Reading Beahrs’ book set me thinking about my own food adventures, recently abroad, but mostly at home.  And just as I was contemplating a fantasy menu of my own, a friend emailed to ask when American Road Trip was going to post a food update comparable to last week’s building slide show.  It was a fair question; I’d taken nearly as many pictures of food on my road trips as buildings.  This shouldn’t come as a surprise.  As loyal readers of American Road Trip are well aware, I hold food and buildings in equal esteem.  If it seems that I sometimes privilege buildings over food, that’s only because buildings are my day job.

Upon reflection, I’ve come to realize my taste in food precisely mirrors my taste in buildings.

I prefer the extremes of vernacular and high style to the dreaded middle ground, tacos at a Route 66 gas station and abandoned motel having an appeal equal to martinis at the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building (which is being lovingly restored by Belmont Freeman Architects). No doubt, this appeal is inextricably linked to what I see as a direct, formal relationship between food and building, one that can have a powerful effect on dining.

Thus, for example, no matter how excellent Thomas Keller’s dishes, my enjoyment of Per Se is muted by the taupe blandness of by Adam Tihany’s interiors.  Only the fake double doors of the restaurant’s entrance offer any kind of aesthetic frisson, but only because they remind me of a 1950s jewelry store I recall from my youth.

With those glossy blue doors, sliding glass partitions, and manicured topiaries, the stylized Dorothy Draper glamour of the entrance (which is little more than an interior store front in a shopping mall) is far more enthralling than the supposedly soothing serenity of the dining room itself.

To emphasize the food:building analogy I seem to be proposing, I was tempted, in the slideshow that follows, to include images of both the dishes I consumed and the spaces in which I consumed them.  In the end, though, I decided that the food was ready for its close-up.  Nonetheless, there are plenty of hints of the settings incidentally captured in photographs otherwise concerned with the fine details of cobblers, hamburgers, etc.  Captions give some additional information for those who might want it.

Here is Mostly at Home on the YouTube channel AmericanRoadTripNYC.  La cena e pronta.

Not surprisingly, my “life in the woods” was far less literal than Thoreau’s, involving little isolation and only fitful removal from my neighbors.  Still, there was sufficient labor (more intellectual than physical) to keep me away from this particular place (my sadly static URL) for more than half a year.  But unlike Henry David, I will display no false modesty about obtruding my affairs so much on the notice of my readers.  After all, why go to all this trouble if not to obtrude?  Isn’t obtruding a condition of life in the 21^st century (at least in the developed world)?  Indeed, it is my greatest hope that I will successfully obtrude, at least on a weekly basis, on the notice of my readers, whoever and how few they may be.

In the meantime, I relinquish the possibility of recouping my life in the woods with the same careful attention to daily minutiae and regular philosophizing found in Walden’s 200+ pages.  Ongoing labors (and perhaps an insufficient dedication to transcendentalism) simply do not permit it.  Nonetheless, some accounting is required.

Let this poor animation suffice: Since January, on AmericanRoadTripNYC, a new YouTube channel.

I don’t remember much about the Anglia, except that it was some sort of British Ford.  Two Peugeots came after, not counting the gold Buick company car that came with my father’s organization-man lifestyle in the early 70s.

The first Peugeot was a 404 with a 4-speed column shifter that cried out for driving gloves.  That car was burgundy with a matte finish and it had tailfins the way France had rock and roll, kind of groovy but a pale imitation of the real thing.

The second Peugeot was more conventional: a four-door sedan with a floor-mounted shifter and a sloped but squared-off rear; it was notable only for its paint job: a subtle metallic color called Cascade Green.   It only looked green in the right light, and even then what your eye perceived was just a hint of sea foam—imagine Scope mouthwash diluted with five parts water.

The first car that was really mine, and that really caught my fancy, was a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle.

Bought at least a decade before “pre-owned” entered the lexicon, this faded yellow bug was a stripped down model, not a superbug.  It had a flat windshield and four-on-the-floor with an AM radio and so much body rust underneath that the driver’s seat sagged towards the ground.  Without a piece of cardboard on the floor, I could look down and see the blacktop, in a close approximation of Fred Flintstone’s motoring style.  Though this induced vertigo at high speeds, driving the interstates of the northeast, between Philadelphia and Northampton, was always thrilling.

Once, I left the yellow bug at school over winter break and returned at the start of the spring semester to find it buried under two feet of snow.  I dug my way in with a broom and had to use a hairdryer on the frozen lock.  I put the key in the ignition and, just like the scene in Sleeper where Woody Allen finds a 200-year-old VW in a cave, the air-cooled engine turned over on the first try.

Sadly, my bug died soon after, though with great flare.  In a catastrophic engine failure, it spewed oil all over the eastbound lanes of the Mass Pike on a final road trip to Boston just after final exams at the end of my senior year.  I don’t remember ever having sex in the back seat of that bug (though I did stuff a queen size futon in it once), but thinking about it produces the same sort of romantic haze that accompanies so many male automotive reveries.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that Volkswagen was my real introduction to serious design, and all the social and political baggage that comes with it.

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Perfected by Ferdinand Porsche and Erwin Komenda with the financial backing of the Third Reich, the body of the Type 1 Volkswagen was an unmistakable product of late 30s styling.  It had much in common with Carl Breer’s Chrysler Airflow and Hans Ledwinka and Paul Jaray’s Tatra T77.

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Like them, the VW was an early attempt to create a car body that was aerodynamically efficient, or at least looked like it was. Because the VW’s bulbous body became so familiar, so iconic, in the second half of the twentieth century, folks stopped noticing its streamlined details a long time ago.

But they were there when the first production VW hit the streets in 1938 and they were still there when the last Type 1 rolled off the assembly line in 2003, nearly twenty-two million inverted teardrops, contoured fenders, and chrome speedlines later.

I’ve been thinking about VWs because I spent the holidays in Mexico, including a night in the city of Puebla, where the last Type 1 was built, in a factory that opened in 1954 after German immigrants to Estado Puebla lobbied Wolfsburg to begin Mexican production.

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Aside from talavera tile and mole, VWs must be Puebla’s most culturally significant export.

That original plant is still in operation: modernized and re-tooled, it’s the only factory that produces the much-hyped, though ultimately underwhelming, new Beetle. (The debut of the Concept 1 prototype in 1994 occasioned my first and only purchase of Car & Driver and Road & Track.)

Touring Puebla at the end of 2009, it seemed clear that building beetles, like being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was making a serious contribution to Puebla’s economic prosperity.

While wandering through a gentrifying indigenous neighborhood outside Puebla’s centro histórico, I discovered the familiar VW logo on all the street signs, corporate PR in the service of a barrio’s rebranding campaign.

Mostly, though, it’s the bugs themselves that make the biggest impression, whether in sleek black or tricked up for a fiesta.

Everyone knows that VWs are legion in Mexico but it was still a wonderment to see so many of them, especially in the capital where their broad metallic curves make a fine roving counterpoint to the churrigueresque ornament that’s as ubiquitous on the buildings as the bugs are in the streets.

I’m not sure if it was Christmas, or nationalism, or just standard color options, but there were green, red, and white bugs everywhere I turned.

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And I can honestly say that they filled me with as much joy as freshly baked roscas de reyes (also green, white, and red) and freshly fried churros.

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.That last bit might be a slight exaggeration because those were damn good churros.  I’m sure it is no coincidence that they were served up at churrería as old as the VW itself.

El Moro opened in 1935 and, unlike Volkswagen, its proprietors have had the good sense to leave well enough alone.  The churro, like the bug, is perfect in its original form.

Thus, this year, it was blueberries, the wild, low-bush variety that grow on 60,000 Down East acres. According to the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world, which explains why they turn up almost as often as lobsters on tourist tchotckes.

Though vanccinium angustifolium are charmingly picturesque, I prefer mine to be comestible rather than graphic.  They taste best when warmed by the sun on a granite topped mountain in Acadia, where the act of picking them after a vigorous hike on a rusticator’s trail is shamefully enjoyable—a little agricultural labor for the bourgeois-at leisure Slow Food set, sort of like Marie Antoinette in the Hameau at Versailles.

By the time I’ve picked enough for a couple of pies, stooping over and crouching down have lost their appeal, and no small order of rest is required.

But the desire for wild blueberries remains as acute as the pain in my lower back and it becomes only stronger once the car is pointed south.  So this year I decided to return with a complete inventory.  Blueberry Ale from the Atlantic Brewing Company in Bar Harbor is much like a traditional lambic.

Back River blueberry gin from the Sweetgrass Distillery in Union makes an excellent martini if you prefer  strong botanicals, as I do.  The blueberries are a fine compliment to the juniper.

These blueberry beverages are immensely satisfying, but I feared they were too far removed from the thing itself.  So this year I also returned home with ten pounds of fresh blueberries purchased from an elderly couple running a farm stand out of their garage somewhere on U.S. 1 south of Ellsworth.

My friend Charles, who lives in Portland and can be accurately described as the King of Pancakes, had assured me that you can stick a box of blues in the freezer and scoop them out as needed, all winter long.  I believed him, but I had to weigh my desire for blueberries against pragmatics. When you don’t have the luxury of a single-family-detached-house-sized kitchen, a 10-pound box of blueberries requires a serious piece of freezer real estate.

It would mean displacing 4 pounds of vegetarian suet and 6 pounds of Smith College pecans, not to mention a couple of bottles of vodka.  Were the contents of that 14 x 10 x 4 box going to be worth the space?

Yes.  On a cold morning in December at the start of winter, a warm muffin filled with wild Maine blueberries is a very good thing.

Still, this commitment to blueberries was not without consequences.  A subsequent purchase of fifty pounds of grass-fed, pastured beef from some friends in Duchess County necessitated off-site storage in a basement freezer in el Barrio.

I’m still searching for a recipe for beef and blueberry stew.  Suggestions welcome.

On an island off the coast of the North American mainland, near the narrows of Somes Sound, across from Norembega Mountain, between Fernald Point and Clark Point, a few steps from the Atlantic, in Southwest Harbor, Maine (at 44.278º North and 68.311º West, to be precise), one is easily, happily, and phenomenologically seduced by the spirit of the place.

The sight of the mountains and forests, the smell of evergreen and seaweed, the feel of the shells and the rocks, the taste and the sound of the ocean.  These are why summer people come to the Maine coast, and certainly why they’ve been coming to Mount Desert Island since the first rusticators arrived in the decades after the Civil War.

By train, steamer, and ferry from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, they arrived eager to consume the same landscape that Thomas Cole and Frederic Church captured in their oils and watercolors.  Beginning with their village improvement societies and ending with their successful effort to create the first national park east of the Mississippi, the rusticators shaped Mount Desert Island as surely as nature and geography.

The earliest white settlers on the island, who arrived mainly after 1759 when the English drove the French out of Acadia, lived with and from the land and the water.  They were the first to harvest the island’s natural resources and to make Maine “Maine.”

But it was the rusticators who understood how to exploit the genius loci for their pleasure, profit, and eventually for the public good, as is still evident in what they built across the island–mountain trails and town paths, scenic drives and carriage roads, inns and resorts, piers and houses.  These were built for the seasonal tourists, but they became the essence of the place.

The cottage I’m renting in Southwest Harbor is called “the Legacy” because it’s been passed down a generation or two since it was built in the 1940s, but it could just as easily refer to the Acadia passed down by the Eliots and the Rockefellers.

Though the pitch of the roof and the knowing placement of the picture windows nod to mid-century architectural taste (the next house down the coast, by contrast, is an over-scaled Dutch Colonial from the 20s), the granite fireplace, pine-framed rooms, and cedar shake exterior evoke the rustic rusticity of the rusticator’s image of Down East Maine.

But placeness here, as everywhere, means more than building materials and manicured wilderness; it also involves food culture and traditions.  The rusticators, like their island hosts and the native Wabanaki before them, were locavores avant la lettre.  Fresh haddock, cod, oysters, clams, mussels, and, of course, lobsters.

Though dining in the rough was more a necessity than a choice in the 19^th century, it has considerable appeal even in the 21^st, at least where lobster is concerned since the whole point of eating at a pound is that, at least in theory, you are guaranteed the freshest bottom feeders possible.

Even if the pound functions as a dealer/middleman, there’s the added value of the picturesque–the harbor, fishing boats, stacked pots and buoys, picnic tables, gulls, mosquitoes, Teva sandals, Life is Good t-shirts, etc.

This year I bought steamers and cherry stones from a guy called Rat who was selling them out of an old refrigerator in a cluttered garage next to a mildly ramshackle house in Bar Harbor.  I was attracted by his sign, especially his use of “safe shellfish” as a descriptor.

While it is true that many areas on the island are closed to digging because of paralytic shellfish poisoning, the need to advertise bivalve safety is both amusing and depressing, sort of like service stations advertising “clean restrooms.”

For the record, I ate two dozen of Rat’s clams for dinner with no ill effects though steaming them in an entire bottle of vernacchia di San Gimignano might have killed whatever toxins lingered in those mollusk filters.

Rat told me that he used to sell his clams to Pectic Seafood before it moved off the island.  I knew Pectic.  It was in a little trailer of a building right next to the house where its owners lived, up a quarry road well off the main highway in Mt. Desert.  When the sons took over the business they closed this location and opened a big store close to the Wal-Mart sprawl of Route 3 in Ellsworth.

While the economics of year-round traffic probably drove this decision, Rat and I both understood that something had been lost in the relocation.  He declared the original Pectic a real “mom-and-pop operation,” the sort of place that appealed to the summer people he described as “those folks in Northeast Harbor with their Philadelphia accents.”  His place, by his own admission, was a little too rough for their tastes, but not for mine apparently, though I wasn’t sure if it was the New York plates on my car or my lack of a Main Line lockjaw that met with Rat’s approval.

When I told Rat that I liked his sign on Route 102 he laughed that I was about the only person who did.  The Japanese tourists told him he needed neon; the village improvement types told him he needed nicer lettering.  The authenticity of place is in the eye of the beholder.

Next: genius loci accinium angustifolium; or, where the wild blueberries grow