This menu, from the December 1968 issue of Gourmet strikes me as so retro as to be rather wonderful.

(With apologies for the quality of the images; this comes from bound issues I found at a garage sale, and it’s impossible to achieve better quality pictures without tearing the whole thing apart.)

And while we’re on the subject of terrible images…. this lovely little caviar and beet tart in a buckwheat crust is definitely the best thing I’ve eaten all week. Rich, surprising, absolutely delicious, it was the highlight of a spectacular meal at Cafe Carmellini; can’t think of a more festive place to celebrate the season.

I hope you are having a very merry Christmas.

I assume your friends are also readers, and in that vein I offer up a few of my favorite food books. It may be too late to mail-order a gift, but it’s never too late to wander into your local bookstore.

Vibration Cooking, or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl by Vertamae Smart- Grosvenor. I bought this book when it came out in 1970 and read it cover to cover in one sitting. It’s one of my all-time favorite books, and it makes me very sad that it isn’t better known.

The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater. I don't think anybody has ever made food sound more delicious. When he describes a beet, for instance, it comes alive for you on the page and you suddenly want to run out and eat as many beets as you possibly can. It's sheer sensuousness.

The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher. Written in 1943, this is one of the earliest food memoirs. I love almost everything Fisher wrote, but this is my favorite. If you haven’t read this bit on eating tangerines, you have quite a treat in store. It’s my favorite piece of food writing.

The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber. One day when I was talking to Diana she said, "There's something safe and wonderful about being raised by a strict father, but it has its drawbacks." That's pretty much what this memoir - about growing up partly in Jordan and always with food- is about.

Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey. Jaffrey’s cookbooks are, of course, wonderful, but this extraordinary cook also has an amazing ability to recall and re-create the evocative flavors of the India she grew up in.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. The original bad boy chef and so much fun!

Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger by Lisa Donovan. “Stop letting men tell your story,” the indomitable Diana Kennedy once told Lisa Donovan. The result is this beautiful book by a wonderful southern chef.

Everything is Under Control by Phyllis Grant. What happens when a poet (and ballet dancer) decides that she wants to be a chef? This gorgeous book.

Hungry by Jeff Gordinier. One of our finest food writers finds himself caught in the crazy orbit of one of the world’s most fascinating chefs. Whatever you think you know about Rene Redzepi - this will tell you so much more.

Heat and Dirt by Bill Buford Bill has such an interesting mind…. I love everything he writes. But his description of working in the restaurants of Lyon makes you understand the origin of all the bad behavior in professional kitchens.

The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillin. This could be subtitled: Why life is more fun for people who like to eat. Pure pleasure.

The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin. There is a reason why Jacques Pepin became one of our most celebrated French chefs. He’s not only technically accomplished, but also deeply curious and extremely intelligent. He just turned 89, and he’s seen a lot.

Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle. A novel about identity theft that contains some of the most wonderful descriptions of cooking I've ever read.

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. The ultimate writer's writer, Mitchell is not usually thought of as someone who focuses on food. But many of his stories are about markets, pubs and restaurants. And this book contains my all-time favorite food story, "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks."

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin. You've never read Laurie Colwin? What a treat you have in store.

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling. Most famous quote: "The primary requisite for writing about food is a good appetite." A truly great writer’s memoir about eating in Paris in the twenties.

Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans. An endlessly amusing behind-the-scenes look at a great hotel restaurant by the man who wrote the Madeline books. Bemelmans wrote from experience; he worked at The Ritz.

Fair Shares for All by John Haney. An extraordinarily affectionate book about growing up on English food when it was truly terrible - written by Gourmet’s last and very beloved copy editor.

Down and Out in London and Paris by George Orwell. I think it was the model for Tony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, but I know that once you’ve read this book you will never forget it. Contains a remarkably graphic, and completely unforgettable, behind-the-scenes look at restaurant kitchens.

Blue Trout and Black Truffles by Joseph Wechsberg, a longtime writer for Gourmet. Wechsberg’s book about Le Pavillion restaurant is another classic.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya Von Bremzen. A memoir, in recipes, of living in the Soviet Union and coming to America. Totally original and completely wonderful.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. This strange little novel is very accurately described by its title. I couldn’t put it down.

Memorial by Bryan Washington. I loved Lot, the book of short stories by this wonderful writer, but in his first novel, which takes place in Houston and Japan, he spends a lot of time in the kitchen. In a surprising and brilliant move the New York Times has given Washington a food writing slot.

Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton. This is, in my opinion, the best of the many, many wonderful chef memoirs out there.

Thirty-Two Yolks by Eric Ripert. Tony Bourdain called this book “heartbreaking, horrifying, poignant and inspiring.” It’s all of that - and also a great introduction to our most beloved chef.

Heartburn by Nora Ephron. This novel about the breakup of Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein is both heartbreaking and hilarious. Her journalism is fantastic too; if you haven’t read Wallflower at the Orgy, here’s a link. And then there’s Crazy Salad; best title ever for a book (it’s from a Yeats poem).

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. You haven’t read Tan’s debut novel? What are you waiting for?

The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones. It’s a love story, it’s a mystery, and it’s also a thorough explanation of Chinese food. You’ll learn more about the recent history of food in China from Nicole Mones’ novel than you will from most cookbooks. Although when it comes to Chinese cookbooks, I recommend everything by Fuchsia Dunlop. Here’s a link to my favorite of the many articles Fuchsia wrote for Gourmet.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The extraordinary novelist decided that she and her family were going to spend a year raising their food or getting it from neighbors. This eloquent book is the result. (They had to do without most processed foods, but they each got to select one exception to the rule.)

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Everybody loves this book. For good reason.

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman. A delicate tale of sisters, food, book collecting, cookbooks…..

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki. I’ve admired every book Ozeki has written, but this novel, about the meat business, was way ahead of its time.

The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. A delicate and poignant novel about a young Vietnamese cook who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris.

Eat Like a Fish by Bren Smith. Smith was born in Newfoundland and became a commercial fisherman while still in his teens. He lived hard and loved it. Then he became a restorative ocean farmer, set up a nonprofit to teach others how to do it and won the $2 million Food Planet Prize for initiatives revolutionizing food production. Part memoir, part manifesto, this is an inspiring book.

Christmas eve, to me, means meatballs. As I began collecting the ingredients for this year’s feast, I happened upon this piece I wrote about ten years ago.

What made me do it?  Not quite sure.  I know better than to think turkey meatballs are going to be great. Yesterday, as I was working on the memoir about the Gourmet years, I came across a recipe we printed in the TV issue in 2004. A famous chef came into our kitchens at 4 Times Square, to demonstrate the dish. I didn't really remember it, but now, intrigued by the inclusion of pine nuts and golden raisins, I decided to make it.

Let me begin by saying that the start to finish time - listed as an hour - was a total lie. There's no way you can do it in an hour. The truth is, we often fudged the timing on recipes; if we told you that it was going to take three hours, would you really embark on the project? Let me also say that it's a rare Gourmet recipe that lets you down. In all honesty, I liked the ragu quite a lot: it was full of flavor, and thin enough to allow the pasta to inhale the sauce, soaking it up until it is literally part of the pasta. But the meatballs....  

When I make meatballs, I want airy spheres that evaporate beneath your teeth, whispering lemon, sighing Parmesan, each bite leaving an echo in its wake. A simple sauce that sings tomato. A dish that rewards your effort by arriving at the table wreathed in joy, eager to make everybody happy.  

What I want are the meatballs that Maggie Ruggiero developed for what would turn out to be one of Gourmet's final issues. At the first tasting I said "Why don't you add a little lemon zest?"

"You always say that," Maggie replied. But she admitted that I was right.

This is a recipe that is well worth your time. (To be fair, it is time-consuming; we listed the active time as 2 hours. But that’s only if you’re very, very fast.)

Classic Meatballs and Spaghetti

Tomato Sauce
2 medium onions, chopped
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
6 (28-oz) cans whole tomatoes in juice (preferably San Marzano)
4 teaspoons salt
pepper

Cook onions in oil over medium heat for about 10 minutes, until they are translucent. Add garlic and stir for a couple of minutes, then add the tomatoes, crushing them with your hands as you stir them into the pot. Add the juice, salt, a few good grindings of pepper and simmer for about an hour until thickened.

Meanwhile, make the meatballs.

Meatballs
2 medium onions, finely chopped
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
10 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 cups torn day-old Italian bread
2 cups whole milk
6 large eggs
2 cups (1/4 pound) grated Parmigiano cheese
1/3 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons finely chopped oregano
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
4 1/2 lb meatloaf mix (a mix of ground pork, beef and veal)
5 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons pepper
1 cup olive or vegetable oil

Cook onions in oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 10 minutes. Add garlic and cook, stirring occasionally for about 3 minutes. Transfer to a large bowl to cool.

Soak bread in milk in another bowl until soft, about 5 minutes. Firmly squeeze bread to remove excess milk, discarding milk.

Stir together cooled onion mixture, bread, eggs, Parmigiano, parsley, oregano, lemon zest, salt, and pepper until combined. Add meat to bread mixture, gently mixing with your hands until just combined (do not overmix).

With dampened hands form meat mixture into about 70 (1 1/2-inch) balls and arrange meatballs on 2 large baking sheets.

Heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet (preferably nonstick) over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking, then brown meatballs in 4 or 5 batches (without crowding), turning frequently, about 5 minutes per batch. This is more time consuming than you think it will be. Return to baking sheets as they cook.

Add meatballs to sauce and gently simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, until cooked through, 20 to 30 minutes. (If pot is not large enough, divide meatballs and sauce between 2 pots.)

Served over 2 pounds of spaghetti, cooked al dente, this will feed 12 to 16 people.

Make-ahead: meatballs can be made and simmered in sauce 5 days ahead. Cool, then cover and store in the refrigerator.

Meatballs with sauce can be frozen in an airtight container for up to 3 months.

Michael Krikorian has invented a whole new category called Fictional Journalism that makes a perfect present..

With your help this award-winning journalist will craft a “front page story” about your friend, complete with photographs. This is how Michael describes the process.

Fictional Journalism starts with actual journalism. Reporting. Asking questions. Having a conversation. Getting someone to open up. Before you and I have a conversation about the star of the story, I have a slew of questions to help formulate the story, such as:

What is this person most passionate about?

Does the person have a favorite movie, actor or actress?

A favorite singer or band or song?

A favorite sports team or player?

A favorite historical period or person?

And a whole lot more…

It only costs $75 - and I can’t think of a more thoughtful or original - gift than their own personal front page story.

A little blast from the past. Merry Christmas one and all.

Actually, I don’t.

This is because I am a cook, not a baker.

Bakers are precise people who believe in perfection. They are deeply invested in results.

Cooks, on the other hand, prefer the journey to the destination and don’t fret over the occasional mistake. Cooks prefer recipes that leave room for your imagination, allowing you to improvise at will.

In my first cookbook I wrote this: Don’t be afraid to produce bad meals. Better to shock friends with your failures than bore them with the same old successes; at its worst a bad experiment is a good laugh. That prompted one early critic to entitle his review “Cooking for Boos.” But I’ve never changed my mind.

So if you want weights and measures, I’m not for you. On the other hand if you consider the kitchen a playful place rather than a laboratory, we think alike.

In that vein, I offer up this recipe for one of my favorite holiday treats. It is utterly forgiving - you might want to add a bit of black pepper or perhaps some fresh rosemary or thyme. Like spice? Try some espalette pepper powder, a shower of fiercer pepper flakes, or a dollop of mustard.

Whatever you choose, these little crackers, hot out of the oven, go perfectly with a glass of Champagne.

Savory Parmesan Cocktail Crackers
7 tablespoons unsalted butter at room temperature
¾ cup grated good quality parmesan cheese
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 large egg yolk

Put all the ingredients into a bowl or a stand mixer and mix until they come together into a smooth dough.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and roll it about until you have a cylinder that is between an inch and an inch and a half in diameter. Cut the roll in half.

Wrap a piece of plastic wrap around each cylinder and roll one around until it’s perfectly smooth, making sure each end is flat. Repeat with the second roll and put them into the refrigerator where they will rest happily for at least an hour - and up to a few days.

When you’re ready, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, cut the cylinders into 1/2 inch slices and bake for 15 to 20 minutes until the lovely crackers have become slightly golden.

Here’s what Gourmet Magazine thought you should cook for Christmas in 1966. It’s especially interesting to me because Beef Wellington is having a whole new moment right now.

You’ll see that back then the mandoline was “a special cutting board,” and you could stroll into your butcher and casually ask him to tie a filet of beef with sheets of larding pork. And just imagine creating that shrimp tree!

Incidentally, I have found a couple of bottles of ‘58 La Tache for sale; the price ranges from $4500 to $6500 .

Would you be shocked to learn that the pinenuts you're most likely using in your pesto come from China or Siberia?

I was. On a recent trip to Italy I couldn't help noticing that the pinoli in the markets were much larger than the ones I buy at home.

Back in my own kitchen, I scrutinized the pine nuts in my freezer. (They're filled with oil, which means that left in the cupboard they quickly go bad.) Sure enough, the label said something about the various countries the pine nuts might have come from, and not one of them was Italy or the United States.

I took out a handful and laid them next to the ones I'd bought in Italy. Half the size! Then I tasted them: half the flavor too.

If you're looking for a thoughtful and inexpensive gift for a cook, you could hardly do better than Gustiamo Pinoli which are organically grown and harvested by hand. I can't think of a better way to stuff a stocking. (And while you’re there…. my pantry is filled with Gustiamo products that I consider essential. Capers packed in salt, anchovies, olive oil, jams… They also import great panettone from Padova every year, but that’s already gone.)

As I mentioned a while ago, I think saffron is one of the greatest gifts you can give a cook. I love that sunny flavor - and it recently occurred to me that it might make a very nice, not too sweet cookie. So I invented one.

Saffron Shortbread
generous pinch of saffron (more is better)
1 cup unsalted butter at room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup whole almonds (to make 3/4 cups ground almonds)
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
demerara sugar to sprinkle on top (if you don’t have it, plain sugar will do)

Preheat the oven to 375.

Combine the saffron with 1 tbsp boiling water and let it cool for at least 10 minutes while it gives itself to the water.

Grind the sugar with the almonds in a food processor.

Cream the butter with the sugar/almond mixture by hand or in a stand mixer. Add the saffron water. Mix in the flour and salt until it has all come together in a smooth dough.

Put the dough on a large sheet of parchment paper; cover with wax paper or another sheet of parchment and roll out into a 9 x 11 rectangle.

Remove the top sheet and sprinkle with demerara sugar.

Slide the entire parchment paper onto a baking sheet. With a dough scraper or knife, mark out rectangles in the dough (the size is up to you).

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes until golden. Remove from oven and cut the slices all the way through before allowing to cool.

When the shortbread is cool, break into individual cookies.

This menu, from 72 Market Street, the celebrity-filled restaurant opened by Tony Bill and Dudley Moore in Venice California is from 1986, but Leonard Schwartz’s menu is filled with modern dishes I’d be very happy to eat right now.

The one thing that gives you a hint to its age is that Caesar salad “with or without garlic”.

In case you’ve been contemplating cooking suckling pig as a Christmas feast, I offer this old article…

With high summer in the Hudson Valley comes high wedding season. Last weekend I was driving, windows down, along a back road (on my way to a smoked brisket feast), when I caught a delectable waft of suckling pig skin.

It made me think of this recipe for stuffed spit-roasted pig, straight from the annals of Colonial Virginia Cookery, Jane Carson's finely researched historical cookbook.

This recipe is originally from Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery, one of the most popular cookery books of its day. It's a reminder of how much recipe styles change over time; although this sounds delicious, most modern cooks would have a very difficult time following these rather vague instructions.

Looking for a recipe you can use? The truth is, nothing's easier than roasting a suckling pig. Here's Kenji Lopez-Alt's encouragingly easy recipe: he calls it “holiday roasting for dummies.”

On the tape that I made as I drove home that night, I sound ridiculously rhapsodic. “Those oysters,” I hear myself saying dreamily, as a car honks behind me, “were an amazing idea. There they were, sitting on a plate half covered with ice and half covered with rock salt. Each oyster had been treated in a unique fashion: a tiny icy Olympia came topped with caviar, a Pigeon Point was hot, crisply wrapped in a tempura of vegetable strips. One came in a vinaigrette, another like a little beggar’s purse wrapped in filo pastry. And each,” my voice gets dreamy again, “was absolutely fabulous.”

There I am, driving through the night, talking about the escarole and fava bean soup: “A clear broth so the flavor of the vegetables came shining through. There were croutons with it, buttery and fine. I absolutely loved it.” I was equally taken with scallops with blood orange butter and fried vermicelli. “Dishes that sound this exotic rarely live up to their promise,” I hear myself saying. “But these all did.”

Three huge charred lamb chops were meaty and lean. They came with a fried artichoke with capers, a sort of American carciofi alla giudia. “A wonderful dish!” I cried. But my greatest praise was for the lobster. “It was perfectly grilled,” I told the tape recorder, “topped with the tomalley that had been sauteed with garlic, and served with a sort of ginger butter. I could have gone on eating it forever.”

I went on so long about the wonder of this food that I was almost home before I even got to dessert. “It was a dream!” says my voice. “Rhubarb crisp, not very sweet, with perfectly flaky crust and vanilla ice cream. Something called ’24 karat gold chocolate plate’ contained a spectacular frozen chocolate mousse with Calvados poured over it; it was cold, soft, velvety all at the same time. White chocolate mousse with raspberries came wrapped in cat’s tongues. A flourless chocolate cake was dense and slightly bitter. There was also an intense chocolate terrine. At $6, this plate was a bargain.”

Even before Shire’s arrival in LA I was so excited that I wrote Women Who Can Take the Heat about newly empowered female chefs. “Next month,” I noted, “when the two most eagerly awaited new restaurants in Los Angeles and New York open their doors, each a multimillion-dollar venture with an enormous staff, women will be running the show.

It began with this note from Anne Rosenzweig. “Did you read that newspaper article? There was one comment I really loved that said hiring Rosenzweig to redo 21 was like hiring the designer of a small Madison Avenue boutique to redo a wing at the Met. I’ve gotten that sort of stuff from the beginning, and I’ve come to expect it. I just want to go out and show ‘em, you know, I can do it.”

Here’s what Lydia Shire had to say: “My job has always come first; my children have always understood that. It would simply never have occurred to me to ask for Saturday night off. If you want to get ahead, you have to do what it takes.”

Lydia did indeed work hard and make a lot of sacrifices. But the real cause of her success was her unique take on food. Look at these menus! They’re astonishing for that moment in time: even today I want to eat every dish.

I should add that, like Thomas Keller who arrived in Los Angeles a couple years later, she was too far ahead of her time for the monied Los Angeles audience she hoped to feed. A year later she was gone, and as I was reviewing the new chef at Gardens I wrote “Was anybody really surprised when Shire and the Four Seasons parted ways? I doubt it. The food and the room were not dancing to the same tune. Shire was doing a terrific tango while the dining room wanted to waltz.”

Speaking of Lydia…. this is from something I wrote in 2009 and I believe she took this picture of Colman Andrews, Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman and me in Barcelona in the late 80s.

Going through old photographs is dusty, sentimental and satisfying work. I've spent the day traveling through the past, poring over old albums and pawing through boxes. I've promised to come up with new material for the reissue of Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, and I thought old pictures might make people happy. But what a journey it's been!

Here's the picture of our fourth grade class at PS 41; I'm a little stunned to discover that I can name every person, even Glynn Turman, who was only in our class for one year. (He left for a role in Raisin in the Sun, and later I heard that he'd married Aretha Franklin.) Here's my sweet Aunt Lili, squinting into the Hollywood sun, holding one of the miniature Schnauzers that she bred. Aunt Birdie, eclipsed by the gaudy splendor of my rainbow wedding dress, stands between me and Doug ; she is so tiny that she barely comes to his waist. In the next picture Alice Waters, Marion Cunningham and Cecilia Chiang hover like three fairy godmothers as they cut the cake at my wedding to Michael. (Nancy Silverton, who made the cake, stands in the background, holding an infant and frowning as if she doesn't quite trust that they'll do it right. )

The pictures are in no particular order, and they tumble from the box in a dizzying spill of years. One minute I'm looking at my father's father, who died in 1913, posing in front of some Alp wearing lederhosen, and the next I'm looking at myself in front of the lake in Taishan in 1980, a long-gone China which no longer exists. I found a whole box of slides from that trip to Barcelona that Colman arranged in the late 80s for Alice Waters, Lydia Shire, Mark Miller, Brad Ogden and Jonathan Waxman. We are buying food in the Boqueria, we are in restaurants, we are in bakeries. Mostly we look like we are pretty drunk (we were), and like we're having way too much fun.

My hands are covered in dust, there are piles of photographs all over the floor and stacked on top of the table. But what I keep wondering is how all these random memories ended up, together, in an apartment in New York in 2009?

Here’s the recipe for Lydia’s wonderful calves brains from that trip to Barcelona. I wrote about it in Comfort Me with Apples.

And while we’re on women chefs….

Francine’s Outrageous sauces are pretty much what you’d make at home; they contain no egregious ingredients (dyes, palm oil, stabilizers and the like), and they are sweet and delicious. My favorite is the toffee…. Anyone in need of a last-minute dessert would be thrilled to have these in the pantry; spooned over ice cream they create an instant party.

If you’re like me, you don’t buy dishtowels for yourself. But if you’re like me, you’re thrilled when someone buys them for you. That’s why I mention Eat Drink Lucky every year, because I’m enchanted with their artist teatowel-of-the-month program. (You can order the full year or any 3 month period.)

These are no ordinary dishtowels; each is a limited edition handmade by a Maine artist. This month’s towel was designed by a clothing designer who prints and dyes her own fabrics; the print above is her adaptation of a Victorian stencil used by house plasterers.

If you know someone who’s obsessed with Korean cuisine - and these days who isn’t? - you could not do them a better favor than turning them onto Queens. This San Francisco shop partners with local, organic farmers to create stellar handmade condiments. Yes, you can now buy kimchi, gochuchang and even Korean chiles at the supermarket, but these seasonings take your cooking to whole new level. Even the packaging (down to the cellophane packing peanuts) is biodegradable and recyclable.

As I was flipping through the December 1978 issue of Gourmet I came upon this iconic Christmas dinner. It’s such a classic I thought I’d share. Isn’t it time you made some mincemeat?

Send a Pastrami to Your Boy in the Army
As any New Yorker will tell you, nobody beats Katz’s delicatessen for pastrami. The venerable establishment has, after all, been making pastrami for 136 years, and they know what they’re doing. You can buy it pre-sliced, but for the true Katz’s experience, nothing beats a whole pastrami.

Any serious cook would be delighted with this gift but it does require a little work. Here are the instructions.

1. Place in a large pot of boiling water.
2. Boil the pastrami for 3 hours, or until tender. (Use a fork to test for tenderness.) Be sure to watch the water level so that the water does not evaporate too much. The pastrami should be submerged in water at all times.
3. When tender, remove from water and heat, and trim any excess fat, particularly from the tip. We do not recommend trimming too much.
4. For best results, slice against the grain for maximum flavor and softness, and angle the blade to produce the widest slices.

Rain. Fog. Looking out at this mournful landscape I know I need a little comfort. So I’m going to make the most soothing soup I know.

No sharp edges to jar the palate, no unexpected spices. It is the perfect prescription for those in need of solace.

Uncomplicated Mushroom Soup
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1 small onion, diced
1/2 pound mushrooms, thinly sliced
4 tablespoons flour
1 cup beef broth
2 cups half-and-half
Salt and pepper
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 bay leaf

Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan. Add onion, saute until translucent. Add the mushrooms and saute until brown. Stir in the flour, then slowly add the beef broth, stirring constantly.

Heat the half-and-half in another saucepan. Add it to the mushroom mixture along with salt, pepper, nutmeg and bay leaf. Cook over low heat 10 minutes making sure not to bring to a boil.

Remove bay leaf and serve to 4 very satisfied people.

I just came upon this fifteen year old post (August 2010), and it’s such a nostalgic view of a long-gone New York that I thought I’d share it with you.

So many things have changed. David Chang has, of course, become a mogul. That sweet little Torrisi restaurant has morphed into and entire empire called Major Food Group (see below for my most recent meal with them)- and April Bloomfield has the wonderful Sailor in Brooklyn.

David Chang is 33

Dark, smoky, intimate dinner last night at Torrisi Italian Specialties to celebrate David’s birthday. It was a small group: a few chefs (April Bloomfield, Jonathan Benno, Marco Canora), some major food folk (Kate Krader, Dana Cowin), and a smattering of Dave’s college friends.

It was funny; all the wine people were standing around drinking beer out of cans, and David was hopping from table to table, looking happy. Or as happy as he can.

The food was so fantastic, I want to go back and eat it all over again. The standouts were powerful little squares of garlic bread with soft warm fresh mozzarella to spoon on top, and the most intense seafood pasta I’ve ever eaten; each strand of spaghetti seemed to have inhaled the ocean. It was followed by long ribs of beef, the edges wonderfully crisped to blackness, the meat itself cut into rich, rare slabs. On the side a bitter little salad paired with achingly sweet polenta. Eaten together the meat, the greens and the corn delivered a powerful flavor punch.

We ate and drank and talked and then afterward – what else? – went off to The Breslin, still packed as the IRT at rush hour at 2 a.m.

How can you not love New York?

I finally got to have dinner at Torrisi last week (reservations are insanely impossible to come by), and while all the food was delicious, it was this innocuously named Chicken Soup that really blew me away.

Clear as a bell, it had a startlingly velvety texture that was like an instant hug. “How did they manage this?” I had to ask. The answer is that they begin with chicken stock and use it to make more chicken stock, filling the pot with chicken feet and wings to coax more collagen into the broth.

The fact that it also contained little threads of enoki mushrooms and copious amounts of grated black truffle didn’t hurt. And then, of course there was the egg.

…

A great grilled cheese sandwich is a seriously seductive creature. Warm, tangy and gooey, it should be absolutely irresistible. But here’s the problem: even ordinary grilled cheese sandwiches, the kind made with white bread and Velveeta, are pretty appealing.  Which means that too many people are willing to settle for good enough.

That’s a shame: Making it better is remarkably easy. Here are a few tips beyond the obvious ones of using good bread (something with character like sourdough) and good cheese (any good Cheddar will do, although I prefer Montgomery).

1.  Do not use margarine - ever. Butter the inside and the outside of the bread.  Or try spreading a thin film of mayonnaise onto the outside of the bread instead of butter; it will not only add a persuasive tang, but is also much more scorch-proof on the griddle.

2.  Grate the cheese, rather than slicing it, for quicker, more even melting.

3.  Mix the grated cheese with a scattering of finely chopped members of the allium family - whatever you happen to have on hand.  I like to mix in about a tablespoon of onions, scallions, shallots and/or garlic per sandwich.

4.  Add a gentle swipe of mustard (or horseradish) to the inside of the bread.  It adds a nice layer of flavor, an extra tang.

5.  Pat some of the grated cheese onto the outside of the bread, where it will create a wonderfully crisp and shaggy crust, giving your sandwich an entirely new dimension.

6. Don’t take your eyes off the sandwich; these babies burn easily!

The Diva of Grilled Cheese
Shallot, leek, scallions or onions (any color)
1 clove garlic
¹/₄ pound cheddar cheese, divided
Butter
2 slices thickly sliced, sturdy sourdough bread
Mayonnaise

Gather a group of shallots, leek, scallions, and onion—as many members of the allium family as you have on hand—and chop them finely into a small heap. Add a minced clove of garlic.

Grate a few generous handfuls of the best cheddar you can afford. (Montgomery is particularly appealing), set a little aside, and gently combine the rest with the onion mixture.

Butter one side of thickly sliced bread and heap as much of the mixture as possible between the slices (butter facing in). Spread a thin layer of mayonnaise on the outside of the bread (this will keep it from scorching on the griddle). Press the reserved grated cheese to the outside of the bread, where it will create a wonderfully crisp and shaggy crust, giving your sandwich an entirely new dimension. (For less mess, it helps to apply the mayonnaise and cheese first on one side only, lay that side on the griddle, then quickly do the remaining top side while the bottom is sizzling.)

Fry on a heated nonstick griddle or in a nonstick skillet about 4 minutes a side, until the cheese is softly melted.

If you’re looking for the perfect thing to watch while eating grilled cheese in winter here it is. Bird feeders are absolutely magical at this time of year.

Having spent a LOT of time fending off squirrels, I recommend this one. (I’ve got nothing against squirrels, but they’re so greedy they don’t stop until the feeder is empty. And that gets very expensive very fast.)

But as you can see from the video, one of these cheap tube-type feeders is a lot more popular with the birds! And they’re pretty much available everywhere. Add some bird feed and you’ve got a pretty perfect present.

Christmas in a Bite
At Christmastime my German father always came home with boxes of lebkuchen: spicy, chewy, gingery cookies laced with marzipan and orange peel. I adored them, but as New York’s German population became assimilated, the Bavarian bakery he favored closed. We grumpily settled for the commercial kind, which proved a very poor substitute.

Then Sandy Lee returned from a stint in Germany and opened Leckerlee, a seasonal bakery whose main reason for being is lebkuchen. These fabulous confections rely on the classic Nuremberg recipe, which features a nine-spice blend and a dough heavy on almonds and hazelnuts. They’re everything lebkuchen should be—including a wonderful way to bring the true taste of Christmas back to the table.

The company creates new tins each year, and I find this year’s particularly appealing.

This recipe, part sticky toffee pudding, part upside down cake, reminds me a bit of lebkuchen. It’s a glorious English confection that comes together easily, requires no exotic ingredients- and is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. Best of all, it fills your house with the warm mingled aroma of ginger, nutmeg, clove and cinnamon.

If you're looking for the perfect dessert to take to a Christmas feast this is easy to transport and keeps very well.

Should you want to make it into a more impressive present, throw in a 10 inch pre-seasoned cast iron skillet. You can find them at most stores - or go right to the source, the Lodge Company. I consider this particular skillet an essential - and economical - kitchen tool.

Sticky Upside-Down Pear and Gingerbread Cake
Preheat the oven to 350.

Butter a 9 1/2 or 10 inch cake tin, then line the bottom with parchment paper. (Alternatively, use a 10 inch cast iron skillet; if it’s well-seasoned you won’t need the parchment paper.)

Melt 2/3 of a stick of butter with 3/4 cup of brown sugar in a small pot until it turns into a creamy, caramel-colored glop. Pour it into the cake tin and tip it until the syrup evenly covers the bottom of the pan.

Peel 4 fat Bosc pears and cut off the tip and bottom end. (Do not core them; they'll look so much better left to their own devices). Cut each pear in half and lay it in the pan, cut side down, with its tip pointing into the center of the pan. Set aside while you mix the gingerbread.

Put 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour into a small bowl. Whisk in 3/4 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and a teaspoon of ground ginger. Grate in a bit of nutmeg. Add a pinch of ground clove.

In another bowl beat 2 eggs. Stir in a cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup molasses, 2/3 cups milk and a stick of melted butter. Grate in a small knob of fresh ginger.

Add the flour mixture to the egg mixture and mix until it comes together into a smooth batter. Pour over the pears, smooth the top and bake for about an hour, until a toothpick comes out fairly clean. (Timing will depend on the size of your pan.)

Set on a wire rack to cool for a few minutes, then run a knife around the edge.

Find a large plate or cake platter. Place a sturdy oven mitt on each hand. Set the plate on top of the cake, then turn the whole thing upside down as quickly as possible. The cake should slide easily out of the pan, leaving the pears smiling up at you.

Serve warm or at room temperature with vanilla ice cream.

Here are some suggestions of where to find find them.

New York's great cookbook store, Kitchen Arts and Letters, stocks every current cookbook and food magazine, along with a fine array of food history and out of print books. They also scour the world for unusual foreign cookbooks which are available nowhere else in the country.

I'm very taken with this series on the food of Singapore, which they import directly. There’s one on the Hokkien recipes of the Fujianese people who came to Singapore from southeastern China. The book contains a number of fascinating recipes, including one for kong pak bau - braised pork belly buns with lettuce..

The series includes a book of Peranakan recipes, from the descendants of the early Chinese migrants who settled in Singapore and intermarried, creating an original (and utterly delicious) cuisine with names like otak otak and gado gado. There’s another on South Indian recipes containing dishes like vinegar chicken, stuffed squid in black ink gravy and tomatoes in yogurt. The book also includes a great recipe for vaduvam, the exotic spice that swept Paris a few years ago.

A little jar of vadauvan, come to think of it, would also make a terrific gift.

Bonnie Slotnik began her career at Kitchen Arts and Letters, but after a few years she moved downtown and opened her own shop. Unlike the other shops on this list, Bonnie has not spent much time creating a website, but if you’re in New York and you love cookbooks, you should stop into this remarkable shop. I have bought far too many books there, including the one above. (Hannah Goldfield wrote a wonderful article about Bonnie here.)

Rabelais Books in Maine is pretty much the opposite of Bonnie Slotnik: they closed their brick and mortar store in Biddeford and moved to a tiny space in Portland and now sell most of their books on line. But with one of the largest collections of rare books on food and wine in the country, the website is awesome. Current offerings includes a signed first edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and this 1909 pamphlet on reindeer cuisine.

Kitchen Lingo books in Long Beach California is both tiny and remarkable. Owner Matt Miller has created more than a bookstore; he’s created a community. In addition to selling books, Matt hosts cooking classes, lectures, events, trips… If you love food and live anywhere near Long Beach, you should definitely stop in.

Lizzy Young’s website is beautifully organized, filled with wonderful offerings…. and very dangerous. If you don’t want to disappear down a rabbit hole, stay away. On the other hand, if you love old cookbooks you will happily spend hours here - and very likely find perfect presents for all your friends. I’ve been seriously considering this special gift edition of the iconic Moosewood Cookbook from 1981.

Another dangerous website? Omnivore books, a store I never leave without armfuls of treasures. At the moment there are 91 pages of vintage cookbooks on the website, among them this adorable little book. There are also fantastic vintage menus, including a trove of vintage Chez Panisse menus owner Celia Sack purchased a few years ago. Most have been scooped up, but a few, like this one, remain.

One more extraordinary site for cookbook lovers: The Cook’s Bookcase where you will find hundreds of vintage books (many, like this classic from James Beard, inscribed), along with a fantastic collection of menus from great restaurants.

Dangerous.

Bring the Heat
Who doesn’t have a friend who’s addicted to chile peppers? In this heat-obsessed moment, finding the perfect present for them can be a challenge.

Here’s this year’s answer: tiny charapita peppers pickled in vinegar. Occasionally called “pepper caviar” because of their diminutive size (about the diameter of boba balls), and hefty price (they are reputed to be the most expensive peppers in the world), they have an almost addictive quality. I find myself popping them into my mouth and simply eating them plain.

The folks at Springs Fireplace grow 16 varieties of exotic peppers on eastern Long Island. They’re the only people on the East Coast growing tesuque peppers - and their Tesuque Hot sauce sauce is slightly sweet, with a deliciously slow burn. A passionate pepper person would be pleased.

The Wonder of Wine
“It is a testament to the world’s passion for Burgundy that our Paulée has evolved from a simple dinner at restaurant Montrachet in Tribeca to the multi-day, multi-city festival that it is today.”

So begins the introduction to this year’s La Paulée, which celebrates its 25th year of over-the-top Burgundy wine events. (The photograph has nothing to do with La Paulee; it’s a memento from my long-ago visit to the late great winemaker, Hubert de Montille whose children continue to make one of Burgundy’s great wines. That’s Kermit Lynch by his side.)

Tickets to La Paulée are expensive, but any winelover would be thrilled with a chance to attend one of the many events.

While we’re on the subject of wine…

Here’s a menu from Narsai’s, which had one of the finest finest wine lists in America.

The late Narsai David opened his restaurant in 1972, a few months and a few blocks from Chez Panisse just north of Berkeley. Unlike Alice’s restaurant, it was Continental and rather formal with an astonishingly long wine list. Here are a few gems from the 1984 list:

1953 La Tache, $490
1960 Latour, $145
1953 Margaux, $285
1961 Pape Clement, $140
1971 Gruaud Larose, $41
1978 Stag’s Leap, $35
1970 Heitz, $88
1961 Y’Quem, $35

You’ve heard of food as medicine, but now there’s candy as medicine.

I can’t vouch for the efficacy of the chocolate bars from The Functional Chocolate Company - but I think they’d make really swell gifts. After all, who wouldn’t welcome chocolates that offer freedom from pain?

VEGETABLE HEAVEN

I’m a huge fan of The Chef’s Garden in Huron Ohio (farmers Lee and Bob Jones are a big part of Food and Country, the film I made during Covid). Once you taste their spinach you’ll be hooked too: it is actually sweet and surprisingly buttery.

The Jones’ regeneratively grown vegetables are so nutritious that they’ve put together a few boxes intended to improve health. Their powerhouse vegetable box is filled with vegetables known to be dense in vitamins and minerals, and their high nitrate rescue and repair leafy greens box is even more nutrient dense.

This year they’ve added something new: a Christmas Story box inspired by the classic tale. The box (recipes included) features a duck raised right on their farm along with all the other makings of a fine Christmas dinner.

FOODIE FANTASY

Looking for a really lavish gift for a sophisticated food-lover? You might want to consider this holiday gift box from Blue Hill at Stone Barns, one of the world’s finest (and most interesting) restaurants.

Dan Barber and his crew are known for carefully sourcing their ingredients, so you can be sure that everything in this box is of the highest quality. The sweets are all handmade: the box includes gingerbread dark chocolate truffles, white chocolate yogurt cashews, roses des sables, holiday fruit cake, spiced honey, chocolate toffee bark, and concord grape, pear, and dulce de leche caramels.

I love looking back at this menu from one of the very first conferences on American Cuisine. Held in New Orleans in the early eighties, it was a pioneer in recognizing that we actually have a native cuisine, and that it varies from region to region.

I remember the first time I tried Miracle fruit. I was a total skeptic, putting the bright red berry into my mouth and then taking a big bite of lemon. It worked! The sourness was gone, leaving behind nothing but a flood of sweetness in my mouth.

For a while I kept the berries in my office as a kind of parlor trick, offering them around like gumdrops just to watch the look of amazement on people’s faces. But then I discovered that the plants are covered with pretty flowers in the summer and really lovely.

Miracle Plants make wonderful gifts, especially at this time of year when they seem like little tropical Christmas trees. They’re an especially thoughtful gift for people undergoing chemotherapy, which often interferes with the sense of taste. Miracle Plants are also good gifts for diabetics since they give people a chance to avoid sugar and still experience sweetness.

You can find Miracle Plants any number of places: this one is in Connecticut and this one and this one in Florida

But you don’t have to grow your own. Miracle Fruit comes in many guises: a site called Mberry sells everything from tablets to freeze-dried berries and potted plants. Even Goldbelly has jumped on the bandwagon, selling freeze-dried Miracle Berry cubes.

This menu from the fifties fascinates me; it’s a classic hotel holiday meal, but the language is nothing like what you would have found had you celebrated Thanksgiving in a restaurant last week.

Modern menus emphasize the seasonal, local nature of their ingredients. Things were different in the fifties. This Hollywood menu starts off with a California fruit salad, and then travels all the way across the country to source its shrimp back east. Then it’s off to Utah for celery.

Utah Celery? Turns out that’s a real vegetable, developed in the early twentieth century and famous for its stringless stalks and mild sweet flavor. Known as Tall Utah celery (the stalks reach over a foot), it’s still available today. But I’ve never seen it listed on a menu. Have you?

But our traveling’s not over. Now we’re off to Carolina for yams. Were they really sourced in North Carolina? Certainly possible: the state is still America’s major sweet potato producer.

As for those silverskin onions - another term that’s new to me - they’re nothing more than our old friend pearl. Creamed of course.

For the beef we’re back East again. Surprising, given that California has a long and distinguished ranching history.

The menu offers a final anomaly: York Ham. That turns out to be dry-cured ham that’s been made from Large White pigs in England for many centuries. But unlike proscuitto, jamon iberico or most dry-cured hams which are sliced thin and served cold, this one is meant to be served hot. The tradition has all but disappeared, but if you’d like to read about it, there’s an interesting history here from a butcher in Yorkshire

.

There is a perfect vintage menu for every person. And a perfect place to find them. The people behind Vintage Menu Art seek out great old menus from 1813 through the 1980s, clean them up and reproduce them on high quality paper.

But beware this website; if you’re like me you’ll end up spending hours looking through the various offerings and reading the interesting information about each restaurant.

Most are beautiful, and each one offers insight into another era. Consider, for example, this one from 100 years ago.

According to the site, “Twelve million immigrants passed through Ellis Island in New York during a sixty-year period from 1892 until 1954, helping to make the United States the culturally diverse country it is today. Anxious newcomers, who had endured transatlantic voyages by sea in “steerage” where they lacked adequate light and ventilation, were processed at Ellis Island, the country’s largest immigration receiving station. This menu shows the nutritious daily meals that were served to immigrants in detention quarters as they waited to be dealt with by the authorities. For many of these immigrants, who had little to eat in their home countries, it was the first time they had seen white bread and butter and had generous quantities of milk to drink.

”

In my opinion you cannot have too much saffron. When a friend walked through my door with this gorgeous saffron from Afghanistan I was ecstatic; the long aromatic strands pulsated with color and as I opened the bottle the dramatic aroma of the world’s most expensive spice leapt into the air.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Saffron is so precious that people tend to use it sparingly, but there is nothing so satisfying as being able to use a lot. I instantly pulled out my risotto pan and began cooking this.

Apologies to Marcella Hazan for my adaptation of her recipe; this is considerably more saffron than the late, great cook advised.

Risotto Milanese
5 cups homemade chicken broth
½ small onion, diced
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups Italian rice (Arborio, Carnaroli or Vialone Nano)
2 tablespoons white wine
1 teaspoon saffron threads
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiano cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

Bring the broth to a slow, steady simmer on a burner near the pan where you will be making risotto.

Set a broad, sturdy, heavy-bottomed pot (see below), over medium-high heat cook. Add a tablespoon of butter, the olive oil and diced onion and cook a few minutes until the onion is translucent. Add the rice and toss about until the rice is coated.

Add wine and stir until it has cooked off, then add ½ cup of broth, stirring constantly.

Continue to add ½ cup of broth at a time, stirring almost constantly for about 15 minutes, until the rice is tender but still firm in the center.

Crush the saffron threads with the back of a spoon, add 1/2 cup of hot broth and stir until the saffron has dissolved.

Add it to the rice and continue stirring for a few more minutes, adding more broth as needed.

Add half the grated cheese, stir, add the remaining butter and stir again. Add a bit more broth, taste and add more salt as needed. (The amount will depend on the saltiness of the broth you’ve used.)

Set the remaining cheese on the table for diners to add at will.

Marcella says this serves 6, but in my house it’s a main course and will feed 3 lucky people.

While we’re talking extravagance…. I make my risotto in a silver-lined copper pot from East Coast Tinning which is not only incredibly beautiful, but also exquisitely responsive to changes in heat. This means that you can instantly moderate the heat as your risotto cooks.

(I wrote about these beautiful pans here.)

All it takes to make a Gilda is Cantabrian anchovies, pitted manzanilla olives and piquillo peppers. You can buy these products many places like Despana and Donostia Foods. All you have to add are some toothpicks!

When I was in San Sebastian last month I became obsessed with the local sal de Anana, the flakiest salt I’ve ever seen (Maldon seems puny next to this). The salt enterprise, which has operated in the Valley of Anana since ancient times, has been recently resurrected.

I brought a few boxes back as gifts for friends, but now I’ve located a local source, MercadoCentral Any cook would be thrilled to receive this.

And while we’re on the subject of great Basque restaurants, I wrote about my trip to Spain a few weeks ago, and the spectacular meals I had at Asador Etxebarri and Arzak. But the other amazing meal I’ve had in that part of the world was a few years ago at El Kano.

This is Aitor Arregi of the restaurant Elkano in Gaitara, just outside San Sebastian. And that is one of the turbots for which he is justly famous. If you can eat only one fish in your life, this is the one you want. But only after Aitor has explained it to you, for he can find the entire world in a fish

If only I could capture Aitor's passion at the table, the way he talks about the turbot. “I don’t like the little ones," he will begin, "they need to be fat to get flavor.” He will go on to tell you that they are influenced by the temperature of the water, the time of the year, and mostly by what they eat.…

I want you see Aitor waving his eloquent hands to demonstrate how these flat fish swim. Turning the turbot he will show you the black skin on the bottom "the side that looks toward the sea," and then over again to display the white skin on top. "That side looks toward the sky." And yes, tasting carefully you do discern the difference, the slightly algal taste of the black side which has spent its entire life under water, compared to the more cosmopolitan white side, which has had the whole wide world to see.

Aitor will gently filet the fish, separating the left side from the right, pointing to his own body as he explains that the side with the organs - the liver, the heart - has a more complex flavor than the side that is pure flesh.

Pulling out the bones he will hand them to you, insisting you eat with your fingers, pulling the soft, slick flesh from the crunchy bones with your teeth.

Then he will take the larger bones at the head and crack them, exposing the marrow. "Taste it," he will urge, holding it out.

When you have finished you will not believe that a single fish can offer such variety. And you will never eat another fish without remembering this one.

Before the turbot you will eat cocochas - the tender flesh from the throat of the hake - which has the texture of the most perfect oyster you have ever eaten. He will offer them cooked in various ways, and you will love them all.

What else will you eat? Almost nothing. A bit of bread. Some of the restaurant's wonderful olive oil. And perhaps to end, their cheese ice cream with strawberry sauce.

Aitor will insist you drink the local txakoli, but from different years so you can taste the way it changes over time. You will drink another glass, and then another, thinking how lucky you are to be here in this wonderful restaurant.

And leaving, you will wonder how soon you can come back.

While we’re on the subject of Basque dishes, here is the easiest desert I know. When I want to cause a splash and have very little time, this is the recipe I go to. It’s so forgiving that while it calls for a springform pan, in a pinch I’ve been known to bake it in a Pyrex bowl. It is literally foolproof.

Burnt Basque Cheesecake
2 pounds cream cheese at room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
6 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons flour

Preheat an oven to 400 degrees and put a baking sheet on the middle shelf.

Cut two long strips of parchment paper and fit them into a 10-inch springform pan so that it is completely lined and the edges of the parchment are higher than the pan. Don’t worry about creases - they won’t matter.

Put the cream cheese into a large food processor and process until very smooth. Add the sugar and process about 5 minutes more until you are sure there are no lumps. Add the eggs, one by one, beating after each addition. Add the vanilla. Sift the flour into the batter.

Pour into the prepared pan and put into the oven on top of the baking sheet. Cook for about 45 minutes until the top is almost burnt and the cake is set at the edges but still slightly jiggly in the center.

Remove from the oven and set on a cooling rack for a couple of hours. You can put it into the refrigerator where is will keep for a few days, but allow the cake to come to room temperature before serving.

(The picture above is the cheesecake at the source, La Vina in San Sebastian. As you can see, it is slightly underbaked. If you prefer this texture, take the cake out of the oven after about 30 minutes. If you like it more baked, you can leave it in the oven for up to an hour.)

And here’s a picture of the cake the time I let it get too burnt: I simply topped it with berries and nobody knew. As I said, pretty foolproof.

Favorite Tool
My bench scraper may be the most-used tool in my kitchen. A few weeks ago I wrote about one of my favorites which is now sold out. A kind reader sent me a link to his favorite scrapers; they’re not cheap, but they are hand-forged, sturdy, beautiful and will last a lifetime. This one, from Forge to Table comes in a wooden box and can be engraved for an extra $10; it would make a great gift for any serious cook.

The Real Scoop
The late Gray Kunz was one of the most talented chefs I ever reviewed, and although he was never a household name, his influence was enormous. For years I’ve used this spoon he designed for tasting, basting and the like.

Chef Kunz designed the spoon years ago, and when he was at the helm of Lespinasse in the nineties, every cook who worked there was issued three upon arrival. Chefs tucked them into their pockets, proudly wearing them as a badge of honor; before long they had spread through the city of New York. Now anyone can buy the Gray Kunz spoon; at under $15, they make great stocking stuffers.

Smokin’
What the Baked Alaska was to the fifties, smoked ice cream (not to mention smoked cocktails) are to modern times: a seemingly impossible juxtaposition. And if you’re looking for the perfect present for a food geek, the Smoking Gun might just be it.

This totally modern tool, (courtesy of the same company that makes the incredible anti-griddle), infuses smoke flavor into foods without actually smoking them. This has nothing to do with preserving and everything to do with flavor.

For the chef who aims to astonish, what could be better than presenting food in a cloud of smoke (various flavors of chips can be ordered with the gun). You can capture the smoke in a glass, invert it over a piece of pie, a slice of salmon or a bar of chocolate, and create an instant cloud.

Pure magic.

So Sweet
I’ll admit that I’m obsessed with the plum jams created by Ayako & Family; unlike most jams, these taste like fruit rather than sugar. And I love the way they rate the various plum varieties for tartness; my own preference is for the tarter plums…

Root, Root, Root
Fresh wasabi root is one of those ingredients for which there is no substitute; the powdered stuff (basically just horseradish that’s been dyed) doesn’t come close. Real wasabi is subtle, with a kick that quickly fades into a clean, green flavor. Although it is now being grown in Oregon, it is still expensive enough to make a wonderful treat for an inspired cook. (It need not be reserved for sushi. It’s great infused into the milk you whisk into mashed potatoes, and a few gratings of wasabi does wonders for pasta con le vongole or atop simply sauteed scallops.)

You can find fresh wasabi root at any good Japanese market (I buy mine at Mitsuwa in New Jersey, or Sunrise Mart in Manhattan), but if there’s not one near you, here’s an online source. (Wrapped in damp paper towels, wasabi will keep for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator.)

If you’re giving them fresh wasabi root, they’ll need a grater to go with it. And they will surely find other uses for this classic Japanese wasabi grater, an ingenious and beautiful object made of sharkskin and wood.

Seasonal Treat
Roy Shvartzapel is, by his own admission, crazily obsessive. He’s the kind of person who will spend an hour answering a single question. The kind of person who, when he discovers a confection he doesn’t understand, will spend years figuring it out.

“Panettone,” he says, “defies every rule of baking.” So he hitchhiked to Brescia where Iginio Massari, the world’s great panettone master, plies his art. And begged him to take him on as an apprentice.

When you taste Roy’s Panettone, you will be grateful that he did. His Italian Christmas bread is so gossamer light seems to evaporate in your mouth, leaving a delicious trail of flavor in its wake and the slight crackle of the crunchy topping.

It comes in many flavors and is absolutely irresistible. Such an extravagance makes a fantastic present because you might be reluctant to buy one for yourself.

One of my favorite recent films was The Taste of Things; if you haven’t seen it, you can now stream it online.

When the film opened in New York last fall director Trần Anh Hùng and his star, Juliette Binoche came to New York for the opening. Chef Pierre Gagnaire, the culinary consultant to the film (he also had a brief part), came along to prepare this celebratory meal.

Over the top.

Apologies.

I intended to send a very long list of gift suggestions today, but Thanksgiving intervened. It lasted for days, culminating in turkey for 23… and, well you know how it goes.

So here’s a start…. expect gift postings to go on all week. Along with some recipes, old menus, great meals. Let the holiday season begin!

Real Beef
Our festivities began on Tuesday night with this beautiful prime rib roast aged for 45 days from Pat LaFrieda. It was a simply stunning piece of meat. If someone sent me this for a present I would be endlessly grateful.

There are lots of offerings on the LaFrieda site, and subscribers to La Briffe can get a 15% discount by using the code RUTH15.

My Favorite Fruit
“Somewhere between a peach and a prayer.”  That is how the poet Diane Ackerman describes eating an apricot.  And that’s just for starters: she goes on to compare the taste of apricots to cool fresh well water, butterscotch and eventually lust. 

I can’t argue with that. Nothing beats the flavor of a truly great apricot. But chances are you’ve never tasted one.

Blenheim apricots – named for Blenheim Palace where Winston Churchill was born – entice you with an intoxicating  scent of honeysuckle and vanilla, a perfume intense enough to knock you over.  Take a bite and you discover that the sweetest apricot you’ve ever eaten is also tart. The experience is exciting; the fruit goes leaping through your mouth in somersaults of flavor. And where ordinary apricots can be dry and wooly, a juicy Blenheim leaves you with sticky fingers.

Eating a fresh Blenheim is one of life’s purest pleasures. It is also among its rarest. Blenheims are delicate creatures; their fragile skins bruise too easily to permit travel. You have to go them – to a farm (or a California farmers’ market) during their brief summer season.

But Blenheims have a secret: unlike most fruits, they’re even better dried. These apricots revel in sunlight, and a few days in in the summer sun concentrates their finest qualities, turning them into irresistible natural candy. One which also happens to be good for you. High in fiber, Vitamin C, iron and potassium, dried apricots make a perfect portable snack.

Blenheims first arrived in America in the late eighteen hundreds when farmers discovered that California’s interior valleys (Santa Clara, Sacramento), with their hot days and cool nights, were the perfect environment for the fruit. During World War One, when European supplies of dried fruits were cut off, sales soared. By 1940 there were 60 orchards south of San Francisco dedicated to the fruit.  Sadly, only five remain: the American Blenheim is in serious danger of disappearing.

What happened?  Four words: Turkey and Silicon Valley.  “Twenty years ago,” says Patti Gonzalez, a fourth-generation apricot farmer in Hollister, “Turkish apricots hit the market and the dried fruit packers began buying them because they were so much cheaper than ours. A lot of farmers went out of business.”  Go to your supermarket and you will find the shelves filled with insipid Turkish dried apricots.  With their pallid hue and dull flavor, they do not resemble Blenheims in any way.

 “We were lucky here at Apricot King,” says Gonzalez, “we simply reinvented ourselves.” When processors said their apricots were too expensive they began drying them at the farm, spreading them across nine acres to bask in the sun. “We used to sell apricots by the truckload,” she says, “now we sell them by the half pound.”

How long will Blenheims last? It’s anybody’s guess, but there are fewer every year. If you want to taste a fresh one you’ll have to wait til summer. But dried apricots – those little edible prayers – are just a click away at Apricot King.

An American Classic
Country ham is one of America’s glories, and at a time when everyone’s falling for prosciutto and jamon iberico, it’s time we appreciated what we have right here. People are making country hams all over this country, but I like Allan Benton’s best. Dry, complex, a little bit funky, it tastes wonderful on biscuits or sliced into scrambled eggs, and nothing looks more impressive on a party table.  It weighs in at around fifteen pounds, so it’s a gift that will keep giving for months.

Serious Cake
Know someone who thinks there's nothing like Christmas in Austria? You couldn't possibly find a better gift than this evocative cake. All it takes is a single bite and you're walking down snow-sprinkled streets in Vienna.

If the only poppyseeds you know are the ones that top bagels, you're in for a surprise: gathered into a group the seeds have a slightly bitter, nutty, almost stony and decidedly intense flavor. This is a very grown-up cake; each bite is intense.

The cakes are created by baker Heidi Reigler, who says this was a favorite when she was growing up in Austria. It's easy to understand why. Covered with marzipan and lemon zest, the cake I ordered from The Vienna Cookie Company vanished in an instant.

Endless Fruit
When I ordered this indoor orange tree a couple of years ago I expected it to blossom once and then slump into sadness, dispirited at being stuck indoors. But here it is, a couple years later, still bearing fruit. The fruit is pleasantly puckery, and when the tree is in blossom the fragrance could not be sweeter.

The Most Absurd Animal
The first time someone told me about clams that grow to 15 pounds I was eighteen years old, and I was convinced he was putting me on. It was, from my Manhattan perspective, impossible to think of such a giant clam as anything but a joke. The name made it seem even more absurd: gooeyduck?

But geoducks (see proper pronunciation above), are no joke. Native to the Pacific Northwest, they are among the stranger beasts of the world. And also among the most delicious. If you’ve ever had “giant clam” in a sushi bar, you’ve tasted geoduck. To me this is the essence of clam – briny, mild, crisp, crunchy. Just one taste makes me happy.

For an adventurous cook, nothing would be cooler than to open up a package and find a giant clam. If it were me? I’d slice that long neck into sushi on the spot, and make the fat belly into an awesome chowder. That is, after I’d stopped laughing – and expressing my endless thanks.

Taylor Shellfish has always sold them whole, but now they’re also selling them cleaned and frozen which is a whole lot easier.

Beautiful Spoons
This may be the most elegant kitchen object ever created. A friend recently gave me one as a gift - a very generous gift I might add - and I find myself simply staring at it each time I walk into the kitchen.

And then I find myself reaching for it, and petting its smooth, silky shape.

Woodworker Joshua Vogel created this covetable creation. (It is also available in black.) While you might not be willing to spring for it for yourself (it's a very expensive spoon), this maple ladle from blackcreekmarket.com really does make a spectacular gift.

Tabletop Heaven
Here’s another dangerous website: I could spend hours pouring over the beautiful objects John Derian has collected in his store. They’re all expensive - and all as wonderful as this whimsical tablecloth by French artist Nathalie Lete.

Edible Art 
No matter how eager you are to buy a wonderful gift for a gardener, don’t even think about going to the Hudson Valley Seed Library’s website unless you’re willing to waste a significant amount of time; theirs is one of the most seductive sites I know.

Started by a group of heirloom seed savers they now have a seed farm to grow their own open-pollinated, non-hybridized and non genetically engineered seeds. 

But what’s really remarkable about this group is the way they package their offerings, commissioning artists to create remarkable seed packets.  One of my favorite ways to celebrate the season is by choosing the perfect packet for each friend and enclosing it wth a gift.  

“Mom,” I said, “this bird weighs 24 pounds!”

She shook her head. My late mother had some extremely strange notions about cooking.  Although no turkey on the planet will cook in under an hour in an ordinary oven, Mom refused to accept that. Let me just say that Mom’s turkeys were never dry.

“And what are you doing now?” she asked, peering over my shoulder. I was squeezing pomegranate juice. Nick, the grandson Mom never met, loves the sweet tart gravy I first made when he was six, and it’s been a staple on our table ever since. As I was silently explaining this to her, I was startled by a thought: this ritual meal is powerful not because we gather with our families, but because we gather with our ghosts. 

My kitchen grew increasingly crowded; as I creamed onions Aunt Birdie suddenly appeared. “Do you remember,” she asked, “the first Thanksgiving you ever cooked?” How could I forget? She was 100 years old, and we had to carry her up the stairs of our lower east side loft. “I don’t remember that” she sniffed. “What I do remember is that we were all thrilled when you agreed to do it. And that you were very nervous.”

Well of course I was! When the meal moved from Mom’s house to mine, it seemed like a major rite of passage and the first time I truly felt like a grown up. I fussed about, desperate to get every detail perfect. It wasn’t: as I remember, the turkey was dry, the mashed potatoes lumpy. But that was also the day I learned the most important fact about Thanksgiving, one every cook needs to know. “We didn’t come to eat,” Aunt Birdie told me gently, “we came to be together and share a meal. We’re grateful when the food is wonderful, but it really doesn’t matter. Remember that.”

Aunt Birdie departed, but as I was scrubbing sweet potatoes a few friends from my Berkeley years came through the door. “Remember,” Jules said, “that time we decided we were vegetarian?” I certainly did. It was 1976, and what I remember most is that as I prepared vegetables for fifty I suddenly understood why so many holiday meals involve a giant piece of protein. Thanksgiving that year was an exhausting production, and by the time it was over our vegetarian days were too.

I roasted chestnuts, crushed cranberries, peeled potatoes; with each step some old friend was at my side. As I sharpened my knife the late Michel Richard, one of the finest chefs I’ve ever known, suddenly appeared. “So slow!,” he said, watching me carve the turkey in careful slices. That man could carve a bird in ten seconds flat: I timed him once. Each slice was perfect. That was in the early eighties, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who could beat him. And here he was, restored to me, poking gentle fun.

My ghosts stayed with me, flitting in and out of the kitchen as the day progressed. Even later, doing dishes, I was not alone. A few years ago, when all the guests had gone, I handed Laurie a dish to dry. My old friend held it for a moment and then blurted out, “The doctors say I’ve only got a few more months. This is my last Thanksgiving.” I miss Laurie — I always will — but last year she was with me at the sink, just like always, another visitor from Thanksgiving past.

This gives me great comfort. Years from now, when I’m long gone, I know that Nick will be standing in a kitchen carving turkey. Maybe he’ll be an old man by then, cooking for his grandchildren. But it’s nice to know that I’ll be there.

There's not a log of wiggle room in our Thanksgiving meal.  Everyone's got a dish they simply have to have.  There are two stuffings Michael considers essential. Nick wouldn't be happy if we didn't have mashed potatoes. I want sweet potatoes with miso butter. Pat doesn't think it's Thanksgiving unless there's red cabbage. Peter requires a salad..... You get the point: it doesn’t leave much room for anything new.

Dessert, however, is different. While we always have pumpkin pie (for Michael), pecan pie (Michael again) and cranberry crostata (me), every year I get to make at least one new pie. This year has been a great apple season, and I’ve began experimenting.

If you’re at my house, you’ll be eating this pie.

Apple Crumb Pie with Sour Cream
Begin by making an all-butter crust.  Put a cup and a quarter of all-purpose flour into a bowl.  Shake in a bit of salt. Slice a stick of cold sweet butter and then cut it into the flour, either by hand or using a food processor, until the butter is reduced to the size of small peas.  Sprinkle in a couple tablespoons of ice water and a tablespoon of vodka, and keep adding liquid until the ingredients will just hold together in a ball. Gather it up, flatten it to a disk, wrap it in wax paper and put it in the refrigerator for at least an hour (or up to a few days). 

Remove the dough from the refrigerator, let it rest for about 20 minutes, then roll it gently out on a floured surface. Fit it into a deep-dish 10 inch pie pan, flute the edges and put the crust in the freezer while you prepare the filling.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Mix a cup and a quarter of sour cream with a half cup of sugar.  Whisk in a couple of eggs, 3 tablespoons of flour, a bit of salt and a couple teaspoons of vanilla.  Grate in a small shower of lemon rind. 

Peel 5 large interesting apples - Cox’s Orange Pippins are good, as are Ashmead’s Kernel, Knobbed Russets, Arkansas Blacks and Esopus Spitzenbergs.  (If you're stuck with supermarket apples, opt for Granny Smiths.) Core the apples, slice them and fold them into the sour cream mixture.  The aroma, as you pour it into the chilled crust, will make you very happy.

Mix a half cup of flour with a quarter cup of sugar.  Sprinkle in some salt and about a teaspoon of cinnamon. Cut in 1/4 to 1/2 cup of butter until it’s crumbly, pick it up and shower it evenly across the top of the pie.

Put the pie on the bottom shelf of the hot oven.  After 10 minutes turn the heat down to 350 and bake for another hour or so, until the top has puffed into a lovely golden dome.  Cool on a rack before serving.

I remember my parents talking about Cafe Chambord, which opened in 1936; Mom said it reminded her of the bistros she went to in Paris when she was at the Sorbonne. It was, she said, small and rather rustic. At least in the beginning.

Then, in 1942, owner Roger Chauveron got his hands on a great wine cellar at a bargain price.  He'd worked at all of New York's one-named big-deal hotels - The Ritz, The Plaza, The Astor, The Commodore - and now he raised the level of the food to match his swell new wine list. Before long it had become a favorite haunt of the French emigrés flooding into the city to escape the war. They were soon joined by prominent New Yorkers (the Rockefellers), and movie stars (Greta Garbo was a fan).  

Chauveron sold the restaurant in 1950 and went back to France.  He didn't stay long; in 1955 he was back to open Cafe Chauveron.  I never went there either, but here's Gael Greene's paean to that restaurant (some wonderful sentences in there like “the great shriek of chic”.)

And some great words on this menu too, like those oeufs pochés Pere Benedict. And just look at the price of avocados!

Next week La Briffe will feature a whole slew of gift suggestions - some old, some new - but I wanted to start off with a couple of old-fashioned products.

Every year I buy a Christmas Pudding from Talbott and Arding. I am not alone; here in the Hudson Valley they’ve become a tradition. The puddings went on sale this week, and since they’re made in limited quantities, they’re sure to sell out fast.

The shop’s co-owner Kate Arding may have traded her native England for upstate New York, but she brought her holiday traditions with her. “When we were growing up,” she says, “we couldn’t wait until Christmas and Mum’s plum pudding.”

The recipe includes three kinds of raisins, candied orange peel, organic eggs and suet from grass-fed local cows. Lots of spices and brandy too. It's hard to think of a better finale to a festive holiday feast.

Brushed with booze, it is meant to be carried to the table swathed in flames. The cakes, dense with ginger and other spices are a true taste of the past. And they come in lovely little ceramic bowls that are not only endlessly useful, but also a lasting reminder of Christmas.

It’s becoming harder and harder to find unusual gifts for the cooks who have everything. But here’s one you can be pretty sure they won’t have stashed in the larder: sorghum syrup.

I had my first taste of this classic American product in Kentucky, and found myself so fascinated I came home laden with jars of the stuff. At first I was just looking for an organic ingredient to replace the nasty corn syrup that goes into recipes like hot fudge and pecan pie, but once I began tasting the sorghum syrups of the various producers, I was hooked. True sorghum is an artisanal product with a distinct taste of terroir, and it changes enormously from one producer to the next.

Since then I’ve experimented with recipes: it did wonders for the pecan pie at Thanksgiving. Mixed with butter (1/4 cup sorghum syrup blended into a stick of unsalted butter), it makes a spectacular spread for a warm biscuits. Sorghum’s great on pancakes, it makes wonderful caramels, and it lends a whole new flavor to tea and coffee. 

 I’m really hooked on the orange sorghum made by the Holbrook Brothers in West Liberty Kentucky but I think you have to go there to get it. But I also love the barrel-aged sorghum from Bourbon Barrel Foods (and while you’re on the website, check out the terrific Bluegrass Soy Sauce).

Americans now make excellent prosciutto, mozzarella and kimchi, and that makes me very proud. But isn’t it time we rediscovered native products that have been made in this country since Colonial times?

They asked who’d helped me along the way, which led to a conversation about MFK Fisher: both her work and her friendship have been important to me. To my delight they’d all read Mary Frances on the joy of tangerines. (If you haven’t had that pleasure, go here.)

The passage comes from my favorite of her books, The Gastronomical Me. This is the introduction I wrote to the most recent edition. I thought you might like to read it.

“Please don’t whisper,” whispers Mary Frances. Even reduced to the tiniest thread, her voice is imperious.

The small house in the tawny Sonoma fields is quiet. She lies propped up in a large bed in a dark room. Occasionally a beeper issues a peremptory honk, but mostly the sounds are the soft whoosh of the rural highway in front and the quiet murmur of the television in the nurse’s bedroom next door.

We both know this will be the last interview. It is 1992 and she is dying, her wasted body unable to rise from the bed, sunglasses hiding old eyes grown too weak to read. Her voice is frail, a sliver of sound that visitors are forced to bend over, an ear to her mouth, to make out the halting words. Conversation has become so exhausting that after a quarter-hour Mary Frances waves me out of her bedroom.

I stroll into the light airy space that serves as kitchen, living, and dining room. Unframed paintings by Mary Frances’s second husband, Dillwyn Parrish, hang on the walls, a constant reminder of the great love of her life. Piles of books, rivers of books, are everywhere. A biography of Isabella d’Este, Little Women, Mrs Bridge . . . Strewn casually across a table are postcards from friends, and I recognize my own handwriting.

In the late 1970s, when Ms Magazine asked me to profile Mary Frances, I was too intimidated to use the phone; instead, I sent a postcard. “Come see my house!” she wrote back. “It would not be ‘an imposition.'” She enclosed her unlisted phone number, but I never used it; over the next 15 years we made all our plans by mail.

“Do you know who M. F. K. Fisher is?” the editor had asked. I almost dropped the phone, and then began reciting entire passages from memory. “‘There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk,'” I intoned, struggling to explain what M. F. K. Fisher had meant to me.

It is, I think, impossible for people raised in our food-obsessed culture to understand the contempt Americans had for food and cooking when I was growing up. Newspapers of the 1950s banished food to the “women’s pages,” offering pleasant little recipes for ham cooked in Coca-Cola and tips for cleaning your kitchen. People who considered themselves gourmets were mostly men and rarely cooks; they reserved that word for people they employed. Restaurant chefs had even less cachet; uneducated blue-collar workers, they toiled in terrible conditions, rarely venturing out of their miserable kitchens. A suggestion that they would one day be celebrities would have been met with raucous laughter.

My parents, who believed that no serious person had any interest in food, were puzzled by their strange child who inexplicably loved to cook and was fascinated by food. Until I discovered M. F. K. Fisher, it was a lonely existence.

I was nine when I found How to Cook a Wolf hidden among my parents’ books. What it was doing there I will never know; my parents did not own a single cookbook. I imagine it was sent by a friend as some sort of joke. Curious, I opened the book and found this sentence. “Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.” I knew that I had found a kindred spirit.

I peered at the author’s name, wondering about the person who had written this. It told me nothing. Was this M.F.K. male or female?

Fisher used initials deliberately; it was not easy for a woman writing about food to be taken seriously. Raised in a California newspaper family, she was, first, foremost, and very fiercely, a writer. In the 1930s, when she sent her first book, Serve It Forth, off into the world, she thought it would have a better chance if people assumed that the author was a man.

I went to the library, borrowed the book, and stayed up all night reading it under the covers with a flashlight. One chapter began, “Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat,” and my heart thumped as I read Mary Frances’s voluptuous description of her private relationship with tangerines.

Early the next morning I went to the refrigerator, removed a tangerine, peeled it carefully and left the sections sitting on the radiator while I went off to school. Home again, I spread the dried half-moons on the snowy windowsill, as Mary Frances had done as a young bride in France. Then I put a section in my mouth, whispering her words to myself, paying attention to the sensual crackle of the skin beneath my teeth and the sweet spurt of juice rushing through my body. In that moment I felt as if I had discovered a new way of being in the world.

Now, some 30 years later, waiting for Mary Frances to marshal her strength, I go to the bookshelf in search of my favorite of her books, The Gastronomical Me. The jacket, a photograph of a young Mary Frances, long hair tossed back, eyes almost closed in ecstatic pleasure, conveys the sensuality of the words inside. She was very beautiful.

“That’s rare, you know.” Momentarily restored, Mary Frances takes the book from me and studies the photo dispassionately. “They pulled that jacket after the first edition. The picture was considered too sexy.”

“Little wonder,” I say, reading her the passage underneath. “‘He had hung all my favorite pictures, and there was a present for me on the low table, the prettiest Easter present I have ever seen. It was a big tin of Beluga caviar, in the center of a huge pale-yellow plate, the kind sold in the market on saints’ days in Vevey, and all around the tin and then the edge of the plate were apple blossoms. I think apple blossoms are perhaps the loveliest flowers in the world, because of their clarity and the mysterious way they spring so delicately from the sturdy darkness of the carved stems, with the tender little green leaves close around them. At least they were the loveliest that night, in the candlelight, in the odd-shaped room so full of things important to me.'”

“Oh pooh,” she snorts. Or would snort if she could. “That’s not sexy.” But it is this voice—almost unimaginable in its own time and rare even today—that sets Fisher apart from other writers. She offers enough imagery to set your imagination spinning while sparing the emotion. By allowing you to fill in all that she has left unsaid, she increases the power of every word.

“You didn’t fool anyone with those initials,” I tell her. “No man would write like that.”

She closes her eyes. “You always say that,” she whispers, and waves her hand, shooing me from the room.

The nurse comes out and points to the refrigerator. “Mary Frances wants you to know there’s wine in there,” she says. I open the door; there are four different kinds, all white. Pouring myself a glass I wander on to the sun porch, a comfortably shabby room filled with weathered furniture. As I look through the bookcase one of the calicos nuzzles my ankles, and I think how appropriate it is that Mary Frances—simultaneously seductive and aloof—has always been a cat person.

Out here there are mostly cookbooks, their edges curling from the damp. Signed from Julia (Child), James (Beard) and Craig (Claiborne), the pages are carefully annotated in Mary Frances’s small, precise hand. To my surprise I also find a copy of The Cooking of Provincial France, the only book she ever wrote that resembles a conventional cookbook.

“I’m not a cookbook author,” she always insisted, “I did that one for the money; it was the first time I ever had an expense account. When Time Life asked me to contribute to their series I told them very bluntly that I didn’t need to go to Provence. I could have done it all at home, but I had French friends who were sort of dying on the vine, and I didn’t have any money to get over there. It worked out beautifully. For me.”

She stayed at Julia and Paul Child’s house in Provence. The series author, Michael Field, was there too, and the cream of American food writers dropped in and out. But Mary Frances was a writer of words, not recipes, and the respect the food mafia of the day gave her was of the grudging sort.

The feeling was entirely mutual. To Mary Frances food was a metaphor for living, and she had little use for people with a narrow focus. “I damn near starved while I was there!” she told me. “Julia and Paul are very tidy. I kept ferreting around in the cupboards thinking that certainly Julia would have hidden a little old can of tuna or something, but there was nothing. So finally I made a very good friend of a chauffeur and he would come up for me secretly, meet me down in the olive grove and take me to the market in Grasse. Oh, it was heaven. I’d bring back a little bag of green almonds, because that was the season, but there was no reaction at all to them. Nobody gave a damn about green almonds! Then we’d all go out to a three-star restaurant which was no good at all that time of year. Jesus, I was hungry.”

I’m still staring down at the book when the nurse comes out to fetch me again, carrying a tray of oysters. “Eating is difficult for her,” she confides as we head back to the bedroom, “but anything with oysters she has no trouble at all.” The thought makes me happy; there is a kind of rightness about the author of Consider the Oyster spending her final days slipping mollusks merrily down her throat. As I come in Mary Frances gestures for me to approach, and I put my ear to her mouth. “I think it’s so sad,” she whispers, “a lot of my dearest friends don’t care about food.”

She is slightly flushed, sipping a mysterious pink drink through a straw. Sniffing quietly I discern the lush herbal scent of gin. She smiles and takes another sip. “Sobriety,” she whispers, “is a rare and dubious virtue. If that at all.”

It is a quote from a later book, A Considerable Town, but I know why she has said it. This notion is one of many that set her apart from the other American women writing about food in her time.

England had the wild and brainy Elizabeth David, but the American food writers were all good girls, virtuous to a fault, who wrote about keeping house and family cooking. Feeding their families was a job, which is undoubtedly why the best-selling cookbook of the proto-feminist 60s was The I Hate to Cook Book. The notion that a woman might pour herself a glass of wine and cook a meal for the pure pleasure of the act never crossed their minds.

Now I feel Mary Frances watching me through her dark glasses, and I have the oddest feeling that she knows what I am thinking. “You know it’s a shame,” she whispers, confirming the notion, “most people can’t cook very well.”

“A shame,” I repeat, knowing that she meant to convey more than most people would understand. And that she has trusted me to know it. Now she closes her eyes. “Let me rest,” she says.

I wander through the house and into the bathroom, remembering my awe on first discovering it. There has never been another like it. The bathtub sat regally in the middle of the room, facing a long low window open to the trees and the distant hills. “Sometimes,” she’d told me with obvious pride, “my friends disappear into my bathroom for hours.” And who could blame them? Back then it was an Arabian Nights sort of room, the floor covered with an array of soft carpets, tables piled high with towels. Paintings, some crooked, hung in a friendly jumble on the walls. And books, of course, everywhere. It looks more ordinary now, but there are still a few scattered about and I pick one up, surprised to discover that it is the American edition of Ulysses, which my father designed.

I once asked Dad if he knew Mary Frances’s third husband, the publisher Donald Friede. “Of course,” he said. “He was one of the first publishers who understood modern literature.”

In her 31 books, Mary Frances wrote about growing up in southern California, so we know about her parents, her grandparents, and each of her siblings. She wrote about life with her first two husbands, Al Fisher and Dillwyn Parrish, about crossing the ocean over and over as she moved from California to France and Switzerland and back again. Later writings chronicle how she raised her two daughters, mostly by herself and often in France, and the years afterward, when she was alone, writing in the California vineyards. She has written of travel and written of aging. But of her last husband she has written very little. Summoned back into the bedroom I say impetuously, “Tell me about Donald Friede.”

“We had a good but dumb marriage,” she whispers, “and we always remained friends. But he wanted me to be a novelist; he thought every writer has one good novel in him. But God, no, I’m not a novelist.” She emits what would pass for a laugh in someone who still owned a voice.

To please her publisher husband she wrote one novel, Not Now but Now. It did not please her—and it did not sell. “Donald had wanted me to be a bestseller and I was not. In 1954 he decided I was through. So he came up with the idea of reprinting my five first books in one volume.” She gives another one of those quasi-laughs. “He was very pleased. The Art of Eating has never been out of print.”

“That,” I tell her, “is because the world finally started catching up with you.” She was the first to write about food as a way of understanding the world, and with The Gastronomical Me she virtually invented the food memoir. And long before food and food studies became fashionable she was insisting that we would all be better if we studied our own hungers. It is a lesson we’re still learning.

I tell her some of this, and she wrinkles her nose with a kind of distaste. “When you write you have no idea if you’ll ever be read by any human being. If you’re lucky, you’re writing for five percent of the human race. You just have to write the best you can for them.”

Sadly she did not live long enough to know how much larger that five percent would grow—or that, as one century turned into the next, The Gastronomical Me would inspire hundreds of food memoirs, by both men and women, every one of which owes a debt to her.

“It’s time you wrote a book,” she whispers as I take my leave. I am still thinking about that as I walk down the path to the little gate with its bronze plaque, which reads “Mary Frances KFisher.”

“It was a mistake,” she told me the first time I came to visit, “but I like it. Sounds like a sneeze, doesn’t it?”

Now I say it out loud, trying to roll the words voluptuously off my tongue as she had. They blow away, over the hills and vanish into thin air.

We celebrated Mary Frances’ eightieth birthday with a wonderful meal. This is what I wrote in my diary when I got home.

At the party Craig Claiborne toasted her by saying she's "a national treasure." Robert Mondavi stood to say, "You've raised the image of food and wine in this country."

Mary Frances sat there with a slightly bemused expression on her face; when all the toasts were over, she responded with a dry "very nice."

The meal itself? Delicious

.

"I love your vintage dough scraper," a friend said to me recently.
"Vintage?" I replied, puzzled.
"Yes," she said, "I can tell by the rivets that it's really old."

It was one of those moments….

I've had this particular utensil for at least fifty years - so I guess that makes it vintage. And although I pay almost no attention to my dough scraper, I use it as often as any of my knives. I'm always reaching for it. Not just to scrape dough off the counter after rolling out pie dough, but also to transfer vegetables from the cutting board, slice pizza (and then clean off the pizza steel), scrape spills off the oven floor.…. it’s an incredibly versatile tool. 

And so, I went looking for a beauty. I found it here. This one’s hand-made, and while you can certainly find less expensive versions, if it's going to last fifty years, why not have a walnut handle?

This gorgeous little creature is a peekytoe crab crepe - and also an example of the beauty of each dish that emerges from Heroes kitchen.

The new restaurant has a surprising and original menu. I loved every dish we ordered, but my favorites were the modest-sounding “fried sushi rice,

….the beautifully aged duck

and the flower-strewn cheese dessert, which was great fun to eat.

But in this post-election moment it strikes me that this is not the time for that. Instead, I offer up a speech I gave to a group of food journalists 33 years ago. As you will see, it was a very different era, a time when food writing was universally disdained by “real journalists” as a mere distraction for the ladies.

But today the speech is a reminder (if we need it), that food touches everything we do. And that it is definitely a political issue. Every election analyst has pointed to rising food costs as a major concern for voters. Yet despite the evolution of food writing over the last thirty years, consumers still have very little understanding of the forces that drive those costs.

That needs to change. Most of the readers of La Briffe are aware that our food system is badly broken. If we have any hope of fixing it we need to know how the food system actually operates.

Thirty-three years ago I was convinced that food journalists were absolutely necessary.

It has never been more true.

You’ll note that this speech mentions that no food writer had ever been honored with a Pulitzer Prize; that changed in 2007 when Jonathan Gold (also mentioned below) became the first.

As for that Black journalist I mention, the one who wrote the piece about living on food stamps? That was Toni Tipton Martin, author of The Jemima Code and the 2021 winner of the Julia Child Award.

Some things do change.

If you’re interested in a much longer discussion of these subjects, you might want to read the Tanner Lecture I gave in 2005, Why Food Matters. You can access it here.

At this point a little nostalgia from a simpler time seems in order. Valentine’s opened in 1936, but I’m guessing this menu is from the fifties.

“No service less than 10 cents.” That pretty much says it all. And look at those hours!

The Kurobata ham I order every year from Snake River Farms has just arrived, and I thought I might mention how delicious it is. For those who are not thrilled with the traditional bird, a ham makes a very fine addition to the Thanksgiving table.

If you’re going to be in New York City tomorrow afternoon, perhaps you’d like to join me at one of my favorite restaurants for Champagne and hors d’oeuvres? Afterwards, participate in a wide-ranging conversation between Chef Michael Lomonoco and me. We’ll end the afternoon with dessert.

I’m looking forward to a few delightful hours at Porterhouse. Please come.

Information here.

Chef Bruno Verjus is wildly ambitious and delightfully quirky. His main philosophy is “Our food choices shape our world.” How could I not fall in love with him?

And his food. His 27-seat Paris restaurant, Table by Bruno Verjus was recently anointed the #3 restaurant in The Fifty Best Restaurants of the World. It is a perfect expression of this erudite and widely-traveled chef. Who else, after all, would serve a caviar-topped chocolate tart?

Like everything else we ate that night it was spectacularly delicious. More about the rest of the meal very soon.