Table of contents for February/March 2017 in SAVEUR

My father had a lemon tree named Marilyn. She was a gift from my husband, Alex, who gave her to my father 11 years ago, when Alex was still my boyfriend and my father was still well. His sense of smell was his strongest tie to his childhood in Baghdad, where lemons fragranced the streets and were essential components of okra or meat dishes or phyllo walnut rolls, and their oily skin was burned over open flames as incense, the scent both invigorating and comforting. For the first three seasons Marilyn refused to fruit for my father—though not for any lack of effort on his part. Fastidiously, he sprayed her with rose water and sang to her in Arabic. He gave her prime real estate in my parents’ apartment: in…

One Saturday in Elmhurst, Queens, Ma Chaw Su Kyaw was busy sautéing chile catfish in her home kitchen. Not yet noon, she had already been cooking for five hours, neatly packing clear plastic containers for the 30 or so people who would arrive to pick up soft tofu salad, cold chicken garlic noodles, and sweet coconut tapioca cake. Kyaw runs one of New York’s underground Burmese food clubs, a handful of home cooking operations that were born of demand for the elusive cuisine—so elusive the clubs’ audiences are almost entirely Burmese. Unlike Thai, Laotian, and Malay cuisine, Burmese has yet to enter the city’s restaurant scene successfully, so home cooks have stepped in to fill the stomachs of nostalgic expats. Kyaw’s front garden brimmed with roselle, an herb prized in…

In the Little Burgundy neighborhood of Montreal, there is a sequestered noname street just off Rue Charlevoix that happens to be one of my favorite places in the world. It’s a narrow conduit behind restaurants and shops where deliveries are made and cooks tread busily between kitchens. There is an outdoor smoker, a woodburning oven, and a huge grill with a spit, some boxed gardens, multiple terraces, a trout pond, a tool shed, and across the street, Parc Vinet, where you can see kids whizzing by on the ice rink in winter, or hitting line drives under the lights of the baseball diamond on long summer evenings. Eleven years ago, Frédéric Morin and David McMillan opened Joe Beef, a French market-fare restaurant with a back door out onto that no-name…

All tea is made from Camellia sinensis, but to be pu-erh, the leaves must be from the large-leaf C. sinensis var. assamica, grown in Yunnan Province, and processed to encourage oxidation and microbial fermentation. You’ll find pu-erh bushes densely packed on plantations, but many obsessives go after tea made from old-arbor trees in wild, spreadout forest groves. Ancient trees—some centuries old—draw more complex nutrients from the soil for a tea with richer character. First, the leaves are picked by hand, then laid out on long beds indoors to wither. The withered leaves are then tossed in massive woks by hand. This “kill green” step drives out moisture from the leaves and moderates enzymes that would cause excessive oxidation. The leaves are then rolled and kneaded to develop flavor and aroma…

Strobel served smothered pork chops, sweet potato biscuits, and buttermilk pie to a crowd of regulars that included Diana Ross and Andy Warhol. “YOU don’t bet against a woman like that,” Matt Lee says of Pamela Strobel, better known to disciples of her cooking as Princess Pamela. Orphanedand alone, Strobel made her way north from South Carolina in the 1940s. She opened the Little Kitchen in New York’s East Village in the 1960s, and in 1969, she published Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook, an original take on Southern cooking from the perspective of a self-made African-American woman. Later, she opened Princess Pamela’s Southern Touch, where she served smothered pork chops, sweet potato biscuits, and buttermilk pie to a crowd of regu lars that included Diana Ross, Andy Warhol, and Tom…

It was a good year for sesame in Ethiopia. The reliable hard spring rains had ended abruptly in time for July’s planting, and the frost held off until late November, giving the seeds time to turn bright white and plump up with oil. Of the dozens of sesame varieties, it’s the buttery, complex Humera seeds that produce the best tahini, prized throughout the Middle East and beyond. And those sesame seeds start here in the rich soils of Humera, a town dotted with mud huts in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, near the Eritrean and Sudanese borders. Worldwide demand for sesame has surged 20 percent in each of the last two years, much of it going into the production of oil, sesame-topped breads and cakes,and, increasingly, tahini—a creamy paste made…

Although I am sure that the first German words I knew were danke and bitte, I doubt that Rouladen, sauerkraut, and marzipan were far behind. Credit for my early fluency goes to one Anna Müller, a Frankfurt-born housekeeper in our Brooklyn home until I was about 7 years old. Cooking was not among her duties, but occasionally she treated us to a specialty she knew we favored. Foremost among them were Rinderrouladen— beef pounded thin, then rolled around bacon strips and minced onions, braised, and finally sauced with aromatic pan juices and sour cream. Anna also prepared sauerkraut to the perfect state she proudly pronounced as “dry but juicy.” That was served with various wursts purchased from Trunz, a local German meat shop closeto our home and probably the place…

If you’re gearing up for a day of tea hunting, you’re going to need a big breakfast. In ’Banna—shorthand for Xishuangbanna Prefecture in southern Yunnan—that almost always means a bowl of noodle soup called mi xian or mi gan, depending on the kind of noodle you order. In big cities and small towns, locals pack bare-bones noodle shops by midmorning, hunching over knee-high tables to slurp tender rice noodles and a rich pork broth fortified with ground pork. An order of soup arrives with some assembly required: It’s up to each customer to season his own bowl to his liking with the dozen-plus condiments at a nearby table. At the best shops, these include homemade roasted chile pastes, local mountain herbs, and an array of pickled vegetables. Because those condiments…

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