Christina Barber-Just of Leverett finds inspiration for food almost everywhere. For one of her family’s favorite summer recipes, her process involved a pork-butchery class, The New York Times and the Fresh Air Fund.
Barber-Just didn’t grow up cooking. “Neither of my parents was a superstar chef cook, although my mom is an excellent baker,” she informed me in a recent interview.
She fell in love with food in college during her junior year abroad, which found her in England.
“I had to cook for myself for the first time,” she recalled. “It was sort of sink or swim. It was fun. I was exposed to all of these great international flavors…. There was a Thai restaurant that I still dream of to this day.”
Her love of food followed her when she graduated and became a journalist. She began working at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in 1999. There she started a restaurant column called “No Reservations,” for which she profiled local chefs and restaurants.
“I got to know everyone in the food scene in the Pioneer Valley,” she remembered with a smile. She is particularly proud of the Associated Press award she won for a cover story about the Blue Heron Restaurant’s move into its current location in the old Sunderland Town Hall. The story took months to research but gave her a great deal of satisfaction.
When she and her wife, Sara Barber-Just, had twin sons in 2005, the pair decided that Christina should be the one to stay home and take care of Henry and Jackson; Sara’s job paid more.
Barber-Just freelanced while parenting and now works as the deputy editor of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. Naturally, she continued to cook.
She took to Instagram, where her food photos and videos have a large following; some have even been shared by The New York Times. Her kitchen gadgets put my modest collection to shame. And she acts as a regional panelist for the James Beard Foundation’s restaurant awards.
She first made her delectable pork and peach dish in 2019. That June, she took a pork butchery class at Sutter Meats in Northampton. She was and is a regular customer at the store.
“Over the years I’ve become really picky about my meat and my seafood,” she told me. “I don’t really want to eat it at all unless it’s local and sustainable. And so I’m willing to pay a little more for it.”
She likes shopping at Sutter Meats because the husband-and-wife enterprise purchases from local farms and employs a lot of women.
“They know me well,” Barber-Just said of the store. “Whenever I buy stuff from them and cook a meal, I tag them on Instagram.”
Consequently, when an opening came up at a pork butchery class at Sutter, she received a call asking whether she would be interested in attending. She assented with enthusiasm.
“We broke down an entire hog from Sage Farm,” she remembered. “Terry Ragasa [Sutter’s co-owner] led the class. It was just me and two dudes.”
Although Barber-Just hasn’t done much butchering since, she noted that the class gave her an appreciation for different cuts of pork … and provided her with new pieces of the hog to try.
“One of the cuts I went home with that night was a boneless pork butt,” she said. “It sat in my freezer for a while…. Then summer came around.”
The Barber-Just clan hosts the same teenager every year from the Fresh Air Fund.
“He’s like our third son now,” explained Barber-Just. “He’s from Queens. His name is Josh. He’s a year younger than our boys; he’s 14. He’ll eat anything you put in front of him. He’s game.”
Barber-Just hauled out the pork butt in Josh’s honor and found a wonderful recipe at the New York Times cooking site. “It sort of checked all the boxes for me,” she reflected. “It looked relatively simple. I’m pretty obsessive about local ingredients, and pretty much everything is local.”
She adapted the recipe using a couple of her kitchen toys. First, she heated the pork for five hours using her sous vide, a machine that will hit and maintain a temperature for hours without drying the food out.
She finished the meat on her grill, which is small and uses pellets for fuel. She then gave the pork an extra-dark crust using a kitchen torch with a Searzall attachment. This gadget allows the cook to brown or blacken food in a targeted fashion.
Barber-Just noted that readers don’t have to own either of those machines to make this dish, which will brown nicely on a standard charcoal or gas grill.
I asked her what appealed to her about the flavor of the dish. “It’s so succulent inside,” she informed me. “Succulent meat on the inside and this ‘on the edge of burned’ meat on the outside.”
She now makes the dish every year when Josh joins her family for his summer break from the city. Like all the best dishes in family repertoires, it has become a tradition.
“My family knows that if I’m preparing this dish, it means Josh is here, and that makes it extra special,” Barber-Just said.
Adapted by Sam Sifton of The New York Times (with a little help from Christina Barber-Just)
Ingredients
1 boneless pork butt, approximately 2 pounds, butterflied and trimmed
8 to 10 cloves garlic, peeled and minced (or 8 to 10 garlic scapes, minced)
2 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary leaves
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
6 fresh Clarkdale peaches, skin on, cut in half and pitted
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, diced into small pieces
Instructions
Heat a charcoal or gas grill to high. Place a large cast-iron pan on the grill, and let it preheat. At this point, it’s fine to let a charcoal grill die down a little bit. A gas grill may be turned down to medium.
Use a meat mallet to pound the pork until it is ¾-inch thick throughout.
In a small bowl, mix the garlic, the rosemary and six tablespoons of the oil into a rough paste. Rub salt and pepper on both sides of the pork; then do the same with the garlic-rosemary paste.
Brush the pan or griddle with the last two tablespoons of olive oil. Let it heat until it shimmers and almost smokes; then place the meat on top. Cook, undisturbed, until it forms a good dark crust, about 10 minutes.
Place the peaches around the meat on the grill, cut side down. Dot the peaches with the butter. Let them cook until they are soft and a bit charred, about five minutes. Remove them from the pan and place them on a platter, covering them with foil to keep them warm.
When the first side of the pork has browned nicely, carefully use tongs to turn it over. Cook it in the melted butter in the pan for five to seven minutes longer.
Place the meat on a carving board, cover it with foil, and let it rest for five minutes. Slice and serve it with the peaches. A little extra rosemary makes an attractive garnish. Serves four.
Tinky Weisblat is the award-winning author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.