Saveur June/July 2017

“Summer is another country,” someone smart once said to me. Where he came from winter seemed to last just shy of eternity and each day of summer was experienced as a brief, happy miracle. I like traveling to places that take their summers seriously, where the glorious reprieve from darkness and cold makes folks feel worshipful toward the sun. Scandinavia with its nightless midsummer is like this. Montreal, between blizzards, is too. Even closer to home, the ideal (read: lazy) summer day can sometimes seem like a destination that’s hard to reach. Busy routines are tough to shake. Scheduling purposeful nothingness is always harder than it should be. Getting out of town helps. Going somewhere with the family— somewhere there’s a body of water to gape at or jump into, a house…

First, look for their silvery eyes. And the murky holes where they nest, the way their legs sprawl out across the swaying seaweed as they swish from place to place. Danai Kyriaki, Greek zoologist, schoolteacher, and diver, is describing how to hunt an octopus as she prepares to go in after her purple prey. She paddles through the bluegreen Aegean, ducking her head below. At first, nothing is visible except a few fish too small to eat and shelled mollusks stuck to rocks. Kyriaki, 26, lives in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-biggest city, but she returns often to Chalkidiki, a series of peninsulas in the north, to reconnect with the sea. She started spearhunting at 12 when her father, an experienced hunter, handed her the gun for the first time. Away from shore, pebbles…

“An octopus has three hearts, not one. Their hearts pump blood that is blue-green, using copper as the oxygen-carrying molecule instead of the iron which makes our blood red.” —P.G.S., Other Minds Q:After spending so much time observing octopuses and cuttlefish, was your appetite for the creatures deterred? A: I don’t eat octopuses anymore. I stopped at some stage during the writing of Other Minds. I regard this as a somewhat sentimental decision, though. I am not a vegetarian, and in general I try to avoid eating the products of cruel factory farming. Compared to other kinds of meat, octopuses are not a particularly bad animal to include in your diet, as octopuses are wild-caught, shortlived, and not endangered. They are sensitive animals and I think they often suffer when they die.…

The two cultures share a profound respect for the nuances of taste, and a near monastic attunement to quiet shifts in the seasons. The restaurant Bissoh can be found through a narrow door offRue Maufoux, a cobblestoned street traversing Beaune’s imposing 13th-century ramparts. At a low wood counter, Mikihiko Sawahata serves meaty unagi marinated in soy sauce, mirin and, unexpectedly, red burgundy wine. His sushi rice is another example of local adaptation, tangy with a hard-to-place lilt. Good rice vinegar is in short supply locally, explains Sawahata, Bissoh’s chef and owner, so he blends it with cider and balsamic vinegars. Sawahata, a onetime TV cameraman in Yokohama, met his wife, Sachiko, a former Japanese Airlines flight attendant—now Bissoh’s sommelier and co-owner— when he was cooking in Naples and she was studying wine…

1850s CHARLES PHILIPPE AUGUSTE CAREY In the mid 19th century, the still-life genre had begun to shift from painting to photography. Props became less symbolic, more literal. In Carey’s Still Life with Waterfowl, which pictures meticulously hung birds, a saucepan suggests that the waterfowl will become food. Gone are the more magnificent piles of animals present in paintings, which both represented status and served as vanitas (symbols hinting at death, decay, or ephemerality). This is a particularly elegant example of using food in its raw form as still life; other examples from this period often lacked the grace of the paintings they were emulating, and could seem cluttered and grotesque. His work is reflective of the time, but in a way, very ahead. Perhaps Carey was purposely trying to forge a different…

“Ten years ago, I didn’t know what a collard green was,” says Fred Razzaghi from behind the counter at Fred’s Country Kitchen in downtown Atlanta. Construction workers and courthouse lawyers are eating elbow to elbow, their lunch platters loaded up with fried chicken and collards, smoked wings and hoecakes. It’s a local’s place, where a meat-and-three plate will run you less than six bucks. But there is another item on Fred’s menu that his most discerning customers are sure not to miss: a bowl of his homemade yogurt. Topped with honey, ginger, chopped strawberries, and crushed walnuts, Fred’s yogurt is tangy and rich, but it isn’t Greek. It was born in Mianeh, an ancient, rural town in northeastern Iran where Farhad Razzaghi— Fred’s given name—is from. Growing up in the 1960s,…