The Entreaty of Eating Outside (the box)

The last column until September

Dear Tamar:

I love picnics, but I’ve fallen into a bit of a picnic rut. Someone brings a baguette, someone brings cheese, someone brings charcuterie. There’s a carton of strawberries. It’s not that I want it to be more gourmet, but I feel like there are variations I’m just not thinking of. Can you help broaden my horizons?

-Eating Outside (the box)

Dear Eating Outside (the box),

I wrote a column on this topic for the New York Times a decade ago. (Actually, a decade plus a year.) Because I’m packing for vacation, because I’ve been asked by readers to publish more of my old writing, and because I still agree with what I said then, I’m reprinting it below. After this column, I’ll be taking a one-month hiatus; I live in Spain these days, where August is a monthlong break. When in Rome…

Into the Wild, May 13, 2015

I once ate a picnic in a canoe floating down a river. We were in the Périgord, and had expected the French families in boats alongside us to retrieve carefully made lunches from baskets at midday. But all had brought potato chips and sodas or beer instead. They watched us, benevolently jealous, as we laid out chilled artichokes and mayonnaise, Bayonne ham, tiny walnut-studded sausages, Cabecou cheese, figs, little tumblers and a bottle of rosé in the canoe’s deep middle. The Dordogne is a slow river, but it was intoxicating to eat with such naïve pomp amid the burbles of small eddies and chirping birds, mingling those two basic impulses of human life: the wild and the tame.

Victorians loved to picnic. Those overly decent people instinctively knew the frisson of performing petty formalities amid beetle and toad, and so they happily trudged in waistcoat and bustle through field and stream for lunch. Picnics might be the one activity that Victorian officiousness improved, because the only difference between “picnicking” and “eating outside” — which for most of history was just “eating” — is the pleasurable collision between human refinements and the places and energies in the natural world that have, so far, escaped them.

I think this is why, when it comes to deciding what to eat on a picnic, I’ve always seen the logic in heading for the deep end — and admire how deep the most committed picnickers have waded. The bon viveur James Beard, who found time during his 81 years of deliberate gastronomy to write four books on eating and cooking in the unfettered outdoors, prescribes this “Rich, Elegant Picnic for 10”: French Champagne, Caviar, Toast, Onion, Sour Cream, Chopped Egg, Double Consommé With Chopped Parsley, Chaud-Froid Chicken, Baked Ham in Crust, Asparagus Vinaigrette, Tiny French Rolls, Frozen Raspberry Mousse, Small Cakes, Demitasse.

When I was younger, I anxiously hosted my share of picnics as close to Beard’s as I could imagine or afford, serving chilled salmon roe, iced white-almond-and-garlic gazpacho, olive-oil cake with whipped cream, poached fish with herbed mayonnaise and big glass jars of Pimm’s and 7Up, each glass garnished with a thin spear of cold cucumber. And I still find that such meticulous excess, mounted outdoors, possesses the same allure as a tuxedo with its tie undone.

Those were good picnics, and a kind I don’t try anymore. It might be because I’m tired, or acutely conscious of being at an age when affectation is unflattering. But I am still pulled, whenever I have a chance to serve a meal on warm earth with grasshoppers chattering nearby, to a menu less practical and more done up than what is most portable or efficient. An exemplary one comes from Amy Vanderbilt’s 1961 “Complete Cookbook”: potato salad, ham sandwiches, cold fried chicken, pickles, olives, celery hearts, small loaf cake, fresh peaches and cherries. I’ve found almost identical menus in “Buckeye Cookery,” from 1877, and from Edna Lewis in 1976.

I’ve never tried to analyze what’s good about the arrangement, only knowing it all to be right for its aim. I think each piece has its own reason for fitting. Potatoes and chicken and ham are adamantly good when served cool. (Nothing at a picnic is ever actually cold, except for wine, which is worth trying to insulate, and still performs if your thermal experimentation fails.) But two of the three still take doing — soaking chicken in buttermilk overnight, frying it a day ahead; boiling potatoes — which serves the purpose of putting on a good show. The other dishes are right because it can’t all be a show, and no matter how much formality we’ve shaken off, it remains blissfully transgressive to serve bowls of unadorned vegetables and fruit.

The wildness of the picnic is in its whereabouts. From what I have read, game Victorian picnickers didn’t need more than sitting in high grass holding crystal coupes to feel the meal’s quintessential thrill. They drew the line at eating anywhere too wild. A poetic Mrs. M. W. Ellsworth, in her 1900 “Queen of the Household,” advises against eating anywhere that “Dame Nature has had her queer moods, and has left imprinted certain too observable evidences of her freakiness.”

I think that this is the religious spirit of the age speaking. In my brief but conscientious experience, meals laid at nature’s freakier tables — atop mystical boulders, at the ends of natural sea walls, on windy harsh hills, at river, or better, at sea — set both nature’s and our precious eccentricities in finest relief. Liberated from rooms built for eating, with no obstacle but will to any of the numerous spots in nature, you make most sense by going strange.

If you live amid cement, it merits noting that much wild beautiful land in cities remains devoted to cemeteries. Through many a forbidding wrought-iron gate you can glimpse great grassy knolls, shadowed by a live oak or willow whose long beard brushes the deep grass, sunlight spotting one side of the hill, leaving the other damp and shaded — all of it inviting a stop for a meal, in spite of the many humans lying in bony silence beneath it. The unsentimental cookbook writer Nika Hazelton thankfully dispensed with squeamishness in her 1969 “The Picnic,” offering this “Menu for a Picnic à Deux in a Graveyard”: double consommé with sherry or manzanilla, foie-gras naturel, asparagus vinaigrette, French bread and strawberry tarts.

But maybe adding that other basic impulse — love — into the mix makes all further details immaterial. This oft-quoted formula from Omar Khayyám, in his “Rubaiyat,” is applicable as ever:

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and
Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Truly I have no plan more likely to lift you to the apogee of gastronomic and spiritual happiness than Khayyám’s of bottle and loaf — and lover! — ferried to the nearest bluff.

Recipe: Cold Fried Chicken

This is Gabrielle Hamilton’s recipe. It is very good.

Yield: 6 servings

FOR SOAKING

• 2 cups buttermilk

• 1 ½ tablespoons kosher salt

• ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper

• 3 pounds chicken thighs, bone in, skin on

FOR DREDGING

• 1 ½ cups flour

• 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon ground turmeric

• 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons kosher salt

• 1 ½ tablespoons ground black pepper

• Enough shortening or peanut oil to come 6 inches up a high-sided pot

Preparation

1. One day before you’re frying, mix all the soaking ingredients in a big container or two. Put the thighs in to soak, and refrigerate overnight.

2. The following day, mix the dredging ingredients in a big deep bowl or high-sided roasting pan. Remove the chicken from the soak, piece by piece, allowing excess buttermilk to drip off away from the dredge. Drop each piece into flour mixture, a few at a time, leaving space between each piece. Shake, and toss to coat each piece evenly and thoroughly.

3. Lay the dredged chicken on a rack set over a cookie sheet to allow the coating to dry and cling, leaving space between the pieces.

4. Heat oil to 325 degrees, testing with a thermometer, or by dropping a few specks of flour in, and begin to fry when the specks sizzle calmly. Fry in batches, until just shy of golden. Continue until all have been fried, lowering the heat as needed to keep the temperature constant, and straining out excess flour to keep the oil clean. Let thighs rest on a rack over a cookie sheet or dish towel. Skim all the excess flour out of the oil, or carefully strain it into a new pot and raise heat to 350. Fry the thighs again, in batches, to (in Hamilton’s words) “finish to gorgeous deep golden brown.”

5. Drain on a rack. Leave at room temperature for a same-day picnic, or refrigerate overnight if you’re eating the following day. Bring buttermilk dressing! Bring hot sauce! Bring butter lettuce! Bring rosé!

Dear cooks, I’ll see you in September! In the meantime…