recipes

Early on in my reporting for this book, back in September of 2006, I decided to eat the city—just to taste. I planned to subsist for seven days only on food produced within the five boroughs of New York City, and asked chefs to provide me with recipes based on available foods. I liked the idea of sustaining myself using all the city’s resources—including the creativity of highly skilled, inventive chefs.
Available foods included foraged onions and greens and fruits, fresh eggs, rooftop honey, Hudson River and Jamaica Bay fish, farmed tilapia, homemade vinegar, preserves made of city-grown peaches and pears, fresh yogurt and ricotta and mozzerella cheeses, and beer, wine, and gut-burning spirits—all produced from the land and water and air of the city. I cheated by including salt, pepper and oil.



That week, putting food on the table was full-time work, involving long subway rides to pick up food in the distant reaches of the city, subsistence scavenging. But as I started to write this book, the effort also made think more deeply about what the city’s land and water are capable of providing now, what they might in future–and what are the limitations of urban food production.
I did not write about this episode in the book. But here are the amazing, delicious recipes the chefs provided, so you too can eat the city.