Saveur January - February 2014

This year marks saveur's 20th anniversary. We have many people to thank: writers, editors, photographers, cooks, and you, our readers, for the recipes, stories, and images that make up the magazine's past two decades. Each issue has enriched our lives and the lives of those who join us at the table. To mark this milestone, we've created a special edition of the saveur 100, our annual roundup of great things in food. We asked some of the people who taught us the most to each peruse a year's worth of issues and to reflect on them. We weren't sure what to expect from the broad assignment we gave to Amanda Hesser a, Jessica Harris b, Marcus Samuelsson c, Mario Batali d, Wolfgang Puck e, Nathan Myhrvold f, Christopher Hirsheimer g,…

Its mid-century signage—a neon whoosh wrapping its name and pointing at a humble clapboard house—is a nostalgic reminder of classic roadside diners, the inside true Americana. But the Modern Snack Bar (628 Main Road, Aquebogue, New York; 631/722-3655; modernsnackbar.com) is even better than it looks. This 54-year-old family-run diner on Long Island, New York's agrarian North Fork is open in summer and fall only. Locals and seasonal visitors come to this adored hangout for its culinary riches: roast Long Island duckling raised on the farm right across the street, custardy shrimp and crab quiche, and the perpetual side of buttery mashed turnips (they prepare six tons of it during the Thanksgiving season alone). Sky-high lemon meringue pie (see page 95 for recipe) ferried by waitresses who've worked here for decades…

For a decade now, I've had a monthly lunch meeting with my best friend Jake at Portland's Higgins Restaurant (1239 Southwest Broadway, Portland, Oregon; 503/222-9070; higginsportland.com). Our standing order: beer and a plate of superb charcuterie cured by chef-owner Greg Higgins. The marble platter arrives with any number of the 70 types of cured meats on offer: sweet, nutty lardo; buttery pork terrine; lomo ibérico, the cured loin of prized Ibérico pigs; and presskopf, a creamy Alsatian headcheese, each exquisite. Higgins, a James Beard Award-winning chef, has been polishing his craft for more than four decades, ever since he became enamored of charcuterie while apprenticing at a cheese shop as a boy. After a stint in Europe, he thankfully settled in Portland, where he's adapted traditional curing methods to his…

more than a decade ago, while walking through a market on a late summer afternoon in Rome, I was captivated by a pallet of little oval tomatoes with pointed ends. I vaguely remembered seeing such tomatoes in an April 1998 saveur article, “Summer in a Can” (saveur.com/1998), which pictured a sun-kissed Italian family in the fields of San Marzano, Italy, harvesting a similar plump red fruit off the vines. And so I bought some. While I didn't recall the beautiful recipe for red sauce that went along with the story—canned San Marzanos simmered with toasted garlic and finished with torn basil leaves—the idea of oven-roasting these fresh tomatoes came immediately to mind. As it turned out, San Marzanos were particularly suited for cooking, their flavor intensifying in the heat. These…

twenty years ago, I had just moved to New York from Sweden and was working as a line cook at Manhattan's Nordic restaurant Aquavit. Between shifts, I would get on my roller blades and head out to graze on the city's diverse culinary offerings—dumplings, tacos, pizza, knishes—hitting several restaurants, stands or take-out windows in a single afternoon. As a young chef in his 20s, seeing these different cuisines in one place was eye-opening. It made me realize that here, I could cook anything I wanted. When I turned to “Capital of Heat” in saveur's March 2013 issue (saveur.com/2013), pictured below, it reignited that same sense of possibility. The article laid out the ingredients that make up the fiery cuisine of Chengdu in China's Sichuan province. Reading about ma la, the…

On a visit to Bologna some years back, I went on a mission to find Le Sfogline, a little shop that I had heard made the town's best pasta. There I discovered proprietor Renata Venturi and her two daughters, Daniela and Monica, grating fresh pears into a salty mound of shaved pecorino cheese, then stuffing the mixture into golden sheets of fresh pasta. A decade later, with their permission, I started making these most delicious and harmonious ravioli, called cacio e pere (see page 85 for recipe), at my Manhattan restaurant Felidia, where I top them with cracked pepper and aged pecorino. Ever since, the dish has been a customer favorite.…