“What are you most excited about?”
That, says Abra Berens in her new cookbook, is the single best question you can ask a farmers market vendor—or a restaurant server, or even a grocery store stockist—and is your surest path to a delicious discovery. These people are skilled workers with the most intimate and recent knowledge of your food, she explains: “Put yourself in our capable, dirt-nailed hands.”
Championing the country’s farmers and food workers, and their hard labor hidden behind our plates—this lies at the heart of Berens’s work. As the chef at Granor Farm, a certified organic farm in Three Oaks, Michigan, she hosts limited private dinners with produce harvested the same day. As a cookbook author, she brings her knowledge to home cooks; her third and most recent book is “Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking With Fruit.”…