The Gift Guide Begins

Expect more suggestions as the week goes on.....

Apologies.

I intended to send a very long list of gift suggestions today, but Thanksgiving intervened. It lasted for days, culminating in turkey for 23… and, well you know how it goes.

So here’s a start…. expect gift postings to go on all week. Along with some recipes, old menus, great meals. Let the holiday season begin!

Real Beef
Our festivities began on Tuesday night with this beautiful prime rib roast aged for 45 days from Pat LaFrieda. It was a simply stunning piece of meat. If someone sent me this for a present I would be endlessly grateful.

There are lots of offerings on the LaFrieda site, and subscribers to La Briffe can get a 15% discount by using the code RUTH15.

My Favorite Fruit
“Somewhere between a peach and a prayer.”  That is how the poet Diane Ackerman describes eating an apricot.  And that’s just for starters: she goes on to compare the taste of apricots to cool fresh well water, butterscotch and eventually lust. 

I can’t argue with that. Nothing beats the flavor of a truly great apricot. But chances are you’ve never tasted one.

Blenheim apricots – named for Blenheim Palace where Winston Churchill was born – entice you with an intoxicating  scent of honeysuckle and vanilla, a perfume intense enough to knock you over.  Take a bite and you discover that the sweetest apricot you’ve ever eaten is also tart. The experience is exciting; the fruit goes leaping through your mouth in somersaults of flavor. And where ordinary apricots can be dry and wooly, a juicy Blenheim leaves you with sticky fingers.

Eating a fresh Blenheim is one of life’s purest pleasures. It is also among its rarest. Blenheims are delicate creatures; their fragile skins bruise too easily to permit travel. You have to go them – to a farm (or a California farmers’ market) during their brief summer season.

But Blenheims have a secret: unlike most fruits, they’re even better dried. These apricots revel in sunlight, and a few days in in the summer sun concentrates their finest qualities, turning them into irresistible natural candy. One which also happens to be good for you. High in fiber, Vitamin C, iron and potassium, dried apricots make a perfect portable snack.

Blenheims first arrived in America in the late eighteen hundreds when farmers discovered that California’s interior valleys (Santa Clara, Sacramento), with their hot days and cool nights, were the perfect environment for the fruit. During World War One, when European supplies of dried fruits were cut off, sales soared. By 1940 there were 60 orchards south of San Francisco dedicated to the fruit.  Sadly, only five remain: the American Blenheim is in serious danger of disappearing.

What happened?  Four words: Turkey and Silicon Valley.  “Twenty years ago,” says Patti Gonzalez, a fourth-generation apricot farmer in Hollister, “Turkish apricots hit the market and the dried fruit packers began buying them because they were so much cheaper than ours. A lot of farmers went out of business.”  Go to your supermarket and you will find the shelves filled with insipid Turkish dried apricots.  With their pallid hue and dull flavor, they do not resemble Blenheims in any way.

 “We were lucky here at Apricot King,” says Gonzalez, “we simply reinvented ourselves.” When processors said their apricots were too expensive they began drying them at the farm, spreading them across nine acres to bask in the sun. “We used to sell apricots by the truckload,” she says, “now we sell them by the half pound.”

How long will Blenheims last? It’s anybody’s guess, but there are fewer every year. If you want to taste a fresh one you’ll have to wait til summer. But dried apricots – those little edible prayers – are just a click away at Apricot King.

An American Classic
Country ham is one of America’s glories, and at a time when everyone’s falling for prosciutto and jamon iberico, it’s time we appreciated what we have right here. People are making country hams all over this country, but I like Allan Benton’s best. Dry, complex, a little bit funky, it tastes wonderful on biscuits or sliced into scrambled eggs, and nothing looks more impressive on a party table.  It weighs in at around fifteen pounds, so it’s a gift that will keep giving for months.

Serious Cake
Know someone who thinks there's nothing like Christmas in Austria? You couldn't possibly find a better gift than this evocative cake. All it takes is a single bite and you're walking down snow-sprinkled streets in Vienna.

If the only poppyseeds you know are the ones that top bagels, you're in for a surprise: gathered into a group the seeds have a slightly bitter, nutty, almost stony and decidedly intense flavor. This is a very grown-up cake; each bite is intense.

The cakes are created by baker Heidi Reigler, who says this was a favorite when she was growing up in Austria. It's easy to understand why. Covered with marzipan and lemon zest, the cake I ordered from The Vienna Cookie Company vanished in an instant.

Endless Fruit
When I ordered this indoor orange tree a couple of years ago I expected it to blossom once and then slump into sadness, dispirited at being stuck indoors. But here it is, a couple years later, still bearing fruit. The fruit is pleasantly puckery, and when the tree is in blossom the fragrance could not be sweeter.

The Most Absurd Animal
The first time someone told me about clams that grow to 15 pounds I was eighteen years old, and I was convinced he was putting me on. It was, from my Manhattan perspective, impossible to think of such a giant clam as anything but a joke. The name made it seem even more absurd: gooeyduck?

But geoducks (see proper pronunciation above), are no joke. Native to the Pacific Northwest, they are among the stranger beasts of the world. And also among the most delicious. If you’ve ever had “giant clam” in a sushi bar, you’ve tasted geoduck. To me this is the essence of clam – briny, mild, crisp, crunchy. Just one taste makes me happy.

For an adventurous cook, nothing would be cooler than to open up a package and find a giant clam. If it were me? I’d slice that long neck into sushi on the spot, and make the fat belly into an awesome chowder. That is, after I’d stopped laughing – and expressing my endless thanks.

Taylor Shellfish has always sold them whole, but now they’re also selling them cleaned and frozen which is a whole lot easier.

Beautiful Spoons
This may be the most elegant kitchen object ever created. A friend recently gave me one as a gift - a very generous gift I might add - and I find myself simply staring at it each time I walk into the kitchen.

And then I find myself reaching for it, and petting its smooth, silky shape.

Woodworker Joshua Vogel created this covetable creation. (It is also available in black.) While you might not be willing to spring for it for yourself (it's a very expensive spoon), this maple ladle from blackcreekmarket.com really does make a spectacular gift.

Tabletop Heaven
Here’s another dangerous website: I could spend hours pouring over the beautiful objects John Derian has collected in his store. They’re all expensive - and all as wonderful as this whimsical tablecloth by French artist Nathalie Lete.

Edible Art 
No matter how eager you are to buy a wonderful gift for a gardener, don’t even think about going to the Hudson Valley Seed Library’s website unless you’re willing to waste a significant amount of time; theirs is one of the most seductive sites I know.

Started by a group of heirloom seed savers they now have a seed farm to grow their own open-pollinated, non-hybridized and non genetically engineered seeds. 

But what’s really remarkable about this group is the way they package their offerings, commissioning artists to create remarkable seed packets.  One of my favorite ways to celebrate the season is by choosing the perfect packet for each friend and enclosing it wth a gift.