I love picnics, but I’ve fallen into a bit of a picnic rut. Someone brings a baguette, someone brings cheese, someone brings charcuterie. There’s a carton of strawberries. It’s not that I want it to be more gourmet, but I feel like there are variations I’m just not thinking of. Can you help broaden my horizons?

-Eating Outside (the box)

Dear Eating Outside (the box),

I wrote a column on this topic for the New York Times a decade ago. (Actually, a decade plus a year.) Because I’m packing for vacation, because I’ve been asked by readers to publish more of my old writing, and because I still agree with what I said then, I’m reprinting it below. After this column, I’ll be taking a one-month hiatus; I live in Spain these days, where August is a monthlong break. When in Rome…

Into the Wild, May 13, 2015

I once ate a picnic in a canoe floating down a river. We were in the Périgord, and had expected the French families in boats alongside us to retrieve carefully made lunches from baskets at midday. But all had brought potato chips and sodas or beer instead. They watched us, benevolently jealous, as we laid out chilled artichokes and mayonnaise, Bayonne ham, tiny walnut-studded sausages, Cabecou cheese, figs, little tumblers and a bottle of rosé in the canoe’s deep middle. The Dordogne is a slow river, but it was intoxicating to eat with such naïve pomp amid the burbles of small eddies and chirping birds, mingling those two basic impulses of human life: the wild and the tame.

Victorians loved to picnic. Those overly decent people instinctively knew the frisson of performing petty formalities amid beetle and toad, and so they happily trudged in waistcoat and bustle through field and stream for lunch. Picnics might be the one activity that Victorian officiousness improved, because the only difference between “picnicking” and “eating outside” — which for most of history was just “eating” — is the pleasurable collision between human refinements and the places and energies in the natural world that have, so far, escaped them.

I think this is why, when it comes to deciding what to eat on a picnic, I’ve always seen the logic in heading for the deep end — and admire how deep the most committed picnickers have waded. The bon viveur James Beard, who found time during his 81 years of deliberate gastronomy to write four books on eating and cooking in the unfettered outdoors, prescribes this “Rich, Elegant Picnic for 10”: French Champagne, Caviar, Toast, Onion, Sour Cream, Chopped Egg, Double Consommé With Chopped Parsley, Chaud-Froid Chicken, Baked Ham in Crust, Asparagus Vinaigrette, Tiny French Rolls, Frozen Raspberry Mousse, Small Cakes, Demitasse.

When I was younger, I anxiously hosted my share of picnics as close to Beard’s as I could imagine or afford, serving chilled salmon roe, iced white-almond-and-garlic gazpacho, olive-oil cake with whipped cream, poached fish with herbed mayonnaise and big glass jars of Pimm’s and 7Up, each glass garnished with a thin spear of cold cucumber. And I still find that such meticulous excess, mounted outdoors, possesses the same allure as a tuxedo with its tie undone.

Those were good picnics, and a kind I don’t try anymore. It might be because I’m tired, or acutely conscious of being at an age when affectation is unflattering. But I am still pulled, whenever I have a chance to serve a meal on warm earth with grasshoppers chattering nearby, to a menu less practical and more done up than what is most portable or efficient. An exemplary one comes from Amy Vanderbilt’s 1961 “Complete Cookbook”: potato salad, ham sandwiches, cold fried chicken, pickles, olives, celery hearts, small loaf cake, fresh peaches and cherries. I’ve found almost identical menus in “Buckeye Cookery,” from 1877, and from Edna Lewis in 1976.

I’ve never tried to analyze what’s good about the arrangement, only knowing it all to be right for its aim. I think each piece has its own reason for fitting. Potatoes and chicken and ham are adamantly good when served cool. (Nothing at a picnic is ever actually cold, except for wine, which is worth trying to insulate, and still performs if your thermal experimentation fails.) But two of the three still take doing — soaking chicken in buttermilk overnight, frying it a day ahead; boiling potatoes — which serves the purpose of putting on a good show. The other dishes are right because it can’t all be a show, and no matter how much formality we’ve shaken off, it remains blissfully transgressive to serve bowls of unadorned vegetables and fruit.

The wildness of the picnic is in its whereabouts. From what I have read, game Victorian picnickers didn’t need more than sitting in high grass holding crystal coupes to feel the meal’s quintessential thrill. They drew the line at eating anywhere too wild. A poetic Mrs. M. W. Ellsworth, in her 1900 “Queen of the Household,” advises against eating anywhere that “Dame Nature has had her queer moods, and has left imprinted certain too observable evidences of her freakiness.”

I think that this is the religious spirit of the age speaking. In my brief but conscientious experience, meals laid at nature’s freakier tables — atop mystical boulders, at the ends of natural sea walls, on windy harsh hills, at river, or better, at sea — set both nature’s and our precious eccentricities in finest relief. Liberated from rooms built for eating, with no obstacle but will to any of the numerous spots in nature, you make most sense by going strange.

If you live amid cement, it merits noting that much wild beautiful land in cities remains devoted to cemeteries. Through many a forbidding wrought-iron gate you can glimpse great grassy knolls, shadowed by a live oak or willow whose long beard brushes the deep grass, sunlight spotting one side of the hill, leaving the other damp and shaded — all of it inviting a stop for a meal, in spite of the many humans lying in bony silence beneath it. The unsentimental cookbook writer Nika Hazelton thankfully dispensed with squeamishness in her 1969 “The Picnic,” offering this “Menu for a Picnic à Deux in a Graveyard”: double consommé with sherry or manzanilla, foie-gras naturel, asparagus vinaigrette, French bread and strawberry tarts.

But maybe adding that other basic impulse — love — into the mix makes all further details immaterial. This oft-quoted formula from Omar Khayyám, in his “Rubaiyat,” is applicable as ever:

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and
Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Truly I have no plan more likely to lift you to the apogee of gastronomic and spiritual happiness than Khayyám’s of bottle and loaf — and lover! — ferried to the nearest bluff.

Recipe: Cold Fried Chicken

This is Gabrielle Hamilton’s recipe. It is very good.

Yield: 6 servings

FOR SOAKING

• 2 cups buttermilk

• 1 ½ tablespoons kosher salt

• ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper

• 3 pounds chicken thighs, bone in, skin on

FOR DREDGING

• 1 ½ cups flour

• 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon ground turmeric

• 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons kosher salt

• 1 ½ tablespoons ground black pepper

• Enough shortening or peanut oil to come 6 inches up a high-sided pot

Preparation

1. One day before you’re frying, mix all the soaking ingredients in a big container or two. Put the thighs in to soak, and refrigerate overnight.

2. The following day, mix the dredging ingredients in a big deep bowl or high-sided roasting pan. Remove the chicken from the soak, piece by piece, allowing excess buttermilk to drip off away from the dredge. Drop each piece into flour mixture, a few at a time, leaving space between each piece. Shake, and toss to coat each piece evenly and thoroughly.

3. Lay the dredged chicken on a rack set over a cookie sheet to allow the coating to dry and cling, leaving space between the pieces.

4. Heat oil to 325 degrees, testing with a thermometer, or by dropping a few specks of flour in, and begin to fry when the specks sizzle calmly. Fry in batches, until just shy of golden. Continue until all have been fried, lowering the heat as needed to keep the temperature constant, and straining out excess flour to keep the oil clean. Let thighs rest on a rack over a cookie sheet or dish towel. Skim all the excess flour out of the oil, or carefully strain it into a new pot and raise heat to 350. Fry the thighs again, in batches, to (in Hamilton’s words) “finish to gorgeous deep golden brown.”

5. Drain on a rack. Leave at room temperature for a same-day picnic, or refrigerate overnight if you’re eating the following day. Bring buttermilk dressing! Bring hot sauce! Bring butter lettuce! Bring rosé!

Dear cooks, I’ll see you in September! In the meantime…

Send me your questions!

- The Recovering Vegetarian

Dear Recovering Vegetarian,

Do you know how I met my husband? It was a summer day in 2011(?). I had plans to toss a frisbee with a friend, Quinn, in Prospect Park. He arrived with a colleague in tow. The first thing I noticed about the colleague—Pete—was that he was very handsome. The second was that he had a prosthetic leg.

We fanned out into the park, and I made two further observations: Peter was great at frisbee, and we seemed to share a sense of humor. Then, obviating further deductions, Pete shouted that the lock on his prosthetic leg was broken, and instructed Quinn to “go long.” Quinn obeyed, sprinting half the length of the field before Pete kicked his prosthesis off, and Quinn, with the grace of a land-borne sea lion, caught it, shouted, and did a touchdown celebration.

And I, looking on, fell irrevocably in love. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I think I felt that if this handsome, one-legged, funny athlete dealt with a broken prosthesis by sending a friend running down a field and kicking it to him, he would likely deal with the rest of life’s vicissitudes with similar humor and equanimity. I’d been offered a rare opportunity to observe Pete dealing with adversity. And I loved what I observed.

I’ve since seen Pete deal with a debilitating mold allergy by sleeping on a pool lounge outside a rental house—while everyone else slumbered comfortably inside—and with an undiagnosed stomach problem by eating nothing but sweet potatoes. (This diet has broadened to include anything except wheat.) The lock on his prosthetic leg continues to periodically break. What I observed in Prospect Park holds: he remains adamantly opposed to suffering from any of it. He allows annoyance—at the mold allergy, and the wheat intolerance. He allows—even invites—ridiculousness. He’s invented bizarre meals of canned sardines, potato chips, and Indian chana snack mixes. But he will not entertain the idea that his situation is lacking, or that life would be better if the world would compensate him, or adjust in some way.

As you’ve probably gleaned by now, my first piece of advice is for you to follow in Pete’s footsteps—to “share meals with friends and family” without expecting those meals to provide everything you need. Eat something at home before going out, or seize the opportunity of a meal at a meaty restaurant to order something fun and silly—like a salad and an ice cream sunday. I don’t see a problem with removing the meat from homemade pizza, as long as you do it without making it the focus of attention. I think it’s fine to make adjustments to what you’re served, provided that you do it with humor and grace. It’s also fine to bring a bag of potato chips and explain to your hosts that you have temporarily developed the palate of a nine-year old, and will, accordingly, eat a meal of chips while enjoying the conversation.

I have advice beyond the above euphemistic version of “suck it up.” There is no certifying board for dietary preference—not for vegetarianism and not for omnivorism. If you’re not enjoying the experience of being identified as someone who prefers meat if it’s available, change how you identify yourself. You can sample meat dishes that appeal, but won’t feel pressured to eat food you don’t want. I have two “vegetarian” friends who occasionally eat meat at my house because they trust my sourcing. Choose a label that sets you up for the happiest eating.

Dear cook, at the heart of this question is the old chestnut about to seem and to be. You can act like Pete, and seem adaptable to whatever dietary circumstances you confront. Or you can be like Pete, unbothered by dishes you don’t find appetizing, trusting that you’ll find something you like at the table,] or fill up on dessert. Or, you can seem a vegetarian, and bend that identity when a ribeye beckons. Whichever path you choose, it seems to me that the only recovery necessary is from expectations, which are more in the way than any unwanted pizza topping.

I need your questions!

I was gifted 10 frozen fish fillets—the kind that's packed in water so the bag is 80% fish, 20% water. They are tasteless. Racking my brains how to make them edible. I have salt-preserved lemons on hand, plenty of garlic, cilantro, tomatoes...if it were decent fish I'd know what to do, but these grey fillets beat me.

-Fishing For An Answer

Dear Fishing For An Answer,

I don’t know enough about my heart’s geography to know its precise coordinates, but there exists a small special place in mine for mediocre ingredients. Certainly, beautiful ingredients have brought me to tears. I wrote about one instance in Feast on Your Life:

The first time we visited Biarritz, Pete lost me in the market. He found me standing in front of the fishmonger, crying at the beauty of a skate wing. I cried again the next time I visited the same market.

I’ve never been so moved by frozen fish fillets—”the kind that’s packed in water so the bag is 80% fish, 20% water.” (That is a perfect description. I know exactly what you mean. I was once given a number of such filets as a gift. We must both examine whom we call friends—or worse: my frozen fish benefactor was my brother!) But I feel kinship with the grey filets, as I do with the sad onions in a cardboard box at the bodega, or a lone, neglected, ancient can of water-packed tuna. It is a tenderness born of the plucking of a different string than whatever the skate wing plucks, but it is just as true.

I can speculate about the reasons: some belief in the intrinsic holiness of all things. (I can’t even throw out a semi-used tissue; a tissue must be thoroughly used before I dispose of it.) Or a love of constraints so pathological that the challenge of a sub-par ingredient is irresistible. Or a compulsive need to help, hiding insecurity about my self-worth. I can come up with more, but I’m boring myself.

The point is that I’ve spent time thinking about and writing recipes for sad ingredients. I run a figurative orphanage-slash-sanatorium for mediocre and unwanted foods, at least in my mind. And in my first book, I published a recipe written after I’d fished for bluefish and brought home a glut—a fact I ignored long enough for the bluefish to become slightly odoriferous. I wrote it in the full faith that the fish hadn’t gone bad, only gotten a bit worse. Here it is:

A very spicy curry for blue (or graying) fish

1 1/2 pounds fish, strong-flavored by design or miscalculation (or just that awful texture you get when fish is frozen in water as per your brilliant description above)

juice of 1 lemon or lime

salt

2 tablespoons peanut or olive oil

6 shallots, or the white parts of 2 leeks, sliced into thin rounds

1-inch piece ginger, finely chopped

1 stalk lemongrass, finely chopped

2 tablespoons combination chopped roasted peppers and spicy fresh chiles

1/2 teaspoon fish sauce

2 teaspoons grated zest

2 whole canned tomatoes, chopped—or 1 big fresh one, now that it’s summer

1 cup fish stock or clam juice

1/2 can coconut milk

1 cup chopped cilantro, mint, basil, or a mixture of all three

Remove skin, if any, from the fish. Cut the fish into pieces about 1-2 inches around. Squeeze lemon or lime juice over them, sprinkle them with salt, mix it through, and let sit until the rest of the stew is done.

Heat a deep sauté pan and add the oil. Add the shallots, ginger, and lemongrass. As soon as they have started to soften, add the peppers, chiles, salt, and fish sauce. Once it’s all soft, but not completely tender, add the lime zest and chopped tomato. Let it cook over low heat until the tomato has collapsed. Add the fish stock and coconut milk. Let it simmer for 5 minutes, then add the fish, lifting it off the plate instead of tipping the plate in. Cook at a bare simmer for 4-5 minutes until the fish is cooked through. Turn off the heat, add the herbs, and serve it over hot white rice.

Over a decade after writing that recipe, I was sent the manuscript of Slow Noodles. I read the book, a beautiful story of survival in the face of the Cambodian genocide, written by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green, in a single sitting. The story itself, of loss and rebuilding, is gripping enough, and I didn’t feel impelled to cook any of the recipes included until I got to one for “Silken Rebellion Fish Fry (or How to Make Your Unfresh Fish Rations Taste Rather Delicious.)” It is a simple recipe—simpler than mine—and it follows the same principles of overpowering unwelcome tastes and textures with stronger ones. It’s the one recipe from the book I was moved to cook immediately, and I did, using the frozen filets my brother had “gifted” me.

Silken Rebellion Fish Fry

(or How to Make Unfresh Fish Taste Rather Delicious)

This is an excellent training dish for a teenage refugee girl who is learning to cook. It is also useful for turning spoiled girls into useful household members, and for transforming spoiled fish into a palatable meal. Finally, it’s a powerful weapon in the arsenal of any resourceful cook faced with a poverty of resources because of its cheap ingredients and big flavors. (Note: This treatment also works well to enliven plain tofu.)

2 pounds old fish (again, I think you can substitute your own problematic fish here.)
too much salt
6 to 8 stalks lemongrass (white part only), minced
8 to 10 cloves garlic, minced
at least 4 Thai red chilies, minced
1 cup neutral oil

Buy the least rotten fish you can find in the communal store or from your neighbor in the market. Grind down a knife edge as sharp as you can get it—the better to chop the tough lemongrass stalks into fine granules. In a bowl, let fish sit for 1 to 2 hours in too much salt, chopped lemongrass, garlic, and a vast quantity of chile. Overdoing it on the salt and chile will make your eyes water and imbue the old fish with a taste of forgetfulness—the idea is for you to forget that this is a very bad fish, indeed. You want to taste salt and chile, not bad fish. In a medium skillet, heat oil over high heat. Turn the heat down and fry the fish slowly, until golden and crisp. Eat it with jasmine rice. If a bad-fish memory reasserts itself, season with more salt and chili as needed.

Dear cook, if you were really fishing, you wouldn’t need a recipe at all—just a hot pan, fat, salt, and a squeeze of lemon. What you are doing is caretaking, conserving, paying attention. All of which are also a kind of prayer—just in this case, a kind that demands chiles, garlic, and a lot of salt.

I need your questions!

I’m all about utilization, so the new—seemingly faddish—idea of using vegetable trims and peels to make vegetable stock has intrigued me. My first two attempts using curated bags of accumulated frozen bits have been more sow’s ear than silk purse. I am an experienced stock maker so my technique is solid. Is this a GIGO situation? Perhaps my usual direct deposit to the compost is a more utilitarian endeavor. Am I wasting time on waste?

-Taking Stock

Dear Taking Stock,

I didn’t know what GIGO meant. This wasn’t surprising. I only learned what GOAT meant last year, after asking my husband twice (the first time it was after I’d taken a sleeping pill. I promptly forgot and repeated the question the following morning.) I learned TL;DR a few months ago.

One interpretation of this cultural blindness is that I must live under a rock. A more charitable one is that I intentionally avoid discourses in which those abbreviations are used. And, of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive—it may be that I’ve chosen my sheltering rock for its isolation. This is the truth. I have—not in objection to the abbreviations but in a more general objection to lingo. I hate it.

I didn’t know I hated lingo until I dated then married someone who worked in software. I disliked culinary lingo, but at Chez Panisse—where I used to work—everyone disliked culinary lingo. No one ever referred to vegetables as “veg,” or to running out of something as “86-ing.” Even the obligatory “Fire table X” always sounded, in a Chez Panisse cook’s mouth, self-aware and tongue-in-cheek. My now-husband, on the other hand, talked enthusiastically about sprints and iteration, about all-hands-on-decks, and one-on-ones, about walled gardens, and features and beta and deployment.

What I dislike about lingo is the way that it sneakily attempts to isolate, even patent, universal experience. This has always seemed, to me, tied to commodification, one step away from assigning a dollar amount to something that used to be free. I regularly argue that “a sprint” is working until the work is done, and “iteration” drafting. (Yes, “drafting” was once lingo, too. I’m not only a curmudgeon but a hypocrite.) My point is that the more universal the terminology one uses, the more creative the available responses. This argument has gotten me far. I live in a lingo-light household—under a rock, as evidenced above.

Learning “GIGO” was useful to answering your question. I think old cooking wisdom being repackaged and sold—as content, as IP, as a hack, as a fad—is similar, in tastefulness and effect, to calling a meeting a “one-on-one,” or a problem a “bug.” Humans have been using bones and trimmings to add flavor to boiling water for as long as we have cooked. Which bones and trimmings we’ve used has relied, sequentially, on two things: availability and flavor. When we were hungry, any soup, even if definitively “sow’s purse,” would have been welcome. When we could afford to be discerning, we began to exclude ingredients that made our soups worse.

Even the earliest recipes for vegetable stocks warned against the inclusion of brassicas—the botanical family that includes cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, collard greens, turnips, mustards, and other flowering, leafy plants. And yet, probably because the age-old practice of using good-tasting trimmings to make a stock has been repackaged so many different ways—as “bone broth,” good for epidermal and intestinal health, as “zero waste,” good for the environment—the basic wisdom of beginning with what is available, then culling based on flavor, is repeatedly forgotten, and needs to be retaught.

You mention that your trimmings have been carefully curated. I can’t know whether you mean that you knew to exclude eggplant stems and pepper cores, but let a cauliflower leaf or turnip top slip through the cracks. When a broth I’ve made has tasted bad, it has been because, out of optimism, I let a single cabbage leaf into the mix, wondering how much harm a single leaf could really do. The proof of how much is, in this case, in the sipping. A single brassica leaf or stem makes a stock stinky and definitely sow-y.

But even a combination of the vegetables I save for vegetable stock—a limited slate of alliums (like onion, garlic, leek), carrot, celery, fennel, and parsley stems, with an occasional tomato top added if its summer—can produce a muddy broth if cooked for too long. In my experience, a vegetable stock is a 45-minute long endeavor. Longer will result in over-saturation. An mistaken ratio of ingredients can do the same—overload a stock with carrot bits once to learn how useless the resulting sweet liquid is; that’s also the number of times you need to err by adding too much allium, leaving you with something that smells like a cheesesteak and tastes like one’s mouth after a big night. Best is to stick to a ratio that mirrors that of mirepoix: 2:1:1, allium, celery, carrot. (Fennel can substitute for celery or carrot or part of both.)

Dear cook, I do not think yours is a case of GIGO— “garbage in, garbage out,” or bad inputs precipitating bad results. I think it may be one of “Too much of one thing in, funky stock out,” or “Too long on the stove, muddy-tasting stock out,” or even “Erroneous brassica stealing the show.” I don’t have an abbreviation for any of those, and I’m glad I don’t. Each of them is a mistake worth making once, and taking stock of, in hopes of future stock success.

I need your questions!

I’m trying to eat more beans (fiber! protein! longevity!) but struggling with how to transform them from their dried form to something I want to eat. I’ve tried different combinations of instant pots, bay leaves and salt, but I’m feeling myself give up on a long life. What are the secrets (or well known culinary steps) to making beans that taste good, decadent even?

-Lost Bean

and…

Dear Tamar,

I love to cook beans from dried. In theory I love to do this in the Instant Pot my mother gave me. But often, I find that they come out with an acrid, unpleasant tang that, to me, ruins the batch. It’s true even if I add in aromatics and use broth. No amount of lemon or olive oil at the end really masks it. It is making bean explorations less fun, as I live in a very hot place and I don’t want to stand over a simmering pot or turn on the oven for hours! Am I the only one that notices this off flavor? Is there something about the temperature or pressure of the instant pot that is preventing the breakdown of some unpleasant chemical?

-Sour Bean

Dear Lost and Sour Beans,

I’ve grouped your letters together because your pleas are similar: Please help me make better beans! I’ve also combined them because I’m slightly mystified by both. “Crunchy” beans I’ve got covered. “Tasteless” beans, too. But “meh” beans and “acrid” beans both hover somewhere just beyond the veil of my experience.

I wonder: Do I have unusually anodyne taste in beans? Am I content with a finished dish that my correspondents would find untenably mediocre? It’s one of the most pleasurable parts of writing this column that I can never know. I’m forced to solve an equation some of whose variables will remain forever unfixed.

Let’s break down the stages of bean cooking:

1. Soak dried beans. Some bean aficionados claim they don’t soak, or don’t soak certain beans. Rancho Gordo sells “new crop” beans—beans that have been harvested and dried the same year they’re sold. This means you can get away with a shorter soak, or with a “quick soak,” which I’ll describe in a minute. But the best way to insure a successful start is to pour beans into a pot and cover them with water by several inches on the night before you plan to serve them. A number of respected cooks add salt to the water during the soak. I don’t, out of habit. Whether you salt or don’t, soak beans at night, and cook them the next morning—or afternoon. If you forget: put the beans in a pot, cover then with water by several inches, bring them to a boil, then cover the pot, turn off the burner, and let them sit for an hour or two. That is a “quick soak.”

2. Either drain the beans, or simply place the pot containing them on the stove. I used to be a strict water-switcher. After hearing that Harold McGee himself, father of food science, does not switch his water, I stopped. It’s easier not to, and I love things being easy. Turn on the burner under the pot, add a bay leaf, a garlic clove, herb stems if you have, a piece of onion or onion skins, any mushroom stems or carrot nubs you’ve collected, and salt. How much? Start with a tablespoon and then, once it has dissolved, taste the water. The water should taste good, almost like the most basic broth. You should instinctively want another spoonful; if you don’t, slowly add salt until you do.

3. Add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda. This is a hack. I support it completely. Baking soda speeds the breakdown of pectin in beans’ skins, softening them more quickly. 1/4 teaspoon is a very specific amount. It’s enough that the baking soda does its work, and not so much that you can taste the baking soda; at much more than 1/4 teaspoon, the beans and bean broth begin to taste metallic.

4. Once the pot comes to a boil, skim the scum off its top, if you want. I’ve addressed this issue before, in a response to “Bean Wondering.” I wrote that: “the scum is the result of saponins—soap-ish, harmless, bubbling compounds—in beans. If you ever cook with canned beans, you’ve seen saponins in their fullest expression while rinsing the beans and watching a layer of suds arise, before subsiding. The same thing is happening in your pot, with bits of plant protein, released in cooking, inspiring the saponins to cohere into a raft.” If you want to skim, skim; if you want to ignore, ignore.

5. Turn the pot down to a low simmer. Add a lot of olive oil. I don’t know the quantity of beans you’re cooking, but add at least a quarter cup and probably more. Make sure the olive oil isn’t rancid before adding it by smelling it, and then if you’re not sure, tasting it.

6. Let the beans cook at the lowest possible simmer until 5 taste perfectly tender. If you remove 5 from the pot and 4 are tender and the last still slightly resistant, cook the beans until the next time you try, you get a straight 5.

The next stage is how you will eat/serve the beans. If you’ve followed my instructions above, your beans are what I consider delicious. They are seasoned—with herbs and garlic and salt and olive oil—and so tender that they seem luxurious. But if you want to add something to them, now that they’re cooked and seasoned is the time to start. Here are some ideas:

1. Make white rice. Top each bowl with several ladlesful of beans and a big spoonful of Sichuan chili crisp.

2. Buy or make tortillas. Serve beans topped with finely sliced scallion and cilantro for bean tacos.

3. Make a bean salad by scooping out beans and leaving their broth behind. Open several cans of good, olive-oil-packed tuna. Cut several tomatoes into large cubes. Remove the pits from several oil-cured olives. Slice scallions. In a large bowl, mix the beans and scallions. Add a drizzle of red wine vinegar and a pour of olive oil. Arrange on a plate, add the tomatoes, salting them well, and the tuna, in large flakes. Scatter the olives around. Enjoy. Make any variation on this you want.

4. Turn your bean broth-with-some-beans-left into minestra by starting a new pot with sofrito—onions, carrot, celery or fennel and a little tomato paste—then adding chopped kale, potatoes, and any other vegetables you want, and a combination of bean broth and water, and simmering it until it’s delicious.

There are dozens of other things you can do, but those four should be enough to last you a while. The only remaining issue is the chance that Sour Bean has been following those exact steps and still ending up with off-tasting, acrid beans. The solution I’ve encountered for this is to remove the silicon seal on your Instant Pot, wash it well, and then replace it and try again. Apparently, these seals have caused hopeful bean cookers all kinds of problems, most resolvable—as so many things are—by a thorough cleaning.

Dear cooks, I admit some reservations at leaving it there. I’ve published all of those steps before, and perhaps you’ve read them before, and hoped that time had borne more fruit—that I had new, better wisdom to offer. I hope you, Lost Bean, feel less lost. I hope the sour taste is gone from your mouth, Sour Bean. I hope that you won’t consider me, giving a version of the same advice, again and again, over years, a has-bean…

I need your questions!

I’m currently travelling in Spain, with three weeks to go. I’ve been staying mostly in places where I can cook my own food as I’m a coeliac and eating out isn’t always easy. A few days ago I roasted a chicken and veggies with full bulbs of garlic, congratulating myself on buying and cooking local produce. To further add to my self congratulatory indulgence, I made chicken stock out of the leftover roasted frame. Here is my dilemma - what to do with it? I fear I will transfer it into a finished bottle of orange juice, then carry it around in my cooler bag for the next three weeks, transferring it from car to fridge over and over again, without actually making anything of it because I fear that whatever I cook won’t be ‘local enough’ or ‘good enough’. Help!

-Home (made stock) Away from Home

Dear Home (made stock) Away from Home,

Oh, the number of rented and borrowed houses I’ve made stock in. Oh, the number of times I’ve carted home ice-blocks of lobster stock, fish stock, lamb stock. Oh, my joy at finding my blocks of stock weepy but mostly intact at the end of a long car ride spent coddled in all the insulating jackets and sleeping bags I could locate.

I even battled with the first stock I made after moving to Spain last summer. The most obvious use is chicken soup, but in Madrid in summer, the air one breathes is a kind of chicken soup. I puzzled over the stock and the weather before remembering that the soul of a good stock is its ability to add immense flavor to something simple, even bland. It’s why so much of the world’s peasant food—whose basic formula is a starch + stock made from bones + anything else that’s available—relies on the stuff.

This brings us to your travels in Spain. I can’t tell from your letter where you’ve been so far. (I’m delighted to hear you have three weeks! You have escaped from the American juggernaut. Enhorabuena!) But I can tell you haven’t been to Valencia. I considered holding off on replying until you had. But Valencia doesn’t make enough greatest-hits lists for me to feel confident I could let the fates play out.

I have four notes to share about Valencia: 1) It is the birthplace of Spanish rice production, where the grain was planted by Moors, who brought it to Spain with them around the 8th century. 2) It is the birthplace of paella, the glorious rice-and-stuff dish that is probably the most famous food in Spain. 3) Paella Valenciana—the version invented in Valencia—does not contain seafood but chicken and rabbit, plus beans and either snails or rosemary (more on this in a moment.) It is made with the local variety, Bomba rice, which is unique for reasons I’ll also explain below. 4) This is entirely unrelated, but in the Cabanyal neighborhood of Valencia, you will find a 25-year old marionette theater that will renew your faith the goodness of humankind.

Because it was not Valencian fishers but Valencian farmers who first thought to simmer rice in a large flat pan with flavorful stock over live fire, the dish relied on stock from farmyard animals—chicken or rabbit. The Bomba rice for which Valencia is famed is unique for the amount of liquid it can absorb: three times its volume in stock, compared to most rice, whose ratio is 1:1 or 1:2. When Bomba rice has been fully cooked in stock, it is deeply flavored with it, more stock than rice. Stock used in paella not end up being carted from one rental house to another in an empty juice bottle. It will, rather, be the very essence of the dish.

Other than snails. Or rosemary. There are been several funny essays written about the odd and repeated prescription in old Valencian paella recipes for using one of the two ingredients, but never both. Jeffrey Steingarten has one in The Man Who Ate Everything. Coleman Andrews revisits the advice in this LA Times piece. The answer at which both arrive is that snails in Valencia feed on rosemary—or if domesticated will have been fed it—so that their main contribution is rosemary’s woodsy herbiness. In the absence of Valencian snails, or simply to streamline things, a few sprigs of rosemary accomplish the same basic effect.

Dear cook, you can certainly follow the vegetarian paella recipe in Coleman Andrews’s piece. Or you can find an old Valencian recipe. Or you can do what I did with my first puzzling batch of home made stock in my new home-away-from-home. Cook rice in it, and serve that next to chicken or rabbit or beans or snails, or nothing but sliced tomatoes and a handful of good olives, feeling comforted and both home and away.

I need your questions!

-Cook or Get Off the Pot

Dear Cook or Get Off the Pot,

If theres’s anything I write about in as elegiac a tone as I do leftovers, it is constraints—the former being an edible form of the latter. I love constraints in (almost) every form. I love deadlines. I love seasons. I love a door frame too narrow to fit the desk through. I love running out of butter. The only constraint I resist is a budget—a form I want to embrace but instead rebuff.

Generally, I’m consistent. My favorite restaurant for its decade of existence was Oakland’s Camino, whose menu featured three main courses—which changed often and comprised a vegetarian dish, a meat, and a fish. The opening menu offered a choice of an egg, goat, or sardines. An empty page terrifies me, while a page covered in mediocre ideas and stilted syntax is energizing. This preference for fashioning a solution from existing materials is so constant across disciplines that I wonder whether there exists a genetic difference between those of us who like to mend/make do and those of us who like to make.

It causes panic in me, too, to imagine a blank slate. But why panic? Why not ask ourselves to reconceive of the feeling as difficulty? If there is any truth to the idea that some people prefer a blank slate, yet must also persevere when constraints arise, shouldn’t our type work to reshape our panic into something more manageable that we can, through effort, overcome?

I think so, and I believe there are several ways to do it. I did a bit of reading about kitchen remodeling in preparation for my reply to you. I do not do such reading normally—again, I experience pure anxiety whenever an article about home renovation finds me. For you, though, I waded in.

My constraint-oriented soul was drawn to the approach one couple took: buying an impractical stone sink on Craigslist and designing a kitchen around it. My friend, Kari, used to have a kitchen I loved. It had come into being in a similar manner: She’d bought an industrial Viking stove in an online auction late one night. She and her husband lugged the behemoth into the room and then, lacking funds and inspiration, installed a work table and some plywood. I found that kitchen perfect—though I wanted a bigger work table and, if they’d kept the house, would have lobbied for one. I remember loving Laila Gohar’s almost impossibly practical studio kitchen—or the one in her old studio, anyway. I looked it up. I found that her approach had been entirely opposite, and that appealed, too. The kitchen was designed and built by one company, with an eye toward complete functionality.

I think back through my own kitchens, every one of which has been borrowed or inherited. Some have been photographed. Each time one of my kitchens is, I intuit a subtext I wish I could erase: If you surround yourself with these things, you will be happy in the kitchen. One of the kitchens belonged to a college friend, one to a landlord, one to us—though it had been designed and built by someone else. I selected none of the things, other than the banged up utensils. In each instance, the happy cooking life captured on film blew into the kitchen with me, like dandelion spores on the wind, and, in my persistent cooking and hosting, found fertile earth, and took root. The subtext I infer has everything backwards.

There is one constant among the borrowed and inherited kitchens. Each is in motion. Something is afoot—rice is being cooked and tasted, tomatoes are canned, bikes lean precariously, a collection of wooden spoons and big cutting boards suggest heavy use. If I made any physical change when I moved into each of those kitchens, it was to clear away any small plastic utensils, replacing them with my own heavy duty metal and wooden ones. And then I immediately began gathering: scraps which turned into stock, glass jars for storage, perishable ingredients, people and more people and more people.

Dear cook, it is hard for our make-do type to cook up a dream kitchen. We must try, and otherwise rely on our ease cooking up the dream kitchen ambience—full of heat, movement, ingredients, laughter, messes, fixes, and people and more people and more people. Buy a big stone sink, or buy a massive Viking stove, or set up a large pegboard with hooks to hang your well-worn pots, and cook on an induction hot plate. Buy old silverware at a yard sale. Buy new silverware in a town you visit for the first time. Eat with chopsticks until silverware grows from your neighbor’s apple tree. Whichever you choose, immediately and without delay, add the elements that matter: cooking and gathering. Then, a predictable perfection will take root—the perfection of a place well used and loved. Other details will work themselves out.

I need your questions!

My point is that, though I had a wonderful letter selected for this week’s column—I’m looking at you, Cook or get off the pot—I’ve been moving for a few days, and I’m not done moving. I’ll save the letter for next week. Today, thinking about old and new, I’ll reprint one of my NY Times columns from long ago. It’s about recipes and context and connection, and the way stories help us understand even small, seemingly self-evident detail. Plus, there’s a recipe!

Mea culpa. I’ll do better next week.

Eat

What We Learn From Old Recipes

By Tamar Adler

Aug. 26, 2015

Out with the old and in with the new! Or so the saying goes. But it often goes the opposite way for me: In a reading life full of recipes, I like old ones better. I didn’t realize how much, or why, until I recently started writing a book updating a hundred of them — mostly from the 20th century, but all with timeworn roots.

There are pedagogical givens of any time. It is only when rubbed up against the givens of another that they show. The recipe of our age has a title that describes its ambition (like ‘‘Vietnamese Chicken Salad’’), then a list of ingredients and a series of calibrations — measurements, oven temperatures, time intervals. It is objective and idealistic, pledging to be ‘‘fastest,’’ ‘‘simplest,’’ ‘‘best,’’ ‘‘perfect.’’ It shies from narrative. It lacks contingencies — orienting itself literally and figuratively toward the supermarket, with its standard and constant inventory.

Older recipes, by contrast, sometimes skip titles altogether, using simply numbers or a Choose Your Own Adventure construction: ‘‘To Sauté Fresh Peas, With or Without Their Pod’’ (‘‘If you want to sauté peas in their pod, take the tenderest ones and cut off their flower end. ...’’) or ‘‘To Make a Quince, Apricot or White Pear-Plum Pudding.’’ Rarely do they supply lists of required ingredients, meaning cook it if you have it. Often old recipes hang their teaching on narrative, with an almost biblical surety that the way to cement information in the human mind is to plot it on a closely described arc of action. They are firmly anti-idealistic. They are full of contingencies.

I especially like the tacit admissions, often found in cookbooks of yesteryear, that not every meal will be extraordinary. In the preface to recipe No. 59 of his 1891 ‘‘Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well,’’ Pellegrino Artusi writes, ‘‘Among ordinary soups, this ranks with the best.’’ Being permitted a category of ‘‘ordinary’’ is a charity to any cook, especially today, when we feel obliged to apologize for anything plain. His previous recipe notes that its result ‘‘is good warm and it is even better cold.’’ Here, too, there is no end to the good that hint does, when what all cooks need each Wednesday night is cultural support for leftovers — as well as dishes that taste good that way.

Some old recipes, like ‘‘Omelette aux Fines Herbes,’’ from Alexandre Dumas’s 1873 ‘‘Great Dictionary of Cuisine,’’ conjure a bright-edged and pleasurable cooking experience through clear description: ‘‘Break some eggs into a salad bowl, and beat them with a wicker beater. ... Pour half a glass of cream into the mixture, and beat it once more.’’ Even without scientific reason, all other things equal, it seems better to froth eggs in a ceramic salad bowl than an impersonal plastic one. And there is irrepressible joy to Dumas’s end: ‘‘Have a platter ready which has been buttered with the freshest possible butter and sprinkled with some more fresh fines herbes.’’

And this, for the pudding-of-some-fruit, from Hannah Glasse in 1774, is more specific and harder to forget than any contemporary pudding recipe I can think of: ‘‘Scald your quinces very tender, pare them very thin; scrape off the soft; mix it with sugar very sweet, put in a little ginger and a little cinnamon. To a pint of cream you must put three or four yolks of eggs, and stir it into your quinces till they are of a good thickness. It must be pretty thick. So you may do apricots or white pear-plums. Butter your dish, pour it in and bake it.’’

At their best, old recipes remind us of what it means to be a human eater in the world. In his magisterial 1570 tome ‘‘The Works,’’ the papal chef Bartolomeo Scappi will begin his recipes with ‘‘Get a turtledove in its season’’ or ‘‘Get a thrush in its season, between the end of September and the end of February. That bird must especially be fresh to be good.’’ Or, my favorite: ‘‘137. Several Ways to Spit-Roast and Do Up All Sorts of Pheasants and Old Pheasants. There are two sorts of pheasants: wild ones, called wood grouse, and local ones; the wild sort is black like a crow and has brownish eyelids and a smooth beak, and is bigger than the local sort. Many of them are born in the Grigioni and Swiss hills. Their season goes from October to the end of February; in the snowing season they are very fat.’’

In today’s recipe, all that binding is gone — the season, the weather, the color of birds’ eyelids; the notion that a person should know what ‘‘a little,’’ ‘‘very sweet’’ and ‘‘thick’’ mean. But we need it. That binding contains other facts we too often forget: That our poultry was a bird. That what a bird looks like matters to how it tastes. That animals have seasonal behaviors, as do plants, as do we. That the world is not a supermarket at all, but a hurly-burly sloping tilting whorl of subordinations and dependencies — and our recipes should not try to fool us into thinking otherwise. The year turns. Seasons change. Things die. Some fresh peas are more tender than others.

Pickled Shrimp

By Tamar Adler

• 2 pounds shrimp, peeled and deveined, tails on

• 4 scallions, mostly white, quartered or in eighths lengthwise

• 2 cloves garlic, sliced lengthwise, very thinly

• ½ cup lemon juice

• ¼ cup white-wine vinegar

• 2 teaspoons kosher salt

• 1 ½ teaspoons fennel seed

• 1 ½ teaspoons coriander

• 10 dried chiles, broken once or left whole

• 1 pod cardamom

• 1 lemon, quartered and thinly sliced

• 1 cup olive oil

• ¼ cup roughly chopped fresh oregano

COURT BOUILLON INGREDIENTS

• a few peppercorns

• 4 bay leaves

• ¼ onion and/or leek

• 1 clove garlic

• a few sprigs fresh thyme or oregano

  Make court bouillon for shrimp: Put a few peppercorns, 4 bay leaves, ¼ onion and/or leek, 1 clove garlic and a few sprigs fresh thyme or oregano in a pot of water. Bring to a boil, and let cook 15 minutes. Then add 1 teaspoon salt and shrimp, and cook for 2-3 minutes at below a boil. Remove shrimp with a strainer.

  In separate bowl, combine all other ingredients except oil and oregano. Let sit 5 minutes. Add shrimp. Mix well. Add oil, and mix. Add oregano, and mix. Serve at least 5 hours later and ideally the next day, cold or room temperature.

  

  I need questions!

-In the Paw Paw Patch

Dear In the Paw Paw Patch,

Whoooooooeeeee! Prepare for a wild ride. When I moved to Athens, Georgia, from New York (in 2004, I think) probably nothing could have prepared me for the difference I was about to encounter. I should write that with a capital letter: the Difference, which included ways of speaking, ways of meaning, etiquette, palate, style, cultural hierarchies, cuisine, literary, culinary, and political heritage and, yes, ingredients.

I also don’t know that preparation is all it’s cracked up to be. When I recount my bests so far in life, I find they’ve usually arisen from no expectation or preparation at all. There was a trip I took to Turkey on 24-hour notice only because I’d lost my Israeli passport in a taxi and couldn’t go to Jordan. There was the tasting of Quintarelli wines in a private cantina, reserved for professionals, which we somehow bumbled into. The best part of a recent weekend trip to Valencia with my son is a tie between finding ourselves at a puppet show at Teatro La Estrella (a marionette theater) and having to run 2 km with our luggage to catch a train, after learning that the streets were closed to traffic.

My point is obvious: being Open—“open” seemed like it deserved a capital, too—to Difference is the single best preparation for delight. I moved to Georgia in such a state. Having done no research, I found myself awash in a froth of the most poetically named fruits and vegetables I’d ever encountered. I would sometimes rub my eyes, listening to a farmer inventorying their delivery, not quite believing I wasn’t dreaming. I would let the words rise around me like a lather: Seckel pears, Muscadines, Scuppernongs, Canary Melons, Malabar Spinach, Ossabaw…I’m not providing links, so you still get to decide: Do you want to know about them in advance? Or do you want to splash in them as you wade?

Books are easier. Vibration Cooking isn’t really about cooking in the South, but it’s about cooking from the South. It’s also about poetry, community, Blackness, and the nature of storytelling. So, start there. When I ran a kitchen in Athens, Frank Stitt’s Southern Table lived at my bedside. I’m ashamed to remember how often I would simply leave a xerox-copied recipe directly from it on one of my cook’s stations, with the note: Please make this! I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial by asserting that most of the culinary heritage of the South is Black heritage, and most of the credit for it has gone to white people. It’s complicated to distill a whole history into a sentence, but I think that more or less sums it up. A decade ago, Toni Tipton Martin wrote, if you can believe it, a subversive bibliography. It’s called The Jemima Code, and turns the canon of Southern culinary writing on its head by showing how 150 cookbooks by Black Southern authors form the spinal column of Southern food.

As far as restaurants…two of my former cooks have great ones. Noah Brendel has Seabear Oyster Bar, and Matt Palmerlee (who’s had places in Atlanta and Savannah) is running The National. They’re both in Athens. Obviously those are the two best places to go.

Dear cook, I started by telling you to be prepared, and then told you not to be. Be Open, and be Willing to see things with fresh eyes. It took me ages to understand why everything in Georgia had to be fried. It took months for me to really know okra. Hell, it even took me a couple of tries to really understand the wonders of a paw paw.

Please send questions!

My toddler has a typical (American) toddler-approach to food—he will only eat what he’s familiar with. It’s healthful enough, he’s growing, and the pediatrician isn’t concerned. We invariably end up with two separate meals, since we want more variety than he’s willing to accept at this point. Admittedly, I too was a simple eater as a child (subsisting largely off of buttered pasta), and have hopes that he’ll eventually come round to the joys of a more complex diet, as I have. But society seems to condemn the two-meal approach. I am caught in the middle: Are two separate meals really so bad? Will he ever learn to love new flavors and textures if he’s not faced with them daily? Please can you share your wisdom on how my husband and I should cope through this stalemate…

The Mealtime Pacifist

Dear Mealtime Pacifist,

I’m writing my reply on May 13—yesterday. I usually tend to letters earlier in the week, but this week has felt strange. I’ve been unable to sleep and logy, agitated and paralyzed. The most likely explanation for these distortions is that May 13 is the day my father died in 1993, when I was 15 and my brother was 11.

I should be accustomed, by now, to the somatic reactions. They come annually, whether I’m keeping an eye on the calendar or not—often I’ve lost track, only to discover the anniversary while seeking answers for a semi-debilitating physical syndrome. Neither ignoring the date nor observing it makes a difference. On the days leading up to May 13, my mind turns to mud and my hands shake. My nights are filled with inescapable preoccupations and my days with dull disinterest.

In other words, my grief, old and chronic as it is, flares up every year. This year, I’m grateful for the flare up because of the way it reminds me of the awesomeness of love. I mean “awesome” in its original sense: “respect mixed with fear and wonder.” What a supernatural force love must be, I’m reminded, to have created a physical syndrome like the one I suffer. I spoke with my brother, who told me that the anniversary creates a time lapse for him. During certain moments of the day, he is both his grown self and himself at 11. Hour by hour he lives two lives, his present one and his childish one. His version sounds just as exhausting as mine.

The anniversary of my father’s death might seem unrelated to your question about societal condemnation of serving two meals. But if I had not decided to reply to your question on May 13 while reflecting on the profound, inexplicable sublimity of love, I might have spent a lot of unnecessary energy on logistics.

Here is my answer—which you yourself, with your use of the word “stalemate” and its implications of transience, have intuited: What matters is love and life and death, and little else. No. Two meals are not really that bad. No, you are not robbing your child of opportunities to develop a broader palate. No, your child’s palate is not permanent. (It has this in common with…everything.) And no, it’s not something that you can, by will, change. You can get bent out of shape. You can yield to societal pressure to serve a perfectly balanced meal to your whole family, and hold to that as though to a pin in a grenade, enduring melt downs and breakdowns and whatever else. You can worry. You can blame yourself. You can buy books, listen to podcasts, subscribe to feeding newsletters.

I’m being extreme. My argument above is that of an existential victim. A more temperate argument is superior—and nudges its adherents toward the realm of existential heroism. It is not necessary, but likely beneficial that your family eats meals at home, together. It is valuable that you and your husband treat eating as an opportunity to seek pleasure, with each other. It is positive for your child to watch you eat new, interesting food, smiling at it and each other. I believe all of that, and at home, I employ a strategy I devised when my own once-hearty eater became, at the age of two, a reluctant and selective one.

It is to include one thing your child will reliably eat in every meal you serve—and not worry about the rest. If you and your husband love Thai food, or Vietnamese, or Chinese, or Indian, leave the rice plain—as the rice in those cuisines generally is anyway—and let your child eat buttered rice, while you enjoy gaeng khiao wan gai (แกงเขียวหวานไก่). Or make a Thai or Vietnamese or Chinese noodle dish, and set some noodles aside before adding herbs to the rest. If you love Italian food, scoop out two cups of pasta and put them in a bowl with butter before you add the remainder to the pot simmering ragú. If you love Lebanese food, buy or make extra pita, and let your child eat pita while you enjoy kibbeh. This strategy does allow you to avoid cooking two meals—not because it’s morally reproachable, rather because your time is valuable, and if your whole family can eat happily within the parameters of a single meal, you’ll have more energy to chat and love and read and play games and go for walks and make jokes.

Dear cook, there is no better day than the anniversary of one’s parent’s death to answer such a question. To make two meals, or four, or to eat on the floor, or to serve chicken nuggets, or whatever else it is that one can get tied up in knots about matters so much less than being alive, together, and in love. The sublime exists, grief tells us. Everything else is logistics.

I need your questions!

I live in beautiful Northern California. We are blessed with an extraordinary bounty of vegetables and fruit year-round. However, we have just entered a particularly challenging “shoulder season” for fruit—straddling a stretch of exquisite citrus, but not yet approaching stone fruit season. We are avid farmers market shoppers, and I’m wondering if there is an approach—philosophical or tactical—that could bring a zestier outlook on this otherwise lean fruit scene.

-Stuck in the Shoulder with You

Dear Stuck in the Shoulder with You,

I don’t think I’ve ever answered a “top five cookbooks” question without including Edna Lewis’s 1976 Taste of Country Cooking. If I have, it was of fear of being repetitive or boring—I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t count it among their favorites. A 50th anniversary edition came out this year, marking a half century of relevance.

Taste of Country Cooking is a perfect book, entirely sui generis. It’s in its own category, making its quirks and conversational tone, its vivid poetry of the commonplace, its positioning of memory at the heart of cooking—which a reader can like or decline to like—the essence of its perfection. Taste of Country Cooking is a song sung only once. I love it.

How could one not?

“I will never forget spring mornings in Virginia…Spring would bring our first and just about only fish—shad. It would always be served for breakfast, soaked in salt water for an hour or so, rolled in seasoned cornmeal, and fried carefully in home-rendered lard with a slice of smoked shoulder for added flavor…There were the unforgettable English peas, first-of-the-season garden crop cooked and served in heavy cream along with sautéed first-of-the-season chicken. As the new calves came, we would have an abundance of milk and butter, as well as buttermilk, rich with flecks of butter. Rich milk was used in the making of gravies, blanc mange, custards, creamed minced ham, buttermilk biscutes, and batter breads, as well as sour-milk pancakes."

I’ve tried in the past to articulate what makes Lewis’s descriptions so moving, so alive, so directly addressed to human appetite. I’ve mostly used the crutch of calling her prose magical or incantatory. (To any young writers out there: Be not deluded. These are crutches, no matter how many senior writers use them.)

Your letter asking about how to deal with the “shoulder season” finally gave me language I’ve feebly sought for years. Edna Lewis’s lush writing is a repeated illustration of seeing the world as it is—dappled in dark and light, in death and birth, in lack and abundance, fading and brightening—and describing only the latter states, from a perspective of familiarity with the former.

If you were to return, sentence by sentence, to the extract above, you’d see that what reads as a celebration of bounty is a trick of celebrating silver linings. (I’m mixing metaphors. Mea culpa. This is why I don’t salute the end of gatekeeping editors.)

I’ll do a hasty job of showing what I mean. Here is a second description, just as accurate, of the ecosystem Lewis describes.

Winter was lean in Virginia…We almost never ate fish, and if we did, never more than a single variety, once a year. There wasn’t good refrigeration, so we had to eat it as soon as possible after catching it—which we had to do ourselves. There was only one way of cooking the fish—which was similar to how we cooked everything, using all of a pig and a good deal of corn…The situation with vegetables was similar: no fresh vegetables for months at a time, which meant enduring the same flavors—canned corn and canned beans and canned succotash (a combination of the two!)—at every meal. Our dairy came from our own farm, and winter was a time of lean and little milk (no fresh grass for cows to eat) as well, limiting any foods that relied on it. No rich gravy, no custards or biscuits. We didn’t even have pancakes.

It’s a ham-fisted attempt, made to prove a point: (At least!) two things make Taste of Country Cooking’s prose so evocative. 1) Edna Lewis’s familiarity with lack and 2) Edna Lewis’s choice to recount that lack exclusively in terms of the capacity for delight it afforded her.

Yes, of course this is an elliptical paraphrasing of the adage about hunger being the best seasoning—alternately attributed to Socrates, Cervantes, Benjamin Franklin, and a Brazilian old wife. I still think it’s a useful one.

Dear cook, trying to learn—in whatever small way I can—the wisdom of Edna Lewis, I haven’t explicitly stated my advice, but left it to be inferred. That’s not entirely appropriate for an advice column though. Here is how I recommend you deal with this “shoulder season:” Stay in it. Seek no escape. Read and re-read the glimmering truth in Edna Lewis’s appreciation of the first shad and the first spring peas, which rely entirely on their long absence. Sit without fruit for days or weeks. Open the last of last summer’s cherry jam. Watch the blossoms fall from cherry trees and the small fruits begin to swell. When you taste the season’s first cherry, then plum, then apricot, let all the time before it open your mind and heart to its miracle. Sit down and describe it. Be stuck until you unstick.

I really need questions now. I'm out!

Spring is sprung! This winter was so long. It’s great to have asparagus. I’m looking forward to the first spring peas. I’m even excited about rhubarb. My spring cooking block is about meat. We ate chicken and beef all winter. I know that spring is usually associated with lamb, but lamb always seems like a special occasion food. Also, I like lamb, but I don’t love it. Any ideas for a springy meat to go with my springy vegetables? Thank you!

-The Bird is on the Wing

Dear The Bird is on the Wing,

A decade ago I wrote an article for Vogue that inspired so much hate email I had to put a dummy address on my website. The lack of good sense I may be exhibiting by returning to the topic merits its own discussion. But for now, I find myself drawn to the apostasy, like some deranged moth. Even after the vitriol and the frightening messages, I still find my argument to be a good one.

Here I go again: We should be eating more rabbit. I include in this “We” anyone who likes to eat meat. I understand that rabbits are cute and furry, while chickens, for example, look and act like psychopathic dinosaurs. But if we were going purely on looks, we would never have another hamburger—cows are just as cute as rabbits—and would eat a good deal of lizard.

My case for encouraging rabbit eating comes down to which natural animal behaviors align most neatly with human requirements for meat eating. In order for meat to be affordable and regulated—meaning have the conditions of its raising and slaughtering monitored by relevant health and safety agencies—it has to be raised at reasonable scale and in captivity. What I’m calling “scale” and “captivity” don’t need to be punishing or intolerable. Whether or not they are depends largely on what the animals themselves, all things being equal, prefer.

If you observe chickens in a barnyard, left more or less to their own devices, you see that they are meanderers. They go from spot to spot, pecking and nudging, seeming to contemplate something invisible with their dinosaur eyes, before moving on and doing it again. Cows, as we know, are ruminants. They like to stand around and ruminate, in both literal and figurative senses. Their innate position seems to be out in vastness, chewing things over. Pigs snort about, seeking mud to cool in, or tree bases to root near, and it’s evident that they like their space. Pigs don’t like to be crowded, and make a row when they sense anyone edging in on their territory.

Goats, of course, jump and ramble and heckle, trying to eat anything in sight. Sheep act like tourists on a bus tour, sticking tight together and roving from site to site. And so on. You know what animal you rarely see out and about, sunning herself, rolling in grass, musing under the vast blue sky? Rabbits.

This is because the natural behavior of a rabbit is to burrow. Left more or less to her own devices, a rabbit will find a confined space and fit herself inside it. She will then procreate with a pace and profuseness that make goats’ mischief-making seem occasional. In other words, a rabbit will meet the two necessary conditions for domestic animal husbandry on her own, regardless of whether you ask her to or not.

The argument ends there. It does not address the underlying fact that no animal, no matter how well the conditions of her life match her natural proclivities, wants to die. I do not claim that because rabbits enjoy a life spent in burrow-like quarters, they are better prepared than other animals to see that life end. This is why my advice is exclusively for meat-eaters—who have already engaged with the ugly truth that each time we eat meat, it is at the expense of an animal’s life. Only once that difficult fact has been faced does it make sense to consider the benefits of using an animal well-suited to meat-animal conditions as meat.

Dear cook, if this suggestion offends you, ignore it. If it doesn’t, try the recipe below, which I cobbled together for a Sunday lunch a few weeks ago when I, too, had tired of the chicken and beef fugue of winter. Keep in mind the rest of the poem about the springing of spring: “Now isn’t it absurd? I thought the wing was on the bird.” At least if you make this very good and very simple rabbit, the wing will remain on the bird, for the time being.

RABBIT IN SALMOREJO

2 rabbits, cut into 6-8 pieces each

Salt

1 head garlic, peeled

2 tbsp pimenton dulce

1 tbsp ground cumin

2-3 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary and thyme or oregano

300 ml vinegar (white wine or sherry)

1 cup white wine

½ cup olive oil

4 bay leaves

In a mortar pound the garlic to a paste with a good pinch of salt–enough to season all of the rabbit, probably nearly a teaspoon. Add pimenton, cumin, and herbs and pound to a paste. Taste. It should be highly seasoned. Rub rabbit with the paste, and then, in a large mixing bowl or other overnight storage container, add the bay leaves, vinegar, wine, and olive oil. Cover and marinate overnight.

The following day, heat 1-2 large shallow saute pans. Add oil. Remove the rabbit pieces from the marinade, but keep all of the marinade. Brown the rabbit pieces. Once they’re all brown, pour the marinade into the pan(s). Cook, partially covered, at a low simmer until rabbit is perfectly tender, about 15 minutes–maybe 20 for the legs. Remove each piece as it’s done, testing with a sharp knife. Serve warm, with its sauce.

I need your questions!

-You've Bean on My Mind

Dear You’ve Bean on My Mind,

Years ago I had a podcast called Food, Actually. It only lasted one season. But in that time, it won a silver medal in some British contest for “most intelligent podcast.” (I use that fact to self soothe.) The podcast is relevant for two reasons. The first is that I recorded an episode on beans, focusing on the deleterious myth that salting beans impedes their cooking. Salting beans seasons beans (and bean broth.) Not-salting beans renders them inedible. The episode also covered bursting beans—to which I’ll return. The second reason the podcast matters is that while I was making tit, I realized that writing a podcast script is an exercise in close reading.

Do you remember close reading? From college English seminars? It’s that glorious analytical technique that lets you pick stitches from a text, like pin bones from a piece of salmon, or threads supporting an unneeded hem. I loved every second I spent doing it in college, and was ebullient when I realized that scanning transcripts of interviews to create an argument was a perfect simulation of the process. Other than when I’m pulling pin bones from salmon or threads from an unneeded hem, I don’t know when (obvious exceptions excepted) I’ve enjoyed myself more.

Close reading is the mode I used for your letter. I combed carefully through it for messages you may not even have intended to leave. In them, I found much of the information I sought.

The first message came in your description of your customary cannelini bean broth. “The broth” you write, “is always golden and delicious…” The broth of the troublesome batch, on the other hand, is “a murky grey/purple colour, and about half the beans burst after less than an hour of simmering.”

Here, I note two things: 1) You usually cook cannellini beans, which are white and create a light-colored broth. Romano beans—more commonly known as cranberry or borlotti beans—can be light brown or pink, and often speckled. But their broth will never been light-colored, but some darker hue. Accustomed to a light-colored broth, you encountered a darker one, which created an unsettling unfamiliarity. 2) I believe that you drew the two descriptions from different stages in the respective beans’ cookery. Cannelini bean broth is light colored, but could not be described as “golden” until the beans are done cooking, or nearly. Once parsley and leek bits’ chlorophyll, and a good deal of golden olive oil, have made theirs mark on the nearly colorless bean liquid, the fat emulsifying with the beans’ starch, the resulting broth will be golden. But this happens once the beans are done cooking (or nearly) and have been sitting quietly in their broth, seeping starch, which emulsifies with the golden oil.

The above sounds like sheer speculation. But you describe the golden broth as “delicious” in the same sentence. In your conflation of the broth’s “golden” color with “delicious” flavor—which only comes into existence once beans (and broth) are done cooking—I find irrefutable (ish) proof that you’re describing a finished pot of cannelini beans.

That is not the stage of cooking from which you draw your description of romano bean broth. You observe “a murky grey/purple colour,” which—while referring to the brownness of romano bean broth—only accurately describes it for the first hour or so. Once all the vegetable bits and olive oil and starch have had time to mingle, romano bean broth will settle into its characteristic deep rosy tawny brown. Again, I point out a conflation. In the same sentence, you write: “and about half the beans burst after less than an hour of simmering.” Which I take as a suggestion that your description of the troubled pot is drawn from the point at which, after less than an hour of cooking, half the beans burst. Bean broth is never much good at this point, still being mostly slightly oily salted water.

My point is that the broth of the second pot didn’t have a chance to fulfill its potential, because the premature bursting scuttled the project. I say it to get the issue of watery broth out of the way. If the beans had not burst, the whole pot would have had enough time to cook thoroughly and taste not golden and delicious, but least tawny and delicious.

If the romano bean is not to blame, then what is? I offer the same answer I did in the podcast: the age of dried beans is the greatest determinant in how they cook. Salt in bean water was one red herring—unfairly accused of hindering bean cooking. Romano beans instead of cannelini is another. When bean-cooking goes pear-shaped—when beans take forever to become tender, or burst before they’ve had a time to cook through—it is because they are old. Their skins have dried out and will burst as soon as their insides begin to swell, as opposed to becoming pliant and stretching to hold them.

There are mitigating factors. If beans come to a hard boil, they may burst at any age—though fresher dried beans may withstand a short time at a jostle. If beans are cooking in a thin metal pot, the temperature to which they’re exposed may vary dramatically, again causing some to burst. I’ve also read that not-salting beans can encourage bursting, because salt may help beans’ skins become stretchy enough to accommodate their expanding inner selves. Your history of successful bean cookery suggests to me that none of those factors are at fault. But there remains the outlying possibility that your usual cannelini are so dewy fresh that they’ve withstood a boil and a tin pot and an undersalt and not born signs of suffering.

Dear cook, I’m afraid though I’ve bean on your mind, I’m going to give you uncharacteristic advice. If the problematic beans did not ever boil, and didn’t cook in a thin pot, and were properly salted, the fault is in the age of the bag’s contents. Therefore the bean bag that looks half full is, at least and at best, half empty. To empty it the rest of the way, pour the second half into the compost, or cook the contents on very low heat until all of the beans have burst, and then blend with pounded garlic and olive oil to make a bean dip.

I need questions!

My question relates more to the history of cooking and cooking terms than to a dilemma of the senses. Or maybe it’s a sort of research puzzle.

On a recommendation from one of your books I’ve been reading Irma Mazza’s ‘Herbs For The Kitchen’ (1939). Many of her recipes contain a mystery ingredient, a fresh “Japanese pepper,” which I can only assume is the 1939 term for some sort of pepper commonly available in the United States and called now by a different name. I’ve had some luck finding out what relatively obscure terms like “mushroom catsup” and “beach plum jelly” mean. The elusive “Japanese pepper” may well be a ghost pepper because there’s no trace of it (see what I did there? 👻). The internet (or at least Google) seemingly has nothing.

Where, how, Who do I talk to? Are you The One who knows?

-Lookin’ for a Cookin’ Historian

Dear Lookin’ for a Cookin’ (&tc),

I was once so enraptured by ingredients such as “mushroom catsup” and “beach plum jelly” that I wrote a whole book on them. Or: not on them exactly, but on how to cook certain recipes without them, since they no longer existed, or no longer seemed as wonderful as they once had.

My thesis was that if I removed the indecipherable ingredients—either replacing them with contemporary ones, or simplifying them away—a curious cook like you might read a recipe for chicken fricassee or petits pois a la francaise or blancmange and let herself be wooed by the romance of the unfamiliar instead of intimidated by it.

Fewer people than I’d expected desired to be so wooed. The unfamiliar seems to hold less romance and more unease, for some, than I’d thought. (Not me. Show me terra nova and I can’t turn away. Be prepared for mistakes to be made.) Such a preference or aversion must be much more deeply located in a self than a pretty book cover or a persuasive essayist can touch.

I abhor how often I assert the existence of “two types.” Here I go again: No matter how I pretend otherwise, there are neophiles and neophobes. A bonus irony (the first being how often I do this disagreeable division of humans into two imaginary camps): here, what is -phil-ed or -phob-ed is not new, but the novelty of the old, of the time-worn, the démodé.

You are in the -philic camp through and through. You’ve read Irma Mazza, even though there exist contemporary herbals and gardening books galore. You’ve probably luxuriated in her evocation of unknown ingredients and unfamiliar uses for them. I suppose the bush that I’m beating around is that I wrote the book making old recipes more usable not for everyone, but for you. Which, after many years of wondering whom, exactly, it had been for, is refreshing to know.

To the question of Japanese pepper: it put me in the mind of another ingredient from the same period, the “alligator pear.” This gorgeous phrase peppers (see what I did there?) recipes from the 1930s and 1940s, and evokes something wild and knobby, plucked but elusive. It refers to an avocado, which is all of the above, but may have lost out in the shedding of its earlier, poetic name. In my research, “Japanese pepper” is most likely to have meant the powdered spice we know as “sansho pepper.” Sansho tastes a lot like Sichuan peppercorns, but more citrusy and slightly less numbing. You’ve probably had it a dozen times without knowing if you’ve sprinkled togarashi over your rice or soup.

But you mentioned “fresh” Japanese pepper. I’m living in Madrid, and don’t have my Mazza with me. I have no way of reading the phrase in context. It is hard for me to believe that she had access to fresh sansho, which looks like tiny, delicate bunches of almost iridescent green grapes. The context I do possess is that her landmark book was published within months of Japan joining the Axis powers in World War II and three years before the internment of Japanese Americans in camps. She could have had sansho in powdered form, but that does not account for the unaccountable: the niggling adjectival appendage: “fresh…”

Dear cook, anything else I offer will be pure speculation: Might it have simply been white peppercorns, which underpinned Chinese food in the US at the time? Or green pepper, which was commonly used as a substitute for both peppercorns and chilies in all early Chinese-American restaurants? I can’t know, of course, which makes it all the better, letting the question retain the whiff of novelty that drew you to it in the first place. I’ve enjoyed wondering with you, and hope you’ll let me know what you turn up, if you do keep on cookin’ and lookin.’

I need your questions!

What can I do with do with the liquid leftover from braising endives? Contains butter, sugar and salt and is lovely, but has the distinctive bitterness of chicory.

-Bewildered by Bitter

Dear Bewildered by Bitter,

I recently went to a spa for Vogue. I won’t say which, because our 2026 Spa Guide is about to come out and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. (I’ll allow that the overlap in readership between the Vogue Spa Guide’s readership and this newsletter’s is likely limited. But you never know.)

At the spa, I learned all sorts of interesting things about the inner workings of my body. My cognition—which I envision as an old, coal-smoke-belching boiler—is somewhat better than average and somewhat worse than the best. I’m unusually good at using oxygen during exercise. I breathe well at high altitude. A particularly interesting bit of information (to me, obviously) is that my parasympathetic nervous system is incredibly active—scoring something like 96 out of 100 on a scale whose units and purpose I now forget—and my sympathetic one is…almost dormant.

I don’t recall what was measured to reach that conclusion. Or really what they mean other than what the nurse administering the test said, which amounted to: It seems that you adapt well to stress, but by being constantly on alert, rather than just processing it well. I told my husband this. He was unsurprised. He pointed out that I might be the most vigilant laid-back person in the world. You would never call me Type A—trust me, my socks rarely match and I’m always sure “it’ll be fine”—but I tend to know the exact location of any object I’ve been in contact with in the preceding week. I am ON ALERT.

What this has to do with your endive liquid is the following. Surrender may be the quality I most admire in friends. More than achievement, more than expertise, more than virtuosity. Maybe more than generosity, because I possess generosity (qualified generosity, like most of ours), but I struggle—and that’s a flattering characterization—to let go.

Surrender is subtle. It’s humble and unselfconscious. Surrender looks like so many other things that it can be difficult to identify: It may look like perseveration on a topic, out loud. It may look like despair. It may look like solipsism. It may look like clinginess. Surrender may look like laziness or an absence of backbone or a lack of creativity. It may look like those, because to let go is to trust that you’ll be caught, which means softening into the kind of borderlessness that is uncomfortable to witness. My friends who are most practiced at surrender cry more than I do, spend much more time on the phone, and preserve, within them more space for the needs of their communities, and a higher attentiveness to what those need might be, than I can ever hope to.

Dear cook, as the possessor of a totally unbalanced nervous system, I attest that I have tried to use bitter leftover buttery braising liquids in as many constellations as have occurred to me. A little pour into a mushroom sauce for pasta—bitter. As part of the liquid for an artichoke or endive risotto—bitter. In minestrone—bitter. In potatoes—bitter. In beans, etc. and so on. Might it add a dimension to…? No. The answer is no. I have tried. I have battled. I have raged and strategized and insisted. But the truth remains, and in it a hard-won lesson of the kind of surrender for which I aim and usually miss by a mile. The only thing endive-braising liquid is good for is braising more endive.

I need your questions!

Feeding a crowd for Passover. Should I make leg of lamb (bone-in?) or brisket? Needn't be kosher. Would love a lamb recipe suggestion!

-Pas de Potschke (lamb or brisket?) for Passover

Dear Pas de Potschke,

Of all the issues whose resolution I consider myself unqualified to assist, a potschke at Passover may be paramount. For the uninitiated—to the term or the phenomenon—a potschke is a culinary kerfuffle. It’s Yiddish and, as often as not, onomatopoeic (at least for the sound the potschke-er makes as she potschkes.)

My lack of qualification doesn’t imply a lack of culinary expertise but a personal flaw—on the scale of those that afflicted Greek heroes. I potschke at Passover. It is as reliable as death and taxes. Your letter motivated me to dig up a short essay I wrote about my handicap a decade ago in the Jewish Forward. I’m including it, not only to prove that I’m not exaggerating, but also for the good recipe at the bottom.

March 20, 2013

I believe there are certain things to which we are each driven, like lemmings to their cliff.

Probably the most curious of mine is a tenacious pull to cook unrealistic dishes I’ve never cooked before, at bad times. These attacks are particularly acute at holidays, when all the cousins -nth removed are coming and there aren’t enough chairs.

My mother cleared an easy path for my internal lemming by having cooked several insensible things herself for big gatherings. By the time I was in my late teens, I was following her example, with the addition of a personal flourish.

My dishes bore a signature mark of being not only unreasonable but very messy, which added an impressive coating of stress and volatility. And so was born, in my twentieth year — in the wake of the unfortunate confluence of my reading that artichokes were a traditional dish at Mediterranean Seders and tasting the magically seductive carciofi a la giudía for the first time at a tiny Italian restaurant in New York — the carciofi a la giudía fiasco, which is my little insistent lemming’s finest work.

That year, we were hosting 30 people. I decided I needed about 60 big artichokes (none of which I knew how to clean, never mind fry), gallons of good olive oil and full run of the stovetop to fill with pots of oil, even though the house would soon be full of grandmothers with their dropped purses and children with their propensity for injury.

I also needed, on the day of the Seder, to focus on breathing deeply, as the hours between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. disappeared and the pile of artichokes in front of me wouldn’t, and to give up on finding a technique — instead tearing off leaves and hacking away at stems as fast and dirty as I could.

When the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt finally drew near its end and dinner hour approached, my mother gave me an indulgent nod and let me back into the kitchen to pick up where I’d left off.

I heated pots of oil to boiling and then added the first round of artichokes, which spurted so viciously that the woman assigned to help ducked behind a cabinet, holding a spoon in the air in a gesture of inadequate but meaningful self-defense. I then proceeded to muddle through rounds of burning and undercooking, splattering and slipping, and barely making a dent in either the mound of artichokes or the reliable hunger of the Seder guests.

For anyone lucky enough to get a small, squashed artichoke every half-hour or so, it must have been more or less pleasant. Occasionally, I lucked upon the right oil temperature — between letting artichokes languish in oil too cold, leaving them too oil-logged for even the most sanguine appetite, and plunging them in oil far too hot, ending up with raw but attractively frizzled-looking things.

For my mother, who entered the kitchen once to help, then slipped in a greasy spot and retreated to call back from the table that there was a piece of mesh which might be helpful in protecting my face from permanent scarring, it must have been fascinating to witness her daughter caught so definitely in the web of fate.

Forearms and neck speckled with red from the dozens of places I’d been burned, I continued to fry the rebellious batches, eventually receiving visitors in the kitchen — stalwart aunts and uncles who would watch me, disturbed and intrigued, as I hid behind my mesh faceguard and dipped a strainer repeatedly into the pots of oil, occasionally retrieving a deflated artichoke. If I happened to get a batch right, whoever was visiting had a little of the experience I’d imagined, after tasting perfectly, deeply seasoned and fried ones a few weeks earlier, of the just barely still cool evening air and the mystically old and elusive artichoke, lightly salted, its rich metallic flavor stung by lemon, its pool of darkened oil dignified and luxurious. There were a relative few that had such a clear, poetic impact. Most were just inconvenient and comical and tragic.

Years have passed, with my only being allowed to cook artichokes again twice, which I did with great restraint. This year, though, our Seder will be smaller than usual. I look out the window these days to plan, and destiny’s siren sings. All I can see are the first spring artichokes, battered and fried, golden and fragile and crisp, bright yellow lemons nestled among them. Though, as I type this, that strange inner lemming tugs once again, harder, and I wonder whether it might be nice to also poach fresh lake trout, one per person, which would, of course, have to be done in many shallow pans, each barely simmering with its own, odiferous court bouillon….

Carciofi Fritti
Adapted from “The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews” by Edda Servi Machlin

12 medium artichokes
2 lemons, juice and rinds
3/4 cup matzo meal
1/2 teaspoon salt
A tiny, tiny bit of freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup cold water
1 egg
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons olive oil
olive oil or safflower oil for frying
1 lemon, cut into wedges

1) Clean artichokes (for instructions, visit forward.com/food). Cut in half lengthwise and remove the chokes. Cut each in half lengthwise again. Drop each into a bowl filled with cold water and squeezed lemons.

2) Combine matzo meal, salt, and pepper with cold water. Add egg, yolks, and 2 tablespoons olive oil, and beat until smooth.

3) Drain the artichoke pieces and leave to dry for a few minutes. Heat 1 cup oil in a small frying pan. Dip the artichokes in small batches into the batter. Fry a few pieces at a time in the hot oil (for a few minutes) until golden keeping the recently fried ones on a paper towel on a baking sheet or plate. Serve very hot, straight from the oil, with wedges of lemon.

See what I mean? Asking me how to avoid a Passover potschke is like asking Donald Trump for grammar help. It’s outside of my purview. That said, I don’t live in a bubble or a vaccum or a delusional gold-plated pseudo-reality. I live in a family and community. I have sources beyond my own troubling penchants. My brother, for example, is a great chef. After the artichoke fiasco, he took over most of the cooking at Passover, which limited the shrapnel range of my efforts.

One Passover, he made a lamb shoulder so simple and so perfect that (maybe) even I couldn’t make a mess of it. I’ve copied it myself, on lower stakes occasions, and loved it every time.

Herb-spiced Lamb Shoulder
Adapted from John Adler and the Blue Apron Cookbook

1 tablespoon kosher salt

3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

3/4 teaspoon ground cumin

3/4 teaspoon ground fennel

3/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika

3/4 teaspoon smoked paprika

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 1/2 teaspoons finely chopped rosemary leaves

1 1/2 teaspoons honey

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 3-pound boneless lamb shoulder roast, trimmed of any rubbery bits

Maldon salt (Optional)

1) Combine the salt, pepper, cumin, fennel, cardamom, paprikas, garlic, rosemary, honey, and olive oil. Coat the inner side of the lamb with half of the seasonings, rubbing them into the meat until thoroughly coated.

2) Cut a long piece of butcher’s twine. Roll the lamb lengthwise into a cylinder. Place the center of the lamb on the twine. Tie a tight knot and cut the excess. Continue tying lengths of twice at 2-inch intervals. Cut one more long piece of twine to tie around the length of the lamb. The tied lamb should be a fairly tight cylinder. Rub the outside of the lamb with the remaining half of the seasoning.

3) Heat the oven to 350. Place the lamb shoulder on a wire wrap set on a sheet pan. Roast for 3-4 hours, until well browned and fork tender. A thermometer inserted into the center of the roast should read 190. Remove from the oven and tent with aluminum foil. Let rest for 1 hour.

4) Remove and discard the twine. Cut the lamb into 3/4-inch-thick slices and transfer to a serving dish. Sprinkle with Maldon salt if using.

Dear cook, you can tell that I’m charmed by my own bad habits. I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug. I can say that both efficiency and convenience are overvalued. And that perhaps, with a reliable quiver of holiday recipes at hand, and friends and family willing to lend theirs, an occasional Passover potschke isn’t the worst problem to have.

I need your questions!

I have a cupboard full of old herbs and spices or some new that are unopened—like a whole lot of chili powder. Is there anything I can do to bring these to life or is it destined for compost?

-How to be Sage

Dear How to be Sage,

For a long time I had a word document on my desktop called “In Praise of What Remains.” I don’t know where the phrase came from. I don’t know what I meant to do with it—though at some point I probably did. I must have eventually deleted the document, and with it whatever intentions I’d had.

I still love the phrase, though. I can imagine having wanted to write a New York Times column about the smudges of the past seen around a city’s edges. Or the palimpsesty nature of restaurants, where, if you look from a certain vantage, you can imagine their predecessors and their patrons. Or the rare old-timey dishes one still finds, like the Baked Alaska at Delmonico’s, or She-crab soup at Gage and Tollner. Whatever my original intent, it’s probably fair to say that almost anything I’ve written has been a form of praise of what remains. Traditions and herbs stems and memories and chipped kitchenware—all the literal and figurative vestiges and verdigris.

The phrase came to mind when I read your question, not because of my own predilection for remains, but because, I realize, it describes, to some degree, a universal urge. Of course there are those who profess to hate leftovers. There are lovers of fashion who adamantly choose “new” over “old.” There are many people, like my mother, who genuinely consider a scratch or stain a form of ruin, a kind of degradation. (If you have seen my pots and pans—or my person—you already know that I believe the opposite.) Even among all of those groups, though, whose positions on tarnish is so anathema to me, there is an occasional—and strong!—impulse to preserve. In fact, I would say that seeing—and seeking to maintain—the value of a thing whose worth might not be preserved by market evaluation is as universal a human impulse as the impulse to create.

Might there be some life to this yet? strikes me as a question we have all asked—one of us only having the impulse to preserve flowers by cutting their stems and refreshing their water, another wondering only about furs that belonged to her grandmother, another only about silver. I find myself musing that perhaps this impulse itself is a vestige—a thing that remains—an ancient, inarticulable memory inside of each living thing that once, we were all related. Perhaps it is a case of matter recognizing its own.

I see that all in your question about herbs and spices. You suspect that there’s nothing to do with them, that they’ve turned to dust, that they’re only worthy of compost—if that. And yet, you wonder. You might even hope. I find that, in itself, worthy.

To get practical, though, the first step toward an answer is the first step toward resolving any culinary quandary: to smell and taste. You must open up each of the agéd bottles and jars and inhale, and then wet a finger, insert it, and taste the contents.

The exception to this step is any herbs or spices that remain unopened. They keep longer that way, and there’s no point in speeding up aging. For unopened bottles and jars, I recommend waiting until you plan to cook something that might require the unopened spice in question. With a good deal of time before dinner, open and taste whichever it is optimistically, and if it tastes like nothing, set yours aside, borrow the amount you need from your neighbor, and continue cooking.

For anything in the cupboard that’s been opened, the rule is: 1) Smell. If a) the contents smell like nothing, set them to the side. If b) the contents smell like something, then 2) taste them. The worst outcome of this is small licks of edible dust. The best is finding an ingredient you can use to cook with. Take anything in this category, wipe down its container, wipe the cupboard it lives in, and resolve to make something with it soon.

Now, turn to those containers from 1)a) above. These can be divided into substances that can be used and substances that can’t. I’m sure I’m missing something, but the only use I’ve come up with for odorless, tasteless herbs is clothing dye. The good news is that both rosemary and sage seem to make quite lovely colors. This involves buying some yarn—which can be used for present wrapping if you’re not a knitter—and boiling some water containing your otherwise useless herbs. In some cases, dyeing might benefit from pre-treatment with alum and cream of tartar. Whether you have the time or interest to dye at all, never mind pre-treat, I don’t know. But I do know the feeling of smug satisfaction of turning what might have been discarded into what will, surely be celebrated.

Dear cook, it may be that all the opened herbs and spices are tasteless and that you don’t have time or wherewithal to repurpose them as dye. In that case, perhaps the thing worth saving—the thing whose remains we can praise—is simply the devoted human interest in saving what we can, regardless of evidence pointing to the effort’s futility.

I need your questions!

They (Vogue, The Guardian) say it’s the Year of the Cabbage. That’s fine, but I’ve never had a stuffed cabbage that I love. The Polish (?) version, with dill and tomato sauce, always leaves me full but with a meh. Is there a great stuffed cabbage recipe?

Thank you,

I leaf it to you!

Dear I leaf it to you!

The news that it is the Year of the Cabbage—which I also read—took me by surprise. Every year has been the year of the cabbage, as far as I’m concerned. But I have noticed cabbage proliferating like mushroom spores in farm stores and on menus over the last little while. Cone cabbage, which I hadn’t even seen until two years ago, began to pile up in apple crates at my favorite stands—it made me laugh out loud on a particularly dim day because of its resolute hat-tiness.

I want to take this opportunity to digress…to digress, and say that while I’ve been truthful in writing that I hated most foods as a child, I never hated cabbage. (Bizarre, I know.) This wasn’t because I was blessed with a special peasant virtue, or had a unique microbiome that communicated its need for non-soluble fiber particularly clearly, but because my mother had a way of cooking cabbage that was so unlike all others, and so unarguably lovable, that I didn’t know about cabbage’s lesser variations—including the stuffed one you mention—until I left home. (Yes, I ate in restaurants. The 1980s or 1990s were not the Year of the Cabbage. Most restaurants didn’t serve cabbage.)

My mother’s cabbage was a whole head of finely sliced cabbage cooked in olive oil, with a good amount of salt, until completely wilted and caramelized. The resulting dish was sweet without being cloying, as savory as french fries and as comforting as rice. Some of the cabbage was tawny and jammy. It was all spoon tender. That was cabbage as I knew it and—other than the little plastic pot of slaw that came with my annual lobster dinner—it was cabbage in toto.

Later in life, I learned of the ubiquity of cabbage crimes in their most common forms: A) Undercooking, B) Under-seasoning, C) Over-salting, D) Over-saucing. These errors are so habitual that it’s a miracle we held the faith long enough to make it to the Year of Cabbage—a testament to the vegetable’s inherent goodness.

My mother’s cabbage was the first dish I learned to cook, and it was years before I made it any other way—the charred cabbage that is so ubiquitous on restaurant menus these days is usually A) and B). Cabbage slaws are usually B) or C), and stuffed cabbage is either D)—in the case of the Polish (?) kind or C) in the case of the French chou farci, of which I judged a competition just last year. Too much or too little is too common in the cooking of cabbage! (Forgive me, if you can…)

Eventually, I started roasting cabbage, sliced into wedges. I think this is a way we sometimes cooked it at Chez Panisse. That’s also where I learned to boil wedges of cabbage in very salty water. Both treatments are simple and rewarding—the first demanding at the end the lightest sprinkle of red wine vinegar, a smattering of parsley, and chopped toasted nuts, the second a dousing with good olive oil or a dollop of salsa verde.

I also began loving cabbage cooked like my mother’s, but with lemon zest and chopped parsley and mint added, tossed with a short pasta. When we began, a year and a half ago or so, to hold weekly Sunday taco dinners, I began making a cabbage salad that quickly became a Sunday staple: finely sliced cabbage, well-salted and left for 30 minutes, then rinsed and pressed a bit, dressed with sunflower oil and sesame seeds. This salad is my current favorite way to eat cabbage, except maybe for the following, which I’d never codified as a recipe before now. It’s a sort of cross between a Lions’ Head meatball and steamed cabbage rolls. I’ve used elements of each as I’ve tried to record what I do when I make it.

Lion’s Head stuffed cabbage rolls

• 1 whole head cabbage, ideally round, but also cone, Savoy, or Napa

• 1/4 cup finely minced scallions, both white and green parts until the green gets too fibrous to easily chop, or shallots

• about a 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely minced, 1 quite heaping tablespoon

• 1/3 cup finely chopped cilantro

• 500 g minced pork, ideally with 20% fat or higher

• 2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine or white wine

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• 2 tablespoons oil from a jar of chili crisp

• ½ teaspoon salt plus more for salting the boiling water

• ½ teaspoon sugar

Dipping sauce from The Woks of Life

• 1 teaspoon sugar

• 1 tablespoon hot water

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• 1 teaspoon rice vinegar

• 1 teaspoon chili oil

• 1 teaspoon finely minced garlic

• 1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds

• ½ teaspoon sesame oil

Bring a large pot of water to boil. Salt it well. With a sharp knife, remove the core of a round cabbage. If using another variety, remove its leaves. Add the whole cabbage to boiling water and cook until the leaves loosen from the core and are tender, 4-6 minutes, or separate the largest leaves and medium-sized leaves and add them,cooking for less time. Remove and drain. Trim off the thick veins of the largest and medium-sized leaves, leaving only the leafy part. Stop removing veins when you get to the very small ones. You may have some leaves remaining, but better than running out! Set the cabbage aside.

Combine all of the stuffing ingredients and mix very well in a large bowl. Divide roughly into twelve equal portions. To assemble, overlap two cabbage leaves. Add a portion of stuffing in a slightly elongated ball or cigar shape. Fold and wrap to encase the stuffing. Place the cabbage rolls, seam-side down, into a wicker steamer basket, using two levels of steamer baskets. Steam over medium heat for fifteen minutes. Remove and serve with dipping sauce.

To make dipping sauce, dissolve the sugar in the hot water. Add remaining ingredients, and dip!

Dear cook, I hope you find this a stuffed cabbage recipe that doesn’t disappoint! There are so many ways to go wrong with cabbage—as I laid out in points A)-D) above, but there are even more ways to go right. Start with my mother’s cabbage, and make your way to this stuffed one. As for the rest, I leaf it now to you.

I need your questions!

I’m 6 months pregnant, and while trying not to get too wrapped up in thinking about all the things I could be doing to prepare for a-completely-totally-unfathomably-new-existence, I am also trying to feed myself (and baby) well. I am not someone who craves liver...but know that it is a nutritional "powerhouse." One (of two) pregnancy books I’m reading offered a recipe for Beef Liver Pâté and I thought: “Ok. Let's try it.” The liver itself was an intimidating orb of grayish maroon, with an off-putting shimmer. I prepared it according to the directions. Did I look at other recipes before trying this one? No. Did I dive into the comments section of an online version? No! I just followed the printed directions. My husband agreed to having it as part of our dinner spread last night with toast and a big punchy green salad.

Tamar. It was terrible! Metallic, upsetting, unpalatable. And now I have 4 jars in my freezer. Salvageable? Worth even trying? My iron levels are probably fine...

-Petrified by Pâté

Dear Petrified by Pâté,

I had a cook in Georgia whom I’ll call “Julien” for the purposes of this column. That wasn’t his real name, but I don’t sense that more facts would add anything to the story’s truth. Julien could have been a model cook. He was fast and strong and positive—when he decided to be. He had a good palate, and promised he’d stop smoking after I nagged him about how much better his palate would get once he quit. He seemed able and excited to learn—sometimes.

Julien was also unreliable, prone to excuses, and truculent. I was a very new, very green head chef, with no experience inspiring or managing or directing humans. I didn’t know how to deal with the disparity between what Julien could do and what he did. I (justifiably) doubted my authority and spent much of my energy trying to prove it—to my cooks, to my patrons, to my partners, to myself.

What I came up with, in Julien’s case, was to offer him a raise. If I could show him the trust I had in his development—if I performed this act of faith—Julien would rise to meet my hopes for him. The raise had to be authorized by the restaurant partner who held the purse strings. I remember sitting with the partner, making my request, and watching his face. “Didn’t he just call out sick for Saturday dinner?” the partner asked. Yes, he had. “Didn’t you just reprimand him for leaving the grill dirty?” Also, yes. The partner looked wary. “I’m not going to tell you how to manage your staff,” he said, “But I would advise not throwing money at a problem.”

Did I mention that I was very new and very green? I ignored the counsel, gave Julien a raise, and watched his behavior get precipitously worse. His absences became routine, his truculence became full-on fights. I don’t remember whether, in the end, I fired Julien or let him quit. I remember offering a mea culpa to the partner who’d had it right all along.

I revisit the quandary when I make a culinary mistake and have to choose: give up or fight? The closest analogy I have to the wording of the partner in Georgia is someone—whose true name I really can’t remember—once counseling me not to “throw good ingredients after bad.” To this advice I’ve also only been able to occasionally abide. I’ve heard it echo in my head as I try to rescue an overly acidic vinaigrette by adding more olive oil, and then more…or to thin a mistakenly-whipped creme fraiche dressing by drizzling in cream—resulting in more mistakenly whipped dressing.

In this comparison, Julien ends up as a “bad” ingredient. He wasn’t. But his behavior should have been attended to or jettisoned, not rounded out with more cream. The tricky thing is that sometimes it works. Sometimes, even though I find myself with a whole jar full, the acidic vinaigrette is evened out by more oil (and more mustard and more salt.) Sometimes, good ingredients applied to mistakes will convert them.

I wish I had a formula for kitchen mistakes as clear as not throwing money at a personnel problem. I have made fixes that felt like miracles. And I’ve had to sigh and throw out ingredients and time and will and hope and kitchen fuel—and more of each than if I’d just given up earlier.

The closest I’ve come is a twofold general guidance:

1. If you will get pleasure from a success and not suffer from a failure, then it is worth an assay and attempt.

2. If you make your attempt on only a portion of the dish, you risk less time and will and hope than if you try it on the whole thing.

Based on your description of your pâté as “metallic, upsetting, unpalatable,” I’ll admit: Some of my hope is at risk. I find myself asking whether your recipe directed you to soak the liver first in milk, or milk and sugar—recommendations I’ve read for softening liver’s iron twang. I have other questions—like the ratio of fat to meat, which should be high—and how thoroughly you cooked the liver, which really can only bear medium rare. I can’t know those answers, which makes this even trickier.

But you did mention having divided your remaining pâté into four jars. This gives me enough to work with. If it will be pleasurable and you will not suffer, thaw one jar and see what happens if you amend it with the seasonings in this recipe for Vietnamese banh mi pâté, or this one, which includes bread and egg. Both include shallots, garlic, five spice powder, and sugar. One includes MSG. Those are all strong enough flavors that they might overpower the upsetting, metallic taste of the pâté as it stands. They might not. But if you’ve only dealt with one of the jars, it will be one or two shallots, a garlic clove, and a dash of five spice. Procedurally, I would mix the ingredients in with a firm hand rather than in a blender. I would add room temperature butter, too, even if the recipes don’t suggest it, because everything is better with butter and, again, you’ll only add—and risk losing—a tablespoon.

Dear cook, you ask a forever question, a daily one, an hourly one. Do I let go or do I gather my nerve—and my five spice powder and butter—and give it another shot? I do not have a formula for the more general form of the question, either. Or, I guess I only have the same answer: If you can make your effort without too much suffering, and without unaffordable risk, then perhaps it is worth it. And if you sense that the stakes are too high, and the risks too great, you can remind yourself that you are a grown human, in the process of growing another human, and you will not let yourself become petrified just by some pâté.

I need your questions!

Food is one of my greatest sources of joy and also an arena for all my issues to play out. My feelings always seem too big for my body to hold. When I am wrought with anxiety, my movements in the kitchen become choppy, haphazard, messy. When I’m hopeless, my cooking becomes grey and flat. When my focus is spinning, I leave rice in the cooker too long and burn sesame seeds I’m trying to toast. How can I learn to cook correctively, instead of in a way that lays my pain bare? Or even—should I?

-The Frog, Watching the Water

Dear Frog,

The first time I noticed time slowing down in the kitchen, I was working the wood-fired oven at Chez Panisse. (Is that true? I’ve become warier by the day of such unequivocal characterizations. How many first times is one permitted…?)

That night stands in sharp relief in my mind, its sounds and smells so near at hand I might be living a double life, both then and now. It was a Saturday night, and I stood at the wood-burning oven, my left hand resting on an oven peel, sighing and feeling—very slightly—bored.

Don’t misunderstand: every varnished wooden table in the restaurant was full. The ticket printer that spit out orders had been erupting ceaselessly since our doors opened at 5. My station was dusted with flour and ash. My wood-fired oven, crackling flames in its back corner, was filled with four pizzas; a little tray of fig-leaf-wrapped sardines waited to replace whichever pizza finished cooking first. The world around me raced and whirled. But for me, awash in wood smoke and the clatter and hum of happy eaters, life inched along glacially.

I described this moment last week to Chef Itamar Srulovich, of the amazing Honey and Co. I compared it to having become Neo from the Matrix, able to dodge live bullets by leaning out of the way. Itamar stared at me and said: “Oh! You get it!” I needled him for sounding so surprised. He doubled down, insisting that he was surprised. What I’d described was the very essence of why anyone would fall in deep, gripping love with cooking. It wasn’t an experience he assumed was universal.

I learned to recognize the feeling as “flow,” or a state in which all of my focus was so fully on what I was doing that time stretched out; there was time enough for anything; each thing that needed doing was done and would be done, and still, excess consciousness remained, ready to be met or teased or touched. I called this feeling “bored” above. That isn’t accurate. It’s more like a complete, fervid readiness.

We don’t talk about what else is happening in a self during “flow”—what is happening to a self ridden with anxiety, or hopelessness, or a lack of focus. I mention it to make a point: We don’t talk about the self during flow because the feeling of time expanding or slowing—or whatever physical metaphor I use to describe this metaphysical phenomenon—is the feeling of the momentary dissolution of self. Neo is no longer Neo when he dodges those bullets. He is the atomic response to the bullets being shot. For a moment, in front of that pizza oven, I was simply the collection of atoms in the space around the pizza (and sardines.)

It all sounds very strange. It also, I imagine, sounds like a relief. I don’t know where the self goes when it dissolves, but it gets a break. It does not have anxiety or hopelessness or distraction. It is at rest. Your dilemma is that you turn to cooking for solace but bring your whole lively troubled self along with youI. It/you never get the break it/you need. Your question is so good: Should I be seeking solace and calm in cooking when my self is unsettled, or is that a betrayal of my self?

Or: that is how I read it. My answer is that you can best honor the self’s anxiety and hopelessness and distraction by letting the self rest. By putting all of your focus on the physical processes in front of you—on the cutting board, on the rice, on the sesame seeds. It’s a strange prescription. You’ll know you’re doing it right when you feel a little bit afraid—a little unsure if it’s safe. It is safe, but you don’t need to know that to begin to let go, for a short time, of the anguish and the anxiety.

Dear cook, you are not a frog and you are not in a pot of water. But your invoking of the old metaphor of a frog being slowly boiled reminded me of another water parable, in which an older fish calls out to younger ones: “Hey, fellas, how’s the water?” And one of the two young fish turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” You don’t need to correct yourself in the kitchen, or continue to mess up as a way of honoring your inner state. You don’t need to try. You just need to turn more and more and more of your mind to the material in front of you, to the feel of an onion on the cutting board, the smell of its teary juice. To the sound of the rice coming to a boil. To the slight pop of a toasted sesame seed. You just need to say out loud, or maybe in your head, if you are self conscious: “This is water. This is water.” It takes all of your body to do this. It takes all of you, except for the bits that need to rest unobserved.

I need your questions!