This velvety mousse of foie gras topped with an ethereal swoosh of parmesan foam (that’s a port reduction between them) was one of the most seductive dishes I’ve ever encountered.

I’ve been remembering it because I’m deep into the sequel to The Paris Novel and at the moment Stella is having her first meal at Jamin. The most celebrated chef in Paris has just offered to make a special menu for her, and preparing to write that I pored over my notes from the many meals I’ve had at Joel Robuchon’s restaurants.

I was astonished to find that I was just as excited about a dinner I had in New York in 2018 as I’d been at my first meal at Jamin thirty-five years earlier. That is fairly astonishing because, as I once wrote, four stars are easier to get than to keep. But the late, great chef never faltered.

I’ll share a few thoughts about that at the end of this post.

1983
It was before the Euro (the franc was trading between 5 and 6 to the dollar), and long before any other country (Spain, Denmark, Australia) started stealing the city’s thunder. It was a time when those of us who cared about food always went to Paris.

And when we got there we always tried to get a seat at Jamin because Joel Robuchon was widely considered the best chef in the world. At the time he hadn’t started trotting around the globe creating his far-flung restaurant empire. All he had was Jamin, an intimate little place with only 45 seats. I remember my first meal there: I took a bite, put my fork down and said, “It’s hard to believe that human hands could have created this dish.” Everything about that meal was astonishingly delicious and technically perfect.

NEW YORK, 2018
Had the foie gras mousse that introduced the meal been the only thing I tasted at Atelier Robuchon, I would have gone home happy. A Robuchon classic, it’s a small miracle, every bite a reminder of how good it is to be alive.

But all the food at the chef’s latest New York outpost is thrilling. Even the breadbasket. It is extremely difficult to force yourself not to eat every morsel it contains.

That would, however, be a mistake. Because you want to experience as much of this food as you possibly can. (Do not be misled when the waiter tells you that the opening courses are mere bites; they may be small, but they’re so rich, so powerful that each forkful packs a wallop.)

Foie gras again, in a different package. This one is simply a slab served with toast and a little squiggle of date marmalade, the richness cut with lemon. Insanely too much for a single person.

The loveliest carpaccio of sea bream, showered with lime and dusted with espalette peppers. Robuchon was one of the first French chefs to appreciate the food of Japan, and you are constantly being reminded of that fact.

Surprise! I was expecting langoustine en papillote to arrive wrapped in parchment, but this package is entirely edible. And as gorgeously fried as it would be in Tokyo’s finest temple of tempura.

Eggplant has never felt so pampered.

Lobster - the softest, sweetest meat- bathed in Robuchon’s favorite ravigotte Malabar sauce. Lively and peppery as a samba, it simply dances off the plate.

Caramelized quail. A bit of foie gras. And those potatoes! Are Robuchon potatoes really that good? No - they’re better. More butter than spud and topped with truffle, these potatoes will invade your dreams.

The potato recipe’s below, should you be brave enough to attempt a recipe that contains only 4 ingredients (counting the salt), and relies entirely on technique.

Duck, lovely duck, dressed up for the circus.

And finally a little edible terrarium. What a sweet way to send you laughing back into the real world.

The New York Atelier is gone, but a dozen Ateliers are still sprinkled around various corners of the globe. The concept is that the guests are seated at high counters all around the kitchen so they can watch the chefs as they work. I had my first Atelier experience in 2006 when Robuchon came to New York. He and I were both on Charlie Rose one night, and he insisted that I come to dinner at his new Atelier in the Four Seasons Hotel.

The meal was, of course, fabulous. But what I remember most is watching Guy Job, the producer of Robuchon’s television shows (and one of the forces behind the Ateliers), eat his dinner: I have never seen anyone do it with greater gusto. As he inhaled the lobster dish - there is always a lobster dish at a Robuchon restaurant - he confided that this was a special treat for him because in his home they kept kosher.

Robuchon was a great chef, but he might be most famous for his humble mashed potatoes. The chef took advantage of the spud’s ability to absorb an extraordinary amount of butter: a pound for every two pounds of potatoes. (Being a reasonable person, you probably balk at all that butter, but you owe it to yourself to try this at least once.)

A few notes on potatoes. They are divided into baking potatoes, like russets, and boiling potatoes like Yukon Golds. Robuchon preferred a kind of boiler called ratte, although you could easily substitute fingerlings or Yukon Golds.

Robuchon insisted that the potatoes be boiled whole with their skins on and then peeled while the potatoes are still hot. It hurts! But it’s important because it allows the trapped steam to escape.

Robuchon Potatoes
2 pounds boiling potatoes, such as Yukon Gold, fingerlings or ratte
1 pound unsalted butter, chilled and cut into cubes
1/4 cup milk, heated almost to boiling.

Boil the potatoes in well-salted water for 18 minutes (or longer if your potatoes are large).

Drain the potatoes and quickly peel them. (The chef considered peeling the hot potatoes the most difficult part of the recipe.)

Put the now empty potato pot back on the stove over low heat.

Heat the milk in a small pot until almost boiling; Robuchon insisted that the milk should be tres chaud.

Sieve the drained potatoes through the finest disc of a food mill right back into the warm pot. (You could use a ricer, but the results are not quite as magical.) Stir them, over the heat, with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon until they are very dry. Still stirring vigorously, work the cold butter, pat by pat, into the potatoes. Keep stirring; this is hard work.

When the mixture is very creamy, slowly add the hot milk and season to taste with salt. At this point Robuchon put the potatoes through a tamis, an even finer sieve. Less picky people will probably skip this step.

Serve to 6 lucky people.

The chef memoir is an increasingly interesting genre. The best (I’ll be posting a list of other favorites next week), do more than simply tell us what is going on behind the kitchen door. Few, however, are as fascinating as Eric Ripert’s 32 Yolks which poses a few questions about why people become chefs in the first place – and even more about why they put up with the punishing work.

Eric’s childhood was heartbreaking - and familiar. In so many classic books (David Copperfield, A Little Princess…) the child leads a blissful existence for a few short years and is then robbed of happiness by death, poverty or in Eric’s case, divorce. There was also, as is so often the case, an evil step-parent.

But Eric’s stepfather was replaced by a mean mentor in the guise of Joel Robuchon. Eric’s description of working in that kitchen is one that stays with you. You leave the book questioning the price of perfection. Robuchon’s food was a gift to his guests, but the cost to the creators (including the chef himself) was enormous.

A little lagniappe: a friend recently sent me this Air France menu from a 1985 trip between Madagascar and Djeddaha on Christmas Eve. I’m about to board a plane for Paris, and it’s nice to remember that there was once a time when flying was fun.

The editors considered the event little more than another meal to review, and most of my article got left on the cutting room floor. You don’t get a sense of the electricity that filled the air, or learn that every important American food person was in that room. You can’t hear the sound that rippled through the crowd when the doors were thrown open to reveal the softly lit space, the gasps when we saw the gorgeous edible centerpieces. Nor can you understand how brave the chefs were to allow movie cameras into the kitchen so the diners could witness the chaos in the kitchen. But it was what made us all feel that we were participating in a historic moment.

The food was delicious and, for the most part, new. Olympia oysters - the only oysters native to the West Coast - which had been decimated by overfishing were just beginning to make a comeback. Few people had ever tasted them. American caviar was in its infancy, the American goat cheese industry was only four years old, and red fish, a Louisiana delicacy, was just being introduced to the rest of the nation. (And thanks to Paul Prudhomme, would soon became so popular that it became endangered.) Alice Waters’ beautiful mesclun salad? She had half of Berkeley pulling up their lawns to grow the tiny greens for her, but they would soon become a commercial product - and de rigeur in dining rooms across the country. Pizza, of course, was about to have its moment. The one food on this menu which still hasn’t gained traction is that tripe gumbo. One can always hope.

About the last line in the article… Paul Prudhomme was about to create America’s first pop-up restaurant; a few months after this dinner he closed his New Orleans establishment and brought the entire staff to San Francisco. They recreated K-Paul’s in one of Bill Graham’s nightclubs. There were no reservations, but people were so eager to taste his food they happily lined up for 12 hours to secure a place at the table.

There was no balsamic vinegar in any of the dishes served at the Stanford Court. No surprise: balsamic vinegar was pretty much unknown in the United States at that time. The meal described below (it’s from Comfort Me with Apples) is one I ate in 1979 at Darrell Corti’s house.

The great balsamico that Darrell served us was, of course, the thick, intense very aged elixir that I wrote about here. I dole it out in thimblefuls. But for everyday balsamic Bariani is the brand I use; made in the traditional manner in California, it’s far superior to the stuff you find in the supermarket.

I’m at the Traverse City Food and Wine Festival, where I’ve just had a spectacular dinner created by a number of Michigan chefs. The restaurants in this city are truly impressive; I’ve only had time to sample a couple, but I’ll be back to this beautiful city.

My favorite bite at the dinner was from Umbo: rich, crisp brown butter brioche hugging a delicate scallop mousse and crowned with caviar. Among other things it made me long for more brioche in my life.

There was also this impressive combination of green beans, peaches (the peaches here are fantastic right now) and capicola from Detroit’s Selden Standard ….

and this Sardinian gnocchetti with pesto trapanese from Detroit’s She Wolf…

I also want to give a shout out to Amical, where I ate a truly delicious rendition of my own recipe for spaghetti with bottarga.

But they had nothing on San Francisco’s Maggie Waldron, a tiny blue-eyed woman who lived on a Sausalito houseboat and spent her days running the impressive Ketchum Food Center. I met Maggie in the early seventies (at the same party where I met James Beard), and was instantly enthralled by her stories. She was the woman who invented the Contadina slogan “They put 8 great tomatoes in that itty bitty can,” painted potatoes green to remind us that they’re vegetables, and introduced the kiwi to America.

Maggie promoted (mostly) good food: "Technological food doesn't taste as good as real food," she always insisted. A force of nature - who could say no to her? - she managed to persuade the HJ Heinz Company to send her around the world and turn their 1983 annual report into this astonishing book.

Of all the cooks in the book - and every one of them is inspirational - the person who most enthralled me was Boonchoo Pholwatana, head chef at Bussaracum Restaurant in Bangkok. At the time no Thai restaurants in America were serving anything close to the rarified royal cuisine that Boonchoo championed, and I was so fascinated by the description of the food that I ended up going to Bangkok to take cooking lessons from her.

This menu from 1984, is definitely not in the royal style; it was the farewell dinner friends threw for me at Berkeley’s first Thai restaurant, Siam Cuisine the night before I moved to Los Angeles. It was one of my favorite restaurants - and a really wonderful meal.

If you’re ever going to attempt a clambake, now’s the time to do it.

This recipe, from The United States Regional Cook Book, was published in 1949, but I imagine that even then few people attempted the real thing. Before you begin, make sure you have a wheelbarrow of seaweed or hay on hand - not to mention an army of small children.

If you’re looking for less of a project, here’s a dish I find myself making very often at this time of year.

A friend came by yesterday with armfuls of lacinato kale from her garden. I’d already bought tiny new potatoes for dinner, and corn and tomatoes, and I had a pan of peppers, onions and green garlic on the stove, sending that spectacular fresh garlic aroma up into the air. But it seemed a shame not to use the kale while it was still hours from the earth, so I poked around in the refrigerator until I came up with this dish. We all liked it so much that I’m calling to ask for more kale; I could eat this every day.

Spicy Tuscan Kale
Strip 3 bunches of lacinato kale from the ribs and coarsely tear them into pieces. Drop them into a few quarts of boiling salted water for about a minute, drain and run under cold water to stop the cooking. Set aside.

Pour a glug or two of olive oil into a frying pan, and add 4 anchovies. Stir about until the little fish disintegrate, then add two coarsely chopped onions. Shake in some chile flakes and salt and pepper to taste. Add 4 smashed cloves of garlic and cook until it is all insanely fragrant. Add the kale and a bit more oil and cook just until it comes together into a dark, soft, glorious mush. Toss with grated Parmesan and crisp bread crumbs.

If you go to Heirloom Lodge in West Stockbridge tonight, you can have the pleasure of eating this shortcake with local peaches and drinking some of the wonderful wines on the restaurant’s list.

But if you come in the fall, you can an even better experience. Matt Strauss, Heirloom’s chef and owner, describes his new project this way.

I am pleased to announce the first November Workshops at Heirloom Lodge, hosted in conjunction with the Granville House in Great Barrington, which offers exceedingly friendly, comfortable and tasteful lodging just down the road. The workshops will take place over two three-night periods, an immersion in French wines and cuisine November 8-10, and a little trip to Italy in the Berkshires the following week, November 15-17.

The price per couple, including three private nights at the restaurant of food and—extraordinary bottles from the cellar - lodging, transportation to and from dinner at Heirloom Lodge, and daytime seminars and demonstrations, optional lunches, ranges between $2,500 and $3,500 per couple, depending on accommodations. I would be happy to provide more details about the two days and three nights, along with a list of world-class wines we intend to open over the course of the two workshops. For more information, click here.

The authors will surprise you. Wang Yin is director Wayne Wang, who wrote this just before his first film Chan is Missing catapulted him to Hollywood fame; he went on to direct films like The Joy Luck Club, Maid in America and this beautiful portrait of Cecilia Chiang, Soul of a Banquet.

Visionary architect Fu-Tung Cheng became famous as the poet of concrete.

And Issac Cronin, who I knew as the author of the International Squid Cookbook, is a social critic. What we alll had in common was a deep interest in Chinese food and a desire to give readers a better understanding of the Chinese food that was available in California.

I remember it as a halcyon time when we drove up and down the state, eating meals with their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles. I learned about Chiu Chow and Hakka cooking. The chefs we interviewed told us about their training; I’ve never forgotten Mr. Pu saying “The Chinese have myriad flavors that are important to their cooking but in my opinion if you take away the essence of milk from French cooking not much is left.”

This is one of the very first articles I shared when La Briffe began in 2021; I’m reposting it now in a more legible style because readers have complained that the old format made it almost impossible to read. (They were right.)

My assistant at the time, Phoebe Papademetriou, wanted to know how many of the restaurants were still around. So she did some research. Shockingly, only 8 were still with us: Far East Cafe, Peking, Chinese Friends Restaurant, San Wang, Twin Dragon Restaurant, Bow Hon, Kam Lok and the beloved Yuet Lee. I’m happy to say that all 8 are still in business. Most of the others have turned into newer Chinese restaurants, but one is now a New Orleans style restaurant, Narai is now a Russian restaurant and Chuck’s Fountain has become a beauty salon.

When I bought my first Sichuan cookbook, I was in heaven. It was 1974, and The Good Food of Sichuan made it possible for American home cooks to attempt what was then a fairly arcane cuisine. Although it was difficult to source authentic Chinese ingredients, I worked my way through the cookbook and it changed the way we ate at my house.

My first encounter with Fuchsia Dunlop was equally impactful. Today Fuchsia is a beloved institution, but when her first book, The Food of Sichuan was published in 2001 she was virtually unknown. The book, which has since been revised, was unlike anything else on the market and once again the food at my house was better because of it.

Fuchsia has written many books, and they’re all excellent. Her Invitation to a Banquet: The History of Chinese Food, is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in food.

As you will see from the article below, I met Fuchsia when she was just starting out and instantly signed her up to write for Gourmet. (If you want to read some of the early pieces Fuchsia wrote for Gourmet, you will find them here. )

“I know you’re interested in Chinese food.” Guy Diamond, editor of Time Out London, was sharing lunch with me at a modest Indian restaurant. “I have someone I really think you ought to meet. Her name....” he looked slightly embarrassed, “is Fuchsia.” He lowered his voice, adding, with all the diffidence of a slightly shameful revelation, “…hippie parents.”

Was he trying to sell her short? I wondered; it takes a rare editor to hand a talented writer off to another editor, even when their magazines exist on separate continents. “She’s the only Westerner to graduate from the great Sichuan cooking school in Chengdu.” This was said a bit reluctantly, and I understood the context; Fuchsia was too good to keep to himself.

It was the early aughts, and Gourmet already had a long history of fine writing on Chinese cuisine, written by native authors exiled from their country, or curious cooks who had studied in Hong Kong or Taiwan. In the eighties the magazine ran a ground-breaking series of articles by Nina Simonds. But Fuchsia was different; she was trained in a corner of the Chinese Mainland few of us had visited - and she was passionate about the food.

She wrote stories for us on restaurants in Chengdu. She wrote stories for us about Chinese restaurants in London. She wrote about ingredients and parts of China that were then unknown. But when she called to say she was escorting a trio of master chefs to the United States, I was particularly excited. “How would you feel about taking them to dinner at The French Laundry?” I asked.

She hesitated. “I’m not sure that they’ll like it,” she demurred.

“That,” I said, “is the whole point.”

I anticipated culture shock, thought they might treat the fare in one of our greatest eating institutions with the puzzled repugnance Americans reserve for unfamiliar foreign dishes like jellyfish and goose intestines.

But I was unprepared for the depth of their disgust.

The chefs thought olives were nasty, like a dose of the bitterest Chinese medicine. Rare lamb was worse. “Dangerous,” was one chef’s assessment. “Terribly unhealthy,” opined another. They were puzzled by oysters, found cheese revolting and considered salad food for savages.

They also found the length of the meal almost unbearable, and half an hour after getting up from the table complained they were hungry again. There was only one remedy: they set off to find the nearest plate of scallion-fried rice. (Fuchsia’s article, Culture Shock, is here.)

Chinese Fried Rice For Two (adapted from Fuschia Dunlop)

You need cold cooked rice to make this dish; it won’t work with warm rice. Leftover rice from Chinese takeout is perfectly acceptable, although it tastes better with higher quality Jasmine or Basmati rice.

Get a wok really hot and swirl in a tablespoon or so of peanut, roasted rapeseed, or grapeseed oil. Add the chopped whites of a couple of scallions, and when they’re fragrant, add 2 large eggs, lightly beaten, and tilt the pan to form an even sheet. It should set in about half a minute; add 2 cups of cooked rice, a half teaspoon of salt and stir fry for a couple of minutes, breaking up the egg sheet. Allow the rice to rest, unstirred, on the pan for about 10 seconds between stirs, so it gets crusty.

Add the thinly sliced scallion greens, and a small splash of sesame oil. And if you like, a splash of good soy sauce as well.

This was a dinner Michael Tong, owner of Shun Lee, gave for Cecilia Chiang of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco. It was the most extraordinary Chinese meal I had ever had in New York, and despite the fact that the food was visually gorgeous (note the reference to “artistic chef”) and every morsel was exquisite, it made me sad.

Because what Shun Lee served most of the time was Chinese food that had been dumbed down, and it hurt to know that the kitchen was capable of food like this. Michael didn’t think his clients were ready for fish lips and fresh eel, and he was probably right. And they were certainly not ready to pay for all the special ingredients he imported from China.

I wish I had taken a photograph of that Panda’s Garden. It was sitting on the table when we came in, a vast tableau made entirely of food with two little pandas carved out of vegetables playing in the middle.

The first Chinese cookbook published in the United States was apparently Chinese Cookery in the Home Kitchen by Jessie Louise Nolton which came out in 1911. Since then a stunning number of Chinese cookbooks have been published. (If you haven’t read Buwei Yang Chao’s 1945 cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese you have a treat in store.)

Thai cookbooks are a different matter. When I fell in love with the food of Thailand I actually had to ask a Thai friend to translate a cookbook for me; there was nothing in English. Many Thai cookbooks have been published since then but the new Cooking Thai by Pim Techamuanvivit is a game-changer. If you have a friend who loves Thai food, you could not think of a better gift for them.

Next week (on August 12th) Kim and her co-author Andrea Nguyen will be offering a free Thai cooking webinar under the auspices of the International Association of Cooking Professionals: you can register for it here.

These are the ingredients for my current favorite dinner: I made it for myself 3 times last week. That beautiful orange stuff is bottarga, the cured roe of grey mullet, which is often called “poor man’s caviar.” It’s wonderful stuff, filled with the deepest, richest, sexiest saline flavor.

When I first wrote about this marvelous food - some fifteen years ago - I said:
Bottarga is poised to be tomorrow’s uni - the food darling of the moment - and we’re going to see it on everything. Why not? It’s fantastic shaved over pasta. It’s wonderful on salads. And one of the best dishes I’ve had recently is an appetizer April Bloomfield serves at The John Dory. She sandwiches thin slices of bottarga between achingly thin slabs of carta di musica (the Sardinian bread that seriously resembles matzo), along with generous amounts of butter and a sprinkling of chile slices. It’s almost impossible to stop eating.

I was obviously wrong about bottarga becoming the Next Big Thing. Hasn’t happened yet….but one can always hope.

Bottarga has traditionally come from Greece, Italy, or sometimes France but now there’s an American product that is local, sustainably produced and absolutely fantastic. I like Cortez Conservas bottarga better than anything I’ve had in Europe or even Japan (where it is known as karasumi).

A little bottarga goes a long way - and well wrapped and stored in the refrigerator it lasts a very long time. Here are a couple of my favorite recipes.

Spaghetti With Bottarga and Bread Crumbs

1 lobe bottarga, (about 1 1/2 - 2 ounces)
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic, lightly crushed with the flat side of a knife
pinch red pepper flakes
1/2 pound spaghetti
1 lemon
chopped parsley
homemade bread crumbs
grated Parmesan cheese
Serves 2

Bottarga usually comes in paired lobes. Cut one lobe from the pair, carefully peel off the thin membrane on the outside and thinly slice or shave half of the lobe. Set the slices aside while you grate the other half.

Gently heat the olive oil over medium heat, drop in the cloves of garlic and let them gently brown for about 5 minutes, turning occasionally. Remove the garlic and discard. Sprinkle in the red pepper flakes and sizzle for about a minute.

Allow the oil to cool a bit, then stir in the grated bottarga.

Cook the pasta in a modest amount of salted water. (Be sparing with the liquid so you will have really starchy water to emulsify the sauce.) When the pasta is al dente scoop out a quarter cup of the water, stir it into the pan with the olive oil mixture and then add the drained pasta and toss well. Grate the rind of the lemon into the pan and toss in a handful of chopped parsley. Add the bread crumbs, grated parmesan and the sliced bottarga, add a few squeezes of lemon juice, toss well and serve.

Home Made Bread Crumbs
Cut a good loaf of stale bread into cubes and grind it into crumbs in a blender or a food processor. (A blender is better; it gives you a more uniform texture). If your bread is not stale enough to crumb, you can dry the cubes out in a 200 degree oven for about 15 minutes before grinding.

Spread the crumbs onto a baking sheet and toast in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes until they are crisp and golden. Drizzle with olive oil (about a quarter cup for every 2 cups of crumbs), season with salt and allow to cool completely before putting into containers.

These will keep in the freezer almost indefinitely. Just stick them in the microwave for a few seconds to take the chill off before using.

Bottarga Sandwiches
I copied this dish from April Bloomfield. At The John Dory she used the Sardinian bread carta di musica, which is considerably thinner than matzo, but sadly hard to find.

Bottarga, thinly sliced
1 package thin, crisp crackers or matzos
good unsalted butter, softened
very thinly sliced red chile pepper

Generously butter a cracker and sprinkle with the sliced chiles, sparingly or generously according to taste. Add the sliced bottarga and eat with enormous joy.

In the eighties the food world was so focused on the then-new notion of great American cooking that it held annual symposiums on the topic. The first was held in Louisville in 1982; Jim Villas gave the keynote speech in his typical curmudgeonly style. The following year the Symposium was held in New Orleans, and John Mariani was the keynote speaker. In 1985 it was held in San Francisco, and I apparently delivered the keynote.

I have, sadly, lost my speech, but from my notes it seems there was a lot of talk about restaurants starting to buy directly from farmers so as to eliminate the middlemen. There were seminars on native products ( wild mushrooms, regional berries, and specialty grains). We were enthusiastic about wood-fired grilling. And there was a serious backlash against the use of adorable but tasteless baby vegetables.

Amazing, isn’t it, how little has changed?

I found the catalogue from the first symposium, and as I flipped through it I couldn’t help thinking that the dishes the various chefs chose to serve say a great deal about both the chefs and that particular moment in our culinary history.

I’ve included three of the more intriguing recipes from the catalogue (although I have to admit that you could not pay me to make those Caviar Puffs).

Bottarga is often referred to as “poor man’s caviar” because it is, after all, fish roe. But recently caviar producers have been making what I think of as “rich man’s bottarga.” They’re taking pricey sturgeon roe and curing it until it is a solid block. It’s wonderful simply grated over buttered pasta or omelets (the heat releases the flavor). And sliced into thin little sheets it’s the perfect topping for almost any canapé.

I particularly like the Calvisius Lingotto caviar, which is produced in Italy. Aged in oak molds, it comes swathed in gold - a perfectly pre-wrapped present.

“You shouldn’t call this tongue,” I told our server after my first astonishing taste of this dish, “you should tell people that it’s a new kind of foie gras.”

This innocent looking slice of grilled tongue is surprisingly rich with the tenderest texture and a flavor so sneaky it keeps dancing away. The Romesco sauce is wonderful, but it’s the freshly grated wasabi that contributes the perfect note. The slight crunch of the grated root is the perfect counterpoint to the tender texture of the meat, while wasabi’s heat thrums beneath the flavor like the beat of a drum.

Somssi is the newest restaurant from the Atomix people. The menu is excitingly experimental; there’s very little here you’ve had before. Other winning dishes: 5 different kinds of mushroom, each prepared in a different way, set on curried rice and crowned with a sizzled egg. Linguine tossed with ragu and the surprise of mustard kimchi. And a smooth fig-leaf custard paired with a rough cherry granita.

I can’t wait to go back to try the rest of the menu.

“I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly.”

It turns out that our readers did, indeed, wish to think hard about the issue: we got hundreds of thoughtful letter.

The recent letters touched a nerve with me; I spent a recent evening with one of my favorite chefs who confided that, while he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me this, he was seriously considering going vegan for both health and ethical reasons. “Even cheese?” I asked. “Even cheese,” he replied, giving me a startling list of ethical reasons for that decision.

I”ll write about that another time, but right now I want to remember my late father’s equally impassioned anti-vegetarian stance… and how radically things have changed since then.

June 2006
Unless you count potatoes, my father never met a vegetable he really liked. He could tolerate the occasional spear of asparagus, provided it was fat, and he was known to eat a few forkfuls of red cabbage every once in a while. But to my knowledge, nothing green ever got into his mouth without a fight.

You can imagine his horror, therefore, when he discovered that the only restaurant within walking distance of his new office was a health food emporium. This was sometime in the early ‘70s, and when Dad went in to reconnoiter (”They must have something a person can eat,” he muttered), he came staggering out looking particularly pale. “They’re selling some substance made of soybeans as a replacement for meat!” he shuddered. Forced by hunger to go in for lunch one afternoon, he emerged with the information that the waitress had talked him into something called “vegetarian beef Stro-ganov.” She’d even persuaded him to have fresh carrot juice to wash it down. In consequence, he announced, he was taking the rest of the day off to recover.

Dad was a pioneer in a part of town slated for gentrification, and as the neighborhood changed, the restaurants did too. Before long, Dad’s unfortunate encounter with health food was completely forgotten. But it all came back to me one day a few weeks ago. I was walking to the farmers market in Union Square when I was suddenly assaulted by an olfactory memory. It was that strange, sharp vegetal smell those restaurants used to have, a kind of urban compost that mingled potato peelings, parsley, and grapefruit rind. I remembered, suddenly, what the words health food had once conjured up: strange brown lumps, gluey breads, and sad salads made of limp greens going dark at the edges. I had a brief vision of Dad coming out of that door, shouting, “How can they say that stuff’s good for you?”

I looked up again and saw that I was now passing the very spot where the health food restaurant once stood. Peering through the window into the restaurant that has replaced it, I saw smiling people sipping wine as they ate light, fluffy salads that looked like jewels. As I walked on to the market I thought how much had changed in a very short time.

I filled my arms with multicolored radishes and the first fresh lettuces of the season, the leaves small and ruffled with that tender new green that they have only in spring. I bought berries from the hands that had picked them, and a few early peas so delicate that I was unable to resist eating them on the spot. As I passed my fellow New Yorkers, all laden with produce just hours out of the earth, I wondered whether my father’s opinion of vegetables might have been different if all this had been available to him. We are so fortunate to be living in a time when even urban dwellers can buy fresh fruits and vegetables directly from the people who grow them.

But on that spring morning, as I wandered home considering what I was going to cook for dinner, I walked once more past the site of the much-loathed health food restaurant.

Union Square Cafe now sits on that spot, and as I looked through the window, I wished that my father were still here.

I imagined taking him inside and persuading him to eat something green. Maybe ricotta ravioli with spring greens and crispy golden garlic. Or a simple salad of baby beets, arugula, and apples. Or perhaps nothing more than a straightforward sauté of spinach grown by a nearby farmer.

“Dad,” I’d say, “this really is health food. Try it. You might like it.”

And in my imagination, at least, he does.

I wish Dad had gotten to eat at Greens, which opened in 1979 and is still going strong. Perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay it is a large, spare, serene space perched right over the water. The sophisticated vegetarian menu was truly revolutionary for its time; today it is enticing but hardly startling.

Originally it was part of the San Francisco Zen Center and the early Greens employees were all practitioners of Zen. Their vegetables came from Green Gulch, the community’s organic farm. And the wonderful Deborah Madison, who has gone on to write so many seminal cookbooks, was the restaurant’s first chef.

I think this menu is from a meal I shared with Marion Cunningham in 1983.

Another in the series of Memorable Meals
This one seems particularly apropos at this moment. It was, without any doubt, the most astonishing vegetarian meal I’ve ever eaten.

June 2017
The Buddhist monk and celebrated chef Jeong Kwan was in New York yesterday, cooking a meal to celebrate the winter Olympics in PeyongChang next year.

Eric Ripert has spoken with great reverence about the chef, so I’ve always been eager to meet her. And the Chef’s Table episode about her is so beautiful that I was excited to have the opportunity to experience one of Jeong Kwan’s vegan meals.

We started with tiny porcelain cups of lotus flower tea: delicate, floral and fragrant, it’s one of those drinks you taste once and never forget.

Then we were introduced to 15-year old soy sauce that the monk brews herself; she urged us to have a spoonful before we began eating and to use it liberally throughout the meal. It was dark, complex and mellow with a lingering flavor that echoed in your mouth long after the sauce itself was gone. I used it as dipping sauce for ganjang and bugak, this centerpiece of crisped seaweed (which had the robust and appealing flavor of fried fish tails), balloon flower leaf, ailanthus (which is also known as “tree of heaven”), potato and shiso.

This was followed by a bowl of pretty little local leaves in a dressing that hinted at orange and spice, and then this grilled deodeok and deoduck with pine nut.

Deoduck is bonnet bellflower; the chewy root, splashed with gochujang, is a standard in Korea. But that little ball of pinenut and shredded deoduck on the side was remarkable: simultaneously soft and slightly crisp, it was tinged with the taste of sesame oil. The chef eschews all alliums - no garlic, no onion, no scallion - but she has no fear of either sweet or heat. There was a touch of chile in almost every dish we ate, and she uses rice syrup and fruit to contrast the saline flavor of soy.

A surprise package sat at each plate. As each little sphere of gangwon was opened up the fragrance of chestnut and shiitake leapt into the air, enveloping the table in the most sensual aroma. Great fat juicy mushrooms had soaked up a luxurious broth of soy, sesame, rice syrup and fermented berry juice; they were tangled into gingko nuts and jujubes. Hauntingly delicious.

Now waiters appeared bearing a black tray covered with little black bowls for each diner: Barugongyang. The empty bowls were for soup and rice, which we passed around the table and served to one another. (I’m embarrassed to admit that our table neglected to wait for instruction and simply helped ourselves, putting the rice and soup into the wrong bowls.)

Starting at the bottom left:

BongPyeong which was translated as “mook with buckwheat.”

Mook, or muk is a soft substance with the texture of taro that can be made from almost any starchy substance. This one was buckwheat topped with two year old kimchi, ailanthus, shiitake and cabbage.

DunNae: a little pancake constructed from baby squash and wild sesame seeds and topped with a bit of squash. In contrast to the contemplative quietness of other dishes, this chewy, slightly spicy offering exploded on the palate like carnival food. A bit of excitement on the plate.

InJae: Grilled burdock topped with sprouted daikon, plum and rice syrup, gochujang, chili powder, sesame seed and sesame oil. Burdock is a bitter root to swallow; you either like it or don’t. If you don’t, all that seasoning won’t help.

ChoDang: Pan-seared tofu with fermented sansho.

Tofu mans up and gets seriously macho here. Eaten slowly, you suddenly discover a world of flavor in this dense, chewy white substance.

Daegwallyeong: Our old friend, cabbage kimchi.

SokChu: Lotus root water kimchi

Water kimchi is a Korean standard. Not hot, the crunchy slices of lotus root were cooked in orange and plum syrup and persimmon vinegar. The chef asked us to leave a bit of lotus root to clean our bowls at the end of the meal. It felt like a sacrifice.

BangTae Mountain.

Named for a famous Korean mountain said to hold “the secret of ancient times,” this sticky rice was mingled with Korean thistle, kidney beans, puffed corn and wild sesame oil.

Odae Mountain
Sip slowly. Think about it. Tease out the flavor of mushroom, daikon, ginger, lotus leaf, jujube. Note the hint of chile. This is the entire meal in a single bowl: flavors that whisper instead of shout, asking that you listen carefully with all your senses. A reminder of how much there is to see, hear and taste if we will simply pay attention.

Postscript
Should you want to experience this Korean temple cuisine, one New York restaurant, Hangawi, provides that opportunity. I have to admit that I haven’t been in many years, but here’s my very old review from the New York Times.

My favorite meal at the moment? Zaru soba - cold soba noodles that you dip into savory mentsuyu sauce made of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and dashi. (If you want to make the dish vegan, simply omit the bonito when making dashi).

Enlivened with a bit of wasabi and topped with tororo - grated yama imo (the wonderfully gooey mountain potato of Japan), it is the perfect dish on a hot summer day.

And I’ve found the perfect place to enjoy it: the new Soba Ulala, which occupies the former Hirohisa space in Soho. This small, serene restaurant is a wonderful place to revel in freshly-made buckwheat noodles with just a bit of bite.

A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the shrimp and grits Robert Stehling made for a dinner at my house, I neglected to mention the chef’s dismay when he saw the grits on offer at our local grocery stores. Happily, I had some grits Robert approved of stashed in my freezer.

McEwan & Sons grits are the real deal: organic corn ground in a stone burr grist mill. The McEwans also make terrific cornmeal that will elevate whatever you bake with them..

I have always loved Michigan’s Upper Penninsula, and I’m very happy that I’m going to be in Traverse City on August 20th.

If you’ll be there too, please come join me at the National Writer’s Series; tickets are available here.

This, my friends, is Iceland on a plate. The giant codhead is cooked in chicken broth and sugar kelp while the soft, tender tongue is breaded and sauteed before being replaced and put on a plate to do rude things.

I thought about this astonishing dish a few days ago when I was at Skidmore’s New York State Summer Writer’s Institute. There I was, dining with legendary writers while thinking about fish heads.

Let me tell you about the Writer’s Institute, which offers excellent workshops and a series of public readings by very impressive people. I was lucky enough to rub shoulders with Joyce Carol Oates and Henri Cole. (Joyce is, of course, one of the most prolific writers on the planet and a wonder woman who, nearing ninety is still working, writing and teaching at a remarkable pace Henri is one of my favorite poets; if you haven’t read his Pig, stop right now and click on it.

Why, you might ask, was I sitting in Saratoga Springs thinking of codheads? Because the evening reminded me of the time I spent at the Iceland Writer’s Retreat in 2015.

Spring 2015
First, a confession. I agreed to teach at The Iceland Writer’s Retreat for only one reason: Susan Orlean told me she had so much fun last year that I’d be a fool to turn it down.

Thank you Susan. It was a memorable week; I’m sorry to say I probably learned more from the students I worked with - they were all so emotionally brave - than they did from me. I also had the joy of meeting some really wonderful writers. A few you will know, and those you don’t, you’ll want to.

Barbara Kingsolver, who is a hero to everyone who cares deeply about great writing, climate change, and the ethics of eating. I’ve loved every one of her books, and was delighted to discover that she turns out to be exactly the person you hope she’ll be: warm, smart and delightfully no-nonsense. She’s down to earth with a very particular view of the world. This is what you think when you first meet her: “This woman knows exactly who she is.”

Adam Gopnik, who is much funnier in person than his rigorous writing leads you to believe. He is effortlessly - and constantly - humorous. Also, I think, the most innately polite person I’ve ever met. I suspect he is incapable of walking into an elevator in front of a woman or cutting into a line. It makes me wonder how he survives in New York.

Taiye Selasi, who is so extremely beautiful you can’t believe she’s also a writer. If I looked like that I think I’d just stare at myself in the mirror all day. But her books are deep and rich - and she is a rare, warm and extremely generous teacher. Her students emerged from each workshop buzzing with energy.

John Valliant. I didn’t know his work before I got to Reykjavik. I’m reading The Jaguar’s Children now. Slowly. It’s a novel you want to savor, a book that gives voice to the voiceless- and he’s a man you want to know better. Also, I might add, a great dining companion. (I was at the San Miguel Writer’s Workshop with John again last year where he was speaking about his latest book Fire Weather. The book, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is about Canadian fires andcould not be more relevant than it is right now. The book is unforgettable, and John is one of the most dynamic speakers I’ve ever encountered.)

Alison Pick. How did I not know this woman before? When she gave me her novel, Far To Go I made the mistake of reading the first page. The next thing I knew it was morning, and I’d been reading all night. It’s gorgeous. Poetic. Compelling. Truly one of the finest books I’ve read in ages. She is a deep soul, and her students emerged from her classes slightly dazed - and then went off to their rooms to write.

Linn Ullman Again, a writer whose work I should have known and to my shame did not. Linn was the voice of reason on the panels: when everyone else was mystifying the act of writing, she said, “You know, it’s a job. All great writing does not come from inspiration. Sometimes it just comes from work.” Later, thinking about it, I realized that of course the daughter of Ingmar Bergman would take a slightly jaundiced view of “genius.” But to read her books is to understand the importance of trusting yourself.

Marcello di Cintio. With a name like that he has to be a dark, handsome Italian with a romantic bent. In reality he’s an approachable (handsome) Canadian who seems too sweet to have undertaken the dark subjects he tends to tackle: war, poverty, people who live behind walls. He taught travel writing, and his students said his workshops were wonderful. He too is a great dinner companion.

Sjon. One of Reykjavik’s most famous writers (among other things he writes lyrics for Bjork), whose latest book has won dozens of awards. The Blue Fox is about to come out in an English translation. Can’t wait.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably considering signing on for next year’s Iceland Writer’s Retreat. The 2027 preliminary faculty lineup includes Rebecca Makkai, Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Lethem and Kaveh Akbar. If you want to spend time among writers, this is a fantastic opportunity. The participants are talented, the workshops never larger than 15, and all the writers are pretty much around, and available, for the entire week.

Beyond literature, the main reason to go to the workshop is to experience the strange, stark, beauty of Iceland. And to discover its truly fascinating food.

To eat a huge codhead is to have an extraordinary experience of texture. The bit of filet, at the top of the head, is rather firm. The cheeks are like little scallops. The bit right beneath the eye is pillowy soft. And that tongue.... like eating a gentle cloud.

The codhead is the signature dish at Matur og Drykker, the restaurant in Reykjavik’s Saga Museum which is named for the classic Icelandic cookbook. Written in the 1950s, the book is the Icelandic version of The Joy of Cooking; every local person I met told me they’d grown up on those recipes.

At the restaurant they’ve gone looking for history - and then refined it. So the classic halibut, mussel and whey soup is turned into the loveliest chowder you can imagine.

The mussels are sweet and plump, their flavor underlined by the other notes woven through the soup: cream, dill, the sweetness of apples and then - surprise! - a bit of prune, which lends an almost wine-like quality. I kept eating the soup, entranced by the parade of flavors, and was devastated when I discovered that there was no more.

The other surprises of this meal:

Cod liver pate with berry jam on caraway flatbread. I’ll admit I was reluctant to try it - too many bad memories of cod liver oil - but how could I resist? The flavor was a total surprise; if you’ve ever had Japanese ankimo - monkfish liver - you’ll instantly recognize the taste. Those berries were a wonderful foil for the fish flavor; think of the sea washing into the forest.

And then there was this, which looked exactly like dried rose petals - and tasted almost entirely of smoke.

Essentially lamb jerky, this was as crisp as a potato chip so the buttermilk smudge on the side made it seem like eating chips and dips. The friend I was with said she always takes double-smoked lamb along when she goes hiking - but she had never had any half so delicious. Excited, she ordered a second plateful.

You don’t get very far in Iceland without eating lamb - and I never met a dish I didn’t like. But this - with gorgeous carrots and some beautifully cooked potatoes - was remarkable for its simple honesty.

And, of course, the classic Iceland dessert: twisted doughnuts. Warm, laced with nutmeg, and barely sweet, these were the most restrained doughnuts I’ve ever encountered. Doughnuts are usually flashy and brazen, but these little cakes simply charm you with subtlety.

My friend Steve Wallace, who opened a small liquor store in 1968 and turned Wally’s into a Los Angeles institution, passed away last month. Steve was an important part of the Los Angeles food scene and a mentor to dozens of wine people. In his honor I’m posting this menu from his 75th birthday party.

I’m also posting this wonderful little artifact from Bipin Desai, himself a Los Angeles wine legend. In 1989 Desai compiled this list of his favorite places to buy and drink wine.

The first local corn is in, but it’s not the corn of high season when you can find sweet slim ears with pearly little kernels that pop when you bite into them. But I’m so eager for corn that I’m turning today’s ears into corn pudding; it’s a reminder of all the good things that are yet to come.

Corn Pudding
6 ears fresh corn, shucked
1 cup cream
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
5 eggs
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter

Using a box grater, coarsely grate the kernels off 4 ears of corn. Use a sharp knife to cut the kernels from the other 2 ears.

Put the cobs in a large skillet with the cream and cook over low heat until the cream is reduced to between 1/2 and 3/4 cup and has been infused with the flavor of corn.

Combine all the corn kernels with the sugar, flour, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the infused cream. Break in the eggs, one by one, stirring to incorporate after each addition.

Put the butter into a cast iron skillet or an 8-inch-square Pyrex pan and set it in a 350-degree oven until it has melted. Pour the butter into the corn mixture and give it a few good stirs. Pour the corn mixture back into the skillet or baking dish and bake for about 1 hour, until it has turned golden and set.

Serves 6

If you happen to be heading north to the Hudson Valley you should know about Dove’s Diner, which is right off the Taconic on Route 82 as you head into the town of Hudson.

Honest food cooked from scratch by very nice people in a classic chrome diner. Did I mention huge portions? Two of us shared a deliciously messy Reuben with a huge stack of fries and couldn’t finish it all. I loved everything we ate, but what I’ll be going back for again and again is that matzo ball soup. Airy matzo balls floating in lovely broth: it’s the real deal.

I find this especially interesting since the movie is loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel about the Teapot Dome scandal, Oil , and I have been fascinated by Sinclair since a high school teacher assigned The Jungle. It is, hands down, the most impactful piece of food writing ever produced in America - and one of the reasons I became a food writer.

Sinclair wrote the book because he wanted to expose the plight of the immigrants working in appalling conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The 26- year old reporter traveled to Chicago to live undercover for almost two months in the section of the city known as Packingtown. He was truly shocked by what he found. Although he was on assignment for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Sinclair was a novelist at heart, and he felt that he could make a stronger impact by turning his findings into a fictionalized account of an immigrant worker’s life.

Sinclair’s article was serialized in the paper, but he also sold it to Macmillan as a novel. But when the publishers received the manuscript it frightened them: it was, they said, “gloom and horror unrelieved.” Little wonder, with scenes like this one about workers in the cooking room who fell into the steaming cauldrons.

“. . . the peculiar problem was that when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,– sometimes they would be overlooked for days till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”

Macmillan cancelled the contract.

Undaunted Sinclair shopped the book around. He had no takers until a young editor at Doubleday, Page and Company found the manuscript so compelling he stayed up all night reading it. Although his bosses agreed to publish it, they found the book so grisly that they sent a copy off to the Chicago Tribune requesting an opinion. Was what Sinclair had depicted, they asked, accurate? The Tribune responded with a fervent 24 page rebuttal.

But the newspaper had not asked a journalist to investigate conditions in the packing plants; they had simply turned the task over to a publicist employed by the meatpackers. And when publisher Walter Hines Page, a former journalist (and future Ambassador to Great Britain), read the report it didn’t feel right to him. So he sent his own people off to Chicago. They returned, nauseated, saying that even when Sinclair wrote that the packers routinely put out poisoned bread to keep the rat population down, and “then the rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together,” he had not exaggerated.

Doubleday, Page and Company published the book, which became an instant sensation. The citizens of Chicago were outraged. All eleven English-language periodicals excoriated the book, calling it fake news. The Chicago Tribune said it was “overblown fiction.” The Chicago Daily News insisted that the book was an outright lie. Meanwhile, the Chicago Public Library banned the book from its shelves.

But outside the city The Jungle was making a huge impact. It was translated into 17 languages, and when Europe nations found out about the truly stomach-churning conditions in the packing plants they banned American meat. This alarmed President Theodore Roosevelt who read the book and sent labor commissioner Charles Neill and social reformer James Reynolds to inspect the stockyards.

They returned echoing what Page’s investigators had said: the book actually downplayed the horrific conditions in the meat-packing plants. “We saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts…gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth and expectoration of tuberculous and other diseased workers,” they reported. Neill was so shocked by what he found that he refused to feed his family any meat that did not come from a local farm.

The Jungle was published in 1905; the following year Congress passed both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Upton Sinclair was deeply disappointed. “I aimed at their hearts,” he said later, “and accidentally hit them in the stomach.” What he was hoping for was better working conditions; what he got was better food.

Sinclair went on to have a very long career, publishing more than 90 novels during his lifetime. Dragon’s Teeth about the rise of Hitler in Germany, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943.

He also entered politics, running for Governor of California in the 1934 election on a platform promising to end poverty in California. His plan? Buy up the idle factories and abandoned farms of the great depression and lease them to the unemployed.

He won 44 percent of the vote.

Eliza Acton was another revolutionary food writer of the past. A teacher and poet, she published Modern Cooking for Private Families in 1845, and changed the way recipes are written. She was the first to include a list of ingredients, write step by step directions, and include cooking times. This is one of my favorite of her recipes, slightly adapted.

Eliza Acton’s Carrots in Their Own Juice
2 pounds carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
2 tablespoons butter at room temperature
¼ cup flour
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1/3 cup heavy cream
juice of 1 orange
salt, pepper and sugar

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, drop in the carrots and cook until tender about 10 minutes. Drain, reserving 1 cup of the cooking water, and run under cold water to stop the cooking.

Cream the butter with the flour in a bowl. Add the parsley and cream, mix well and add the carrot water. Stir in the carrots, return to the pot and cook for 2 minutes to thicken the sauce. Add the orange juice and season to taste with salt and pepper. If the carrots are not sweet enough, add 1/2 teaspoon (or more) of sugar.

Serves 4

Last week I mentioned the recipe for Hominy Grill’s buttermilk pie, which many people wrote in to request. It’s a lovely recipe, a classic which comes together very easily. Robert often tops it with seasonal fruit; at the moment blueberries would be perfect.

Hominy Grill Buttermilk Pie
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs, separated
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
1 blind-baked 9-inch deep-dish pie shell

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium bowl, combine butter and sugar until sugar is completely incorporated. Add egg yolks and mix well to combine. Add flour, lemon juice, nutmeg and salt. With the mixer running, slowly add buttermilk. Mix well and set aside.

In another bowl, whip egg whites until they form soft peaks. Pour a small amount of the buttermilk mixture into the whites. Fold gently to combine. Gently fold egg white mixture into remaining buttermilk mixture until just combined (mixture will be slightly lumpy). Pour custard into pre-baked pie shell.

Bake in the middle of the oven for about 45 to 50 minutes, until the top is lightly brown and the filling is set so that it barely jiggles in the middle.

• Cool on a rack.

  

  

  

  

  Another in a series of Memorable Meals: Jamin, Paris

  1990

  It takes six months to get a reservation at Jamin.

  There are two reasons for this. The first is that with three stars from Michelin, and four toques and 19.5 points from Gault-Millau (their highest rating), it holds an extremely exalted status. Everybody wants to eat Joel Robuchon’s food. The second reason is that, with only 45 seats, everybody can’t.

  I finally managed to get a reservation. Then, on the big night, I couldn’t get a cab. The Metro from the Ile St. Louis required so many changes that I finally ran most of the way along the Seine to the Place d’Iena, charging into the restaurant with coat flaps flying, 15 minutes late. I expected pomp, circumstance and disapproval. Instead the maitre d’ made a comical little gesture, bowed, and pointed to the only empty seat in the room. “Relax,” he murmured, bringing me a glass of champagne. I was instantly charmed.

  Nothing that took place that evening caused my mood to change. Somewhere during the course of the meal, after the soupe chaude a la gelee de poule and before the petite salade champetre, I remember thinking, “This food was made by magic.” Indeed, Robuchon’s food is so extraordinary it does sometimes seem that it could not have been created by human hands.

  The first course was a soup that had been turned into a custard--a sort of French version of the Japanese chawan mushi. It was, without doubt, the most intensely pleasurable soup I’ve ever eaten. “Stick your spoon straight down,” said the waiter, showing me that more riches--a sort of liquid essence of the livers -- was lurking at the bottom.

  Next came another sort of soup-- etuvee de noix de St. Jacques au fumet de champignons. This seemed like a remarkably simple dish; when you looked down at the flat bowl what you saw was a frothy white liquid containing a few large rounds of scallops. But when you tasted it, there was such extraordinary intensity of flavor that I can only think that the chef cooked the dish in two steps: first the mushroom fumet, then the braised scallops. But all of the dishes I was to eat were the same; seemingly simple, they turned out to be remarkably complex.

  At the next table a beautiful Japanese woman was eating alone, her pinky lifted, periodically smoothing back her long black hair. She ate with fierceness and with great concentration. When the dessert cart came, she looked at the tarts, the gateaux, the sorbets and when the waiter asked what she would like said wistfully, “All of them.”

  Easy to understand, I thought, as the waiter set the next course before me. Paupiette of sole-- my least favorite fish--had real flavor. It was followed by another sleight-of-hand dish. The waiter appeared with a plate holding a perfectly white little ring made out of carefully constructed spaghetti. When you cut into the ring, you discovered that it was filled with shrimp poached to such softness that they slid down your throat. Truffles danced across the dish. How many people did it take to construct this little edifice, I wondered?

  The main course-- beatilles de canard aux lentilles-- was a sort of stew of duck innards served on top of lentils, a dish for pampered peasants. With it came Robuchon’s famous potato puree--potatoes elevated to high art. There was cheese, dessert, little tidbits to eat with the coffee. But most of all there was the sense of being in the hands of a master.

  Joel Robuchon is not a man who goes parading about the dining room. And his dining room itself may be the most pleasantly low-key of any great restaurant in the world. It’s the food that does the talking here--and not a single word is wasted.

  

  

  Stephanie Mutz may be the coolest woman in America. When I first met her I couldn’t help noticing that her hands were stained a deep purple, which makes sense since she is the only female sea urchin diver in the state of California - and the owner of Sea Stephanie Fish, which sells sea urchins (and other fantastic seafood) to restaurants across the country.

  The sea urchins she sells are, in my opinion, the best in the world. (Some people prefer sea urchins from Hokkaido, but I’ll take the richer, creamier ones from Santa Barbara any day of the week.)

  When I first fell in love with sea urchins they were a rare delicacy that few people enjoyed. Today they seem to be everywhere; fish mongers on both coasts are now selling live urchins. But if you’re buying whole sea urchins, you’re going to need to open them. Given their sharp spines and prickly exteriors, that’s not easy. Which is where this extremely functional tool comes in. Its only purpose is to open the little creatures up.

  Stephanie sold me my sea urchin opener, but these days you can buy them in a number of places. Like this site on Ebay. And what sea urchin lover wouldn’t be happy to possess an opener of her very own?

  

Dinner with Friends Abroad
Our fall trip sold out so quickly that we’ve added a second trip next June. There are only a few places available, so if you’re interested, act quickly. Information here.

This intimate tour begins at Nancy Silverton’s home in Panicale and then moves on to her favorite cheesemakers, olive growers, farmers, salumi artisans, chefs and truffle hunters. Along the way you will cook with local chefs and dine in both Michelin-starred restaurants and neighborhood pizzerias. Between meals you’ll explore Renaissance masterpieces in Arezzo, Assisi and Orvieto, shop in local markets… and have a lot of fun.

There was, for instance, Howard Johnson’s. When the last one in New York City shut its doors in 2005 Jacques Pepin wrote a little ode to the American restaurant he once helmed. He reminisced about Mr. Johnson hiring him to revamp the food in 1959, and how he replaced margarine with butter, used fresh onions instead of dehydrated ones and made an astonishing ten tons of frankfurters every day from scratch.

It was real food made with care. Remember the fried clams? I fell in love with fried clams at Howard Johnson’s and now I know why: it turns out that they were made from crisp the necks of geoducks. (The soft bellies of the giant native clams went into the restaurant’s chowder.)

“For me,” Pepin wrote, “Howard Johnson’s reliable, modestly priced food embodies the straightforwardness of the American spirit. It saddens me that New Yorkers looking for this kind of gentleness and simplicity will soon have to find it elsewhere. It won’t be easy.”

How right he was! In its heyday Howard Johnson’s was the largest restaurant chain in the country, serving more food than any institution except the army. While Califonia’s Clifton’s Cafeteria’s were not nearly as ubiquitous, they too were extraordinary institutions.

I first encountered the place in Bukowski’s novel Ham on Rye. “Clifton’s Cafeteria was nice,” he wrote, “if you didn’t have much money, they let you pay what you could. And if you didn’t have any money, you didn’t have to pay…It was owned by some very nice rich old man, a very unusual person.”

He was indeed. Clifford Clinton actually had a neon sign flashing in his cafeteria that read, “Pay what you wish. Pay nothing at all if not delighted.” And he meant it. In one 90 day period during the depression he fed 10,000 people for free.

But he also understood that restaurants were a kind of theater, and his various establishments offered a lot more than food. Clifton's Pacific Seas, for instance, probably America’s first tiki bar, was filled with tropical plants, volcanic rock and a dozen waterfalls. Brookdale was a buccolic lodge with meandering brooks, faux Redwoods, stuffed moose heads and animated racoons.

The food was made from scratch and very fairly priced, and I always had a soft spot for them. I last visited in 2011, when the Clifton’s in downtown Los Angeles was the oldest cafeteria in the city - and the largest cafeteria in the world. Sadly, it closed in 2018.

2011
Just had breakfast at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles. With its timbered walls, waterfalls and stuffed fauna, Brookdale was a magical little bit of forest in the middle of the city when it was built in the thirties. Its founder, Clifford Clinton, was a man who believed in the golden rule, fed people good homemade food at fair prices, and believed in the Golden Rule. His motto was “Pay what you wish. Pay nothing if not delighted.” He went on to become, briefly, the mayor of the city.

Today this wonderful old place looks weirdly, kitchily old-fashioned. It is filled with mostly older people who come because the food is still hand-made and decent and the prices are still fair. Early in the morning wizened old women slide their trays through the cafeteria line, helping themselves to enormous dishes of chicken livers (I suspect this is the most protein for the least money), and big bowls of cream of wheat with raisins and brown sugar.

The women behind the counter are all kind, and they cook the eggs and pancakes with care. “You want bacon with that? No toast?” And even this early in the day there is a lively business in lunch to go, as enormous men walk off with bulging sacks of food.

As I sat eating my eggs and drinking my coffee (“you want cream in that?”) I listened to three old men arguing politics at the next table. It was an erudite conversation – I had the feeling it has been going on for years – that ranged through the Middle East, to Asia and then settled back at home. At points it veered into German, at others it settled back into disgruntled English.

It felt comfortable in that room, and it made me sad to think of all the people all over this city who were grabbing something to go at a drive-up window and gobbling it down in their cars. Even in the middle of downtown Los Angeles – which is a fairly sad place early in the morning – this was a restaurant that has true nourishment on offer. Looking around I wondered how long it will last? It seems like a quickly vanishing part of the American landscape.

Too bad.

Another little blast from the past. This is also a post from 2011.

Mitch’s Beans
“I’m going to make my beans,” my friend Mitch announced as we were trolling through the supermarket. “When I was poor I lived on these.” He began loading the cart with cans, and I looked on, dubious, as he he added a package of bacon.

I’ve always been partial to Buster’s Beans, which I published in my first cookbook, Mmmmm: A Feastiary. They do, however, take an entire day (and night) to prepare.

Mitch’s, on the other hand, are easy. And - to my surprise - incredibly delicious. And unlike most baked beans, these are not sweet enough to be dessert. In my opinion that’s a plus.

Mitch began by cooking 6 strips of bacon. When they were done, he removed them from the skillet, leaving just enough bacon fat to sauté a chopped onion, 5 minced cloves of garlic and a diced jalapeno (use less if you’d like something milder).

When the vegetables were translucent and aromatic he added 2 cans of pinto beans, a 14 ounce can of tomatoes and a tablespoon of cumin. (He says you need a LOT of cumin.) Stirring that all up he diced the bacon, threw it into the pot and left it to simmer on a very low flame for a couple of hours.

He added salt and pepper and we ate the beans - with grilled chicken and coleslaw - with enormous pleasure.

I’ve been trolling through my old cookbooks, remembering how many cookbook authors of the American past believed deeply in industrialized food. To cooks of the thirties and forties, the promise of convenience products was extremely beguiling.

There is, for example, this from one of my mother’s favorite cookbooks, Poppy Cannon’s Can Opener Cookbook, which was first published in 1951.

Mom bragged that she could “have dinner on the table in less than ten minutes.” No wonder, with dishes like this one.

Poppy Cannon, incidentally, was a fascinating character. I’m amazed that nobody’s done a movie about her life. Born Lillian Gruskin in South Africa, she was constantly reinventing herself. She had a long affair with Walter White, head of the NAACP, and when they finally married the interracial union was considered so scandalous he tried to resign from his job.

But all cookbook writers were not like Poppy Cannon. In contrast, I offer this recipe for a classic clambake from Ruth Berolzheimer’s United States Regional Cook Book, published in 1949. There are no corners cut here; this will take all day. And before you begin, make sure you have a wheelbarrow of seaweed or hay on hand. (Not to mention an army of small children.)

At a time when few of us understood that there really was an American cuisine, Jeremiah Tower created a series of spectacular dinners dedicated to the regional foods of various states at his Santa Fe Grill in Berkeley. The cost was $30 a person - although I suspect this one was more expensive since it was a fundraiser.

What am I making for the fourth?

Shrimp and grits. Because my friend Robert Stehling came to stay a few weeks ago and made the most famous dish from his much-loved and now closed Charleston restaurant, Hominy Grill. It was so delicious that I’ve been thinking about it ever since. And what could be more American?

I was going to suggest that Robert’s lovely Hominy Grill Cookbook would make a wonderful gift on the Fourth. Sadly, it is out of print - and very hard to find.

So I’m offering the recipe instead. It’s easy to make and incredibly satisfying.

Happy Fourth!

Grits
1 cup stone-ground grits (I like Anson Mills)
1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
3/4 cup grated sharp Cheddar cheese
1/4 cup finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon Tabasco

Bring 4 1/2 cups water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the grits and salt, reduce the heat to low, and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the grits are thickened. (Depending on what kind of grits you use this will take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Follow package instructions. Robert really didn’t mess with this; he let them cook about 40 minutes and just gave an occasional lazy stir.) Remove from the heat and stir in the cheeses, butter, pepper, and hot sauce.

And should you be looking for a great American appetizer, you can’t do better than this:

And one final All American offering. I have just discovered this wonderful Apricot Jam from Valerie Confections in Glendale. I have never had better apricot jam; I went back to Rubiner’s in Great Barrington where I purchased it and bought 3 more jars. I never want to be without it.

And so I began packing a special suitcase filled with food for future travels.

I still do that - but the contents have changed. These days once exotic ingredients - Thai rice noodles, excellent salsa, arborio rice - are readily available in ordinary supermarkets. And those once esoteric chile flakes are on every shelf. And so I’ve included a list of the ingredients in my current suitcase.

It’s packed and ready to go!

What’s in my current suitcase? Here’s the list.

I wonder what’s in your suitcase? Please leave a note and let us all know what you consider essential.

I still pack a pepper mill, but now it’s filled with a variety of peppercorns. I’m particularly fond of the Tasmanian peppercorns from La Boite, but it’s worth tasting your way through a number of different varieties to figure out which flavor profile you prefer.

Parmesan Cheese: Indispensable. I wouldn’t dream of leaving home without a big hunk of the good stuff..

Pasta: The quality of pasta available in the supermarket has gone up. Nevertheless, since pasta is a mainstay in my house, I’ve tossed my favorite pasta into the suitcase. I wrote about Felicetti pasta here: scroll down to the bottom of the post.

Chile flakes: These days I’m packing Cobanero chile flakes

Cocoa powder: Looking back at this old article I realized that we’ve undergone a serious chocolate revolution over the past couple of decades. We are a nation of chocoholics and many of the best American chocolatiers now offer extremely high-end baking products. My current suitcase contains Dandelion chocolate baking essentials

Red wine vinegar: Although there are now excellent American vinegar producers, I’m shocked by the quality of red wine vinegar sold in most supermarkets. I’ve got a bottle of the classic red wine vinegar from Badia a Coltibuono red wine vinegar wrapped up in bubble wrap in my suitcase. I love its mellow sharpness.

Garlic: It’s still hard to find good garlic in many places, so it’s wise to take your own.

And I’ve added one more ingredient: Chinese sesame paste. At the moment cold sesame noodles are my go-to summer lunch, and this essential ingredient is very difficult to find in supermarkets.

It’s easy. It keeps forever. And I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like this Chinese restaurant classic. This is an adaptation of the recipe Shorty Tang made famous in his New York restaurant in the sixties.

Cold Sesame Noodles
2 1/2 tablespoons Chinese sesame paste
1 tablespoon peanut butter
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
4 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon grated ginger
2 cloves garlic, grated
1 tablespoon chile-garlic paste or chile crisp

Whisk all the ingredients together, put in a jar and store in the refrigerator. It will keep for quite a while.

I keep these dried Chinese noodles on hand, but you can use spaghetti or any other kind of noodle you happen to have. Cook the noodles al dente, immediately drain, run under cold water and then toss with the sesame sauce. Top with crushed peanuts, sliced cucumbers (or any other green vegetable) and more chile crisp if you like it hot. You could also add slices of cooked chicken or even pressed tofu.

This is enough sauce for about a pound of dried noodles - or 4 individual servings.

Shorty Tang arrived in New York just after the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 changed our immigration laws, allowing more Asians into the country and creating the first flood of non-Cantonese Chinese restaurants in the United States.

Before that most Chinese restaurants in America had menus that looked a lot like this one from Forbidden Palace, which opened in Los Angeles in 1938 catering to an audience who considered this very exotic food.

When you’ve been writing about restaurants for 50 years, certain meals stay with you. Last night I had a dream about the sushi bar I went to in Tokyo fifteen years ago. It forever changed the way I think about both rice and raw fish.

Walking down the cramped, narrow stairs to Sushisho Masa, a 7-seat counter in Tokyo, I have no idea that this experience is going to forever change my standards for sushi.

But as I inhale one extraordinary slice of fish after another, I begin noticing nuances of flavor I’ve never before experienced. Chef Masakatsu Oka is a pleasant, modest man who bends over the fish with a tender expression, intent on his work, but you can taste his passion in every bite. He’s proud to answer every question: Where was this fish caught? How long was it cured? Why? I notice that he’s not wearing the standard sushi chef’s apron, but that of a sumo wrestler. A message?

I’m not going to go through every course of a dinner that lasted 3 hours and included at least 35 different varieties of fish. But I’ll mention a few favorites.

Sea grapes - a seaweed from Okinawa - that is among the most refreshing palate cleansers I’ve ever encountered. Each little bubble pops in your mouth with a burst of brine.

Wild octopus - remarkably tender, with a creamy custard-like layer just beneath the crisp tentacles. I’ve never tasted anything quite like it

Uni from Hokkaido. I’ve always thought Santa Barbara sea urchins were the best in the world. I was wrong.

Sanma (saury or mackerel pike). I wish I were a better photographer; this was so beautifully cut. And pure pleasure in the mouth. It was followed by the same fish, lightly grilled.

Tiny shrimp, each one no bigger than a fingernail, each one so soft and tender that it seemed impossible it could contain such depth of flavor.

Karasumi - Japanese bottarga - the mullet roe cured to an entirely different taste and texture than any Mediterranean variety. Soft without being sticky, the surprise is that it is not in the least bit salty. If you close your eyes, you might be eating candy.

Fluke - and its liver. I expect the liver to resemble ankimo, the rich monkfish liver that is the foie gras of the sea. But it is entirely different: softer and much more subtle in flavor.

Anago - sea eel - is a pure astonishment. It looks like every other piece of eel I’ve ever eaten, so I’m utterly unprepared for the almost fluffy texture of the fish. Or for the way it simply vanishes, melting in my mouth like so much snow.

Trout roe, which explodes in my mouth in a way you always wish caviar will, a tiny flood of flavor. The surprise here is, once again, that it is not the least bit salty. Just the pure essence of fish. Hiding underneath is a small ball of Mr. Oka’s rather amazing rice, which he mixes with four different kinds of vinegar.

I’m skipping so many wonderful fish: small herrings, kohada, fantastic tuna, a tiny grilled fish I eat in one bite. But at the end there is one absolutely remarkable roll. Toro, along with a strip of its own fat (Japanese lardo), and some finely julienned member of the onion family. Wrapped up in rice and seaweed, it makes me think of the motto of Prexy’s, a long-gone New York restaurant: “the hamburger with a college education.” It’s a very elegant translation - and one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted.

At the end, of course, there is tamago, a tiny square of mirin-enriched egg that is the perfect final flavor. Then we’re bowed out the door and up the stairs, and into the raucous Tokyo night.

Not exactly a genius plan.

Especially when you consider that at least 8 of those people are, even now, driving up from New York City to spend the night. I’ve rented an airbnb to house them, but they’re going to want dinner. What on earth am I going to feed them?

In my panic, I pulled out this old article about a very strange party from my past. I learned a lot that evening….

By eight o’clock we were out of wine, and our hostess took up a collection so we could send Hollywood’s most famous set designer around the corner to the liquor store for more. By nine we were ravenous, but signs that dinner was imminent had yet to appear.

Curious, I ventured into the kitchen to see if I could hurry it along by offering my assistance.

“Help?” said the hostess. “I’d love it.” Glancing around I noticed that the onions on the counter were still in their skins, the lettuce was still in its plastic bag and the oven had yet to be turned on. The lady of the house pointed to a pearly pile of naked chicken breasts and some stacked logs of zucchini. “I was thinking of doing something with those,” she said breezily. “Do you have any ideas? In fact, maybe you could cook dinner?” Throwing me an apron she waltzed happily out the door.

Looking back, what surprises me is not the sheer audacity of inviting ten people to dinner and then asking them to cook it, but the fact that I remember it as one of the best dinner parties I’ve ever attended. The gathering included not only the set designer but a news director, a restaurant critic and the heir to one of America’s great family fortunes. We were strangers when the evening began, but as we crowded into the kitchen to figure out what to make from the available ingredients, we moved beyond small talk. We were still cooking at eleven -chicken Milanese, a faux risotto and sautéed zucchini and onions - when the heiress discovered that her ring was missing. She’d removed it to wash lettuce for the salad, and we found that uproariously as we upended the garbage can. Happily, the ring was found and at midnight when we finally sat down to eat, we’d become intimate friends.

To someone who likes to have dinner in the oven, clean counters and an empty dishwasher when my guests walk in the door, this was a serious lesson in the mechanics of entertaining. Although I’ve never plucked up the courage to let my guests fend for themselves, I now know that there is nothing quite like cooking together to break the ice. I suspect that one of the reasons we’re so fond of Thanksgiving isn’t our abiding love of turkey and stuffing, but the fact that it is one major meal where everyone’s expected to pitch in. These days when I entertain, I try to leave something for the guests to do, even if it’s just washing lettuce, slicing tomatoes or stirring mushrooms in the pan.

So if you’re the kind of cook who likes to have everything finished before your guests arrive, maybe rethink it. Get out the glasses, chill the wine… and be sure to leave a little work for them to do. I can’t guarantee that you’ll make lifelong friends out of strangers, but I can promise that you will end up with a very fun party.

Reading that helped. I’ve decided what I’m going to cook tonight - and what I’m going to ask my guests to do.

If I were a griller I’d just get some steaks, throw them on the fire, steam some corn and make a salad. But the grill was Michael’s domain- he was very proud of his high-fire technique - and he guarded it jealously. I haven’t a clue. One of my goals for this summer is to master that skill.

Instead I’m going to make the easiest and most foolproof meal I know.

Menu
Cheese and crackers
Prosciutto and Melon
Rack of Lamb
Baked Potatoes
Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing
Blueberry-Apricot Crisp with Vanilla Ice Cream

Rack of Lamb
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons minced parsley
1 tablespoon minced rosemary
2 tablespoons kosher salt
3/4 cup Dijon mustard
1 1/2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar (not the good stuff)
3 racks of lamb with Frenched bones

Put the garlic, parsley, rosemary and salt into a bullet or food processor and whir until they’re almost a paste. Add the mustard and balsamic and process until well mixed.

Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil.

Coat the racks of lamb with the mustard-herb mixture and set on the baking sheet, bones curved down. Hold at room temperature for about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Roast the lamb for 20 minutes for rare meat, 5 minutes more if you prefer medium (although at 20 minutes the outside chops will be medium). Take the lamb out of the oven, cover with aluminum foil and allow to rest for 15 minutes before cutting the rack into individual chops and serving.

Serves 8 -10

This really is the easiest dessert I know. I love roasting fresh apricots; usually the ones we find in the market tend to be uninteresting eaten raw but roast into a fascinatingly tart sweetness. And they’re so easy: you don’t even need to cut them, just pull them apart.

Apricot-Blueberry Crisp
1 stick butter, melted
2 pounds apricots
1 pint blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup flour
dash of salt
splash of vanilla
fresh nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375.

Break the apricots apart with your fingers; do not peel them, but remove the pits. Put them into a deep dish pie plate, casserole or Dutch oven along with the berries.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Remove from heat. Stir in the sugars, then the flour and salt. Add the vanilla and grate in a bit of nutmeg. Cover the fruit with the sugar mixture and put the crisp into the oven. Bake for about an hour until the top is crusty and golden and the fruit well cooked.

Serve warm or at room temperature with vanilla ice cream.

Lately I’ve been thinking about San Francisco. When Michael and I started living together we shared a magical old house on Russian Hill that we were told had been the first fisherman’s cottage in the area. Lying in bed at night we could see the distant bay from our bedroom window.

So when I found this old menu, I was ecstatic.

Please excuse the quality of the reproduction: this is a forty year old Xerox of a menu that was already forty years old when I copied it. But there’s a lot to look at here, from the fact that abalone was pretty inexpensive, that Olympia oysters were still available (they all but disappeared for many years), and that a child’s plate consisted of filet of sole or lamb chop (one). Not exactly what we’d consider kid food today.

It is interesting to remember that although Joltin’ Joe was a national hero his father Giuseppe, a lifelong fisherman, was not allowed to fish during World War II because he was Italian, and considered an alien risk. He was not, in fact, even allowed to visit the family restaurant: as an enemy alien, he was prohibited from traveling more than five miles without permission. (Italians in San Francisco also had a curfew, and many of their homes were seized by the government.)

For more information on the family, this article is instructive.

A chef friend and his wife spent the weekend with me, and on Saturday night Robert offered to make dinner. It gave me great pleasure to watch this practiced man cooking in my kitchen. But then he started mincing a mountain of garlic on my wooden chopping board….

“Stop!” I wanted to call out.

But it was too late.

I never chop garlic on my large wooden chopping board because the scent lingers, perfuming everything it touches. And there is nothing pleasant about biting into a fruit pie and having the first flavor be garlic.

When I chop garlic - or onions or chiles - I pull out my Material Kitchen chopping board. It’s made of plant-based materials, it doesn’t dull your knives and it goes happily into the dishwasher.

This is from their website: Chef’s Tip: Have a slippery counter? We’re looking at you quartz and marble! Slip a damp cloth beneath your cutting board to lock it in place.

But if you buy their mini-board - also indispensable - it comes with “grippy corners” so it doesn’t slip.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Bill Sertl, Gourmet’s last Travel Editor, has a delightful new Substack called Kick the Bucket List. This week he reprises the trip he and I took for Gourmet’s last Paris issue. We had so much fun! It comes complete with old photographs and current recommendations for Paris hotels and restaurants.

So I decided to look at what I said the last time I spoke at a memorial for someone who was very important to me. I thought you might like to read what I said at Jonathan Gold’s memorial in 2018.

It’s been a horrible week. But the one thing that has given me comfort is the huge, international outpouring of grief and love for Jonathan. I knew he was famous and beloved in Los Angeles, but I had no idea how much he meant to so many people all over the world.

A few days ago I was in Italy speaking at a conference on social gastronomy. We were talking about how food can change the world. But when I stood up in front of all those chefs, academics and journalists who had come from every continent, all I could talk about was Jonathan. I worried that the people from Asia, Australia, South America, Africa and Europe might not know who he was, but the minute I mentioned Jonathan’s name, a huge wave of applause erupted in the room, and people burst into tears.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. This year, as I was sifting through the articles for Best American Food Writing, one theme kept recurring. Over and over young writers began their pieces by saying, “I want to be the next Jonathan Gold.”

And no wonder; nobody ever loved language more or had a better way with words. He even spoke carefully, choosing each separate word as if he were tasting it. And so instead of telling you about the rich, strange, and often maddening relationship I had with Jonathan, I want to talk about him as a writer.

All the articles have spoken of the enormous impact Jonathan’s unique brand of cultural anthropology had on Los Angeles. As the proprietor of a small restaurant wrote: “He treated us and our food with respect and love. And saw us as equals. Our food trucks, our holes in the walls, Mom and Pops – that was the true identity of Los Angeles. He saw it, he loved it, and he wanted us to succeed. He believed in us when many did not.”

And yesterday I got a note from a young woman who has nothing to do with food and never met Jonathan. She said she needed to tell someone how much he had meant to her. “Wherever he is now,” she wrote, “I know that if I ever end up there he’ll be the first person I ask to show me around, right after I thank him for teaching me how to live in this city I call home.”

But Jonathan did something much more important than offer us a new way to experience LA. And his legacy goes beyond expanding the borders of food writing. Jonathan proved that - even in this age of computers - words still have power.

We live in a time when we all spend far too much time worrying about the impact of the internet and the power of television. But Jonathan didn’t have a tv show. He wrote nothing that was clickbait. He did not indulge in any of the stupid antics that most food people participate in. And sadly he never wrote that book he kept promising to write. But he was a bold, ferocious, generous, passionate writer – and he made every word count. He proved, beyond any doubt, that those little black characters on paper can still change the world.

And here’s the thing: Jonathan never thought he was good enough. Even winning the Pulitzer didn’t quell the little voice inside his head that was constantly doubting what he wrote. His overwhelming desire to make every word perfect kept him from meeting deadlines or writing for the publications he most admired. He never sent in the articles the New Yorker had commissioned, because they didn’t meet his own stringent standards.

But Jonathan, you won! It kills me that you’re not here to see it. Because I don’t think you could ever have imagined how many people would mourn not only you, but your words. You made us all see that in the hands of a great writer even the smallest stories can make a huge impact.

A few years before he died, I mentioned that Jonathan’s words had inspired me to cook.

Reading Jonathan Gold’s description of a Sichuan dish in today’s LA Times made me really hungry. Partly because it’s such a lovely description; partly because he was writing about yama imo - Japanese mountain potato - which is one of my favorite foods.

Yama imo looks like daikon, and it begins with a crunch. But it quickly transforms itself into a creamy paste and as you chew it keeps changing - a little circus of the mouth - until it has become liquid. It’s a transformation that always delights me. I often eat it for breakfast, rolled up in sheets of nori with a bit of umeboshi, the pickled plum-like apricots of Japan.

But I don’t have any yama imo on hand at the moment, and I’m now desperate for some Asian flavors. A quick search through the refrigerator reveals the squid I bought yesterday, some chiles, a bottle of Shaoxing wine and a package of Chinese noodles; that, I decided will be lunch.

This recipe is based on the one in Bruce Cost’s Big Bowl Cookbook.

Slightly Spicy Chinese Noodles with Squid
1 pound cleaned squid
8 ounces Chinese noodles
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon neutral oil
2 tablespoons shredded ginger
5 scallions, sliced
1 jalapeno, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, smashed or minced
2 teaspoons Chinese black beans, rinsed
1/2 cup chicken stock
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine

Bring a pot of water to a boil.

Cut the squid into 1/2 inch wide strips, and if the tentacles are very large, cut them in half. Throw the squid into the boiling water, let it come back to a boil and cook for about half a minute. Drain and immediately run under cold water to stop the cooking. Set aside.

Cook the noodles according to package directions; Chinese noodles take about 3 minutes. Drain, rinse under cold water and toss with the sesame oil to keep them from sticking together. Set aside.

Prep the other ingredients: shred the ginger, slice the scallions, slice the jalapeño, mince the garlic and rinse the black beans.

Mix the chicken stock with the sugar, oyster sauce and soy sauce.

Heat a wok or heavy skillet over high heat. When it’s hot, add the neutral oil, allow it to get hot and add the ginger, scallions, jalapeno, garlic and black beans; toss and stir until the aroma floats over the pan. Add the chicken stock and cook for a minute or so, until it boils. Add the cooked noodles and toss for another minute. Add the squid and the wine and cook for another minute or two, until it’s all heated through.

Serves 2-3 people.

(I wrote this when it was much more difficult to find good Chinese ingredients than it is today. I now source most of my ingredients at Ma La Market. )

The Chinese black beans are really necessary for this; they cost very little, you can get them at any Chinese grocery store and they last virtually forever. They’re a classic umami ingredient, and a great pantry item.

Shaoxing is harder to find, but it’s flavor adds a lot to Chinese dishes. In a pinch, substitute dry sherry.

Try to get a brand of oyster sauce that is actually made from oysters; Ma La Market has two excellent brands.

If you don’t have fresh chiles, you can substitute dried chile flakes. Or a dollop of Chile Crisp. Or simply forego the bite of heat.

If you don’t have scallions, a small diced onion will do.

And if you don’t have Chinese noodles, you can substitute any other kind of noodle.

I just found this menu from La Broche, which was at the time the most avant garde restaurant in Miami. I loved the food at this outpost of Sergi Arola’s two Michelin star Madrid restaurant, but Miami was not impressed with molecular gastronomy and the restaurant had a very short run in the early 2000’s. (The Madrid restaurant closed in 2010.) The chef was Angel Palacios, who is now at Curate making tapas in Asheville…

Gaetano Arnoni has quite a pedigree; he was chef de cuisine at Babbo, worked with Dario Cecchini in Panzano Italy and then cooked in Tuscany for 4 years. Now he and his wife Meigan have Via Cassia, their own small (15 tables) restaurant in Hudson.

I’ll be eating there often. I loved this huge black kale salad with its sheaves of ricotta salata (despite the fact that there is honey in the dressing). The pastas are homemade, mostly classic, always excellent.

And this monkfish picatta was a textbook version: the sturdy fish with its gentle flavor snuggled happily into that buttery citrus sauce.

The service has a lovely small town quality, with Gaetano and Meigan stopping to say hello to every table. Via Cassia is a serious addition to the neighborhood.

(If you’re going to be in the area, you should know that the much-loved Lil Deb’s Oasis plans to close in October, so go now while you still can. The equally beloved Cafe Mutton now serves dinner Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. And Efren Hernandez, who has another beloved restaurant, Cafe Susanna across the river, is transforming Rivertown Lodge Tavern into a Mexican fish restaurant called Pez. It is slated to open late next week.

And speaking of Hudson… I am always charmed by the artistry of the seed packets from Hudson Valley Seed Company. (They open up into a flowery shape, perfect to hang on your walls.) This is, notably, the one place where you can buy the seeds to grow my favorite sauce tomatoes, Cesare’s Canestrino di Lucca.

The most remarkable was surely dinner at Corima, where the talented Fidel Caballero is cooking food that will challenge all of your notions of what Mexican food might be. Caballero hails from the northern part of the country, and he is determined to use the ingredients he grew up with in new and startling ways. Every dish in a long tasting menu was as original, personal, beautiful and delicious as the dish above: ruby red shrimp from Montauk served in potato foam with charred potato flakes and apple blossoms.

Our meal began with this little tart filled with English peas that had been peeled before cooking then laced with tiny bits of chopped surf clam creating the most intriguing textures. It was crowned with golden osetra. When chefs use caviar as a garnish I almost always wish they’d just given me the caviar and left the other stuff out. Not this time: everything about this little tidbit was perfect. Who knew that peas and caviar have secretly been longing to dance together?

I loved every one of the 13 courses ($140), but I’m going to limit myself to the ones I found most astonishing. There was, for instance, this little bit of branzino collar covered in chintextle, a wildly delicious Oaxcan smoked paste traditionally made by grinding dried chiles with dried shrimp, garlic, pumpkin seeds and avocado leaves. The flavor is intoxicating; the scallion-topped tidbits were like elegant hot chicken wings with serious character.

This remarkable combination of squid, oyster mushrooms and knotweed aquachile came topped in a flurry of grated macadamia nuts. The flavors were gentle but the textures were so unexpected and surprising that I found myself eating in utter silence.

Texture again: a giant morel stuffed with lamb and artichoke, topped with purslane and folded into one of Caballero’s remarkable tacos. (The warm, feathery tortillas are also not to be missed.)

Caballero is clearly seduced by color, as you can see from this little medley of squab, rhubarb and amaranth. I loved the look of this beautiful dish, but I liked the flavor even more.

This wasn’t my first experience of Corima; I visited the small, casual restaurant in January and wrote about the wonderful food and comfortable service here. (Scroll down to the bottom of the post.) But I was in a different mood then, and it was wonderful to return and rediscover how comforting it can be to put yourself in the hands of people who practice their art with so much passion and talent. The word corima comes from the Tarahumara language; it means “circle of sharing.” I found that sitting around this table with friends was exactly that: wonderfully heartening.

In another mood….
I was lucky enough to score a table at the new Cote 550. It is pure, unadulterated fun. You walk down the stairs into a steamy red room reverberating with disco music. But you soon leave this behind, walk down a long mysterious hall and end up in an underground forest with a pool at its center.

And then the show begins…

Like the original Cote (I wrote about it here when it first opened in 2018), if you stick with the Butcher’s Feast at $115 it’s an enormous amount of delicious food at a very fair price. You begin with a small cup of bone broth and a stunning little cube of toro.

Followed by an array of lovely banchan and a heap of scallion salad.

Then the cooking of the meat begins, an endlessly interactive exercise. It is so much meat that I found myself surreptitiously putting bits aside. (I took my little pile of steak home and enjoyed a second feast the following day).

After the meat there are a couple of delicious stews, an egg soufflé and finally soft serve for dessert.

There is also a fantastically tempting wine list and all kinds of ways to spend a lot more money on fancy cuts of meat. But really, you’re here for the theatrical fun of this lively restaurant. It’s a place that was created to make you forget all your troubles. And for the time that you spend here, it does.

And in yet another mood….

Chef Jae Jung grew up in Seoul but began her serious cooking career in New Orleans where she worked with everyone who matters, including the great Leah Chase. Her Kjun is an homage to both parts of her background: her food is a combination of the two cuisines. Where else are you going to get kalbi brisket over cheesy grits?

The atmosphere, on the other hand is pure New Orleans. This is a jazzy, vibrant place with young servers whose mission in life seems to be making sure that you have a good time. So just relax and enjoy the party.

Hard not to when you’re crunching into fried chicken bites or indulging in this good gumbo.

Two month fermented okra kimchi. Let the good times roll!

Forgive me: I’ve spent the last couple of weeks doing the kind of mindless chores you think will distract you. They don’t. But as I was cleaning out a bunch of old papers I came upon this article, and it somehow seemed appropriate.

Since Dad was on my mind, I went looking for the article I wrote the only time he was ever in a hospital. At the time I was living in Berkeley, but as I was heading to the airport to visit him I picked up the menus of the two restaurants I was currently reviewing. “Look at the typography,” I said. “What do these menus reveal about the restaurants?”

As it turned out, quite a lot.

I’m headed to Chicago in a couple weeks to give a speech at the Arts Club of Chicago. That has made me think about Charlie Trotter. (If you haven’t seen the movie, Love Charlie, it’s streaming on Netflix.) So I went looking for a menu.

I wish I remember this meal because although I find many of these dishes intriguing I have trouble imagining how the ingredients go together. And now, looking at that wild mushroom cappuccino I can’t help wondering if Charlie was the one who invented the dish? It was, in that moment, ubiquitous.

My friends have been wonderful too. When food people grieve they do it over food and I have not had a solitary meal in two weeks.

It is, I suppose, a prolonged wake. We go out to eat and tell each other tales of the person who is no longer at the table. We talk about him. We toast him. And while we’re doing that we are reminding ourselves that life can still be good.

Sometimes, however, it’s just too soon. We were headed out to dinner when we realized that nobody had the energy for that. So we did what my family has been doing for many years: we ordered in from Sushi Yasaka. For upper west siders, this is the go-to spot: it is the most reliable, affordable sushi in the city. I’m always amazed that it gets delivered with such speed that the sushi rice is still warm on arrival.

I should note that if I were going out to dinner I would choose Sushi Kaito just across the street; the12-seat bar looks like it was lifted, complete with Maneki-neko (the beckoning cat with raised paw), straight out of a Tokyo subway station. For $115 you get a truly beautiful 17-course omakase of pristine fish.

On the hottest day of the year a group of Gourmet friends took me to lunch at Rocco DiSpirito’s new Bar Rocco. I have always loved Rocco’s food, and I eyed the meatballs, the pasta and the arancini nero. But it was just too hot. So we indulged in his wonderful take on oysters Rockefeller and a grand seafood platter. The oysters were crisp, cool, briny, the shrimp and lobster perfectly cooked, and the tuna tartare hiding in the back was laced with surprising little bursts of salmon roe.

I have not stopped lamenting the loss of Honmura-An, the soba-ya which was, for many years, our family’s favorite New York restaurant. We were not alone; it was a very special place to many people. So I was overjoyed to discover that Soba Ulala has come along; this small calm restaurant is superbly Japanese in its simplicity and perfectionism. The zaru soba is exactly right, the chawan mushi with lobster and uni a little bite of heaven. The service is gentle and the sake list superb. I will definitely be back.

Lunch with a friend at Uncle Ray’s Chicken Rice. I fell in love with the classic Singapore dish on my first visit to that city in 1980, and I’ve been longing for a great version to arrive in New York. The chicken broth here is rich with pandan leaf and lemongrass, each grain of rice is plump, the chicken smooth and silken. (Both the poached and roasted versions are wonderful; I’m less fond of the char siu.) It’s a little feast for $18; no wonder the owner is now looking for a larger venue.

Look at the marbling on this meat: that is the reason you go to Yoon Haeundae Galbi, the New York outpost of a venerable restaurant in Busan, Korea that is famous for its short rib. There are other delicious dishes on the menu; the jeons (eggy Korean pancakes) are excellent and the fat, puffy meat-filled galbi dumplings are juicy. The banchan are admirable. But what you really want is that short rib, either fresh or marinated. You want to order a plate of greens to wrap around the meat - and some noodles to go on the griddle at the end of your meal to soak up the last delicious bits of charred meat.

Lunch with a good friend at the remarkable Rezdora began with gnocco fritto. The joy of this classic Modenese dish is feeling your mouth explode with flavor as the hot, airy puffs of bread melt the prosciutto and guancialle.

Nobody in New York makes better pasta than Stefano Secchi, but when he sent out these little pockets filled with ramps, chives & squacquerone cheese I gave an inward groan. Everyone seems to be enamored of ramps but to me they are flavor bullies, overwhelming everything they touch. Not here. The creamy cheese tamed the ramps into something that was both polite, restrained and utterly fascinating.

These little tomato tortelli topped with parmesan cream were a little dance of texture: toothsome, then soft and finally creamy. They are savory, but as I ate I kept remembering that tomatoes are fruits.

The people at the next table ordered the regional pasta tasting, and every pasta looked so delicious that I can’t wait to go back and try them all.

And finally, dinner at Cafe Luxembourg. (Someone told Michael that Keith McNally meant to name the restaurant for Rosa Luxemburg but misspelled her name. He instantly insisted that we go.) We have been eating at the restaurant since it opened in 1983. There is something soothing about sitting in that unchanging space surrounded by the ghosts of the people we used to be.

I ordered the Michael meal: Caesar salad, burger, fries. All excellent. And although I haven’t had a martini in years tonight I had one just for Michael.

Gin.

Extra olives.

Ice on the side.

How amazing that, just as I headed out to dinner at Cafe Luxembourg this menu from 1984 floated to the top of the pile.

In the same folder as the menu was this card from the late Patrick Clark, the original chef at both Odeon and Cafe Luxembourg. He was a rock star chef with enormous talent who died of a rare blood disease in 1998. The card was his response to my review of his food at Tavern on the Green,

Somehow, this piece seems appropriate right now.

Nancy reserved a ticket on the redeye.

Meanwhile my New York friends hit the subway so speedily they beat the undertakers to our place.

In a moment of crisis my friends show up. I am deeply grateful.

The last week has been both terribly sad and strangely joyful. Friends I haven’t heard from for years have been sending memories of Michael, and after the agony of watching his decline they have given me back the fierce, honorable, wonderful man I married.

It is the greatest gift.

Almost everyone has written about Michael’s bullshit radar - he had no tolerance for pretension. Nobody knows this better than I do. When people ask how I could have married a man who had very little interest in food this is my answer: he kept me honest.

As you can see from this excerpt from Garlic and Sapphires.

I still cringe when I read that. But it was what I loved about Michael. He told you the truth - even when it hurt.

So what, I wondered, as Nancy, Laurie, Robin and I set off for Le Bernardin to toast Michael’s memory, would he have thought about this?

Oddly, I’m sure he would have approved. Le Bernardin is the only fancy restaurant he ever enjoyed and we celebrated many important moments of our lives there. Michael would have liked knowing that when the time came, we were at Le Bernardin celebrating him.

Our meal began with a series of intricate jewel-like amuse-bouches. This tiny morsel, hamachi tartare with pea shoots in a crisp seaweed shell, was my favorite. All crackle, crunch and soft seductive textures. “Hello,” it whispered when you picked it up, “isn’t life wonderful?”

Tuna tartare topped with sweet, briny caviar surfing on a seaweed tuille. As the flavors went ricocheting through my mouth I began to cry: Michael would have loved everything about this extremely luxurious dish.

Filet of sole crowned with a diadem of tiny vegetables and slivered almonds. A gentle dish, a quiet pause after the introductory fireworks.

My favorite dessert: Strawberries reimagined as candy, as jelly, as a mousse. A parade of textures and temperatures, a celebration of creativity, proof that even great ingredients can be coaxed into something even better.

It was a wonderful meal. But it was the service as well as the food. We felt cosetted by everyone who came to the table, all trying to remind us that happiness is possible. A great meal at a terrible time can remind you, if only for a moment, how beautiful life can be.

Your friends, of course, do that too. When the meal ended, Nancy called an Uber and went back to the airport.

“You’re leaving?” I asked.

She had been in New York less than eight hours.

“I had to come,” she said simply.

And then - the final gift - Laurie wrote this beautiful piece about Michael, who she called “one of the world’s great curmudgeons.”

More tears.

The day after Michael died the food started to arrive. The first delivery, which came from Zabar’s, was labelled “the care and condolence collection.” Honestly. It was the perfect thing to have on hand when friends dropped in. As they did.

The next delivery was from Russ and Daughters. This one is called Russ and Fathers. More lox, cream cheese, bagels and babka. Not a crumb remains.

From now on the flavor of lox and bagels will be bittersweet to me.

And finally, this memory of what I’ve lost….

Early in our relationship I took Michael to meet M.F.K. Fisher and he drew her out on a subject she was reluctant to talk about. That was when I fell in love.

This is from Comfort Me with Apples.

Michael turned forty that year and threw himself a huge birthday party at the Savoy Tivoli, his local North Beach bar. He asked me to bake a cake. Of course I did.

It took four men to carry the thing in.

I thought I’d baked a cake, but actually I’d baked an enormous love letter that could feed three hundred people.

I eat a lot of wonderful food and it always makes me happy. But every once in a while I have a meal that does more than that: it reminds me of all the reasons I love restaurants and makes me forget, for a little while, all the terrible things that are happening in the real world.

I had a meal like that the other night at the brand new Oyatte. And it reminded me of how lucky I am to live in New York City. I’ll tell you all about the serene service, lovely ambiance and Hasung Lee’s remarkable food next week. Apologies for not doing it right now (and for being late today), but at the moment I’m in the midst of a serious family medical crisis and I don’t thing I can do it justice. What I can do is remind you of a few of the other reasons I feel so lucky to live in New York city.

Did this article ever get printed? I’m not sure. I don’t have a copy, just this version that the editor sent me, presumably right before it went to press. But it’s a very fun (and rather edgy) look at Manhattan’s restaurant scene in 1984.

The headline on it was: A California restaurant critic surveys New York’s trendy new eateries. She finds a homey cassoulet, a tender pink risotto and a lot of people in chic shock.

From that folder I pulled that article out of, the menu at Gotham Bar and Grill….

My friend Troy Chatterton has just opened Wild Sorrel, a cookbook shop dedicated to the home cook in the East Village. If you’re in New York stop by to say hello. And if you’re looking for a great mother’s day present, this would be a wonderful place to find it.

One thing you might buy at Wild Sorrel is the book I mention in this article. It’s a wonderful tale of a truly iconic New York restaurant of the sixties.

Forget Le Pavillon. The hardest reservation in the sixties in New York City might have been Little Kitchen, Princess Pamela’s soul food restaurant. The Princess moved around a lot; at one point her restaurant was in a walkup apartment in the East Village, but by the time I nervously rang her bell she’d moved to a narrow storefront on very east Tenth Street. Princess Pamela didn’t let just anybody in: she had to size you up first, and if you passed muster, she might open the door. That did not, however, mean you got to stay.

When I visited the Princess in the summer of 1971, I was already a fan. I’d found a used copy of her cookbook, Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Recipes, and practically memorized it. I was hoping for something exotic - chitlins maybe - but you pretty much ate what the Princess gave you. In our case, that meant nothing. One of my friends made a joke about “a soul food restaurant with no sweet potato pie.” He thought he was being charming; the Princess was not amused. “Out!” she shouted.

I’ve been thinking about Princess Pamela because I recently reread her cookbook. The Lee Brothers, who brought the book back, set out to find out as much as they could about Pamela Stroebel. It’s a melancholy tale. Orphaned at the age of ten, she wended her way up the East Coast, working in kitchens until she opened her own place. Then, somewhere around 1998, she simply disappeared. The Lees think she may have been interred at Hart Island, where the city buries unclaimed bodies.

Reading about the Princess in this great Food 52 piece by Mayukh Sen, it’s impossible not to mourn the untold numbers of Black chefs whose stories we’ll never fully know. It makes me doubly grateful that Princess Pamela’s book has been given a second chance.

One of the glories of New York is our cheesecake. Here’s my favorite recipe.

NEW YORK CHEESECAKE
Crust
1 1/2 cups chocolate wafer crumbs (about 6 ounces)
1/2 cup melted butter
1/4 cup sugar
pinch salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the graham crackers with 1/4 cup sugar and the melted butter and press into the bottom and sides of a 9-inch springform pan. Put into the freezer for fifteen minutes (it will keep here, covered, for a couple of months). Bake for 10 minutes, just to crisp the crust. Turn the oven down to 300 degrees.

Filling
1 1/2 pounds cream cheese, preferably without gum, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
Beat the cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until smooth. Pour into crust and bake 50 minutes, or until the cheese is set on the edges, but still a bit wobbly in the middle. Remove from the oven (leave oven on) and cool for about 10 minutes on a wire rack.

Topping
2 cups sour cream
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Stir together the sour cream, sugar and vanilla and spread over cooled cake. Return to oven for 12 minutes until glossy and set.

Cool completely, cover, and chill at least 8 hours.

And finally, a little nod to the fact that New Yorkers are loyal people: I wrote this twelve years ago, and with the exception of The Breslin every one of the shops and restaurants mentioned is still alive and thriving.

Monday, May 5, 2014
James Beard Award weekend in New York is always exhilarating and exhausting. Endless parties lasting late into the night. Chefs filling up every restaurant. Too much food. Too much wine. I love it.

But the highlight of my weekend was a stroll around the lower east side, visiting my favorite food places with a group of new friends. We began at Katz's - of course - for some of their tender, spicy, irresistible pastrami. Just walking into that enormous room packed with raucous people makes me insanely happy. The walls throb with the intense scent of smoke, salt, pepper, garlic, spices and then, somewhere, like a reverberating backnote, the richness of beef.

Afterward we went down the street to Russ and Daughters, where we ate - what else? - some herring. Although they’re now famous for their lox, when Meyer Russ arrived from Poland he started it all by selling herring from barrels on the sidewalk. Meanwhile Niki Russ Federman told great stories about growing up in the shop she now runs.

Then it was on to Deluxe Foods, a fantastic Chinese market where we feasted on roast duck and the most delicious roasted pork belly. Not to mention tendon, with its wonderful texture, and scallion chicken so soft and silky it literally melted in our mouths. We ended with their spectacular just-made char shiu.

Onward to Di Palo's, where we drank wine and ate spectacular cheeses for a very long time. A new discovery for me: Camembert di Bufala - a rich, runny cheese that seemed less like its namesake and much more like the infinitely more delicious Epoisses.

By then it was late, and dark, and I said good-bye and walked up the street to Estella, where almost every table was occupied by someone who'd come to town for the Beard awards. (Restaurant people included Nick Kokonas (Alinea), Daniel Patterson (Coi), and Sean Brock (Husk).

We were all there because the food is so impressive. Fascinating flavor combinations and very precise and careful cooking. My pictures, I'm sorry to say, are terrible: this mussel escabeche is the best of the lot, which tells you something. This seemed more like a i made with mussels than a true escabeche, but it was wonderful.

So was beef tartare, studded with crisp little bits of pungent sunchoke, and kampachi tartare popping with tart tiny squares of apple and singing with yuzu. There was a wonderfully musky aroz negro, dense with squid ink, and this celery salad, dotted with mint and cave-aged cheese:

and these lamb ribs scented with charmoula

:

Lovely food. Lovely evening.

On Sunday, more food people gathered for a friends and family brunch at the new Russ and Daughters Cafe. It's a lovely place, respectful of its origins, lovingly put together (note the marble floors, the poppyseed wallpaper in the bathroom, the comfortable stools). The counter in front looks as innocent as an old-fashioned soda fountain, but it actually functions more like a bar where elaborate drinks are carefully concocted. This cherry shrub was shot through with hints of pepper:

The food is also very respectful of history. Lots of smoked salmon and herring. Some chopped liver. Matzo brei. Eggs. Not to mention the best rye bread I've ever eaten: dense with a deeply fermented flavor, this is bread that makes you understand why it's called the staff of life. Made from an 80 year old starter, it is, literally, the taste of tradition.

The bread is perfect with this rich, smoky, delicous whitefish chowder

Leaving, we walked across the island in sunshine. Then, in the middle of Chinatown, sun still shining bright in the sky, it suddenly started to rain. Everyone looked up, startled, and laughed. We were wet by the time we arrived at Barbuto, where chefs drank endless glasses of rosé, ate lovely little tidbits - and talked about where they were going to eat dinner.

Me? I ended up at The Breslin with these people - and 20 or so other friends - where April Bloomfield sent out this this crisp little roast piglet. (Alas The Breslin is no more. Happily, however, we now have Sailor where April is cooking the best food of her career.)

She is also causing me to consider, once again, the rather fraught notion of how to feed a child. Since she’s been born I’ve spent time looking at what I’ve written on the subject. This particular article from 2007 stuck a chord: it has been quoted more than anything else I’ve ever written.

I never gave much thought to what children eat until the mid-eighties, when I set off to write an article about Alice Waters. At the time Alice was completely obsessed with cooking for her 18-month old daughter, Fanny.

Fanny now has a daughter of her own, and she is equally obsessed. So obsessed that she coauthors The Green Spoon, a Substack about feeding children. If you have a young child I think you’ll find it extremely useful.

Since we’re talking about Alice Waters in the early eighties, let’s take a look at how she was feeding grownups back then. In those days I preferred the menus earlier in the week (they were usually the most adventurous), but that menu for Friday the thirteenth looks incredible to me.

People have a lot of preconceptions about what foods children like, but the truth is that if the dinner table isn’t a battle ground they will probably like what you do. I love spicy food, and my son followed right in my footsteps. This is a little excerpt from Save Me the Plums.

Nick was still awake, and I was absurdly happy to see him. A better mother, I thought, would be worried about his losing sleep, but just the sight of him made all the other stuff seem small.

“I’m hungry,” he said when the babysitter had gone.

“Didn’t Anisa make dinner for you?”

“Yes. But it wasn’t as good as the food you cook.” My son has always known exactly how to play me.

“It’s kind of late.”

“Please.” He looked up at me. “Please.”

What the hell, I thought; end the day on a high note. “How about spicy noodles?” They could be ready in a flash.

Nick nodded, happily following me into the kitchen, bare feet slapping against the floor. He hoisted himself onto the counter and, as the scent of ginger, scallions, and black beans rose around us, regaled me with tales of his day. I boiled the pasta and tossed it into the wok, swirling it with a flourish. As I ladled noodles into Nick’s bowl, I inhaled the scent, thinking how much better this was than anything the restaurant I’d reviewed earlier that evening had served us. I reached for another bowl, and we took them into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and slurped noodles together.

Spicy Chinese Noodles for Nick
1/2 pound Chinese noodles, dried egg noodles, or spaghetti
Peanut oil
1/2-inch-long piece of fresh ginger
2 scallions
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons Chinese black bean paste with garlic
1 tablespoon Chinese bean paste with chili
1/2 pound ground pork
Sesame oil

Cook the noodles in boiling water until al dente (the time will vary with the type of noodle). Drain, toss with a half tablespoon of peanut oil, and set aside.

Peel and mince the ginger (you should have about two tablespoons). Chop the white parts and slice the green parts of the scallions.

Mix the sugar and the two kinds of hot bean paste, and set aside.

Heat a wok until a drop of water skitters across the surface. Add a tablespoon of peanut oil, toss in the ginger, and stir-fry for about half a minute, until the fragrance is hovering over the wok.

Add the pork and white scallions and stir-fry until all traces of pink have disappeared. Add the bean sauce mixture and cook and stir for about 2 minutes.

Stir in the green scallions and noodles and quickly toss. Add a drop of sesame oil and turn into two small bowls. This makes a perfect snack for two.

This remarkable little book, The Gentle Art of Cookery, published in 1925, is a reminder that long before Elizabeth David weighed in the English were eating interesting food from all over the world. The author’s basic philosophy, laid out in the introduction, is that one should “shop first and then arrange the dinner according to what is most plentiful in the market.” She includes an entire chapter on The Arabian Nights, with recipes for dishes like imam bayaldi and chicken stuffed with pistachios.

The book’s author, Hilda Leyel, was a famous herbalist with a remarkably modern attitude (among other things, she agitated for the use of compost as opposed to synthetic fertilizers). The book is valuable for its vegetable recipes alone, and is best known for the chapter on cooking with flowers, which includes recipes for Dandelion Wine, Chrysanthemum Salad, Violet Marmalade and Rose Ice Cream.

But what I find most fascinating is Leyel’s ideas on cooking with children. A few of these recipes I’ve never seen before. I particularly like that “ostrich egg,” although I’m a little stumped as to where a modern cook would source the pig’s bladder.

Going through old files I came upon this speech I wrote in 1991 when I was the food editor of the Los Angeles Times. I’m not even sure where I gave the speech - it was obviously at some sort of conference - but from the vantage point of thirty-five years, it’s an interesting artifact.

Seems like such a long time ago. Looking at the paper it’s printed on - in those days we used a machine that printed on a continuous roll of paper with sprocketed edges - reminds me that I went down to the composing room every day just as the paper was about to go on press. Each page was pasted up so you could take one last look. If an article was too long the pressmen told you how many inches you needed to cut and you took an xacto knife and pared the piece down, then pasted it back together with rubber cement.

In those days the food section of the Los Angeles Times was huge - 2 full sections, often running to sixty or more pages. It was all about advertising, of course; supermarkets were still printing coupons in the paper for their customers to clip. Still, I find it fascinating that food sections have once again become financial engines for newspapers - just look at the New York Times. But there’s one big difference: back then the money came from advertisers. Today, it’s the consumers who pay. It is, in my opinion, a much more sensible model.

I can’t help noticing something else. Back then I was worrying about who was writing about food. I was right to be concerned. It’s taken too long, but it’s wonderful to see how many diverse voices have now been added to the food writing mix.

Best of all is the fact that food writing is no longer being sneered at. Food writers now win major awards for their reporting. It took 16 more years from the time I wrote this speech, but a food critic (Jonathan Gold), finally won the Pulitzer for criticism.

I certainly hope he’s not the last.

There is no more iconic Los Angeles restaurant of the eighties and nineties than Spago, which opened in 1982 and changed the city’s food landscape.

Here is the opening menu. That drawing on the cover? Take a look at the signature. Wolf couldn’t figure out what he wanted, so at the last minute he simply picked up some pencils and made a drawing.

While we’re being nostalgic…here’s the kind of article that was routinely printed in the “women’s section” of newspapers. I have to admit that although I tore this out of a magazine in 1975, I never actually made any of these recipes.

Carol Cutler was a prolific cookbook author and the queen of quick food. In addition to six minute soufflés she wrote books about fast breads, fast fish and low-calorie desserts. But my favorite of her books? Paté, The New Main Course for the 80’s.

It, in this case, being the world.

The Vilcek Foundation is dedicated to recognizing the contributions immigrants have made to our culture. In 2027 they are offering six $50,000 prizes for immigrants in the culinary arts. If you know someone who’s eligible urge them to apply. The prize is open to immigrants who are cooks, makers, writers, editors, scholars, bakers, photographers, content creators etc, age 38 and under. Applications close May 4. Apply here.

I am a big fan of the Vilcek Foundation, and I know how much good they can do. In 2010 I was on the committee that awarded the Vilcek prize to Jose Andres. I could not be more proud of what Jose did with the prize money. He was determined to use it for good, and when an earthquake ravaged Haiti he flew to the island and fed hungry people. It was the beginning of the organization that became World Central Kitchen, which has served more than 500 million meals to hungry people all over the world.

If you’re like most people, you’re eating a lot more beans than you used to. But do you know about the fantastic Judion butter beans of Spain? The lovely large beans come pre-cooked so that it is easy to add their soft creaminess to all manner of dishes. They are sold in many, many gourmet food shops (I’ve bought them at Rubiner’s in Great Barrington and Maison Marcel in Los Angeles), because I like having them on hand when I make this fast, easy lemony shrimp stew that everybody loves.

The other day somebody asked me to list my favorite cookbooks and I found myself going on about my battered old edition of Edna Lewis’ The Taste of Country Cooking. It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, the fiftieth anniversary edition of the book is about to be issued with a new introduction by my friend Toni Tipton-Martin. (The thirtieth anniversary edition had a preface by Judith Jones and an introduction by Alice Waters. )

I first met Edna Lewis in the early seventies, and like most people was immediately taken with her extraordinary beauty and straightforward intelligence. There really was no one like her - which is why one of the first things I did on becoming editor of Gourmet Magazine was ask one of my favorite writers, Chang-rae Lee, to profile her. You can find that here.

Seven years later, in 2008, editor Jane Lear was offered an unpublished Edna Lewis essay; thrilled, we decided to build an entire issue around it. Here’s what I wrote at the time.

After reading this you will, of course, want to read What is Southern. You will find it here. That issue is one I am very proud of; be sure to click on the recipes, because every one of them is a winner.

Sadly Miss Lewis is no longer with us. But her great friend - and the person she lived with during the last years of her life - Scott Peacock is very much alive. If you want to learn to make biscuits Miss Lewis would approve of, you must sign up for Scott’s biscuit experience.

Your life will never be the same.

This menu, from the seminal Oakland restaurant Bay Wolf, dates from sometime in the seventies, right around the time I first met Edna Lewis. (Bay Wolf closed in 2017 after a 40 year run.) It’s a great example of how excited food people were about regional American cuisines. After years of considering the hamburger to be America’s major contribution to the culinary canon we began seriously studying the local foods found in different parts of the country.

We had a lot to learn. First there was the excitement about California cuisine, followed very closely by Cajun (thank you Paul Prudhomme). Gradually we began to discover that, thanks to both the climate and the ethnic groups who settled the area, each American region has a different cuisine. But nowhere, in my opinion, is the food as exciting as it is in the south, because so many different cultures have left their mark upon it.

These waffles always make me think of Edna Lewis. They are so light they seem to float off the griddle and hover in the air. Then they dissolve the instant they hit the tongue.

Many thanks to Anson Mills, whose 13 colonies rice waffle flour is unlike anything I’ve used before. Like Sean Brock (with whom they’ve partnered), Anson Mills has embarked on a quest to bring back the heirloom crops of the antebellum Carolina rice kitchen. They’ve searched through seed libraries, looking for southern crops that disappeared with the industrialization of American farms, and brought them back. Take a look through their site; this is agricultural history at its most intriguing.

This rice flour is specifically intended for waffles, which were extremely popular in the old south, and often served at dinner with fried chicken. Personally, I prefer them in a starring role at breakfast. A perfect way to start the day.

Note: If you’re not using the Anson Mills rice flour, substitute 3/4 cup rice flour mixed with 3/4 cup pastry flour.

Rice Waffles
(adapted from Fannie Farmer and Anson Mills)
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
1/2 teaspoon plus one tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 cups Anson Mills 13 colony rice flour (or 3/4 cup ordinary rice flour plus 3/4 cup pastry flour)
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
1 cup whole milk
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Dissolve 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast and 1/2 teaspoon sugar in 1/2 cup warm water (be sure the water is not too hot or it will kill the yeast). Set aside.

Whisk the flour, salt, and remaining tablespoon of sugar in a large bowl.

Slowly melt half a stick of butter, allowing it to turn a slight, nut-like brown. Remove from the heat and stir in the milk. When it’s cool enough to stick your finger in, add the yeast mixture.

Stir the liquids into the flour, mixing well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave on the counter to rise overnight.

The next morning, stir in an egg and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda. If the batter feels a bit thick, add up to 2 tablespoons more milk.

Pour batter into a hot waffle iron: how much batter you use will depend on the size of your iron, but in my old-fashioned cast iron waffle iron it makes about 7 waffles.

Eat with maple syrup, apple syrup or, in true southern fashion, sorghum. Or simply eat the waffles piping hot, unadorned, with your fingers.

A little lagniappe….

In 2009 Francis Lam wrote a wonderful story about a master roaster in a Toronto suburb at Ho Ho BBQ. Today he sent me a link to this amazing video of the same technique being practiced in Hong Kong.

If you’ve been reading La Briffe for a while you know that I’m a big fan of the glass Any Day containers which are some of the most useful tools in my kitchen. They go easily from refrigerator to freezer to oven - and they make attractive serving bowls as well.

Now the Anyday people have come up with a new tool: Anydeli. This is how they describe their latest product. Anydeli keeps everything people love about plastic deli containers — while making them microwave-safe, freezer-safe, and dishwasher-safe, too.

Use them to store leftovers, portion ingredients, freeze soups, pack lunches, and so much more.

And this is what I say: another great addition to my kitchen.

I had a long conversation with Chris Kimball about all manner of subjects, including the state of modern foodwriting. If you’re curious you can find it here.