Tabla de contenidos para April 2016 en SAVEUR

Hainan chicken rice is not a love-at-first-sight affair. Whitish, wobbly, skinon, bone-in, a cleaver-hacked bird, slicked in poaching juices and draped over some pedestrian-looking rice. Decidedly not a dish to eat with your eyes. Happily, that’s what we have mouths for. I first encountered it at the Maxwell Food Centre in Singapore, where fiercely debating which hawker stall makes the best chicken rice is something of a national pastime. Here, the curious visitor is subjected to endless impassioned (and contradictory) advice about where to taste the finest examples of the form. My jaundiced, jet-lagged initial assessment: I flew all that way for this? Then I took a bite. It was remarkable in its clarity of flavor and simple satisfaction, a sustained and deeply comforting note of unadulterated chickenness. A few…

Gujarat, India, 1970: I’m five years old, and we are celebrating the spring harvest on my grandparents’ vegetable farm amid their rows of beans. Into my bowl I spoon heaps of vegetables from a steaming earthenware pot that has just been dug out of the ground after spending all night there, toasting under the embers of a fire until its contents are transformed into tender, mushy comfort. Everything in this celebratory undhiyu (which translates to “upside down,” because the pot is sealed and buried upside down) is smoke-flavored: my grandparents’ own beans, of course, some of which I picked myself the day before, but also potatoes and other vegetables from neighboring farmers that my grandparents got after bartering their beans in the informal trading economy that pops up every season.…

THERE is no sound I associate more with the three years I spent in India than the whistling of pressure cookers. For the first two years, though, this constant aural accompaniment to life in our leafy South Mumbai neighborhood was abstract, a reminder that mothers, aunties, cooks, and maids were hard at work in kitchens nearby. The home my wife and I shared was a studio apartment in an area full of charming, if crumbling, colonial and Art Deco apartment buildings, bordered on two sides by the sea. Our four-story U-shaped apartment block was a short walk from the Gateway of India and Taj Mahal Palace hotel— two of the city’s most iconic landmarks—but far enough from the throngs of tourists and the freelance guides, souvenir sellers, and scamsters who…

Seen from the sky—which is to say, observed on the in-flight video map during our final approach—the island appears as a triangularish football being punted toward the Maghreb by Italy’s boot. It’s a pixelated reflection of Sicilian identity itself, which hovers midway between North African and European. That intersection is what brought me here. I’ve come in search of a particular idea, a local expression, a secret password into this place’s soul: mal d’Africa. The mal refers to heartsickness, as in the feeling of missing Africa. For Sicilians, mal d’Africa is a kind of phantom continent syndrome, a sense of nostalgia for a lost homeland, a homesick longing for the landmass next-door that played such an important role in shaping their way of life. We all have it in some…

When the email came from my dealer, I moved fast. “The first tea of the year is on its way,” the message read. It was an implicit warning that we hopeless tea addicts know so well: Get this early taste of spring before it’s gone. As the weather turns warmer from March through May, tea bushes awaken from their winter slumber and shoot up new buds, yielding thick, luscious brews with powerful flavors—jolts of freshness that chase away the creaky ghosts of the cold. For tea obsessives, the spring months are a time of anticipation and, once we get our hands on the new stuff, delight. I immediately placed an order, and when my shipment of shincha arrived from Japan, I wasted no time. Opening the canister, I stuck my…

When spring bursts forth, the swelling buds and brightly colored wildflowers call me into the forest near my home in rural Tennessee. There, with a basket slung on my arm, I’ll gaze and graze upon some of the first edible ephemerals. Every part of toothwort, with its early greens and delicate white flowers, exudes a delicious, biting flavor reminiscent of horseradish. I’ll harvest some, then move on to the mottled green leaves of the trout lilies—juicy, sweet, with a pleasant sharp accent—and stop at the stream to add some hearty handfuls of watercress to my basket. Perhaps my most exciting foraging find each spring is ramps, a wild cousin of garlic and onions with a rich, pungent flavor. The first way I enjoy them is just as I find them,…

I don’t order dry martinis anywhere except in Estoril. Usually, I like my gin wet. But sitting in a low antique chair at the wood-paneled Spy’s Bar in the Hotel Palácio, nothing but a dry gin martini will do. The echoing clatter of heels on marble drifts in from the hotel’s double-height lobby, and there’s never quite enough chatter to drown out the soft music. In daylight, the gleaming green and blue of the garden and pool blink through long windows into the dim bar, lined with elegantly worn satin upholstery, and smoky mirrors catch the light at night. When it rains, as it does in winter, you can stare out at the dappled pool with underwater lights changing colors for no one. Waiters in white jackets carry platters of…

An old traveler’s adage: The more ramshackle the restaurant, the more soulful and satisfying the food find. So here I am at a spot in Wenchang, China, perched along the canal and facing Three Corners Street, with rickety tables, pink plastic lawn chairs, and tarps strung overhead that shade from the fierce sun. Several older men in flip-flops just sit here, for no reason other than it’s midafternoon on Hainan Island, and the air is so sweltering and sticky the smart thing is to remain motionless until sundown. This restaurant specializes in Wenchang chicken, the hometown specialty, and it is called, fittingly, Wenchang Chicken Restaurant. The 63-year-old owner, Sung Shen Mei, tells me it has operated continuously here since 1927. His grandparents, he says, were the first to make a…

This Sicilian specialty combines two of our best-loved foods “Lasagna bread!” our staff shouted when the first scaccia (see page 70 for recipe) came out of the test kitchen. “No, it’s tomato and cheese babka! No, it’s lasagna babka!” We were amazed at this Sicilian street food, a multilayered pie made by folding a thin pasta-like dough smeared with tomato sauce and shingled with shavings of caciocavallo cheese. Similar in style to a calzone (made with pizza dough folded in half over toppings to form a crescent) and stromboli (pizza dough covered in toppings and rolled into a cylinder), scaccia is a specialty of Ragusa, in southeastern Sicily, and is typically made into a freeform rectangular pie. Our recipe, however, calls for baking the pie in a loaf tin, giving…