Cooking

There’s something wickedly entertaining in reading about other people’s kitchen debacles, whether actual or fictional. They’re just so relatable. The jelly that won’t jell in Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives is cruelly hilarious, but the best culinary catastrophe in classic fiction, for my money, is in Anne of Green Gables. Stylish guests, including the upper-crust Mrs. Chester Ross, are dining at Green Gables and our ebullient Anne is on her very best behavior. All goes well until Marilla arrives with the pudding and a pitcher of pudding sauce. On spotting the pudding sauce, our heroine’s eyes grow wide and terrified.

How do you choose ten cookbooks out of more than a hundred collected over sixty years? With difficulty. After my beloved husband Richard died, I decided that the only place I would want to live without him was in Meursault, France. The most difficult part was having to leave behind my cookbook collection. For a food writer, it was a daunting challenge. Here is what made the cut. I obviously couldn’t get rid of my father Bob Jones’s The Outdoor Picture Cookbook, published in 1954 and launched to Americans over their morning coffee on NBC’s Today show. He demonstrated how to cook his famous grilled chuck steak as Arlene Francis and Dave Garroway looked on with a bevy of buckets at the ready in case of fire.

Miles Coverdale’s translation of Psalm 105 in the Book of Common Prayer elevated iron from metallurgical to literary significance. The story of Joseph being sold unjustly as a bondservant — “Whose feet they hurt in the stocks: the iron entered into his soul” — shames flaccid times like ours. And iron’s virtues excel not least of all in cooking, where it can enter literally into our bodies and, who knows, maybe our souls too. Joseph just got things started. Think of the first ironclads, Monitor and Merrimac, hammering away at each other at Hampton Roads in 1862, of the dreadnoughts that put paid to Nelson’s wooden walls, of Agatha Christie’s ironclad alibis, of the verse in Christina Rossetti’s great carol: “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.

It’s summer and very warm on the famed Café Tomaselli terrace in the heart of Salzburg. Nevertheless, I’m sipping a hot coffee and nibbling strudel (mit Schlagobers — whipped cream, of course!) with Melissa (Missy) Baldino. We are talking food, fashion and Rike & Co., the charming entrepreneur’s new business. Missy launched Rike & Co. this past October from her charming Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It may seem a bit incongruous in this age of hyperfeminism to be selling aprons and housedresses. But “Rike & Co.,” Missy says, “is all about family and being fashionable while cooking and doing housework and everything else that many of the fairer sex still enjoy doing.

I first came across the food influencer Samah Dada while searching for gluten- and dairy-free dishes. Dada, a twenty-eight-year-old food influencer with regular segments on the Today show, a cookbook, and a 400,000-follower Instagram account, somehow makes being a gluten-free vegan who doesn’t drink look fun. Her skin and hair are positively radiant with nourishment and nontoxicity; she looks very well-hydrated. Hoping to achieve some of this plant-based glow for myself, I headed to the Instagram account DadaEats and tried to eat like Dada. I started with the desserts, simply for the economy of scale: check out of the grocery store with almond butter, dark chocolate chips, rice cakes, maple syrup and dates, and you’ll be able to make almost any of her no-bake desserts.

The cardinal rule of the internet may be “never read the comments,” but in at least one corner of the web, the rule should be never to skip them. I’m talking about the New York Times Cooking blog and app, the most-used resource in my kitchen. NYT has more than 20,000 recipes in its database. Many of them sport hundreds of “community notes” left by passionate home cooks. In my years using the app, I’ve noticed a few trends in the comments. The most famous NYT Cooking comment annotates the classic recipe for Katharine Hepburn’s brownies. The commenter gushes about the recipe before veering into a story about sharing her brownies with a German acquaintance. The note ends with a twist: “Eventually, she moved to the US and stole my husband!

What do I cook when I don't feel like cooking? Scrambled eggs. Beans on toast. Canned soup. But Caro Chambers, recipe developer, Substack author and mom of three little boys, might instead go for Jerk Chicken with Coconut Rice and Strawberry Salsa, or Lamb Pita with Dilly Minty Yogurt Sauce, or some other recipe with prepositions in the title, from her popular Substack “What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking.” Once a week, she releases a new recipe to her 112,000 subscribers, who pay $5 per month for fifty-two new recipes per year plus access to the archives. “If you want something done, ask a busy person,” said either Benjamin Franklin or Lucille Ball. This could be Chambers’s slogan.

Our first Thanksgiving together, my now-husband, then-medical-resident-boyfriend worked a shift during the family feast. I made it up to him with Melissa Clark’s one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving for two. The recipe went off flawlessly and made the constraints of my tiny apartment kitchen feel more like a game-show challenge than a life-or-death struggle. Clark’s 2022 cookbook Dinner in One makes the same promise about 100 different meals. The game-show, can-it-be-done? energy made the Thanksgiving method fun, but could feel tedious on a Tuesday night. Is “one-pot” a theme or a gimmick? Does this constraint serve the cook and the recipe, or is it arbitrary, artificial and unnecessarily limiting?

There comes a time in every home cook’s life when she is separated from her craft. This may be due to illness, incapacity, repairs, renovations or, worstof all, moving house. This month, I moved from Texas to Pennsylvania. Between packing up my utensils and appliances, waiting for the moving truck to make its halting way across the nation, and finally unpacking and reorganizing my tools, I lost my kitchen for four weeks. But benched cooks like mehave a surprisingly satisfying alternative: cooking podcasts. The first podcast I tried is most similar to traditional cooking shows: Food 52’s Play Me a Recipe. Chefs and cookbook authors host episodes in which they introduce a favorite recipe and talk through its ingredients and method, encouraging listeners to pause and rewind as needed.

I occasionally come across a social media account — usually run by a conservative male — claiming to great fanfare that young women these days don’t know how to cook. They’ve been too busy girlbossing to learn. In my experience, this is wrong. The ambitious women I know are ambitious in every part of their lives. They get the promotion while moving up the Peloton leaderboard, planning their dream wedding and creating flavorful, photogenic meals that Betty Crocker hadn’t dreamed of. For these women, there’s the Ambitious Kitchen. The Ambitious Kitchen was created in 2011 by a Chicago woman named Monique Volz. It has since amassed more than 700,000 followers on Instagram and a cookbook deal for 2024.

A few years ago, I came across a delightful bit of Americana in Hobart Book Village in the Catskills: Naomi’s Home Companion, a 1997 cookbook/ scrapbook from Naomi Judd, the late matriarch of the famous country music family. Because I’m not a country listener and I don’t eat a lot of meatloaf, I didn’t buy the book, its kitsch appeal notwithstanding. Nineties fashion may be back, but its nutritional standards are permanently out of style. Right? I thought of that old Naomi Judd book when a new cookbook landed on the New York Times bestseller list: Y’all Eat Yet? Welcome to the Pretty B*tchin’ Kitchen by country music star Miranda Lambert. The book purports to share recipes from Lambert’s downhome roots and humble upbringing in East Texas.

Heidi Swanson started her vegetarian food blog, 101 Cookbooks, in 2003. At the time, the Atkins Diet was sweeping the nation, even as schoolchildren still learned the carb-heavy Food Pyramid. It would take another year for a landmark study to link high-fructose corn syrup to the obesity epidemic, and another fifteen for the FDA to ban trans fats. Back then, granola was for tree-huggers, like organic produce, Whole Foods Markets and the Pacific Northwest. Times have changed. These days, everyone outside the Lion Diet community agrees that a plant-based diet is best, preferably free of hormones and artificial sweeteners. 101 Cookbooks is still active and popular, if less countercultural than at its inception.

My mother advised that I get a plain wedding ring. Diamonds, she said, interfere with a woman’s ability to knead dough. “But I don’t knead dough,” I protested. “You will when you’re married.” I guffawed. And yet there I was, four days into my marriage, in an Albanian chef’s Venetian home, being told in no uncertain terms that while my husband Nick could keep his ring on, mine would need to come off. We had arrived in Giudecca, an island in the Venetian lagoon, by water bus, having spent the day in Padova. There, we’d visited the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, home to first-class relics of the great saint — bones, lower jaw, incorrupt tongue and cartilage from his larynx.

Summer comes early to San Antonio. I moved here in January, dodging the worst excesses of the northeastern winter, but by March, the temperature had already reached into the nineties. By the time you read this column, summer will be approaching the rest of the country as well. It’s no-bake dessert season. I’ve always been intrigued by this genre of dessert recipe, which involves a vast spectrum of quality. The worst can be appalling — think of gelatin salads, gloppy pudding pies, packets of flavored powders and demeaning names like “mess” and “fool.” On the other hand, some no-bake desserts are transcendent: for example, panna cotta and the Magnolia Bakery banana pudding.