SpiceLines

“Let me tell you about chilies.
“The dry chili, lanka, is the most potent of spices. In its blister-red skin, the most beautiful. Its other name is danger.
“The chili sings in the voice of the hawk circling sun-bleached hills where nothing grows. I lanka was born of Agni, god of fire. I dripped from his fingertip to bring taste to this bland earth.”

--from The Mistress of Spices, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, 1997.

Whenever we discover a novelist who writes as well about food as she does about an earthquake or the slow erosion of a marriage, we feel twice blessed. And when there’s a vein of magical realism, in which spices and talking snakes whisper incantations to a sorceress who’s landed on a gritty street in Berkeley, California, we’re truly hooked.

Food runs through the works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni like a gleaming thread. It’s the metaphoric link between out-of-place characters living in America and their real or imagined pasts in India. Often it is “the thinnest strand of a spider web” that pulls discordant families together. In Queen of Dreams, a father wins over his antagonistic daughter when he makes traditional Indian snacks that will save her chai shop from ruin; in Vine of Desire, a woman who never cooks stuffs her Bay Area refrigerator with spaghetti, tuna casserole and potato salad to welcome her long lost friend from India.

We interviewed Divakaruni when she was still at work on her most recent novel, Queen of Dreams. When she came dashing into her hotel, a little late from a book signing, we were struck first by her rippling waist-length hair, and then by her luminous eyes and melodious voice. She is author of four novels, two collections of short stories, two children’s books and has written for both The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. A long time resident of Northern California, she and her family currently live in Texas where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston

Naturally, we talked about food and spices.

Q. You were just 19 when you left India to come to America to continue your study of English. What was the biggest point of culture shock?

A. India is such a family-oriented country. I had always lived with my family or with my extended family. The concept that so many people in America live alone, and actually choose to leave their families to live alone, was very different. It was at once exciting and lonesome. In India it is still very common to live at home. If you were offered a job in another city, and say you had two job offers in two cities, you would probably choose the city closer to your family.

Q. Was food a way to stay connected?

A. Oh, yes! In the beginning I was so homesick. I was living in the dorm in Ohio [Wright State University in Dayton] and you couldn’t get Indian food there. Really you couldn’t get any ethnic food. My mother would send packages of whole spices to me. I would open them and smell the red peppers. It was wonderful. You could get little jars of spices in the big grocery stores, but you wondered how long they had been waiting on the shelf for someone to buy them. So they weren’t very fresh and none of the uncommon spices were available.

Q. For an immigrant, is food is a link to home?

A. That kind of emotional connection is a big part of immigrant cultures and it’s a part of many of my novels. You miss your food because it is associated with love and family and home. When everything is changing around you, there’s a sort of stability in the food that is familiar to you.

Q. Did you know how to cook?

A. I knew just a little from being with my mother. A few months before I left Calcutta, I started writing recipes down in a little notebook. I knew that I wouldn’t have a lot of the ingredients or the equipment in the dorm, so I asked my mother, “What can I cook with one pot and a stirring utensil and whole spices?” So she gave me some very simple recipes that I still make today.

Q. What do you still make?

A. Stir fried green beans. It’s very simple. You heat vegetable oil, add a whole red chili and a spoonful of cumin. When it sputters, add onions, turmeric and the green beans, which you have cut. Add salt and a little black pepper. People who like a lot of black pepper add the whole spice to the oil. Stir fry, then turn the heat low and let the beans simmer until they are cooked.

Q. What kind of oil do you use when you make the beans?

A. In Bengal mustard oil is very popular. It has a very strong flavor, but it is not as healthy, so now I use canola oil.

Q. Why is food is such an important part of your novels and stories?

A. It is because there is so much emotionally imbued in the foods that we choose to prepare. When I was living in India, I didn’t think too much about the meaning of food. It wasn’t until I came here that I began to reflect on it. For so many women, it is the way they show love, exert control, and practice art. In traditional Indian households, the women serve everyone else first and then they sit down to eat when everyone has finished. It’s regarded as a sign of virtue. I’m very ambivalent about that.

Q. I love the story in which the divorced mother reconciles with her teenage son by making him some almond milk.

A. Yes, almond milk. She has spent her life cooking traditional Indian meals, and then her husband leaves and she stops cooking. Her son resents it. In the end she comes back to some middle position. She will make him some almond milk. Talk about comfort food. When children are little and they are upset at night, it’s a calming drink. Good for both of them.

Q. Where did the spice world come from in The Mistress of Spices?

A. There are old folk tales about islands where women with magical powers live, and every now and then one of them will leave these very beautiful islands and come to our very ordinary world to help people. And there are legends about spice islands, where, if you can only find them, you will have everything you desire. So different strands were woven together to make the story. And there are old stories about talking snakes.

Q. The spices in that book were used more for healing than for cooking.

A. Yes. In India we follow Ayurveda, an ancient form of medicine. I use Ayurvedic remedies at home. In the old stories you hear of these spices, but they are lost. An ancient story in, say, the Mahabharata will mention a particular spice or spice mixture or remedy with special magical powers, but as far as we know, they no longer exist, if they ever did.

Q. Is there a spice you cannot live without?

A. I’m quite fond of all the peppers, red and black. Then mustard seed and cumin which are often used in combination.

I really love mustard paste. You take black mustard seed and grind it with mustard oil. It makes a really thick creamy paste. You cook fish in it. It is typical of Bengal. My family knows how much I love it, so they always make it for me when I go back. It is quite pungent and you can add a little red pepper to make it more so. It makes a spicy, creamy, thick gravy.

Q. Do you cook now?

A. I cook all the time. Two things my husband and my boys love are rice pilau and chicken curry.

Q. What’s your curry like?

A. I fry grated onion, ginger and garlic, add turmeric, red chili and garam masala, let cook slowly, add beaten yoghurt at the end and it’s done. It makes a really spicy creamy sauce that my family loves.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I’ve just finished The Conch Bearer, which is novel for young adults. It’s about a 12-year-old boy who goes on a search for a magical object and what happens when he finds it. My son leaned over my shoulder and read while I wrote. He’s very excited about it.

Q. Are you writing anything for adults?

A. Oh, yes! My next novel for adults is also magical. It’s about a dream interpreter. I’m in a magical period.

Editor’s note: The Conch Bearer was published in 2003 and Queen of Dreams in 2004. To see more, go to www.chitradivakaruni.com.

[Editor's Note: This interview originally appeared in the Fall, 2004 issue of SpiceLines Newsletter. To see the entire issue on black pepper, please go here.]

Tabla chef Floyd Cardoz tells us how black pepper is
used in the cooking of Goa and in his New York restaurant.

Crabcakes appear so regularly on New York restaurant menus that you could probably eat a different rendition--for better or worse--every day of the year. But the Goan Spiced Maine Crabcake at Tabla, the city’s most intriguing Indian restaurant, is the one we’d devour anytime: A disk of succulent lump crabmeat, delicately crisped to a golden brown, it bursts with the zingy flavors of ginger, coriander, chiles and other spices that enhance yet never overwhelm the sweetness of the shellfish. Eaten with bites of tart tamarind chutney, Tabla’s crabcake is thrilling, a bit like a rollercoaster ride through the flavor spectrum.

Tabla is not actuallly an Indian restaurant, but rather, a wondrous cross cultural kitchen manned by Floyd Cardoz, whose inventive way with Indian flavors creates dishes that owe as much to French or American styles of cooking as to the subcontinent. At 43, Cardoz is a gentle, softspoken man whose round face radiates a genuine sweetness, a rare quality in a chef. When he talks about India and the spices of his childhood, his eyes begin to glow.

Cardoz was born in Mumbai (Bombay). While studying to become a biochemist, he ran across Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel and realized that he could get paid to do what he really loved: cooking. He enrolled in catering school, a move which stunned his family and friends, then took an entry-level job at the Taj Majal Intercontinental Hotel, where his first day’s assignment was to peel a 200-kilo bag of onions. After more culinary schooling in Switzerland, he worked at restaurants in Zurich and New York, before becoming executive sous chef to Grey Kunz at Lespinasse. During the next five years, with Kunz’s encouragement, Cardoz developed his own style of cooking, in the process increasing the Indian spices in Kunz’s kitchen from four to 25. In 1999, he joined with restaurant impresario Danny Meyer to open Tabla and in 2001, its more casual offshoot, The Bread Bar at 11 Madison Avenue. His first cookbook is due out in 2005.

We talked with Cardoz one blustery November afternoon about spices and the food of his native Goa:

Q. You spent your childhood in Bombay. What is the food like there?

A. The flavor tradition in Goa is influenced by the Portuguese. Pork, beef, and alcohol are all part of the cuisine. We used vinegar in our food, which is not common in Indian cuisine. We ate Western style bread instead of Indian flat bread. There are dishes like bibinca, a custard made of egg yolks, flour, coconut milk and nutmeg. Egg yolks are not normally used in Indian cooking. We have pork roasts and choriz, which is similar to chorizo [spicy pork sausage]. You’ll find bacalau [salt cod] cooked in olive oil and garlic, just as you do in Portugal.

Q. Did this tradition influence the kind of cooking you do at Tabla?

Almost everything I do draws on the Goan tradition. The crisped skate with pickled onions and yoghurt curry that you had for lunch is coated with salt, pepper and cream of wheat or semolina. We used to eat fish with cream of wheat at home. In India, the wheat is soft, not hard, so you can use it like breadcrumbs. I grew up up eating skate and it’s been on every menu I’ve ever had.

I borrow from Indian cuisine too. I might stretch the spice palate a bit, but I never force anything. For instance, fennel seed is used a lot in Indian cooking. It has a licorice flavor, so I might use spices with a similar flavor profile like anise, star anise, ginger, rosemary and tarragon to create layers of flavor. It’s subtle, but I like the way they play off each other.

Q. What was your family’s kitchen like?

A. It was modern. It had a gas range and an oven with a broiler. Our spice mixes were ground daily for each curry or marinade. We had a blender or coffee grinder for spices, but our cook would only use a traditional stone grinder.

Q. Did you spend much time in the kitchen as a boy?

I was in the kitchen all the time. I would catch fish and clean and cook it. I’d clean shrimp. I’d make omelets. I loved food so much, and I discovered that I had an aptitude for cooking.

Q. Are there dishes in Indian cuisine that use black pepper as a predominant spice, or is it usually blended with other spices?

A. There are some dishes that are based on black pepper. Murgh Kali mirch is chicken with black pepper. Potatoes are prepared with garlic, ginger and black pepper. My father used to eat watermelon sprinkled with black pepper and salt. My wife, Barkha, always eats fresh fruit with freshly ground black pepper. We drink lassi [ chilled yogurt and water] with black pepper. There is rasam, which is a sour, sweet, spicy soup that has a predominance of black pepper. The heat does help to cool down the body in the hot climate.

Q. How do you like to use black pepper at Tabla?

A. We tend to blend it with other spices, but sometimes black pepper is the strongest note. We’ve done skate with black peppercorns, lambchops seasoned with black cardamom and black pepper, and a black pepper shrimp salad with watermelon and lime. Tandoori quail in a black pepper glaze. Foie gras with black pepper and pear compote. For dessert, we have a vanilla bean kulfi, which is like ice cream, in a pomegranete-black pepper consomme. A lot of chefs use white pepper, but I prefer the nice aroma you get with black peppercorns.

Q. Do you use it whole or grind it?

A. I like to toast black peppercorns in a pan before grinding them. It gives them a nice citrusy aroma. The flavor almost sings when you eat it. If you bite a peppercorn, it’s fiery, but toasting balances the heat. I personally love peppercorns whole, so when I cook at home, I tend to use both techniques.

Q. There are different types of black pepper. Can you tell the difference between them?

A. The main difference is in the aroma, but unless you have a very trained palate, it’s hard to tell one from the other when they’re combined with food or other spices. We use Tellicherry peppercorns at the restaurant. The most important thing is to keep your spices fresh.

Q. How do you keep your spices fresh?

A. It’s all based on turnover. We go through $10,000 worth of spices a month, mainly coriander, cumin, black mustard seed, turmeric and black peppercorns. We keep our spices in sealed containers in a room separate from the kitchen away from the heat. We call it the spice room. It’s my favorite part of the kitchen.

Tabla, 11 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Telephone: 212/889-0667. Fax: 212/889-0914. Web: www.tablany.com

James Oseland, author of Cradle of Flavor

One blustery morning last November I found myself huddled over a glass of lukewarm tea at Happy Joy, a blue collar Malaysian-Cantonese eatery on Canal Street in New York. Most days this small pink-walled, lineoleum-floored restaurant is thronged with hungry people coming and going from work, but today, Sunday, there are just a few bleary-eyed Chinese families in puffy down jackets hunkered down over steaming bowls of noodle soup.

A dozen red-lacquered ducks hang in the front window and their fragrance—or it the smell of succulent roast pork?—is driving me mad with hunger. I scan the enormous menu, which features “Famous Malaysian Hawker Food,” wondering about specialties such as Congee with 1000 Year Old Eggs, Curry Beef Skids Soup, and the many varieties of handmade noodles. I want to order everything.

The door bursts open and James Oseland blows in on a gust of icy wind. His nose is red from the cold and he has a long woolen scarf double-wrapped around his neck. Small and slight, with bright inquisitive eyes, the new executive editor of Saveur throws off so much energy that the desultory atmosphere in the restaurant is suddenly charged. Heads swivel, eyes widen. The waitress, clearly intrigued, sidles over to our table. They confer intensely over the menu. James jumps up to investigate the prepared food counter across the room, studies the menu again, and finally orders wonton mee for both of us, thin yellow noodles with dark soy sauce and scallions, topped with fish balls for him and some of that roast pork for me.

Over breakfast, we chatted about his new book, Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, arguably the best, and certainly the most enthralling, cookbook of 2006. It is the tale of two decades of passionate travel through the seductive tropical islands where spices grow and, equally, of the extraordinary cooks who shared the secrets of their aromatic cuisine. The recipes are delicious, rigorously authentic and, thanks to Oseland’s intelligent advice on ingredients and cooking methods, very accessible to American readers. (See my review of Cradle of Flavor here.)

This is a portion of our conversation:

Q. Why did you call your book Cradle of Flavor?

A. It’s pretty basic. That part of the world—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore—was my place of apotheosis. It was where my palate woke up, so it’s my own “cradle of flavor.” I used my experiences there as a conduit for the reader, to convey a sense of place and to put the food into context. And then so many of our best-loved flavors come from there—nutmeg, cloves, mace, ginger, lemongrass. We’re beginning to discover some of the lesser known aromatics too, such as galangal.

Q. How long did it take you to write the book?

A. Five years—except it really took 20, if you take into account that I was writing it in my head for that many years!

Q. Where did you write most of it—in New York, on the road?

A. I wrote about half of it in my Brooklyn home, and the other half in Kerala, South India, and in Malaysia and Indonesia.

I actually finished the book in Kuala Lumpur, which is the most amazing food city. I rented a room so I could hunker down and get it done. There were at least 20 hawker stalls right down the street and every night I would plan out what I would eat for breakfast the next day—nasi lemak [ginger-scented coconut rice] or idlis [steamed rice cakes] with curry or dal. After breakfast, I would have to plan what to eat for lunch and then an afternoon snack.

I also made friends with some illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who had a room across the alley. They were great cooks and invited me to share their food—usually fantastically spiced biryanis and mango pickle. They were amazingly accommodating hosts.

Q. Do you cook at home?

A. Not much right now. The magazine keeps me busy. This morning I’ve been trying to finish the Saveur 100 list for the January issue.

But a year ago I’d make a curry that would extend for a day or two, with rice, invariably, and stir-fried Asian greens such as choi sum. When I made rice for the curry, I’d double or triple the quantity. Then the next day I’d make beautifully stir-fried rice, very simple, with fried red chiles, kecap manis [Indonesian sweet soy sauce], and shallots or garlic. Or a pared down Chinese rice with light soy sauce, browned garlic, egg, black pepper, and fresh green chiles.

Q. What’s your favorite kitchen tool?

A. My Cuisinart Mini-Prep food processor.

Q. Seriously? I would have guessed a mortar and pestle.

A. Yeah, it would be nice to do everything that way, but I don’t have time. In places like Jakarta food is still mostly prepared by hand because there are so many people to help. Around 10 o’clock in the morning the women of the house get together in the kitchen. A friend from next door might stop by and maybe a couple of cousins or aunts. Everyone chops and grinds ingredients to make fresh spice pastes for that day’s meals. But the Cuisinart is a perfectly good substitute.

Q. Where do you shop for spices in New York?

A. Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights. The turnover is fast and the quality is great.

Q. What are your favorite markets in other parts of the world?

A. In Padang, there’s Pasar Besar Kota Padang. The best thing is the vast section (sections, really) dedicated to all the aromatics used in local dishes—shallots, galangal, fresh spices, daun pandan [vanilla-scented pandan leaf]; and most of all, ruby red chiles called lada merah in Bahas Minang, the local language.

In Kuala Lumpur, Pasar Pudu is a rambling produce and meat market not far from the center of town where shoppers make a beeline for an amazing mix of ingredients, including Indian spices, Chinese vegetables, and Malay aromatics.

There’s a market in Bangkok that has fabulous stalls manned by people from Isaan, Thailand’s northeast and home of its spiciest food. I also like Mercado de la Merced in Mexico City, which is apparently the world’s largest market. My favorite thing? The aisles and aisles of mole vendors, offering sumptuous smelling moles in seemingly endless variety.

Q. How about here in the U.S.?

A. The Saturday morning farmers market in central Stockton, California specializes in pristine, mostly Asian produce—a visit there is like a trip to Southeast Asia.

Q. So where do you get your vegetables in New York?

A. I go to a lot of places in Chinatown, but one I really like is Choi Kun Heung on Chrystie Street. It’s small and a little hard to find, but you can get beautifully fresh vegetables there—baby bok choi, garlic chives, long beans.

Q. If you had to pick a single spice you couldn’t live without, what would it be.

A. Coriander—there’s something so exquisitely, richly fragrant about that spice, plus I love its adaptability. The seeds were first brought to the Malay archipelago by Indian spice traders and they soon became a keystone ingredient, especially in the earthy, zesty flavoring pastes and marinades of Java. Two types of seeds are available: One is round and light brown to tan and has a lemony taste. The other is egg shaped and has a green-yellow tint, with a fresher, grassier taste. It’s especially important to use whole seeds rather than the preground spice, as the latter has little taste. The best, freshest-tasting coriander seeds come from Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani spice shops. They usually carry both varieties and have a high turnover, ensuring aromatic seeds.

Moments later James hurried off to buy a few ingredients for the cooking class he was giving that evening at the Institute of Culinary Education. Among the wondrous dishes we made that night was Acar Terung, a South Indian-Style Eggplant Pickle. Chunks of pre-fried Japanese eggplant were stirred into a vibrant flavoring paste of dried red chilies, garlic, ginger, and fennel, cumin and—yes—coriander seed.

I left with a gift—two envelopes, one of fiery black peppercorns “from somebody’s backyard in India” and another of enormous nutmegs from the Banda Islands. Yesterday, I made James’ version of Spekkuk, or Indonesian spice cake, using one of those wildly fragrant nutmegs. For that recipe, go here.

Happy Joy Restaurant, 125 Canal Street, New York NY 10002, 212-388-0264. Patel Brothers, 3727 74th Street, Flushing, NY 11372-6337,
718-898-3445, www.patelbrothersusa.com. Order the Cuisinart Mini Prep Plus Processor from www.amazon.com. Stockton Saturday Farmers’ Market, 208-934-1830, www.stocktonfarmersmarket.org.

Chef Andrea Reusing in the serene Asian-ispired dining room of the Lantern
Restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Photo credit: Natalie Ross

Chicken as revelation—that’s a hard notion to swallow.

But five years ago, the Lantern Restaurant’s Tea and Spice-Smoked Chicken offered tantalizing possibilities. The bird was full of genuine flavor, the slightly gamey taste that comes from a life in the outdoors spent pecking and scratching. The first bite was succulent, oozing with luscious juices. With the next came a delicate smokiness and the mild astringency of black tea. Then the spices hit my palate: sweet cinnamon, licorice-scented star anise, aromatic cloves, peppery red chilies. The chicken had been brined and smoked, then roasted to order, and the miracle was that, after all that manhandling, it was tender and utterly delicious.

Last fall, Gourmet gave the Lantern the No. 47 spot on its list of America’s Top 50 Restaurants. The editors got it right: Chef Andrea Reusing “cooks to her own tune.” Like a lot of American chefs, she starts with local fare--in this case pristine North Carolina ingredients like briny shrimp, flounder and soft shell crab; heritage pork; free range duck and chicken; locally made cheeses; sourwood honey; and truckloads of wondrous vegetables grown on nearby farms. But then Reusing performs a sort of culinary legerdemain, using these raw materials to conjure dishes from five Asian culinary traditions (Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, Japanese) that remain true to their roots yet have a distinctly modern sensibility.

Here’s what I ate at the Lantern a few weeks ago: North Carolina crab cakes spiked with vibrant Thai flavors such as lemon grass and mint, with a sweet-hot house-made chili sauce that titillated every one of my 10,000 taste receptors. Sumptuous coconut-braised pork shanks, falling off the bone tender, cooked with fresh gingery galangal, topped with crispy shallots and a side of addictive Vietnamese style green papaya salad. Dessert was a deceptively simple crème fraiche panna cotta served with local organic strawberries.

In spite of its sophisticated airs, Chapel Hill is still a small, laid back southern university town where you might reasonably expect to find black-eyed peas and fried green tomatoes on the menu. But Reusing is the ultimate insider’s outsider, and she brings a global spin to the kitchen. She grew up in Washington DC and New Jersey, fell in love with homegrown tomatoes in her parents’ garden, studied cinema at NYU, ate out a lot in Chinatown, edged into line cooking in the East Village. After marrying Durham rock musician Mac McCaughn, she ran a catering business out of their house, then helped open Enoteca Vin in Raleigh where the focus on food and wine pairings won national raves. She left in 2001, gutted the old Darbar and Leo’s space in Chapel Hill, and with her brother Brendan, opened the Lantern in 2002.

Those are the basic facts. But they don’t capture Reusing’s boundless energy, or her passion for the Slow Food movement and the dedicated farmers whose bounty is the focus of the Lantern’s menu. When she addressed the American delegation at the Slow Food summit in Italy last year, she summed it up in one sentence: “…food grown by people with strong connections to their land and community is the only way a girl from New Jersey could open an Asian restaurant in North Carolina and even approach some idea of authenticity.” Check out the menus for the Lantern Table, a dinner series celebrating local fare, and you’ll see what she means.

One of the things I like best about the Lantern is the way it transports you to another place. The dining room that opens onto Franklin Street is cool and serene, with walls the color of green tea and clusters of George Nelson bubble lamps casting a diffuse glow over the scene. It has a calm, almost meditative vibe—until it fills up with 58 hungry people, of course. But go down the back alley, open the iron gate, push aside a heavy velvet drape and you’ve walked into an oriental dream right out of a Charlie Chan movie. It’s the coolest bar in town, dark and moody as an opium den, with dangling red lanterns, a laughing Buddha, and exotic drinks like the Red Geisha (muddled fresh strawberries with lime, ginger and vodka) and my own favorite, the Hibiscus Petal (pink flower-infused vodka with Thai basil.) You can eat here too, so you have a choice of escapist fantasies in which to enjoy this very global local fare.

I first visited with Andrea at the restaurant a couple of months ago. Here’s what we talked about.

What was your first cooking job?

I was writing for a political consultant in New York and also working as a cocktail waitress. Then I started as a line cook at the Telephone Bar which was an English pub in the East Village. It was easier than waitressing because I didn’t have to wear heels. I was getting up at 6 AM to make Sunday brunch—kippers and scotch eggs for 100 people. I had no experience, but the chef, Ellen Smith liked hiring women and she trained me.

Where did your interest in food come from?

My grandparents were good cooks. They lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In the summer, we’d walk across the road to pick corn. My grandmother would take us to Amish farms to buy cheese and eggs and milk. We’d also go to Central Market which is the oldest farmers’ market in the country. It has homemade pickles, amazing chickens, good dairy products. There’s a man who grinds fresh horseradish on an old grater with wheels. The flavor is completely different from what you get in the bottle. Everything was local and delicious.

My parents loved food too. They always had a garden. We’d eat tomatoes only in summer. They’d get Asian or Chinese recipes from Craig Claiborne and make Chinese American food. We always had a wok.

Going from catering to being chef at Enoteca Vin must have been a big jump. How did that happen?

The people who were opening Vin took a big chance on me. I was cooking mostly Asian food at the time and some of that was on the menu. The focus, then as now, was on wine and food pairings, so we’d serve different spicy dim sum with great champagne. There were tons of cool artisan cheeses. But the real emphasis was on local, very seasonal ingredients. I was there for two years. Ashley Christensen is the chef now.

Did you have a signature dish at Vin? What was most popular?

We did a salt cod hash with fried local egg. Roasted whole cauliflower with fontina and white truffles. A homemade seafood choucroute with monkfish and periwinkles. I made picnic hams out of local pork shanks. Our most popular dish was steak frites—we served it with duck fat-fried potatoes with olive butter and arugula.

What was your concept for the Lantern?

There weren’t many Asian restaurants in Chapel Hill, so that was a good niche for us. And I wanted to have a friendly neighborhood spot where people could drop in for great food whenever they felt like it. The space had a really good vibe. Before Darbar [an Indian restaurant], Leo’s had been there. It was a beloved Greek restaurant run by an Italian family. I know of two couples who got engaged there.

What’s the idea behind the Lantern’s menu?

It’s pan-Asian, with respect for regional Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese and Japanese tradition, using local ingredients as much as possible. We have wonderful North Carolina eggs, greens, pork, mushrooms, seafood.

We rotate the vegetables so that they are strictly local and served only in season. In the fall we do braised Asian greens and yellow wax beans. In the winter, dark green crinkly savoy cabbage, which has a really interesting flavor. In spring, lots of asparagus and sugar snaps. Whatever’s wonderful and growing right now.

There’s been a big move towards heritage pork around here…

Our small farmers are raising amazing pigs. Ossabaw fat is delicious. It’s high in omega-3’s and low in transfats. Another great one is Berkshire Red Wattle. We use local pork for all our dumplings and roast pork dishes. The pork shanks are pasture-raised from Niman Ranch. An animal only has two hind shanks and we use 100 a week. That would be 50 pigs and there’s not enough volume to support that.

What items are always on the menu?

Tea and spice smoked chicken. We brine it, smoke and roast it to order. We sell 130 of those a week. Also the dumplings: pork and chive, and cabbage and shitake mushroom.

Braised pork shanks are another big favorite. In the fall we cooked them with soy, sugar, orange peel, cassia and star anise, and paired them with mushroom sticky rice and braised watercress. Right now we’re doing shanks braised in coconut milk with galangal root. The spicy papaya salad on the side is a sort of crossover Thai-Vietnamese dish

Is there a spice that you’re really excited about?

Vietnamese black pepper from Adriana’s Caravan. It’s pungent and spicy and has an almost floral taste. We use it to finish “shaking beef”: the meat is stir fried with lalat leaves and seasoned with salt, sugar, fish sauce, rice vinegar and lime. The pepper goes on at the end.

Do you make your own spice mixes?

Oh, yes. We grind the garam masala for an Indian soup made of local white sweet potatoes. It’s based on Julie Sahni’s recipe and has cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves and mace. We sauté it in ghee and add it to the soup at the end.

What’s your favorite dish?

The local pickle plate. Right now we’re doing one with ramps, turnips, green tomatoes, radishes and kimchi.

After five years, how do you stay excited?

The farmers and the ingredients keep me excited. I appreciate people who work really hard but who have a great time doing it. It makes them fun to hang out with.

Tell me about your car.

It’s a 1985 Mercedes diesel that runs on cooking oil from the restaurant. We use a German converter. If you smell fried fish driving around town, it’s me.

To see Andrea's recipe for Indian Stew with Tomato-Saffron Broth and Chickpea Dumplings, go here.

Susana Trilling, cookbook author and PBS chef, gives
classes in the spice-rich cuisine of Oaxaca at Seasons
of My Heart cooking school at Rancho Aurora.

Under the sky blue dome that crowns her spacious “temple of cooking,” Susana Trilling is explaining the mysteries of mole. Dressed in an embroidered huipil, her dark hair braided with maroon ribbons, she holds up several types of wrinkly dried chiles: “Oaxaca is the land of seven moles. Everyone makes it differently, but the ingredient that all moles have in common are chiles. The mole [which means “mixture”] is cooked in one pot, the meat in another. You never want to taste one ingredient over another.”

Seven other students and I are lounging at a long, handhewn table, sipping chilled Coronas, eating buttery, black skinned aguacates criollos we picked up in the market earlier in the day. I take notes, but steal an occasional glance at the Sierra Madres from the window of the school at Rancho Aurora where we have gathered for a five-day cooking class. If culinary heaven exists, at least for this moment I’ve found it here.

The traditional cuisine of Oaxaca has roots that go deep into Mexico’s colonial and pre-Hispanic past. There is no livelier guide to its twists and turns than cookbook author and PBS television host, Susana Trilling. She has spent the last 19 years in the region’s kitchens, coaxing authentic recipes for moles and other gastronomic delights from a wide circle of stellar home cooks. A former caterer and restaurant chef, she now runs Seasons of My Heart, a cooking school at an organic farm just outside town.

Born in Philadelphia, Trilling first tasted homemade flour tortillas, tamales and frijoles at a small Tex-Mex café her grandmother ran at the Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio. After cooking at restaurants from Alaska to Australia, she became chef at Bon Temps Rouler in New York. Then she came to Mexico and fell in love with the ancient culture of Oaxaca—a passion which she shared in her first cookbook and PBS series, Seasons of My Heart. A second book on the foods of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is in the works.

Trilling’s generosity and good cheer have won devoted admirers all over Oaxaca. Wandering with her through the city’s bustling Mercado de Abastos, we were besieged by vendors crying, “Susana! Susana!” as they embraced and exchanged family gossip. Her friendships led us to the mountains where we spent an afternoon with a mystical wild mushroom hunter and to the home of the four cheery Hernandez sisters where we made sopa de guias de calabaza (summer squash vine and flower soup) and black beans with niditos (literally “bird beaks,” actually tiny handmade dumplings) over an open fire. She once tossed out our schedule and whisked us off to a raucous fiesta celebrating the baptism of a friend’s grandson, making us feel less like students than old friends at a free-wheeling house party.

Recently, we talked with Susana by email about the cooking of Oaxaca and the way cinnamon is used in its signature dishes.

How would you describe the cooking of Oaxaca?

The Oaxacan kitchen is a magical place where foods from Mexico and other parts of the world have converged to produce a unique style of cooking. It is a mixture of pre-Hispanic foods prepared and eaten by indigenous groups—such as armadillo and turkey, or atole, a gruel made of ground corn—and the Mestizo cuisine that emerged a few generations after the Spanish Conquest. Mestizo cuisine has ingredients like almonds, allspice, cinnamon, raisins, prunes, sesame seeds, all foods that were transported to Mexico from the Old World, India and other parts of Asia.

After the Spanish Conquest, there was also a big Moorish influence, which is apparent in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec as well as Oaxaca city foods. When Maximilian became Emperor, his cooks brought French culinary traditions—cream sauces, etc.—that influenced the cuisine of Mexico as well as Oaxaca.

Could you give an example of a dish that reflects these currents?

Estofado de pollo, Spanish chicken stew with capers and green olives, is a signature dish of the region. It’s prepared many different ways. Sometimes it’s red, sometimes it’s green, depending on the type of chiles used, how ripe the tomatoes are and the proportion of tomatillos used. But in general, the sauce is made of Old World ingredients such as almonds, capers and olives, Asian spices such as cinnamon, cloves and black peppercorns, and indigenous chiles, tomatoes and tomatillos. Traditionally all the ingredients are ground on a metate, a three-legged grinding stone used since pre-Hispanic times.

Gerard Vives, photographed in Paris last spring, sells 19 varieties of extraordinary
peppercorns to the top chefs of Paris--and to you, if you know where to shop.

In Paris last spring I finally had breakfast with Gerard Vives,

I’d been on his trail for over a year. Or maybe five. That’s when I first ran across his peppercorns at Maison Izrael. Izrael is Paris’s most venerable spice shop, stuffed to the rafters with dusty packets, jars and bottles, and that wintry Friday afternoon rue Francois-Miron was thronged with weekend chefs, stocking up on hard-to-get ingredients. (One kitten-heeled woman asked for Mazola as if it were the rarest huile d’argan.) The place was mobbed and how my eyes ever lighted upon the slim box inscribed Le Comptoir des Poivres I’ll never know.

Andrea Nguyen is the author of Into the Vietnamese
Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors.

The first thing I notice about Andrea Nguyen, as she strolls through the crowded dining room, is the crinkly good humor in her eyes and her winning smile. Being female, the second thing I notice is her hair. It is thick and black, and the cut is casual chic with a few jagged ends, almost—but not quite--as if she had scissored it herself. Dressed in a tight zip up Juicy Couture-style jacket, she stands out among the woozy academic types ruminating over breakfast this chilly spring morning.

At 39, Nguyen is arguably the most compelling voice in the American Vietnamese food world. Her 2006 cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Food Ways, Modern Flavors was a finalist for the James Beard Award of Excellence and garnered a Chicago Tribune review that compared her to Julia Child. The book, written in a friendly, down to earth style, not only clarifies Vietnam’s somewhat mystifying culinary heritage, but also explains in detail the role of such unfamiliar ingredients as fish sauce---where it came from, how it’s made and why you might add salt to this already salty condiment. In the nicest possible way, it establishes the author as an authority on the food of her homeland.