Dear Sarah,
You may find me a little punchy in this last entry. I’ve been up very late working on my year-end tax calculations; my baby sitter is away for two weeks; the kids’ school is having one of those snow days that Washington schools always call at the first panicking sign of a frost; and my husband, who is doing the child-minding this week, has a horrible honking cold. Plus the string of lights that graces the very tip of our enormous Christmas tree just went out, leaving us with a gloomy intimation of failure. (Husband, at tree lot: “No, this one is too little.” Youth employed by tree profiteer: “How about this one? It’s the biggest one on the lot. It was on the evening news the other day!” Wife: “I don’t think we need a tree of newsworthy height, do we?” Guess who won?)
None of this has anything to do with cookbooks. But the entire subject of cooking is somehow yoked to the anecdotal impulse in me; cooking and talking have some bubbly common source. Food writing is really about everything under the sun, if you let it be. Julia Child is always writing about how to live and the killing effects of fear and too much moderation. James Beard is always telling us to have fun. “I tell about myself,” M.F.K. Fisher wrote, “and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.”
Some of my favorite cookbooks, then, are the late Laurie Colwin’s two little collections, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking–books of essays that incorporate recipes so that you get not just the briskly sensible cooking instruction but the whole train of sensual association that each dish summoned for her. I really like Betty Fussell’s Masters of American Cookery, an interesting hybrid of cookbook/narrative appreciation/interpretation focused on the contributions and styles of Child, Beard, Fisher, and Craig Claiborne. (Say you want to make a cream sauce. Fussell will tell you what a cream sauce is and how it works; she’ll tell you what Julia does with cream sauces and where Beard disagrees with her, and then she’ll give you three good cream sauces. So it’s very instructive, in the best sense of the word. Also, a digression: Don’t miss Fussell’s wonderful memoir of last year, The Kitchen Wars.)
If a cookbook doesn’t have that quality of a captivating authorial sensibility, then I like for it to impart its expertise (in a sensible layout on a nice clean white page I can spatter with grease) and then get out of the way, leaving room for me to weave my own rich associations around the recipes that work. So I still use my old Joy of Cooking a lot; also one called Master Recipes, by Stephen Schmidt–a totally comprehensive book that serves as my safety net. I always know, if I buy some interesting new vegetable at the Sunday farmer’s market near my house, that Schmidt will have something to suggest. I always go back to Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The New James Beard. (Like you, I’m also a big recipe clipper, though I’d cross the street to avoid picking up a copy of Gourmet magazine–way too labor-intensive and generally food-serious.) I also like Patricia Wells’ books that aim to teach you the artfully simple tricks of rustic French and Italian food–Bistro Cooking and Trattoria.
Now on to the Vongerichten. I also really liked the idea of a book that tells me straight which recipes are elaborate and which are not; it is far and away the best-designed of the three books, both elegant and functional. And like you I was grateful for its clarity about such things as preparation time and possible shortcuts as well as its mostly successful efforts at democracy. Every once in a while you catch Vongerichten working a little too hard at the assurance that the humbler versions are fine–just fine, really, all the children are above average. But for the most part, the book was free of that chefy pretension that so annoyed me in Portale, and it has high browsability: I found lots of recipes I’ll probably try in the future.
So why was my first effort a disaster? For some reason I decided to start with grilled shrimp with apple ketchup, which was the third of five grilled shrimp variations. It looked simple, and “apple ketchup” had an intriguing ring, and perhaps I was rebelling against the tyranny of seasonal ingredients. Plus, it seemed like a good idea to start by picking a variation right in the middle range. But of course I had to broil rather than grill the shrimp (he says that’s OK) since it isn’t summer and I don’t have an indoor grill. Basically, it’s a simple recipe of grilled shrimp topped with a sauce combining ketchup, sherry vinegar, diced tomatoes, a tart diced apple, and chopped fresh lemon. As I type these words, I hear you saying: But it sounds dreadful. What were you thinking?
And it was dreadful! The sauce, which is cooked hardly at all so none of the flavors even get past the handshake stage with each other, tasted just like … ketchup! Only with vinegar added. The unsoftened apples sort of shivered glumly in their red bath. The dish was edible, but only just. It was all very undermining because I’ve been looking at the recipe ever since and for the life of me can’t figure out why this dish–described as “a Jean-Georges classic … crunchy and unusual”–is even supposed to work, or what the best chef in the world could do to it to make it better.
So it’s a good thing that I went on to two recipes I really liked: roast pork with citrus caramel (the fourth of five variations–the most ambitious you can get without smoking your pork before roasting it) and, my favorite of the week, roast tomatoes stuffed with bitter greens.
The pork is roasted in a very dark, somewhat bitter caramel sauce known as a gastrique: It’s a combination of caramelized sugar, sherry vinegar, and the juices and zests of a lemon, a lime, and an orange. It yields a very brown, almost black roast with a somewhat crispy, sweet-and-sour skin. I didn’t find this especially hard to make–it’s all straightforward, except that the sauce began to burn in the pot well before the roast was done, and Vongerichten didn’t have a thing to tell me about what I should do. (He does tell you to keep adding a tablespoon or two of water as it cooks to keep the sauce liquid. But my sauce was both burning and liquid, somehow. Like a sensible girl I decided to turn the oven down, but I figured that out sort of late.) Also, I have faint hope of getting the pot cleaned by Christmas–it’s on its 11th soak in the kitchen sink, with stubborn patches of that black caramel still hanging on. But that seems a small price to pay for the intense, sweetly bitter taste of this dish. I would do this again, for an impressive but not very difficult dinner party entrée.
As for the tomatoes … how can you go wrong with roasted tomatoes, goat cheese, and a miscellany of bitter greens? (Click here and scroll down for the recipe.) In the spirit of science, I used the ones he suggested–arugula, radicchio, and dandelion greens. But I’m sure you could use almost any. The principle is that you sauté shallots and scallions (I don’t suppose you even need know which is which), then briefly wilt the greens in the pan, and stuff the mixture into hollowed-out tomatoes, pausing to put a generous dollop of goat cheese into each one before continuing the stuffing. These are simple and pretty to look at, with a high ratio of bang for effort, and they taste just spectacular. When I was done, I wanted to eat cooked bitter greens on everything–on my waffles, even–for the next six months. I will make this a staple of my cooking, I suspect. And though Vongerichten is mum about this, I don’t see why you couldn’t assemble it all hours ahead of time.
I ended with the best to give you a reprieve from all the pre-Christmas whining I’ve been doing. I hope your holiday is swell, that all your tree lights (if any) last the season, that you get takeout for the next five days. … This has been really fun for me.
All best,
Marjorie
