Eating

I
greatly admire Michael Pollan for his brave campaign to detoxify the American diet, but I lack the puritan fiber to be a true disciple. Of course I worry about the personal and environmental hazards that he and others have identified, and I mean to avoid them. Often I do, but not always, for though my will is strong my temptations are stronger, as they were on a lovely late-summer day recently on eastern Long Island at the height of the blueberry season.

With Michael Pollan in mind, I promised myself that this year I would not make a blueberry pie with its simple sugars, animal fats, and refined flour, as I had been doing for years at blueberry time, which coincides with my birthday. This year, as always, my children and grandchildren were coming from far away to celebrate the occasion, and that morning I stopped at the Pike Farm Stand to pick up some vegetables for dinner: tomatoes, sweet corn, cauliflower, and so on. I included two and a half quarts of blueberries, just the amount for a pie, but vowed not to pour them into a bowl, as I had done on so many previous birthdays, and mix in a cup or a little more of sugar, some lemon juice, or, better yet, the zest, and enough powdered cinnamon so that its faint aroma rises as the pie bakes, and then shower the mixture with arrowroot to hold the juice without making the berries
gummy, as cornstarch does. On previous birthdays I would roll out on a marble slab two very thin sheets of the simplest pastry, the one for the bottom slightly smaller than the one for the top. To make the pastry, I cut a quarter-pound of unsalted butter in the food processor into two and a half cups of all-purpose flour with a little sugar and less salt, until the butter was incorporated but still a little lumpy. Then very carefully I added a half-cup of cold water a little at a time until the dough began to form. Though most cookbooks suggest letting the dough rest awhile to relax the gluten, I have never found this step necessary. I fitted one sheet of pastry into a black ten-inch pie tin with holes in the bottom, poured the filling onto it, and topped the berries with the other sheet, into which I poked a few slits, then sealed the edge and brushed the top with egg wash. After forty-five minutes or so in a 375-degree oven, the egg-glazed pie with its rivulets of blueberry syrup would be ready. But this year I vowed to serve the blueberries plain, or perhaps with a little crème Chantilly and a plate of cookies.

Instead I made a pie. I served it still warm beneath vanilla ice cream hand-cranked by my friend Billy Leonard in his old White Mountain freezer. This followed a dinner of ripe local tomatoes and fried chicken from Sal Iacono’s farm, with a bowl of steamed cauliflower picked that morning. I let the glorious cauliflower speak for itself, with neither salt nor butter.

On the other hand, I would not dream of making the French toast that my daughter, Helen, recalled when I
asked recently about her childhood culinary memories. This monstrous concoction I learned to make when I worked many years ago in the kitchen of a boys’ camp in Maine, from a cook named George who worked winters in a logging camp. He showed me how to dip a thick slice of homemade
pain de mie
in pancake batter with a little extra baking powder, fry it in deep fat till it puffs, browns nicely, and forms a lacy fringe of fried batter, dip it in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon, and cover it with maple syrup. I mention this deadly pleasure here as temptation’s outer boundary. No one who reads this book should think of going near it.

I began cooking as a child as other children of my generation toyed with chemistry sets or electric trains. I remember reading Irma Rombauer when I was ten or so with the same curiosity that I read Kipling and Jules Verne. My mother had little interest in cooking, and my father none at all, so I was free to amuse myself in the kitchen without getting in their way. Later, I worked a bit in restaurants, where I picked up fragments of technique and jargon and began to think of myself as a cook long before anyone else might have agreed. As readers of this book will see, I prefer plain cooking. I don’t bother with foams, complex emulsions, or exotic ingredients, but let each ingredient speak for itself, often with the help of herbs, spices, and wine. I am a serviceable cook. Friends like what I serve them and come back for more. This gives me pleasure.

Recipes are approximations, starting points. I learn
usually by failing the first time, then discovering where I went wrong, then trying again, and so on, until the basic preparation becomes second nature. Then I vary it, as I plan to do tonight with swordfish in a spicy marinara, an easy dish to make for ten or twelve people. I make the marinara early in the day, and sear the fish quickly at dinnertime in olive oil, and top it with the sauce just before it goes to the table. For the marinara tonight—actually a kind of puttanesca—I’m thinking of mashing in some fresh sardines if I can find them, a Sicilian touch, along with the pine nuts and raisins that are already in the sauce. I won’t risk the whole pot of marinara, but try a cupful with only a bit of sardine. It may not work—the sardine may be too strong, may squelch the lively marinara—but it’s worth a try. When I made this the first time, I let the sautéed swordfish sit for a while in the marinara, with the result that the sauce, which had been fairly tight, became watery and the swordfish dry.

The value of writers like Michael Pollan, whom every cook should read, is that they suggest limits which we may respect or ignore as we choose—but at the extreme they define the reality by whose rules we succeed or fail, live or die. I look forward to next year’s blueberry season, and now that apple season is here I may bake a tarte tatin now and then; otherwise, except for special occasions, I’ll skip dessert.

In this book, when I recommend olive oil I mean extra-virgin unless otherwise indicated. There are many
types of extra-virgin oil, and many shops let you taste before you buy. Take advantage of this opportunity. Fine-quality oils come in many flavors and textures, from subtle to aromatic, from gentle to powerful. As with wine, let your taste be your guide.

My thanks to:

An incomplete list of my instructors, in no particular order, includes Michael Field, Elizabeth David, Julia Child, Alice Waters, Daniel Boulud, Irma Rombauer, Maida Heatter, Frankie Pellegrino, Patrick O’Connell, Fernand Point, Rick Moonen, Julia Reed, Mario Batali, Wolfgang Puck (whose original Spago, with its bare pine walls and Milton Berle always in the corner, is dear to my memory), Joël Robuchon, Mike Anthony, Buwei Chao, Lou, Marie, and Sal “Di Palo,” Mark Russ Federman, Alice Toklas, Richard Olney, Paula Wolfert, Diana Kennedy, Martin and Adela Garcia, Sheila Lukins, Pierre Franey, Charlie Palmer, Eddie Schoenfeld, and that centuries-long procession of unknown cooks and bakers from whom my teachers and their teachers learned their craft.

I thank Billy Norwich for suggesting that I write a recipe column for the Style section of
The New York Times,
from which much of this book derives. I thank, too, my dear and second-oldest friend on earth, the incomparable Judith Jones, for urging me to use these recipes as the basis for a book. Thanks to Terry Zaroff-Evans for her superb copyediting, and to Carol Carson
for the splendid jacket. Also my agent, Andrew Wylie, for reminding me that this book was long overdue; my wife, Judy Miller, for reading and commenting on the manuscript; and Jacob Epstein, Susie Norris, Helen Epstein, Barbara Goldsmith, Mary Bahr, Hilton Als, Doron Weber, and Olaf Olafsson, who also found the time in their very busy lives to read and comment.

SAG HARBOR, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

I
seldom cook by numbers, any more than when I walk my dog, Hamlet, along the familiar streets of lower Manhattan I use a compass or plot my course on a map. When my wife, Judy, or friends ask how much of this or that I use in a stew or salad, I say “a little” or “a lot,” but usually I say “not too much”—not meaning to be rude, but because I agree with the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus that you cannot enter the same river twice, that each act is unique and irretrievable, like the water rushing downriver to the sea, or the seconds of our lives ticking away on our wrists, or the way we hear a tune or read a book. From a Heraclitean perspective, it is impossible to make the same dish twice—nor should one want to, since it can be made better the next time, when you will be a little wiser and the ingredients, a little more forthcoming. Recipes should be more like stories than like maps or formulae. So in this book I tell practical stories about some favorite dishes and how they fit
into my life and hope readers will try them in the same spirit. In cooking, “not too much” is usually a good rule, since you seldom want a particular flavor to dominate. You want harmony, though syncopation helps.

I am a book publisher, not a professional cook, though in my youth I worked in restaurant kitchens, and later published many fine books by famous chefs who became friends—Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Daniel Boulud, Maida Heatter, and Patrick O’Connell, among others—and learned from them, too. From time to time I’ve written about food for various publications, and many of the dishes I describe in this book appeared first in those magazines, usually with a list of ingredients and step-by-step instructions for combining them. But in this book I shall describe some favorite dishes as if I were talking to friends who have liked something I’ve cooked and want to try it themselves. To friends I would not dream of reciting a list of measured ingredients and numbered instructions. Except when it comes to baking, where precision is important, I prefer to suggest parameters and leave it to others to work out for themselves such specifics as time, quantity, and temperatures, so that the dish becomes theirs, too. Cooking is like poetry, where one’s unique voice is everything: words and their placement are essential ingredients, too, but the poet’s own voice makes them sing, which is why when you paraphrase a poem you end up with nothing but words.

For example, take a simple penne in tomato sauce
with basil and mozzarella, which I often make for friends at lunch.

For three or four people you will need a twenty-eight-ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes. These are grown in volcanic soil on the slopes of Vesuvius and sold in high-quality supermarkets and Italian fine-food shops. I buy mine at Di Palo’s magnificent cheese shop on Grand Street in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from where I live. From a culinary point of view, Di Palo’s is as close to a visit to Italy as you will get without leaving home. San Marzanos are more plump than other varieties, with more tomato flavor and just enough acidity. But if you can’t find San Marzanos, any good brand will do, preferably Italian. Muir Glen is a good American brand.