When I set out to write this cookbook, I had no idea how massive the Times 150-year-old food archive was or the fortitude I would need to navigate it. And I certainly didn’t plan to test anything like 1,400 recipes.
I couldn’t have done any of it without the help of Merrill Stubbs, whose research and cooking skills are limitless, and who has become like a sister—one with a happily complementary set of enthusiasms. She doesn’t like making pastry dough; I love it. I hate chopping parsley; she finds it a gratifying challenge. When I was pregnant with twins and unable to stand, Merrill would set up a cutting board at my dining room table and bring me vegetables to chop. Once my twins were born, we’d take turns stirring pots and swinging the babies in their bouncy seats. We spent hundreds of weekends and evenings testing recipes, eating triumphant and failed dinners, and doing dishes late into the night.
My husband, Tad, a reluctant foodie, had the taxing job of tasting everything. He would like it to be made clear that he lobbied for the Mocha Cheesecake here, and that the biscotti recipes, a cookie he despises for its “unfriendly” crunch, were included over his objections. There is no way in one short paragraph that I can amply thank him for all of his help—his laser-like editing, his tolerance for dinners consisting entirely of four kinds of crab cakes, his patience with my hare-brained scheme to take on this project while I had a full-time job, his heroic dishwashing, his willingness to cook dinner during the months (well, years) when I was actually writing the book, his infinite support and sweetness.
This was a true family affair. Our children, Walker and Addie, were raised on the recipes in this book: they got them first as purees, later as solids. They ate roast pigeon cut into tiny bits, spaghetti with sea urchin sauce, and île flottante before the age of two. They’ll probably grow up to subsist entirely on junk food. My father-in-law, Dorie Friend, a long-time Times reader, worked on title ideas; Mary French, his girlfriend, helped perfect the Stewed Corn here; our babysitter, Lorna Lambert, kept the trains running; and the entire Friend family served as open-minded and enthusiastic tasters.
As she has with my previous books, my sister, Rhonda Thomson, played a vital role in whipping this one into shape. She tested (and retested and retested) recipes for me, read proofs, and—using her expertise as a designer—weighed in on page layouts and fonts. Any time I saw them over the past few years, my mother, Judith Hesser, and my sister, Andrea Manella, were roped in to help me put together potential dishes for the book (there is now a rule that I’m no longer allowed to test recipes on family visits—OK, hot dogs for all!). And my brother, Dean, and sister-in-law, Leslie, let me hole up in their house in Pennsylvania for a week to write, during which time I managed to coax Dean into testing the Moscow Mule (here), Cheese Straws (here) and Pickled Shrimp (here). All great!
Any institution as old as the New York Times can seem like a crazy family filled with eccentric characters (the disguise-flaunting food critic Ruth Reichl; the peerless bon vivant R. W. Apple Jr.) and hidebound, idiosyncratic rules (its style book insists on calling a “lychee” a “lychee nut”), but I am grateful to have worked at such a remarkable place and to have had a chance to capture some of its history in this book. Among the dozens of people who helped me in ways small and large were Susan Chira, Alex Ward, Tomi Murata, Nancy Lee, Gerry Marzorati, Bill Keller, Jeff Roth, Linda Amster, Pat Gurosky, Nick Fox, Anne-Marie Schiro, Rick Flaste, Trish Hall, Andy Port, Michalene Busico, Mike Levitas, Joanna Milter, Phyllis Collazo, Michael Ryan Murphy, and Kathi Gilmore-Barnes.
This kind of project doesn’t take a village, it takes a metropolis teeming with smart young recent college graduates. Among the many whom I will probably end up working for someday are Emily McKenna (who tested 150 recipes in a month, created the source list, and assisted in countless other valuable and thoughtful ways), Helen Johnston (who helped with recipe pairings, recipe categories, and menus), Jacqueline Barba (who proofread every recipe), Nicole Tourtelot, Alison Liss, Johanna Smith, Lauren Shockey, Tabitha Schick, Adrienne Davich, Francesca Gilberti, and James Malloy.
Countless food writers, specialists, and historians contributed to my research. I am particularly grateful to Andy Smith, a professor at The New School in New York City; Anne Mendelson, the writer and food historian; and the Association for the Study of Food and Society, whose Listserv members have been extraordinarily generous with their time over the years.
I found many wonderful old cookbooks, including my copy of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook, at Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks in Manhattan. One splendid new book that is especially thoughtful about the changes in American food and food journalism is David Kamp’s United States of Arugula.
No cookbook should be published without a lot of friends and opinionated cooks weighing in. Early on, Nora Ephron suggested I write the book from a personal point of view rather than that of an arm’s-length editor. My friends Esther Fein and Jennifer Steinhauer made sure this WASP included all the right Jewish foods; Jennifer also read proofs and kept on me like an army sergeant to finish the manuscript. Elizabeth Beier came up with the chronological recipe structure within chapters. And every time I saw Aleksandra Crapanzano, she’d whisper a new favorite Times recipe into my ear. I am also filled with appreciation for the dozens of friends, family, and neighbors who recommended recipes and tasted the various dishes that I forced upon them. And I am grateful to the hundreds of people (some of whom I know, most of whom I don’t) on Twitter and Facebook, who readily answered questions about recipes like carne asada (here), and about the material used for the book cover, and who contributed a huge number of excellent ideas for the food timeline in the introduction.
Thanks to Heather Schroder, my agent and a great cook herself, who didn’t press the mute button every time I called to complain about ten-step recipes and sinks full of dishes. W. W. Norton’s Starling Lawrence, Jeannie Luciano, and Jill Bialosky had a great vision for this book and an understanding of the time it would take. Julia Druskin came up with the clean, timeless design and worked tirelessly to find an ingredient font that was both compact and vivid. Bill Rusin and Ingsu Liu came up with a cover that pleased everyone (not an easy task!). And Judith Sutton copyedited this manuscript with such precision and deftness I think her next job should be inspecting the Large Hadron Collider. She surely wanted to egg my house for the number of times I misspelled chiles. Or is it chilis?
I wrote much of this book underground on the 2/3 subway train and I am genuinely glad to live in a place where the MTA provides clean, well-lighted cars. If they’d put in WiFi too, I might actually have met my deadline.
This book, I hope, will serve as a monument to all the great food writers, home cooks, and chefs whose work has made the Times food sections a must-read for more than a century and strongly shaped the way we eat. I am particularly grateful to the many people who have generously allowed me to reprint their work here and to all the Times writers whose exceptional voices became part of our food culture: among the many, Jane Nickerson, Juliet Corson, June Owen, Kiley Taylor, Jane Holt, Charlotte Hughes, Jean Hewitt, Nan Ickeringill, Raymond A. Sokolov, Mark Bittman, Marian Burros, Florence Fabricant, Patricia Wells, Molly O’Neill, Melissa Clark, Nancy Harmon Jenkins, R. W. Apple Jr., Suzanne Hamlin, Julia Moskin, Sam Sifton, Julia Reed, Jonathan Reynolds, Jason Epstein, John Willoughby, Chris Schlesinger, Joan Nathan, Toby Cecchini, William L. Hamilton, Matt Lee, Ted Lee, Jonathan Miles, Ruth P. Casa-Emillos, Denise Landis, Regina Schrambling, Christine Muhlke, Pete Wells, Kim Severson, Alex Witchel, Eric Asimov, Frank Prial, Howard Goldberg, Ed Levine, Bryan Miller, Mimi Sheraton, Oliver Strand, Peter Meehan, Maura Egan, Michael Pollan, Paul Greenberg, William Grimes, Jill Santopietro, Pierre Franey, and the great Craig Claiborne.
Last but definitely not least, I want to thank the thousands of newspaper readers from around the world who wrote to me to tell me their most beloved Times recipes. They sent thoughtful, multipart e-mails. They sent tattered decades-old clippings. They recounted how these recipes epitomized both periods and shifts in their lives. They wrote, directly and indirectly, about the community of food. Many of them also sent follow-up e-mails years later, wondering where the book was.
Here it is.