Ian Jackman believes that life is too short to deny yourself our nation's true culinary treasures. Guided by food experts throughout the land, he travels from east to west — from small town to big city — uncovering local treats, guilty pleasures, and some oddities that no true food lover should miss. From lobster rolls and buffalo meat to banana cream pies and clam stuffies, Jackman finds the sinful temptations your taste buds crave — and he writes about them in a way that's certain to get any confirmed foodie salivating!
- Where you can find the very best burgers in America
- 21 varieties of apples you must try
- Lamb fries — eat or avoid?
- The country's primo pizza parlors
- And more!
Escape the guilt and anxiety propagated by our puritanical, diet-obsessed society and indulge yourself with Eat This!
We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a spoon.
— Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii (1866)
Route 25 winds through the farmland and vineyards of the North Fork of Long Island. By the side of the road in the village of Cutchogue sits the Wickham family farm stand, where the main attraction is the wonderful local fruit. If you stop there once during the high summer season, it's almost impossible to drive straight past ever again. As you approach, you'll start thinking about the extraordinary white and yellow peaches or the tiny Suffolk red grapes. You'll wonder what that morning's sweet corn is like. Then your mind will wander to one of the many varieties of tomato; then to the blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. By the time you're contemplating what's in the cheese locker today and you remember the homemade doughnuts, you've turned off the road and into the dusty parking lot.
The current custodians of the family business are Prudence Wickham and her husband, Dan Heston, along with Prudence's uncle Tom Wickham. Other family members share ownership, but these three live and work here. They're part of a very long line of Wickhams who have been farming this land since 1680. When Prudence talks about the land grab the family suffered after the Revolutionary War, she sounds like she's still miffed about it on her ancestors' behalf. More recent incursions from pillaging property developers have been fended off. The family has sold development rights to their land, mostly to the state and county, and it's good to think that the monstrous and ugly houses long a feature of the South Fork, and which are now cropping up to the north, won't be built on this bit of eastern Long Island at least.
This is the kind of place where you can feel close to the source of what you're eating. Directly behind the structure that houses the retail operation are the pick-your-own apple and peach trees. Buy some of the family's produce and talk to Prudence Wickham for a couple of minutes. She grew all the crops here, so she can tell you everything you could possibly ever think to ask about them, including their lineage and the history of the land they grow on. The location of the farmhouse has changed more than once. It's now situated down a lane that begins behind the stand and through the fruit trees. "You want to have a buffer between you and the rest of the community," says Prudence. "Everybody wants to live next to a farm, until they live next to a farm."
Cutchogue is situated on a narrow sliver of rich farmland between the abundant waters of Peconic Bay and Long Island Sound. Says Prudence, "It used to be that anyone who was farming out here was also working the water. When my great-grandfather was farming he did as much with the water as he did with the land. He did the farming in the summer; in the winter he was mostly working the bay and had one of the largest fleets of boats out here doing commercial fishing. That has changed because farming has specialized more and the knowledge required to put these crops out has increased. Farmers have been forced to make the decision: Are you going to go fishing or are you going to stick with the land?" The Wickhams decided to stay ashore, although nothing is far from the water in this part of the world — there's water on three sides of the farmland. The Wickhams own about 292 acres, but some of that is salt marsh, where food crops won't grow. After the Second World War there was an initiative to make the country self-sufficient in food. The...
