Yesterday I wanted to bake a cake. Sure, it was a Monday, but since finding out over the weekend that my cookbook was now available for pre-order on Amazon (!!!), I wanted an excuse to celebrate. Or more accurately, I wanted an excuse to eat cake.
But not a cake with frosting or layers or anything that required more effort than a Monday evening calls for. Then I remembered a recipe for French-style yogurt cake in Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life that I had bookmarked a while back but hadn’t had time to try yet. It’s an old-fashioned dessert that home bakers used to make by measuring ingredients in a yogurt jar. (Dorie Greenspan has also said this was one of the few desserts that French women actually make at home, given that in France amazing pastry shops are pretty much everywhere.)
A delicious-sounding cake that didn’t take much effort? Sold.
I can thank my first job out of culinary school for introducing me to how wonderful strawberries and rhubarb can be together.
The job was at an catering company in Manhattan that specialized in large-scale events. I worked in the pastry department, which meant that we could spend an entire day creating hundreds of portions of the same desserts. At times, the head count for certain events could be as high as 1,500. If you have ever done 1,500 portions of the same cookies, cakes, or pies, you know how tedious this can be.
A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a carton of strawberries from the market, fully intent on using them for making sorbet. At home while unpacking groceries, I decided it wouldn’t hurt if I tasted a couple, you know, just to see if they were sweet and ripe enough. And then a couple more. Before I knew it, most of the carton was gone, and I was still standing in the kitchen with strawberry-stained hands and groceries still needing to be unpacked.
“After you have been a very good person for a very long time and are thin as a bean, you may decide to fall briefly into sin. You will want something simple and elegant that cannot be made without butter. There is only one thing that will do: shortbread.” – Laurie Colwin
I have written before about bookmarking pretty much every recipe out of Laurie Colwin’s books. It’s hard not to. She writes about classic, unpretentious comfort food that is old-fashioned in a back-to-basics way yet modern in ease and speediness. Dinners, especially weeknight ones, focus on roasts and braises practically anyone can make. Desserts are equally unfussy.
There are few books I’ve read more times than Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. Any time I have a rough day or just find myself in need of reading material before bed, I pick up one of her two collections of food essays and get transported back to her world in 1980s- and early-1990s- New York.
She wrote about the best ways to do the classics, including roast chicken, shortbread, and biscuits. She wrote about surviving dinner parties, in an age when everyone has food allergies. She wrote about organic food a decade before the organic movement took off in the U.S. She wrote about being a coffee addict who collected leftover brew from other people’s cups to make iced coffee, and being a salt fiend who “if nothing salty was around…simply ate salt.” And she did it all with warmth and humor.
While itching to bake cookies last week and flipping through The Essential New York Times Cookbook, I came across a recipe for “jumbles”, revised from a recipe that a Times reader had sent in to the paper in 1878.
Jumbles? I had never heard of them, but the ingredients looked like the ingredients in your average cookie recipe, except with the addition of sour cream. Amanda Hesser described them as “crisp and buttery and trilling with freshly grated nutmeg.” I was intrigued.
I recently got my hands on a copy of Toll House Tried and True Recipes, from the legendary Massachusetts restaurant that gave birth to the chocolate chip cookie. Written by Ruth Graves Wakefield, the owner credited with inventing the cookie back in 1937, the book is pretty extensive, covering not only appetizers, entrees, and desserts, but also making preserves and canning vegetables. True to 1940s fashion, it also has a “Primer for Brides” section, a short collection of recipes that all new housewives should know. Quite a time capsule!
Like pretty much every person in America, I’ve baked from the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of the Nestlé chocolate chip packages from the time I learned to read. And I’ve found few recipes that can rival it. So the day I got this cookbook in the mail I dove right in and tried their recipe for peanut butter cookies. Until then, my go-to had been this recipe for flourless peanut butter cookies. It had only 5 ingredients and I could make it in my sleep. Whereas the flourless cookies were crunchy, with the harder texture of peanut butter cookies sold at Chinese bakeries, these cookies were a bit softer and chewier. And so now I have two go-to recipes, depending on which texture I prefer on a given day.