Recipes

In the depths of winter last year, an ice cream and wine bar opened in Islington. The Dreamery serves ice creams and sorbets in silver goblets with tiny vintage spoons. On the ceiling is a glowing mural of happy cows and a sun with a face, resembling a child’s finger-painting (the artist is Lucy Stein, daughter of Rick). Outside, neighbours whisper about a recent Dua Lipa spotting. The Dreamery is inspired by the Parisian ice cream and wine bar Folderol, and makes fairly sophisticated flavours such as salted ricotta blueberry and Greek mountain tea. It is TikTok chic – a gamble, after Folderol unwillingly became a viral sensation and ended up sticking up signs saying: ‘No TikTok. Be here to have fun, not to take pictures.

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.

This doesn’t feel right. I am wrapping plastic around a freshly baked cake, preparatory to putting it in the freezer for thirty minutes. Then, I’m supposed to take it out and gingerly unmold a bowl of ice cream on top of it. Back into the freezer after that for another hour or so. The bowl of ice cream is lined with plastic wrap and filled with layers of raspberry sorbet, mango sorbet and chocolate ice cream. The ice cream was pressed flat to fill up all the gaps, and it went into the deep freeze two hours ago. Will it be firm enough to hold a beautiful dome shape as it unmolds onto the cake? Or will it slither and slide everywhere? I’m making Baked Alaska — or what seems to be a modern twist on it.

"Comment trouvez-vous le sanglier?" Guillaume parent/hunter/head rôtisseur, asked me last spring, in the tiny village of Monthélie, next to Meursault, where my family lives and where I now live. We were there to enjoy a wild boar banquet. Guillaume, who was dressed as Obélix, Astérix’s sidekick, known for his voracious appetite (especially for wild boar), had roasted three sanglier shoulders on spits over coals from old wine vines. Many of the other villagers had also dressed as famous characters from the comic book series, which often depicts les Gaulois feasting on sanglier after defeating the Romans. Never mind that they are subsequently themselves defeated by the Romans at Alise-Sainte-Reine, an hour north in the Auxois region.

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!

My sister recently gave up gluten and dairy on doctor’s orders. In a show of support, my whole family has been exploring ways to make shared meals more tolerable for the poor woman, suddenly deprived of the two best food groups. We’re revisiting family recipes for breakfasts, sides and desserts: my grandmother’s strata, with its layers of cheese-soaked bread, is out altogether, while mashed potatoes go without butter and pie goes without crust. It’s easy to make your first GF/DF meal. The first time my sister came over for dinner after starting her new lifestyle, we smoked a pork shoulder and ate it with mayo-based coleslaw and baked beans: a classic BBQ! Meat and potatoes are GF/DF, as are stir-fried veggies and rice, and bacon and eggs.

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?

Choux pastry can inspire fear in even the most confident of cooks. There's a good reason for it: it’s difficult to give a very precise recipe for choux pastry, as the amount of egg needed to create the correct texture depends on the flour you’ve used, how long the choux has rested, and how fast and how thoroughly you have cooked the choux mixture out. It’s the water content in the egg that primarily causes the choux to rise and puff in the oven into those distinctive domes or elegant eclairs: not enough and they will fall flat, but too much and the pastry will be too sloppy to pipe properly. It’s the Goldilocks of pastry recipes. I am not unfamiliar with choux-dread.