Portland

The infant city called The Clearing was a bald patch amid a stuttering wood. The Clearing was no booming metropolis; no destination for gastrotourists; no career-changer for ardent chefs just awkward, palsied steps toward Victorian gentility. In the decades before the remaining trees were scraped from the landscape, Portlands wood was still a verdant breadbasket, overflowing with huckleberries and chanterelles, venison leaping on cloven hoof. Today, Portland is seen as a quaint village populated by trust fund wunderkinds who run food carts each serving something more precious than the last. But Portlands culinary history actually tells a different story: the tales of the salmon-people, the pioneers and immigrants, each struggling to make this strange but inviting land between the Pacific and the Cascades feel like home. The foods that many people associate with Portland are derived from and defined by its history: salmon, berries, hazelnuts and beer. But Portland is more than its ingredients. Portland is an eaters paradise and a cooks playground. Portland is a gustatory wonderland. Full of wry humor and captivating anecdotes, Portland: A Food Biography chronicles the Rose Citys rise from a muddy Wild West village full of fur traders, lumberjacks and neer-do-wells, to a progressive, bustling town of merchants, brewers and oyster parlors, to the critical darling of the national food scene. Heather Arndt Anderson brings to life in lively prose the culinary landscape of Portland, then and now.