Looking back at her life as a young single woman in New York City in the heady 1980s, novelist Ann Hood (The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread) nostalgically recalls her first dinner par-ties—and the cookbook that made them possible.
The first time I made pesto sauce, I used dried basil. Lots of it. Two entire jars of McCormick’s dried basil, to be exact. This was 1982, and I wanted to impress my new boyfriend. Josh had just relocated to New York City from San Francisco. He made a mean cup of coffee by pressing the grounds through what looked like a sock. He put apples in cole slaw. He bought live soft shell crabs in Chinatown, fried them in butter and put them in a sandwich smeared with homemade mayonnaise.
Up until I fell in love with Josh, my idea of a fancy dinner came straight out of the orange Betty Crocker cookbook I got as a college graduation present: chicken Kiev (filled with dried parsley, dried rosemary, dried thyme and lots of butter), chicken Rice-a-Roni, and a salad with a sugary dressing poured over lettuce, slivered almonds and mandarin oranges straight from the can. Back in college, my sorority sisters and I used to marinate flank steak in Good Seasons’ Italian dressing to woo boys we had crushes on. For dessert, Kathy, the sophisticated one, dumped a can of cherries into a pan, poured brandy on it and lit the whole thing on fire. This was Cherries Jubilee. I also had a recipe for curried chicken salad that I’d torn from a Glamour magazine. I made that when my girlfriends came over for lunch.
Luckily, our little apartment on Avenue A made it impossible to put together any of these dishes. I needed a one-pot meal that required no fancy appliances. So I stirred all of that basil into a bowl of olive oil and crushed garlic, added some Parmigiano Reggiano, and tossed it with spaghetti, al dente. It is surely a sign of how much Josh loved me that he ate my pesto at all, even as I spit it out, mumbling that it was, well, a little dry. Afterwards, as he did the dishes, Josh said, “I wonder if next time you might use fresh basil. That might work better.”
Fresh basil? I tried to imagine what that might even look like. I knew my fresh parsley, the curly and the flat. I even knew the flat was better, the only kind my Italian grandmother ever used. But fresh basil?
“Good idea,” I said, certain there would be no next time.
For me, Julia Child did not become the kitchen goddess she was to so many Americans until much later in my life, when I already knew how to cook and had grown to love good food. As a teenager, Julia Child was a black and white image on public television, cooking up food too fancy for my tastes. By the time I was in my twenties and living in New York City, she had morphed into a Dan Ackroyd skit on Saturday Night Live. During a brief misguided vegetarian phase, I made a whole wheat pizza from Laurel’s Kitchen that could be used as a doorstop and gazpacho and tabouli salad from The Moosewood Cookbook. When I grabbed onto the big Cajun food craze, I almost asphyxiated a small group of friends by trying to make blackened something in my studio apartment. It filled with smoke so spicy that even my cats were gasping for air. Other than my beloved Betty Crocker, I had no cooking gurus.
Until the weekend I visited my friend Gilda Povolo in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she served me grapes rolled in Roquefort cheese, prosciutto-filled pinwheels, and a chicken dinner topped with prunes and olives, followed by bread pudding, all of it so delicious I had seconds and even thirds. Groaning, I asked her where she’d learned to cook like that. Gilda tossed a red and white book onto my lap, and said, “It’s all in here.” The book was The Silver Palate. And it changed my life.
That chicken, of course, was chicken Marbella, the dinner party staple for every woman who, like me, had never known herbs came fresh and green, who were just starting to give grown-up dinner parties, who saw ourselves as urban and sophisticated but needed—were desperate for—a guidebook.
When my Advanced Fiction Writing class came over for an end of semester dinner, I made Chili for a Crowd. When Josh and I took a picnic to Central Park on a summer night before a play, I made Lemon Chicken or Cold Sesame Noodles. When my parents visited, I made phyllo triangles stuffed with spinach and feta by following the simple drawings in the cookbook, rolling and tucking as if my little package was an American flag.
Once I opened those pages, my world expanded. The Silver Palate’s recipe for pesto became routine. Fresh basil? Easy. Now I was buying herbs I’d never even heard of before. Fresh tarragon sat in a glass of water by my sink so that I could easily pluck it. In my fridge I always had a big jar of their vinaigrette to add to my salads. Suddenly, I was a cook. A good cook. Within a few short years, the food-stained pages fell apart, the binding cracked and crumbled. When I replaced it, I bought The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, too, and soon my cooking repertoire expanded even more. Apple Crisp, Stuffed Pork Loin, Pasta with Three Peppers.
One of the most important things The Silver Palate did for me was to open me up to all kinds of foods. I began to cook everything. Instead of relying on that red and white book, I cooked from recipes torn from newspapers and food magazines; I had recipes scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper; my bookshelves dipped from the weight of cookbooks. As time passed, I used The Silver Palate less and other recipes more. Some things, like that Apple Crisp, I had made so often that I no longer even needed to open the cookbook. I knew it by heart.
One day, I sat at my kitchen table in Providence, Rhode Island, a pad and pen in front of me, trying to decide what to make for an upcoming dinner party. More than a decade had passed since I was that long-haired girl, crazy in love with a boy from San Francisco, living in a tiny walk-up apartment with a bathtub in our kitchen. Now I was married to a businessman, living in a big Victorian house, with a baby crawling at my feet. The dinner party was for three couples I hardly knew. The men had all worked together at summer camp, friends since they were adolescents. Unlike these long-married couples, I was an interloper, a second wife, a writer from New York City. The dinner loomed ominously.
Then it came to me. The dinner party meal that never failed. The one Gilda Povolo had served to me so long ago, the one I’d recreated dozens of times to so many boyfriends and their families and our friends. I pulled The Silver Palate from my bookshelf, and found the well-worn recipes easily, those pages so used that the book fell almost magically open to them.
On my pad, I wrote the ingredients I would need: grapes, Roquefort cheese, heavy cream; phyllo dough, spinach, feta; chicken breasts, prunes, green olives; day old bread, raisins, eggs. That afternoon, I began to cook, barely needing to glance at the recipes as I moved through my oversized kitchen.
The couples arrived. I nervously poured wine, smiled too much, dashed in and out of the kitchen. On one of those furtive trips, I saw a full measuring cup sitting by the stove. I paused. My chicken was happily baking away, the bread pudding beside it. What was in that measuring cup? I lifted it to my nose and sniffed. The white wine for the Chicken Marbella. Of course I had ruined the dinner. The Silver Palate couldn’t save it, or me, now. I opened the oven. The chicken was finished. The skin nicely browned, the prunes plump, the green olives juicy. I set it on the counter, wondering if I should add the wine now. But that would taste too wine-y. Disappointed, I placed it on the platter I’d bought in Italy, added the chopped fresh parsley, and brought it to the table.
I watched everyone as they cut their chicken and brought it to their lips.
“What is this?” one of the guys asked, surprised.
“Chicken Marbella,” I managed to say.
“This is amazing,” he said, shoving more in his mouth.
The women were nodding in agreement. People were taking seconds. And thirds. Even without the wine, the Chicken Marbella was a success. I couldn’t ruin it.
Over the next fifteen years, these same couples came to my house again and again. I have served them spaghetti carbonara from my own recipe. Steak with chimichurra sauce. Beef tenderloin with blue cheese. I have served my family these things too, and so much more. Homemade gnocchi. Beef fajitas and thick lentil soup and brined pork chops.
But still, there are days when perhaps I feel nostalgic for a time that was simpler and cooking seemed like a wild adventure. Days when I feel overwhelmed by responsibility and burden, by the complications of middle age. Days when I take my third copy of The Silver Palate from the shelf, and find the page with Chicken Chile, or Black Bean Soup, or yes, Chicken Marbella. I run my hand over the sticky cookbook. I read the familiar words. I cook.