Sunday Brunch: The Best Silver Dollar Pancakes Ever
November 19, 2009
Classic Cookbooks: Elizabeth David's Ratatouille
One of my guilty secrets as a food person and a word person is that I have never fallen for Elizabeth David. When Summer Cooking and A Book of Mediterranean Food were reissued by NYRB Classics in 2002, I bought them eagerly, expecting to be transported and inspired. Instead I was a little bored by the prose and much confused by the recipes, which assume a basic understanding of cookery I had not yet attained. I felt like a philistine.
But everyone else is enraptured by David, who as a young woman left her posh home to become an actress, took up with a married man with whom she traveled all over the Mediterranean, and worked abroad for the United Kingdom's Ministry of Information during World War II. After the war she introduced England to the frank foods of southern climates and became (inevitable phrase) "the foremost food writer of her day."
Classic Cookbooks: Edna Lewis's Oven Brisket
My family has a dinner-table tic: whether we’re at a restaurant or at home and especially good bread is served, someone always says, “You know, I could just eat bread for dinner. This is all I need.” When my father says it I laugh because we’ve heard it a million times, but as often as not I’m the one who pipes up, involuntarily and completely carried away by my enthusiasm for bread and butter.
This weekend I made brisket and realized I’ve developed a new kitchen tic all my own. Whenever I slow-cook or braise a tough piece of meat, I taste it to see if it's tender enough, then announce, “I bet this is going to be so good tomorrow.” Everyone knows that kind of thing improves with a day or two, but saying it aloud reassures and excites me.
Classic Cookbooks: Ham Biscuits
“The women of Freetown were amazing because they participated in the work of the fields and barnyard and yet would step right out of the field work when an unexpected friend or traveler turned up,” Edna Lewis writes. “They would make a quick fire in the wood cookstove, and in a few minutes emerge from the kitchen with a pot of hot coffee, a plate of biscuits—flannel-soft, a thin slice of ham inserted in each—a bowl of home-canned peaches, and perhaps some sugar cookies. Often the biscuits were made with chipped pieces of ham.”
Would you not pledge eternal devotion to someone who brought you coffee, biscuits, peaches, and cookies when you showed up unannounced on a summer afternoon? Easy-peasy cream biscuits tenderly entered my repertoire a few years ago, but biscuits made with lard, butter, or shortening were still in too-challenging territory for me (I have a fear of overworking dough) until The Taste of Country Cooking convinced me that I had to learn to make these ham biscuits, simply regular biscuits with minced ham folded into the dough before baking.
Classic Cookbooks: Steamed Chicken in Casserole
Whenever you hear about how people don’t have time to cook because we’re all so busy with work and kids and the gym and eight hours per day of reality television and internet surfing and whatnot, don’t you think, “Hey, people used to find time to cook because they had no choice. What’s the matter with us?”
I’m not thinking of a mid-century family helmed by a mother whose job description was to help with the PTA and have dinner on the table when father walked through the door at 6 p.m. I’m thinking of pioneers and farmers, men and women, who did hard physical labor all day long and still had to face the dreaded problem: what’s for dinner? I’m not saying I want to return to the era when we all had to grow or make just about everything we ate and wore ourselves—there are definitely days when I’m grateful that I can cop out and order a burrito. But contemplating that time does make me think that most people today, even busy people, could forgo takeout and make dinner two or three times a week if they cared to.
Classic Cookbooks: Scalloped Salmon
When I read an older cookbook, I am drawn to the recipes that sound a little funny and old-fashioned: stuffed breast of veal, pork chops flambé, Indian pudding. I’m pleased to say that not once did this method lead me astray when applied to The James Beard Cookbook. From now on I will turn to this fat little no-nonsense paperback often, but I do think it would be dauntingly vague for beginning cooks of the less confident sort. And I do still feel as if I don’t know much about James Beard and his career. I will have to turn to the collection Beard on Food or track down his autobiography for that.
This week I settled on scalloped salmon, a casserole made with canned salmon, expecting it to be either brilliant or disgusting. (If disgusting it would at least, I thought, give me a taste of the kind of thing my unfortunate mother had to force down on Fridays in the fifties and sixties as a Catholic schoolgirl.) In the end the dish was neither brilliant nor disgusting, but rather a comforting sort of thing I’ll be happy to make again when the larder is looking bare. With its sturdy vegetables and tinned fish, it made me feel economical and housewifely and could be a good end-of-grocery-week standby. The best way to describe it is perhaps as a large fish cake, easier to produce than individual cakes and baked instead of fried (although full of butter, so perhaps no healthier). It might also be interesting to try this with cooked potato flesh standing in for the crumbs.
Classic Cookbooks: Spoonbread
While your other correspondents were dolled up and hobnobbing at the Beard Awards Sunday night, I was just a few blocks and a world away, wearing an old Mexican dress and perusing The James Beard Cookbook. I thought I should try one of his hors d’oeuvres, since I was reading about all the party food and his first book was about canapés; when he was a young and struggling actor, he would cater parties to make ends meet, in which enterprise he met much more success than he ever did on the stage. I was delighted to find his recipe for chili con queso—where did an Oregon-raised New Yorker come up with that? Unfortunately his recipe is based on a white sauce. Has anyone ever made this recipe, or is anyone willing to try and report back? I want to hear about it but am afraid they’d take away my native-Texan card if I made queso with white sauce.
I decided instead to make spoonbread, which far exceeded my expectations. While I was awaiting something porridgey like grits, or something airy like soufflé (since the recipe is also called cornbread soufflé), this resembled a substantial, sliceable custard. It had all the sweet, buttery, corny taste of cornbread, but even my favorite cornbread recipe has nothing on this spoonbread when it comes to moistness and texture. With no sugar at all and only one egg and one tablespoon of butter per serving (not so bad), it was still wonderfully rich, like dessert posing as part of dinner. I served it with bacony collard greens and was in heaven.
Classic Cookbooks: Barley Casserole
"Melt the butter and sauté the onions and mushrooms until soft. Add the barley and brown it lightly." These two sentences raise so many questions for an inexperienced cook with OCD: how high should the flame be? How long might this take? Mushrooms are already pretty soft, and barley is already pretty brown—how will I know when I’ve reached the end point? Commenters in cooking forums usually scoff at the notion that anyone could be puzzled by such simple instructions, but the truth is that some people are. (I know I was when I started cooking.)
Now that I’ve built up some experience, I feel comfortable winging it but still prefer recipes that are as precise as possible in terms of instructions, visual cues, and possible cooking times. Every recipe in Sunday Suppers at Lucques specifies how long to heat the pan and then the oil before adding food (and it’s a lot longer than I ever would have guessed on my own; now I actually know how to brown meat). Ina Garten tells us how much salt and pepper to add to most dishes, which I love—“seasoning to taste” is hard, and it’s good to know about how much should work. Nevertheless, some people consider such specificity to be the height of culinary philistinism. My husband and in-laws definitely look at me as if I'm insane when I carefully level off a half-teaspoon of baking powder or use my kitchen scale.
Classic Cookbooks: The James Beard Cookbook
About a month ago a headline on Gourmet.com caught my eye: What Ever Happened to James Beard? Once indisputably the central figure in American food, today James Beard is for most people the name attached to a cookbook award or perhaps associated with some foundation’s financial scandal. It was true, I realized, that all I knew about him came from anecdotes in other people’s memoirs and histories. He is always depicted in such books not just as the “dean of American cookery” but as an involved and gossipy connector of people and giver of advice. Because he mentored and shaped so many important food careers, Laura Shapiro says, his influence is still with us today, even if his vibrant personality and many books no longer occupy center stage.
I decided it was about time to try The James Beard Cookbook. Although it has undergone some light revisions in the intervening half century, the edition available today from Marlowe & Company is, for the most part, the same comprehensive and unintimidating collection of recipes that Dell published in 1959 as the first trade paperback cookbook. Since one of Beard’s aims here was to encourage new cooks, I chose something slightly intimidating that I had never made before—soufflé. Spinach soufflé, to be exact: moist and light and, in the end, not tricky at all.
Classic Cookbooks: Tuscan Tomato Soup and Homemade French Bread
The first time I really sat down and read Entertaining was when I was planning my wedding. I opened it looking for ideas and closed it thinking, “Yes, I could make all the food for our wedding, wouldn’t that be personal and fun?” Everyone talked some sense into me, thank goodness, and my self-catering ambitions were quietly dropped.
Don’t let this story deter you. Among the delusion-inspiring accounts of “Desserts for Forty: Soirée Dansante” and “Cocktails for Two Hundred: Country Fare,” one can find in this book ideas for relatively simple dinners at home. Last week I made tomato soup and French bread. I was too tired to make the green salad I had planned, but with a piece of Gruyère the soup and bread made a very pleasing meal indeed.
Classic Cookbooks: Alexis's Brown-Sugar Chocolate Chip Cookies
When I was five, my mother bought a new kind of cookbook because she was entranced by the pictures within: here were elegant parties and rustic feasts; there was the author working her massive garden, feeding “part of [her] flock of rare and unusual chickens,” and tending her honeybees; and finally, sealing the deal (for our family, at least) there was a basket of gingerbread gnomes with red hats patiently awaiting a Christmas party.
The book, of course, was Martha Stewart’s Entertaining, and this year it is 25 years old. It is fascinating to look back at the original book to see how much styles in food, flowers, and presentation have changed. (Also how much more honest Stewart is now about her massive staff: the early books make it seem as if she is doing all that cooking, gardening, chicken-rearing, bee-keeping, etc. single-handed.) Some arrangements still look perfectly lovely, and some treats are still worth eating: Alexis’s Brown Sugar Chocolate Chip Cookies have been among my very favorite cookies since the first time I tasted them.
Classic Cookbooks: Delicious 'Dry' Potatoes
Spending a month with An Invitation to Indian Cooking has reaffirmed my love of Madhur Jaffrey. I feel strongly that anyone who likes Indian food should find a copy, as should anyone interested in charming but unpretentious stories about food and the writing of friendly recipes that work.
Last week I tried two new dishes: sookhe aloo (“dry” potatoes), a deliciously familiar variation on other Indian dishes I have tasted, and karhi, a thick porridge of chickpea flour and buttermilk that I thought would be either a hit or very weird.
Classic Cookbooks: Mulligatawny Soup
Madhur Jaffrey's recipe intrigued me, though, because it is made with meat and thickened with chickpea flour. Mulligatawny takes so many different forms that it seems almost silly to group all these soups under one name, but most of them do seem to be chicken based and have nothing to do with chickpea flour. I had to try this version, and I'm very glad I did.
Classic Cookbooks: Chana Dal with Lamb
Recently I had much better luck with her chana dal cooked with lamb. . Chana dal is a hulled and split dal whose grains are a little larger than split peas; it is a member of the chick pea family. In this recipe, it is cooked with so much lamb that it seemed more like lamb stew than a dal to me, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.
Classic Cookbooks: Chicken with Sliced Lemon and Fried Onions
Well, my adventuresomeness was not rewarded. I don’t know if it was the recipe (which included at least 8 tablespoons of oil) or the goat (which gave off a lot of fat), but the stew tasted mostly of grease and gristle.
Classic Cookbooks: Madhur Jaffrey's Cauliflower with Ginger and Chinese Parsley
Classic Cookbooks: Bread Pudding
My grandfather took me to a buffet dinner when I was very small, younger than six, and after surveying my dizzying options I chose bread pudding for dessert because it had such a lovely cinnamon aroma. When the first bite landed on my tongue, I crumpled—mushy bread was not on my list of acceptable textures. The disconnect between inviting smell and (to me) repulsive mouthfeel was so jarring that I did not eat bread pudding again until I was 28, hungry for dessert on a whim, and in possession of a stale loaf of bread.
Classic Cookbooks: Kasha Varnishkes
Cooking them properly is a different matter. The first time I tried, I got it just right: the grains were separate, firm, and nutty. Since then I have tended to produce mushy messes that are edible but not appetizing. The Joy of Cooking
Classic Cookbooks: Shepherd's Pie
Classic Cookbooks: 'Joy of Cooking' Chicken Divan
