Voracious

by Cara Nicoletti

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  To Noodle and Mummo:

  For trusting my crooked path

  Growing up in a family of butchers and food lovers, I was surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells of cooking from an early age. But the truth is that I fell in love with cooking through reading, and I learned quickly that being in the kitchen offered me the kind of peace that settling in with a good book did. For the first half of my life I used both activities as a way to draw inward and escape from a world that I often found overwhelming. I connected deeply to the characters in my books, and cooking the foods that they were eating seemed to me a natural way to be closer to them, to make them as real as they felt to me.

  I cooked and read my way through awkward middle school years, first love, devastating heartbreaks, loss, and change. As I grew older, though, reading and cooking became the forces that broke me out of my shell, allowing me to form strong relationships and connect to the world around me.

  I moved to New York City in 2004 to study literature at NYU, and I quickly found myself working in restaurants, first as a server and a barista, and eventually as a line cook, baker, and butcher at some of Brooklyn’s best-loved spots. Studying literature and working in kitchens, I was, for the first time, surrounded by people who loved books and food as much as I did, and it awakened me to the fact that the connection between food and literature is one that is felt deeply by many, many people.

  In the locker rooms of the restaurants where I worked, I noticed my coworkers’ backpacks spilling over with well-worn novels. It turned out that Hemingway and Faulkner, Morrison and Plath, were part of their lives, too, comforting them the way they comforted me, through long days of oven burns and broken emulsions. While preparing for service, picking herbs, and parcooking fillets, we talked about short stories we had recently read and everyone’s own half-written coming-of-age novel. Eating dinner at the apartments of my English-major friends, I was pleasantly surprised by how well prepared all of the food was, and how seamlessly the conversation switched from new books to new cast-iron skillets.

  On my friends’ bookshelves, next to the obvious college-student staples like Moby-Dick and Ulysses, sat well-thumbed volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In between writing their own poetry and personal essays, they were bussing tables and running food, making coffee and selling high-end chocolates in restaurants and shops all over New York.

  In 2008 I started a literary supper club out of my tiny, sweltering apartment, with the goal of bringing my friends’ best-loved literary meals to life. When I could no longer keep up with the demand for the dinner parties, I started the blog Yummy Books, and through the success of Yummy Books, Voracious was born.

  While doing research for this book, I took a trip home to spend some time with my childhood books. It had been many years since I had read most of them, and I felt oddly nervous on the bus ride to Boston, in the way you might feel waiting to meet a friend you haven’t seen since you were small. Would we even recognize each other? When I got home I went straight up to the attic, where I spent the rest of the day and most of the night surrounded by my old friends. I was amazed at how well I still knew them, how reading them—even holding them and studying their covers—transported me back to specific moments in my life with startling immediacy. What struck me most, though, was how many of them had their food scenes marked up with purple pencil, their back covers scrawled with imagined recipes. I had forgotten how long ago my fascination—my obsession—with food scenes in books had started.

  Hosting literary dinner parties, developing recipes inspired by books for my blog, and writing this book have reinforced for me the profound connection between eating and reading. And along the way I’ve discovered, to my delight, how deeply this connection is felt by so many of you.

  Little House in the Big Woods

  BREAKFAST SAUSAGE

  The playground of my childhood was vastly different from that of my peers. A few days a week, my mom would drop me off at my grandfather’s butcher shop, Salett’s, to do my homework and spend the hours between school and dinnertime out of her hair. Under the watchful eye of Betty the cashier, my cousin and I would play a high-adrenaline rendition of hide-and-seek we called “Get Down! Get Down!”—which involved ducking behind hanging beef carcasses in the warehouse-sized refrigerator and crouching beside buckets of rendered pork fat, fingers pointed like guns at imaginary bad guys and piles of lamb shanks.

  On most days, though, I sat curled up on milk crates behind the cash register, devouring book after book while my grandfather, in his blood-spattered white coat, brought me snacks like corned cow’s tongue on Wonder Bread and chicken liver pâté spread thick on Ritz Crackers. When he kissed me his cheeks were always cold from hours spent in the cutting room, a room that all the grandkids called “the stinky room” but that he somehow emerged from smelling like Calvin Klein Obsession.

  I never really took an interest in what my grandfather and his brother, Bobby, were doing in the cutting room until second grade, when I began reading the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I got the full set all at once from the Scholastic book fair at my school. I was so taken by their covers’ pastel-checkered borders and colored-pencil drawings of cherubic homesteader children that I rearranged an entire corner of my bedroom in order to properly display them. The books were wildly popular with the girls in my class at that time, and many of them took to playing “Little House” at recess. I didn’t find the game nearly as thrilling as the books, partially because of the humiliation of always being forced to play Pa Wilder (in fairness, my bowl cut did make me the only viable candidate for the role).

  One day, while playing the game, I pretended to walk in the door with a dead pig slung over my shoulder, ready to cut up for dinner, just as Pa Wilder does in Little House in the Big Woods. The girls were horrified. “This book is from a long time ago,” they said. “People don’t do that anymore.” I was mortified, mostly because I knew that people—my people—did indeed still do that.

  After school that day I paid close attention to my grandfather and great-uncle—the fluid dance of carrying in the pigs from the truck and the focused silence that came once the animals were all on the cutting table, the way their hands changed position on their knives at the same time, in perfect choreography, and I felt proud. I watched as the pigs turned into smaller and more recognizable parts, flipping back through passages in the book for reference—“There were hams and shoulders, side meat and spare-ribs and belly. There was the heart and the liver and the tongue, and the head to be made into headcheese, and the dish-pan full of bits to be made into sausage.”

  I saw the bin of tails and briefly imagined asking my grandfather for one to fry over the fire as the Wilder girls did, but the thought made my knees weak, so I decided to focus on the sausage instead. We ate a lot of sausage in my house growing up, pulling it from the freezer where it was packed in bulk in my grandpa’s black-and-white checkerboard bags. He made only three kinds: a spicy Italian, dotted red with paprika and cayenne; a sweet Italian, studded with plump fennel seeds; and a liver sausage that my dad wouldn’t allow past our doorstep. After reading Little House in the Big W
oods I asked Papa if he would make breakfast sausage like Ma Wilder made, “seasoned with salt and pepper and with dried sage leaves from the garden.”

  I knew my grandpa loved breakfast sausage from our semi-frequent trips to Bickford’s Pancake House. He always ordered a side of them with his western omelet and drowned them in that viscous maple syrup, cutting them up with the side edge of his fork rather than picking them up and eating them in two bites as my dad did. Despite how much we all liked them, my grandpa never made them at Salett’s. Sage was expensive, and he already knew what his customers wanted to buy—it would have been a waste if nobody bought them, and avoiding wastefulness was the entire purpose of sausage in the first place. He was correct, of course, so the shrink-wrapped logs of Jimmy Dean that my dad always got from the supermarket to sate his craving for breakfast sausage continued to fill our freezer.

  Today I work in a butcher shop with more than eighty varieties of sausages. They are packed with cheese and piles of finely diced herbs, pickled vegetables, wine, and toasted spices. I teach sausage-making classes to people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the subject, and every time the class sells out I am amazed by how much things have changed since I was a kid. Yet even with all of these varieties available, breakfast sausage remains one of my favorites.

  LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS

  Breakfast Sausage

  Like Ma Wilder’s, this version uses only salt, sage, and loads of black pepper, but it also includes a healthy dose of good maple syrup, which makes all the difference in the world.

  Makes 20 (4-ounce) sausage patties

  5 pounds ground pork shoulder

  2½ tablespoons kosher salt

  3½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

  1½ teaspoons dried sage

  ¼ cup pure maple syrup

  ¼ cup ice-cold water

  Place the ground pork shoulder in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Turn the mixer to the lowest speed and add the salt, pepper, and sage. Mix for exactly 1 minute (set a timer!). Add the maple syrup and mix for another timed minute, then add the ice-cold water and mix for one more timed minute.

  Form the sausage mixture into 4-ounce patties and fry them over medium heat in a well-seasoned skillet for about 5 minutes per side.

  Note: If you aren’t going to cook all of the sausage patties right away, you should freeze them. Because the sugar content in the maple syrup is so high, the sugars will ferment over the course of about 3 days, causing the sausage to taste sour if you leave it in the refrigerator—which is why cooking immediately or freezing is your best bet. Stack the patties between layers of parchment paper before sealing them in a zip-top plastic bag. Frozen patties will keep for up to 6 months.

  “Hansel & Gretel”

  GINGERBREAD CAKE with BLOOD ORANGE SYRUP

  In the annals of books that upset and terrified me, Grimms’ Fairy Tales is surprisingly absent. It would make a heck of a lot more sense if this collection of creepy and horribly violent stories had kept me up at night as a kid, but for some reason I simply couldn’t get enough of them. In third grade I discovered a dusty old copy of the book in my attic while snooping around after school with my best friends, Christie and Meg. We were heavily into mysteries and ghost stories at the time, and when we found the book we were certain that we had discovered some dark secret that my parents had tried to keep under lock and key.

  The book was wonderfully old, with gilded pages and illustrations covered by thin sheets of onion paper, full of beautiful words like “dearth” and “soothsayer” and “earthenware.” From then on, every chance we got, we snuck up to the attic, settled on some old packing blankets, and read it by flashlight.

  In reality, my parents had gotten the book as a gift from a distant relative after my older sister was born and had stashed it in the attic, thinking (with very good reason) that it wasn’t well suited for bedtime reading. The only real memory I have of this relative is being forced to sit on her lap at a family gathering when I was very little and her telling me, “If you don’t brush your hair, your thumbs will fall off!” so it’s not surprising that she was the one who gave my parents the book. Grimms’ Fairy Tales are full of children meeting violent ends—losing limbs or getting lost in forests or being eaten by witches or wolves—but they are also full of food.

  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm knew well what it was like to want for food. Although they lived comfortably for the first few years of their lives, by the time they reached their teens they had been orphaned and left to care for their younger siblings. While compiling their collection of fairy tales they often ate only one tiny meal a day in order to make sure that their brothers and sisters were properly fed, so it makes sense that food would figure so powerfully in almost all of their stories. It is either overly abundant or absent completely; it heals and destroys, taunts, teases, nourishes, and saves; but it is always part of the narrative.

  After reading a few tales, Christie, Meg, and I always found ourselves terribly hungry and, often, while eating graham crackers and peanut butter and drinking ice-cold milk, we felt vaguely guilty thinking of the starving characters we had just read about. It was conveniently close to Christmas when we reached the story of Hansel and Gretel. We had smuggled up to the attic a few Christmas decorations that we thought our parents wouldn’t miss and switched from reading by flashlight to reading by electric Advent candle.

  All three of us had read an edited, child-friendly version of the story at some point in our lives, which made the discovery of the original version all the more shocking. We were disgusted by Hansel and Gretel’s father, so willing to kill his own children at his horrible new wife’s bidding, and incensed that he got off scot-free in the end. The scene that shocked me the most, though, was the one in which Hansel and Gretel discover the witch’s house and immediately begin to devour it with abandon, not even pausing when the old woman appears and yells that someone is eating her house! I was raised to respect adults, and I was horrified at Hansel and Gretel for being so piggish and rude to the old lady, witch or not.

  We decided that the only way to rectify this horrid misdeed was to build our own versions of the witch’s house, so Christie, Meg, and I began drawing enormous, intricate blueprints for the ultimate gingerbread house. Meg’s included spiral staircases and balconies with frosting icicles hanging from them, Christie’s had colorful stained-glass sugar windows, and mine featured pink spun-sugar clouds suspended above the house and a pistachio-pudding swamp. When we actually went to build our houses, we discovered that we were going to have to pare things down considerably.

  In the end, we decided to pool our efforts into making one grand house rather than three. We drew and cut and traced, both on paper and on dough, editing and reworking our original ideas, chatting about the fairy tale as we mixed and rolled and waited for things to cool. It was not unlike many professional kitchen experiences I would have years later, bouncing ideas off fellow cooks, drawing and measuring, dreaming huge and then simplifying, simplifying, simplifying. Hours later, eyes bleary and fingers cramped, we stood back to look proudly upon our crooked masterpiece. Even though our stomachs were grumbling and our noses were full of the aromas of molasses and cloves, we didn’t eat an inch of it, not one broken corner.

  I have always found it frustrating that gingerbread houses—which are glorious in their complete edibleness—are not meant, really, for eating. You toil and sweat, smelling good smells and touching sticky dough and mixing sweet icing for hours and your only reward is visual. It seems so wrong. This gingerbread cake is superior not only because it is actually meant for devouring but also because it is serious and grown-up and dark, which is how I think the Brothers Grimm would have wanted it to be. The blood orange syrup pairs perfectly with the cake’s heavy spicing, and it looks creepy to boot.

  “HANSEL AND GRETEL”

  Gingerbread Cake with Blood Orange Syrup

  This cake is delicious right out of the oven but gets e
ven better over the course of a few days.

  Serves 8

  2 cups all-purpose flour

  2 tablespoons ground ginger

  1½ teaspoons baking powder

  1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

  ¼ teaspoon kosher salt

  ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

  ¼ teaspoon ground cloves

  ⅛ teaspoon ground cardamom

  1 cup unsulphured molasses

  1 cup stout (such as Guinness)

  ½ teaspoon baking soda

  12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, melted

  1 firmly packed cup dark brown sugar

  1 cup granulated sugar

  3 large eggs

  Blood Orange Syrup (recipe follows)

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a Bundt pan thoroughly with nonstick cooking spray. (A 6-cup Bundt pan will yield a taller cake; a 9-cup Bundt pan will yield a shorter cake.)

  Sift together the flour, ginger, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, cloves, and cardamom in a large bowl and set aside. Combine the molasses and stout in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Remove the pan from the heat. Whisk the baking soda into the molasses-stout mixture and set aside.

  Pour the melted butter into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add both sugars to the butter and beat until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until fluffy. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the molasses-stout mixture to the butter mixture, mixing just until everything is incorporated.

  Pour the batter into the greased Bundt pan and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes. Allow the cake to cool in the pan for at least 10 minutes before turning it out onto a cake stand or plate. Drizzle the cooled blood orange syrup over each piece of the cake immediately before serving.