Kitchen Yarns
Page 1
For Michael
and
in memory of Gogo
September 5, 1931–February 24, 2018
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Contents
Introduction
The Golden Silver Palate
Recipe: Chicken Marbella
The Best Fried Chicken
Recipe: Indiana Fried Chicken
Pie Lady
Recipe: Gogo’s Lemon Meringue Pie
Gogo’s Meatballs
Recipe: Gogo’s Meatballs
Love, Lunch, and Meatball Grinders
Recipe: Gogo’s Meatball Grinders
Fancy Food
Recipe: Fancy-Lady Sandwiches
Recipe: Gogo’s Chicken Salad
Recipe: Gogo’s Ham Salad
Recipe: Glamourous Curried Chicken Salad
Recipe: Chicken Salad Veronique
Confessions of a Marsha Jordan Girl
Recipe: Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins
My Father’s Pantry
Recipe: Baked Macaroni à la Poops
Carbonara Quest
Recipe: My Perfect Spaghetti Carbonara
Recipe: Pasta Amatriciana
Sausage on Wheels
Recipe: Gloria and Hood’s Sausage and Peppers
Dinner for One
Recipe: Pork Roast with Garlic
Recipe: NoHo Pork Enchiladas
Recipe: NoHo Chicken Enchiladas
Party Like It’s 1959
Recipe: Michael’s Whiskey Sours
Recipe: Dinner-Party Cherries Jubilee
Soft Food
Recipe: French Scrambled Eggs
Recipe: Never-Fail Soufflé
Recipe: Central Mexican Guacamole
One Potato, Two
Recipe: Sam’s Potatoes
Recipe: Grace’s Cheesy Potatoes
Allure
Recipe: Mary’s Peach Pie
How to Butcher a Pig
Recipe: Matt Gennuso’s Cassoulet
Risi e Bisi
Recipe: Annabelle’s Risi e Bisi
Five Ways of Looking at the Tomato
Recipe: Gogo’s Sauce
Recipe: Matt’s Pasta with Tomatoes and Brie
Recipe: Better Than a Restaurant Caprese Salad
Recipe: Jill’s Tenderloin and Roasted Tomatoes
Recipe: Kirsty Wark’s Bloody Mary Tomatoes
How to Smoke Salmon
Recipe: Smoked Salmon Inspired by Mark and Heather
The Summer of Omelets
Recipe: The Perfect Omelet
IKEA Life
Recipe: Gogo’s Swedish Meatballs with IKEA Gravy
How to Cook Fish When You Really, Really Do Not Like Fish
Recipe: Cousin Chippy’s Swordfish Oreganato
Recipe: Green Herb Sauce
Three Potato
Recipe: Michael’s Baked Potatoes
With Thanks to the Chicken
Recipe: My Roast Chicken
Recipe: Michael’s Overnight Chicken Stock
Recipe: Tortellini en Brodo
Let Us Now Praise the English Muffin
Recipe: Italian Beef Stew
Comfort Food II
Recipe: Perfect Instant Ramen
Recipe: Perfect Grilled Cheese
Tomato Pie
Recipe: Laurie Colwin’s Tomato Pie
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I grew up eating. A lot. As the great food writer M. F. K. Fisher said, “First we eat, then we do everything else.” That describes my childhood home. In my mind, my Italian grandmother, Mama Rose, was always cooking. We lived with her in the house she moved to with her parents when they came from Conca Della Compania, a small, mountainous town an hour and a world away from Naples, Italy, to West Warwick, Rhode Island. When I was young, Mama Rose and her mother, Nonna, kept an enormous garden in the backyard, and they would sit on summer afternoons and snap the ends off string beans (served cold with garlic and mint), press tomatoes into sauce, pickle red and green peppers for the Christmas antipasto. We had fruit trees—Seckel pear, cherry, apple, fig—and blueberry and raspberry bushes. They raised rabbits and chickens, too. More than once a beloved white bunny—Snowball, Snowflake, Snowy—disappeared from its cage only for us to have funny-tasting “chicken” that night at dinner.
My mother baked pies—lemon meringue and chocolate cream—and a fancy Friday night dinner of creamed tuna on toast, but otherwise she left the cooking to Mama Rose, who pretty much banned us kids from her kitchen, which was the smallest room in a house of small rooms. So small that the refrigerator didn’t fit in it and stood instead right by the dining room table. How she fed so many people—as many as thirty on Sundays and holidays—in a kitchen with no countertops and just a four-burner electric stove, I don’t know. But she did, turning out homemade gnocchi, polenta with kale or red sauce and sausage, gallons of spaghetti sauce, and hundreds of meatballs. For reasons I never knew, we called that little kitchen “the pantry,” and the room others might call a dining room “the kitchen.” We kids would sit in the kitchen at the green-and-brown enamel-topped table, with its pattern of sheaves of wheat, to mix the ground beef, egg, parsley, garlic, and bread crumbs for the meatballs. That was the closest we came to getting any cooking lessons. Mostly, we were told to get out of Mama Rose’s way so that she could cook.
My father manned the grill, as most fathers did in the 1960s. He turned out thick T-bone steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs, Italian sausages, and his two specialties: Chicken Bountiful, which was half a chicken topped with potatoes and green beans and cream of celery soup and wrapped in tinfoil, and shish kebabs, which were chunks of steak marinated in his secret sauce. We weren’t allowed to help at the grill, either, and really, who wanted to? Grilling happened on summer weekends, and we wanted nothing more than to run through the sprinkler in our bathing suits, drink cold soda, or sit in front of the fan watching television.
All of this is to say that even though I lived in a house filled with good food, no one ever taught me to cook. In 1979, I was working as a TWA flight attendant, based in Boston, and I lived in a tall apartment building that overlooked the bay. I was usually away on trips, flying to San Francisco or Las Vegas. When I was home, I mostly ate out with some combination of my five roommates—at Regina Pizzeria in the North End, TGI Fridays on Exeter Street, Durgin-Park or Cricket’s at Faneuil Hall. One day I found myself alone in the apartment, a rare experience with so many roommates. I remember enjoying the pleasure of drinking coffee in my little twin bed and not having to talk to anyone, give love advice, or hear complaints about passengers. By noon, I was hungry. If my mother didn’t send me home after a visit to Rhode Island with a lasagna or a bag of meatballs, I had nothing to eat. So I dressed and went to Faneuil Hall, where I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich from one of the shops there.
“Eleven dollars,” the woman said as she handed me a white bag with my sandwich and a pickle inside.
“Eleven dollars!” I shrieked. Or maybe I didn’t say it out loud. All I know is that I made a vow to never again pay that much for something I could surely make myself.
A friend had given me Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for my college graduation the year before, and I methodically worked my way through those recipes, ruining more dinners than I can count. Soon I was clipping recipes from the newspaper and buying other cookbooks—Moosewood, Laurel’s Kitchen, The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet. Over the next few years, I taught myself to cook. Sometimes I reached too far—stuffed pork chops with apple compote, whole wheat pizza that I could have used for a doorstop. But slowly I learned how to make an omelet and scramble eggs, use leftover chicken for curried chicken salad, make a stock from the
chicken bones.
By the time I was married and raising a family, I was a good home cook. As in the household in which I grew up, life at my house revolved around the kitchen. Something was always simmering or roasting or marinating. But unlike in my childhood home, my kids stood on stools right beside me, sprinkling shredded Gruyère on potatoes for an au gratin, layering slices of apples for a crisp, whipping cream, or chopping vegetables. One of those kids, my son, Sam, grew up and moved to Brooklyn, where he makes dinners for his friends—Spaghetti Amatriciana or risotto or Chicken Chili. One of those kids, my daughter Grace, died when she was only five, already the expert Apple Crisp maker in our family. One of those kids, my fourteen-year-old daughter, Annabelle, lives with me across town from her father in a loft in a converted factory, where every night I cook her favorite food—roast chicken, rice and peas, homemade macaroni and cheese—and we sit together at our table that my friend Steve made for me and we eat together. “It seems to me,” M. F. K. Fisher wrote, “that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it.”
This is how my culinary life began—in a big, noisy family, in rooms overflowing with people and food, with the rustic peasant food of our village. But even in the midst of this, no one ever taught me how to cook. Kitchen Yarns is my journey from that family and that childhood through my early efforts at cooking—flank steak marinated in Good Seasons salad dressing to impress a boy I liked in college; pesto made with two cups of dried basil—to diligently copying recipes from The Silver Palate Cookbook as a young single woman living in New York City to trying to make the perfect spaghetti carbonara, like the one I ate in Rome on a layover as a TWA flight attendant. Eventually, I became a very good home cook, throwing elaborate dinner parties and cooking in the kitchen with my own children. Today, I’m married to the food writer Michael Ruhlman, who has taught me how to properly dice an onion and make chicken stock in the oven while I sleep, and who mixes me his recipe for whiskey sours at the end of a long day.
I realized as, over the years, I wrote essays about food—Laurie Colwin’s Tomato Pie, my father’s mac and cheese—that as M. F. K. Fisher said, writing about food is really writing about love. When I write an essay about food, I am really uncovering something deeper in my life—loss, family, confusion, growing up, growing away from what I knew, returning, grief, joy, and, yes, love.
It was impossible to put these essays in chronological order. Like so many things about complicated issues, the themes and settings and time frames overlap, recede, jump forward. I tried to put them in loose chronological order, but my adult self and my present self keep having new realizations about my younger self, and so that intrudes on those earlier recollections and stories I tell. They move crookedly from my earliest memories of fried chicken, to the food my mother made when I was a child, to that Spaghetti Carbonara and Silver Palate Chicken Marbella, to my young children, my divorce, my new happy marriage. To me, there is a shape that is not unlike a recipe: it starts at the beginning, but as ingredients are added, it becomes something different. Each essay stands alone, but taken as a whole, they make a life—mine.
Kitchen
Yarns
The Golden Silver Palate
The first time I made pesto sauce, I used dried basil. Lots of it. Two entire containers 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 coleslaw. He bought live soft-shell crabs in Chinatown, fried them in butter, and put them in a sandwich smeared with homemade mayonnaise.
Until I fell in love with Josh, my idea of a fancy dinner came straight out of that 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 C 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, cooked al dente. It is surely a sign of how much Josh loved me that he ate my pesto sauce at all, even as I spit it out, mumbling that it was, well, a little dry. Afterward, 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 that 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. When I was 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 Aykroyd skit on Saturday Night Live. During a brief misguided vegetarian phase, I made a whole wheat pizza from the 1976 paean to vegetarian cooking Laurel’s Kitchen, and gazpacho and tabbouleh salad from Mollie Katzen’s seminal Moosewood Cookbook. When I latched 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 then 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 that herbs came fresh and green, who was just starting to give grown-up dinner parties, who saw herself as urban and sophisticated but needed—was 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 seeing 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 were 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 the Silver Palate’s 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 that volume, I bought The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, too, and soon my repertoire expanded even more. Apple Crisp, Stuffed Pork Loin, Pasta with Sausage and Peppers.
One o
f 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 book. 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 the 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 re-created dozens of times for 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. 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 winey. Disappointed, I placed it on the platter I’d bought in Italy, added the chopped fresh parsley, and brought it to the table.