Mr. Trillin Picks a Peck of Unpickled Peppers

Also, a vintage menu from Spain. And a vintage recipe from Big Sur.

I wrote this for Save Me the Plums; it was in the chapter called The Florio Potato about my first few months at Gourmet, but it got left on the cutting room floor. Reading it now, I wonder why we decided to leave it out.

Bud
In the mid-eighties, when my first interview with Calvin Trillin was printed in the Los Angeles Times, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling sick. I’d misspelled his name, I was sure of it, and it was too late to fix it.

My nausea was so intense that by morning I could not even look at the paper. I drank my coffee, expecting an angry message from the celebrated writer. Any minute my editor would open the paper, and I  waited, trembling, for the call that would end my career.  “How could any decent reporter misspell Calvin Trillin’s name?” he would shout. “You’re fired!”

When I finally had the courage to look at the story I saw that Trillin was correctly spelled. That crazy nightmare had come from writing about someone I so deeply admired.

Calvin Trillin wasn’t just another writer who occasionally took food as his subject; he was the one who deflated the balloon, took the hot air out of food writing. And he did it without ever moving to the snide side.

I’d been reading him for years, quoting him forever.  He was the one who initiated the phrase “Maison de la casa house…” and laughed at restaurants with menus bigger than your head. I loved his celebration of regional American dishes, and for a while began many conversations with his great line, “"It has long been acknowledged that the single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant’s barbecue….”

But that was a long time behind me, and over the years I’d come to know Mr. Trillin well enough to call him Bud. Still my hands were shaking as I punched in his phone number. I was new at Gourmet and I really wanted him to write for us… but despite our friendship I was not convinced he’d do it.

I did, however, have an ace in the hole. His name was Nick.

“So what did you and Bud do after the game?” I asked my son the first time the two vanished into Chinatown intent on beating New York’s most brilliant chicken at tic tac toe.

“Eat.” Nick was vague.

I pressed on. “Where?”

“In a restaurant.” Although Nick and Bud had a standing Chinatown date, my son remained maddeningly mum about the details.  He would, occasionally, admit to having stopped in to see the Egg-Cake Lady, who baked irresistible little cookies in a sidewalk lean-to on Mosco Street.  “I ate ten,” Nick told me once.  “I just couldn’t stop. They’re hollow inside!”

Bud answered on the first ring. “Is it time to visit the chicken again?” he asked.

“I’m not calling about Nick,” I replied. “I have my editor’s hat on, and I’m hoping you’ll write for us.”

The ensuing silence was not promising.  “You can write about anything you want,” I urged. “I’ll send you anywhere in the world.”

The silence continued, but at least I could hear him breathing.  It seemed like a good sign. “Well,” Bud drew the word out into many syllables, “I did eat these fantastic peppers a couple of years ago in Spain. Pimientos de padron are sneaky; most are mild and flavorful, but every fifth pepper has real heat. I can’t stop thinking about them, but they’re not grown here. The only way you can get them is to go to Spain.”

“Spain!” I leapt on this idea before he could have second thoughts.  “We’ll send you. How soon can you go?”

“If The New Yorker wants the story….” He was hedging, but I knew I had him. Back then The New Yorker rarely ran food stories, and they would have no interest in sending a writer to Spain, at great expense, in search of some obscure pepper nobody had ever heard of.

I was thrilled to have Bud writing for Gourmet, and even more excited when the piece came in; he was an editor’s dream. Unlike most writers, a Trillin piece always arrived on time, at the right length, and with scrupulous documentation to back up every assertion.

Beyond that, everything he wrote had legs.

“Bud called,” Nick reported a year or so later when I got home from work.

“Are you going off to try to defeat the chicken again?”

“They retired the chicken,” he said, with some disgust.  “Some animal rights group……”

“So what did he want?”

“He wants us to come eat pimientos de padron.”

“He wants us to go to Spain?”

“No!” Nick was gleeful. “There’s this guy in New Jersey who smuggled in pepper seeds from Spain, and now he’s growing them.  He’s sending some to Bud. We’re going, right?”

Right.

Pimientos de Padron Trillin

When Bud’s story, Pepper Chase, ran in November 1999, there was not a single pimiento de padron grown in the United States. Today farmers markets everywhere are filled with them.  (Bud wrote about that development here.) So begin by making a trip to a farmers market and purchasing your peppers.

If you are going to do this right, you then invite a group of friends to come to your house wearing indestructible clothing. Invitations sent, you hop on your bike and peddle to Chinatown, where you buy, in no particular order:

Chive pancakes
Meat-filled dumplings
Spicy noodles

If you’re in a good mood you go on to Little Italy, where you purchase salami, prosciutto bread and really good parmesan cheese.

For your last stop you go to the local artisanal ice cream store.

You fill your refrigerator with beer and wine (preferably made by Bud’s good friend Bruce Neyers), and you arrange the takeout food out on platters.

You fill a large pot with Wesson Oil and allow your friends (if you’re very lucky this group will include the wonderful Robert Sietsema), to take turns dropping the pimientos de padron into the hot oil for a couple of minutes until they wrinkle up. You put them on paper towel-lined plates, sprinkle them with salt, and stand around, eating them with gusto.

Speaking of Spain… Sometime around the turn of the last century the Spanish government gazed at the innovative chefs in their region and saw dollar signs. Then they started promoting food tourism.

Among the programs they sponsored is an annual gastronomic get together called Madrid Fusion, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. It now bills itself as “the most influential gastronomic festival in the world,” but in the early years it was a wonderfully intimate affair where you got to sit down with all the fascinating stars of the Spanish culinary world. This is a menu from one of the dinners. (Note the after-dinner cigars.)

A few weeks ago I shared a letter the owners of Glen Oaks Restaurant sent years ago from Big Sur. You can read it here.

Yesterday I received this lovely note from a reader, which I thought I should also share .

Dear Ms. Reichl,
I read with interest the letter from Forrest and Marilee Childs. While I never dined at their restaurant, I still make his Mushroom Stroganoff with Wild Rice recipe which was printed in the January 1991 issue of the PG&E Progress (see attached).

Best Regards,

Sharon Ow-Wing

Last week I wrote about pitting sour cherries with a paper clip. It works very well, but reader Stephanie Leveene suggested I purchase a cherry pitter. “They're pretty cheap,” she wrote, “and they make pitting cherries (and olives) super easy.”

I took her advice, and she’s absolutely correct. If there are a lot of cherries in your future, this Oxo Good Grips cherry pitter is a wise investment.

Hilltown Hot Pies is the newest restaurant in Egremont, Massachussetts. You sit outside, watching pizzaiolo Rafi Bildner as he makes ethereal pizzas topped with produce from local farms…. Definitely worth a stop if you’re in the area.

One last thing: Julia O’Malley, an excellent Alaska-based environmental writer, has a devastating article in the New York Times this week. If you love salmon you won’t want to miss it.