Saveur Fall 2019

WE CAN NEVER LEARN ENOUGH about one another’s cultures. Although there is beauty in our individuality as nations, regions, and families, making an effort to know more about each other is the ultimate path toward kinship and unity. What we’ve already shared, learned, and adopted from one another’s food cultures worldwide is a marvel. This issue celebrates those migrations—the movement of cooks, culinary ideas, and dishes—across the map and throughout history, and how they have made our shared culinary experience richer. In “Around the Fire” (p. 58), writer Yasmin Kahn beautifully unpacks the relationship between London’s diverse population and its beloved Turkish-run restaurants, dozens of which span the city’s Hackney borough. Kahn’s focus is kebabs, those tender, spiced grilled meats, and her piece shows how widely Turkish ocakbaşl—fireside restaurants—have been embraced,…

ON THE CORNER OF an otherwise indistinguishable big-box strip mall in Markham, a suburb of Toronto, you’ll see signs for a Jewish delicatessen. It’s a predominantly Chinese neighborhood, but Sumith Fernando, a Roman Catholic Sri Lankan immigrant, saw an opportunity: The rent was low, and he knew through a previous deli job that the Chinese shared a penchant for fatty cuts of smoked meat. Called Sumilicious, his deli, which is also halal to appeal to the area’s Muslim population, primarily serves Montreal-style smoked meat sandwiches, for which he laboriously cures and wood-smokes the brisket himself. Why? To this improbable deli man, the answer is obvious: “I love this food.” When Fernando and his wife, Shalika De Fonseka, immigrated to Canada from Sri Lanka 20 years ago, neither had ever encountered Jewish…

I’D BEEN IN ELKO, NEVADA, for less than an hour, and I’d already broken a rule. I had come to the Star Hotel, a century-old restaurant and former boarding house for cattle ranchers, in search of the Picon punch. There it was, advertised on a chalkboard menu. you only need one, promise was written underneath. I was on my second. I forged ahead, given that I’d driven to northeastern Nevada to chase this elusive cocktail, a boozy punch traditionally made with an obscure French bitter called Amer Picon. It’s the local drink of choice for ranchers in Elko and Reno, brought there, it’s surmised, by waves of Basque immigrants in the Gold Rush era, when many migrant shepherds by trade found work in Nevada as cattle ranchers. In the classic drink, for…

In my kitchen in Oakland, California, I preheated my cast-iron comal and slipped a pat of butter onto the surface. I’d just gotten home from New Orleans, where at an artisanal bakery I’d purchased a mallorca, a sweet spiral bun made by a baker from Puerto Rico, who was in turn following a centuries-old formula that can be traced back to a tiny island off the coast of Spain. Removing the pastry from my backpack, where I’d kept it safe and unsquashed on the 2,000-mile journey, I sliced it in half and set both sides face down on the griddle. I made a sandwich like the ones you’ll often find in Puerto Rico, where my family is from, with some crispy bacon and melted American cheese, a decadent treat made…

THE POUNDING OF BOOZA is a spectacle worth lining up for. Though the word means “ice cream” in Levantine Arabic, today it mostly refers to the Syrian version, a combination of milk with sahlab or salep (a starchy orchid-root flour) and mastic gum (a tacky, piney-tasting tree resin), which give it its characteristic stretchiness. The landmark Bakdash shop in Damascus, Syria, opened in 1986 and mesmerized customers with a rhythmic pounding of the sweet base: Servers hammered 3-foot-long wooden paddles against the cold metal counter until the booza looked like soft serve but stretched like taffy. It became a ritual to crowd in and watch the show. After more than 100 years of production in Syria, booza has been on the move over the last six years, but for bittersweet reasons.…

“THIS IS NOT ENTRY-LEVEL FISH,” says a smiling Michael Benevides, standing in what has to be the United States’ largest purpose-built bacalhau chamber. It occupies one end of Portugalia Marketplace, the emporium Benevides opened with his father, Fernando, six years ago in Fall River, Massachusetts. The glass-enclosed, temperature controlled monument to salt cod is just one corner of the ambitious family market, but it perfectly represents the store’s mission to serve the local Portuguese community and to celebrate and share the culinary heritage of Portugal. Benevides was born in 1977 on São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores, a chain of Portuguese islands more than 800 miles from the mainland. But when he immigrated to Fall River with his family at age 2, he settled into an already well-established community.…