February 12 & 19, 2024 Issue

One of the magazine’s most inspired recent moves was the creation of the new Hannah Goldfield column “On and Off the Menu.” Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. Her new column gives her more space to explore subjects that interest her. For example, in this week’s issue, in a piece titled “Pucker Up,” she writes about handmade vinegar. She says,

Many vinegars taste overwhelmingly of acid, which might seem like the point—until you try Crawford’s, which are more flavorful than sharp. You can sip them without wincing; they’re as suited for spiking soda water or cookie icing as they are for finishing a soup or a salad. A young batch we tasted, made from fresh bay leaves, could convert the staunchest skeptic of that herb: it was powerfully earthy but also citrusy and a bit sweet. 

Crawford is a former restaurant chef who is the founder and sole employee of a company called Tart Vinegar. Goldfield visits her at her “factory” – a single room, situated on a high floor of a building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, “equipped with an induction burner, a microscope, and a big sink, plus bouquets of lemon verbena and whole persimmons hanging from the ceiling to dry. About half the room is occupied by tall shelving units, lined with hundreds of large plastic pails.” 

In my favorite passage, Goldfield goes “foraging” with Crawford at the Union Square Greenmarket:

On the day I spent with her, we stopped at the Union Square Greenmarket, where she goes at least once a week, foraging for what could become vinegar—Vermont maple syrup, lavender grown on Long Island, perilla from the Catskills. “If it doesn’t taste good raw, it won’t taste good fermented,” she said—and, if it tastes good raw, turning it into vinegar is like preserving it in edible amber. At the factory, she plunged her arms elbow-deep into her newest batches, swishing around the pungent matter, nudging it toward its next life.

That “and, if it tastes good raw, turning it into vinegar is like preserving it in edible amber” is delightful! The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: The New Yorker’s other food writer, Helen Rosner, also has a piece in this week’s issue. Her “Tables for Two: Border Town at the Screen Door” reviews a breakfast-taco pop-up in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint. It contains this delectable passage:

On one visit to Border Town, I devised a test: I scarfed down one potato-and-chorizo taco almost the instant Rosa handed me my bag: terrific. Back at home, I unwrapped another one, after the tortilla and its filling had been steaming inside their foil blanket for close to an hour. Sure enough, the taco was extra warm and yielding, and the flavors—the flour and the char, the faint and sweet minerality of the potato, the spice and fat of the chorizo—all blurred together, a perfect harmonic chord.

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner in the same issue: double bliss.