But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!: Adventures in Eating, Drinking, and Making Merry
Page 5
1 cup tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped (if tomatoes are not in season, canned are better than the hothouse varieties)
4 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
2⁄3 cup dry white wine
¼ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons chopped gherkins
3 tablespoons capers, drained
Stream okra for 5 minutes, or until just fork tender. Allow to cool, but do not refrigerate.
Heat the oil and add the shallots; cook until just wilted. Add tomatoes and simmer for approximately 5 minutes. Add vinegar, garlic, wine, salt, and pepper. Simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, or until reduced to a thick sauce. Correct seasoning. Add gherkins and capers and serve warm over okra.
NOTE: This sauce is also really, really excellent with grilled, steamed, roasted, or simply sautéed fish.
6
My Dinners with Jason
Julie had Julia; I had Jason. (Actually, I had Julia, too, but when I made my first quiche from Mastering the Art of French Cooking at the tender age of ten, there were no computers, much less blogs.)
I met Jason Epstein in the mid-1980s when I was sent to interview him for U.S. News & World Report. He was the legendary editorial director at Random House, a cofounder of both The New York Review of Books and the Library of America, inventor of the quality paperback, and editor of Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, and E. L. Doctorow. The subject at hand was the future of the book business, but all I remember of that day was a lively, and lengthy, conversation about food—specifically the importance of brining a loin of pork, a process I’d learned about (long before it became fashionable) in the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, which Jason happened to have published.
In the more than two decades since, the conversation has continued pretty much uninterrupted: Jason telling me (a Southerner!) about the excellence of Sherman’s memoirs while mixing a perfect martini (vermouth poured into the pitcher and promptly poured out, replaced with Bombay Sapphire gin from the freezer) and serving it with a lemon peel in a thin, thin glass from Harry’s Bar in Venice. Jason showing me how to make superior versions of the Chicken Grande from Mosca’s outside New Orleans or the lobster roll at Amagansett, New York’s Lunch. Jason pressing me into duty to help prepare an outdoor dinner for thirty-five—a gift originally promised by Daniel Boulud in thanks for Jason’s publishing his first cookbook (and which he had to apologetically back out of when his then-boss Sirio Maccioni would not let him leave Le Cirque).
He took me to Lutèce before it closed and Daniel as soon as it opened, and invited me into his kitchen while Wolfgang Puck made duck for both of us. Among his first gifts to me were a heavy copper saucepan and a complete set of Edmund Wilson.
That same combination of the literary and the culinary is seamlessly contained in Jason’s Eating: A Memoir. There’s the young Jason in the kitchen of his grandmother Ida, a determined rather than gifted cook to whom he dedicates his recipe for chicken pot pie. There’s the teenage Jason making eggs for Gertrude Lawrence in a diner on Cape Cod or enjoying a perfect hamburger beside a lake in Winthrop, Maine. There he is on the Île-de-France, honeymooning with his first wife, Barbara, and reading a new translation of War and Peace. They ate chicken sandwiches with Chablis for lunch on deck and shared a New Year’s Eve table with Buster Keaton, Wilson, and Wilson’s then wife, Elena.
Interspersed throughout the charming tales (short stories, really) are wonderful—and wonderfully doable—recipes, written in an equally conversational tone. Though I’ve rarely seen him follow a recipe himself, he is responsible for some of the great cookbooks—in addition to Boulud, Puck, and Alice Waters, he also published Maida Heatter, Charlie Palmer, and Patrick O’Connell, just to name a few. He met Heatter at Craig Claiborne’s annual summer party and by the time he left he’d become her editor. After a single dinner at Chez Panisse, he scribbled the terms of a deal with Waters on a scrap of paper over soufflés and coffee—in part because he wanted the recipe for the “silken fugue” of a bouillabaisse he’d just eaten. The result, two years later, was no less a cultural game-changer than Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which he also published.
Eating is an unpretentious chronicle of an extraordinary life well lived, an antidote of sorts in this age of Rachael Ray and Iron Chef and meals made in an ever-decreasing amount of minutes. To read it is to vow to live better, though not necessarily extravagantly. The last recipe in the book is for a simple apple or pear tarte Tatin followed by the words, “And so life goes on.” A swell one it is, too, especially when Jason is around to enhance it.
Recently, for example, he e-mailed me his latest variation of a cauliflower puree he’s been making in one form or another for years (I’ve already published a version with curry). It is so easy and so refreshing and as delicious as everything else he’s ever shared with me, including the pear tarte Tatin I first tasted on my twenty-eighth birthday, the same one on which he gave me the Wilson book and my now-seasoned—and much treasured—saucepan.
CAULIFLOWER PUREE WITH MINT
( Yield: 6 servings )
1 head cauliflower, broken up into florets
1 bunch mint
Whole milk or cream
Butter (optional)
Salt
Freshly ground white pepper
Steam the cauliflower until very tender and put in the bowl of a food processer. Process until pureed, and add mint and ¼ to ½ cup of milk or cream and a tablespoon of butter (this is optional—it makes it a tiny bit richer, but is not necessary for the texture) to smooth it out. Add salt and white pepper to taste.
JASON’S TARTE TATIN
From Eating: A Memoir
Tarte Tatin can also be made with pears (comice are best, just as they begin to ripen). For the traditional tarte Tatin, however, you must use apples, preferably Golden Delicious, which are not good eaten raw but hold their shape nicely in a tart. The tarte Tatin is baked upside down, with the apples under the crust, which, when the finished tart is flipped, becomes the bottom. I peel, core, and quarter 4 Golden Delicious apples. Then, in the copper Tatin pan that I bought from Fred Bridge fifty years ago, I caramelize a ½ cup or so of granulated sugar in a ¼ stick of unsalted butter until the sugar becomes the color of honey. Be careful not to cook the caramel for more than a few seconds beyond this stage or the sugar will darken too much. You can move the caramel with a wooden spoon to even the color, which will be a little darker in some places than others. Then turn off the flame and wipe the wooden spoon clean (or the sugar will harden and stick to it).
Carefully, for the caramel is burning hot, lay the apple wedges thick side down in a circle on the caramel, shaping one of the quarters to fill the center of the circle. Use any remaining scraps to fill gaps and sprinkle a good handful of arrowroot over the apples to hold the syrup. Now make a crust of simple pie dough by spinning in a food processor 2 cups of all-purpose flour with a stick of unsalted butter cut into chunks until the butter is incorporated but still a little lumpy. Then add a ½ cup or a little less of ice water, a sprinkle at a time, processing after each addition, until the dough begins to form.
As soon as it forms, remove it from the processor onto a marble slab or plastic sheet, and knead dough into an oblong. You might enclose the dough in plastic wrap at this point and let it rest in the refrigerator for a half hour or so to relax the gluten, or you can skip this step, as I usually do. Then roll out the dough in a circle about an eighth of an inch thick, place the tarte pan with its apples (or pears) adjacent to the dough, roll the dough onto the rolling pin, and place it over the apples, discarding the trimmings or saving them for another purpose. With a fork I tuck the edge of the dough down into the pan. Then I slip the pie onto the middle shelf of an oven just under 360 degrees, at which temperature the fruit will not stick to the pan when you turn it right side up. But if you forget and some of the slices stick, just shove them with a wooden spoon from the p
an into the gaps where they belong and smooth everything out. When the crust begins to darken, after about 40 minutes, slip the pie out of the oven and let it cool for 10 minutes or so.
Then carefully place the plate on which you plan to serve the tarte over the pastry and flip the pie over. If the syrup is too runny, spoon it back over the pie and with a damp paper towel wipe up any excess syrup from the serving plate. A dedicated tarte Tatin pan is not essential. A well-seasoned iron skillet or even an 8-inch sauté pan will do just as well. Serve the tarte warm with vanilla ice cream.
7
Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah (and Pearl and Ernestine)
When Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins was published in 1971, my father sent a copy to William F. Buckley, Jr., who immediately (and wisely) became obsessed with all things Percy and asked the author to appear on Firing Line, his long-running public affairs show. When the deal was done, Daddy flew Buckley in his small plane to see Percy at home in Covington, Louisiana. Percy met them on the little runway, and the first thing he said to Buckley after he disembarked was that he was delighted to meet him, having just seen him a few days earlier on The Dinah Shore Show. Though he laughed about it later, Buckley was stunned, and not just a little embarrassed. He’d figured no one whose opinion he actually cared about would ever watch a daytime talk show, and his stint on Dinah was not necessarily the first impression he wanted to make on his new hero.
Both men were among the smartest I ever met, but Percy was also a great consumer of pop culture. He took a break from writing every day by tuning into his favorite soap and he once had a passionate conversation with Eudora Welty about The Incredible Hulk. One of the few books he ever reviewed was Elmore Leonard’s Bandits; he was a big fan of Larry King, and, apparently, of Dinah. I thought about them both not long ago when I ran across Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah: Dinah Shore’s Personal Cookbook in a used bookstore. The cover features the ageless Dinah herself, all white teeth and perfect blond coif, dishing something out of a pot in a classic 1970s kitchen. When I was a kid, I loved Dinah, too. She had a deep, honeyed voice and was an early cougar—she and the much younger Burt Reynolds were an item for years. What I hadn’t known until I came across the title was that she was also a good cook and a prolific entertainer. The book features more than two hundred recipes and anecdotes about guests both on her show and in her kitchen, including one about George Plimpton. (Clearly, Buckley was not her only erudite acquaintance.)
These days, Gwyneth Paltrow gets a lot of ink for being a “real” cook. She did her own PBS show, on cooking in Spain with Mark Bittman and Mario Batali. She wrote a cookbook inspired by her father and she is almost certainly the only actress to have made the cover of both Vogue and Bon Appétit. She has a niche because none of her contemporaries are fellow cooks. But this was not always the case. Years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Sophia Loren’s Recipes and Memories, which has a mean Spaghetti al Limone and lots of very glam photos of Sophia in the kitchen and out, with friends like Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton, and Gregory Peck.
My favorite, though, is a treasure called Pearl’s Kitchen: An Extraordinary Cookbook by Pearl Bailey. Pearl was another childhood idol—I loved to hear her sing and talk about her husband, the Italian-American jazz drummer Louie Bellson, on The Tonight Show, and I remember when Nixon appointed her “Ambassador of Love” to the United Nations. Pearl was born in Virginia and had a ton of soul, and I should have known she’d be a great cook and storyteller. A recipe for Pork Chops and Green Apples, for example, starts off like this: “I had a dinner a few nights ago that was more exciting, actually sexier, than a best-selling novel. What, you may ask, does sex have to do with food? Darlin’, I am not going into that right now. Just let me tell you that what got me so excited was pork chops, buttered rice, and Mama’s cabbage.” A two-page entry on how to make the perfect cup of coffee begins with Pearl’s opinion that “women have mind (and men have muscle), but at night … the brain sort of turns way down to low,” which is why, when she wakes up, “I have to do something to get that baby going again.” She reports that when she served Baked Sole Spontaneous “the whole family had a real ball.” She rails against aluminum nonstick pans that are way too thin and prefers butter or lard to margarine, which she loathes. There are lots more gems inside, including a recipe for smoked trout by her friend and avid fisherman Bing Crosby and a long riff on how she made her children learn to do housework.
Reading Pearl’s book, I thought a lot about my Nashville grandmother’s cook, Ernestine Turner—she shared Bailey’s imposing stature and larger than life personality and they both cooked a lot of the same stuff like “greasy greens” and fried apples. Ernestine was the president of the Lady Par Busters Golf Club and was forever irritating my grandfather, a member of Augusta National, by winning more and bigger trophies than he did. When I was old enough, I loved going to the Par Buster parties at Ernestine’s house. The gin flowed, the food was always fried chicken and potato salad, and Ernestine was always glam. In one of my favorite snaps from those events, she’s wearing my grandmother’s gold silk dressing gown with frog closures as an evening dress, her arms held high above her head, doing the shimmy.
I spent countless hours in the kitchen with Ernestine and her father, Louis King, who also worked for my grandmother. They taught me how to play poker and to dance the funky chicken, and the first time I ever got drunk, it was on the wine my grandmother let me drink at Ernestine’s kitchen-table birthday party. Long after I was old enough to eat lunch in the dining room, I opted to stay at that blue Formica table where the lunches frequently included green beans or black-eyed peas cooked forever with a country ham hock. No matter what was on offer, there was hot water cornbread, a sort of fried cornmeal quenelle I’ve only ever encountered in middle Tennessee. Deceptively simple, the batter is comprised of nothing but boiling water, cornmeal, and salt, but it has everything to do with the individual cook’s hand and intuition. Ernestine’s perfect pieces were crispy on the outside, almost silky on the inside, and, when sliced in half and slathered with butter, pretty much the best things anyone ever ate.
When I went off to college she mailed me foil-lined shoeboxes full of her famous fudge cake and apple cake and when I came back to visit she made the most elegant biscuits and a caramelized leg of lamb for dinner and cheese dreams when my friends came by for drinks. I still can’t believe I didn’t stand at her side every time she dropped those hot water cornbread “dumplings” into the bubbling grease of her iron skillet or that I didn’t beg her to write down more recipes in her flowing hand. I guess I hoped she’d live forever.
Ernestine died of uterine cancer more than twenty years ago and since then I’ve been trying with mixed success to emulate some of her signatures. The good news is that Pearl does live forever—in print and on the Internet. One of the most joyous YouTube clips I’ve ever seen is a duet of Pearl and Dinah on a 1960 episode of one of Dinah’s early TV shows. Everything, it seems, comes full circle. Like Ernestine and my grandparents, Dinah was from Tennessee, and like Pearl, she was a college graduate. Dinah got a degree in sociology from Vanderbilt in 1938; Pearl earned a degree in theology from Georgetown in 1985. The duet features Dinah singing “Mack the Knife” while Pearl “explains it” and it is impossible to watch without tears in your eyes and an enormous grin on your face—pretty much the same thing that happened whenever I ate Ernestine’s cooking.
Below, I’m including recipes for the aptly named “cheese dreams” (easy and decadent cocktail bites) and a warm-weather variation on Ernestine’s black-eyed peas. In summer, Ernestine always accompanied the latter with a platter of sliced peeled tomatoes and trimmed whole scallions. Both were such perfect counterpoints to the salty starchy peas that I made a salad of all three ingredients and added fresh basil, an herb that neither Ernestine nor Pearl nor Dinah stuck around long enough to embrace.
While I know I’ll never match the sheer crispy/creamy perfection of Ernestine’s cornbread, lately
I’ve had help in the form of one of the few recipes I’ve seen for it in print in The Gift of Southern Cooking by Scott Peacock and Edna Lewis. Peacock writes that he’d enjoyed hot water cornbread only in his small hometown of Hartford, Alabama, and that Miss Lewis, a Virginia native, had never heard of it. Clearly, this stuff is limited to a handful of pockets of the South. In this respect it is similar to another fried bread known as a cala. At the turn of the last century in New Orleans, these rice fritters were such a breakfast staple that “Cala Women” sold them hot from baskets all over the French Quarter. Stephen Stryjewski, chef/co-owner at New Orleans’s superb Cochon, substitutes corn in his. They are a bit easier to perfect than the cornbread and would go well with the black-eyed pea salad. When they are on the menu at the restaurant, Stephen serves them as a first course topped with a simple tomato basil salad.
CHEESE DREAMS
( Yield: About 30 to 40 pieces )
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
½ pound sharp cheddar cheese, grated
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 egg
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon Worcestershire
Cayenne pepper or Tabasco
1 loaf Pepperidge Farm white bread (or a comparable firm white sandwich bread)
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and lightly butter or oil a cookie sheet.
Cream the butter and cheese in the bowl of an electric mixer. Add cream, egg, salt, mustard, and Worcestershire, and mix well. Add a healthy pinch of cayenne or a couple of shots of Tabasco to taste and blend.
Cut crusts off bread slices, cut into rectangles, and cut in half again. Make a sandwich of two squares by spreading cheese mixture between each piece. Spread cheese on top of each “sandwich” and spread a thin film around all four sides. Place bottom side down on cookie sheet and bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown.