Author: Paul Gerald

Years ago, I happened to arrive in San Francisco on the day my calendar said “Chinese New Year.” Naturally, I headed for Chinatown, expecting to see all sorts of craziness and get a great dinner.

Instead, the place was a ghost town — absolutely closed. What kind of New Year celebration is this, I wondered? Well, it turns out everybody was at home — eating.

When most Americans think of Chinese New Year, they envision parades, dragons, and fireworks. But for thousands of years, food and family have been at the heart of a 15-day celebration of the new year.

First, a few words about the calendar. The traditional Chinese calendar is based on both the moon and the sun. Since a lunar “month” is about 29.5 days, they add an extra month about seven times each 19 years, meaning the date of the new year changes every solar year. This time around, Chinese Year 4704 starts on January 29th.

In traditional China, this event would kick off a celebration that is all about family, community superstition, and food. It ends with the Lantern Festival, highlighted by the dancing-dragon parade which, in America, is always held conveniently on the first weekend after the new year begins.

The communal New Year’s Eve feast, known as “surrounding the stove,” invites the spirits of ancestors to be honored. Fireworks are shot off at midnight to chase off the old year and make way for the new.

After that, each day has its own traditions, many focused on food, and many of the foods are chosen because of what they sound or look like.

What’s served at a New Year’s Eve feast might depend on which part of China you’re from. In south China, it would be nian gao (sticky-sweet glutinous rice pudding) or zong zi (glutinous rice wrapped up in reed leaves), while in the north you’d have steamed dumplings called jiaozi or steamed-wheat bread called man tou.

The next day, people abstain from meat to ensure long and happy lives. The traditional meal is a vegetarian dish called jai or Buddha’s Delight. Among its roughly 30 ingredients are lotus seed (for many male offspring), ginkgo nut (representing silver ingots, or wealth), black moss seaweed (a Chinese homonym that sounds like “rich”), dried bean curd (a homonym for “fulfillment of wealth and happiness”), and bamboo shoots (“wishing that everything would be well”).

Apparently, it’s easy to make Buddha’s Delight — once you assemble all the ingredients. So if you can find some black tree-ear fungus, dried snow fungus, bean-curd stick, bamboo piths, dried mung-bean thread, Chinese cabbage, and both black and straw mushrooms, knock yourself out.

On the celebration’s seventh day, farmers display their produce and make a drink from seven types of vegetables. The seventh day is also considered the birthday of human beings, so everyone eats uncut noodles for longevity and raw fish for success.

Day eight brings another family-reunion dinner, plus a midnight prayer to the God of Heaven. Days 10 through 12 are all about inviting friends and family for more eating. Among the traditional foods might be a whole fish to represent togetherness and abundance or a whole chicken — head, feet, everything — to represent completeness. Mmmm, chicken head …

Spring rolls symbolize wealth, because their shape is similar to gold bars. Plenty of lettuce is eaten because the word for lettuce sounds like “rising fortune.” The words for tangerines and oranges sound like “luck” and “wealth.”

The word for fish sounds like the words for “wish” and “abundance,” and it’s served whole to represent the end (tail) of the old year and the start (head) of the new.

Sticky rice cake stands for a rich, sweet life, as well as rising abundance for the coming year — the higher the cakes rise, the better the year. And the round shape signifies family reunion.

After all this stuffing, on Day 13 the Chinese take a break by eating only rice porridge and mustard greens to cleanse the system. On Day 14 they get ready for the next day’s Lantern Festival, during which everyone lights lanterns and eats yuanxioa, a sweet or savory dumpling made from glutinous rice flour that is either boiled or fried.

I got to thinking how Americans might translate some of these traditions to our food culture. I can see us eating lots of “rich” foods, downing bowls of Lucky Charms, eating out of sacks because it sounds like “sex,” and who knows what kind of goofiness? I suppose it’s best we have parades and leave the food to the experts.

What started as the organic food movement is now a $15-billion-per-year industry, filled with all the government regulation and business intrigue of any other market segment. But for winemaker Gilbert Heller, it’s much more personal than that.

“It’s our mission in life,” says Heller, owner of Heller Estate in Carmel Valley, California. “When you put pesticides on your crops, those pesticides go into your body, and into your children’s bodies, and your grandchildren’s bodies. There’s no reason for it. We believe in the organic lifestyle.”

Heller, who has made wines for 45 years, will be in Memphis on January 18th to spread the word about organic growing and to introduce people to his wines during a dinner at Jim’s Place East.

When Heller bought his vineyard in 1994, he set out to have it certified as organic — an arduous four-year process which, he says, only half a dozen vineyards in California have completed.

“For example, we planted French plum trees, which play host to predatory wasps,” he says. “The wasps eat the eggs of insects we don’t want on the vines. We also bring in vineyard spiders to attack other insects.”

Such is Heller’s dedication that the winery steam-cleans the tires of cars and trucks that come from non-organic vineyards.

Heller uses 100 percent organically raised grapes to create his wines, and the results are no novelty product. The London Times gave favorable reviews, and The New York Times restaurant critic came for a visit after being impressed by Heller’s wines at a Manhattan restaurant.

“I have been very pleased with the recent quality and quantity of organically produced wines now available,” says Kevin Weaver, national wine buyer for Wild Oats Markets. “The quality of these wines is there and should be celebrated.”

The dinner’s host, Victor Robilio, who is president of the wine importer Victor L. Robilio Co., sees organics as playing an ever-larger part in the future wine industry.

“It’s coming on strong,” he says. “As grape growers find out that people want these products, you’ll see a swing in that direction. Whatever the public wants — even if it costs a little more — the industry will provide. And the quality is good. You don’t lose any thickness of the body or the bouquet; what you probably have is a less heavy taste.”

Marne Anderson, Robilio’s general manager, says that healthier wines make for healthier sales.

“With the organics, you get a purer concept of the grape varietal itself, rather than tainting it with herbicides,” she says. “From a business perspective, there’s such a glut of good-quality wines right now, it’s nice to have something that has a unique selling appeal.”

For Gilbert Heller, though, it’s still very simple: “Organics is the future of the food industry. It costs a little more, but it’s our mission in life. We’re here to run a vineyard and make money, but we’re also doing it the right way.”

Of all the weird things that will happen at midnight on December 31st, imagine this: All over Spain, people will gather around the radio, each making sure they have 12 grapes on hand. The radio will broadcast live from the Plaza del Sol in Madrid, and as the plaza’s clock strikes midnight, millions of Spaniards will try to eat one grape per chime for good luck.

Why? Well, that’s an open question. So is the German habit of eating herring at midnight. Ditto for the Poles’ preference for their midnight herring to be pickled. And heaven only knows why Venezuelans consider yellow underwear a lucky thing to wear while they’re eating their dozen grapes, but they do.

Buddhist monks eat noodles at midnight. The Pennsylvania Dutch eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day. Danes eat boiled cod on New Year’s Eve. The Dutch start the year with olie bollen, a donutlike fritter made with apples, raisins, or dried currants and dusted with powdered sugar. Well, actually, that makes perfect sense.

Koreans eat ttok-kuk, a rice cake in a thick beef broth topped with bright garnishes and green onions. The name means “adding age,” and people believe if they have a bowl of this soup, they will become one year older. Koreans, you see, traditionally add one to their age on New Year’s, not their birthdays.

For some traditions, there’s at least a hint of reasoning or a good story. The Greeks eat vasilopita, a cake with a coin inside, to commemorate the return of their money (via a miracle of Saint Basil) from the tax-and-spend Ottoman Empire. Whoever bites into the coin gets the good luck for the new year.

Across the way in Italy, they eat cotechino con lenticchie — pork sausage (a symbol of bounty because they’re rich in fat) served over lentils (which are green and shaped like money) — and then they throw old stuff they don’t want out the window to make way for new stuff during the New Year. No doubt there’s some vino involved in this particular tradition.

Unlike most of Asia, Japan celebrates the New Year (which they call shogatsu) at the same time we do, but they stretch it out over three days. They have “year-forgetting parties,” eat toshikoshi soba (buckwheat noodles symbolizing longevity), fly kites, and play cards and badminton.

Japan’s main food tradition stems from the fact that stores and restaurants close for all three days, so people have to make food ahead of time. Thus was born osechi-ryori. Ever efficient, the Japanese cook many different dishes — sake-steamed shrimp, rolled kelp with fish, sweet black beans, teriyaki dried sardines, daikon, pickled carrot, herring roe — and store them in lacquered boxes called jubako, which can be stacked, chilled, or frozen to last until January 4th.

Scotland — particularly Edinburgh — is one of the places to be on New Year’s Eve. The celebration is called Hogmanay, and as many as 200,000 people gather in the town center for concerts, feasting, general partying, and, this year, a 150-person human tower.

The Scots also have a food-related tradition called first-footing, which means that the first foot to cross your door in the New Year will set the tone for the year. Custom holds that a tall, dark man is best (no doubt a custom started by women), but apparently new brides, new mothers, and anyone whose birthday is January 1st are also prized. People go around visiting each other and bringing gifts of shortbread, tea, a black bun cake, a seed cake (with caraway seeds), or a lump of coal. Yes, coal. It’s cold in Scotland on New Year’s Eve.

And then there’s the black-eyed pea. Being people of the South, you know this: Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is good luck. Do you know why? Of course not. Neither does anybody else. We do it because our mothers and grandmothers tell us to.

One theory is that it’s tied to the siege of Vicksburg, when people had to resort to eating “cowpeas,” which, before that terrible event, folks didn’t eat. So now we eat them to show solidarity, or somesuch. Other theories involve being humble (“eat poor on New Year’s, eat rich the rest of the year”) and the fact that black-eyed peas, if you eat them with cabbage, collard greens, kale, or some other green and if you’ve had enough champagne, look like little pennies next to a pile of dollars, hence good fortune for the year.

Some folks even eat 365 peas, one for each day of the year. I guess if you survive that, you can handle whatever 2006 brings. Oh, and black-eyed peas are not peas. Or beans. They’re lentils.

The most traditional way — though no one knows why — to consume black-eyed peas is in a dish called Hoppin’ John, a name of unknown origin. Some posit that the maker of the dish would say, “Hop in, John,” when it was ready. Another comes from Raymond Sokolov, former food editor of The New York Times. He said the dish goes back at least as far as 1841, when it was sold in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, by a crippled man who was known as Hoppin’ John. Yet another theory is that a Caribbean dish called pois à pigeon (rice, peas, and salt pork) was pronounced “pwa-ha-pee-zhawn,” which sounded to English-speakers like “hoppin’ John.”

All of this matters about as much as who wins the college football bowl games we’ll all be watching on January 1st. Have a happy, well-fed New Year!

There was a time and a place in which Christmas wasn’t mainly about presents. In fact, there was a time when it wasn’t even about Jesus.

This isn’t going to be a lecture about the “reason for the season,” although the people in this faraway time and place eventually did celebrate the birth of Jesus. This is about how they celebrated — and what they ate and drank along the way.

You may have heard of wassail as a spiced wine, served hot. And that it is. It’s also an expression from the Saxon days in 8th-century England. It means “be in good health.” It would have been said as a greeting, farewell, or a toast — the forebear of our “to your health!” A Saxon’s response would have been drinc hail, or “drink good health.” (The word “hail,” by the way, is closely related to both our words health and hail, as in “to greet or salute.”)

Eventually, wassail came to mean the wine being consumed, especially the spiced ale or mulled wine that was shared during winter festivals. When Christianity was introduced to England, winter festivals became Christmas festivals, and on Christmas Eve and on Twelfth Night (January 6th), folks would gather to celebrate the holiday with food, wine, and song.

And, as they did before Jesus got involved, they would bless the apple orchards by putting pieces of bread, soaked in cider, in the trees and firing guns to ward off evil spirits. This piece of bread was called “toast,” and the tradition of “toasting” apple trees produced the expression “propose a toast.”

Over the years, the whole celebration came to be called wassail — there was also a verb, as in, “gather to wassail” — and in typical modern fashion the only part of the tradition that survives is the drinking. We added the shopping.

So here’s an idea of what an old wassail would look like — and then we’ll get to the wine.

In addition to the apple orchards, wassailing would happen in one’s home or as a roaming, door-to-door party in which the revelers carried a bowl of wine and offered it, along with food and song, to whoever answered the door. Take out the wine and food, and you have what we now call Christmas caroling.

The idea spread. People would wassail wheat fields, beehives, New Year’s Eve, Twelfth Night, and so on. The English, God bless ’em, were willing to wassail darn near anything.

So what where they drinking?

Coming up with a recipe for wassail is like getting one for chocolate chip cookies. Everybody has their own variation, which leads to two entertaining traditions: arguing about what goes in it and sampling some of everyone’s. The basic, traditional recipe is a hot wine, served in a wood bowl. The ingredients back in the day would have depended on where one lived, social standing and wealth, and so on. Today, there are three variations in England: Apple/Ale, Bishop, and Posset.

Apple/Ale:

A version of this less-fancy wassail is probably what was most commonly hauled around town. In a 375-degree oven, bake 1 and 1/2 pounds of cored apples for 45 minutes or until they burst. After they cool, remove the peel and mash the pulp. Heat one quart of ale in a pot, then blend in the apple pulp, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 1/8 teaspoon each of ground ginger and nutmeg. Go to town.

Bishop:

So-called because ingredients such as citrus fruits and exotic spices would have been expensive and hard to find. Stud an unpeeled orange and/or a lemon with 12 to 18 whole cloves, then coat it thickly with brown sugar. Roast in a 350-degree oven until the sugar caramelizes into a crust. Cut the orange in quarters and place in a bowl. Simmer (in 1 cup of water) 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, a pinch each of powdered cloves and mace, 1/2 teaspoon each of allspice and ground ginger, and a strip of lemon peel. Simmer until the water is reduced by half. In a separate pot, heat 1 quart of port (or table) wine and a quarter-cup of brandy (not to boiling), then pour everything into the punch bowl and get ready to start singing.

Posset:

This is an ancestor of eggnog. Combine 1/2 cup of sugar and 1 quart of dry sherry in a saucepan. Heat but do not boil, stirring frequently until the sugar is completely dissolved. Cool. Beat 18 eggs till thin and frothy, then add to the sherry along with two quarts of milk or half and half. Forget fat grams. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until the drink coats a metal spoon. Dust with 2 teaspoons of ground nutmeg. Mmmm.

So there you have it: Christmas the old way, when people would roam around to see, toast, feed, and sing to their neighbors — a fine tradition which seems ripe for reviving. So fill yourself a bowl, make some meat pies, get out there, and wassail!

Do the Wassail, by Conrad Jay Bladey, is available at Amazon.com and answers every question imaginable about this fine tradition.

Ever wonder why you can get fresh vegetables at the store in late November? If you know a farmer or gardener in the area, you know those Thanksgiving green beans didn’t come from these parts.

Most of your winter veggies come from or through Florida. And this year if you don’t see fresh green beans at the store or if tomatoes are about $5 a pound, you have Wilma to blame.

Hurricane Wilma raked across southwest Florida — often called the winter vegetable capital of the nation — in October. Beans, peppers, tomatoes, citrus fruits, and sugar cane had just been planted or were just starting to come up. When such fields get 14 inches of rain and 100-mph winds, it doesn’t go well for the produce.

Wilma flooded fields, blew over citrus trees, knocked fruit to the ground, destroyed packing houses, and ripped apart greenhouses, tearing up tender young vegetable plants that had yet to be planted. And all the various hurricanes of 2005 have drawn labor away from picking and into cleaning up.

“It’s an agriculture disaster,” Gene McAvoy, a regional vegetable agent, told a Naples, Florida, newspaper. “It could not have come at a worse time if you planned it.”

Since southwest Florida supplies more than half the nation’s winter vegetable supply — including all its green beans — you’ll be noticing the Wilma effect at stores.

As the storm approached, there were more than 15,000 acres of vegetable plants in the ground worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Florida Agriculture commissioner Charles Bronson has estimated total damage to the state’s farms at more than $1 billion.

Among citrus crops, grapefruit took the biggest hit, with as much as 80 percent of the fruit on the ground. Some groves in the region lost more than 70 percent of their early- and mid-season oranges, and 50 to 60 percent of the Valencia crop was on the ground.

Tomatoes suffered as well. There could be a 90 percent loss of tomato production in the area because of Wilma. Other reports from Florida indicate that sweet corn, lettuce, radishes, and cucumber were wiped out by Wilma.

Farmers can replant some crops and start over — after they clean up and rebuild and find labor to help out — but even then, it will be at least a couple months before anything shows up at the stores. In the meantime, as supply shrinks, prices will go up.

Ricco Gaia, sales manager for Palazola Produce Company in Memphis, says he’s seen a big effect in the wholesale vegetable market, though in different ways from last year. “Last year tomatoes were $50 a case, when they’re usually $12. This year, the tomato market has stayed firm so far, but bell peppers, cucumbers, and green beans have tripled or quadrupled.

“Hurricanes don’t just damage the crops,” he says. “When the electricity goes out, the packing houses close down, and then people have to go to alternate places to get product. It takes weeks to get back to any kind of normalcy. Plus, shippers are out of business. A lot of things come through Florida ports from South America, so even asparagus and limes from South America are in shortage.”

As an example, Gaia says that cases of green beans, which normally go for $18, are now at $40. “We’ll see this for a few more weeks,” he predicts.

The increases will be passed on to consumers, though some might opt out of certain vegetables. Gaia says, for example, that he’s afraid to even order green beans at current prices for fear he can’t resell them to his restaurant and grocery clients.

“It’s a real volatile market — even more than oil, because our product goes bad,” he says. “We can call in the morning, get a quote, then there’s a hurricane report, and that afternoon we’ll get a different quote.”

Some local farmers might see a benefit from Wilma. Bryan Marinez, manager of the farmer’s market at the Agricenter, says that last year local growers sold wholesale tomatoes and other crops to packers in Florida to help make up for hurricane losses. Tomatoes, for example, went for about twice as much as usual. He anticipates something similar will happen this year.

Once upon a simpler time, camping food was its own, separate category. There was food you’d eat at home, food you’d eat in a restaurant, and food you’d eat in the woods: cheese and crackers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, summer sausage, cans of soup, tuna, and Tang. You would no more consume that stuff at home than you would think to have seafood fettuccini or risotto around the fire.

Here’s an example of how things have changed. On a recent campout with some annoyingly young and energetic fellow hikers, a certain, somewhat old-school travel and food writer busted out his favorite dinner: a box of Lipton noodles, a can of tuna, and some green beans. As he waited 10 minutes for the pasta to cook, drained off the hideous juices from the can, and chopped beans down to bite-size, the youngsters poured boiling water into a pouch and enjoyed a sip of whiskey from a plastic flask.

“What does that can weigh?” they asked, not trying to hide their contempt. “How much wasted space in that box? Are those beans organic?”

“Harrumph,” said the writer.

A while later, as he chowed down on his noodles and contemplated cleaning the cook pot, he asked the pipsqueaks what they were having for dinner from their little pouches.

“Oh, curried lentil bisque,” they said blithely. “Actually, we’re already done with that. Now we’re moving on to the Bavarian chocolate mousse.” They were eating with titanium “sporks.”

Folks, if you haven’t eaten camping food lately, you haven’t eaten camping food.

“Freeze-dried food has changed,” REI product manager David Fieth recently told The Seattle Times. “It tastes better than it did years ago, and it’s following food trends by offering healthier ingredients and more choices. I think people who haven’t tried it for a while would be surprised by how good a lot of it has become.”

Easy too. Here’s just a sampling of what you can get these days by pouring boiling water into a pouch and/or tossing something in a skillet: tuna in red panang curry sauce or yellow curry, wild or Spanish rice, various risottos, focaccia, wild blueberry scones, garlic fry bread, organic griddle cakes, minestrone couscous, mandarin orange chicken, vegetable risotto with turkey, chicken primavera, chicken polynesian, organic chili mac, tiramisu, and Organic Mango Almond Delicacy Delight … you get the idea.

There are also now about 257 varieties of trail mix, where once there was pretty much dried fruit and mixed nuts. And the bulk sections at groceries now bulge with options for making your own mix.

One thing about the new hiker food is that it isn’t cheap. That curried lentil bisque is $6.95 for a five-ounce package. A quick survey shows prices like $7.95 for a 6.5-ounce package of organic chili mac, $5.95 for four ounces of Southwestern couscous, $6.95 for four ounces of organic sweet corn and black bean chowder, and $6.50 for four ounces of Organic Mango Almond Delicacy Delight.

Brands to look for: Richer, Mountain House, Alpine Aire, Backpacker’s Pantry, and Mountain Gourmet. The last one is a line of all-organic, vegetarian food.

If you’re just a convenience hound, hit an Army-Navy store for Meals Ready to Eat, or MRE’s. Each one has several courses and, in some cases, a heating element.

Now, don’t think you have to write off fresh food entirely. On your first day out, eat fresh eggs, greens, and meat. Other produce like broccoli, peaches, and pears can last a couple of days in your pack, and peppers, herbs, apples, carrots, citrus fruits, and potatoes can last several days. Just buy under-ripe products, freeze them ahead of time if you want to, and pack them in cook pots or other hard containers so they won’t get squashed.

I know some backpackers who do a kind of potluck: They each carry one or two ingredients for, say, burritos: tortillas, dehydrated beans, cheese, Mexican rice, guacamole, salsa, black olives, sour cream, sautéed peppers and onions, and tortilla chips in a Tupperware container. There are even, yes, margaritas you can chill in a stream: see Margaritainabag.net.

A search on Amazon.com for “camping food” turned up 78 hits, so there’s no shortage of information out there. Just take two pieces of advice: Whatever you plan on eating, try it at home before heading out on your trip. Even accounting for what happens to your taste buds after a few days out, if it’s crappy or a hassle at home, it’ll be crappy and a hassle in camp.

The other is, if you’re taking tuna, don’t take cans. You can get it in pouches now — along with salmon and other fish, many of them smoked or seasoned — and besides, cans are heavy, bulky, and might lead your companions to make fun of you.

portlandpaul@mac.com