Food Heroes by Georgia Pellegrini

Author:Georgia Pellegrini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2010-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

My first lesson in brix begins at Jon’s breakfast table over a plate of scrambled eggs and Swiss chard, which he grows in a converted parking strip on the sidewalk. He offers up the first ripe tomato of the year and hands it to me so I can feel the warmth of the sun on its skin. He drops some of its juice on the refractometer and peers through the microscope—a five. A really good tomato is a six, he says. Then he gets out a pair of Frog Hollow peaches, which are delivered to his house weekly because he has concluded that they are the best in the country. He knows this because he went on a two-year quest to find the best peach after convincing a grocery chain to pay him for it in his role as taste consultant. He hands me the refractometer to peer through the lens and show me that the peach’s brix is off the charts.

“In the interest of science,” he takes me to Chinooks, a restaurant by the water, and orders a blackberry cobbler. He invented this dish for them when he served as their consultant years ago, because the wild blackberries he discovered were spectacular. He waits for them to ripen every year and has people on the lookout, ready to inform him when they have peaked. The cobbler arrives, steaming warmth and the smell of briar. “This variety is Rubus ursinus. Can you taste the briar?” he asks. But they have added too much sugar to the blackberries, and the sweetness is cloying. He shakes his head, “Sugar is cheaper than fruit, which is why fruit desserts are often too sweet. That’s what a guy who processes fruit told me. The number-one criterion is whether you taste sugar or fruit in the aftertaste,” he says. “I taste sugar.”

But then he moves on. “Do you like purslane?” I do, but usually as an accent in green salads, not by itself. And so he sets about changing my mind, collecting the weed from his garden, picking the fleshy leaves, and tossing them with sweet onion and tomato chunks, salt and pepper, and a little bit of juice squeezed from the tomato. “I like really simple foods,” he says. “This doesn’t need any dressing other than a little juice from the tomato.” And as we sit for dinner over a plate of purslane salad, and the next night too over a plate of parsley and anchovy paste and beautiful bread, I become a convert. This is what he has done all his life: change people’s minds. He’s a kind of taste missionary.

Rowley likes to go to the farmers’ market early, before it opens, so he can take pictures and visit with the friends he has made at virtually every stall. He carries his refractometer with him, tasting cherries, checking their brix, and giving a young farmer a lesson in how to measure when he looks wide-eyed at the apparatus. “Old Billy there has to get his brix up on his tomatoes.

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