Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 7, 2008 at 2:00 PM
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.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 23, 2008 at 2:15 PM
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.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 9, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Until last week I never met a mulligatawny soup I liked. It wasn’t that I hated the ones I was introduced to; it was more that they were watery, wan, and forgettable. Usually they were included as part of some deal at an Indian restaurant. I was torn between feeling sorry for mulligatawny, clinging to its place on the menu for people scared to order anything else, and vaguely disdaining it as an Anglo imposition on the Indian table.
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.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 2, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Although I love dried legumes and pulses more than most non-vegetarians, and although I love the vegetables and meat dishes in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, I tend to avoid the chapter on dals. I think this is because the first dal recipe I ever tried was Jaffrey’s moong dal. “This is North India’s most popular dal,” she writes, “and it is eaten with equal relish by toothless toddlers, husky farmers, and effete urban snobs.” That sounds delightful, right? But it calls for a full tablespoon of turmeric, which was definitely not to my taste. I wonder if my American turmeric is not so great or if it’s my American palate. What do you think?
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.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 26, 2008 at 1:30 PM
One of the first Madhur Jaffrey meat recipes I ever tried was a goat stew. Although she recommends that Americans replace the goat with lamb, I’m open to new meats, and someone at the Greenmarket was actually selling goat for stew, so I thought, why not?
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.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 19, 2008 at 2:45 PM
I didn’t discover Indian food until I was 21 and living in New York City for the first time, and I didn’t try cooking it until my husband and I started dating a few years later. His family, he explained, loved this cookbook author called Madhur Jaffrey—had I heard of her? As it happened, I was working for Knopf, her publisher, but had never taken home a copy of her 1973 classic An Invitation to Indian Cooking. Indian cooking seemed forbiddingly complicated, and besides, the current edition of the book was just a little paperback whose cover featured a campy picture of Jaffrey dressed in a sari, smiling benignly over a still life of ingredients despite the fact that we readers seem to have surprised her in the act of chopping cilantro.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 12, 2008 at 1:15 PM
For me, one of the pleasures of being a young adult was discovering that many of the foods I had rejected as a child were actually edible and, in fact, rather tasty. My mother says I wasn’t a picky eater, but there were certain textures and flavors that did not work for me—mushrooms, fish, olives, guacamole (!), cherries, and, perhaps most deeply, 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.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 5, 2008 at 2:00 PM
As an undergrad, I spent a semester studying in Russia. Our host mothers urged hot kasha (referring to any kind of porridge) on us in the sub-zero mornings, and they served a different kind of kasha (buckwheat groats) as a side dish in the still-freezing evenings. When the time came to leave, one of the most pressing questions for many of us was, “Will I be able to find kasha in the United States?” Obviously, none of us had ever lived in cities with large Eastern European immigrant populations or been members of health-food co-ops, or we would have known that buckwheat groats aren’t hard to find at all.
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 recipe for kasha varnishkes yielded very nicely cooked buckwheat groats, but also the realization that I don’t particularly like this particular dish, which is kasha with mushrooms, onions, and bowtie pasta.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 27, 2008 at 1:30 PM
As JerzeeTomato pointed out last week, chicken divan is a great way to use leftovers. Joy of Cooking is chock-full of wonderful ideas about what to do with the remains of last night’s dinner; I just wish that in my house dinner stuck around for day two more often. One of my dreams is to get my kitchen running such that I always have a cold roast in the refrigerator—chicken, beef, anything I can make into sandwiches or otherwise quickly transform into a delicious second-day dish. Though many people seem to arrive at this cozy and satisfying state of affairs without even trying, my horror of wasting food or watching it spoil makes it difficult for me to roast lavishly. So when I want to make classics of the leftover genre, such as shepherd’s pie, I do the whole thing from scratch (which, honestly, is never that much more difficult).
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 20, 2008 at 11:00 AM
As I wrote long ago in another forum, Joy of Cooking has never much appealed to me. A prudish child, I was, I think, put off by the way its title echoed The Joy of Sex (a subject I would have preferred never to hear mentioned or even hinted at), and as an young adult learning how to cook I was faithful to How to Cook Everything (which had something to do with my naively limitless reverence for the New York Times). Eventually, however, the man I would marry came into my life, and I was ready for it—“it” being, of course, Joy of Cooking, which had been his family’s standard text and now was his. Many skillets of refried beans, pots of stew, and countless muffins later, I’ve learned to give Joy its due as a classic of the American kitchen.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 13, 2008 at 1:45 PM
My biggest liability in the kitchen is my extreme pokiness at doing pretty much everything. Chopping onions, thinking through recipes, and (especially) washing vegetables—I’m just not speedy. Cookbooks that list prep times always make me laugh (a little tightly) because no matter how realistic they claim to be, the authors seem to have at their disposal either a team of prep cooks (and multiple sinks) or magic instant vegetable washing techniques they have forgotten to share. Confronted with a mountain of kale to wash or carrots to peel, I usually cope by trying to convince myself that the task at hand is meditative and even enjoyable. This works on the weekend but is a harder sell on Wednesday night. So why did I try to make Marcella Hazan’s Baked Escarole Torta—bread stuffed with sautéed escarole, a recipe I had been eyeing for years—on a night when I had about five thousand other things to take care of?
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 6, 2008 at 2:30 PM
Besides big roasts, slow braises, and stuffed pastas that are probably best for lazy-Sunday cooking, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking has much to offer in the way of weeknight dinner (if you’re accustomed to spending about an hour making dinner, that is). I love Marcella Hazan’s frittate but somehow always forget that eggs for dinner are allowed, so I usually end up browsing soups, salads, and vegetables for ideas. Recently I put Chick Pea Soup, Potatoes with Onions, Tomatoes, and Sweet Pepper, and Shredded Savoy Cabbage Salad to the test.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, January 31, 2008 at 1:45 PM
When I read the comments on my first post about Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.
I realized that I had underestimated the delicacy of the thumbnail biographer’s task. As an educated, experienced woman who brings home the bacon (okay, a small piece of bacon, but still) and cooks it up for her husband every night of the week, I never considered the possibility that I could be somehow insulting Marcella Hazan by writing that she learned to cook to feed her husband (something she herself has said), and I didn’t mean to imply that a woman who teaches herself to cook is necessarily without other accomplishments (such as Hazan’s doctorates in natural sciences and in biology). Heck, even if we didn’t have her amazing career to demonstrate what a formidable woman she is, we have her writing, so full of authority and character it leaves no doubt about the intelligence and strength of personality behind the words. I certainly meant no disrespect! I know most of us cook because we ourselves love food and being in the kitchen, but don’t we love to feed other people, too?
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, January 24, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Marcella Hazan, who introduced an America familiar with red sauce joints to true Italian food, is a teacher and writer with whom every home cook should spend some time. She was born in Italy but immigrated to the United States as a bride. Though she had never cooked before, she had to learn to feed her husband (hey, it was the 1950s), and luckily for all of us it turned out that she was no slouch. She began teaching Italian cooking in New York City and eventually published several books of her beautifully simple, authentic recipes.
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking combines two books Hazan published in the 1970s. The food here is, for the most part, straightforward and homey, and the instructions are detailed and clear. I often turn to this book when I’m not sure what to do with a vegetable or need new ideas for saucing pasta, but there are lots of big meaty dishes as well.
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