This book began in 2004 over a lunch of Sri Lankan food at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Theatre District. Susan Chira, a foreign correspondent and editor at the New York Times, was cultivating book projects by the paper’s staffers. She asked me if I had any ideas. I had exactly none, but Susan is also into food, so we began talking about cookbooks. It occurred to me that of the many cookbooks containing recipes from the Times, the best known—the one on nearly all of my friends’ mothers’ kitchen shelves—was The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne. Still in print, it was originally published in 1961, nearly fifty years ago.
But, as Susan and I discussed, American cooking has seen monumental changes in the intervening decades. We discovered classic French food and then Italian, New American, Japanese, and Southeast Asian before looping back to France for a brief rendezvous with the bistro, and then on to the trattoria, tapas bar, and British butcher. We learned about seasonal cooking as well as local cooking, sustainable foods, and artisanal ingredients. We became vegetarians, pescatarians, vegans, and locavores. In 1961, there were lots of curious home cooks. Now there are lots and lots of obsessed and well-informed foodies.
Before lunch was over, this book was in the works. Had I known then that it would take six years and entail cooking more than 1,400 recipes, I might never have gotten started.
During the course of this project, whenever I told someone I was writing a New York Times cookbook, they’d say, “Oh! You’re updating Craig Claiborne’s!” As soon as I said, “Well, no . . .” they’d frown. Claiborne’s collection of more than 1,000 of his recipes was splendid and seminal; an instant best seller, it gave the Times’s food section an identity, not only as a source of great recipes but also as the leading voice in the food world, an arbiter of style. Yet Claiborne’s book, for all its virtues, encompassed just a decade of years of his food coverage. The manuscript I’m working on, I’d tell those who asked, would be much broader in scope. It would include the most noteworthy recipes all the way from the 1850s, when the paper began covering food, to today. It would be a kind of 150-year flip book of American cooking.
Did I mention that it would not be an update of Claiborne’s book?
To start, I crowd-sourced many of the recipes that had to be included by posting an “author’s query” in the Wednesday Dining section and the Sunday Magazine asking readers to let me know their favorite Times recipes. The results were delightful: thousands of e-mails and letters poured in, with more than 6,000 recipes suggested. I learned about classics like Claiborne’s Paella (a recipe that took him six years to perfect; see here), Le Cirque’s Spaghetti Primavera (a recipe so famous that three people claimed to have invented it; here), and Forget-It Meringue Torte (a bouncy meringue cake that billows like a jib in the oven; here).
The letters also contained passionate accounts of readers’ relationships with dishes they had been cooking for decades. Readers wrote me about recipes that had held together their marriages, reminded them of lost youth, given them the cooking bug, and symbolized their annual family gatherings.
After much collating by my talented assistant (and now business partner) Merrill Stubbs, I had 145 single-spaced pages of recipe suggestions. The document, which is divided into recipe categories like soups, salads, beef, and cakes, sums up both what, exactly, we really love to eat—namely gazpacho, chicken, shrimp, salmon, crab cakes, meat loaf, chocolate cake, cheesecake, apple tarts, lemon desserts, and coffee cakes—and which writers’ recipes seemed most inventive and easiest to make. I joked that I should call the book either Chicken and Dessert or Forever Bittman: The Best Recipes from the Recipe Writer We Love.
Four of the top five most-recommended recipes were desserts, unsurprisingly; surprisingly, four of the five were more than twenty years old:
Purple Plum Torte (265 votes; here)
David Eyre’s Pancake (80 votes; here)
Teddie’s Apple Cake (37 votes; here)
Chocolate Dump-It Cake (24 votes; here—my mother’s recipe and a terrific one, but surely a biased result, as I asked for the suggestions)
Ed Giobbi’s Lasagna (23 votes; Lasagna here edged it out)
WAYS TO USE THIS BOOK:
To reconnect with the dishes you grew up with.
To discover the joys of dishes you’ve never heard of—like Eldorado Petit’s Fried Noodles with Garlic Mayonnaise (here) and Huntington Pudding (here).
As a compendium of the most well-known and influential recipes printed in the New York Times.
As a time machine, to travel back to when corn pancakes were chichi (1980s) and rum omelets were a dramatic dessert (nineteenth century).
As a gateway to culinary adventure: go ahead, try that Raspberry Bavarian Cream (here) from 1910. It could be a new sleeper hit for your dinner parties.
As a weight for pressing terrines—its size and heft are just right.
WAYS NOT TO USE THIS BOOK:
For academic research—I’m not a food historian, so if you’re really interested in the origin of Saratoga potatoes, do what I did and turn to Andrew F. Smith’s Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, America Cooks by the Browns, and James Beard’s American Cookery.
As a path to weight loss—if you dive in and start cooking, expect to be enjoying your share of butter. Don’t get angry at an old recipe (or me); appreciate the past for what it is and balance heavier recipes with lighter dishes from the 2000s.
As a doorstop—though I admit it’s heavy enough to serve as one.
I decided to test any recipe that was recommended by three or more people, which meant some 400 recipes stretching back to the late 1950s. Merrill and I devised menus of three to five recipes. A few days a week, she’d shop and we’d meet at my house after I got home from work. Then we’d cook for hours, usually sitting down to eat with my husband, Tad, around 10:30 p.m., at which point we’d all weigh in—Tad playing the Simon Cowell role—and then Merrill and I would make notes while Tad did the dishes. (Our sturdy twelve-year-old dishwasher survived two cycles a day during these years.) Once my twins were born, in 2006, they too were roped into the project—turns out, almost any recipe in this book can be pureed!
As we cooked our way through that stack, I discovered interesting shifts in the way Times readers have approached food. Desserts experienced a major renaissance during the 1970s, as the writers served up ambitious cakes, extraordinarily sweet American pies, and a novel concept called the French tart. Pastry chefs then cut back on the sugar and moved away from these monolithic, Wayne Thiebaud–style desserts to heavily constructed individual servings. We ate a lot of duck in the 1990s and none at all in recent years. We discovered faki (here), bobotie (here), and baumkuchentorte (here), then promptly forgot about them. We learned to cook pasta and sauce it properly, and to roast vegetables, but we left a lot of great Germanic foods like goulash and spaetzle by the curb. We tried and largely failed to adopt Chinese cooking at home.
| —1860s— | • First refrigerator car carries strawberries on the Illinois Central Railroad. |
| —1875— | • The New York Times publishes its first cookbook. |
| —1893— | • The Chicago World’s Fair displays foods from around the globe to 27 million visitors. |
| —1894— | • Milton Snavely Hershey starts making caramels and chocolate and wisely uses only his last name on the product. |
| —1897— | • Grape-Nuts go on sale; Americans sign up for a century of punishing breakfasts. |
| —1906— | • Upton Sinclair writes The Jungle about the horrors of the meat-packing industry. |
| —1911— | • Crisco’s partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is introduced, becomes widespread during World War II. |
| —1916— | • The refrigerator goes into mass production. |
| —1917— | • First raw-food restaurant in Los Angeles; this (non)cooking style becomes trendy again ninety years later. |
| —1920s— |
• White Castle promotes its hamburgers and its cleanliness. By minimizing its seating area, the chain also establishes the notion of take-out. • Aluminum pressure cookers proliferate. |
| —1920— | • Prohibition becomes law. |
| —1922— | • Stephen Poplawski invents the blender to make soda-fountain drinks. |
| —1930— | • Clarence Birdseye’s packaged frozen foods go on sale in a Springfield, Massachusetts, grocery store. |
| —1931— | • Irma S. Rombauer self-publishes The Joy of Cooking. |
| —1933— | • Prohibition ends—cheers! |
| —1939— | • Boston Oyster House at the Morrison Hotel in Chicago popularizes its “salad bar”; the concept doesn’t catch hold more widely until the 1970s. |
There were a few writers who shall go nameless whose occasional recipe failed to meet basic standards of edibility. And there are surely readers who will scorn me for not including their favorites—or for not even locating their favorites. Seven people wrote in about clams possilipo, but though Merrill and I made dozens of searches, it remained lost in the archives, probably under a pile of chicken and dessert recipes. My hope is that revelatory reader-recommended recipes such as Cucumbers in Cream (here) and Fontainebleau (here) will make up for any gaps.
After the first year, as the pile of “yes” recipes grew, the book began taking shape. It wasn’t going to be a dutifully comprehensive collection of recipes or a thoroughgoing history of American cooking. It was going to be an eclectic panorama of both high-toned masterpieces and low-brow grub, a fever chart of culinary passions. It was going to be by turns global and local, simple and baroque, ancient and prescient. A book, I am convinced, that will serve your every mood.
Two years, 400 post-day-job late-night recipe tests, and two babies later, the book’s foundation was complete.
PHASE TWO: THE PREVIOUS 100 YEARS
Next project: the century of recipes that predated most of us. This time there were no readers or cooks to turn to, just a lot of reading and sleuthing to do in a lush if uncultivated playground. The Times’s vast nineteenth-century recipe archive was largely user-generated and ran under the rubric “The Household.” Readers submitted housekeeping tips, health remedies, and loads of recipes—it was like an online forum. None of this material seems to have been vetted by the editors, so readers were free to propagate a conviction that noses should be wiped by alternating left and right sides to prevent “deformity,” or that anxious people should eat fatty foods because fat around the nerves “smooths them out.” “The Household” format also inspired an inordinate number of nostrums for asthmatic canaries.
| —1940s— | • Sugar, coffee, butter, and red meat are rationed during World War II. |
| —1941— | • Henri Soulé opens Le Pavillon in New York City and ushers in fancy French dining. |
| —1950s— |
• Passenger jets make travel easier, giving Americans firsthand access to French cheese and wines. • Cake mixes hit the shelves, a half-century before Anne Byrn’s The Cake Mix Doctor. |
| —1952— | • Elizabeth David writes French Country Cooking—readers swoon over France. • Pierre Franey becomes the chef at Le Pavillon. |
| —1954— |
• Swanson comes out with a snazzy new concept: the frozen TV dinner. • M. F. K. Fisher’s books are collected in The Art of Eating. |
| —1955— | • Tappan introduces a home version of Percey Spencer’s microwave oven; it costs more than $1000 ($10,000 in today’s money). |
| —1956— | • The first Williams-Sonoma launches in California. • The Federal Aid Highway Act is passed and the interstate highway system is established; food now is transported long distances as easily by truck as by rail. |
| —1957— | • Craig Claiborne is hired as the food editor at the Times; readers are introduced to chicken paprikash and leeks vinaigrette. |
| —1958— | • Diet Rite is the first low-calorie soda. |
| —1959— | • Joe Baum opens the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City; the restaurant, designed by Philip Johnson and hung with paintings by Picasso and Miró, costs $4.5 million. |
| —1960s— | • Weight Watchers inspires millions of Americans to obsess over calories. |
| —1960— | • Bill Niman starts raising cattle humanely in northern California, initiating a movement that will take three decades to gain significant traction. • Reuben Mattus makes a high-butterfat ice cream, mixes in much less than the usual amount of air, and sells it as Häagen-Dazs. |
But food mattered—as the food historian Anne Mendelson has observed, the thinking of the day was, “If you don’t have good food, you can’t have good morality.” Recipes were usually brief—almost Tweet-like in their shorthanded scope—and were composed in a paragraph form with ingredients listed in the order in which the writer remembered them. The general assumption was that you knew how to cook and bake, so no one needed to tell you what size cake pan to use or that you needed to butter it, or how to tie up a roast, or make a custard. Just make it already! Here are two examples:
| —1961— | • After taking nearly a decade to write it, Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck find a publisher for Mastering the Art of French Cooking; Americans discover their inner Francophiles. • André Soltner begins taking reservations at Lutèce; soon, they are impossible to get. |
| —1965— | • Anchor Steam Brewery becomes the first American microbrewery. |
| —1967— |
• Robert Mondavi releases his first vintage of Fume Blanc. • High-fructose corn syrup production leaps forward; American food culture falls backward. |
| —1970s— | • Turns out just about anything can be cooked in a Crock-Pot. • Pink peppercorns, foie gras, Paul Bocuse, and Fernand Point become part of our vocabulary of nouvelle cuisine. • The decade of home-baked desserts. |
| —1971— | • Starbucks is launched in Seattle; becomes a chain in 1987; goes public in 1992. • Alice Waters dreams up Chez Panisse (and a food revolution). • Willy Wonka and his Oompa-Loompas tip vats of chocolate into the dreams of a generation of children. |
| —1972— | • James Beard writes American Cookery, and Diana Kennedy writes The Cuisines of Mexico. • Dr. Robert Atkins’s Diet Revolution is published; takes off twenty years later. |
| —1973— | • Carl G. Sontheimer demonstrates the first Cuisinart at the Housewares Show in Chicago. • Marcella Hazan writes The Classic Italian Cookbook. |
| —1974— | • Chocolate curls are the dominant cake decoration. • Le Cirque opens; its regular patrons include Frank Sinatra, Princess Grace, Sanford I. Weill, Bill Blass, and Nancy and Ronald Reagan. |
| —1977— | • Mollie Katzen comes out with The Moosewood Cookbook, and the Silver Palate opens on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. |
| —1978— | • Robert Parker begins publishing The Wine Advocate; soon wineries quail at his name. |
| —1980s— | • After an earlier flameout, frozen yogurt conquers the market by eliminating any traces of tangy yogurt flavor. • Sales of olive oil grow 72 percent in the second half of the decade. • California cuisine. • Raspberry coulis. • Laura Chenel starts making European-style goat’s milk cheese in California. • The new miracle tool: tongs. • Balsamic vinegar drugs us into thinking no salad can live without it. • Americans eat way too much oat bran. |
Eccles Cake (1877)
Make a rich and delicate puff paste; roll it out thin, cut it round, using a bowl for that purpose; sprinkle each round with nicely washed currents [sic], a little sugar, chopped lemon (only a small quantity of lemon), and nutmeg; wet the edges well, then place another round of paste on the top, pressing the edges neatly together; put in a hot oven and bake quickly.—Polly.
Crullers (1878)
One pint sour buttermilk, nearly the same white sugar, half pint butter and lard mixed, three eggs, one teaspoonful soda, flour to make a light dough; warm ingredients.
| —1980— | • Whole Foods Market brings natural foods to a supermarket setting in Austin, Texas. |
| —1982— | • Wolfgang Puck and Ed LaDou create a phenomenon: the gourmet pizza made in a wood-fired oven. • Martha Stewart, a caterer, writes Entertaining, then takes over the world. |
| —1983— | • Nora Ephron writes Heartburn. Ex-husband, Carl Bernstein, gets heartburn. |
| —1984— | • Paul Levy and Ann Barr coin the term “foodie” in their Official Foodie Handbook. • Marian Burros starts writing “Eating Well,” the Times’s first health-related food column. • Harold McGee makes it cool to be a geek in the kitchen with On Food and Cooking, providing riveting explanations of why mayonnaise breaks and how to temper chocolate. |
| —1985— | • Florence Fabricant gets New Yorkers obsessed with prosciutto. |
| —1986— | • The Slow Food organization is founded in Italy by Carlo Petrini. |
| —1987— | • Babette’s Feast. • Rick Bayless opens Frontera Grill in Chicago and publishes Authentic Mexican. |
| —1988— | • The sun-dried tomato gets used and abused. • Laurie Colwin writes Home Cooking. |
| —1989— | • The Times declares fresh herbs trendy. |
| —1990s— | • Heritage breeds of vegetables, fruits, and even animals become chic. • Architectural food. • Sushi shifts from curiosity to obsession. • People begin talking about seasonal cooking. • Fat-free craze; amazingly, no one loses weight! • Sustainability becomes a buzzword for the food movement. • Pan-Asian cooking is attempted and pretty much fails. |
| —1992— | • Molly O’Neill begins writing for the Times Sunday Magazine. |
| —1993— | • Food Network is launched; now seen in 100 million American homes. • Fresh mozzarella changes pizza forever. • Emeril Lagasse shakes food television with a single word, “Bam!” |
| —1994— | • The Mediterranean Diet by Nancy Harmon Jenkins imports a new diet pyramid, in which meat is minimized and vegetables and grains are heralded. |
| —1996— | • Monsanto introduces genetically modified soybeans. • Big Night. |
Among recipes for more proletarian johnnycakes and tripe stew were recipes for granita, polenta, fruit cordials, and salads with nasturtium. Occasionally there were full-fledged food essays, articles debating what constituted good ice cream, treatises on table manners, surveys of the city’s cattle and produce markets, and reported stories on olive oil production and its culinary uses. An 1852 story on a country dinner included this menu: roast potatoes, fricasseed chicken, bread, butter, cream pies, fritters, Pippin apples, and cracked butternuts. From this bountiful if erratic archive, the Times published its first cookbook in 1875.
These early recipes were dominated by the equivalent of today’s “power users,” with frequent contributions from such readers as Aunt Addie, Mollie, and Bob the Sea Cook, whose recipes you’ll find in the following pages. No one could outcook Aunt Addie: if you sent in a recipe for tomato soup, she’d raise you three tomato soups the following week. Mollie was hard-working and determined, if not the best recipe writer—measurements and techniques eluded her. And Bob the Sea Cook was an excellent storyteller, if occasionally sexist and racist. In a recipe for lobster and chicken curry, for which garlic must be peeled, he wrote, “If there are any ladies on board, make them do it.”
Poring through the archives reminded me that food is like fashion, a business of recycling and tweaking. An 1895 story pointed to some changes in the layout of the kitchen, noting, “The ideal is converting the kitchen into a nearer similitude to the drawing room.” In the 1980s, similarly, we embraced the “open kitchen.” A 1879 recipe declared that baking beets was better than boiling them because it concentrates the sugars. More than 100 years later, I wrote about Tom Colicchio’s method of baking beets in foil—to concentrate the sugars. “A Chafing Dish Frolic,” a story from 1909, told you how to plan a cooking party for children. Nowadays, people throw cooking parties for adults.
Anthony Bourdain would have eaten well in the 1870s, which presented some extreme foods, including horse steak, brain fritters, starfish, roasted cat (Rôti de Chat), and braised lion with olives and oranges. This last dish was served as a special dinner at Restaurant Magny in New York. “When Mr. Lion was placed upon the table,” a participant wrote, “there was a religious silence, which, however, only lasted for a few seconds, for at the first mouthful a murmur of approbation ran round the table, and the guests with one accord drank to the health of Mr. Cheret”—the hunter—“and M. Magny, coupling in their admiration the valiant lion-slayer and the clever artiste who had proved himself able to prepare such a delicious dish out of the flesh of this ferocious game, which is more frequently in the habit of eating others than of being eaten itself.”
| —1997— | • The Joy of Cooking is dramatically and controversially revised to exclude squirrel stew and include smoked tofu burgers. • Americans install professional stoves in their home kitchens (and two dishwashers if they’re feeling fancy). • AllRecipes.com, the world’s largest food Web site, is founded by Tim Hunt in Seattle. • The Times creates the Dining Section and introduces color photos! |
| —1998— | • Fleur de sel downgrades the salt shaker. • Everyone is into French country cooking. |
| —2000s— | • Bagged salad is a $2 billion industry. • Crock-Pots successfully rebrand themselves as slow cookers. |
| —2000— | • Prosecco takes off as Americans weary of the cost of Champagne. • Anthony Bourdain shocks us with chef tales in Kitchen Confidential. • El Bulli gets noticed, and chefs around the world become obsessed with molecular gastronomy. • Foie gras is on every other menu. |
| —2001— | • Bottled water is the fastest-growing beverage category for the past decade. |
| —2002— | • Michael Pollan buys a cow and exposes the dark side of agribusiness for a story in the Times Magazine. • There are 3,100 farmers’ markets in the United States, compared with just 100 in the 1960s. • Costco becomes the largest wine retailer in America. |
| —2003— | • 101 Cookbooks goes online, establishing a sophisticated tone for food blogs. • Times food writers begin what the paper insists on calling “web-logging”:) • The food memoir becomes a genre. • The Microplane zester (originally a wood rasp) radically changes zesting citrus and grating cheese—really! |
| —2004— | • Meyer lemons abound. • La Caravelle closes after forty years—one of the last of the great French restaurants in New York City. |
| —2005— | • The term “locavore” is used in the Times. • Sous-vide is all the rage. |
| —2006— | • “Food porn” is coined by Bill Buford in a New Yorker article. • E. coli outbreaks become a news staple. |
| —2007— | • Banner year for smoked paprika and Brussels sprouts. • Ratatouille celebrates chefs, bistro cooking, and rats. |
| —2008— | • Small batch coffee roasting creates a cult-like following. |
| —2009— | • Julie & Julia, the movie about Julie Powell, the blogger, and Julia Child, the national treasure, is a hit. • Food, Inc., a documentary about the dark side of our industrialized food system, is nominated for an Oscar. • Gourmet folds after 68 years in print. |
| —2010— | • Specialty coffee bars proliferate in New York City. • Jamie Oliver is awarded the TED Prize for his work fighting childhood obesity. |
The first forty years of the twentieth century, however, were a culinary abyss. The Times moved away from reader recipes and toward uninspiring ones written by its staff for a column unpromisingly titled “Women Here and There” (which was later replaced by “Victuals and Vitamins”). Sheila Hibben, a New Yorker writer in the 1930s, was a prescient critic of the shift toward convenience cooking. In her 1932 book The National Cookbook: A Kitchen Americana, she wrote, “If the American housekeeper would only pay attention to how things taste, would study the materials of her own district, would become a virago even about fresh materials, how much happier everybody in her family would be!”
A year later, in the Times, she smartly observed, “Our forefathers knew about food and were proud of the knowledge, but with the passing of the pride of knowing came a new pride in not knowing—a singular phenomenon to be observed nowhere save in the United States of the last twenty years. For some inexplicable reason the young American woman of immediate postwar days got the idea into her head that not knowing how to make biscuit was the first step in sophistication, and, as she took a good many steps in that direction, traditional American cooking was rapidly on the way to perishing from the face of the earth.”
Yet even during this dark period the Times kept in touch with food culture. A 1903 story noted the trend for chop suey. In 1940, the paper wrote about a company that specialized in early mail-order food (fresh crab, pies, etc.), which was called “air shopping.” There were stories about men who cooked, new cooking thermometers, roasting steak on oak planks, and one of my favorite inexplicable headlines: “Bad Cookery: Produces Results and Bad Ones.”
Merrill listed the title of every recipe published during the long span between 1852 and 1960 so we could see which dishes were part of the vernacular and which were outliers. She created folders of all the variations on recipes like deviled crabs or orange ice, and then, as I extracted the prevailing techniques, I’d figure out which recipes to cook by looking for voice, interesting details, and ingredients and techniques that promised a successful outcome. I looked at the dozens of variations of such nineteenth-century staples as tomato soup, tripe á la mode de Caen, fritters, lemon pie, and Roman punch. There were a few once-popular recipes like whigs and graham gems (types of rolls) and all manner of terrapin (turtle) that felt too dated to include. Only once was there a dish I wanted to feature—charlotte Russe—but simply couldn’t: all the recipes seemed stiff and bizarrely flavored.
More risky were the outliers, yet these were where the greatest rewards lay. And the only way to see what was what was to get in the kitchen and start cooking. This off-roading led to lacy Green Pea Fritters (1876; here); sun-dried Tomato Figs (1877; here); Spanish Fricco, a hearty beef and potato stew (1877; here); bright and bracing Raspberry Granita (1898; here); Raspberry Vinegar, a refreshing drink syrup (1900; here); Chicken à la Marengo (1908; here); and Green Goddess Salad (1948; here)—some of my favorite recipes in the book. It also led to a few belly flops, like silver cake (made with cream of tartar), which was as tough as a foam mat, and a vinegar pie that was more vinegar than pie.
Sharp-eyed readers may suspect that I slacked off during the 1940s and ’50s, but if you could taste some of the recipes I made from this era, you would see that I am saving you from a world of hurt. I am sparing you the 1947 canapé that involved spreading peanut butter on toast, topping it with bacon, and finishing it under the broiler, and from the inglorious memory of the winter day in 1958 when Craig Claiborne ran recipes for turnip casserole, turnip soup, steamed white turnips, pureed rutabagas, and baked rutabagas. This is a cookbook, not Madame Tussaud’s.
Another 400 recipes and another two years later—with my toddlers adapting to dinners of Roasted Squab with Chicken Liver Stuffing (here), Ceylon Curry of Oysters (here), and Fried Sweetbreads (here)—the second pillar of research was in place.
THE FINAL PHASE
There were still 600 more recipes to test and the book to write. I turned back to the reader suggestions to make sure there were no glaring gaps. I did the same with the nineteenth-century list. I asked the food writers and editors at the Times for their suggestions, and then I spent a couple of days at the paper, digging into the Dining sections and Magazine food columns that had been published since I’d begun the project. Here I discovered extraordinary dishes like Stuck-Pot Rice with Yogurt and Spices (here), Thomas Keller’s Gazpacho (here), and Tangerine Sherbet (here), and I reimmersed myself in the more recent history of the Times’s food coverage.
After the 1950s, the Times food pages increasingly reflected not the way Americans were eating but the way Americans were going to be eating. Craig Claiborne arrived in 1957, at a time when Clementine Paddleford at the New York Herald Tribune was the city’s leading food writer. “Craig ate Clem’s lunch,” Molly O’Neill, the longtime Sunday Magazine columnist said in a talk she recently gave about him. “Craig rode into town much younger, much cuter, a little exotic, and a true journalist.” He knew what he liked to eat and, therefore, what everyone else should be eating: German stews and Southern desserts. “He defined food chic from almost the start of his work at the Times,” Anne Mendelson, the food historian, said. As Claiborne grew into the job, he grew synonymous with it. He expanded his areas of interest to cover foreign cuisines with an unprecedented zeal, writing about osso buco and Dutch apple cake, Pakistani pigeons and pilau, tostones and tempura, génoise and buttercream.
Readers developed an intimate relationship with Claiborne: he was part reporter, part prophet, and part therapist. His number was listed in the phone book, and panicked readers didn’t hesitate to call him from the stove. A friend of Florence Fabricant’s once dialed him up when a scallop sauce wasn’t reducing properly. “Boil the bejeezus out of it,” Claiborne advised, and hung up. Nadine Brozan, a Times reporter, told me that people would offer her money to tell them what Craig was going to publish so they could stock up on the ingredients before the story ran and the shelves went bare.
In 1974, he teamed up with the well-known chef Pierre Franey for a Sunday cooking column. To write it, they’d get together at Claiborne’s house in the Hamptons. Franey would cook and shout out measurements while Claiborne typed on his IBM Selectric. They also threw legendary parties there, one of them so packed with people that the deck collapsed.
As Claiborne’s career was winding down, in 1983, he wrote about Alice Waters. The article served as a baton pass. When Claiborne went into retirement, taking with him chicken paprikash, crepes Suzette, and stuffed peppers, the food revolution was beginning. The Times amped up its food coverage and recipes, treating fads as news and recipes as gospel. Too many excellent writers have contributed to the paper’s coverage to name them all here, but you’ll find their work in the book. (And keep in mind that some of the greatest Times food writers—R. W. Apple, William Grimes, Frank Bruni, Ruth Reichl, Kim Severson, Eric Asimov, Mimi Sheraton, and Frank Prial among them—appear only occasionally here because they didn’t write much about cooking.)
In the 1990s, Molly O’Neill’s food column in the Sunday Magazine served as a springboard for chefs like Emeril Lagasse and new ingredients like kaffir lime leaves. O’Neill loved New York’s lox shops as much as she adored fine dining, and she brought her omnivore’s curiosity to the page, with love letters to pesto, riffs on granita, and an enduring love for French food. But perhaps the most influential column to run since Claiborne in his prime is Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist.” It was the brainchild of Rick Flaste, who with Trish Hall created the Times’s first full-fledged all-food section, Dining In/Dining Out. Bittman’s column was originally supposed to be called “The Spontaneous Cook” and was going to focus on what you could cook with the ingredients you had in the fridge. It was planned for the new food section, but then the new section took three years to develop. When Flaste finally called, he told Bittman, “So you’re doing this column and it’s going to be really clever and really interesting and new and common and easy.” Flaste told him to make the first one about red pepper puree, “the ketchup of the future.” After Bittman wrote it, he told me, he thought, “OK, now I’m out of ideas. What am I going to do next?” He’s been writing the column for thirteen years.
Seeking to do justice to all these developments, Merrill and I returned to the kitchen and started testing, and my sister, Rhonda, began re-testing recipes that needed minor tweaks. Eventually, finally, I sat down in front of my computer.
As I wrote, I tried to balance classics like Osso Buco alla Milanese (here) and Chocolate Mousse (here) with esoteric finds like Oriental Watercress Soup (here), Charleston Coconut Sweeties (here), and Tuna Curry (here), a Sri Lankan dish that I included in honor of Susan Chira. I tried to trace the evolution of some currently popular dishes, like panna cotta, by highlighting the custards and creams—blancmange, pot de crème, crème brûlée—that preceded it. And when readers had expressed sufficient interest, I occasionally included variants of the same basic dish—you’ll find two versions or more of boeuf bourguignonne, butternut squash soup, black bean soup, and gazpacho.
My test for whether or not to include a recipe was simple: after testing it, I’d ask myself, “Would I make this again?” And with 1,104 of the recipes, the answer was yes. I made the Raspberry Granita (here) three times, baked Teddie’s Apple Cake (here) at least four times, and made the Stewed Fennel (here) on easily a half dozen occasions. I also included a fair number of recipes from my own stories, not because I thought my work was so special, but because I could turn to them to fill in gaps, because I knew they worked—and because there was no one to stop me!
While there are some whoppingly time-consuming recipes in the book, there are also plenty of basics, like chicken broth and plain vinaigrette. There are recipes with lots of cream, butter, and booze, and a smaller number made with oil and herb infusions. The book isn’t a one-stop-shopping, how-to-cook-everything compendium, but if you cook your way through it, you’ll be more experienced than nearly anyone else. I’m certainly a much better cook than when I started this project: I’ve learned to braise meats in their own juices, poach scrambled eggs, combine molasses and lemon, bake bread in a Dutch oven, and make candy.
MY APPROACH TO THE RECIPES
Keep in mind that relatively few of these recipes originated in the Times—the paper is a way station for recipes, which pass through on their way from chefs and home cooks to readers. So the archive is a mish-mash of the traditional, the innovative, and everything in between.
Over 150 years, cooking styles and methods have changed.
• The main improvement has been intensity of flavor. Recipes are much more aggressively seasoned now, with layers of herbs and spices.
• Cayenne was the only chile-based heat up until about 1970; chiles, in many varieties, are now commonplace.
• Meats, especially chicken, cook nearly twice as fast as they did 100 years ago because animals are raised more quickly and exercise less, which renders their meat more tender.
• Egg yolks have either shrunk or lost their binding strength—old custard recipes that called for 3 yolks generally needed 5 to 6 “modern” egg yolks to set.
Sometimes I left the recipe language as it was, to preserve it. At other times—taking into account that many of the original recipes are available to the public on the Times website, should anyone want to see them—I completely rewrote the instructions because they were vague or confusing. And I added “Cooking Notes” where necessary for clarity. I also added serving suggestions for almost every recipe, drawing on other recipes in the book to offer up either complete menus or an array of complementary dishes.
In general, though, I made the decision to trust the reader. If there is too much dressing for the amount of greens you have, I expect you to figure out how to add a little at a time until the salad is properly dressed. I count on you to remember to always season a dish to taste rather than depending on a step that tells you to do so. And if you don’t have the right size casserole dish for a gratin, I know you’ll find some other dish and improvise.
My cooking axioms:
• Use fresh spices, good oil, and flaky noniodized salt.
• Low-fat dairy is not a dependable substitute.
• Add enough salt to your pasta water that it tastes like seawater.
• If a recipe calls for yogurt, use a whole-milk Greek yogurt like Fage (unless otherwise instructed). The recipe and your life will be better for it.
• Good ingredients are sometimes expensive. But if more people buy them, the prices will drop (at last, my economics degree proves useful).
• Use more salt and higher heat than you think is prudent when searing meats.
• Take cookies off the baking sheet within 2 minutes, no matter what the recipe says.
• Undermixing is always better than overmixing.
• I know this sounds batty, but no toasters and no teapots—they take up valuable counter and stove space. (Use your broiler for toasting and a pan to boil water.)
• Refrigerate your best oils and definitely don’t store them near your stove.
• Use a meat pounder to crush garlic and spices.
• When it comes to pastry and bread doughs, remember you’re the boss.
• Embrace the adventure of cooking odysseys like Paul Prudhomme’s Cajun-Style Gumbo (here), the humor of recipes like Turducken (here), the majesty of desserts like the Gâteau de Crepes (here), and the economy of dishes like Baked Mushrooms (here).
The recipes in this book will turn out differently in your kitchen than they did in mine or than they did for the person who wrote up the recipe fifty years ago. Recipes are by nature inexact, because everyone works with different ingredients, tools, skills, and expectations. Be patient. Adapt. And if a typo turned teaspoons into tablespoons, try your best not to curse my name, but simply let me know (I can easily be found online).
CONCLUSION
I tried to make this a book that blended the Times’s best recipes with the interests and passions of its readers. I’m excited to have written a cookbook that is genuinely unlike any other—one that gathers up both modern and classic recipes, tells a story of American cooking, includes many surprises (early doughnuts, the forgotten oyster pan roast, and the best panna cotta recipe in the world), and, most of all, provides curious and savvy food lovers with a book that can be a lifetime kitchen companion.
As a lark, shortly before I handed the book in, I Tweeted to ask what people thought the title should be. I loved writer Andy Selsberg’s response: That Old Gray Lady Can Cook. But the overwhelming favorite was All the Food That’s Fit to Eat.
I thought that was apt. I hope you’ll find it so, too.