Saveur 2018 Vol. 4

NORTH AMERICA 1. TOTOLAC, MEXICO Challah-like pan de fiesta, p. 20 2. REMSEN, NEW YORK Cooking with local lard, p. 23 3. THE CAROLINAS Heirloom rice bread, p. 26 4. QUEBEC, CANADA A colossal meat pie, p. 42 5. VERACRUZ, MEXICO Peanut-studded palanquetas, p. 50 6. SAVANNAH, GEORGIA Benne seed brittle, p. 50 7. WHITE HALL, VIRGINIA Inspired by country stores, p. 62 8. LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA An ode to lemon chiffon pie, p. 78 9. COBÁN, GUATEMALA Behind the cardamom harvest, p. 82 SOUTH AMERICA 10. CUSCO, PERU Daily bread at the market 11. BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA Grilled cheese bread EUROPE 12. MOSCOW, RUSSIA Multi-layered Napoleons, p. 27 13. GERMANY The origins of crumb cake, p. 34 14. LONDON, ENGLAND Traditional steamed pudding, p. 46 15. MURCIA, SPAIN Baking with salt, p. 54 16. PINEROLO, ITALY Inside a panettone factory, p. 72 17. SWEDEN Swirled cardamom buns, p. 93 18. DACHSBACH, GERMANY A master pretzel maker, p. 94 19. PARIS, FRANCE An unconventional local bakery, p. 102 AFRICA 20. EGYPT Rice pudding with…

AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, WHEN MUCH of the world is muted, hushed, and hibernating, bakers everywhere are in overdrive. The rich scents of chocolate, cinnamon, and toasted nuts pour out of our home kitchens on the regular, and bakeries decorate more cakes and box more cookies than in any other season. Even if you don’t consider yourself a baker (though I know for a fact there is one dormant in each of us—we just need the right teacher to bring it out), the magic of sharing, eating, and gathering around cakes, cookies, and breads is universal. In this issue, we used a baker’s perspective to transport you to kitchens and shops around the world where sweet and savory baked goods are prized and their traditions are maintained. We go to…

YOU HEAR THEM long before you see them. The lanes off Charminar, the sepia-toned arch in Old City that defines Hyderabad’s skyline, pulse with the energy of thousands of people on a thousand missions: some browsing for bangles, others dealing delicate crystal bottles of ittar perfume, many simply searching for a good plate of biryani. But if you listen closely, amid the honking rickshaws and entreaties of women bargaining for lace, you can hear a measured beat: tak-tak-tak-tak, tak-tak-tak-tak. In a handful of workshops—most so tiny that you’d miss them entirely if you sneezed while walking past—workers hammer at slender, nondescript booklets, creating a percussive clattering. All day long, karigars, or artisans, pound cubes of silver into warq, the whisper-thin silver leaf traditionally draped on dishes in Hyderabad and beyond. These…

WHEN DAVID CUAPIO’S GREAT-grandfather started making bread in the early 1900s, San Juan Totolac was just a tiny hillside village. He and his family would make their dough from wheat ground at the Spanish mill up the hill, mix in a little lard and piloncillo (unrefined cane sugar), and leaven the dough with pulque, a mildly alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of agave plants, which once proliferated in the region. They would load their bread into wooden crates, strap them to the backs of mules, and sell the loaves at whichever nearby village or town was celebrating a festival, usually tied to the local Catholic patron saint. Their customers called it pan de pulque, pan de burro (mule bread), or pan de feria (fair bread). In Totolac, they…

“I WAS NEVER ALLOWED TO HAVE PIGS GROWING UP,” said Jennifer Romer of Slate Creek Farm in northern New York, as she slid ground pork fat into her oven to render. “My dad didn’t like them, so he always said no.” Romer grew up on a second-generation farm in sunny Central California. Now a homesteader who owns a vintage Sunbeam deep fryer and collects wire bail Ball canning jars, Romer also breeds Yorkshire, Duroc, and Hampshire pigs on sunflower-filled pastures above the Steuben Valley. It’s a harsh region north of Utica, home to a strong “waste nothing” hardscrabble ethic. Romer adjusted the oven temperature to 225°F and stirred the pan with a wooden spoon. “This is three pigs’ worth of leaf lard,” she said. “I’m breaking it apart to move it…

IN COLONIAL TIMES, NEARLY ALL the bread in the Carolinas was made with rice. Slaves of some wealthy households were sent to France to learn to cook, starting with James Hemings, one of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, who spent around five years training in Paris. When the slaves returned home, they cooked and baked with the ingredients they had at their fingertips, which meant they were often making French-style sourdough breads by cutting wheat with rice, the most important and lucrative crop in the antebellum Lowcountry. The labor-intensive rice plantations were built on the backs of slaves in the swamps and tidal estuaries of the Lowcountry, so rice was plentiful and much cheaper than wheat. During the Civil War, Union blockades of Confederate ports forced Lowcountry cooks to rely even more heavily…