Beatrix Potter/The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin/1903 by Frederick Warne & Co.

One of world’s largest and oldest living organisms also happens to be one of its least-respected. Nicholas P. Money’s most recent book, Mushroom, is something of a corrective and an enthusiastic outpouring for all things fungal—from a 2,400-acre colony of Armillaria ostoyae in Oregon to the supermarket’s white button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) right on down to the stuff that makes dandruff (Malassezia). In a testament to his passion, Money criticizes an amateur collector who’s removed a giant bolete the size of her head. “Why do people view mushrooms as so different from other living things?” he says. “Imagine, a meeting of the local Audubon Society that ended with the janitor tossing a sack of songbird eggs in the Dumpster.” Or whaling for research purposes.

Amateur mycologists foster a rare scientific partnership with professionals (a claim that perhaps only astronomers can boast of). Amateurs pioneered the study of mycology and the often-inseparable practice of mycophagy. One of these amateur mycologists was Beatrix Potter. She made careful observations of fungi and lichens, and her watercolors illustrate the 1967 British book Wayside and Woodland Fungi. Potter studied spore germination and wrote a scientific paper, but after being repeatedly snubbed—both for radical botanical views and because she a woman—she turned her attention elsewhere. Money writes:

Potter was, nevertheless, a pioneering mycologist, one whose intelligence and inquisitiveness might have been channeled into a career in science had she possessed the Y chromosome required for most Victorian professions. Fortunately, her considerable artistic talents gave her other outlets for her ambition.

Would The Tale of Peter Rabbit have been conceived had it not been for the biases of Victorian era science? Maybe not. In the paper “Bamboozled by botany, Beatrix bypasses bigoted biology, begins babying bountiful bunnies. Or Beatrix Potter [1866-1943] as a mycologist: The period before Peter Rabbit and friends,” Rudolf Schmid suggests that “her exclusion from botany has been said to have a direct analogy to Peter Rabbit being chased out of Mr. McGregor’s garden, that is, the garden of botany.”

Curiously, though, fungi rarely appear in Potter’s tales, and then mostly as a decorative or whimsical addition. Field mushrooms sprout in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin; Agaricus campestris is a species squirrels collect, and elsewhere Potter noted their “nasty smell” and “good flavour.” The species also laid the groundwork for cultivated mushrooms and Heinz ketchup. It’s certainly one of the more subtle depictions of food in a genre rift with delightful donkey picnics and a champagne toast between mice.

As many hundreds of times as I’ve heard the story of Flopsy, Mopsy and Peter Cottontail, I never read it as a tale of enthusiasm for the natural world. Yet, at a time when animals are apparently falling out of favor in picture books (at least among Caldecott-award winners), I thought these observations made by an amateur naturalist were a testament to looking, you might say, where no one else had—towards the lowly fungi.

Thai festival. Image courtesy of Flickr user Halans.

At a Thai restaurant last week, my dining companion convinced me to forego the tantalizingly spicy offerings in favor of a chicken dish served with ginger, pineapple chunks and cashews in a sweet and sour sauce. When the dish came out, I was thrilled to see that it was served in half of a hollowed-out pineapple, with the fruit’s spiky green crown adding some visual flair. How novel! It was the sort of presentation I had seen only at picnics when someone would carve out a watermelon into a bowl or basket to hold bite-sized chunks of fruit. But in Thai cuisine, food carving is an intricate art form meant to turn ordinary dining into a visual spectacle.

Kae sa luk, the centuries-old Thai tradition of transforming fruits and vegetables into elaborate displays, began in the court of King Phra Ruang. Meals were expected to please both the palate and the eye. Using specialized tools to make intricate incisions and excisions, artisans—either palace chefs or the daughters of aristocrats—would craft foodstuffs to resemble plants and animals. Onions become chrysanthemum blossoms, cucumbers are fashioned into leaves to ornament soups, and the vibrant colors of a watermelon’s pulp and rind are used to dramatic effect in the creation of flower blossoms. And while pieces are generally made for garnish and table decoration, produce such as pumpkins may be carved into serving vessels and even some salads are presented as a floral spray to be dismantled and consumed by diners. And the Thai take on the watermelon basket is above and beyond anything I’ve seen at the picnic table.

Radish rosettes suddenly seem pedestrian by comparison (not that I could even carve one of those).

And for those of you wanting to learn the craft, there are books and DVDs on the market to get you started. For the rest of us who don’t have the time or patience, YouTube lets us admire kae sa luk masters and their edible masterworks from afar.

Maple tap, courtesy of Flickr user Chiot's Run

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you may have noticed that we’ve given a lot of the-stuff-formerly-known-as-ink to maple syrup. We’ve written about how it’s made, how to turn it into a sticky taffy by pouring it on snow, maple creemees, vodka made from fermented maple sap, even an entire alphabet of ways to eat the stuff. It’s a geographical bias, I’m afraid; my former co-blogger, Amanda, grew up in Vermont, and I live just across Lake Champlain from the state. Pretty much the only exciting thing happening in the Northeast in March is that the maple sap is (usually) running.

Although I moved here from a non-maple-producing state, I sometimes forget how little thought the rest of the country, and world, gives to maple syrup. I was reminded of this recently during my visit to Australia, when someone commented that he didn’t understand why Americans were always going on about how much better their maple syrup is. I was a little baffled by his remark—I thought there were no sugar maples in the southern hemisphere—until a few days later, at breakfast, when our host put a bottle of syrup labeled “maple” in big letters on the table. It was artificially flavored corn syrup, of course, but I realized that a lot of people south of the 40th parallel, much less the equator, don’t know the difference.

There is at least one place outside of the United States that might be as maple-mad as New England: South Korea. Except instead of pouring the syrup on pancakes, they’re drinking the straight sap, and in surprising quantities. According to a 2009 New York Times article, some Koreans drink as much as five gallons of sap in a sitting from the maple tree they call gorosoe, during a spring ritual that may be thousands of years old. Gorosoe translates to “tree good for the bones,” but many Koreans believe its sap is good for all kinds of ailments, including high blood pressure, diabetes and hangovers. They gather for sap-sucking picnics or sit in heated rooms, playing cards and eating salty snacks like dried fish to work up a good thirst.

Health claims haven’t been proven, but maple sap is high in vitamins and minerals, including calcium and potassium. Unlike the boiled-down syrup, sap is low in sugar—it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. When I tasted some straight from a tree last year, it was nearly indistinguishable from water, although sugar content varies over the course of the running season. Some people use the sap in place of water for cooking, as Elizabeth Folwell writes in Adirondack Life (excuse the shameless plug for the magazine where I work), in anything from oatmeal to “faux pho” (recipes at link).

Or you can just drink it as a spring tonic, as the South Koreans do. Dried fish not necessary.

Isaly's chipped chopped ham, courtesy of Flickr user Brian Butko.

As ecstatic as my husband would be if I were, I am not a die-hard fan of any one team, be it football, baseball, basketball or hockey. So when he asked me the other night whether I’d be rooting for the Green Bay Packers or the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl, I had to chew it over a bit.

He filled me in on statistics that others might normally take into consideration, like the fact that the Steelers have won more Super Bowl titles (six) than any other team. But my thoughts quickly veered from the teams’ talents to the places from which they hail. Then, soon enough, it was on to the cities’ food offerings.

Food is always on my mind, but I would be willing to bet that, for most people, it’s not that great a leap to make when talking about the Super Bowl. Along with clever new commercials, good grub is an essential part of the viewing experience.

Last year, in honor of the New Orleans Saints making it to the Super Bowl, fellow F&T blogger Lisa Bramen paid due homage to gumbo, suggesting that readers incorporate the stew into their game-day menus. Maybe Pittsburgh and Green Bay aren’t as revered for their cuisine as New Orleans is, but, with a little research, I found a few interesting food traditions.

Pittsburgh Delicacies

To eat “locally,” so to speak, a Pittsburgh native might suggest you try one of these “Steel City” dishes:

City Chicken. Despite its name, this meal contains absolutely no chicken. The Pittsburgh favorite is basically cubes of veal and pork on skewers, rolled in flour or breadcrumbs and then baked or fried. The recipe took root during the Great Depression, when veal and pork were cheaper than chicken. The 1936 version of The Joy of Cooking refers to them as “Mock Chicken Drumsticks (City Chicken)” because the idea was to assemble a drumstick-shaped kebab out of scraps of other meat. Apparently, some grocery store butchers in Pittsburgh sell packages of cubed pork or veal with a handful of skewers labeled “city chicken.”

Chipped Ham. Most people who grew up in Pittsburgh “Remember Isaly’s,” as the dairy-turned-deli-meat-brand’s slogan harps. The establishment’s chipped chopped ham, a Spam-like loaf of ground ham that’s “chipped” into razor thin slices at the deli counter, became popular after World War II and has stuck around ever since. (According to Isaly’s Web site, Steelers fans across the country have it shipped in for big games.)  Traditionally, the ham is fried in a skillet, doused in Isaly’s own barbecue sauce, and then piled high on a bun. But there are many spinoffs: chipped chopped ham scramble, creamed chipped chopped ham over biscuits, chipped chopped ham, rice and spinach casserole….

Pittsburgh-Style Steak. Actually, in Pittsburgh, it’s just called “black and blue.” The steak is cooked so that it is charred on the outside but rare on the inside. Lore has it that Pittsburgh steelworkers used to bring slabs of meat to work and slap them on exposed metal, like a hot furnace, to cook them in this way.

And when it comes to dessert, especially at wedding receptions, Pittsburghers are all about cookie tables.

Snacks for a Packer Backer

For some insider knowledge, I consulted Ray Py of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, whose daughter Beth Py-Lieberman is an editor here at Smithsonian. When it comes to the Super Bowl, he says, it’s mainly beers and brats. But, throughout the year, the Green Bay area offers some of these specialties:

German Beer Spread with Wisconsin Swiss and Cheddar Cheese. Among the usual suspects—chicken wings, chili and nachos—that Mr. Py found listed on the menus of some of his local Super Bowl buffets was something I hadn’t heard of before: German beer spread. I found a recipe from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, a nonprofit funded by dairy farmers that promotes more than 600 kinds of Wisconsin cheese. (Green Bay fans are cheeseheads, remember.) The spread is made by mixing shredded cheese, Worcestershire sauce, dry mustard, garlic and a dark German beer in a food processor and then served on crackers or rye bread.

Pan-Fried Walleye. The Friday night fish fry is a Wisconsin tradition, which began when German Catholic immigrants populated the area and observed meatless Fridays during Lent. Sometimes cod and perch are served, but a staple freshwater fish is the walleye, plucked from the Great Lakes. The fish is often battered or pan-fried with a lemon butter sauce, though there are countless ways to prepare it.

Booyah. “People will argue until the Holsteins come home about what the proper ingredients are,” Terese Allen, a food columnist for Madison’s Isthmus newspaper, has said. But booyah is a stew of meats, usually chicken and beef, and vegatables, such as onions, celery, carrots, onions, potatoes, cabbage, corn and green peas, often cooked in large kettles for church picnics and county fairs. From what I’ve read, it originated in Belgium, and its name is thought to be derived from “bouillon,” the French word  for broth. One local, in an article in the Green Bay Post-Gazette on October 29, 1976, claimed his father had something to do with the naming of the dish. He said that his father had approached the paper about advertising a “bouillon” supper he was hosting at the school where he taught, but the reporter instead heard “booyah” and published it as such.

Ultimately, I’ve decided to rally behind the Steeler Nation. I was born in Pittsburgh, and although I only lived there for my first six weeks and for about a year when I was four, I have to go with my roots.

If you haven’t drawn your allegiance, though, I say go with your gut.

Chocolate bars, courtesy of Flickr user dcosand

Now that we’ve been schooled on college food, it’s time to graduate to a new Inviting Writing series. This month the topic is something on the minds of most American children this time of year, and anyone else who passes the seasonal displays in the supermarket: candy.

Send us your personal essays about trick-or-treating or other sweet memories. The only rules are that the story you tell must be true, and it must be in some way inspired by this month’s theme. Please keep your essay under 1,000 words, and send it to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Candy” in the subject line. Remember to include your full name and a biographical detail or two (your city and/or profession; a link to your own blog if you’d like that included).

I’ll start. For more inspiration, see previous entries on the themes of manners, picnics, fear, road trips and college food.

Chocolate Terror
By Lisa Bramen

Candy and fear have always been intertwined in my memory. My earliest trick-or-treating outings were haunted by the 1970s hysteria over razor blades hidden in apples. I always figured that this was an urban legend started by clever kids hoping to discourage the do-gooders who gave out healthy alternatives to candy, but according to the myth-busting site Snopes.com, there really have been a number of cases of apple and candy tampering since the 1960s—although many were probably hoaxes. In any case, the fear of sabotage led parents to lay out trick-or-treating ground rules: anything homemade or not in a wrapper got tossed, and—the torture!—nothing could be eaten until it was brought home and inspected.

But my most traumatic candy experience wasn’t on Halloween. It was selling chocolate bars as a Camp Fire Girl.

Camp Fire Girls (now Camp Fire USA) is a club started in 1910 to give girls an experience similar to Boy Scouts; I joined my local troop in around 3rd or 4th grade. According to the Camp Fire USA Web site, wilderness outings are an important part of the program. But instead of walks in the woods or roasting marshmallows over a campfire, the only outings I recall my troop making were to the regional gatherings at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. Even worse than the morbid venue, the Whitman’s Sampler chocolates we were given as a special treat appeared to be as old as some of the headstones—and of a similar texture.

Renting out a cemetery isn’t cheap, I suppose, so another part of Camp Fire Girls was raising money through the annual chocolate bar drive. This was problematic for me in a couple of ways. First of all, unlike the ossified bonbons in the Whitman’s Samplers, the chocolate bars we were entrusted with selling were delicious. Giving an 8-year-old sugar fiend a box of candy she is not allowed to eat is like asking a drug addict to guard a pharmacy. As anyone who’s watched The Wire knows, the best dealers don’t touch their own product. I’m pretty sure I used up all my allowance money eating through my inventory.

I was already a poster child for the dental perils of sugar; the earliest consequence of my addiction (apple juice was my gateway drug) was that my two top front baby teeth rotted when I was a toddler and had to be capped in stainless steel. Who knows—maybe a future rapper saw my blingy smile one day, inspiring the grill trend of later decades?

An even bigger challenge than resisting temptation was door to door sales. I was a shy child, and I didn’t know most of our neighbors beyond the ones next door. I avoided it as long as I could—my parents brought boxes of bars to work to guilt their colleagues into buying, and group ambushes, when my fellow troop members and I stood outside the supermarket hassling potential customers, allowed me to stay in the background and let the more outgoing girls do the work.

But the day finally came when I would have to knock on my neighbors’ doors. I dutifully donned my official blue felt vest and white blouse, and set out on my Willy Lomanesque quest. The first few doors weren’t too bad. I made a sale or two, and even those neighbors who turned me down did so nicely. My confidence grew.

Then came the Tudor-style house with the turret entry near the end of the block. I knocked on the heavy wooden door with the black wrought-iron knocker. Someone opened a small window in the door and peered at me through an iron grate. I couldn’t see more than her eyes, but I could tell from the way she screeched, “what do you want?” that she was very old and not very happy to see me. I wanted to turn around and run back to my mother, who was waiting for me at the bottom of the driveway, but I stammered through my sales pitch anyway. The crone, apparently judging me some kind of third-grade con artist, shouted: “You people were just here last week. How do I know you’re even a Camp Fire Girl?”

I ran down the driveway, tears forming in my eyes, and told my mother what had happened. I’m a little surprised that she didn’t head back up the driveway and give the woman a piece of her mind for treating a little girl that way, but I guess she knew what I have since come to realize: She was probably just a confused old woman who was as scared of the people on the other side of the door as I was.

My mother consoled me and allowed me to cut my sales trip short. I probably even got a chocolate bar out of it.

As always, the rules are simple: Tell us a story! We’re looking for true, original, personal essays inspired in some way by our theme. Please keep it under 1,000 words, and send it to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: College Food” in the subject line. Remember to include your full name and a biographical detail or two (your city and/or profession; a link to your own blog if you’d like that included).

I’ll start. For other examples, see previous entries on the themes of manners, picnics, fear, and road trips.

Fluff and Nonsense
By Amanda Bensen

Courtesy of Flickr user .MegLynn

I accidentally became a vegetarian a few weeks before my freshman year of college began, and I decided to stick with it. But while young adulthood may be idiomatically called one’s “salad days,” I didn’t eat much in the way of leafy greenery that year. “Carbs and sugar days” would be more accurate. In my dorm-room hot pot, I cooked up vast quantities of macaroni and cheese, minute rice and ramen noodles. I ate any kind of snack that could be bought in bulk and stowed in a plastic storage bin for weeks at a time: Goldfish crackers, chips, pretzels, Twizzlers, Skittles, M&Ms, Swedish Fish, matzo bread, animal crackers. I experimented with dipping all of those things—and even, occasionally, sheets of raw ramen noodles—in Marshmallow Fluff. (Yes. I know. I should have warned you not to read this while eating.)

In the cafeteria, I gravitated toward cereal and dessert, sometimes combining the two (frozen yogurt mixed with Corn Pops! giant rice crispy treats!), and felt justified in this because, hey, it wasn’t meat, after all. As long as I wasn’t eating that, my diet must be “healthy,” I figured. I mean, who ever heard of a fat vegetarian? (Ah, the wisdom of a 17-year-old brain.)

Then, one day, a friend casually mentioned a fact that rocked my world.

“Did you know gelatin isn’t vegetarian?” she said, gesturing at my bag of Skittles. “It’s made from animal bones. So real vegetarians don’t eat it.”

That stung. Given the sketchy circumstances of my conversion, I was eager to prove to the world that I was a “real” vegetarian. I’d read the brochures about animal rights, and I’d heard the statistic about how dozens of hungry people could potentially be fed with crops grown on an acre of land that, used for cattle grazing, would yield only a handful of hamburgers. A copy of “Diet for a Small Planet” was prominently displayed on my bookshelf (though I hadn’t actually read more than a few pages at that point). I was serious about this, gosh darn it!

So I gave up gelatin. Since this suddenly ruled out things like rice crispy treats, Fluff, and many types of candy, I was forced to adapt my diet. I finally read that book, and a few others, and learned about the importance of balancing one’s carbohydrate, protein and fat intakes. I started eating more salad, and less sugar, from the cafeteria. I discovered chickpeas and hummus. The “freshman 15″ disappeared rapidly.

College, I realized, is all about learning to balance—time, workload, opinions, allegiances and so on. Food is only the beginning, but it’s a good first step when still recovering from the wobble of leaving the nest.

By the start of my sophomore year, my roommate Jenna and I formed a pact, scribbled on a sheet of notebook paper and officiously signed by each of us and a bemused “witness” (the girl who lived across the hall). I still have a copy. It’s about boys, because we’d just had a shared epiphany that they could be a terrible distraction from more important matters such as studying, exercising, and staring dreamily at world atlases.

We promised, in writing, never to let ourselves become inordinately obsessed with a boy. And if I did?

“My roommate, Jenna, has permission to force-feed me gelatin.”

If this inspires your inner Kerouac, there’s still time to send in your own story about road food. E-mail submissions to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Road Trips” in the subject line by August 1st.

Our Moveable Feast
By Anny Wohn

On the first morning of our trip to Paris, I awoke to Andy pacing around our darkened hotel room, deliberately trying to get my attention. That rainy November day began with his words, “I can’t sleep knowing there’s a city full of pâté out there!”

Courtesy of Flickr user Cassidy Curtis (otherthings)

When you are a pastry chef married to another chef, all vacations, conversations and road trips converge on food. After three days in Paris of continuous eating punctuated by museum visits, we were about to embark on a 307-mile voyage through northern France, dipping under the English Channel for 20 minutes, before arriving in London via the countryside of Kent.

Because I have lived only in large cities throughout my life, and didn’t even sit behind the wheel of an automobile until the age of 29, the network of transit systems is my “open road” of possibilities wherever I journey in the world.

Preparations for the 2-hour-and-15-minute train ride from Gare du Nord to London’s St. Pancras Station on the high-speed Eurostar began early on the day of our departure. During our breakfast at the café near our hotel in the 5th arrondissement, we pocketed leftover tabs of Isigny butter wrapped in foil paper.

Then, traversing the Seine over the Louis Philippe Bridge, we arrived in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, where we hunted for unpasteurized cheeses and pâtés, and gathered nutty financiers and boozy cannelés for dessert. I peeled away the woolen gloves from my frozen fingertips to linger over my last chocolat chaud of the trip.

Breaking a long crusty baguette in half (breaking this pastry chef’s heart to compromise the integrity of the beautiful loaf) in order to conceal it in my carry-on bag, we finally ducked into the metro and headed for the train station.

Weaving through the crowd, passing French police dogs whose discerning noses were unperturbed by pungent cheese, we stepped across political boundaries at the immigration desk and onto our train as the door clipped at our heels. As we were just placing our bags overhead, the more punctual couple in our four-person seating pod was already clearing their lunch of fast food purchased from a stall at the Gare du Nord. We sat facing them, yet avoiding eye contact, and strategically positioned our feet to avoid knocking knees.

Andy left to find the café car—where he exchanged the last of our euros for a Stella Artois and a bottle of mineral water—while I watched the scenic frames of northern France whizzing past at 186 m.p.h. When he returned, we set up our feast in an assembly line, stretching across our half of the table surface from window to aisle.

I spread the baguette with the golden butter made of grassy Norman cows’ milk, and passed it onto Andy, who topped it with any one of the full kilogram (2.2 pounds) of treats we’d purchased. There was country pork pâté, unctuous rabbit terrine, duck liver mousse and Pounti, a dense Auvergne-style meat loaf studded with sweet prunes.

After that, we unleashed our cheese course of Saint-Nectaire, followed by a sweet ending of pistachio-brown butter cake with sour cherries and cylinders of rum-soaked custard pastry (cannelés).

Upon detraining at St. Pancras and following the stampede through the labyrinthine Underground, we emerged from the Sloane Square Tube station, walked a few blocks to my sister’s flat, bearing small gifts of colorful macarons from Ladurée and a tin of crêpes dentelles from La Grande Epicerie.

We were just in time to join the expats for a Thanksgiving dinner in London.

Courtesy of Flickr user JForth

It’s time for a new Inviting Writing topic. This month’s theme is one of my favorite summer activities—road trips.

The rules are simple: Tell us a true story that somehow relates to that theme (and food, of course), and e-mail it to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Road Trips” in the subject line. We’ll pick three of the best, lightly edit them and publish them over the next few Mondays here on the blog. For more guidance, please read this and peruse last month’s stories about “picnics.”

I’ll get things started with a story of my own. Surprisingly, as much as I love taking to the open road, the only food-related road trip story (actually, two) I could come up with isn’t very appetizing. Let’s see if some of the budding Jack Kerouacs out there can do better—it shouldn’t be hard.

ROAD TRIPS, or WHAT HAPPENS ON THE WAY TO VEGAS…

For my 30th birthday, a couple of good friends and I decided to take a road trip to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. We planned to gamble a little, sit by the pool, maybe see a show—nothing unusual. But my first indication that things weren’t going to go exactly as planned was that another friend, who had been living overseas, decided to surprise me by flying in to join us for the weekend trip. That was great, but the real surprise was that she also needed to crash at my cramped 1-bedroom apartment for the next month.

I shrugged off this unexpected twist and we were on our way. Driving from L.A. to Las Vegas on a Friday evening is rarely pleasant. A good portion of the 17 million or so inhabitants of the L.A. metropolitan area funnel onto the 10 and 15 freeways heading east, trying to get home to the suburbs or out to the desert for a weekend escape. A trip that would take about four hours without traffic can stretch to hours longer, as cars crawl along the blacktop.

I made my first gamble of the weekend before we even crossed the Nevada state line: hungry but not wanting to add more stops to our stop-and-go journey, I ate a sandwich from a national-chain sub shop located inside a gas station mini-mart.

A couple hours later, after the traffic had thinned and we were driving through the night on the lonesome desert highway, an ominous gurgling in my gut told me that I had made a bad bet. There was nowhere to stop for miles, and I wasn’t about to squat behind a tumbleweed in the dark, where I was sure rattlesnakes and scorpions were lurking. Luckily, a small cluster of lights soon appeared on the horizon, indicating my salvation—a clean public restroom—was near.

The only other time I experienced food-borne illness was also on a road trip, although not in the classic sense—I was on an overnight bus trip between Istanbul and the Cappadocia region of Turkey, during a solo European backpacking adventure in my 20s. This time, the fact that I was alone among strangers in an unfamiliar culture made the onset of the gut-gurgling even more disconcerting.

I was laid up for three or four days in the small village of Göreme with what some travelers call “Sultan’s Revenge.” During that time, multiple locals tried to cure me with home remedies—the pansiyon (guesthouse) owner urged me to drink a glassful of equal parts honey and water; the tour-office worker’s concoction included hot water, honey, lemon juice and salt; and the restaurant owner insisted that raki, the ever-present anise-flavored liquor, was the cure for what ailed me. A visit to the doctor, facilitated by the raki-pushing restauranteur, finally did the trick.

Other than the first day, during which I was feverish and bedridden, being sick may have actually been a positive thing in the long run. Forced to slow down and hang out in town rather than go out exploring the area’s tourist sites, I got to spend a good amount of time talking to the local Turkish people.

That’s the great thing about road trips—you don’t always know where they might lead you.

Hollywood Bowl picnickers, courtesy of Flickr user bfick

We couldn’t decide between several of the short, sweet stories you sent us in response to the latest Inviting Writing prompt about picnics, so we decided to share the whole spread today—enjoy!

From John Haddad (Epicuriousity):

Many of my memories involve food and traveling. Fish & chips in London, waffles in Bruges, Guinness in Ireland, and lots of pasta in Italy. In particular, I have very fond memories of a trip to the south of France in the Spring of 1990.

The details are a bit fuzzy, but I remember being stranded with a group of friends in Aix en Provence on a Sunday during a train strike, with hardly two francs to rub together. Somehow, we pooled enough money together to buy provisions at the market for a picnic. We walked down a dirt road into the countryside for several miles until we were nearly in the shadow of Mont Sainte Victoire—a scene made famous by the Impressionist artist Cezanne—and sat in a field of flowers.

We lounged for hours in those fragrant fields, forgetting our worries, eating and drinking like there was no tomorrow. We filled ourselves with bread and cheese, saucisson and tomatoes, washed down with cold white wine and luscious strawberries that I can still almost taste today, twenty years later.

From Dale Elizabeth Walker in Kansas City, Missouri:

Some years ago, I found myself the proud owner of a magnificent hand-crafted picnic hamper, complete with glass champagne flutes and plates, metal silverware and cloth napkins. It was a generous gift from a client whose kitchen I’d been painting for several weeks, during the phase of my working life when I ran a faux finishing business.

I had grossly underbid the job, which started as a repair job on a faux marbled-feature wall but soon extended into tedious wallpaper removal and painting one-inch striping on the remaining walls. Though I had never bid my jobs very well, this one was a particular disaster. My client knew it and offered to pay more, but I felt bound by my contract and refused.

A personable, energetic woman, my client and her husband owned an older home in a charming urban-residential neighborhood. They had packed a gourmet kitchen into a tiny space, with windows pushed out into a shady yard where their cats could perch and watch the songbirds flitting by. It was summer, so we chatted about the local Shakespeare in the Park performance that I planned to attend with friends. I talked about how we would all bring sacks full of tantalizing treats and bottles of our favorite wines to share, and how the ripe fruits and savory cheeses always seemed to taste better in the open air.

When I had finished putting the last stripe on my client’s wall, packed up my brushes, cans and miles of narrow blue painters tape, she handed me a check and asked me to wait a minute while she got something else. That was when the hamper emerged, delivered with her thanks and a warm hug.

I have since wisely quit that business and now earn my living in marketing, but I will always remember her graciousness every time that hamper comes off the shelf and gets packed for another outdoor theatrical performance.

From Jessica Harper (The Crabby Cook):

I love the Hollywood Bowl, but I love it for the wrong reason.

I don’t love it because it’s a beautiful outdoor venue where you (and nearly 18,000 other patrons) can sit under the stars and hear the L.A. Philharmonic or Beck while crickets chirp. I don’t love it because it was it was designed by Lloyd Wright (son of Frank), or even because the Beatles played there in 1964.

I love it because it means that many restaurants and eateries in Los Angeles offer picnic baskets to go, all summer long. For those of us who are honing our cooking-avoidance skills, this is fabulous news!

I caught on to this when we canceled our plans to go to the Bowl for a concert at the last minute on a recent night. My daughter was late from work, my husband had a volatile situation at the office, the pre-4th traffic was insane, and it turned out the concert was a celebration of the L.A. Dodgers, a team none of us has an allegiance to. But the good news was that I’d ordered and already picked up a picnic for us at Clementine’s, a great local eatery. We ate al fresco on the patio, with our own private stars and crickets and about 17,996 fewer people.

So from now on, I plan to pretend to go to the Hollywood Bowl on a regular basis. I’ll order a picnic basket, and at pickup time I’ll exchange lively banter with the purveyor about who’s playing the Bowl that night and how bad the traffic’s likely to be. Then I’ll sneak home, mix up a martini, put on my L.A. Phil CD…and dinner will be so done!

P.S. 32 Picnic
by Anny Wohn

I attribute it to the mountainous terrain or perhaps the four distinct seasons, but Koreans adore picnics.  In fact, each spring and fall when the fragrant blossoms or the magnificent foliage paint the landscape, there are organized picnics known as so-poong for school children and their chaperones nationwide. On these school trips, each student-parent pair brings a do-shi-rak, a portable, multi-tiered lunch box with samplings of different dishes in each compartment.

Korean dosirak lunch, courtesy of Flickr user titicat

A Korean child’s school lunch is akin to a smaller individual-scale picnic.  The do-shi-rak my mother typically packed for me contained bulkogi (marinated grilled beef), blanched spinach tossed in sesame oil, marinated soy bean or mung bean sprouts, grilled tofu with a ginger-soy dressing, spicy cucumbers and steamed rice, each in its own neat little space within my portable lunch case.

My parents enrolled me at Public School 32 within ten days of our arrival in New York from Seoul. I ate my elaborate do-shi-rak at the school cafeteria, with curious stares and sometimes rude comments from my classmates, who ate their sandwiches from their all-American “Barbie” or “Dukes of Hazzard” lunch boxes.

It was 1979, after all, and Americans did not yet know Asian cuisine the way they do now. Chop suey and chow mein were still mainstays on Chinese menus, sushi was only just becoming popular among yuppies, and although hippies had long embraced Indian cuisine, it was hardly mainstream. And Korean? No one understood Korean food then.

About a week after I started at P.S. 32, I stood up to reach for my do-shi-rak in the cubby neatly lined with everyone’s lunch boxes, and to my horror realized it was not there—I had forgotten to bring it with me that morning! Panic set in almost immediately.

My astute teacher, Mrs. Modry, detected something was wrong and came to my aid. Though I had been tutored in some English words and phrases at the International School back in Seoul, I did not know how to say “lunch box.” Finally, after miming and playing guessing games, I conveyed to her that I did not have my lunch with me.

She escorted me to the school cafeteria with the class, and put my name on the list for “hot lunch.” It must have been a traumatic event for me, because I vividly remember every detail of what was on my cardboard tray: the hamburger patty saturated in gravy—a.k.a.  “Salisbury Steak”—with floppy crinkle-cut fries, khaki-colored “green beans,” and one red-and-white half-pint carton of milk with a thin white plastic straw.

It was not particularly palatable, but I went through the motions, picking at the food with a “spork” until Jonathan, who had already built a reputation as the class scavenger, reached out a scrawny hand and asked, “are you gonna eat that?”

Just then, my mother showed up at the cafeteria’s back door with my do-shi-rak, a few moments too late. She was a lovely sight through my teary eyes, even with her face flushed from rushing. She spoke to Mrs. Modry and went to the principal’s office to pay the fifty cents owed for my hot lunch. I don’t know what happened to my untouched do-shi-rak, but I suspect Mom probably had her own picnic at home afterwards.

Speaking of beaches, this theme did inspire one of my colleagues, Surprising Science blogger Sarah Zielinski. Here’s her picnic story, which gives you all another week to send in yours! Thanks, Sarah.

Don’t Picnic on the Beach
By Sarah Zielinski

Now that's fast food. Courtesy of Flickr user Nathan (San Diego Shooter).

Since Amanda thinks you are all away at the beach this month—unlike we poor bloggers who remain attached to our desks and computers, pounding out words for your enjoyment—I thought I would tell you how I learned that picnicking at the beach is a bad idea.

I remember a trip to the beach back when I was nine or ten. I can’t recall where we were, but the huge flocks of seagulls made an impression. As my family settled in for lunch, the birds circled above, squawking and screaming and terrifying my younger brother, an adorable little five-year-old. We munched on sandwiches (of course) and tried to ignore the avian predators overhead.

My mother assured my brother that he really had nothing to worry about. Those birds wouldn’t go anywhere near him.

The next thing you know, a gull swooped down towards us and made for the most vulnerable target, snatching my little brother’s sandwich right out of his hands.

We all stared in shock for a moment, unable to believe what we had just seen. And then, in perfect big sister fashion, I started to laugh.

Funny, I don’t remember any beach picnics after that.

What are the best and worst picnic foods? Courtesy of Flickr user 19melissa68

I’ve had picnics in the fall, spring, and even, like Amanda, in the dead of winter. (In college, my friends and I tried to make “blizzard s’mores” outside on a charcoal grill. It wasn’t our finest moment.) But I’ve always associated my best picnics with that carefree, summer feeling: a shining sun, running barefoot in the grass, and sipping on lemonade (or sangria) under a large, shady tree.

There’s almost no wrong time to have a picnic, but there are several food items that never feel quite right: foods that will spoil; foods that are meant to be cold, or piping hot, since you can rarely guarantee either; and foods that require labor-intensive eating methods.

Keeping those guidelines in mind, here  are, in no particular order, some of the best and worst picnic foods, based on my own experience and some informal polling on Twitter.

Worst:

1. Ice Cream/ Ice Cream Sandwiches: While picnicking last week, I actually saw a mother pull a box of these out of her cooler and give them to her children. There was a lot of crying, sticky hands and vanilla- and chocolate-stained clothing. I understand the nostalgia surrounding ice cream and summertime. But even if you’re driving straight from home to your picnic site, odds are it won’t make it. Save it for a special stop on the way home.

2. Potato or Egg Salad: This may be biased, since I’ve always been scared of mayonnaise, but eating something covered in mayonnaise that has been out of the refrigerator for a few hours doesn’t sound very appealing. It’s the same kind of reaction people have to warm milk, or that cream cheese your coworker left sitting out in the office kitchen from the morning until you leave at night. Just don’t do it. I have, though, had success with roasting red or sweet potatoes the night before, and serving them with heat-friendly dipping sauces (ketchup, honey mustard) the next day.

3. Chocolate: Chocolate is the siren of picnic foods. It calls to you with sweet promises of happiness and no mess, but when you get to the picnic with M&Ms and thumbprint peanut butter cookies with Hershey Kisses, it rears its ugly head: your package of M&Ms feel like one of those first aid heat packs, and your beautiful, sugar-encrusted cookies look like a pile of poo. Your brother will tell you so, in even less eloquent words.

4. Fried Chicken: Aside from the dangers associated with cooking meat, cooling it down and letting it sit in the sun for a few hours, fried chicken is just plain messy. Your guests might seem excited when you show up with a bunch of fried wings or drumsticks, but it’s only because they’ve temporarily forgotten what eating those things entails: a whole lot of napkins; discarded, gooey bones; and at least two grease stains on your favorite shirt.

5. Anything you have to cut with a knife: This was the overwhelming “worst picnic food” response in my informal Twitter poll. Cutting food when you’re eating on your lap is hard. Cutting on a paper plate is hard. If it’s windy, even having a paper plate is hard. And cutting with a plastic knife is almost impossible.

Best:

1. Pasta or Bean Salad: Despite my rant against potato salad earlier, there are a lot of great salads that make perfect picnic foods. Toss some pasta with pesto, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, or salad dressing, and then add some vegetables and fresh herbs. There are endless possibilities. (For inspiration: My favorite bean salad is a combination of pinto, black and kidney beans, corn, tomatoes, onion, lime juice, cilantro and salt. Anyone else want to share their favorites?)

2. Cheese and Crackers or Chips and Dip: Another set of perfect marriages. And if you buy individually packaged cheese like babybel (which my colleague Abby also recommends for backpacking food), it’s even easier.

3. Sandwiches: Tuna, egg or chicken salad probably won’t make the cut. But vegetables, hummus and the classic peanut butter and jelly can all be unrefrigerated for a while. They’re easy to make, pack and transport and even easier to eat. Add in fun things like basil, sundried tomatoes, artichokes, or pesto if you’re looking for something a little more classy. If you’re serving a group, make a few different kinds of sandwiches and cut them into small squares. Finger food at its finest.

4. Vegetable Crudites: Vegetable platters are fairly easy to make. If you don’t have time, pre-made platters are also pretty easy to buy. You can also have fun with different dipping options.

5 Watermelon: Fruit salad deserves to be on this list, but everyone who responded to our little Twitter poll listed watermelon as the best picnic food. Cut at home, it’s easy to serve and eat and is refreshing even if it’s a little bit warm. Plus, then you can have a seed-spitting contest. Just make sure you aren’t too close to other picnickers.

What foods would be on your best and worst list?

The rules are simple: Tell us a true story that somehow relates to that theme (and food, of course), and e-mail it to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Picnics” in the subject line. We’ll pick three of the best, lightly edit them and publish them over the next few Mondays here on the blog. For more guidance, please read this and peruse last month’s stories about “fear and food.”

I’ll start the party by telling you about a particular picnic I remember…

A Picnic for the Fourth of…January?

Northerners know the peculiar illness well. It often infects a household after the holidays have come and gone, leaving a wake of wrapping paper, pine needles and chores. Faced with the grim promise of three or four more months of cold, snow and slush that will keep them largely cooped up indoors, folks can go a little crazy. It’s called “cabin fever.”

Courtesy of Flickr user Mykl Roventine

My mom must have had a bad case of it one midwinter afternoon when I was about thirteen years old. I don’t remember the exact date, but I think it was sometime in January. My friend Kristen had come over, and we were hanging out upstairs in my room, when my mother called up to us.

“Find some shorts and T-shirts to put on, and come downstairs, girls!” she hollered in her I’m-up-to-something-fun tone of voice.

We rolled our eyes, being teenagers, but were curious enough to play along. I retrieved some cut-off jean shorts and T-shirts from deep in the dresser drawers, and we even found some flip-flops and sunhats in the closet. (I’m embarrassed to remember this, but I think we also tucked our oversized shirts into those glittery plastic T-shirt slides. Hey, it was the early ’90s.)

In the living room, we discovered a fire roaring in the potbelly stove. My mother had spread a checkered cloth over the carpet in front of it, and laid out a full-fledged picnic, complete with the basket, paper plates and plastic cups, and she’d festooned the room with small American flags and other red, white and blue decorations.

“It’s the Fourth of July!” she declared. “And it’s a hot one, isn’t it?”

The funny thing is, I don’t remember what we actually ate. Probably hot dogs or hamburgers that my mom surreptitiously prepared in the kitchen, and some grapes or other out-of-season fresh fruit she’d splurged on at the supermarket. I think there were cans of soda, chips and ice cream sandwiches.

But the real joy was the picnic itself, an act of defiance in the face of winter. We giggled as we complained about our “sunburns,” pretended to find ants in the carpet, and blasted cassette tapes from our boom box. It reminded me of other outdoor meals my mother had orchestrated through the years, from fried eggs cooked on campstoves to elaborate birthday-party picnics at the beach by Lake Champlain. Just the word “picnic” sounded playful and bright.

From our ground-level seats, we couldn’t see any snow outside the windows. Maybe it really was summer?

I think that’s when my father walked in from shoveling the driveway, stamping his boots and shaking his gloves and hat to dry them.

“Cabin fever, eh?” he remarked, chuckling.

(Interestingly, according to food historian Kathryn McGowan’s blog, the first picnics were held indoors. Guess my mom’s idea wasn’t so crazy after all!)

May Day fritters (trippaleivat), courtesy of Flickr user karviainen

May Day, the first day of May, doesn’t usually get a lot of love—or anything else—in this country, but elsewhere it is observed as an important holiday. In some countries it has become associated with the worker’s movement and is a day for protests; interestingly, this tradition began in 19th-century America, where Labor Day is now observed, usually protest-free, in September. In the last few years, though, the activist tradition has been revived in some large cities, where (predominantly Latino) immigrants have chosen May 1 to rally against anti-immigrant sentiment and laws that they consider unfair, such as the one recently passed in Arizona.

But the holiday’s origins are ancient, and have little to do with labor or politics. The Celtic festival of Beltane was a celebration of fertility and renewal. Huge bonfires were lit, around which people danced and feasted. A highlight was the serving of the Beltane cake, which had a scalloped edge and held a special surprise—more frightening than the baby in a king cake—for the person who received this blackened piece. What happened next is described in the 1922 book The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer:

Towards the close of the entertainment, the person who officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped round the edge, called am bonnach bea-tine—i.e., the Beltane cake. It was divided into a number of pieces, and distributed in great form to the company. There was one particular piece which whoever got was called cailleach beal-tine—i.e., the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach. Upon his being known, part of the company laid hold of him and made a show of putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing, he was rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground, making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole year. And while the feast was fresh in people’s memory, they affected to speak of the cailleach beal-tine as dead.

About 15 years ago, I stayed in Edinburgh, Scotland, for several months, and attended the revived Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill. The bonfire reached three or four stories high and lasted all night, with people in wild costumes parading and dancing around it to a constant drumbeat. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my visit, though I don’t recall any cake.

In Northern Europe, related festivals have merged with the feast day for St. Walpurga. Called Walpurgisnacht in German and Vappu in Finnish, the night before is often celebrated with bonfires, student pranks and other mischief, and the following day with picnics. Maiwein, or May Wine, is a traditional beverage flavored with the herb sweet woodruff. In Finland, a version of mead called Sima is the drink of choice. May Day fritters, called Tippaleivät, look like miniature funnel cakes and are a customary Finnish treat for the holiday.

In this country, by coincidence, the first Saturday of May is always Derby Day, when the Kentucky Derby thoroughbred races are held. Mint juleps and a thick stew called Burgoo are the traditional way to celebrate Derby Day. If you read the 1970 account of the festivities by the original Gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, called “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” you might get the sense that the raucous event is not all that different from May Day revelry elsewhere.

A glass of white wine on a sunny day, courtesy of Flickr user iansand

Wondering which wines to pack for picnics or bring to barbecues this summer?

White wines tend to be more popular in hot weather, since they’re served chilled. Look for types described as light and crisp, rather than rich or full-bodied. As a general rule, wines aged in stainless steel tanks rather than oak barrels will keep more of their crisp, fruity taste—oak can add a buttery quality because of malolactic fermentation.

Here are a few suggestions, gleaned in part from a recent Smithsonian Resident Associates event with wine educator Kelly Magyarics.

Type: Sauvignon Blanc
One to try: Emiliana Natura, made with 100 percent organic Sauvignon Blanc grapes from Chile’s Casablanca Valley
Average retail price: $11
Tastes like: Limes, green apples, lemongrass
Pairs well with: Salad of mixed greens and herbed goat cheese, steamed clams with lemon butter, sushi, chips and salsa.

Type: Prosecco
One to try: Cantine Maschio Prosecco Brut, made from 100 percent Prosecco grapes in Italy’s Veneto region
Average retail price: $12
Tastes like: Fizzy, with peach-almond flavor. Like champagne, but less yeasty because it’s fermented in the tank instead of the bottle.
Pairs well with: Oysters, shrimp, fried chicken, avocado salad, prosciutto-wrapped melon balls. Mix with orange juice to make mimosas!

Type: Gavi
One to try: Vigne Regali Principessa Gavia, made from Cortese di Gavi grapes in Italy’s Piedmont region
Average retail price: $13
Tastes like: Apples and grapefruit with a whiff of pineapple
Pairs well with: Pasta salad, grilled lemon pepper shrimp or chicken, pesto dip.

Type: Torrontes
One to try: Crios de Susana Balbo Torrontes, from the high-altitude Cafayete region of Argentina
Average retail price: $15
Tastes like:  A tropical garden full of fruits and flowers; smells sweet but tastes dry
Pairs well with: Peanut satay skewers, grilled mango shrimp, fruit salad, salami, Gouda and most cheeses.

Type: Gruner Veltliner
One to try: Meinhard Forstreiter Grooner, made from Gruner Veltliner grapes in Austria’s Kremstal region
Average retail price: $9
Tastes like: Green apples and lime with a hint of mineral
Pairs well with: Fish tacos, grilled asparagus, pineapple chicken skewers, artichoke dip.