Apple R. W. - Far flung and well fed: the food writing of r.w. apple, Jr

Far Flung and Well Fed is most certainly a celebration of a life on the road aided and abetted by so many. Sadly, Johnny is not here to thank and acknowledge all the many good and generous souls who fed and inspired him over the years. A heartfelt thank-you to all the chefs, sous-chefs, sommeliers, waitstaff, cheese makers, winemakers, farmers and inspired ones whose years of hard work made for many a splendid meal described here in this book.

Elizabeth Beier of St. Martins Press and Alex Ward of New York Times Books have been enthusiastic champions of this book. Many thanks for their unwavering support. My mother, brother and I are all deeply grateful.

A big thank-you to Corby Kummer for his eloquent foreword about Johnnys food writing and for his constant friendship.

In particular, we would like to thank The New York Times . Johnny loved being a reporter, and even more, he loved being a reporter for The New York Times .

Far Flung and Well Fed tells the story of a man with a boundless enthusiasm and curiosity. Yet it is also the story of my stepfather, Johnny, and his wife (and my mother), Betsey, and their adventures around the world. Johnny was lucky to have found a fellow traveler in Betsey. Her intelligence, wit and patience made a perfect foil for the Big Boy, as we called him. Johnny greatly appreciated her acute observations and, most important for their travels, her timekeeping; she always managed to get him to the airport on time!

Catherine Collins

For over 40 years, my stepfather, R. W. Apple Jr., reported for The New York Times on war, politics and culture in more than 100 countries. Universally known as Johnny, he lived a good deal of his adult working life on the road and traveled just as often for pleasure. He toted stacks of maps, Michelin guides, history books, a bottle of Tabasco and a pocket-size pepper grinder wherever he went. No matter where Johnny landed, whether Des Moines or Tehran, he knew where to head for a good meal, high or low. Only Johnny could have sourced the best kafta (meatballs) in Monrovia, or famously warned fellow reporters on President Clintons trip to Uganda, No prawns at this altitude!

Johnnys interests were widehistory, music, art and architecture. But food, and later, writing about it, became his great passion. It allowed him to do what he relished most: to travel, learn, taste and report. He regarded a countrys food as the story of its people, its culture and its history, without which one couldnt hope to understand or report on a place.

Far Flung and Well Fed is a collection of Johnnys food writing from around the world. The book is organized geographically by country and region and takes the reader on a gastronomic journey of the first order. With his reporters eye, his gourmands palate and his big Midwestern heart, he takes us from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay to the elegant rooms of Taillevent in Paris to the food stalls in Singapore. But this is not a guidebook. Rather, it is a memoir of some lively and unforgettable adventures. While the reader will certainly be inspired to seek out restaurants that Johnny wrote about, or to track down some of the local produce he sampled, fair warning: Some restaurants may no longer exist and producers may have moved on to other ventures.

On a personal note, it has been an immense pleasure to work on this book. Johnnys writing is so vivid and his voice so distinct that reading hundreds of his food pieces brought back many memories. I remember one time Johnny took usmy brother and meto Allard, a 1930s Left Bank bistro with hearty traditional fare. It was our first trip to France, and after several visits to two-and three-stars where we would squeal, Ooh, that fish still has its head on it, or Calves brainsthat is gross, Johnny had had enough. Right, he bellowed as we were ushered into Allard, no more cheese pizzas. He then proceeded to order the Challans duck with olives. He blinked and the duck was gone. Since then, weve probably eaten at more Michelin-starred restaurants with him as the kids than we ever will as adults!

Yet it is the cozy dinners around his kitchen table in Georgetown that I miss the most. There, he would be at his most relaxed as he cooked up something inspired from his travels, told tales of the politicians, chefs, winemakers and artists whom hed met along the way, described a painting that hed detoured to see in a small museum or recounted a fascinating bit of history that he had just learned. And then, as the glow from the last trip waned, he would invariably start planning another trip, and the cycle would begin again. He opened a wider world for me with his infectious enthusiasm and curiosity, and I believe Far Flung and Well Fed will do the same for you.

Catherine Collins
Dubai, 2009

For years and years there wasnt a food and travel writer alive who didnt want to be Johnny Apple and have his expense account and his wife, Betseypreferably both. But what they didnt have, as this feast of a collection demonstrates on every page, was his style, gusto and encyclopedic field of reference. Not to mention his diligence.

It was a legendary expense account, yes. A big number, he said to me one day, and then named it. I nearly fell off my chair, and I wasnt sitting down. But what use he put it to! Like what the French and the Chinese do with the pig, Id say. Every trip, every meal got turned into a pieceoften, several, for The New York Times, of course, and also for a range of other magazines he wrote for, in the kind of careful retreading a beginning freelancer works months to line up. Or an extremely experienced and successfuland drivenone.

And the productivity! Long before the day of the blogger who feels compelled to share every trivial thought and petty, undigested experience, Johnny filed constantly, on wars, on an unbroken string of presidential campaigns, on world-shaking and chaotic events in calm, magisterial Page One accounts so sweeping that editors made his name into a verb (Lets Apple that). He would meticulously plan his trips and come home and file stories seriatim, sitting down early each morning at the piano, as he called the laptop keyboard.

Far Flung and Well Fed is a time capsule not only of the diners, crab houses and satay stalls that were open when Johnny and Betsey schlepped to every one of them, but of an era in journalism when one voice could guide you around the world as tastes changed (including his), being by turns your pontificating uncle, your chiding brother, your friend. And it is a guide to restaurants and food youd like to eat made by people youd like to meet, all written with a grandiose panache not even the Times could coin a word for.

This book is really Johnnys invitation to the world as he traveled it whenever the whim suited him, becoming as fascinated by the food and agricultural history of a place as he was by its cultural and political history. Send him a particularly sweet and juicy grapefruit, as a Georgetown neighbor did, and hed be off to McAllen, the heart of the Texas citrus industry, to find out what made it so good.

And this being Johnny, the neighbor was Ken Bentsen, nephew of a four-term senator named Lloyd Bentsen. Johnny made it his business to know everyone who ran the world, and wasnt coy about letting drop that a guest at one of his dinners had been, say, Paul Bocuse. When he went to see how Galatoires and other iconic New Orleans restaurants were faring post-Katrina, he dined with a fellow Lucullan, Paul McIlhenny, heir to the makers of Tabasco sauce and one of several McIlhennys living on Avery Island, a few hours down the Gulf Coast. He had already stayed with his friend and feasted on the fare of Eula Mae Dor, the family cook and a regional legend. Of course, Dor put on the dog, dressing up the traditional Acadian chicken and sausage gumbo with andouille sausage and a goose McIlhenny had shot himself. Everybody put on the dog for Johnny.