The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [146]
I barely noticed the absence of purple-hinged rock scallops; besides, the best and freshest way to eat them is underwater, according to Sinclair, snipped from their shell before they have had time to clamp shut, and slipped between your lips. I did notice that lemon, lime, olive oil, and other culinary commonplaces were missing from Ron’s cooking. The Philips’ interest in local products rules out most plants and animals that don’t grow in the Northwest. To replace lemons and limes, Ron has developed other sources of acidity, such as rhubarb juice and apple cider, and the Philips have found a mill that cold-presses cooking oil from locally grown seeds and nuts. Common Asian spices like black peppercorns are suspect; I wondered about vanilla. At its best, the result is a rejection of all culinary clichés, a rediscovery of the natural world at every meal.
I am still wondering about vanilla because the seaplane schedule back to Seattle deprived me of dessert. I wish I had stayed overnight in every one of the inn’s thirteen lovely rooms, all with fireplaces and all facing the strait and the snowy Olympic Range on the U.S. side. But I had a dinner engagement to keep, and a week of lunches and dinners after that. The Pacific Northwest overflows with such good food that one grows frenzied trying to nibble and gnaw on it all.
My trip was planned for late winter because that’s when oysters are best. In the springtime, as the water grows warm, oysters prepare to spawn, and their flesh becomes milky and soft. After spawning, oysters, like men, are good for nothing until they rebuild their reserves of glycogen. But in winter (when, coincidentally, the names of the months contain an r) they are crisp and glistening and incomparable.
My culinary base camp was Seattle’s Pike Place Market and the Inn at the Market hotel, which overlooks it. Visiting at the ideal time for oysters meant that I would forgo the wild blackberries and tree-ripened cherries of June, river crayfish trapped between April and October, the peaches and apricots of late summer, and the May debut of white and golden beets, sweet onions, red and white chard, white carrots, and twenty kinds of salad greens. But the local pears (unlike most fruit, pears improve after they are picked) were the best I’ve tasted. The Manila clams and the mussels from Race Lagoon and Penn Cove were a delight—sweet and creamy and mild—as were the fresh sturgeon and black cod. And the oysters! Every day I held a little contest among the Shoalwaters, Quilcenes, Hamma Hammas, Kumamotos, and Olympias. In the end, the tiny oceanic Olympias won, and I celebrated by eating seventy of them one evening just before dinner.
It seems incredible that Seattle was a culinary wasteland fifteen years ago, but that’s what everybody says. Supermarkets sold frozen fish, and restaurants served it deep-fried. The oyster industry produced only shucked meat in gallon containers, and my exquisite little Olympias were just being nursed back from extinction. Pink singing scallops were an uneaten oddity, mussel cultivation was unknown, geoducks were spurned by everyone but a few fishermen, and the salmon caviar was shipped abroad. Fancy restaurants imported oysters, mussels, and lobsters from the East Coast.
But Seattleites loved to go fishing and clamming, foraging for berries and wild mushrooms. They knew what was fresh and seasonal even if their