Author of nearly a dozen books on vegetarian cooking, Deborah Madison represents the flip side of twenty-first-century cooking—farm-to-table, seasonal, locavore, Slow Food, in many ways the antithesis of Modernist cuisine. Connecting recipes to their human past is more her style.
When I look at a recipe card I see the person who wrote it, and sometimes more.
My petite grandmother penned—with a fountain pen—her recipe for raisin squares in an elegant script on pale crinkly blue airline stationery. A handwritten card for a stollen from a Flagstaff friend, her words covering a large lined card, reminds me of how much her warm and nourishing table meant during a long rough patch. My own 3-by-5 cards, intended to jar my memory, are sketchy and rough, clearly for me alone and not for sharing, just as personal foods are meant for one and not for others.
Then there’s the big ebullient scrawl of my sister’s recipe for pasta with caramelized onions. Turning over the paper, I see that it was written on the back of a Chez Panisse menu from February l978 when we both worked there. Of course, I have to read the menu for the week, and as I do, hidden stories emerge. My parents, dangerously close to the end of their marriage, ate chicken Kiev there on the 14th. No hints of Italy had yet crept into the menu, and France was still the source of most dishes and ideas. The cost of a dinner was $12.50, and although the menu had been photocopied, it had been typed first; you can see that the “m’s” were a little faint, and the accent over the word puree was drawn in by hand.
I have a folder full of such papers, among them notes I took from a talk gardener Alan Chadwick had given at the end of his life, urging a handful of his students towards a practice of artistry in the kitchen. Those notes bring back the hushed expectancy of those of us who crowded his sickroom. We seemed to have held our breaths while he spoke about plants and food, grasping for words like “noyau” and stammering with frustration when he couldn’t find them. That’s when I heard him say, “Cooking is done in the garden. When that’s not complete, the gardening takes place in the kitchen”—words that have long served as my North Star.
“Arrowroot is a weed; it grows in a bog and has charming flowers,” he said.
“True rennet is an herb. Put a little handful in the milk and it goes solid,” he instructed.
“For a sauce, take milk. Place onions, peeled and halved, peppercorns mixed spices. Simmer and let reduce for a half-hour. Strain.”
The last is a technique I’ve used ever since for infusing milk with flavor.
But it’s not just the content that matters. My typing errors reflect the urgency to get words down the way Alan had said them. The paper bears a watermark, and after 30 years it has a parchment-like feel. In addition to the words on the page, the spell of the moment also comes through, Alan’s anxious searching for words, his wish to transmit his wisdom before dying.
There are other pages—quotes from “Memoirs of Hadrian,” Rilke’s sonnets (the ones involving fruit), a piece from Andre Simon about how medical science is now justifying the wisdom of eating more vegetables and less meat, all typed on the thin stationery from the American Academy in Rome when I was living there. Though faded, they still remind me what I was moved by then and why I copied these words.
Among the papers I was most happy to find were lists of dishes I wanted to cook at Greens, the San Francisco restaurant I headed up in the late 1970s. Handwritten on lined paper in brown notebooks, sometimes in ink, sometimes in pencil, are the names of recipes, doodles and question marks, references to authors and books, the suppliers of wild strawberries and especially good coffee, exclamation points flying when something really comes into focus as a great possibility. It’s a record of time spent fitting new thoughts together. At times it looks careful and deliberate. Other times my hand gets distracted and strays, looks sloppy and tired. But mostly it conveys such a deep sense of discovery that reading through these notebooks, I am reinfected with the obsessive excitement I felt then. Would a list on my computer do the same thing? I’m not sure.
I recently got a letter in the mail, a personal letter, my name and address written on a typewriter. I knew it was typed because typewritten letters are often uneven, except in the cases of strong, disciplined typists who press every letter evenly without fail. The typist of this envelope is 85 years old and he uses the Internet with ability, but the typewriter is the machine he loves. His wife shrugs it off when I mention my delight in this envelope, saying that he simply won’t give up his typewriter. Perhaps it’s stubbornness on his part not to give in entirely to electronics. I say “Bravo!” for there’s much to be said for the mark of the hand, whether expressed through penmanship or a typewriter. In fact, I’ve come to think of the typewriter as a kind of letterpress. Your fingers hit the keys and press the ink into the paper. Wham! Your weak fingers show up in the faded “a’s” and “z’s” where the ribbon didn’t get inked enough. Your strong-hitting forefingers make smudgy “t’s” and “y’s.” Ideally, all the letters should look the same, but because they don’t, I can recognize my (or another’s) typing as surely as I can recognize handwriting. And this connection of pen or typewriter key to paper to author is what makes me a firm believer in recipe cards, handwritten notes, and typed papers of all kinds.
I hear the loud and whining protest from afar. “But Epicurious is so much easier when you want a recipe!”
But recipe cards and other handwritten documents tell so much more of a story. Given the lack of typewriters today, may I suggest that you sit down and write out a favorite recipe and send it to someone. You may be surprised by the response you get.
This recipe, from Helen Potter, a friend and once the historian of Sutter Creek, Calif., makes a tender, cake-like bar filled with currants and drizzled with a tartsweet lemon glaze. Filled with spice and the color of pumpkin pie, these are a truly autumnal, a dessert to look forward to. For persimmons, use the large Hachiya variety, deadripe and as soft as jam.
Makes about 32 bars
Butter and flour for the pan
1 cup dried currants
1¾ cups unbleached white flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup persimmon pulp, from 1 or 2 Hachiya persimmons
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1½ teaspoons lemon juice
1 egg
1 cup light brown sugar
½ cup melted unsalted butter or neutraltasting oil
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 10-by-14-inch baking pan. If the currants are dry and hard, cover them with warm water and set them aside while you assemble the other ingredients.
2. Combine the flour with the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves in a bowl. In another bowl, beat the pulp until it is smooth, then stir in the soda, salt, lemon juice, egg, and sugar. Pour in the melted butter or oil.
3. Gently stir the dry ingredients, a third at a time, into the wet. Make sure they are blended, but do not overmix. Drain the currants if they’ve been soaking, squeeze them dry, and stir them in along with the nuts. Spread the batter in the pan and bake until firm and lightly browned on top, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and cool while you make the lemon glaze below. Dribble the glaze from the ends of a fork over the top, then cut into pieces. These soft, moist sweets keep well stored in an airtight tin.
Juice of 1 lemon
Approximately 1 cup powdered sugar
1. Stir enough juice into the sugar to make it the texture of thick cream.