. Many of them were Sikh, and their hard work -- felling trees, laying rails, and laboring in fields and orchards -- helped build the West.

The November festival in Yuba City honors the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, and the recitation of its words is central to the procession. Large, decorated semi-trucks help pull the priests and musicians through the crowded streets.

This Thursday, I'll be giving a presentation about the importance of the communal kitchen in the Sikh religion. There'll be lots more photos, including many archival ones, and we'll discuss how Asian Americans such as the Sikh navigated strict immigration and alien land laws to establish thriving farms in the Central Valley.

"Sikh Temples and Communal Meals: Religion, Politics and Potluck in California's Central Valley"
Presented by Thy Tran
Thursday, October 11, 2007
5:15-6:45 pm

Magnes Museum
2911 Russell Street, Berkeley, CA
Contact: Erica J. Peters, Culinary Historians of Northern California
Phone: (650) 938-4936
Email: e-peters-9@alumni.uchicago.edu

The Indian karahi has the same lovely, generous shape as a Chinese wok.

The pot of chives was waiting for me in Moraga. Little did I know there was an entire afternoon of wonder in store for me when I went to pick it up.

With just his hands, a shovel and a wheelbarrow, 79-year old Ze'ev Vered has shaped seven terraces of gardens and orchards. Trees bearing pistachio, quince and pomegranate push up against the golden hills. A 6-foot cyclone fence that encircles his garden, to deter the insistent deer, has long been covered with the rambling vines of eight different varieties of grapes. The paths between each hand-weeded bed switch back several times, a steep trail that leads from one beautiful, delicious plant to another.

Raised on an Israeli farm and then trained in forestry, Vered landed four decades ago in the Bay Area. He settled into insurance work to help raise his family, but much of his free time was spent building up his garden and cooking -- he handled all the savory food while his wife took care of the sweets. When he retired, Vered finally launched a business that expressed his passion: Herb Gardens by Ze'ev. He specializes in culinary herbs, helping his customers grow unique gardens that reflect their favorite cuisines, from my little chive pot to complex, professionally tended installations.

Vered treated me to a lunch: Salad Caprese with his own sun-warmed tomatoes and a lovely barley soup made from the herb-stuffed carcass of a spit-roasted turkey. After I'd had enough to eat, he walked me slowly through his garden.

Here are some highlights from my amazing tour, sprinkled lightly with Vered's salty jokes and stories:

After many years, Vered has perfected his own secret blend of soil. For example, powdered dolomite lime sweetens the mix to provide the basic pH that culinary herbs prefer.

Whenever his wife and he traveled to Mexico, they'd bring back a few pots. If you find one you like, he'll sell it to you.

Vered sequesters his newly potted plants inside wire cages for a week to protect them from squirrels, who love to dig up the plants. His plants all have well-established root systems, and as soon as you get your herb pot home, you can begin harvesting and cooking.

At one of his lectures, a skeptic kept asking Vered, "Are you sure that your plants are organic?" He answered patiently until the third time, when he couldn't help adding, "Yes, these plants are organic. And not only that, they're orgasmic -- I get a real charge out of growing them!"

Welcoming visitors at the entrance to his herb garden are pots of low-spreading, tiny-leafed Corsican mint.

The herb invites you to caress its velvety surface and then imbues your hand with its fresh, summery perfume. Someday, I'm going to have a garden path with Corsican mint growing in the cracks between stones.

The leaves of this slightly bronzed peppermint has a sharp flavor that lingers long. I could feel its menthol in my sinuses.

Spearmint has a softer, rounder flavor. Growing in this large patch is what Vered calls "Safeway mint."

A much-lauded celebrity chef, who will here remain nameless, needed fresh mint for his cooking show. Vered gets a call from the chef's assistant. "What kind of mint does he need?" Vered asks, referring to the many varieties he grows. A pause on the phone. "You know, the Safeway kind."

Three sages hold court along his retaining wall.

For the first time, I came face to face with a fresh caper. If you don't pick and pickle the small bud, it opens into a beautiful white and pink-tinged blossom.

Recently planted caper bushes that Vered hopes will soon cascade down part of his hillside.

Enough horseradish to feed a small village. Vered likes using its leaves in salads before pulling up their roots and bottling his own sauces.

Mediterranean bay, known as true laurel, has a sweeter, less harsh flavor than California bay. Here, small plants spring up from a potted tree's crown roots.

Tomatoes grow two levels down from his fruit and nut trees. Asked if he shares his fruits and vegetables with his neighbors, Vered says "Back when they used to be nice to me!"

Golden quince with their soft, delicate fuzz.

At the top of one hill, just past the plum and pistachio trees, Vered placed a bench in the shade of grape vines. He can sit and gaze across the valley. I asked him if he sat here with his wife, while she was still alive, and he smiled mischievously. "Oh yes...and sometimes we held hands."

Pistachio nuts just beginning to blush.

Over the next several months, this tiny bud will flower, fruit and ripen into a juicy pomegranate.

Vered grows a rare variety of Asian pear, the only sand pear that resembles its European cousin in shape.

Vered picked some tomatoes and plums for me to take home, and then asked if I wanted to taste some of his green tomato pickles. Uh, yes, I LOVE green tomato pickles!

The tiny, still green cherry tomatoes are tart, a nice pick-me-up after the hot afternoon sun. They're preserved in his own special brine.

To a colleague who asks for the recipe to his kosher dill pickles: "Well, first you cut the tip off each little cucumber...."

Herb Gardens by Ze'ev
Ze'ev Vered, M.S.
(510) 631-0199 (925)631-0199
P.O. Box 6486
Moraga, CA 94570

It's that time of year. When Bay Area markets are jumping with stone fruits. Names whimsical, actual and unpronounceable and downright silly fill signage over mysterious glowing orbs. People want to know, "What's the difference between a pluot and a plumcot, a nectarcot and an aprium? Why all the funny names? What happened to the straight up plum, apricot, nectarine and peach?"

The full answer is too wordy for this medium. But, truth be told, there are almost no fruits we eat out hand today which are their true selves in their original form. All stone fruits are hybrids of the bitter almond tree, and all have been developed by horticulturalists for hundreds of years to withstand certain weather conditions, soils and various interfering pests. And in the last one hundred years or so, farmers have been juggling/gambling with different trees in an attempt to provide Americans with what appears to be one fruit during the course of a season. The peach you eat in May is not the peach you eat in June or July. But the hope is that on each of these hot summer days, you can find, buy and eat a peach.

It's almost impossible to keep up with all the stone fruit hybrids once summer begins. They rush at us like stars in a meteor shower. Some varietals last a month, but many come and go within a week or even days! My favorite farm for stone fruit is Blossom Bluff. Ted and Fran Loewen grow dozens of varietals, oftentimes experimenting or sticking with more difficult trees and fruit to provide their customers with a delicious spectrum of complex, aromatic, texturally sensuous fruits.

It's been as big a surprise to me, as anyone else, that peaches and various plum-apricot hybrids are arriving at the farmers' market as early as this. It's May; still spring by the calendar! But here they all are, available for the picking, and in wide sweeping arrays and displays at Berkeley Bowl, Monterey Market and local farmers' markets.

Unless a farmer has stayed loyal to calling these hybrids their proper names, what you buy here will be named something different there. As of yet there's little regulation to insure names stay consistent. Train your nose and mouth to recognize new varietals. Pick fruit that has a strong scent when you go in for the smell. All stone fruit can ripen off the tree. Unless your house is very hot or humid, ripen fruit further by setting fruit on its shoulders, stem side down, until, when pressed, flesh has a bit of give. If the fruit you buy is very ripe, be sure to refrigerate it immediately.

Early fruits will be smaller and higher in acid than their later cousins. Fruit whose color bleeds right down into the stem end will ripen sweeter than those whose color is yellow or green by the stem. Look for fruit with saturated color. The sun's blush is what determines sugar in stone fruit.

But remember, some of these varietals will be gone before you can decide if you'll like them! Buy a few of each as the season progresses and jot down the name on the placard as well as the name of the farm stand. These notes will help you get a head-start on next years stone fruit onslaught.

If you have an interest in the history of these quirky hybrids, Mr. Floyd Zaiger is the first person to learn about. He has contributed more to stone fruit hybridization than any other person to date.

Short Pieces on Floyd Zaiger:

Your Produce Man
News from The Dave Wilson Nursery (where many California farmers buy these various hybrids.)

And if you are a nerdy (budding) fruit historian (pun intended) like me, you'll enjoy words written by and about the infamous David Karp, Fruit Detective extraordinaire:

California Heartland . Org
John Seabrook from The New Yorker spends a few days with our man.
Smithsonian Magazine interview.

Shuna Lydon & Sherry Yard, both on team #1.

A number of months ago I received an email from an old pastry chef of mine, Stephen Durfee, who is now an instructor at The Culinary Institute of America, Greystone campus in Napa Valley. He was letting me know I would soon receive an invitation to The Fifth Annual Worlds of Flavor Baking & Pastry Arts Invitational Retreat.

But I thought I would have to respectfully decline, because I am not currently working for a specific establishment. The only name on my chef's jacket is my own. I could not be more grateful that Stephen talked me out of my no.

For 3 1/2 days at the end of April I breathed, thought, emoted, questioned, hypothesized, puzzled over, laughed about, informed, taught, learned, listened, typed, photographed, argued and dreamt pastry and dessert making. {I also "live-blogged" it. Find the blow-by-blow by clicking on this link.}

Notes from the Ideation Session before we went into the kitchen to start creating.

The dessert ideas and chef teams that were formed our team's Ideation Session.

From 8:30 am until near 8 pm every day our 70 plus pastry chef and industry representatives' gaggle went from demonstration, to lecture, to lunch, and then at night many of us went out to dine and commiserate. On the last day and a half we were broken up into 5 teams on the basis of various themes and asked to create 4 desserts each.

Team #1, my own, was themed "Health and Agriculture." In the one hour Ideation Session Sherry Yard and I threw out a lot of excited ideas, were reigned in, we all picked partners and then walked into the palatial kitchens that make up CIA's kitchen classroom. For the 'fruit dessert' my cohort/teammate was Master Bread Baker Mark Furstenberg from Washington DC.

The idea was we would showcase one ingredient, rhubarb. Although rhubarb is not a fruit, it's what's most in season right this minute, and I wanted to show off a special method I have of cooking/treating it, so as to preserve its original integrity, its rhubarb-ness. I like to hot-sugar poach the stalk in such a way as to keep it's crunchy, sour nature. {For a full explanation and recipe, order the Spring 2006 issue of Edible San Francisco, where I went into great detail about osmotic reciprocity and why rhubarb always turns into mushy, stringy baby food when it's introduced to heat.}

Verbena from the Julia Child Gardens at CIA, infused cream and rhubarb juice.

Mark made a slightly savory biscotti of cornmeal and toasted almonds, and besides the rhubarb I wanted something to mediate the textures and flavors of the rhubarb and cornmeal cookie. Plated dessert making is about balance. Pastry chefs are always thinking about texture, flavor, presentation, sweetness, acid, production, size, plating speed, accessibility, temperature, and the food you ate before eating our courses. The best desserts are the ones not made on autopilot. Don't get me wrong, I like my lemon bars, chocolate eclairs and creme brulee, but I want the pastry chef to be paying attention to all the ingredients to produce the best possible taste sensation.

Because of rhubarb's high acid content, it likes to be married with fat. I ate at Gary Danko recently and was not surprised to see rhubarb paired with foie gras. Rhubarb likes butter, cream, creme fraiche, and eggs. But the actual flavor of rhubarb is fairly subtle. If I want a diner to really taste it, I try and make pairings that are of complementary, not competitive flavors.

To this end, I made a light and aromatic, herbaceous sabayon. Instead of wine or alcohol, though, I juiced rhubarb raw through an extractor. If you have time for all these steps I can guarantee you an elegant and voluptuous, seasonal dessert.

David Winsberg of Happy Quail Farms said that he'll have rhubarb through 'til August, but Sabayon is a perfect foil for most fresh fruits, especially berries and stone fruit.

RHUBARB-VERBENA SABAYON

Large Egg Yolks 4-6 each
Sugar 1/4 cup
Honey 3 Tablespoons + (2 Tablespoons: later)
Sea or Kosher Salt Pinch

Rhubarb Juice 3/4 Cup

*Verbena, fresh The leaves from 3 stalks
Heavy Cream, not ultra pasteurized 2 Cups (I use Clover Organic.)

*Knoll Farms has some of the best Verbena available in the Bay Area.

1. Infuse cream and lightly crushed Verbena leaves and stems in a non-reactive pot by heating with low flame until hot. Shut off heat and let steep for at least one hour, preferably more. Do not allow mixture to boil. You can sprinkle in a little sugar to help with infusion.
2. After cream has steeped, turn flame to medium until hot to the touch and strain through a fine meshed sieve. Chill cream in ice batch until very cold. (This step may be done 1-2 days before making Sabayon.)
3. Combine first four ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whisk yolks to break apart before adding sugar and salt.
4. Set bowl over a pot of boiling water. Bottom of bowl should not touch water. The steam is what's cooking the Sabayon.
5. Whisk thoroughly and rapidly, without pause, and, using your other hand, pour rhubarb juice into yolks a little at a time, letting custard thicken a little before adding more. When all liquid has been added, whisk until mixture holds a visible "trail" and has become quite thick.
6. Place bowl on stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment and set speed to medium. Add extra 2 Tablespoons of honey now. If it looks like honey spun to attach itself to the side of the bowl, stop mixer and scrape down Sabayon with a spatula to combine.
7. Increasing speed incrementally, whisk until custard is light and voluminous.
8. Whisk Verbena infused cream until soft peaks form.
9. When Sabayon is ready, transfer into a larger bowl.
10. Using the most pliable spatula in your kitchen, fold whipped cream into Sabayon in three distinctive additions. Fold intentionally, from the inside of the bowl to the outermost edge. Each stroke counts. If you over mix these two ingredients your Sabayon will deflate to the point of liquidization.

Rhubarb-Verbena Sabayon with Crunchy Poached Rhubarb, Corn-Almond Biscotti and Marshall Farms Star Thistle Honey. Pastry Chef Authors: Shuna Lydon & Mark Furstenberg.

Sabayon keeps, refrigerated, for 1 day, but it is best the day it is made.

Apricots Almonds
Leeks vinaigrette
gentle flavoured grains
sweet fresh rice.

almond blossom tea
green and black
the cathedral inside the fig trees
leaves like large hands
blush striped
and blue black purple figs
ripe and heavy
the heft of grapefruit
tangerine oil, when peel is pulled back
scent of lemon in my hands
eucalyptus honey
bay laurel leaves, definitive green
juniper berries and pinecones
their nuts burrowed deep inside
Quince perfumes house at dusk
leave me wandering
in oily night blooming jasmine.

One crushed cardamon pod at the bottom of inky thick coffee
hot and dark
four
crisp
doughnut
fritters
shiny with ferocious oil
browning, expanding
caramel buttery salty
chocolate melting
like paint on cheek insides
a woman's face against mine
like peaches
or green almond husk
plums with reds and purples
mixed inks
flesh and skin
sour and sweet
love affair with citrus.
the dream of bergamot
one shot of Royal Mandarin juice
limes and kumquats
whole and wagon wheel shapes
quarters, eighths, whole.

Crunchy Hot toast
Crab apple, autumn scented
pears picked once
cold, green, ready.
A Comice's fair complexion
bruised by insults uttered
Walnuts and dried fruit compotes
fireplace warmth
mittens and woolen scarves.

the cherry that protects its stone
and one tiny almond lives within it.
bees who sex flowers to fruit

Thick Arms on Mango Trees
pulp and juice to my elbow
avocados underfoot
i'll take green or ripe guavas
challenging loud seeds between uncertain teeth
lychees in porcupine skin
k'nippes camouflaged in their own canopy.

Demure berries
the most delicate of all
needing sun but not heat
rain but not downpour
bees not birds
fingers but not hands
o raspberry, where art thou?
ripe blackberry?
bloody forearms
mosquitoes in ears, on sweaty neck
blue-purple stains every which way
the pleasure is grand
but fleeting -
Strawberry soup
smooth and seedless
exquisite small strawberries
crawling on the ground to find you -
Summer drunks me with berries promise.

Clamming in Long Island with my Grandfather
they spit and pee and pull you down
The immense strength of mollusk
Seagulls repeatedly dropping from great heights
smashing open tightly sealed lips
our roof a beach
the ground outside the door, white
My mother feeding me the salty sea
raw clams
taste memory
connected to swimming in ocean alive
sand sharks against shins
schools of fish turning in unison
inquisitive little fishes nibbling toes
learning to drive boats first
salted eyelashes and brows
smoked gold fish for lunch.

lox and bagels
gefilte fish
and what does that fish look like?
Scales stuck to my clothes like sequins
guts on the dock
birds at its wooden edge, eager.
Flounder is flat
the swordfish above my bed is very blue
lobster was always delicious
steamers and their liquor
hot roiling boiling steamy sea
chewy, soft, gritty, sweet.

My love for you
as delicious as
all this.

-- March 2001

April is Poetry Month.
For more poems by Shuna Lydon, check in with Eggbeater through this link all month.

In this age of Google and Wikipedia, it's easy to forget the joy of getting lost for hours deep in the stacks of a three-dimensional library. To entice you back to these important anchors of our community, here's a short list of culinary exhibits and events worth adding to your list of food adventures:

READING AMERICA: Reconstructed Books by Mary Marsh

"Snack." Mary Marsh, 2004. Coffee, ink, gouache on found book.

Head to the airy, sunny sixth floor of the San Francisco Main Library to find a wonderful exhibit of new work by artist Mary Marsh. Using comfort food as an analogy, Marsh explores the intersection of eating and reading. Discarded books and old library catalog cards (remember those?!) find new lives with bits of linen tape, layers of gouache and coffee as ink. Marsh explores issues of privacy, consumption and narrative with these evocative creations. Her artwork will be on display at the library galleries though April 5, 2007.

While you're at the top of the SF Main, visit one of my favorite local resources: the Koshland SF History Center. If you can't make it there in person, it's almost as fun browsing their amazing photo collection online. Their "Picture This" series includes a line of serious-minded, long-aproned butchers at the Stadium Market in the Sunset District (1935), a proud baker at Dianda's Bakery in the Mission (1980); and a birthday party in the Western Addition, when Japanese-American families still flourished in the neighborhood (1938).

San Francisco Main Library, 6th Floor
100 Larkin Street, San Francisco
(415) 557-4400

TASTE MATTERS: The Role of Food and Drink in Jewish Culture

Detail of "Pesach" by Mary Thorman

The Magnes Museum, a stately building tucked in the foothills of Berkeley, has launched a series of cross-disciplinary presentations of gastronomic narratives in Jewish culture. These intimate gatherings are open to the public ($8 for nonmembers) and offer a valuable resource both for those attempting to understand their own heritage and those trying to learn more about the history of an important but largely invisible group. Last week's conversation with Eleanor Kaufman from UCLA highlighted Eastern European homesteaders keeping kosher under harsh conditions on the plains and utopian farming communities, such as Petaluma's chicken and egg producers, that succeeded for a brief period in the early to mid-20th century.

On May 31, Alisa Braun from UC Davis will discuss the depiction of Jewish foods in films, and on August 16, Benjamin Wurgaft from UC Berkeley will show how food writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, shape perception and identity.

In addition to its ceremonial, decorative and modern art collections, the Magnes houses an excellent research library for scholars of Jewish history and culture.

Judah L. Magnes Museum
2911 Russell Street, Berkeley
(510) 549-6950

ALICE STATLER LIBRARY

The menu cover from a 1930s "Bohemian" restaurant near Coit Tower.

To support its stellar culinary arts and hospitality program, City College maintains a reading library of books about food, restaurants and anything remotely related to the history, culture, science, politics and business of cooking and eating. Their periodical collection alone could occupy a dedicated cook for years.

Though nearly everyone in the Statler Library is wearing chef whites, it's open to the public. You're welcome to read for hours whether you're browsing for random discoveries, honing a research topic or filling up on glossy food mags.

You can also enjoy the library's beautiful menu collections online. With their covers and inside pages lovingly scanned, the menus highlight restaurants across the nation as well as concessionaries at the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco.

Alice Statler Library
City College of San Francisco
Room 10, Statler Wing
50 Phelan Avenue, San Francisco
(415) 239-3460