Dear Marjorie,
You’re right: We’re insane! I’m trying, not very successfully, to fall into a Zenlike trance as I follow these recipes. It hasn’t worked so far. I’d be happy to meet you on the fainting couch.
When it comes to food, I combine the worst of both worlds: I am picky but also lazy. I’m sure it comes from growing up in a house with a Swanson’s TV dinner-based cuisine. Somehow, we never managed to get them right. (“Oh, good, crispy,” my mother would exclaim merrily, scraping the charred bits from the apple-related goop in the “dessert” compartment.) Later, I was spoiled by being a single adult in Manhattan, where everything is so delicious and where food-related aggro comes not because you have to cook but because you have to wait in line–behind other people!--for takeout.
In preparation for this cooking club, I just spent a week in New York, subsisting more or less on prepared food bought from Eli Zabar’s Vinegar Factory. Their soups are so good they make you cry. They also make you think, there is no way I could ever make a soup this good myself unless I quit my job and got a divorce and gave the children away and spent every waking hour learning about and preparing soup. And what would be the point of that, really, having soup but not much else?
Similarly, I like to cook but not as a day-to-day enterprise, particularly because the other people in my family–a 4-year-old, an 18-month-old, and a 47-year-old English person who likes meat pies that he buys at the convenience store at the gas station–do not generally appreciate the effort that goes in to creating the sorts of things that are featured in the three pretty cookbooks we’re discussing. I cook a range of standard meals and variations on them at home, consulting cookbooks only when we’re having guests over and they expect a grown-up meal. Sometimes my husband cooks, but so successfully has he managed to turn his ineptitude to his advantage that I don’t mind that those occasions are rare.
So, I confronted these three books with the attitude of enthusiasm and hope and hunger and envy and fatigue that generally roils around in my head when I read new cookbooks. I’m always looking for the one that will solve all my needs at once. I want recipes with easy-to-find ingredients, instead of unpronounceable things found only in out-of-town stores that are open once a week in the dead of night. I want simple instructions that don’t spring surprises on you as you hover in midstir over the flame. (Like, I don’t want them suddenly to mention, after “add two tablespoons of butter,” that a key ingredient should have been marinating in Himalayan pashmina urine for the past 12 hours). And I want things to taste delicious when I’m done.
As it happens, I first tried a trio of recipes from Alfred Portale’s 12 Seasons Cookbook. This book didn’t bother me as much as it did you, but I was not thrilled by it. I found few things in it that I was interested in eating just now and a lot of recipes that either looked too complicated or had one or more deal-breaking ingredients. (Linguine with grilled shrimp and pesto looked good, for instance, but not necessarily when mixed with cranberry beans.) This was surprising because I am very fond of the Gotham Bar and Grill, where Portale is the chef, and would go far out of my way to eat there.
First I tried the butternut squash soup with spiced creme fraiche (Pages 197-198) because I love good butternut squash soup but have found many recipes over the years that make it taste creepy. This is a good recipe, different from others I’ve tried in that you cut the squash into little cubes and cook them slowly for a long time–until they are caramelized in butter–before adding them to the stock and other ingredients. (In other recipes I’ve tried, you either bake the squash first or sauté it very briefly before putting it in your pot). Not being able to cope with homemade chicken stock, I bought fancy chicken stock from the store. The resulting soup was really first-rate if a little bit too chickeny for my taste. What do you think about using vegetable stock for vegetable soups?
I had medium success with my next effort, seared halibut with haricots verts, scallions, and white wine sauce. My husband, who boiled the haricots verts–or shall we call them string beans?–was thrilled at the chance to eat a fish dish different from the ones we usually get at home (steamed in foil or baked in teriyaki sauce). There were a few things that went wrong. It was unclear whether you were supposed to leave the skin on the bottom of the halibut filets. If you did, I thought, how could you brown them on both sides, as the recipe calls for, since the skin side is gray–is that supposed to turn brown, too? Or is that just an idiotic question? Anyway, I panicked, but when I took the skin off, the filets fell apart so I was left with six little bits of halibut instead of two big bits. But that was OK in the end. The sauce made with lemon and white wine and butter was easy and delicious, probably because it takes nearly a stick of butter.
I also made banana cake (Pages 414-415), which I thought would be a good way to use up the browning bananas in the fruit bowl. (Click here for the banana cake and other recipes.) My 4-year-old, Alice, helped stir, and we both found the batter delicious. But the cake, alas, was slightly rubbery. It might be because it called for 12 and a half tablespoons of butter, an amount that is virtually impossible to measure accurately in Britain. Butter comes packed in grams here and is not divided into tablespoons on the foil. In any case, the tablespoon size here is different from the tablespoon size in America. So I kind of estimated, and I think that was kind of stupid. Also, at the last minute I realized that my local grocery store did not have hazelnut flour, so I substituted whole-wheat flour instead, which may not have been a good idea. The result: yummy cake, yucky consistency.
How good are you at improvising? And have you found that you’ve had to do that a lot with these recipes?
Yours,
Sarah
P.S.: Too bad we don’t have one of the White House chefs helping us out. Did you see that Hillary’s book on entertaining made the New York Times best-seller list this week? Helped considerably by our discussion last month, I’m sure.
