Best Food Writing 2011

by Holly Hughes

  Her lasagna is our favorite of that suite, though to taste it now I fear it might disappoint me, for the factory sauce (which I demand she use, this after noticing jars of Ragú at both the Goldfusses’ and the Stanleys’) and the rubbery, part-skim mozzarella, the cut-rate store-brand pasta, the dried herbs. But, back then, it’s a revelation. Our usual dinners feature salty fish and ginger, garlic and hot pepper; they are delicious in part because you can surgically pick at the table, choose the exact flavor you want. But this is a detonation of a meal: creamy, cheesy, the red sauce contrastingly tangy and a little sweet, the oozing, volcanic layer cake of the pasta a thrilling, messy bed. Maybe I first have it at Ronnie Prunesti’s house, or Mrs. Churchill delivers a show model, but all of us are crazy for it once my mother begins to make it. We choose our recipe (was it on the box of macaroni?), our tools. I remember how she carefully picked out a large Pyrex casserole dish at Korvette’s for the job, a new plastic spatula, two checkerboard wooden trivets, so we can place it in the center of the table, and for a few years it becomes a Friday-evening tradition for us. She makes it in the afternoon after dropping me off in town for my junior bowling league, and when she and my sister pick me up I hardly care to recount my form or my scores (I’m quite good for a second grader, good enough that my father decides that I should have my own ball, which is, whether intentionally or erroneously, inscribed “Ray”) owing to the wonderful smell on their clothes, clinging to my mother’s thick hair—that baked, garlicky aroma, like a pizzeria’s but denser because of the ground beef and the hot Italian sausages she has fried, the herbal lilt of fennel seeds.

  My father gets home early on Fridays, and while he takes off his tie and washes up for dinner my sister and I set the table with forks and knives (but without chopsticks, since I insist that there be no side of rice and kimchi at this meal, as there is at every other), folding the paper napkins into triangles. My mother brings out a bowl of iceberg-and-tomato-and-carrot salad, a dish of garlic bread, my sister waiting for the Good Seasons Italian dressing to separate so she can start shaking it again. I wonder aloud if my father ought to retrieve from the top of the kitchen cabinet the clay-colored ceramic bottle of Lancers they got as a present (they rarely drink), if only because it makes the table look right. They do, although the wine is old, for they forget that they opened it a month before, when a classmate came through New York. But no matter. They don’t know that the wine has soured. My mother will lift out fat squares of the casserole, the fine strings of cheese banding across the table; I scissor them with my fingers and flinch at the tiny-striped burn. We feast. Only my sister can eat just one. Who cares that it’s too rich for us to handle, who cares that our family affliction of mild lactose intolerance will surely lead to guffaws and antic hand-fanning during the Friday-night repeat of the Million Dollar Movie. Here is the meal we’ve been working toward, yearning for. Here is the unlikely shape of our life together—this ruddy pie, what we have today and forever.

  This is what a boy thinks, a boy with a tongue for a brain, a heart.

  Now my mother is nearly done baking the turkey. Bake she must, because there’s no Roast setting on the oven. It reads “Roast” in Mrs. Churchill’s beautifully handwritten instructions, and the Churchills have gone away for the holiday. There’s no one else we can call—at least, no one who would know. It certainly smells good, as if we were going to have a soup of pure fat. Yet my mother desperately peers in at the bird, the tendrils of her hair stuck against her temples, biting her lower lip, as she does whenever she’s frustrated or unsure of herself. She has been basting it with margarine and the pan juices, but I can see she’s deeply worried, for the bird was still slightly frozen when my father shoved it in, and we’ve been baking instead of roasting and we have no meat thermometer (“Why didn’t I buy one!”), and at some point amid the continuous conversation with my uncle and aunt we’ve lost exact track of the time.

  My mother has readied other food, of course, if none of the traditional accompaniments. We’ll have the bird and its giblet stuffing à la Churchill (a recipe I still make), but the rest of the table is laid with Korean food, and skewed fancy besides, featuring the sort of dishes reserved for New Year celebrations: gu jeol pan, a nine-compartment tray of savory fillings from which delicate little crêpes are made; a jellyfish-and-seaweed salad; long-simmered sweet short ribs; fried hot peppers stuffed with beef; and one of my favorites, thin slices of raw giant clam, whose bottom-of-the-sea essence almost makes me gag, but doesn’t quite, and is thus bracing, galvanic, a rushing of the waters. Yet, because of what’s happening in the kitchen, we’re not paying much attention; we’re distracted by our celebrity guest, so buxom and tanned. My mother decides it’s time; a piece of plastic has popped up from the breast, though exactly when she’s not sure. My father helps her pull the turkey out and they lift it from the pan, cradling it with butcher string, onto the platter. We quickly take our places. Do we remove the stuffing now or serve it directly from the bird? The instructions don’t say. After some discussion, it’s decided that it should be left in—the bird might look too empty, sad. My father wields the new carving knife he’s bought, a long, scary blade with a saw-toothed edge on one side and smaller serrations on the other. My mother winces. The knife strobes: the first cut is deep, surprisingly easy.

  THE GOLDEN SILVER PALATE

  By Ann Hood

  From Alimentum

  Looking back at her life as a young single woman in New York City in the heady 1980s, novelist Ann Hood (The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread) nostalgically recalls her first dinner par-ties—and the cookbook that made them possible.

  The first time I made pesto sauce, I used dried basil. Lots of it. Two entire jars of McCormick’s dried basil, to be exact. This was 1982, and I wanted to impress my new boyfriend. Josh had just relocated to New York City from San Francisco. He made a mean cup of coffee by pressing the grounds through what looked like a sock. He put apples in cole slaw. He bought live soft shell crabs in Chinatown, fried them in butter and put them in a sandwich smeared with homemade mayonnaise.

  Up until I fell in love with Josh, my idea of a fancy dinner came straight out of the orange Betty Crocker cookbook I got as a college graduation present: chicken Kiev (filled with dried parsley, dried rosemary, dried thyme and lots of butter), chicken Rice-a-Roni, and a salad with a sugary dressing poured over lettuce, slivered almonds and mandarin oranges straight from the can. Back in college, my sorority sisters and I used to marinate flank steak in Good Seasons’ Italian dressing to woo boys we had crushes on. For dessert, Kathy, the sophisticated one, dumped a can of cherries into a pan, poured brandy on it and lit the whole thing on fire. This was Cherries Jubilee. I also had a recipe for curried chicken salad that I’d torn from a Glamour magazine. I made that when my girlfriends came over for lunch.

  Luckily, our little apartment on Avenue A made it impossible to put together any of these dishes. I needed a one-pot meal that required no fancy appliances. So I stirred all of that basil into a bowl of olive oil and crushed garlic, added some Parmigiano Reggiano, and tossed it with spaghetti, al dente. It is surely a sign of how much Josh loved me that he ate my pesto at all, even as I spit it out, mumbling that it was, well, a little dry. Afterwards, as he did the dishes, Josh said, “I wonder if next time you might use fresh basil. That might work better.”

  Fresh basil? I tried to imagine what that might even look like. I knew my fresh parsley, the curly and the flat. I even knew the flat was better, the only kind my Italian grandmother ever used. But fresh basil?

  “Good idea,” I said, certain there would be no next time.

  For me, Julia Child did not become the kitchen goddess she was to so many Americans until much later in my life, when I already knew how to cook and had grown to love good food. As a teenager, Julia Child was a black and white image on public television, cooking up food too fancy for my tastes. By the time I was in my twenties and living in New York City, she had morphed into a Dan Ackroyd skit on Sa
turday Night Live. During a brief misguided vegetarian phase, I made a whole wheat pizza from Laurel’s Kitchen that could be used as a doorstop and gazpacho and tabouli salad from The Moosewood Cookbook. When I grabbed onto the big Cajun food craze, I almost asphyxiated a small group of friends by trying to make blackened something in my studio apartment. It filled with smoke so spicy that even my cats were gasping for air. Other than my beloved Betty Crocker, I had no cooking gurus.

  Until the weekend I visited my friend Gilda Povolo in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she served me grapes rolled in Roquefort cheese, prosciutto-filled pinwheels, and a chicken dinner topped with prunes and olives, followed by bread pudding, all of it so delicious I had seconds and even thirds. Groaning, I asked her where she’d learned to cook like that. Gilda tossed a red and white book onto my lap, and said, “It’s all in here.” The book was The Silver Palate. And it changed my life.

  That chicken, of course, was chicken Marbella, the dinner party staple for every woman who, like me, had never known herbs came fresh and green, who were just starting to give grown-up dinner parties, who saw ourselves as urban and sophisticated but needed—were desperate for—a guidebook.

  When my Advanced Fiction Writing class came over for an end of semester dinner, I made Chili for a Crowd. When Josh and I took a picnic to Central Park on a summer night before a play, I made Lemon Chicken or Cold Sesame Noodles. When my parents visited, I made phyllo triangles stuffed with spinach and feta by following the simple drawings in the cookbook, rolling and tucking as if my little package was an American flag.

  Once I opened those pages, my world expanded. The Silver Palate’s recipe for pesto became routine. Fresh basil? Easy. Now I was buying herbs I’d never even heard of before. Fresh tarragon sat in a glass of water by my sink so that I could easily pluck it. In my fridge I always had a big jar of their vinaigrette to add to my salads. Suddenly, I was a cook. A good cook. Within a few short years, the food-stained pages fell apart, the binding cracked and crumbled. When I replaced it, I bought The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, too, and soon my cooking repertoire expanded even more. Apple Crisp, Stuffed Pork Loin, Pasta with Three Peppers.

  One of the most important things The Silver Palate did for me was to open me up to all kinds of foods. I began to cook everything. Instead of relying on that red and white book, I cooked from recipes torn from newspapers and food magazines; I had recipes scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper; my bookshelves dipped from the weight of cookbooks. As time passed, I used The Silver Palate less and other recipes more. Some things, like that Apple Crisp, I had made so often that I no longer even needed to open the cookbook. I knew it by heart.

  One day, I sat at my kitchen table in Providence, Rhode Island, a pad and pen in front of me, trying to decide what to make for an upcoming dinner party. More than a decade had passed since I was that long-haired girl, crazy in love with a boy from San Francisco, living in a tiny walk-up apartment with a bathtub in our kitchen. Now I was married to a businessman, living in a big Victorian house, with a baby crawling at my feet. The dinner party was for three couples I hardly knew. The men had all worked together at summer camp, friends since they were adolescents. Unlike these long-married couples, I was an interloper, a second wife, a writer from New York City. The dinner loomed ominously.

  Then it came to me. The dinner party meal that never failed. The one Gilda Povolo had served to me so long ago, the one I’d recreated dozens of times to so many boyfriends and their families and our friends. I pulled The Silver Palate from my bookshelf, and found the well-worn recipes easily, those pages so used that the book fell almost magically open to them.

  On my pad, I wrote the ingredients I would need: grapes, Roquefort cheese, heavy cream; phyllo dough, spinach, feta; chicken breasts, prunes, green olives; day old bread, raisins, eggs. That afternoon, I began to cook, barely needing to glance at the recipes as I moved through my oversized kitchen.

  The couples arrived. I nervously poured wine, smiled too much, dashed in and out of the kitchen. On one of those furtive trips, I saw a full measuring cup sitting by the stove. I paused. My chicken was happily baking away, the bread pudding beside it. What was in that measuring cup? I lifted it to my nose and sniffed. The white wine for the Chicken Marbella. Of course I had ruined the dinner. The Silver Palate couldn’t save it, or me, now. I opened the oven. The chicken was finished. The skin nicely browned, the prunes plump, the green olives juicy. I set it on the counter, wondering if I should add the wine now. But that would taste too wine-y. Disappointed, I placed it on the platter I’d bought in Italy, added the chopped fresh parsley, and brought it to the table.

  I watched everyone as they cut their chicken and brought it to their lips.

  “What is this?” one of the guys asked, surprised.

  “Chicken Marbella,” I managed to say.

  “This is amazing,” he said, shoving more in his mouth.

  The women were nodding in agreement. People were taking seconds. And thirds. Even without the wine, the Chicken Marbella was a success. I couldn’t ruin it.

  Over the next fifteen years, these same couples came to my house again and again. I have served them spaghetti carbonara from my own recipe. Steak with chimichurra sauce. Beef tenderloin with blue cheese. I have served my family these things too, and so much more. Homemade gnocchi. Beef fajitas and thick lentil soup and brined pork chops.

  But still, there are days when perhaps I feel nostalgic for a time that was simpler and cooking seemed like a wild adventure. Days when I feel overwhelmed by responsibility and burden, by the complications of middle age. Days when I take my third copy of The Silver Palate from the shelf, and find the page with Chicken Chile, or Black Bean Soup, or yes, Chicken Marbella. I run my hand over the sticky cookbook. I read the familiar words. I cook.

  WHEN FOOD DOESN’T HEAL

  By David Leite

  From LeitesCulinaria.com

  Founder/editor of the award-winning website LeitesCulinaria.com and author of the cookbook The New Portuguese Table (2009), David Leite characteristically brings a snappy humor to his food writing. Yet there are times when humor—and a hearty meal—just aren’t enough.

  One immutable law of the kitchen when I was growing up was food heals. Regardless if I were laid low by a thwackingly bad cold, a bully from school, or just a winter weekend without snow, food cured all. The powerful antidotes? My grandmother’s chicken soup, my aunt Irene’s massa sovada (sweet eggy bread), my mom’s stuffed quahogs.

  And that’s the philosophy I brought to the stove when I began cooking. It’s as if my dishes were shouting, like a carnival barker, “Looky here, looky here! A touch of gout, sir? Too many wrinkles, ma’am? Feeling blue about a boy, missy? Dr. Leite’s Magical Meals will make you feel like you just got a hug from the great Jackie Gleason himself.” And in each case, the palliative power of cooking—the kind that takes time and care and love—worked.

  My belief was put to its most rigorous test on Saturday, September 15, 2001. New Yorkers were finally able to leave Manhattan after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The One Who Brings Me Love, Joy, and Happiness, our friends, and I fled to the safety of our weekend homes. That night, as I served as many carbohydraterich dishes as the table would hold, six broken people slowly shook off the torpor of 24/7 viewing of the tragedy, the incessant roar of F-16 fighter jets overhead, and acute bunker mentality to hug, cry, even laugh.

  That night, armed with braised beef short ribs, celery root and potato gratin, and cheddar-crust apple pie, I beat back a cabal of terrorists and won. So who could have imagined that a slight, troubled 18-year-old girl would eventually take me down.

  Last month, The One’s niece, Callie (ed. note: not her real name), visited us for a week, as an all-expenses-paid birthday present from him. Coming from a rough area in Baltimore, and from a broken family, Callie dropped out of school in the eighth grade. Since then she’s ricocheted like a ball in a pinball machine, bouncing from one set of friends to the next, on
e home to another, trying to find her place, even living with an older boyfriend for a spell while she was still a minor.

  From the time Callie was very young, The One and I would go down and bring her and her two brothers to Connecticut for several weeks each year and take them on vacations to Disney World. It was our attempt at showing them that there is, indeed, another way to live—and that someone in their own family managed to achieve it. But in the end, it just didn’t seem to be enough: one nephew was shunted to his father’s home across the state due to a second marriage, another sits in juvenile detention, and Callie, now single, is back with her mother, both unemployed.