Best Food Writing 2015 (30 page)

4. Your freezer is your friend
.

There's another benefit to specializing, which is that you can make components of your dish ahead of time and freeze them. Hosting is a lot easier when you're not tied up in the kitchen all night. We make meatballs early in the week, then let them spend all day Friday in the slow cooker, soaking up sauce. Your freezer is also a handy place to store alternatives for guests with dietary restrictions. If you make vegan or gluten-free meatballs, freeze them individually on a cookie sheet covered with wax paper, so they won't stick together, then store them in portion-sized bags so they'll be ready when guests need them.

5. Unplug
.

One of the most magical things about Friday Night Meatballs is that
people put their phones away
. We don't make this a rule, though you certainly could, but most of the time everyone is so busy eating and talking that phones just get in the way. I'm notorious for constantly snapping photos, but I've taken very few during Friday Night Meatballs. My theory is that the desperate need to stay connected that keeps us tethered to our phones melts away when we're all sitting around a table sharing
a meal,
actually
connected. Once your candles are lit, put your phone away and just be there. You'll be amazed at how renewed you feel once the last guest has left.

In the past nine months, friends who've been inspired by Friday Night Meatballs have told me about slow cookers full of meatballs in hotel rooms at conferences. There's a Taco Tuesday in Minneapolis and a Brisket Brunch in Austin. Many others have shared their favorite low-stress ways to bring people together: game nights, “bring a weird snack” night, bad movie night, Sunday brunch club, even a backyard friedchicken competition. It doesn't matter what dish you serve or what idea brings you together: the point is simply to break bread.

Super Simple Friday Night Meatballs
Super Simple Friday Night Meatballs

        
So many readers asked for my husband Joe Cleffie's meatball recipe that we had to oblige. After making a few small tweaks for foolproofing and streamlining, we're proud to present it here. This isn't the most complicated meatball recipe around—quite the opposite in fact. Our goal here is a recipe that anyone can make, no practice required, and get great results. I hope it inspires a thousand dinners in communities worldwide.

        
Why this recipe works:

        
•
  
Simplicity is the name of the game here. The adobo seasoning in the meatball mixture adds plenty of garlic and spice flavor, while breadcrumbs and eggs help keep the balls tender.

        
•
  
A long simmer in the sauce leads to good flavor exchange, making the sauce meatier and the balls saucier.

                 
Note:
Meatballs can be frozen after frying and before adding them to the sauce. After browning, transfer to a parchment-lined plate or baking sheet. Place in freezer until balls are fully frozen, then transfer to a zipper-lock bag. Sauce can be frozen separately in a zipper-lock bag. To finish, thaw sauce and transfer to a pot. Add meatballs and simmer for at least one hour. Alternatively, transfer thawed sauce and meatballs to a slow cooker. Set to “keep warm” setting and allow to cook for 8 hours.

Yield: Serves 8 to 12

Active time: 45 minutes

Total time: 2 hours

For the Sauce

            
2 (28 ounce) cans whole peeled tomatoes

            
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

            
6 to 8 cloves minced garlic (about 2 tablespoons)

            
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste

            
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the Meatballs

            
4 slices bread, crusts removed

            
2 eggs

            
2 pounds 80/20 ground beef

            
1½ tablespoons adobo seasoning (such as Goya), see note above

            
½ cup minced fresh parsley leaves

            
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

            
Olive oil for frying

            
Pasta and grated Parmesan cheese for serving

For the Sauce

            
1. Crush tomatoes by hand, with a food mill, or in the food processor to a very rough puree. Heat oil in a large Dutch oven over medium heat until shimmering. Add garlic and cook, stirring, until softened but not browned, about 1 minute. Add tomato paste and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 1 minute longer. Add crushed tomatoes, bring to a simmer, cover, and reduce heat to low. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Meanwhile, make the meatballs.

For the Meatballs

            
1. Tear bread into rough chunks and pulse in the food processor until reduced to fine crumbs. Transfer to a large bowl. Add the eggs and mix with your hands until combined. Add beef, adobo seasoning, and half of the parsley. Combine mixture with your hands, working
the breadcrumbs into the meat until meat mixture can form a ball that holds together when tossed back into the bowl. Do not over mix.

            
2. Place a small amount of mixture on a microwave-safe plate and microwave on high until cooked, about 20 seconds. Taste and add salt and/or pepper to mixture to taste. Using wet hands, form the mixture into balls roughly 2 tablespoons each, about 1½– to 2-inches across. Place the balls on a large parchment or wax paperlined tray as you work.

            
3. Add enough oil to a large cast iron or stainless steel sauté pan to form a thin layer across the bottom. Heat over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add as many meatballs as will fit in a single layer and cook until well browned on first side. Gently turn balls with tongs or a thin metal spatula and continue cooking and turning until well browned on all sides. As the meatballs finish browning, add them to the pot of sauce and replace them with raw meatballs. Continue, adding more oil as necessary, until all meatballs are browned and in the sauce.

            
4. Simmer over low heat for 1 hour. Season to taste with salt and pepper and stir in remaining fresh parsley. Serve with pasta and grated Parmesan cheese.

A Mother's Cookbook Shares More Than Recipes
A Mother's Cookbook Shares More Than Recipes

B
Y
K
IM
S
EVERSON

From the
New York Times

          
New York Times
^*
*
Atlanta bureau chief Kim Severson has a hefty food-writing history, with stints at both the
Times
and the
San Francisco Chronicle
, not to mention two books:
Spoon Fed
and
Cook Fight
. When a box full of worn recipe cards and beat-up cookbooks landed on her doorstep, it triggered a nostalgic quest.

The last full sentence I heard from my mom was around Easter. “You better call Michael,” she said.

The only Michael in our family is a distant cousin I can't be sure I've even met. But I went with it. Sure, Mom. I'll call him.

That's what it's like these days.

My mother has a kind of dementia that comes with advanced Parkinson's. That's lousy in a million ways, but I especially miss talking to her about cooking.

My dad recently sent me a big box filled with her old cookbooks and stacks of handwritten recipes on index cards and slips of paper. The recipes are held together with thick rubber bands or filed into a cheerful metal recipe box. They are the sum total of the cooking life of a woman who fed seven people every day for a long time.

I wish I could tell you that the collection is a brilliant, well-ordered trove of culinary instruction.

That special glazed Bundt cake I remember from childhood, the one she would always have under the green plastic dome when I returned home for a visit? The recipe came from a card attached to a bottle of Bacardi rum.

Next to the King Ranch casserole recipe in an old PTA cookbook, she made a note to add chopped green peppers, green chiles and a can of Rotel tomatoes. It was her attempt to give the sauce of canned soup a little life. The page ripples with the aftermath of some long-ago spill. Bits of dried sauce still cling to it.

In a flash, I'm back at our oak dinner table, my dad still in his shirt and tie from work serving that workhorse of a dish to five kids.

Turns out it was the mess that mattered to me the most.

The worn pages of a cookbook have a unique ability to drill into a place where food memory mixes with love and loss. As our kitchen adventures increasingly get recorded in sleek digital files or even the fleeting history of a recipe search, beat-up cookbooks become more valuable, both personally and historically.

“We love to see marked-up, dog-eared, grease-splattered cookbooks,” said Paula Johnson, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, where Julia Child's kitchen and beloved books are housed. How a cookbook is marked, by handwritten notes or physical evidence that a recipe was prepared over and over, tells much about the intent and life of the cook.

At the museum, visitors marvel at how worn Child's books are, especially her two copies of
Joy of Cooking
.

“They're thrilled to see the wear and tear, because Julia used her books just like they do,” Ms. Johnson said.

From a curator's perspective, the mess also brings worry. “We know that big old grease stains and bits of buttery dough on the pages will have an impact on the long-term viability of the volume,” she said. The mess could even attract bugs, which could harm the volumes around it. So conservators must sometimes clean the books, documenting every splotch they remove so the full story of the book is preserved.

Celia Sack, 45, collects old cookbooks, and she opened Omnivore Books in San Francisco, in part, to feed her habit. She sells plenty of
new cookbooks, but her shop has also become a repository for antiquarian volumes and other important work.

She bought the chef Jeremiah Tower's entire cookbook collection in 2011. Mr. Tower didn't make notes as he cooked his way through Child's
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, but he made plenty of splatters.

“What made it valuable was, it was his and you could travel back in his mind and see where he was going by what he was cooking at the time,” Ms. Sack said. “It is a journey.”

In Nashville, three writers joined this year to celebrate the analog beauty of a well-used cookbook page. They asked 18 cooks, some professionals and some novices, to select a meaningful recipe of their own and write about why it mattered. The women and their recipes were photographed. The project, called “Dirty Pages,” became an art installation that made the rounds in Nashville and will have a permanent home at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans.

The idea came when Jennifer Justus, a food writer, saw a friend's Facebook post depicting a splattered cookbook page. Kim McKinney, a home cook in Nashville, left a comment: “I tell my daughters that when I go, they'll know the good recipes from the dirty pages.”

Erin Byers Murray, a founder of the project, said, “What's crazy is that it's taken social media for a lot of us to recognize what treasures they are.”

The novelist Alice Randall, 56, is one of the women in the exhibit. In February, she and her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, published
Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family
.

At the heart of the book, which covers four generations, is a collection of more than a thousand cookbooks left to Ms. Williams by her grandmother, a Nashville librarian who read cookbooks like novels. As one might expect from a good librarian, she didn't mark her books. But they hold treasures pressed between the pages, like Queen Anne's lace and grocery lists.

“Every time I come upon one, it is a marker of a shared, similar experience,” said Ms. Williams, who recently received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Mississippi. “It connects you to a moment when they were alive and were occupying space with this same object.”

Even the titles of the books her grandmother collected speak to her. “Knowing that my grandmother loved Italian fish stew and salmon mousse and Russian food, what does that tell me about a black women in Nashville during the civil rights movement?” she said.

Her mother, Ms. Randall, is a much messier cook, and her books reflect it. She describes her mother as distant. For comfort, Ms. Randall watched old Julia Child cooking shows and taught herself to cook from her books. Later, at Harvard, she did an independent study with Child.

She contributed Child's lobster bisque recipe from “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” to the exhibit. She has made vats of it, starting when she was the young bride of a State Department official, because it seemed suitable for entertaining. The book's pages are older than her daughter, who is 27.

“If I had to take one item out of my burning house to give to Caroline, it would be that book,” she said.

I feel the same way about the trove my father sent me. (He has been passing on family memorabilia since he moved into a condominium a short walk from the little nursing home where my mom lives, in a Colorado ski town. He goes there to feed her every meal.)

When I finally got the strength to dig into the box, everything in it seemed important. Even the order felt too sacred to mess up.

My mom was a cook who got better as her children grew up. Eventually, she would head up the cookbook committee for the hospital auxiliary and even teach a few classes when she got a part-time job at a kitchen cookware store.

She clipped recipes from magazines or wrote them on whatever happened to be at hand. Instructions for the popovers she made with our Christmas roast beef were scratched out on the back of a contract bridge score sheet. Several were taken down on notepads from moving companies, evidence of how many times we packed up and headed for a new city. Sometimes, a recipe like chicken chili or an aunt's carrot cake would show up in my dad's neat block script on his work stationery. She had odd little notes—“3 qts water 1 qt vinegar 1 cup salt boil and put on pickles”—and mysteries I have yet to solve, like who was Shirley, why were there quotation marks around her “sugar cookies,” and did they really need a cup of lard?

She even had practical advice from friends, like this on a recipe for
cassoulet: “Really good if you like beans. A real pain in the ass to make, however.”

The most sacred to me are the recipes from her Italian family. I picked up a sheet that listed mashed potatoes, oil, salt and egg with only two lines of instruction. The word “rats” was written at the bottom. That's what some of her sisters called cavatelli. Early on, I learned how to press the potato dough on the counter with my thumb so the little dumpling flipped over and curled like a rat's tail.

I finally got to the card that held a recipe for the coconut cream pie she would bake because I loved it so. It was the first pie I ever attempted.

My mom's handwriting is a messy version of the formal cursive they taught in northern Wisconsin public schools in the 1940s. I traced the loopy, uneven instructions with my fingers. And then I made the pie for my daughter.