Spring 2023 Publisher’s Letter

Folks, how all these stories landed together in the same issue still confounds me.

Aside from the recipes, none is particularly spring-like; there’s no overarching theme nor thread connecting trends or evolutions in local food. It’s all kind of a hodgepodge—but I love it.

Over the course of a typical year, I’ll collect pitches, topics and ideas and add them to my lists, slotting them carefully into appropriate issues where they’ll mingle and mix and later blend into a cohesive whole that strikes just the right seasonal note. Let me tell you, there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to compelling regional food stories—I could fill six, eight, even 10 magazines a year and still have umpteen topics left over for the next.

This season, as usual, I found myself with a first-rate collection of articles all slotted for Spring 2023, but when I really dug in, I found there wasn’t much to unite them. We were missing an obvious theme! Now, though, looking over the completed magazine I finally see it: It’s the incredible diversity of the food system in Greater Boston and Worcester County that reminds me why we do what we do—why we share stories like these in every single issue—and how lucky we are that so many cool and interesting people have decided to make, grow and share food in the Commonwealth.

So let’s get into it.

First, we have a quartet of edible FOOD FINDS: Robin Hauck takes us to Hudson for unique teas, tinctures, infused cocktails and farm-to-table grazing boards. Then Jackie Cain visits a Newburyport butcher (moving to Danvers soon—stay tuned) for custom cuts of local meat, decadent sandwiches, housemade sausages and a nothing-goes-towaste ethos. Staying up north, Naz Hassenein heads to Hamilton to visit a wife-and-husband CSA farming team in the Essex County Greenbelt hosting a collaborative on-farm dinner series. And lastly, it’s back to the city where Jolivia Barros tucks into Cajun seafood hush puppies at a well-loved Asian-Caribbean-Latin fusion restaurant in Hyde Park with a mission-driven food education foundation built right in.

Fred Yarm and Claudia Catalano are back again this season with a pair of recipe stories you’ll certainly want to bookmark. Fred’s ode to maple syrup shows us just how well this ingredient works in springtime cocktails, pairing the smokey, caramelly sweetener not just with rum and bourbon—the classics—but with tequila and gin, too. Seek out a fresh bottle from a local sugar shack and get shaking! Claudia’s elegant toppers for the humble piece of toast can help stretch a few luxe ingredients into a full meal—try toasts for lunch, toasts for dinner, toasts to pass at a party. With so many excellent local bakeries producing stunning (and sometimes costly) artisan loaves, she’ll make sure you use up every last slice.

When Special Projects Editor Rachel Caldwell moved west from Cambridge to Greenfield, she needed a new way to shop. Turns out Western and Central MA is dotted with old-fashioned general stores anchoring towns with updated wares for a contemporary clientele; we sent her east to Worcester County to visit a few. New contributor N.A. Mansour profiles two North African food entrepreneurs bringing a taste of the Maghreb to local farmers markets—Moroccan olives, preserved lemons, savory pastries and so much more. Then Mike Floreak schools us on the history of candymaking in Greater Boston—think Necco, Schraft’s, Charleston Chew, Tootsie—and the rebirth of the beloved Sky Bar, now made in Sudbury. And Lisa Zwirn gives us a roundup of local fresh juice companies, with a little lesson on cold-pressed nutrition and food safety science on the side.

If you’ve ever doubted that food = love, then Lindsay Crudele’s profile of a statewide network of volunteer chefs delivering a home cooked meal to anyone who needs one—appropriately called Lasagna Love—will change your tune. If you need an activity during school vacation week, this season’s installment of Edible for Kids was built for cutting out and sharing; with helpful hints for cooking with children and a darling “kind deed coupon” activity, this one’s a keeper. Our longtime contributor and former colleague Tara Taft is back this season with a thoughtful visit to the Women’s Lunch Place in Back Bay, a nonprofit daytime shelter and advocacy space serving up better-thanrestaurant- quality meals with dignity, kindness and respect. And finally, as the coda to this eclectic batch of stories, Alison Arnett looks into the shortage of slaughterhouses in Massachusetts: Reading about the challenges farmers face when taking their animals to harvest, which requires a lot of pre-planning and extra expense, could help explain the high prices consumers encounter when purchasing locally raised meat. Keeping these operations alive, both farm and abattoir alike, is vital to the success of our local food system, so perhaps paying a bit more isn’t too onerous after all.

So there you have it, our Spring 2023 issue—a celebration of our food community and (just a fraction of) the impressive people who contribute to it every day. We’ll be back in June with more stories just like these. In the meantime, I hope you’ll continue to support local food in whatever way you can.

Peace,

Sarah