PARSLEY ISN’T ALL ONE THING. It’s not just curly or flat and grown in larger or smaller sizes, but it varies in flavor and intensity because of growing conditions and how fresh it is. The ideal is a fresh sweetness from young leaves picked from a thriving plant. Good flavor tends to go with tenderness. As well as being tough at times, parsley can be metallic, muddy, and bitter. Sometimes it’s better not to use it. Parsley used reflexively for decoration is a bore, but cooked parsley deepens flavor and raw parsley brightens it. Parsley is the most common herb in French and Italian cooking; maybe, overall, it’s the most used herb in Europe and the Near East.

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Yesterday we stopped by the sugarhouse where my wife’s cousin was boiling sap, because his mother, Gilly Beattie (my wife’s aunt), had just dropped off several dozen raised doughnuts for dipping in the hot new syrup. The doughnuts had been fried in lard and were still partly crisp on the outside — at their best.

Why lard? “My mother always said that they cooked better in lard,” Gilly responded. They cooked at a higher temperature without burning, and the fat didn’t soak in as much. “She always rendered her own lard. She tried to get the leaf lard.” That comes from around the kidneys and has the most neutral flavor. But now Gilly buys her lard rather than render it herself. “It’s a pain in the ass, and I don’t like the smell in the house. I use the lard two or three times during doughnut season, and then I dump it.”

Gilly’s parents ran a dairy farm, and her mother cooked every day for a very large family and whoever else was around at mealtime. The doughnut recipe was hers. Some people use doughnut cutters, but Gilly’s mother said that forming “a twist was the way the old people always did it.”

She scalded the milk for the doughnuts, as cooks had done going back to the time when all milk was raw. Safety wasn’t her concern because, although she used raw milk from the bulk tank, the family drank the same raw milk. Maybe she thought scalded milk made a lighter, more tender result, which is what some bakers say now. I’ve always meticulously avoided giving recipes that call for baking soda and powder because they so often replace the generally more interesting lightness and flavor from eggs or yeast. The recipe below is the exception to my rule: it has eggs, yeast, and also, for better browning, baking soda.

1 pint milk, scalded

1 stick plus a little extra butter

4 eggs

salt to taste

1 tsp baking soda

14 grams (2 envelopes, or 4½ tsp) instant dry yeast

100 to 200 gr (½ to 1 cup) sugar, depending on how sweet you want them

flour (see below)

about 2¼ kg (5 lb) lard

When the milk is cool enough, beat the eggs into it. In a large bowl, combine the salt, sugar, baking soda, and sugar, and mix in the milk-butter-egg mixture and the flour. (How much flour? “I don’t know,” said Gilly, meaning a specific amount.) It’s not a question of measuring. You add enough to make a stiff dough, one that it’s not easy to stir together. “It’s not wet but it’s sticky, if that makes sense.” You stir but you don’t knead.

Cover the dough, and let it rise to about double. Cut it in little sticks, and roll them and make twists. Cover them, and let them rise but not as much as double.

Heat the lard in a Dutch oven to 165° C (325° F), checking the temperature with a candy or deep-frying thermometer. Drop the twists into the lard. They float, and when the top looks bubbly like a pancake, flip them and brown the other side. Makes several dozen doughnuts.

The cheese Cîteaux comes only from the Abbaye de Cîteaux in Burgundy, and it’s not easy to find outside the region. Even in books it shows up only a little. There is, however, real praise for Cîteaux in Richard Olney’s Romanée-Conti. Aubert de Villaine, a co-owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the pinnacle of red Burgundy, told him there is “no better companion for a Romanée-Conti ­— or any other wine from the Domaine — than a perfectly ripened Cîteaux.”

I visited the abbey and wrote about the cheese in 2001; the story then and now turns partly on pasteurization. Like all cheese, Cîteaux was once made with raw milk. In more recent times, like some other cheese, it has been made with heat-treated milk, a compromise that’s better for flavor than full pasteurization. Frère Jean-Claude, in charge of the cheesemaking, explained the current situation to me by email a few days ago, “Since we had a listeria contamination almost a year ago, we stopped making our cheese with heat-treated milk,” he said. “After thoroughly disinfecting our cheese dairy, we began to pasteurize the milk and developed a ripening process to ensure the cheese has flavor. We have succeeded in this now. Having done that, we plan to continue pasteurizing the milk. We’re pleased with the results.” To be clear, the cheeses that tested positive for listeria never left the monastery and were destroyed. And listeria is more common by far in pasteurized-milk cheeses because contamination can occur after pasteurization. But the origin of the listeria at Cîteaux was never discovered, and there was a chance the abbey’s milk might itself have been the source, so the monks felt they had to pasteurize. My original story about Cîteaux appeared in print. I’ve revised it and written a new afterword.

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NORTHERN WILD RICE once grew in abundance in shallow, slow-moving waters in the broad region of the Great Lakes in the United States and Canada. The largest US concentration remains in Minnesota. That wild wild rice is very different from the kind in supermarkets, which is grown in paddies and harvested by machines, and has a thick, hard, nearly black coating and uninteresting flavor. Truly wild rice is olive green to brown mixed with tan. It tastes nutty, usually toasted, slightly grassy, with something like the essence of tea, anywhere from green to black, depending on the example. It isn’t rice at all, of course, but the seed of a tall, annual aquatic grass, Zizania palustris. (There’s also southern wild rice, Zizania aquatica, whose seed is smaller, thinner.) Northern wild rice was and is essential food of the Ojibwe people, called by them manoomin, “the good seed.” Nineteenth-century treaties recognize the Ojibwe right to hunt, fish, and gather not just on their reservations, but on the land that was formerly theirs and that they ceded to the United States.

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It used to be that the only way to separate cream from the watery portion of milk was to wait for gravity to do the work. The cream, being lighter, rose to the top, more slowly in winter, faster in summer. “Cream-line” milk sold in glass bottles visibly had cream at the top. Centrifugal separators exploit the same difference in weight, throwing skim milk out one spout and cream out the other. To keep milk and lower-fat cream from separating, normally they’re homogenized. That breaks the fat globules into fragments that are too small to rise. It also exposes the fat to enzymes that quickly turn it rancid, so to destroy the enzymes, the milk must first be pasteurized.

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I ONCE THOUGHT THAT THE BEST olive oil in the world must be the one from the Moulin Jean-Marie Cornille in Maussane-les-Alpilles near Les Baux in Provence. Not that I was necessarily wrong but that a single “best,” with so many things, is a flawed concept, and I hadn’t tasted really good oil from anywhere else. The 400-year-old C…

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FOR YEARS, NOT QUITE UNDERSTANDING what was being offered, I declined a friend’s invitation to visit his family’s summer cottage on an island off the coast of Maine. Finally, I went. The island was reached only by boat, but the population was large enough to support, barely, a one-room school. (High school was on the mainland.) The cottage was modest, hardly 50 feet from high tide. As I recall, the family had bought 150 acres by the shore for very little money at the end of the Depression. I arrived in afternoon fog, so the surroundings didn’t make much impression. My bed was beneath the roof in the open upstairs, where there was a window at either end. I woke up the next morning and looked out at a clear day with golden sun lighting near and distant islands. On the horizon was Mount Desert. The scene was so unexpectedly beautiful that I cried, the only time nature ever affected me that way. For one meal, we gathered mussels at low tide from the clusters among the rocks. They were steamed and as fresh and sweet as could be. I returned each summer for several years, but eventually my summers were filled with other things. Not long after I stopped going, my friend told me that the mussels were entirely gone. What happened? he asked. I’d written about mussels, but I didn’t have the answer. I know now that mussels have disappeared in many places in Maine because of invasive green crabs, warming water, and acidification from increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (part of it is absorbed by the ocean, where it forms carbonic acid). In some areas of Maine, overharvesting of wild mussels is also a problem. And yet in general in the world, the warming climate has allowed mussels to expand into places that were previously too cold.

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A TOP-QUALITY PURIST CHOCOLATE bar may contain just cocoa beans and cane sugar, nothing to distract. But purism isn’t everything, and the best chocolate may also contain vanilla, chocolate’s number one complement, and it can certainly have other honest flavorings or solid additions. For texture, it may also contain extra cocoa butter. For sure, there are no money-saving substitute fats, no emulsifier, nothing artificial. The flavor of fine cacao is a complex, variable mix, especially of ripe fruit, often led by berries, and sometimes flowers, along with the roasting and cocoa flavors, all backed by a good amount of acidity and bitterness. A precise list of the potential flavors goes on and on (raspberry, cranberry, blackberry, plum, jasmine, almond…). We all taste differently and sometimes inconsistently. Recently I tasted a microbatch bar before I read the roaster’s description of “strawberry parfait.” I hadn’t perceived that; I retasted, skeptically, and there it was. Someone else’s perceptions often help our own.

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THERE MAY NEVER BE A GREATER expert in the deliciousness of fruit than Edward Bunyard. In the 1920s and 30s, he was the leading fruit expert in Britain, a collector and observer of varieties who cared most of all about flavor. He inherited the family fruit nursery, founded by his great-grandfather in 1796. That gave him the resources to pursue flavor, although the pursuit eventually consumed the resources and contributed to his suicide in 1939. Bunyard traveled widely in Europe, gathering varieties; over 200 pears were planted at the nursery, European as opposed to Asian pears, to be clear. He compared varieties and kept detailed records. Bunyard’s magnum opus is The Handbook of Hardy Fruits More Commonly Grown in Great Britain in two volumes, the first devoted to apples and pears and published in 1920, the second devoted to “Stone and Bush Fruits, Nuts, Etc.” and published five years later. Unsurprisingly, the varieties Bunyard preferred generally weren’t and aren’t commercially successful or easy to find either as fruit or plants. And yet in the lucky category of pears, the most common varieties grown in the United States are among the best of all — Bartlett (Williams or Bon Chrétien in Europe), D’Anjou (Beurré d’Anjou or Nec Plus Meuris), and Bosc (Beurré Bosc) — and they overlap with the dominant varieties in other countries. A few more, also at the top, are raised in the US on a smaller commercial scale, including Seckel and Comice (Doyenné du Comice). All those except Seckel originated in Europe, and amazingly not one of the varieties is new. The most recent, Comice, dates from the 1840s. Bunyard liked them all, but Comice was at the summit: it “can hardly be too highly praised.”

Bunyard was also the author of The Anatomy of Dessert with a Few Notes on Wine. “Dessert” meant only fruit; a chapter was devoted to pears. “After thirty years of tasting Pears I am still unfurnished with a vocabulary to describe their flavor,” he said. But, maybe without full confidence, he borrowed words from others: almond, vinousness, rose, honey, walnut, and more. “The presence of acid, that oboe of the Pyrian orchestra, gives a zest and at once raises the mere Pear to a higher plane,” he explained. “The next addition is musk, which Williams [Bartlett] has in such notable quantity.” He was wary of the musk. “Like the cooks who think that a sufficiency of truffle will carry any dish through, we feel that musk predominating is a facile and suspect quality; it requires great discretion in its disposal.”

All such information about flavor and variety is meaningless, however, if the pears aren’t beautifully ripe. Ripening makes the fruit sweeter, juicier, more aromatic, and softer. Certain variety names begin with the French word beurré, “buttery,” which describes the desired melting texture. But when pears are left to ripen on the tree, they tend to turn mushy and brown at the core before they ever develop full aroma. They also contain more of the grit that puts some people off pears entirely. Nearly all pear varieties ripen better if they’re picked before they’re ripe and then ripened off the tree. Still better is to give them a period of chilling before ripening starts. A “mature” pear, not ripe but ready for harvest, has begun to soften, but the change is so slight that it’s not easy to detect, and it varies from cultivar to cultivar and location to location. (“Mature” pears are hard, but even in the US almost all pears are hand-harvested to avoid damage as well as to select by size. Eventually, they may be picked by drones combined with aerial robotics, which is also how the trees may be pruned.) Before the harvest, professionals measure hardness with a penetrometer, whose calibrated plunger punctures the fruit.

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Chilling has been studied in depth. The precise temperature and length of time for best results depend on the variety and the state of the fruit, but with backyard or PYO pears even a week or two in a home refrigerator makes a difference. Here I have to acknowledge that in Bunyard’s time refrigeration was new and chilling wasn’t the norm. He ripened his pears only in a cool “fruit-room.”

In a supermarket, ripening starts when the pears set are out on display, and you don’t know how far along they are. Take them home, and at cool room temperature they’re ready in a day to a week. The longer they were stored in the cold, the less time they need, and, once ripe, the faster they become overripe. As they ripen, they release ethylene gas, which speeds the process. It helps to put the pears in a paper bag to hold the gas in. The skin of most varieties becomes lighter or yellower, but the way to judge ripeness is to press on the shoulders and see how readily they yield. Experience helps. Pears are ripe for two or three days, but peak ripeness lasts less than a day. Refrigerating pears before that point holds them a little longer.

Pears ripen beautifully only when they weren’t picked too early or too late or kept in cold storage for too many months. (To prolong the keeping, some controlled atmosphere storage employs an ethylene inhibitor.) And then there’s the grit, especially around the core. Some varieties have more than others; some have little or none. Harvesting at the right moment and then chilling help to reduce it.

The great US fruit flavor expert today is David Karp, who has a broad California perspective. His highly informed articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and elsewhere. In “The Elements of High Flavor in Fruit: Nine Varieties that Meet the Classic Standard for Greatness,” written for AoE in 2017, Karp said, “In the heyday of high flavor, pears, for those who could afford to grow or buy them, were the supreme fruits of connoisseurship.” Commercial pear varieties are slow to change, he explained, because the trees are slow to start bearing fruit and then they live a very long time. There has been some evolution in US varieties (additions of Red D’Anjou, Red Bartlett, Starkrimson, and Concord), but growers tend to stick with what they’re got. Karp admires the dominant old varieties, and yet for the article he had to choose one great variety, and he opted for Warren. It’s “a cross of Comice with a seedling of Seckel that combines their best features: it is stately, bronzed, luscious, buttery, sweet, spicy, and rich in flavor.” Warren, a chance seedling, was found by T.O. Warren in about 1975 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Unfortunately, it remains scarce.

The varieties have their seasons. You may find pears as early as July at an orchard or a farmer’s market, although later varieties are better. More names to look for are Beurré Superfin, Magness, and Winter Nellis (Bonne de Malines). Where I live, the cold climate limits the kinds that will grow. A few weeks ago at a local PYO, I picked smallish pears of an unnamed variety. (I got in touch afterward but couldn’t figure it out.) I’d selected only pears that separated more easily from the spur (you lift and twist), but still they were crunchy-hard. I refrigerated them in a plastic bag, to hold in moisture, and waited two weeks. After a few more days on the kitchen counter, two or three felt soft at the shoulder. I cut in. They dripped with juice; they were fully tender, not highly perfumed but sweet and very good.

In a supermarket, avoid large pears, which were almost certainly blown up by extra irrigation. They don’t become fully flavorful. For cooking, I buy two or three pears more than I need. I give them a little time to ripen and then select ones that are a day or two away from peak, so they have a bit of extra firmness and acidity. Pears are much better peeled because the skin has a distracting acidity and astringency and sometimes a sandy texture. You can use lemon juice to prevent browning before you cook them, but I rarely do.

I like a salad of sliced pears with walnut oil (not too much if it’s especially toasty), lemon juice, and either lettuce with crunch or Belgian endive (witloof). Pears are good with cheese, from Pecorino to Parmigiano-Reggiano to Roquefort. Not that pears need anything.

Cooked pears love butter (I’ve often made this buttery pear tart), cream, caramel, vanilla, walnuts, and wine. Poaching pears in white wine respects the pear flavor. Chocolate, in contrast, almost annihilates pears, for all that the enduring 19th-century dessert Poire Belle Hélène places a poached pear on vanilla ice cream and pours on chocolate. Among spices, pears and black pepper are surprisingly successful. Pears and ginger are an old combination, but to me almost any amount of ginger by itself is too much for them. Better are the mixed spices of gingerbread, although they also cover a lot of the flavor. The wine and spices of pears in red wine (cinnamon, black pepper, clove, orange peel) go further and transform the pear flavor into something entirely different and, if you reduce the syrup, wonderful.

Very easy to make are Richard Olney’s baked pears from Ten Vineyard Lunches: four peeled and sliced pears in a buttered shallow dish with a few spoonfuls of sugar as needed and 80 ml (⅓ cup) of heavy cream, put into a 200 degrees C (400 degrees F) oven until lightly colored on top. Sliced pears cook quickly.

Bunyard’s “Notes on Wine” in The Anatomy of Dessert contain unexpectedly few suggestions of wines that go with fruit. For pears, in an old-fashioned way he recommends a Pomerol, St.-Émilion, or red Burgundy. He probably assumed a five- or six-year-old bottle, which would help. I wouldn’t contradict him, but a much easier path is to drink a sweet wine with cooked pears. Olney with his baked pears called for a Quarts-de-Chaume or Bonnezeaux at least eight or ten years old. Sweet wines are never in vogue, and how many of us have a cellar with those options? But the pear-sweet wine combination can be beautiful. ●

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FOR A VERY LONG TIME, I didn’t pay close attention to spinach, as if it were a commodity. Maybe that was because it was always available in supermarkets, and it doesn’t have a peak season. It grows in all but the coldest or hottest months, depending on where you are. Right now in September, mine is thriving, and it will continue until the hardest frost. Maybe I didn’t think much about spinach because it doesn’t generate a lot of how-to cooking advice or novel recipes. But, finally, I noticed that all spinach doesn’t look the same. Some leaves are rounder, some are shield-shaped, some are flatter, and some are savoyed (crinkly). Young spring spinach is a warm green; it darkens as it matures. Some varieties are always darker than others, and I’ve grown one that’s bluish gray. There’s an uncommon red-veined kind. Spring spinach from moist, fertile soil is especially tender and mild; cooking turns the texture silky, slinky. Mature spinach tastes stronger, more astringent, tannic, mineral, acidic. Eventually, the leaves develop strings and are better cooked.

Often, cooked spinach is combined with milk or cream. Harold McGee, who has a deep knowledge of the science of food and cooking, once explained to me, when I asked about creamed spinach: “Cream and white sauces indeed reduce the astringency of vegetables because the tannins bind to proteins in the sauce rather than the proteins on our tongues — once bound to the milk or flour proteins, they’re pretty much permanently out of action. It’s like the effect of adding milk to tea.”

Eat spinach on the day you buy or pick it, if you can. The clean immediacy of the taste doesn’t last. It’s true that the leaves sold in clear plastic boxes are nearly inert, thanks to the controlled mix of gases inside (less oxygen, more nitrogen and carbon dioxide), but the taste of market garden spinach or your own is much better. If that spinach has to wait in the refrigerator, rather than protect it in plastic, it’s probably better to wrap it in a damp towel.

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ALMOST NO OLIVE OIL USED TO be like the kind we love now. The harvest took place mostly in January and February. By then the olives were black and soft, easier to press with primeval wooden equipment, and the color of the oil was golden. Even with the advent of hydraulic presses, the mats holding the olive paste required an effort to kee…

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ZUCCHINI AS A RULE IS watery and insipid, so that many people don’t like it. It’s fast-growing and high-yielding, a plate filler. Smooth, deep green zucchini are some of the least interesting. Overlooked on the plant, the fruits swell into giant clubs; the quantity undercuts any sense of specialness. And yet there’s much better zucchini! It’s one of my favorite vegetables. Most varieties form neat bushes, but what you want is a louche vining plant for delicious ratatouille, ultraclassic Neapolitan zucchine alla scapace, Piedmontese bread and zucchini soup (which does have more tomato than zucchini), or, for instance, the zucchini pudding I’ve made often.

(I have to interrupt and acknowledge that I wrote an entire book, 50 Foods, focused on taste, and I didn’t mention zucchini once, according to my memory and the index. I didn’t include any squash at all, summer or winter. I have a note to myself that says I did write a paragraph about zucchini and then cut it. I thought that was all I had to say, and I didn’t know what to do with the fragment. But I really like squash.)

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THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO EAT black currants off the bush. But why? A sun-warmed berry has a raw herbal taste, as if it weren’t meant to be eaten. It’s much more tart than sweet, and it has a tannic bitterness; worse, the fruit flavor is overtaken by an herbal-cat pee one. Rub the leaves and you smell it. You might think of Sauvignon wine from poorly grown grapes. And yet cooking with sugar banishes the unpleasant flavors. The fruit flavors come forward and into balance with the herbal ones. The taste is strong, still tart, but gratifying. Black currants may make the best jam of all. And you can make sauce, jelly, an ice, a mousse, a clafoutis.

I’ve been growing black currants for 25 years. Some US states, not mine, prohibit planting them or any Ribes because they can carry white pine blister rust. Fortunately, some currant varieties are resistant. In northern Europe, including northwest Russia, black currants are so popular that breeders have created 1,200 varieties. I’ve grown just two, both Russian. Currently, I have the self-pollinating, variously spelled Minaj Smeriou, which resists white pine blister rust. Some North American growers like the Scottish varieties, including Ben Nevis and other Bens (they’re all named for mountains). Black currants aren’t hard to multiply; a low branch in contact with the soil will root itself. The grower Peter Hingston once told me that if you take cuttings of the previous year’s growth in March and put them in the fridge in a plastic bag, “They’ll root amazingly.” Midsummer isn’t the time to plant, but looking far ahead to next spring, a good US source of uncommon varieties of currants and other fruits is Whitman Farms in Oregon. (No online ordering. You have to call and place your order directly with Lucille Whitman.)

Black currant bushes are vigorous. In early spring when blueberries are hardly awakening, the buds of black currants are already green and swollen. In my garden, the berries ripen in mid-July and are at a peak for four or five days. Not just the black color but a slight softness shows they’re ready. When you sort through, you can pull off the few minor stems that remain; the small remnant of the flower isn’t a problem. (That’s a big contrast to gooseberries, which have to be topped and tailed one by one because the stems are thicker and cling and the withered flower gives a woody taste.) For jam and jelly, Ribes are conveniently high in pectin. What works for me for jam is 500 grams of fruit to 300 to 350 grams of sugar (60 to 70 percent sugar by weight) in a wide pot. The texture is right in about seven minutes. For flavor, minimal cooking is key (definitely don’t add water). When you run out of homemade jam, the commercial one is a big disappointment.

If baskets of black currants are scarce where you are, there’s always crème de cassis, the liqueur, for making Kir or, if you add Champagne, Kir royal. Denis Lagoute devised the first crème de cassis in Dijon in 1841, and the firm Lejay Lagoute still makes it. There are other makers, including Gabriel Boudier, also in Dijon, and a few small, much newer ones in North America. “Store your cassis in the fridge; it oxidizes quickly, so buying it by the half bottle is advised,” says the mixologist Jim Meehan in Meehan’s Bartenders Manual. For Kir, you need a fresh-tasting white wine; Burgundian Aligoté is classic. Add one part, or less, of crème de cassis to four parts of the wine. ●

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STRAWBERRIES LOVE SUN; it gives sugar and perfume. Maximum flavor arrives with the longest days of the year. What I call high-note strawberry aroma, the most desirable, is linked with a pleasing acidity, at least in my cool climate. But flavor like that is elusive. Most strawberries are picked underripe, so they’ll keep. The best of the wild are unbeatable, but those little berries lack generosity, and larger ones can have most or all of the wild flavor.

The alpine strawberry, or fraise des bois (Fragaria vesca), is native to Europe. So is the candy-scented musk (F. moschata), which is too low-yielding to be raised in a significant commercial way, although it used to be. The Virginia, or common, strawberry (F. virginiana) grows wild from Newfoundland to Alberta, Oklahoma, and Georgia, and the Chilean strawberry (F. chiloensis) grows wild on the Pacific Coast of North and South American as well as in Hawaii. Both the Chilean and Virginia were carried to Europe, and by the mid-1700s in the mild marine climate around Plougastel in Brittany, gardeners were raising the two American kinds side by side. Spontaneous crosses occurred, producing plants with larger fruit. The French named the hybrid ananassa for its pineapple scent. (Modern strawberries are classified as Fragaria x ananassa.) Gardeners in England, Holland, and France further selected for size as well as for varied fruit flavor, although pineapple was the most prized.

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JUST-CUT GREEN ASPARAGUS TASTES astringent, faintly bitter, green, fresh, delicate, sweet, tender — if you peel before you cook. Last week when we cut and immediately boiled some of our own, our visiting son said, “It’s a different vegetable.” He lives in an apartment in a small city, and if he eats asparagus, who knows when it was cut? Food writers don’t say so, but old asparagus tastes dirty, unfocused, earthy, crude, and animal. That’s why so much of it ends up grilled. Grilling distracts from the old taste, but it overwhelms the fresh one. The problem is that fresh asparagus is not easy to find unless you grow it yourself.

In the garden of the house where we used to live, I dug a trench about three feet wide, two feet deep, and more than 25 feet long. A friend who farmed close by used to deliver as much manure as I wanted. I filled the trench with a huge amount of it plus extra topsoil. (I filled in the last ten inches gradually, over a few weeks, after planting the crowns, as you’re supposed to do.) The plants grew powerfully robust. We ate asparagus every day during the season, we gave it away, and still we couldn’t keep up. Before the season was over, some of the fat spears left behind had opened into ferns. That’s the asparagus our children remember, and it gave me my understanding of freshness. By midsummer, the plants formed a hedge over six feet tall. People commonly asked what it was, because they’d never seen asparagus so tall and so dense that you couldn’t see through it.

I like to eat a spear in the garden, and raw strips are good in salad, but cooking makes asparagus really delicious. Peeling makes it even better — more delicate, sweeter. The difference is obvious in old asparagus because the old flavor is concentrated in the skin, but it’s clear too in the just-cut. At least once each season I don’t bother to peel and I regret it. Besides making the taste more elegant (that may be the best word), peeling eliminates the stringiness and any dirt that the rain has splashed behind the bracts on the stems. Peeling also allows the spears to cook more evenly: the tips cook first, and if you don’t act in time they fall apart.

Green asparagus to me is more interesting than white, although a fat, meaty, luxurious white spear is wonderful. You have to peel white asparagus because it’s inherently stringier. It also loses freshness faster, getting a cardboard flavor; growers chill it in the field. Green asparagus isn’t quite as vulnerable, but it would benefit from the same treatment. (Peru supplies the United States with white asparagus, not for any reason of soil or climate but thanks to a trade agreement whose aim in part was to encourage farmers to grow other crops in place of coca. At the moment, however, Peruvian asparagus is subject to a 10 percent baseline tariff, assuming the courts allow it.) Purple asparagus is a sweeter, milder, tenderer variation on the green, creamier in flavor and texture, but not better.

Most US and Canadian asparagus comes from Mexico. Few large growers are left in California, and small-scale North American growers don’t often raise asparagus because of the labor. You have to harvest every day, each spear has to be cut by hand, and the harvest takes place in spring when there’s plenty of other work to do. On warm, sunny days, the spears push up fast.

For flavor, the best American variety may be the open-pollinated Mary Washington. The Jersey hybrids that set the standard for high yield ceased to be produced in 2021. The current leading hybrid is Millennium (from the University of Guelph in Ontario), which has still more of the advantages of the Jersey kinds, including being higher in yield. That’s because it has a higher proportion of male plants. Females put some of their energy into producing seed (inside the red berries), so their spears are somewhat smaller, and the seeds fall to the ground, where they sprout and produce small competing plants. Nonetheless, for flavor, I grow the mixed-gender Mary Washington, a USDA variety from 1919.

If, in a garden, you see some spears that aren’t arrow straight but have wobbly curves or are even bent over, that’s because of asparagus beetles. Both the larvae and the adults feed on the plants. The common asparagus beetle is black with six white spots, and the spotted asparagus beetle is red-orange with twelve black spots. The organic solution is to pick them by hand and drop them into soapy water. The common kind lays minute dark eggs that stick out on end from the spears, while the eggs of the spotted are more greenish and adhere on their sides. Spears with eggs are off-putting and considered unsaleable, although the eggs rub off.

You pick the spears for six to eight weeks until the remaining ones are pencil thin. Then you let the plants grow and build strength for next year. In a store or at a stand, look for tight tops, an alive appearance (definitely not dry), a minimum of white bottom stem, and recent bottom cuts (suggesting a recent harvest, although the stems may have been recut). Buy from a refrigerated case or go early to a farmer’s market.

The stalks conveniently break at the point where they become tender. If, instead, you slice off the tail ends with a knife, you inevitably take some edible stalk or leave some fibrous toughness, which no amount of peeling will cure. Especially with bought asparagus, there’s waste. I should say that peeling pencil-thin spears isn’t practical.

The best asparagus preparations maximize freshness. There’s asparagus soup (this one has just three ingredients apart from salt and pepper), asparagus with sauce maltaise (hollandaise with fresh blood-orange juice — the seasons slightly overlap), and asparagus in scrambled eggs (even better if you include morels).

For adding to scrambled eggs or risotto, slice the asparagus 5-mm (¼-in) or thinner, and cook it gently in butter. Otherwise, boil it. It makes sense for a restaurant to tie up serving-sized bundles for boiling, although the center spears take a little longer to cook. I boil mine loose and pick them out in rough order of size, giving more time to the fattest. Just-picked asparagus is easy to overcook; it’s done in only two to five minutes, depending on the diameter. There’s no difference in taste between the thin and thick spears, but the thick are more fun to eat. For serving cold, some cooks “stop the cooking” by chilling the spears immediately in ice water. I’ve compared, and the water only washes away flavor.

The prime complement to asparagus is butter, then olive oil (alone or with a squeeze of lemon or a very little vinegar). If you move to sauce, the great complement is sauce maltaise, followed by béarnaise (hollandaise with tarragon), and regular hollandaise. Asparagus goes well with so many foods; some of the best combinations are with scallops, shad, softshell crabs, fish in general, dry-cured ham, guanciale (or bacon or salt pork), morels, boletes, and, on salad, sieved hard-cooked egg with finely chopped shallots.

Asparagus makes a wonderful course in itself, and then it certainly doesn’t need wine — French sommeliers didn’t use to serve wine with asparagus on the theory that no combination worked — but at one point I became fascinated. My book 50 Foods contains four fanatical, discouragingly specific paragraphs about interactions. It was a good analysis, still the best that I’m aware of, and I recommend it to the right person. But I must have put off all but a tiny handful of readers because hardly any bottle is a sure match unless (big catch) you know it works because you already tried it. The mini summary is: the wine must be white and just slightly sweeter than the asparagus, and if it has a floral aroma that’s all to the good. The bottles are out there, but no label indicates sweetness precisely enough to help. Pure Sauvignon, which is by far the most frequent recommendation, is never right. (Why it’s relentlessly recommended is a large question.) The great reliable success, not modest in price, is young Condrieu from the northern Rhone Valley, if it comes from a top producer. Try it with just-cut, boiled, buttered asparagus and you’re a world away from grilled asparagus. ●

JACQUES MÉDECIN CLAIMED mesclun definitively for Nice. It’s recipe no. 182 in his Cuisine du Comté de Nice, a tall, narrow, red-highlighted book of 308 Niçois recipes. It appeared in 1972, and if you want a Nice cookbook, it’s the one to have. Médecin, who was mayor, seems to have loved the city’s food. (He held office from 1966 until 1990, when he fled to Uruguay to escape corruption charges. He was eventually extradited and served almost two years in prison. Peter Graham, who wrote the evocative Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village, translated Médecin’s book into English. He met Médecin and later painted an appalling picture of him. The cookbook may be Médecin’s best legacy.) “If I wanted to write a book about the cuisine of the Comté de Nice,” Médecin said, “that is because it seemed to me that my generation was the last repository of ancestral traditions.” The recipes came partly from his grandmother, who in the 1880s recorded them as they were dictated by Tanta Mietta; her photograph is the frontispiece of the book. Those recipes, Médecin said, were already 100 years old. Yet for all that, the book appears to have been secretly written by the starred chef Jacques Maximin, who was Médecin’s friend at the time.

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IF YOU COULD TASTE A CLOVE of garlic without cutting or crushing it or biting in, it wouldn’t taste like much at all. Only when the cells are broken and their contents interact do the heat and aroma form. That happens instantly and then continues, more and more slowly, as the substances, mostly sulfur compounds, change and new ones form. That’s why dehydrated garlic, such as garlic powder, tastes so different from fresh (and is rarely if ever a plus). The same thing occurs with other allium species. Onions themselves, when sliced, turn unpleasant in half an hour or less, and then they get worse. They’re responsible for the characteristic smell of a bad sandwich shop. Chives, shallots, and garlic hold up better.

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EARLY ON, I NEVER WROTE ABOUT maple syrup because I was afraid of being pegged as a New England food writer, and I never got around to maple until now. (I did publish a couple of maple recipes, including the one at the end of this post.) But maple syrup is a really good subject. The taste varies from sugarbush to sugarbush and boiling to boiling. People point to the soil, the angle toward the sun, the weather that spring, the moment during the season, and the knowledge and equipment of the producer. In some years and locations, a maker gets mostly light-colored syrup, but generally as the season advances, the syrup grows darker and stronger.

Each producing state and province, with Quebec making about 70 percent of the world total, used to set its own maple grades, but since 2015 all the grades have been the same. There are just two, Grade A and everything else, which isn’t for retail sale and is called Processing Grade. To lump all the good syrup together as Grade A is pure marketing. Grade A, however, is divided by color into Golden, Amber, Dark, or Very Dark, and the syrup must meet standards for clarity, density, and flavor. Previous generations preferred the lightest syrup, which in Vermont used to be called “Fancy.” The farmer-producers originally made sugar not syrup, and maybe they liked the lighter flavor because it was closer to the neutral sweetness of white sugar, which was expensive and had to be bought. The flavor of the lightest syrup is certainly delicate, but it’s also more complex. I like Amber, which has some of the qualities of both light and dark. Consumers, however, increasingly opt for Dark and Very Dark.

Within each color, some syrup is definitely more delicious than other and the flavors vary. The syrup of one producer near me always has a distinct vanilla quality. A dozen years ago, Vermont researchers focused on taste and created a “map of maple.” To give an idea, some of the more delicate flavors you might find are raw nuts, butter, honey, floral blend, bourbon, or cinnamon. Darker, stronger syrup might have caramel, toffee, toasted nuts, chocolate, molasses, even soy sauce. Canada has its own Flavour Wheel for Maple Products, prepared by the Centre ACER in Quebec and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and it has a somewhat different take. I exchanged emails with Nathalie Martin, a chemist at the Centre ACER, who clarified some technical aspects of maple flavor. She told me that flavor differences result more from the expertise and equipment of the producer than from the terroir. “This is despite the fact that research has shown that there can be differences in sap composition depending on the type of soil in the sugarbush.” People who really know the taste of a specific food or drink sometimes have an unexpected point of view. I was thinking of some of the delicate flavors I’ve just mentioned when I asked Martin whether there was a particular flavor she liked to find in maple syrup. “Personally, I like a slight woody note in my maple syrup, but it’s a matter of taste,” she said.

The sap, as it flows from the tree, contains roughly 2 percent sugar. Boiling, commonly aided now by reverse osmosis, raises that to 66 to 68.9 percent. Those are the US and Canadian required minimum and maximum amounts, measured in degrees Brix. There’s a practical logic to them. A less sugary syrup could ferment, and a more sugary one will more readily form crystals in its container. One other thing: the minimum sugar in Vermont is just little higher than anywhere else, 66.9 degrees Brix. If Vermont’s syrup is sometimes better, that could be because of a slightly heavier body and a little extra concentration of flavor.

Syrup can have defects. They’re rare in anything for sale, but they’re interesting because they underline just what a seasonal product maple is. As points of reference, producers can get kits with small bottles of syrup with each of the three most common natural defects. The off-putting, sometimes cardboardy one called “metabolism” tends to show up early in the season; it might be associated with deep winter freezes or, another speculation, with quick changes in temperature. “Sour sap” comes from letting sap sit at warm temperatures, so that acid-producing bacteria go to work. “Buddy,” triggered by too many warm days, appears toward the end of the run, when the buds are about to open. It’s often compared with the flavor of Tootsie Rolls. A few years ago, researchers at the Centre ACER identified a chemical marker for the flavor, the sulfur compound dimethyl disulfide. It isn’t necessarily the source of the flavor, but the more there is, the more buddy-tasting the syrup.

I once bought syrup that I thought had either a buddy or metabolism off-flavor and mentioned it to the producer. He tasted the syrup and couldn’t find anything wrong. I was just learning about maple flavor, and I wasn’t sure of myself, so I sent a sample to the Proctor Maple Research Center at the University of Vermont. A specialist told me over the phone, “Nobody could find anything negative to say about the syrup”; there was “no metabolism whatsoever.”

The prime Vermont expert in flavor was then and probably still is Henry Marckres, a significant figure in the maple world who has tasted syrup in every maple-producing state and four provinces. In 2016, he was inducted into the North American Maple Hall of Fame. Marckres, before he retired, was Consumer Protection Chief for the State of Vermont. A maple producer once described him to me as “a maple policeman,” though he’s actually friendly and accessible. I mailed Marckres a sample, too. “The syrup you sent me indeed had what we would call a metabolism off-flavor,” he responded by letter. “There is a slight odor that might be characterized as ‘woody.’ There is no maple flavor and the aftertaste is, to me, cardboardlike.” One of his colleagues, he said, considered metabolism to be like popcorn; it’s also compared with peanut butter. Marckres followed up by email: “Tasting syrup as much as I have over the past nearly 30 years allows me the ability to detect certain off flavors that others may not pick up at first.” I was relieved to know I wasn’t bothering people over nothing, but I don’t think I ever told the producer. And I’ve never since come across syrup with a flavor defect.

When you’re buying syrup, it’s much less expensive to go for a whole gallon. As time passes, crystals form in the bottom of it or any size container. When a piece comes loose, it’s colorless and looks like rock candy. Not many organisms will tolerate the high-sugar environment of maple syrup, but they do exist, and after you open a container, it’s important to keep it refrigerated. The syrup will last a long time.

Unsweetened Apple Pie with Maple Meringue Sauce

This apple pie with maple sauce appears in Vermont Maple Recipes by Mary Pearl, a spiral-bound book that she apparently self-published in 1952. She describes it as “one of the oldest maple recipes.” From one perspective, the sauce is marshmallow; from another, almost Italian meringue. Exceptionally for Vermont, the pie has only a top crust. I like a butter crust, but pie crusts in Vermont were always made with lard, and the quality makes a difference. My wife’s grandmother rendered her own; she used only lard in her crusts, and she baked a lot of pies, never just one. Tart apples are essential.

900 gr (2 pounds) tart but ripe apples, peeled, cored, and sliced

dough to make one 25-cm (10-inch) flaky crust

250 ml (1 cup) maple syrup

2 whites from large eggs, at room temperature

a fat pinch of cream of tartar, if you use a noncopper bowl

Heat the oven to 190° C (375° F). Arrange the sliced apples in a 25-cm (10-inch) metal or ceramic pie plate, deep enough that the fruit won’t boil over. Roll out the pastry and cover the apples with it, trimming and forming a neat edge, pressing to seal it to the pan, and cutting slits for steam. Bake until the apples are soft and the crust is brown, about 40 minutes.

Over medium-high heat, boil the syrup — which will foam up, so use a larger pan than you may think you need — until it forms a fine thread when poured from a spoon, about 10 minutes. Don’t let it go any further, or you’ll have pieces of candy in the sauce. Promptly take the pot from the flame and keep it warm near the stove. Whisk the egg whites until they just form stiff peaks, either in a copper bowl (freshly cleaned with lemon juice or vinegar and salt, rinsed, and dried) or else in a noncopper bowl, adding the cream of tartar. Then add the syrup in a thin stream while continuing to beat. When the syrup is fully incorporated, the meringue sauce will be thick but flowing. Serve it with the warm pie. Makes 1 pie and a lot of sauce.

FOR A VERY LONG TIME, I wasn’t interested in Raclette at all. Fire, cheese, melting, and potatoes to me said everything there was to say about both the cheese and the dish, which appeared to be just cheese melted in an awkward way. (I didn’t automatically find flames special; in the past, I’ve burned a lot of wood for heat.) I still haven’t tasted Raclette roasted primevally before a fire. Finally, however, I became curious. I’m learning. I have a wholly different view. Although the dish and the eponymous cheese have spread over the world, it’s crucial that they originated in the French-speaking canton of Valais in Switzerland. Raclette was and is the cheese of its place.

The name Raclette comes from racler, to “scrape.” A wheel weighs roughly five kilos, and to melt it in the pure, original way you set half a wheel with the cut side facing the flames. The cheese bubbles; you may like it golden brown. It may gain a touch of smoke. In one swipe of a dull knife, the melted portion is scraped off onto a plate, where it’s joined by potatoes in their skins, cornichons, pickled baby onions, and, usually, cured meats. The cheese offers richness and a bit of earthy funk. To drink, if you’re loyal to the Valais, you may opt for a glass of the white wine Fendant. When the half-wheel has been scraped a few times, the roasted edge of crust protrudes, and it’s sliced off for those who enjoy it. To them, it’s the “religieuse,” for its divine taste. The meal is an event, something for a cold winter day, part of a rustic time spent in the mountains.

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