Well, it's March. Here in New York, after another warm spell, we're back in the midst of chilly temps. It's more Paris chilly than Northeast US frigidness; instead of negative temps giving your face frostbite, the all the cold moisture in the air just seeps into your bones. These past few rainy days, hiding indoors with a good movie or book seems preferable to sloshing through the streets and subways, the latter which in New York becomes totally crippled any time we get more than 1/4 inch of rain.
I've also been dealing with the cold by whipping up some hot drinks. In this case, hot buttered rum. Now, every bar in town seems to serve a mulled wine, hot apple cider, or hot toddy. But in our high-cholesterol-fearing modern age, it seems that nobody wants any butter in their drinks anymore, even as we scarf down pork belly entrees and bacon desserts en masse. What a shame. Because you can actually make this delicious drink with just a scant 1 teaspoon of butter, or less than the amount the average person puts on his morning toast.
Last year I had an amazing cocktail at a restaurant whose name escapes me now. It might have been in Brooklyn. Or Manhattan. All I remembered is that it was one of those places that served amazing, pitch-perfect cocktails.
I ordered one called The Bee’s Knees without knowing the ingredients except gin. I took a sip and immediately asked the bartender what was in it.
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.
After about 14 months of recipe testing and photography for my cookbook, I am finally finallydone. No more waking up every morning and consulting the massive spreadsheet of recipes and the to-do list. No more schlepping to any of the three New York Chinatowns for ingredients (unless I’m teaching a class or blogging for Appetite for China.) No more months of eating Chinese food almost every single day.
It’s a little bittersweet, actually. I really enjoyed the cookbook writing and photography process, as hard as it was. But it is nice to finally be able to cook different cuisines at home again. It’s funny — while many fellow Americans try out Asian food to spice up their home cooking, I couldn’t wait to try out (after a year in which my diet was 95% Chinese food)…tuna noodle casserole.
We’ve all seen deviled eggs countless times before, but what about deviled mushrooms? My first encounter was in James Beard’s American Cookery, that wonderful trove of American recipes that date back to when the U.S. was a wee infant. Though the practice of adding hot spices to eggs appears to date back to Ancient Rome, the term “deviled” came into common usage in the US in the late 1700s to early 1800s to refer to any spicy dish.
The index of American Cookery shows a couple handfuls of recipes for foods we used to devil often, including crab, scallops, beef bones, and veal kidneys. They all used either cayenne or Tabasco for flavoring. I ended up making the mushrooms, with a bit less oil and a bit more Tabasco than the recipe calls for; what was considered spicy generations ago is considered mild now.
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.
January, the unofficial month in America for diets and cleanses and general low-fat eating, might seem like an odd time to cook a bunch of recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Especially if you’re someone who, for example, ate an average of 6 to 8 cookies at day for the last two weeks. (But who’s keeping exact count?)
Contrary to some beliefs, not ever recipe in MTAOFC involves tons of butter, heavy cream, or fatty meats. You just have to dig a bit to find the recipes from Provence, where olive oil is used more profusely. Soup au pistou, one of the quintessential Provençal soup, is pretty much all vegetables and beans. Ratatouille is another all-vegetarian dish using olive oil, and you can really use half the oil that Julia Child calls for. Or salade niçoise, or bouillabaisse, or saffron-scented garlic soup.
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.