Best Food Writing 2010 by Holly Hughes Page B

service. Ann O’Bryant, a woman in her 40s who does most of the cooking, tells me that she prepares sides “just the way Mrs. Ward did,” and Henry Ford, 16, the newest member of the team, moves quickly as he washes dishes and cleans up. Reverend Edison, under the watchful eye of his wife, Wyvonnia, who helps him manage the place, runs the cash register. He also comes in early to make a few desserts, having added his own, excellent buttermilk pie to the repertoire.
    By around one o’clock, the rush has died down, and I come out from behind the counter where I’ve been shooed so that I’d be out of the way. I find Edison at a kitchen counter putting away leftovers. I have a couple of final questions for him, including one that you could almost call theological: What does the future hold?
    “Well,” he says, “our first goal is to give this place a good face-lift.” I confess that I find this alarming. While I can’t deny that the church hall could use an upgrade—the flooring is cracked, the curtains are faded—too much spiffing up could destroy the joint’s scruffy charisma.
    Perhaps Reverend Edison senses that I’m quietly freaking out. “We’re not going to do much; people come for the history,” he says, as he stretches a sheet of plastic wrap around a bowl of potato salad and puts it into the refrigerator. Aside from a little sprucing up, the reverend says, he and his flock plan to keep things exactly the same. Thank heaven.

KYOTO’S TOFU OBSESSION
    By Adam Sachs From Bon Appetit

If the term “globetrotter” hadn’t already existed, it would have to be invented to describe Adam Sachs. Few travel writers delve so eagerly into the local tastes of a destination. He doesn’t just dine in Kyoto, he seeks out the artisans who create its signature foodstuff.
    M itsuyoshi Kotzumi squeezes a soybean between his fingers and looks pleased.
    “ Unyuu ,” he says—a Japanese onomatopoeia that means (more or less) the sound of something firm but pliant being squished. This, according to Koizumi, is what a perfect soybean sounds like when it’s ready to become tofu.
    “Like gummy candy,” he says, handing me the wet soybean.
    It is 5:30 a.m. on my first full day in Kyoto. I am wearing a hairnet, standing in a narrow, steamy kitchen overlooking the Kamogawa River, pinching a soaked bean. Why am I here? The reason is bean curd.
    Koizumi-san is a tofu maker at Kinki, an artisanal shop where I have come to witness the daily predawn alchemy by which raw soybeans are transformed into squares of the firm-but-creamy building blocks of kyo-ryori , the cuisine of Kyoto. Ancient land of culture, temples, and gardens, once the imperial capital of Japan for 1,000 years, Kyoto is a city with a healthy obsession for tofu.
    But stay, carnivorous reader. Don’t turn the page. It’s not what you’re thinking. Believe me—I’m not a morning person, and before coming here, I was never an avid tofu-seeker. The fresh Japanese version is a far more noble creature than the often bland loaves sold in American supermarkets. The difference in taste? Chalk and cheese, I’d say, though that would be unfair to chalk.
    Here, tofu is a delicate handmade food, produced every morning in small shops and large industrial kitchens throughout the country. Each region makes its own styles of tofu, but Kyoto is to tofu what Naples is to pizza, New York to bagels. The Kyoto variety—perfected over centuries by Buddhist monks, in imperial kitchens, and in neighborhood shops like this one—is the accepted standard; it is regarded as the best in Japan and thus the world.
    While tofu has become a mass-produced staple stateside, only now are we waking up to the allure of nonindustrial tofu. Japanese restaurants like EN Japanese Brasserie in New York feature fresh tofu on their menus. Reika Yo, the proprietor of EN, told me it took her a while to educate people about how tofu was eaten in Japan. I’d had great tofu dishes in the formal kaiseki