“My wife is about to have a baby, so I was wondering if you could make me work late for the next eighteen years or so.”
Recipe File
Without getting into replicating any of the major recipes in
50 Great Curries of India,
here are three tasty side dishes I’ve simplified and memorized. I once knew the correct amounts of each spice, but no longer. Taste as you go.
Spicy Potatoes
Cut potatoes into chunks and boil with turmeric powder and salt. Don’t overdo. Fry canola oil (or, if it is available, ghee) with twice as much red chili powder as coriander powder. Put in potatoes when they’re ready. Don’t overfry. Throw over garam masala powder just before you take them out, then sprinkle with
amchur
(dried mango powder: optional, but excellent).
Cauliflower with Shredded Ginger
Fry a little chopped-up fresh ginger in canola oil (or ghee). Throw in some cumin seeds, a little red chili powder, cumin powder, and salt. Add entire cauliflower, cut up into florets. Sprinkle with garam masala powder, cover, and cook until it’s how you like it.
Cucumber Raita
Peel and cut up cucumber, about a ½ cup. Mix with 1 cup of plain yogurt, cumin powder, some salt, and a little sugar. Wait until it looks like a
raita,
then sprinkle with paprika and eat. Goes with every meal.
On the Shelf
Rick Stein’s Food Heroes; Rick Stein’s Food Heroes: Another Helping;
and
Rick Stein’s Complete Seafood,
Rick Stein. These books guarantee food that’s cookable and that tastes wonderful, and they are well narrated.
Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook,
Mark Robinson. This collection is a little more adventurous (trip to Japanese supermarket required).
The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating,
Fergus Henderson. This book is strictly for the more adventurous cook with time to spare (and a love of offal).
IN THE TRENCHES
Nicola Cetorelli, a forty-five-year-old senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with his wife and two young children.
I would cook every day if I could. I’d shop even more often. For me, shopping is exciting: I may find something I’d really like to cook. I probably buy more than I should. Going to the store is like being the proverbial kid in the candy store. I don’t like to delegate the shopping. I get nervous when other people do it. I’m afraid that they’ll get the wrong thing. I have a recipe for lentil soup from my mother, for example. It has three ingredients: lentils, bay leaf, and garlic. But it has to be the right lentils, or else the dish won’t be any good. Lentils go well with fish, too. They are a fantastic match, as long as you have good ingredients. I am enamored with ingredients. I have developed a respect for good ingredients and I try to treat them well. I like the idea of how they interact and how I can modify a recipe. That, to me, is very creative.
I have two types of olive oil, one for cooking and one for dressing. With two ingredients I can make you very happy for dinner. Parmesan cheese, a good one, a real Parmigiano-Reggiano, and olive oil over pasta. It will be very good, I promise you. For a weekday, I can come up with very simple sauces that will make you very happy. What I might do depends on the season. In the summer, I’ll make a quick tomato sauce. Small cherry tomatoes, cut in half, go into the pan before turning on the heat. Garlic, too. All you do is heat them until the tomatoes shrivel and collapse. It takes ten minutes. It is really incredible, but you can’t use shitty tomatoes. I can’t make this in February with tomatoes that have been gassed to turn them red. I’ll go ten months a year without using tomatoes.
My favorite ingredient is salt. I have five or six different types, from kosher to pink Hawaiian clay salt. I keep them in little glass jars and clear plastic bags in their own cabinet in my kitchen. The kosher salt is the only one I use for cooking. I have gray salt, which I got when I kind of went nuts for salt, that I rarely use, just on steaks and the like. The pink Hawaiian I use for its color. I sprinkle the bright pink crystals on the white mozzarella for an eye-catching effect. The
fluer de sel
I use on salads, the English Maldon goes in soups. It gives them a nice crunch.
I think the role of food in family life is obvious. It is very central. We make a point of eating dinner together every day. I don’t make much of an actual effort to stress the importance of good food, but because I have such a passion for it, I believe it gets transmitted to the rest of the family. Even my six-year-old, who loves watermelon, has come to understand that you cannot have watermelon in December. I will not allow him to buy it.
Recipe File
Simple Tomato Sauce
This recipe should not take more than ten minutes to cook. If the tomatoes are nice and fresh, the idea is to preserve their flavor by avoiding cooking at length. Also, in the interest of obtaining a fresh flavor, it makes a difference to start with all the raw ingredients together instead of first sautéing the garlic with the olive oil. This is best served with a short pasta
(orecchiette, conchiglie,
or
penne rigate,
for example). I would not recommend long cuts, such as spaghetti, because the sauce will not be concentrated enough to stick on spaghetti-like shapes.
2 pints cherry tomatoes, washed and cut in half
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Parmesan cheese
Put a pot of water on high heat.
Salt it when it comes to a boil and add the pasta of your choice.
Place the tomatoes facedown in a skillet.
Add the garlic to the skillet.
Add the olive oil and a generous pinch of kosher salt.
Cover the skillet.
Put the skillet over high heat until the pan starts sizzling, then lower the heat to medium low and keep cooking until the tomatoes have collapsed.
Drain the pasta when it is ready, reserving some of the water.
Add the cooked pasta directly in the skillet with the sauce.
Mix together while the heat is still on.
Add some pasta water, if needed (it depends on how watery the tomatoes were in the first place) and keep mixing. This last step will make the sauce creamier.
Add more olive oil, if preferred, and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese to finish.
Carbonara di Zucchine
The important thing about making this recipe is to sauté the zucchini, not steam them. Don’t crowd the pan while cooking them. The squash has a naturally high water content, and too many in the pan will end up stewing them. The zucchini should have a bit of a bite when they are ready. The consistency should be reminiscent of bacon bits in this meatless version of the recipe.
2 medium-size zucchini
1 clove garlic, sliced
2 tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil
4 egg yolks
⅓ cup Parmesan cheese
⅓ cup Romano cheese
Salt
Black pepper
Cut the zucchini into small cubes, about ½ inch.
Heat a large nonstick skillet on medium high.
Add the oil and garlic and sauté until they turn golden.
Add the zucchini, making sure not to overcrowd pan. (Do this in separate batches if necessary.)
In the meantime, beat the yolks in the bowl to which the pasta will ultimately be added. Add the cheese, a pinch of salt, and freshly ground pepper to taste, and mix together.
Cook the pasta (your preferred cut, but spaghetti works perfectly with this sauce).
When the pasta is ready, drain it and reserve a cup of the water.
Immediately add the pasta to the egg mix, along with the sautéed zucchini, still hot from just being cooked. The heat of the zucchini and pasta will cook the egg mix while leaving a creamy consistency.
Note: The eggs will be somewhat undercooked, at least according to conventional cooking temperatures. If this causes unease, do the following: Combine the egg mix and the pasta together in the skillet with the zucchini and stir until the eggs are thoroughly cooked. Use some of the reserved water while mixing all the ingredients together to try to achieve a similar creaminess.
Quick Fish Fillets in Tomato Sauce
2 pints cherry tomatoes
1 medium onion, sliced not too thin
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
4 fresh fish fillets, about 4 ounces each (preferably fish with a consistency similar to that of bass, grouper, and so forth) Fresh parsley or cilantro
Place the tomatoes, onion, and olive oil in a nonstick skillet.
Sprinkle with salt.
Cover the skillet if using fresh tomatoes.
Set the skillet over medium-high heat.
Cook until the tomatoes collapse and become concentrated (this takes longer to cook than the Simple Tomato Sauce recipe).
Sprinkle salt on the fish fillets.
Add the fish to the skillet, skin side down, on top of the tomato and onion sauce.
Cover the skillet.
The fish will be steamed more than sautéed.
Baste the top of the fish with the tomato sauce occasionally to impart more flavor.
The fish is cooked when the flesh is barely opaque and it flakes easily.
Finish with freshly chopped parsley or cilantro.
Note: This recipe works with strained canned tomatoes instead of fresh ones. They just need to cook a little longer to achieve some concentration.
Tip: Use the leftover sauce, and also bits of the fish, instead of plain tomatoes in basic lentil soup recipes.
MARK KURLANSKY
Confessions of a Foodiephobiac
Mark Kurlansky has published twenty books, about half of which have a food theme. He has worked as a cook and pastry chef and has won the James Beard Foundation Award, the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Award, and the
Bon Appétit
American Food and Entertaining Award, in addition to being a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and the recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His books include
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History; 1968: The Year That Rocked the World;
and
Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
I was walking my poodle in the park when I came across a man with an Airedale. It was one of those New York winter days with brilliant pale sunlight that you pay for and with air that is so cold it burns your face. The flawlessly blue sky looked like a sheet of ice. As we stood there freezing, he started complaining about the weather—the man, that is; Airedales are very accepting of cold weather. This was not what was forecast. It was supposed to be a rainy day.
We were having this discussion of how unreliable weather forecasts are when suddenly his face turned mean, like a snarling terrier, and he said, “So how the hell do they know that the climate is getting worse?”
An invisible warning light started flashing. He was a global warming denier—scientists call them contrarians. These people who think that science is a question of belief—people who don’t believe in evolution, the roundness of the earth, or the Copernican order of the solar system—irritate me. But having spent many years advocating the tactics of nonviolent activism, I know that I should conceal my scorn and try to explain in a way that is respectful (that is, act more like a poodle and less like an Airedale), and so I pointed out that global warming is not documented by mere forecasting, that there is a record of weather going back for centuries that can be studied, and certain patterns can be detected, and things can be gleaned from these patterns.
And as I enter my seventh decade, a particularly gruesome way of saying I am sixty years old, I find that there are patterns I can discover in my life that are perplexing and instructive. What am I to make of the strange realization I came to, only recently, that I have never been seriously involved with a woman who cooks? In fact, to the best of my recollection, I have never even dated a woman who cooks. I have never before thought about this. It was not a decision I consciously made, but like the storms of El Niño, it must mean something if it keeps happening.
I do believe in the banal and ubiquitous observation that cooking is an expression of love. At least it can be. It certainly is when I cook for my family. In a rush to the cheap talk-radio version of Freud, it would seem that I am capable of love but unwilling to receive it.
Not so fast. I love to be cooked for. I wish more people would cook for me. People are reluctant to do it because there are intimidating rumors adrift about my gastronomic expertise. Friends often say that they are afraid to cook for me, but I am not hypercritical and will happily accept most any effort in the spirit in which it is offered. The gesture is more meaningful to me than the food.
I think my phobia of women who cook started, as many things do with me, in my being from that fabled generation, born with the cold war and the civil rights movement, come of age with the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. It was a generation that sought a complete break with the world of our parents, with their politics, their wars, their music, and their marriages. Many women my age do not take their husbands’ names and their husbands don’t want them to.
But there is this one little-noted and somewhat shocking anomaly. The sixties generation was the earliest-marrying generation in the history of twentieth-century America. It was common to get married in college, and many wild college kids were hunting for spouses.
Well, that was scary.
The drugs, sex, and radicalism were all there back in my college days, but, in several instances, so were the girls who wanted to cook for me in the hope that the relationship would become a permanent, legalized arrangement. There were even a few cases of young women wanting to clean. All of this profoundly offended me. Surely a meaningful modern relationship was about something other than being cooked for and cleaned up after. Long before the advent of global warming contrarians, I was irritated by feminism contrarians. Unfortunately, I always seemed to have roommates who, though not particularly interested in marriage, thought this was a situation worth exploiting. So the women were forever showing up at our house or apartment ready to cook. I reacted against this with a primitive form of feminism. I made it clear that anyone who wanted to be involved with me would not be cooking for me. I frequently heard the tearful good-bye line, “I feel that you don’t really need me.” Well, it was true: I didn’t.