Secret Ingredients (32 page)

Few people in Troxelville are Quakers, Gibbons told me, and many of the old and frequently grand meetinghouses in that part of Pennsylvania are now nearly empty on Sundays. He and his wife go to meeting at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, twenty-five miles away. “In meeting, of course, if anyone is moved to speak he speaks, and college professors are almost always moved to speak,” he said. (A couple of weeks later, I asked one of the professors for his view of Gibbons, and he said, “People are supposed to speak when the spirit moves them. Sometimes we think Euell
plans
to be moved. Sometimes he speaks like an anarchist in meeting. He has no faith in existing institutions and says that he has no use for institutions that are killing the spirit of society.” Other members told me that Gibbons has “religious depth and insight to an amazing extent” and that “he’s been inspired, and he is inspiring at times, but he’s not like a preacher preaching down.” After meeting, people sometimes thank Gibbons for sharing his thoughts and say to him, typically, “That just spoke to my condition.”)

At seven that last evening of the trip, the rain was still humming on the roof of the Volkswagen, and Gibbons and I decided that it would be pointless to try to cook in a state park. As a campsite, we chose instead a motel in Mechanicsburg. After we had registered, we unloaded our luggage, and, in the room, we spread a tarpaulin on the floor and sorted things out. Then we put in a request for ice. When it came, we opened the door only enough to get the ice bucket through the crack, since we were both somewhat self-conscious about the appearance of the room. On one of the beds were several ground-cherry plants, loaded with ripe ground-cherries; a wild carrot; a big, airy, fernlike wild-asparagus plant (a souvenir for me), full of berries; and a deadly poisonous jimsonweed, heavy with seedpods (I wanted to take that home, too). On a bedside table were nutpicks and hunting knives. The Coleman stove and the cooking pots were on the bathroom floor, and on the bathroom shelves were salt, oil, wild garlic, and the hammer. Mounds of wild food were spaced out on the tarp. The large outdoor thermometer that we had been using throughout the trip was hanging by a loop of string over the wall thermostat. The temperature indoors was seventy-five degrees. We opened the windows. Gibbons took the red fruits of the staghorn sumac and soaked them and rubbed them in a pot of cold water. After sweetening the water, he poured sumac-ade into glass tumblers, over ice. “This has no food value, but it’s a nice sour drink,” he said. It tasted exactly like fresh lemonade.

Gibbons set me to work peeling Jerusalem artichokes while he carved chicory crowns. In a market in Gettysburg, we had foraged two porterhouse steaks as a climactic salute to the Susquehanna River and the Appalachian Trail. We had also bought some butter, and the dinner as a whole consisted of buttered mashed Jerusalem artichokes, buttered oyster mushrooms, buttered chicory crowns, porterhouse steak rubbed with the wild garlic of the Gettysburg battlefield, and a salad of watercress, sheep sorrel, brandy mint, salt, oil, wild garlic, and red wintergreen berries. The glistening greens dotted with red berries provided an extraordinary variety and balance of tastes, and I have never encountered a salad anywhere that was more attractive or delicious than that one. The chicory crowns had much sharper overtones than the dandelion crowns we had had, and, while good in themselves, served most significantly to put the steak into relief. The steak was excellent and was made trebly so by the taste of the chicory in apposition to it. Gibbons said, “People have forgotten how to use bitter things.”

At breakfast, the penultimate meal, we introduced eggs, and Gibbons made a fine wild omelette containing winter cress, watercress, and wild garlic. We had bacon as well, and pennyroyal tea. Then we packed up and headed north across the mountains toward Troxelville. The first ridge was Blue Mountain, and from it we could see, about fifteen miles away, the level ridgeline of the next one, Tuscarora Mountain. Between these two was a valley so rich with dairy farms and wooded streams that there had to be, somewhere in it, an incomparable lunch. Slowly, we foraged toward Tuscarora Mountain, passing up practically everything—wild mustard, day-lily tubers, bearing hickories, poke, chicory—in a selective search for excellence. We had crossed about two-thirds of the valley when Gibbons finally stopped. From the car, he studied a colony of small plants that were growing beside a barn. “Mallow,” he said. “Let’s go see if they’re any good.” Roughly one out of ten of the plants was heavy with seed-bearing discs, and it was these that Gibbons was looking for. Each one was round, had wedgelike segments, and, although it was only a third of an inch in diameter, remarkably resembled a wheel of cheese. Gibbons said that mallow fruits are almost universally called doll cheeses but that around that part of Pennsylvania people often call them billy-buttons. We went over to the farmhouse to get the permission of the farmer, who said, “Those billy-buttons are no good to me. Take all you want.” The picking was slow, and we needed about twenty minutes to get a pint of them.

Across the rest of the valley, nothing of particular interest presented itself, and soon we were moving uphill through hardwood forests on Tuscarora Mountain. The climb became quite steep. Going around one hairpin curve, which Gibbons was somehow attending to with his peripheral vision, he suddenly swung off the road and stopped. Below us, on the inside of the curve, hanging prodigally over a ravine, were hundreds of thick bunches of wild frost grapes. They were as densely concentrated as grapes in a vineyard, probably because they had little room to expand into from such a difficult purchase on the cliffside. The vines were sturdy and about two inches through. They supported us easily, and, out over the ravine, we filled bags and buckets with grapes. Then we drove on up the mountain.

At the summit, there was a turnout area, with a plank table under a stand of oaks. The ridgeline of Tuscarora Mountain is so narrow and its sides are so steep that we seemed to be standing on a wall two thousand feet high as we looked down on either side at villages, rivers, and farms. That day was as extravagantly out of season as most of the preceding days had been, but this time with sunshine and warmth. The temperature there on the ridge was seventy-one degrees. Gibbons lighted the stove and began to cook a large potful of grapes in a little water. He cooked the mallow cheeses in water, too, and as they simmered the fluid around them took on the consistency of raw egg white. “These are the fruits of round-leaf mallow,” he said. “If you cook the fruits of marsh mallow like this, the same sort of stuff comes out. The original marshmallows were made from it. Now there is no more marsh mallow in marshmallows than there are Hungarians in goulash.” He stirred the doll cheeses in their clear, thick sauce. “I used to do a lot of foraging with a friend of mine who was a vegetarian,” he went on. “He was an Oriental, and a vegetarian for religious reasons, and he would not eat eggs, or even gelatin. I once made a May-apple chiffon pie for him, using seaweed for gelatin and mallow instead of egg whites.” When the grapes had simmered for a while, he strained them into another pot, sweetened the juice, and thickened it with flour. After draining the mallow cheeses, he stirred butter into them. Then he served lunch—buttered mallow cheeses and wild-frost-grape flummery. The mallow cheeses were both crunchy and tender, and their taste was more delicate than the taste of any cultivated vegetable I could think of. The frost-grape flummery, deep in color, was quite similar to a Scandinavian fruit soup, and it was filling. Each of these dishes could have been a flourishing entry on any luncheon menu in any restaurant anywhere at all that noon, but on a mountaintop, with hundreds of square miles of forests and valleys falling away in two directions, they were served in an atmosphere appropriate to the attainments of the greatest living wild chef.

We moved on into the second valley, and followed an indirect route to Troxelville, so that we could stop again and weigh ourselves. From notes, we made sure that we were wearing exactly the same clothes that we had been wearing when we weighed ourselves at the outset, which was not difficult, since we still had them on. We found that I had gained eight ounces. Gibbons had gained two pounds.

1968

THE FRUIT DETECTIVE

JOHN SEABROOK

O
ne hot summer day not long ago, just as the specialty-food stores around town were putting up
FIRST OF THE SEASON
signs to advertise their peaches, a rare and extraordinary shipment of apricots appeared in Manhattan. They were white apricots, which you almost never see in the United States. Unlike the familiar tawny-colored varieties, these had pale, almost translucent skin, with a yellow blush. And, unlike the cottony supermarket fruit, the white apricots tasted great: a rush of sugar, with a complex, slightly acidic aftertaste. The flesh almost melted in your mouth, and the juice was so plentiful that you had to bend over while eating one, to avoid staining your shirt.

The apricots were available at Citarella, which has four branches, and only at Citarella—a fact that pleased the store’s produce manager, Gregg Mufson, a great deal. Like his competitors at the other high-end specialty stores around town, such as Eli’s, Dean & DeLuca, and Grace’s, Mufson tries to titillate his customers by giving them uncommon fruits—curiosities that they may have encountered in a restaurant, on their travels, or on the Food Network. “Anything new, anything different, and if I can get it directly from the grower it’s even better, because there’s no middleman,” said Mufson, who is in his mid-thirties and wears a neatly trimmed goatee. “I want them to go ‘Wow!’ I want to blow their minds with something. They’ll eat these apricots, and they won’t forget that taste, and then they’ll come back and buy some more of my fruit.” Mufson pays attention to the food press, so that he can be sure to have the trendy fruits and vegetables in stock. “When the
Times
did an article on rambutans”—bright-red, golf-ball-size, tendril-covered fruits from Southeast Asia, with translucent, sweet-tart flesh—“we sold ten cases of them in a couple of days.” Appearance, he added, is the most important quality in attracting people to new fruit—the more colorful the better—followed by sugar. “Basically, if it’s sweet, people like it,” he said.

At first, not many customers paid much attention to the new apricots. “That’s a white apricot,” one of the produce workers in the store said when a customer asked about the fruit. “First one I ever seen,” he added. But the customer went for the Apriums—yellow-skinned, pink-fleshed plum-apricot hybrids, which have become popular in the past few years.

Soon, however, word about the white apricots got out. The pastry chef at Citarella thought they were one of the best fruits he’d ever tasted. The chef Daniel Boulud bought two cases of white apricots and was “crazy for them,” Mufson said; Boulud used them to make apricot galettes. The owner of Citarella, Joe Gurrera, gave a white apricot to Martha Stewart when she came into the East Hampton branch of the store, and “she was blown away by it,” Mufson reported. “Blown a-way.” The store sold out of its supply in a couple of days; the next shipment disappeared even more rapidly. Mufson was delighted. “My boss gave me a compliment! My boss never gives me compliments. He said, ‘This is the best fruit ever. We got to get more of this stuff.’ All I can say is David really scored this time.”

David is David Karp, a sometime “provisioner” for specialty stores like Citarella, and a noted fruit writer. He is the Fruit Detective, a persona he invented around the time he worked as a provisioner for Dean & DeLuca. His job is to range around the country and the world and find exotic fruits, or uncommon varieties of common fruits. In recent years, he has traveled to Madagascar to investigate vanilla, to Sicily to hunt for blood oranges, and to the Australian outback to research bush fruits. But most of his work is performed in California. The Fruit Detective is a familiar figure at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market—he’s the one in the pith helmet with the leather chin strap, his fruit knife in a holster on his belt, looking like a slightly demented forest ranger as he interrogates farmers with rapid-fire questions and eats their fruit. Readers of Karp’s articles, which appear regularly in the
Los Angeles Times
and
Gourmet,
follow him on his quest for pomelos, Asian pears, mulberries, and persimmons. Most people experience a truly great piece of fruit very rarely—that perfect peach you ate one summer day long ago, a taste you hope for in every subsequent peach you eat but never quite recapture. Karp’s goal is to have that experience again and again.

I first heard about the Fruit Detective from a friend, an organic farmer in southern New Jersey named Torrey Reade.

“Anything new on the farm?” I asked her one day about a year ago.

“Well, we had a visit from the Fruit Detective.”

“What’s a fruit detective?”

Torrey wasn’t sure, exactly, except that the fellow was passionate, almost manic, about fruit. “He left his business card—wait, I think I may have it in my wallet.”

The card said
DAVID KARP, FRUIT DETECTIVE.
It had raised lettering that looked slightly crooked, and it gave a residence in Venice, California. The name reminded me that I once knew a David Karp, whose passage from brilliant Upper East Side private-school kid to heroin addict was a sad but familiar story of money, drugs, and wasted talent. I stood there rubbing my finger over the lettering, wondering what had become of that David Karp, while Torrey described her encounter.

“We were trying to grow Charentais melons,” she explained, “which is a French exotic, and he had heard about us from a health-food store in Princeton. Somehow he found us and came down to see about getting some for Dean & DeLuca. He was wearing this funny hat and shorts—no one in South Jersey wears shorts in the summertime, because of the bugs. We showed him our melons, which he liked but didn’t love, and then he started asking, ‘What else do you have?’ So we told him about the pear tree that was growing near the old privy. He demanded to see it immediately. It produces these tiny, inedible pears, but he thought it might be an heirloom variety and got very excited—he was actually hopping around in the weeds.”

The more she described the Fruit Detective, the more he sounded like my David Karp. I kept the card and, over the winter, sent the Fruit Detective an e-mail. After he confirmed that he was the person I was thinking of, we talked on the phone and made plans to have lunch the next time he came to New York on “fruit work.”

I hadn’t known David Karp well, but I had heard a lot about him from some friends who had grown up with him in Manhattan and told memorable Karp stories. Karp’s father, Harvey Karp, was an extraordinarily successful businessman, whose house in East Hampton was reputed to be a palace. David was brilliant. He was fluent in Latin, and, it was said, read only the poets of late antiquity. He published a translation of the sixth-century writer Venantius Fortunatus when he was twenty. Not only did he get 800s on the SATs but he got 800s on a friend’s SATs, too—and he did it while coming down from LSD. He also knew more about punk rock than any of his friends, and he was well versed in drugs.

After graduating from Wesleyan, in 1979 (word of the SAT caper had got back to the authorities, and he and his friend were suspended for a year, but he finished in three years), Karp worked on Wall Street in risk arbitrage and option trading, where he was soon making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. He collected rare books and rare wines. He produced a Lydia Lunch album,
13.13,
in 1982, and cultivated friends in the downtown rock world. But his dabbling in heroin had turned into an every-weekend habit, and in 1984, after drugs were found in his desk at work, Karp got fired. At this point, a less apocalyptic spirit might have stepped back from the dark side; Karp moved into the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris with his fashion-model girlfriend and a supply of heroin, and indulged in a life of total hedonism—sleeping all day, living off pastries from Lenôtre, getting high and staying up all night reading Saint Augustine (in Latin), and, when his drugs ran out, taking the Concorde back to New York to buy some more. Eventually, he ran through most of his money and returned to New York, where he was soon supporting his habit by selling off his book collection and by dealing heroin to friends and friends of friends.

Karp has been completely sober—no drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes—for almost twelve years. In 1990, after waking up on a floor strewn with broken glass and Cap’n Crunch cereal (“Junkies love sweet stuff”), he had allowed his parents to put him in detox at Gracie Square Hospital, and he then spent seven months in rehab in Southern California, doing the twelve-step program. On returning to the world, he called up a college friend, Eric Asimov, who writes the “$25 and Under” column for the
Times,
and proposed a freelance piece about apricots. Fruit was connected in Karp’s mind to the great love of his life, a woman he had met in college, with whom he had shared an interest in collecting fruit-crate art and the elaborately decorated wrappers around blood oranges. “I thought it would intrigue her if I became a fruit expert,” he explained. He’d try to find great fruit, and woo her with it. He got the fruit, but not the woman. “This is very pathetic,” he told me. “The story of unrequited love. But what can I say? She was the love of my life.” In the course of pursuing her, he began amassing “dossiers” on different fruits, which contained the names of thousands of fruit growers, breeders, marketers, wholesalers, and retailers. Ten years later, he is a unique source of information on the fruit industry—a vital link between the “knowers” who love obscure fruit and the “growers” who cultivate it.

Karp moved to California in 1999, because that’s where so much of the nation’s fruit comes from, and he lives in a small cottage in Venice with his cat, Sahara, who, he is convinced, once saved him from dying of an overdose by licking his face until he woke up. When he isn’t searching for fruit, he collects books about fruit, compiles songs about fruit, and corresponds with fruit lovers all over the world—chefs, specialty stores, and amateur fruit enthusiasts who simply want to know the difference between a Pluot, an Aprium, and a plumcot. Does he have any other interests? Aardvarks, Karp says. “I love them, because most people think they’re unattractive, but I think they’re incredibly soulful.” Once, when he was visiting the Philadelphia Zoo, he climbed into the anteater pen, hoping to commune with the animals, but instead experienced “a nasty confrontation with the business end of an anteater.”

We met in April. In the intervening years, Karp had lost the hair on the top of his head. “I’ve grown glabrous,” he said, using the term of art for a fuzzless nectarine. He looked very fit, not at all like a former junkie—more like a guy who eats a lot of fruit.

Over lunch, he told me that he had recently wrapped up a research project on bitter almonds (“I’m not, generally speaking, a nut enthusiast”) and was hot on the trail of European greengage plums, which are common abroad but extremely rare in the United States. “Have you had one? Oh, my God, you’ll die when you taste one—it’s an atom bomb of flavor. I’m convinced there’s a small planting somewhere in California, and I won’t stop until I find it.” He didn’t eat much of his pasta, and what he did eat he liberally coated with dried chile peppers, a shaker of which he carries in his black canvas bag. He scolded me for drinking a Coke: “That stuff is bad for you. Have you ever seen what it will do to a penny?”

After he had finished his lunch, he said, “Okay, ready to eat some mind-blowing fruit?” It is Karp’s custom, whenever he meets people for a meal, to bring along remarkable fruit. Eric Asimov recalls an occasion when the Fruit Detective turned up with a bright-red fruit from West Africa called a miracle fruit (
Synsepalum dulcificum
), which, Karp said, had a startling effect on the taste buds: for an hour after you’ve eaten it, even the sourest foods taste sweet. “I tried one, and then I ate a sour lemon,” Asimov said. “I was stunned at how sweet it became.”

Karp took from his bag a large, heart-shaped, scaly greenish fruit that I had never seen before—a cherimoya, a fruit native to South America. Taking out his grapefruit knife, he concentrated his full attention on slicing into the white, custardy flesh and peeling several sections for me. The focus he brought to this task, the specialized equipment he used, and the obvious tactile pleasure he took in the procedure, combined with the prospect of an imminent mind-blowing experience, were all powerfully reminiscent of the David Karp of twenty years ago. And, as promised, the fruit was amazing.

One day in 1962, a Mormon missionary walked into a Safeway in Los Angeles and asked for a Chinese gooseberry. The produce manager didn’t know what that was, so he asked the main produce buyer for Safeway, who, in turn, called Frieda Caplan, the founder of Frieda’s Finest, a local wholesaler of specialty produce items. She didn’t know, either. A few months later, a broker representing New Zealand farmers was walking around the L.A. wholesale produce market, trying to sell Chinese gooseberries. The other produce buyers weren’t interested, but Caplan, remembering the Safeway buyer’s query, said, “I’ll take all you’ve got,” and that turned out to be 2,400 pounds. “No one is ever going to buy something called a Chinese gooseberry,” a shipping official told Caplan. The rind of the gooseberries was kind of furry and reminded him of New Zealand’s national bird, so he suggested naming the fruit after it—the kiwi.