1. Give me some background on how the Jewish people came to live in Algerian, what time-period(s) did they settle here? Why which particular hardships were they fleeing/where?

The first Jews who settled in Algeria arrived there involuntarily, as slaves or exiles. The Romans landed initially at Carthage and discovered the lands of Algeria as they spread westwards from Tunisia. Many late Roman-era Jews were exiled to Algeria from Palestine in the first century C.E. for rebelling against Titus. These Jewish settlers were very successful and consequently, many indigenous, pagan Berbers converted to Judaism. The integration of Berbers into Jewish settler communities fused Jewish customs with Berber traditions. Intermarriage between Jews and Berber was common throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Cultural and culinary similarities between Jews and Berbers in modern Algeria, such as the use of North African spices like coriander, stem from the cultural exchange between the communities that took place during this era. The next major upheaval in Algerian Jewish life occurred when Muslim armies conquered North Africa in 642 C.E. After their successful conquest, the Muslims forcefully converted the indigenous pagan Berbers, but because of their shared monotheistic religious heritage, the Muslim invaders permitted the Jews of Algeria to live as “tolerated infidels” within the umma, the Muslim community of believers. The Muslim ruler of Algeria protected the Jewish community and assured their freedom of religion because of their identity as “People of the Scripture,” or dhimmi. The freedoms accorded to Jews because of their dhimmi status afforded them a measure of autonomy within the Muslim population.

Though the physical, social, and economic separation of the Judeo-Algerian community from the Muslim majority enabled the creation and preservation of a unique culture, such autonomy came at a price. Jews had to pay additional poll and land taxes, jizya and kharaj, and could not marry Muslims or testify against them in court. Algerian Jews lived separately from the rest of the population in a ghetto, or hara, and were required to wear markings on their clothes to indicate their Jewish identity. Though Jews lived peacefully during the Muslim occupation of Algeria, the majority Muslim rulers and population treated them as foreigners in their own homeland. When the Ottoman Turks conquered northern Algeria in 1481, they continued to categorize the Judeo-Algerian population as dhimmi.

Shortly thereafter, a large number of Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled to Algeria after the Spanish Inquisition exiled them from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Iberian culture influenced the customs and cuisine of these new Jews, the megorashim, literally “exiles” in Hebrew. The cultural changes wrought by the integration of Iberian Jews into the Judeo-Algerian community permanently differentiated Judeo-Algerian culture from the indigenous Berber cultures by incorporating Spanish and European traditions into Judeo-Algerian customs. While Berber converts to Islam were increasingly culturally aligned with the Ottomans, the arrival of the megorashim facilitated the beginnings of European cultural influence in the Judeo-Algerian community.

2. How is Algerian Jewish Food different from simply Sephardic Jewish cooking? How is it the same?

Algerian Jewish food, because of the influx of Sephardim in the fifteenth century, bears much in common with basic Sephardic cuisine. This includes the use of a wide array of spices, frying savory pastries in oil, etc. However, unlike sephardic foods in, say, the Balkans, Algerian Jewish food retains common features of Berber cuisine-the use of the Tajine, for example, and the ras al hanout spice mixture.

3. Has an Algerian Jewish population moved on to the United States? Where have they settled, and in what ways have their foodways changed in the U.S.?

There are few Algerian Jews in the United States. The French colonial state granted Algerian Jews French citizenship in 1870. Consequently, between 1870 and the end of French colonization in 1962, Algerian Jews gradually acculturated and assimilated French customs. As a result, it made much more sense for Algerian Jews to immigrate to France when, in 1962 and 1963, they were forced out of Algeria. The majority of Algerian Jews continue to live in France, with some immigrating to Israel in recent years. In terms of evolving foodways, in French colonial Algeria and in France, Algerian Jewish cuisine became somewhat gallicized, with foods like coq au vin and boeuf bourguignonne (kosherized, of course), entering their repertoire.

4. What ingredients are very unique to this area of the world? How have they been used specifically in Algerian-Jewish dishes?

Ingredients unique to Algeria are those common in North Africa: dates, raisins, prunes, olives, lamb, goat, spices (cinnamon, coriander, ras al hanout), wheat, couscous, fava beans, oranges, lemons, etc.

5. What’s most exciting to you about being the special guest at this upcoming dinner what’s your area of passion on this subject?

I’m fascinated by the ways that the evolution of Algerian Jewish foodways between 1830-1962 (the period of French colonization) maps the cultural shifts in the community. You can mark the changing identity of the community in the foods they consumed over that period: from lamb kefte to Coq au Vin and Blanquette de Veau! The retention of many traditional Algerian Jewish dishes also speaks to the community’s desire to maintain their cultural and religious heritage, especially after their mass migration to France in 1962. Adrift in a foreign country, with no chance of returning to their homeland, Algerian Jews maintained their unique cultural and religious heritage through their foodways, both ritual and everyday.

Why are the flavors more intense?
For starters, gelato has less air than ice cream. Conventional ice creams can contain as much as 50 percent of their volume as air. Zingerman’s gelato has only 10 to 20—that means that a little bit of gelato goes a lot farther than a big scoop of ice cream. Gelato also a softer texture than ice cream. Instead of scooping rock hard ice cream, you’ll find our gelato melts almost immediately in your mouth, leaving lots of flavor and a wonderful finish.

How does Zingerman’s Creamery Gelato differ from all other gelato you can get around here?
1) Better Ingredients. High quality whole milk and cream from Guernsey dairy, organic natural Demerara brown sugar and the finest flavorings possible.

2) Italian equipment. We’ve brought over special equipment from Bologna, Italy that’s designed to blend in a minimum of air during the carefully timed freezing process. This special machinery allows us to produce an authentic Italian gelato in Ann Arbor. Many so called gelati in this country are made using ice cream machines and are inadvertently incorporating air equivalents to ice cream and are therefore producing a hybrid of gelato and ice cream.

3) Freshly made. Because we’re working in small batches right here in the Ann Arbor area, Zingerman’s Creamery gelato will always be far fresher than pre-packed product shipped half way across the country. We deliver to the Deli and the Bakeshop from our Manchester base at least three times a week. And with gelato, freshness really does make a difference.

4) Tons of taste tests. We research and test each flavor in blind taste tests to determine which makes the most intensely flavorful recipe.

How can I tell a good gelato when I taste one?
Trust your taste buds. Taste a little of it. If it doesn’t scream out the flavor, it’s not a good gelato. It may be a OK ice cream or something similar, but it’s not good gelato. We joke that when we do a tasting, we give samples to ten people, if three people tell us the flavor is too strong, we double the flavoring and know we’re close. We want big, intense,
exciting flavors.

This has been a steady core menu dish at the Roadhouse since we opened. It’s been on my mind this fall for two reasons. First off, I’ve had a steady stream of really positive customer comments about it of late. The second reason it’s on my mind this holiday season is because Uncle Joe Burroughs passed away this summer.

I’m not sure where to start this story so I’ll just begin it with the opening of the Roadhouse in the fall of ’03 since that’s the first time we served catfish here at Zingerman’s. It’s a classic American dish so it makes sense that we’d put it on the menu and it was pretty popular right off the bat. That said, we knew too that it could be better, so I started asking around about it.

Although I knew her only from her “modern” life in Boulder and from traveling together in Europe, Peggy Markel actually grew up in Alabama. (Unrelated—or at least not directly related—to catfish, she runs a cooking school in Tuscany and food tours in Italy and Morocco. See her website for more on her work—www.peggymarkel.com). And, it turned out that her Dad, Joe Burroughs, has cooked catfish almost every Friday night in the small town of Albertville where Peggy grew up.

“He always wanted his own fried catfish joint. He was famous,” Peggy told me five years ago. “People came from far and wide to our house for some of ‘Uncle Joe’s famous catfish.’ It was a hot ticket. My dad had a barbecue pit in the back yard that he rigged a gas line to. He would heat a deep, oblong cast iron skillet full of Mazola oil. Soon after, those delectable fillets lightly dusted with corn meal from being shaken in a paper sack would be sprinkled with the ‘secret ingredient’, and expertly slipped into the simmering hot oil. We never had enough money to realize his Catfish Café, but we had one anyway, every Friday night at our house with people going crazy over crispy fried catfish, hushlittlepuppydogs (aka, hush puppies), slaw and hot pickled jalapeno peppers that my dad grew and pickled himself from 12 different varieties. This all went down easy with a few beers (home-brewed by my uncle Charlie) from one of the outdoor fridge’s behind the barbecue pit.”

The ‘secret ingredient’ is garlic salt—not something that I use much of in my cooking these days. But, if Peggy’s dad was doing great catfish with that much success for so long it seemed sort of silly not to try it. And, lo and behold, Alex and I tested it and it really does liven up the flavor of the fish. And in honor of Joe, my friendship with Peggy, and his long-standing if unfulfilled desire to open his own restaurant, we named the dish on the menu after him.

As I said, above, Uncle Joe passed away this past summer. While I’m saddened for Peggy and her family, Joe lived a good life. To quote from Peggy’s nice eulogy: “‘Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay, gone are the years of the cotton fields away, gone from this earth to a better place I know, I hear the gentle voices calling…old..black…joe…I’m a comin, I’m a comin for my heart is young and gay..I hear the gentle voices calling…old..black…joe……..’

“This was a song our daddy used to sing to us at bedtime. When I got old enough to understand the words, I registered then and there how sad I would be when that time came around. Life without daddy Joe would be real sad. That time came Saturday, July the 12th, 2008, when at 90 he took his last breath. It is as sad as I always imagined it to be. But I feel better about it than I ever thought I would. To reach 90 having had a good life, no sickness and die in one’s sleep from old age and no regrets is cause for celebration.”

Shifting back from sadness to sunny memories of fish fries, she went on, “I can still remember how proud I was as a kid to learn how to take my fork and go up the spine of a freshly fried fish, still steaming, fillet it and dab it into some homemade ‘goush’: an equal mix of catsup and mayonnaise. It was so good, my sisters and I would turn on Elvis Presley and ‘do the mash potato.’ It became a regular theme.”

I’m sad that I never got down to Albertville to meet Uncle Joe in person. Peggy’s tales will have to suffice. That and the taste of this not particularly fancy, but nevertheless darned good fried whole catfish. If you’re into fish, give it a shot next time you’re in, and make a toast to Uncle Joe. I do every time one of great looking hush puppy and cole slaw laden catfish platters goes out to a table.

Even visually, coming in from by air, the state strikes me as something special. It’s amazing to see from above how the dessert stops so suddenly, and the mountains just seem to start out of almost nothing. Very brown, very flat surfaces that almost instantaneously erupt into big, barren rock-strewn mountains, capped with snow covered white peaks.

Serious History

Aside from our mutual interest in chiles, I like Tandy Lucero a lot because we’re both so happily seduced by history. Walk into his little office and you’ll find yourself staring straight at a dozen sheets of white copy paper taped together on the wall behind his wooden desk. Clearly it’s a family tree. But a casual inquiry tells me quickly that it’s not just any family tree. “There’s three different families on here,” he says excitedly. “The Gidenz, the Aragon and the Ortiz. One branch of the family—the Ortiz—has been in New Mexico since the 1600s.” Since I can barely trace my ancestry back to the late 19th century I’m already impressed. “But, this woman, Jane Lawrence,” he adds, “I can trace her back to the 700s, all the way to Charlemagne’s time.” That sort of longevity and sense of rootedness is not what I’d have expected to encounter out in the American west. But like I said, New Mexico is an exceptional place.

On the other wall, to the right of Tandy’s desk is an assemblage of family photos. Arranged in no particular order I can ascertain, they remind me of the sort of random placement of familial images my grandmother used to have in her apartment. But while the arrangement is casual, the content is not. There’s a pair of hundred year old photos, one each of Tandy’s two maternal great-grandfathers. One— Juan Pablo Aragon—is possibly the most distinctive old photo I’ve ever seen. A beautiful oval frame, the photo itself is slightly convex, like something you’d see in a locket. But this is no miniature—it’s a good two feet high and a foot across with a beautiful blue, green and brown pastel portrait of his mustachioed grandfather. Nearby are wedding photos of both sets of Tandy’s grandparents, each taken somewhere in the vicinity of 1910. On the far right there’s one of his parents.

From the photo, it’s obvious that he looks a lot like his father. Square shouldered and about six feet tall, Tandy’s got dark, if slightly graying hair, and a big mustache that curls up at the edges, not unlike that of his great-grandfather. He’s got a proud square-sided face. And, of course, he talks with a solid New Mexican accent, which unnervingly reminds me of that of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Despite his long heritage Tandy in the state, didn’t start out to work with native foods. “I backpacked around the world for a year. Except I didn’t make it all the way around the world. I ended up in Puerto Rico for awhile. But then I came back to New Mexico and I’m still here.” “When I started out in 1981 I only knew New Mexico red and green chile. That was twenty years ago. I was gonna supply New Mexico specialties. And then along came Mark Miller with his Coyote Café and he said, ‘If you get these chiles in I’ll buy ‘em from you.’ And I found sources for all these Mexican chiles and they took off. But at the time they nobody knew them around here.”

Of course it’s not just personal history that’s so engaging, but that of the region as well. The story of chile in America (the peppers not the Texas stew) isn’t very well known, but it ought to be. It’s as much a part of our national culinary heritage as hot dogs and hamburgers, Vermont cheddar or Virginia ham.

Peppers probably came up to what is now New Mexico from the Central America in the pockets and packs of Spanish settlers. In the form of an expedition led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado the conquest reached what is now New Mexico in 1540; Spanish historians believe the mission brought chile seeds up from Mexico and gave to the Pueblos. The native Pueblos, however, claim that they were growing and eating chiles long before the Spaniards showed up. Either way, the blending of Spanish and native cultures accounts for many of the state’s unique people and its chiles. The northern half of the state is known for producing particularly flavorful peppers. Most are smaller, well-wrinkled varieties; their yields are typically way too low to make them viable options for anyone seeking meaningful commercial results. Many peppers became identified with particular towns the most prominent of which is the famous chile of Chimayó.

In more modern times, 1821 saw the opening Santa Fe Trail opened and New Mexican farmers started to be ship chiles back east. During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act establishing the national network of land grant colleges, as a part of which New Mexico State University at Las Cruces was founded in 1889. The school quickly became a center for chile development. In 1921 a professor by the name of Fabian Garcia introduced New Mexico No. 9, the first scientifically developed chile cultivar. It became the standard strain grown in the state straight through ‘til the 1950s. In the second half of the 20th century the New Mexico 6-4 and the NuMex Big Jim followed the fame of Garcia’s No. 9. I’ve no doubt that somewhere on the Las Cruces campus there’s a “family tree” as detailed as the one behind Tandy’s desk.

Seeing Red

South of the Rio Grande, in Mexico, if you say “chile” it will mean little without having a varietal name—ancho, arbol, etc.—attached to it. But if you ask for chile in the Land of Enchantment they know you’re referring to New Mexico peppers. Most New Mexico people simply say “chile” in the same way that people in Parma just order “cheese” but everyone knows that what they mean is Parmigiano-Reggiano. More often than not the only detail you’ll be asked to provide is whether you want red, green or some of each, a mixture that natives know as “Christmas.”

In more detailed discussions chiles are known both by seed source and by growing location. These days there are dozens of varieties, each with its own slightly different spin on the typical New Mexico green chile flavor. If you hang around with people in the business you’ll find them comparing chile varieties and vintages the way the French do wine. “The green you’re getting from me are Sandia chiles,” Tandy advised. “They’re grown in the Hatch valley, near Las Cruces. They’ve got a little bite and a lot of flavor. Some of the other ones, you only have heat no flavor but the Sandia is the favorite of the New Mexico people.”

The red chile is harvested in October, after the chiles have had time to turn from green to reddish orange all the way through to the deep red color of full ripeness. It’s at this point that the chiles are at their peak of sweetness as well as heat. Most all of the red chiles are dried in the early autumn; most these days are done in commercial dryers. Many though are still strung up to dry naturally. If you visit the state you can’t miss the millions of red chile ristras—or wreathes—hanging in almost every spot that’s even remotely related to food. They make beautiful decoration but they’re of far more practical value than the evergreen wreathes we’ll see here in the Midwest. As the weeks pass you can pull off a chile or two at a time, soak ‘em, and use ‘em.

The New Mexico chile is pretty moderate the heat standards south of the border—hot, but no so hot that it overwhelms other flavors. The main thing about it is its flavor, which is, indeed, very rich and very good. Aside from the above mentioned ristras, you can find red chile for sale as whole pods on their own, or, quite commonly, in the form of chile molido, or ground chile.

Although he obviously has a high interest in chiles of all sorts, it’s the native New Mexico product that really gets Tandy going. After showing me a dozen different Mexican chiles, he guides me into a separate room where he’s storing a year’s supply of New Mexico chile molido. He cuts open a box, unwraps the plastic bag in which the chile has been sealed. “Look at this,” he says with excitement. “The quality on this is just sooooo good.” He opens another box. Again, the aroma is truly pretty amazing. It’s so deep I want to dive in headfirst. “This is what chile is all about,” he says. “It smells so good it makes you want to eat it with a spoon!”

“What makes it so special?” I inquire.

“The color tells you a lot.” Without a doubt this stuff does look rich. It’s a deep, dark, almost crimson red with only a hint of orange, almost as intense as the color of good saffron stigma. “Usually you’ll see a more yellow-orange color in the chile. That’s because they’re grinding the seeds and stems in with the chile. It gets bitter. But the guy who does this for me, his seed is so popular that everybody wants that—he takes all the seed out first to sell by itself so his chile is very pure.”

All you need to make a New Mexico red chile sauce is a good bit of chile molido, some cold water, a little bit of salt, and maybe some garlic, cumin and Mexican oregano. Mix ‘em all cold so the chile doesn’t lump up, then simmer for somewhere from 20-45 minutes depending on how thick or thin you like your sauce.

Go Green

The red chile in New Mexico is certainly special, but it’s the green that really gets me going. The license plates in the state say “Land of Enchantment,” but maybe they ought to try switching to “Land of Green Chile.” Chiles are big business in New Mexico—24,000 acres under cultivation, annually producing over 46,000 tons which easily makes it the largest chile growing state in the union, and on its own accounts for over half of US chile growing.

Most all green chile in New Mexico these days is roasted right after it’s been harvested. Because the chile loses water very quickly after picking, it has to be processed within a few days of leaving the fields. In the southern part of the state the harvest starts in late August; in the north not until early September. If you’re into chile it would be worth timing your visit just to experience it. Personally though I stumbled into chile season unknowingly. I went to Santa Fe for vacation; I came back with a green chile obsession.

The smell is the first thing that got my attention. It caught my unsuspecting tourist nose completely by surprise, creeping over walls and around soft adobe corners. It’s subtle, smoky, but unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before. “You only find it in New Mexico,” explained Tandy. The aroma of roasting chiles is as much a part of the end of the New Mexican summer as the smell of burning leaves would be in the Midwest. “I never get tired of it,” Tandy added.

When the season starts, fresh green chiles come in from the countryside in most every kind of container you can imagine; weathered bushel baskets, heavy burlap bags, split wood crates, and beat up cardboard boxes, all filled with freshly picked, smooth, skinned, Kelly-green (dappled with an occasional red or orange streak) crunchy peppers. Maybe two inches across at the stem end, with gently sloping shoulders, and six, seven inches long, about as long as a small banana. They taper down towards their tips, slightly curled like the toes of pointed Arabian sandals. They’re roughly half the width and half again as long as the round, dimple-bottomed, green bell peppers we’re used to in the rest of the country.

The roasting is done using a contraption that, as far as I know, is unique to New Mexico. Cylindrical wire cages that are, oh, about five or six feet-long, and about two to three feet across that sit on simple metal frames, just within the reach of a half a dozen gas jets. A small motor mounted on the end turns the cage. Simple, ingenious, practical, and easy to use, they look a bit like giant bingo hoppers. The metal of the cages turns black from regular exposure to the flames.

In the old days this roasting was done in an outdoor oven, an horno, but this old technique is almost extinct these days. “Back when I was growing up people used their ovens,” Tandy related nostalgically. “But it literally takes a whole weekend to roast a sack of chiles. You have to really tend to it. The chile would have to be hand turned four times. And since the invention of those roasters the home roasting is almost nonexistent. It’s a lost art anymore.”

These days, what used to take two days now takes no more than about ten minutes. To roast, a case of crisp, freshly picked peppers is unpacked into the cage. The door is latched shut and the gas jets are lit. The cage rotates slowly, gently tossing the chiles around as it goes. A few peppers cling to the cage by their stems, and travel up, over and around like riders on a giant chile Ferris wheel. The chile is roasted when the skins are charred fairly evenly. The peppers drop quite a bit of weight during the roasting since most of the pepper’s natural water is lost during the process. A forty-pound sack of fresh chiles comes out at about 15 pounds. When they’re done the motor is shut off, the cage stops, the door opens and out comes a case of hot, smoky, roasted, green chile.

During the season New Mexicans go after roasted green chiles like 19th century pioneers racing to make claims in a land rush. At the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market one farm family had the smarts to bring along their machine to do on-the-spot chile roasting. They were doing, what my grandmother used to call “land office business.” Customers were lining up, anxiously pushing crushed and crumpled dollar bills at the poor woman who stood at the front of the stand, like a beleaguered restaurant hostess with a wrinkled yellow legal pad of a waiting list in her hand. Meanwhile her husband and father-in-law were sweating away at the roaster trying desperately to keep up. At a little after 8:00 in the morning on the second Saturday in September, the wait for a bag of roasted chile was over an hour!

The other eleven months of the year—when green chiles are not regularly a’roasting—most New Mexicans get their fix out of the freezer. Well, not right out of the freezer—they do thaw them first. Experience has born out that the charred skins help to buffer the pepper’s delicate flavor against the freezer’s foreboding temperatures. This “freez-a-bility” means that New Mexicans buy up enough roasted peppers each September to keep themselves in green chiles through the rest of the year. I should mention that you can also get canned green chile, but to my experience it’s too soft, too mushy.

When they come out of the roasters, the skin of the chiles is a pale, almost luminescent green with lots black-brown blisters. The skin is left on after roasting to protect the flesh, the part of the pepper that counts the most. When you’re ready to eat a freshly roasted chile you need to peel it, which fortunately is fairly easy to do. Just grasp the thick, stem end of the pepper and gently slide the charred skin off with your other hand. Right out of the roaster they’re slippery, warm, and a little wet, almost the consistency of a raw oyster. Tandy pulled a few chiles from a recently roasted batch to fix us “a little green chile sandwich.” A couple of still warm, just-peeled peppers, a pinch of salt, a bit of garlic, simply rolled inside a warm corn tortilla. Damn, it was good.

The flavor of roasted green chile—like that of any food—is hard to describe to someone who’s never had it. There are hints of the green bell peppers we all know so well, but really, it’s much richer and far more complex than that. At first you taste the smokiness, then a hint of warmth, then gradually, like the sun coming over the mountains, you start to feel the heat. The flavor melts slowly away in your mouth like a piece of hard candy, lingering sweetly and spicily long after you’ve swallowed the pepper. Truly, amazing. For hours I wouldn’t eat anything else for fear of losing the taste of that simple little sandwich.

Of course every green chile is a bit different, and the perceived heat will vary drastically depending upon who’s doing the eating. For the most part, it ranges from mellow to medium hot; unless you’re exceedingly sensitive to heat, smoke won’t start shooting out of your ears, nor will tears flow down your face. Yeah, it’s “hot,” but I’d peg the heat at only about a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. All but the most heat sensitive will likely find it a modest spiciness, a pleasant warmth that melts softly in your mouth, and slowly but surely sets your tongue to tingling. And it’s nowhere near the eye watering, tongue blistering heat of, say, a Jamaican Scotch Bonnet pepper or a Habañero.

Dried Green

To me, the jewel in the New Mexican chile crown is dried green chile. Increasingly hard to find, it’s not inexpensive—you may pay up to $100 a pound. Of course like dried mushrooms and saffron, the most any of us are buying is an ounce or two at a time so, fortunately, the cost is a lot less foreboding than it sounds.

For hundreds of years dried green was the norm in New Mexico. “Nowadays though,” Tandy told me sort of sadly, “people just freeze the chile. But when I was growing up everybody dried it.” There is a difference between the two. The flavor’s a bit richer, the texture a little different as well. “There’s something special about the dried green,” Tandy said wistfully. “That’s my favorite. But, then, I grew up on the dried green. It sure brings back the memories.”

There’s no real magic to the drying. Just patience and the willingness to watch your profits “vanish into thin air.” It’s done by simply placing roasted and peeled chiles out on racks, then setting them in front of slowly moving fans. It takes a day or so to complete the process. By the time you’re done with the drying, a 40-pound sack of fresh chile (roughly 300 peppers) is distilled down to about a scant pound and a half of dried. “I don’t make any money on green chile,” Tandy said with a chuckle. “It’s a giveaway item. I just stick with it because it’s traditional. People think it’s expensive, but really I don’t make any money at all.”

Of course I already knew that finance was not what makes Tandy tick. We all need money to live, but it’s clearly the food and the traditions that get him going. And the more he talked about dried green chile the more excited he got. “It’s so easy, it takes five minutes to make it.” He paused for a second then decided to just show me first hand. “Come on,” he said, as he walked me over to a little stove in the side of the packing room, and set to work to prove his point.

“You just take a quart of cold water and put it in a saucepan. Add an ounce or so of dried green chile. Bring it to a boil for a minute, and then take it off the heat. Then you just let the chile sit in the water for about five minutes. And that’s it.” Well, that’s not quite it. But almost. All that’s left to do is to take the chile out of the water, pat it dry, then sprinkle it with a bit of sea salt and a touch of chopped fresh garlic. Cut it into modestly sized strips. And then spoon the mixture onto warm corn tortillas. “Little green chile burritos,” Tandy says, happily handing me one. They were delicious. Simple as can be. Hot but not too hot, the flavor lingers and lasts. “The Mexican chiles are never like this,” he adds proudly.

This truly is great American fast food. Twenty minutes later he smiles and says, “I still taste that green chile.” As did I, and happily so.

The Language of New Mexico Chile

Interestingly, not only is New Mexico chile unique in flavor but also in linguistic application. The “s” that most of us would instinctively put at the end of the word when using it in the plural doesn’t show up in New Mexico. Whether you’re referring to one pepper or a hundred, the syntax seems to be strictly singular. Where we Midwesterners would surely say “chiles,” New Mexico people stick to simply “green chile.”

Equally interesting the term “green chile” is used in New Mexico to refer to a multitude of related, but never the less distinctive, variations on a chile theme. In New Mexican vernacular there’s “green chile,” the crunchy, freshly picked, uncooked, green vegetable/fruit. There’s “green chile” the roasted and peeled peppers. There’s “green chile” the dried roasted and peeled. And then there’s “green chile” as a sort of stew—onions, pork, chiles and spices that’s served for lunch, as in, “a bowl of green chile.” And finally, there’s “green chile,” a sauce of onions, garlic, a little water and, uh, green chile that’s offered on the side with what seems like most every dish you order in New Mexico. You just have to kind of intuit which “green chile” is being referred to by the context in which it comes up. They’re all good. And in New Mexico, they’re all “green chile.”

What To Do With Green Chiles

“We use chile differently here in New Mexico,” Tandy told me. “In Mexico they use the chiles as a seasoning, as a spice. But here we make chile the main item in the dish.”

There’s a wealth of wonderful dishes that are typical of New Mexico and which rely on red or green chiles. I mean, chile.

“Do you cook?” I asked Tandy.

“Oh yeah!” he answered enthusiastically.

So what do you do with the chile?

Just Eat It

The best thing to do with a roasted green chile is quite simply, to eat it. I mean, all this other stuff I’m telling you is just a load of inedible, dry, newsprint unless you’ve got green chile to put in your mouth. So go to it. If you’re working with dry green, simply bring ‘em to a boil in a quart of water, let ‘em soak for five minutes or so, drain, pat dry and you’re ready to use. If you’re using frozen, all you have to do is thaw, peel off the charred skin, and you’re ready to go. Either way, you can put green chile on sandwiches of all sorts—they’re particularly good with cheese, but try ‘em with roasted pork, grilled chicken or steak. Chop green chile and toss on pasta or put it on pizza. Stuff roasted green chiles with cheese and bake for incredible chiles rellenos. Put green chile and goat cheese in an omelet. Cook up a green chile and cheddar cheese soup. At our bakery we make a very good green chile and cheddar cheese bread. It’s simple, really. It’s green chile. Eat and enjoy.

While the latter is fairly common with stuff like catfish, best I can tell, this makes it completely unique in the bacon world. From what I’ve learned over the years, the rolling wasn’t any big brilliant culinary thing, but really just a practical solution to a practical issue. “In the ‘olden’ days, you would go to the grocery store, ask the meat counter for your “Peameal Bacon,” I learned from Canadian born, now living in the U.S bacon importer, Ken Haviland. “They would grab a hook,” he told me, “pull a loin out of the brine solution, roll it in cornmeal, package it up, weigh it, sticker it and hand it to you.”

With that in mind though, I’ve always wondered about the origin of the “peameal” name; the question came up because when I really thought about I realized that it was a bit odd since all the Canadian bacon I’ve ever come across was rolled, as I said above, in cornmeal I’ve never understood why the stuff isn’t called “cornmeal bacon.” The answer, apparently, is that Canadian bacon was originally rolled in ground dried yellow peas, but later that was changed to the more readily available cornmeal.

Folks from Canada, and in some case from areas up near the border, are pretty darned passionate about this bacon. As is true for grits in the South, peameal bacon can carry big emotional attachments up north. Just asking about peameal evoked a whole lot of info, emotion and some good culinary story telling. Seriously, all you have to do is talk to a couple Canadians (or close-to-Canada Americans like Ms. Stevens) and you start to realize that peameal bacon sandwiches, while pretty much unknown down here, are about the equivalent up there of pastrami in Manhattan or cheese steaks in Philadelphia. Iconic is starting to sound like understatement. I’d ask all my Canadian relatives about it but of course they all keep kosher so Canadian bacon is just something they’d seen signs for in the market when they went shopping.

Molly Stevens, author of the award-winning book Braising is one of the latter. She grew up in Buffalo, close enough to Canada that Canadian bacon and hockey were both a big deal for her family. “In my family,” she started out, “for some reason, it’s long been one of those ritual foods.” For me, Canadian bacon is just one more option on a long list cured pork options, and, in honesty, not in my top two or three. But for Molly (and I’m sure many others like her), is as much about emotion and memorable family meals as it is about the pork.

“Peameal for us symbolizes summer at the beach in Canada, and all that goes with it; long days, no school, and so on,” she said. “I remember one year when an in-law sliced it too thinly, and we were all silently horrified. Of course, we were polite enough but each made a mental note to watch the next time that THAT brother-in-law went anywhere near the peameal. Then there was the other time when someone bought the pre-sliced stuff. Again, horror.” This is a much mellower way of staking claim to the way cured pork (or any food really that has this sort of sub surface significance to it) is handled, but it reminds me of the Jamon Serrano producer in Spain who once told with a semi-serious smile that he’d have to kill me if I cut off the fat on the ham. (Here in the US we fear the fat, there they know it as the best part!)

So, assuming that incompetent in-laws have been kept safely out of the way, how’s Canadian bacon slicing supposed to work? “The deal is, you get a big hunk—anywhere from 2 to 3 pounds, slice it not too thin, not too thick. Grill it over medium heat so it stays just ever so pink in the center and the cornmeal coating and external fat grills up crispy. Then you serve it on a soft sort of Kaiser roll—the best of them have a thin crispy crust and soft absorbent interior. You slather on Hellman’s mayonnaise, add lettuce and slices of summer ripe tomato. Depending on the size of the roll, who sliced the peameal, your pigginess, etc. you may stack two slices, or maybe one. Oh, and a few thin slices of orange Canadian cheddar is acceptable too.”

As with so many foods that we grew up on, the importance of this one goes way beyond the actual sandwich itself, which is in essence “just” (I’m wary of even putting that word in here) a Canadian bacon BLT. “Even the thought of this sandwich,” she explained, “brings a rush of familial memories and ties me to my childhood in a deep way. And the first taste always thrills me. Even to this day, when my family calls from the beach, where they all still gather, and tell me that they’re having peameal, I feel a pang of nostalgia. Now the funny thing is that I’m sure there are other ways to prepare peameal, and I know I could figure out a recipe using really high grade pork and brining it myself, and I could get a quality roll to serve it on, and use only really good cheese, and homemade mayo, but you know what, I don’t really want to. For the one or two peameal sandwiches I eat a year, I love that they are just what they’ve always been.”

I’m not the world’s expert on this stuff but word is that there are still some very good versions available from various local butchers. (Happy to hear your suggestions if you have them.). To my experience, the best Canadian bacon in the States is the stuff that’s imported by the appropriately named Real Canadian Bacon Company, which is based not far from Ann Arbor, in the town of Troy, Michigan. It was started by the above-mentioned Ken Haviland, originally from an Ontario, but who went on to work for General Motors here in Michigan. While working here he grew increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t find the real Canadian bacon he’d grown up with—most of what’s available here in the U.S. is already cooked and sometimes smoked and not all what folks who love this stuff are seeking. I guess we really should refer to that as “American Canadian bacon;” by contrast what you get up north of the border is indeed, real Canadian bacon—needless to say, the taste and texture of the two are totally different.

With that in mind, Ken came to the entrepreneurial conclusion that he’d have to import his own. The RCBC offers the peameal both as a big chunk and pre-sliced. As per Molly’s memories, I’d recommend going with the chunk and cutting your own. Like her, I prefer it cut a bit thicker—you get a nicer mouth feel and the eating experience is, I think, more interesting. The flavor is mellow—a light refreshing summer local wine compared to the earthy, smoky well-aged intensity of say, the dry cured bacon from Allan Benton—the wine analogy, which now that I think about it, fits perfectly with Molly’s memories of beach eating. I’ve made up a fair few of the sandwiches just as she described them and they are, really, some very nice, refreshing, fun, summer eating. I’ve been cooking the bacon in a skillet but of course doing it on the grill as Molly mentioned above would be a good way to go. It’s best, I think, to have the bacon warm so it softens up the bread and all the accoutrements.

In what I’ve come to realize is pretty much a lifelong exploration of this country’s traditional barbecue styles at the RH, I wanted to let you all know that there’s a pair of really good ones on the specials list this week through Thursday. Both have been really well received so I wouldn’t be shocked to see them making more appearances down the road. But for the moment you have a few days to get over there and take a taste of two of the lesser known American barbecue traditions.

To state what most of you, and certainly, most everyone in the South, already knows, barbecue isn’t just something to eat—it’s tied to region, to family, to tradition, to politics, to people. Just the other morning I met a customer at the Deli who hails originally from Chapel Hill (North Carolina). She lives now in Birmingham (Michigan, not Alabama) and had only been up to the Deli once before. She was lamenting how she can’t find real eastern Carolina barbecue. To say what you already know she hadn’t been to the RH yet so I steered her that way and I’m hoping that we were able to make her day by serving up the real thing. For the people who grew up with it, barbecue is a big deal!

Our conversation reminded me how far we’ve come here in bringing the at first “where’s-the-sauce?” strangeness of Eastern North Carolina barbecue to Ann Arbor. Thinking back to how when we first got going there in the fall of ’03 almost NOONE here really knew what it was. But now that we’ve spent five years working at it, a whole lot of folks are on board, whether they actually come from the Carolinas or not. I guess this is not much different from all the work to familiarize folks with better bread, real bagels, artisan cheese and all the other good stuff we produce and sell. It’s rarely a short-term project but when the food tastes good and we help guests to understand it . . .

All of which leads me to the South Carolina mustard barbecue that’s on the specials list at the RH this week. I actually don’t have humungous amounts of great info to give you about the history of the mustard sauce. In part I write this stuff to see what others will tell me so if you have someone you know who’s got some good info by all means send ‘em my way. While most everyone in the Carolinas will have heard of, and probably tasted, the mustard sauce, it isn’t even really served all over the state. It’s primarily in the center of the state that they seem to swear by mustard sauce. For people there it’s the norm. Heather Showman, who just started serving at the RH and who grew up in Columbia, SC, was very happy to see it on the specials list. For her mustard sauce was just the way it was. “I think I was fifteen before I realized barbecue could come in any other color,” she told me the other night.

South Carolina is seemingly the most diverse of barbecue states (though I’m sure someone out there’s going to argue this one so . . .). If you go to http://carolinaqcup.com/ at the bottom of the page you’ll find a nice little colored map showing where the various styles are still found in the state. Mustard, like I said, is mainly in the middle. In the northeastern part of the state they seem to eat mostly vinegar sauce akin to the Eastern North Carolina style we already do. In the northwest it’s tomato vinegar akin to the way it’s done in western North Carolina. In the south down by the Georgia border they opt for a thicker tomato-ketchup type sauce.

No one seems very sure of the mustard sauce’s actual origins—one theory I saw said that it could have been tied to the settlement of a fair few Germans in the area and their love of good mustard. Germans were actually actively recruited to the South Carolina colony in the first part of the 18th century and there’s a relatively strong number today. Some of the biggest names in South Carolina mustard barbecue are of German origin—Bessinger, Sweatman, etc. John T. Edge pointed out that there are also pockets of mustard sauce served in Georgia and Alabama as well.

The main thing here is that the mustard sauce is really good. Really good. Nothin’ fancy—a lot of yellow mustard, a good dose of the Quebec, oak-barrel aged cider vinegar, a touch of sugar, and a bunch of spices (ground coriander, celery seed, fresh garlic, chili pequin, and fresh ground Telicherry black pepper). As you can tell, I like it, and I like being able to teach people about the little ins and outs of food and food history (in case you didn’t notice that about me J So with that in mind, come on out and give it a try. If you’re up for a little bbq adventure check it out.

The S.C. mustard sauce is on the specials list at lunch as a sandwich and on the dinner specials as part of a really nice pork sampler platter. But you can basically order it up anyway you want – South Carolina bbq sandwiches, South Carolina bbq platter for a main meal, South Carolina bbq on some sort of sampler you create for yourself. Plus I have to say that it looks really great on the plate because of the mustard. One way or another give it a try this week and see what you think.

One of the first things that English settlers did when they got to North America was to plant wheat. Bread was the taste of home that they had a hard time living without. While the wheat growing didn’t always work out, they always found ways to make bread. Though few American s know it, this is one of the first, and to my taste, the best, of old time American breads.

I won’t say that I’m addicted to this bread because I’m sure I could live ok without it. Plus “addiction” is probably better applied to stuff like chocolate or . . . but damn, if this bread doesn’t just keep growing on me. The longer we make it, the more I taste it, the more I like it. If I’m not careful this is going supplant Farm as my favorite bread. I know I’m not alone because more and more regular customer and crew have been telling me much the same thing. Somewhat ironically it’s been very popular amongst many Europeans who, although the recipe is all American, go for the high density and high flavor of the bread. In the last week I’ve had a Dutchman, a German and a Czech all come calling for it. I shared these thoughts just last night with a long time and very loyal customer, and she immediately shot back, “It is MY favorite!”

Two hundred years ago Roadhouse bread would have been as everyday an event in New England as a baguettes would be today in Paris. But while so many traditional breads have made big comebacks this one remains our little culinary secret—hardly anyone out of this area other than Ann Arbor expats and Zingerman’s Mail Order customers has still even heard of it. Back in the spring of ’03 when we were working on American foods to get ready to open the Roadhouse I’d barely even heard it either. And yet there it was, right in every old American cookbook. A bread that most everyone seems to have baked at home in the 19th century that, best I could tell, wasn’t being made anywhere any more by anyone in any sort of commercial setting that I know about.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about it in “Little House on the Prairie,” marking its by-then-national prominence in the second half of the 19th century. What we’re making at the Bakehouse is pretty much done as it was two hundred years ago from a blend of cornmeal, rye, and wheat, sweetened with a touch of molasses. If they’d had their druthers, the colonists were very clear that they’d have been baking bread made only from wheat. But in the early days after their arrival wheat was hard to get and rather costly—poor families typically reserved it for special occasions or ornamental elements of their baking, like the top layer of a pie or pot pie crust. Rye and cornmeal were cheaper and more readily available so those were used to bake with everyday. Molasses—commonly used by colonists near ports trafficking in the rum trade with the Caribbean Islands—was the most common sweetener (along with maple syrup).

Anyways, on to the flavor, which, as I’ve already said, I think is really ridiculously good. The kind of “good’ that may not grab you the minute you taste it but rather grows and grows and grows on you until one day you realize (as I have) that you’ve become enormously emotionally attached to the item at hand. It’s great just like it is. It’s even better toasted or put back in the oven for 20 minutes at 350°F ‘til the crust is crisp and the inside all warm. It’s outstanding with smoked salmon. It’s excellent with Creamery cream cheese. Great for grilled cheese with any of the aged mountain cheeses or cheddars and maybe some bacon.

If you have any of this great bread sitting around for too long it makes really tasty croutons. It also holds up really well so it’s a gift item—definitely put this on the list of foods to send to food-loving friends and family around the country if you want them to get to eat something special. Because special is the key here. This is really good American food. There is no other bread like this anywhere in the world.

The bacon came up because we had the special bake of Peppered Bacon Farm bread this weekend. Since the special bake is over with, I apologize for even bringing it up. If you haven’t had the bread, it’s worth the wait. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to seems to love it. I’ve used it for toast, heating it up to eat with dinner . . . hard to go wrong on any count really. I’ve done it toasted for a fried egg sandwich, which was great. And I’m thinking it’d be great for an egg salad sandwich. And if you happen to have any bits and pieces of the bread lying around, it makes great croutons too.

With the bacon bread already in mind I went by Radio Free Bacon on the patio at the Roadhouse Sunday afternoon and since Nueske’s is a sponsor the bacon was there too. They were demoing and sampling the bacon, winning more fans for something that everyone seems to love. And then Kevin came out from the bar with his first draft of a BLT cocktail—Tito’s vodka, our homemade bloody Mary mix and a bit of pureed lettuce with of course, a slice of bacon. More work to be done but stay tuned . . . it’s gonna be good!

About half an hour later I had a woman stop me to tell me that she’d been in the RH a year or so ago and that I’d given her a taste of the Nueske’s bacon. I’m not sure exactly where she lives but that’s ok—it’s her comments that are of note. Apparently she’s been thinking of it ever since. Last night she came in with her dad (retired but moved back from Florida because he just didn’t like it down there) and wanted to get something with the Nueske’s on it. They went for a 24/7 burger (Nueske’s bacon—smoked for 24 hours—and Hook’s 7-year old Wisconsin cheddar) and loved it.

All of which was followed up this morning by about five different people eating breakfast at the Deli and seeing the applewood bacon appearing in every one of their meals—breakfast BLTs, bacon and eggs, etc. And in the spirit of “everything’s better with bacon” they all looked very happy.

Anyways, if you somehow aren’t particularly familiar with Nueske’s bacon . . . the late political and food writer R.W. “Johnny” Apple wrote in the NY Times, that Nueske’s was, “the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers.” As he usually was, Johnny Apple was right on. Pretty much everyone loves this bacon, from kids to connoisseurs.

In terms of the family a fair few of you have met Tanya Nueske, but if you haven’t had the pleasure I’ll just say here that she’s about as passionate about her product as you’re going to get. In buying from them for over two decades they’ve consistently been a great supplier—they’re generous with samples and support, they’ve supported all the promotional work we do, their product has been consistently excellent. And I appreciate that!

Anyways, Tanya’s grandfather started up selling the bacon in 1933. He started out smoking over applewood, using techniques that he’d learned from his grandparents. Not surprisingly, the family starts out with higher quality hogs—primarily a cross of Yorkshire, Hampshire, Landrace and Berkshire. The hogs are fed a much bigger percentage of barley and corn by comparison to most. They still hand trim everything. The Nueske’s cure the fresh slabs of bacon in brine for at least 24 hours, then hang the pork for another day to dry, then finally send them into the smoker them for another 24 hours.

The finished bacon is sweet, smoky, rich without being overwhelming. It’s kind of candy for bacon lovers I guess. Good stuff, the sort of thing you could eat a whole lot of if you let yourself get going. Its flavor is meaty, subtly sweet, big without being obtrusive, compelling in the way that makes you want to eat another slice not long after you’ve finished the first one.

Fortunately we have about fifty ways to do that, from sandwiches at the Deli, Bakeshop and Roadhouse to salads (check it on the Deli’s ZCobb salad along with hard cooked eggs (organic ones from Grazing Fields), blue cheese from Great Hill in Massachusetts, Amish chicken, avocado and more on a bed of chopped local lettuces. And of course, as Darin is wont to remind us so appropriately, everything is better with bacon so feel free to put it on most anything you’re cooking.