In their persistent humor and charm and their seeming effortlessness, these essays remind me of the best of Mark Twain’s.
 

You may have come across a condensed version of Amis’ hangover recovery advice in the Daily Mail a couple years ago. I enjoyed it at the time, but now, having read that section of the book in full, I’m aghast that so much was lost in the cutting. Couldn’t the editors have omitted some of the day’s news instead?

Amis advocates a two-pronged approach to hangover recovery: the physical, and the metaphysical. The third step in his treatment of the metaphysical hangover (M.H.) — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” — entails embarking on either the M.H. Literature Course or the M.H. Music Course, or, if necessary, both in succession. “The structure of both Courses … rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.”

Amis’ Rx for hangover reading:

Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lose, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick someone less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A.E. Housman and/or R.S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Houshold, C.S. Forester (perhaps the most useful of the lot). Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white — i.e. not black — comedy: P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one*). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.

This weekend, while grapefruit is still indisputably in season, I’m going to make Amis’ Salty Dog: “Moisten the rim of a glass and twirl it about in a saucer of table salt, so that it picks up a thickish coating about a quarter or an inch deep. Carefully add one part gin and two parts fresh grapefruit juice, stir thoroughly; add ice, stir again, and drink through the band of salt. Splendid for out of doors.”
 

* Hear, hear.

Muriel Spark’s 1992 autobiography has been characterized as purse-lipped, sterile, and withholding, a manipulative account designed to settle scores and divert attention from anything unflattering.

Curriculum Vitae may be more factual than confessional, but judged on its own terms rather than by the standards of the contemporary tell-all, the book is a charming, idiosyncratic, and closely observed personal history, one that manages to surprise even as it turns out to be almost exactly what you’d expect the author of Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Comforters, and The Girls of Slender Means to offer up.
 

In an early passage, Spark explains the way children made tea in 1930s Edinburgh.

Sixty years ago is a short time in history. As recently as that I made at least one pot of tea for the family every day. It was delicious tea. Every schoolgirl, every schoolboy, knew how to make that exquisite pot of tea.

You boiled the kettle, and just before it came to the boil, you half-filled the teapot to warm it. When the kettle came to the boil, you kept it simmering while you threw out the water in the teapot and then put in a level spoonful of tea for each person and one for the pot. Up to four spoonfuls of tea from that sweetly odorous tea-caddy would make the perfect pot. The caddy spoon was a special shape, like a small silver shovel. You never took the kettle to the teapot; always the pot to the kettle, where you filled it, but never to the brim.

You let it stand, to ‘draw’, for three minutes.

The tea had to be drunk out of china, as thin at the rim as you could afford. Otherwise you lost the taste of the tea.

You put in milk sufficient to cloud the clear liquid, and sugar if you had a sweet tooth. Sugar or not was the only personal choice allowed.

Everyone who came to the house was offered a cup of tea, as in Dostoyevsky. What his method of making tea was I don’t know. (Tea from samovars must have been different, certainly without milk, and served in a glass set in a brass or silver holder.)

Tea at five o’clock was an occasion for visitors. One ate bread and butter first, graduating to cakes and biscuits. Five o’clock tea was something you ‘took’. If you had it as six you ‘ate’ your tea.

Tea at half-past six was high tea, a full meal which resembled breakfast. You had kippers, smoked haddock (smokies), ham, eggs or sausages for high tea. Potatoes did not accompany this meal. But a pot of tea, with bread, butter and jam, was always part of it.

In my continuing quest to set the world record for dullness, tonight I’m picking up some sausages on the way home and following Spark’s instructions with the pretty tea set (above) that Lizzie gave me for Christmas. Too bad I don’t have any darning to do. Afterward, naturally, I’ll go out on the balcony and water my plants.

Hello from Tuscany, which contrary to all the books and movies turns out to be a gated-community-type suburban enclave, staggeringly beautiful as advertised, but very quiet except for the madly honking, bat-out-of-hell drivers on the narrow walled roads. Life here is calm and quiet, wholesome if you don’t count the vats of wine, and hermitlike.

Given this, my big news is that I discovered this morning that the unripe-when-picked persimmons from the tree outside are finally ripe, so I plucked 3 of them off their branch and cut them all in half and scooped them out and whizzed the insides in the blender, which gave me exactly one cup of smooth orangey-gold pulp. With this, I made the following old-fashioned and very easy recipe, which is from an old index card in my half-sister Thea’s recipe box. I steamed the pudding for the full two hours, as instructed, and the second it was done, about 10 minutes ago, we ate huge slices of it with vanilla ice cream and, with our mouths full, we raved to each other about how good it was and are in fact about to go down for more.

In the lamentable absence of any impending soiree with strong cocktails and drunken chatter and everyone all tarted up in shiny clothes, it’s a festive bit of holiday cheer.
 

Persimmon Pudding

1 c. sugar
1c. flour
1 tsp. baking pwdr
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 c milk
1 c. persimmon pulp
2 T. melted butter
1 tsp. vanilla
1 egg
sprinkle of nuts

Mix all ingredients except nuts. Pour batter into a greased mold or coffee can or metal mixing bowl (I used a Bundt pan). Sprinkle nuts on top (I used a combination of pine nuts and chopped walnuts because that’s what I had on hand). Set mold on a trivet in a large kettle, and pour water in the kettle to a depth of 2 inches. Cover the kettle and steam the pudding for 2 hours.

Freezes well. Re-steam for 1/2 hour to reheat before serving.
 

Note: better than vanilla ice cream, serve this with hard sauce, as follows:

1/2 cup soft butter
1 1/2 cup sifted confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract OR 2 tablespoons rum or brandy

Cream butter with confectioners’ sugar until light and fluffy. Stir in vanilla extract or rum or brandy.
 

Image of persimmon tree swiped from Slow Muse.

“It can be said,” Fisher admits, “with few people to argue the point, that water boils when it has been heated to two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit.”

Having read a few chapters into the book, at this point you will probably have the sense that she is getting ready to disapprove, and she will not let you down.

Myself, I would say that when it bubbles with large energetic bubbles, and looks ready to hop from the kettle, and makes a rocky rather than a murmuring noise, and sends off a deal of steam, it is boiling. [A friend of mine who grew up alongside a samovar has only one way to describe water proper for tea: "A mad boil." In the same forceful way she never says rolls or toast must be hot, or very hot. They must be "hot-hot-hot!"...]

At this point, full of sound and fury, it is ready to be used… The quaint old fiction of the kettle simmering all day on the hearth, waiting to be turned into a delicious cup of tea, is actively disturbing to anyone who cares very much whether his tea will be made from lively water instead of a liquid that in spite of its apparent resemblance to Webster’s definition is flat, exhausted, tasteless — in other words, with the hell cooked out of it…

It is safe to say that then the water boils, as it surely will, given enough heat under it, it is ready. Then, at that moment and no other, pour it into the teapot or over and around or into whatever it is meant for, whatever calls for it. If it cannot be used then, turn off the heat and start over again when you yourself are ready; it will harm you less to wait than it will the water to boil too long.

With its mix of useful advice, withering commentary, and obsolete references of historical curiosity, this book would make an excellent gift for anyone who’s spending less and cooking more these days — provided he or she does not suffer, as I do, from a touch of the OCD.

At first I was afraid that Fisher’s instructions would set me off on an endless loop of pointless activity — i.e., is this really the moment that the water rose to a boil? Was the steam intense enough? The bubbling insane enough? Maybe, just in case, I should turn it off, let it cool down, and then start over… Fortunately, my caffeine addiction has (so far) forestalled descent into this kind of madness.
 

See also: Kate Christensen on Fisher’s Consider the Oyster.

Both of these recipes remind me of Peter De Vries (pictured), author of one of my very favorite novels, who contributed to The Great American Writers’ Cookbook his secret recipe for “Frazzled Eggs,” and who asserted in a 1949 New Yorker essay (or is it fiction?) that the “gourmet and the person who is merely fond of food have no connection.”

The person who is fond of food likes things that are edible but not necessarily delicacies (steak, sweet corn, apple pie with cheese), while the gourmet likes things that are delicacies but not necessarily edible (brains, kidneys, snails, etc.). One of several cooks who recently banged their luggage in and out of our door had a formidable history of ministration to the latter. Eighteen years in the employ of an aging friand called Pomeroy had left her skilled in the frazzled nuance but helpless before a family pot roast… One gland after another crossed our table, leaving as its single nutritive effect hunger at midnight. I took to padding downstairs in slippers and robe to the icebox, there to find nothing but food for thought — leftover chicken livers and the cooling lobes of cattle…

I know, I know, a cook. High-class problems, heart bleeds, etc. It’s an entertaining essay, though.
 

Here’s De Vries on his eggs, which I’ve never attempted to replicate:

I don’t cook — except for steaks and chops, which isn’t cooking, and one conceivable slight invention which might rate inclusion in this collection. A breakfast I call Frazzled Eggs, which consists in frying them so you scarcely need the bacon, and thus cut down on your cholesterol, if that’s an aim. Have two eggs broken and ready in a crock, or cup, or ramekin. On a hot burner set a small skillet with plenty of cooking oil in it… When the oil is so hot it smokes, slide the eggs together into the skillet. They will instantly brown and blister up, like potato chips. Take the skillet and roll the hot oil around so the eggs are browned well to the edges, which should crinkle and fluff up. Let them simmer for a few minutes on a lowered flame (all the searing you want you will get immediately) either turned over if you want them over easy, or under a lid with a few drops of water in the pan to steam them a little, puffing them up, if you prefer them basted sunny-side up. If you’ve browned and potato-chip-blistered the whites just right, you won’t miss the bacon too much, though of course with bacon, ham or sausage they’re always that much better. This with a wedge of hot cornbread slathered with marmalade or jelly, together with a cup of strong coffee, and you’re ready to face the day.

Somewhat related: Jeffrey Frank’s 2004 essay on De Vries; a call to restore De Vries to print; gearing up to read De Vries; my praise for his The Blood of the Lamb, and more, and more. And on the recipe front: an acknowledgment that seeking information about a favorite writer’s diet may be the lowest form of literary boondoggle; Ford Madox Ford’s garlic chicken, and more; also, an Awl reader makes Balk’s steak, pronounces it fucking good.

De Vries image taken from the LIFE archives.

This year, instead of a tree, we decorated Max’s beloved pole lamp. He calls the result a “3-way collision between Festivus austerity, Xmas kitsch, and midcentury modernism.”

I call it, “We can take all that down on the 1st, right?”
 

Christmas Day was an intimate and jolly affair. Joseph brought his cornbread-sausage-fennel stuffing and his chocolate bourbon pecan pie. Max made the salad, kept the wine flowing, and struggled against the rising tide of dishes. I tried Hannah Green’s (a/k/a Joanne Greenberg of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) “Ford Madox Ford’s Garlic Chicken” recipe from The Great American Writers Cookbook. It required some guesswork: oven temperature, size of bird, etc. After our feast, we could barely straggle out to meet a friend for a 7:15 showing of Milk.

I hope your holidays have been merry and bright, however you’ve celebrated them, and that 2009 brings you only good things. I’ll leave you till early January with Green’s recipe (and a few of my own [bracketed] notes).

Ford Maddox Ford’s Garlic Chicken

I call it my garlic chicken, but I sometimes also call it Ford Madox Ford’s garlic chicken because the idea comes from his Provence. His recipe calls for at least a kilo of garlic — but that may be the result of his grand hyperbole when it comes to anything Provençal. (“Is it any better in heaven, Ford, than you found it in Provence?”) At any rate I’ve modified that kilo down to 3 or 4 whole garlics [I used 4], all peeled, so the cloves are placed in the roasting pan in such way as to form a bed on which the chicken is placed to roast. In this way, as Ford points out, the garlic perfumes the chicken, the sauce, (even the whole house where it is being roasted,) but only those who want to, need eat the garlic. (Ford, however, mentioned this garlic in a tale set down to prove that if you eat enough garlic, a great deal of garlic, that is, you won’t have garlic breath.) (And whether that is really true or not, I may never know.)

Here are my directions mixed with my inventions:

The whole bottom of the roasting pan should be covered with a thin layer of olive oil, and into the olive oil set the peeled cloves of garlic in a shape more or less like an almond so that the chicken can rest on them and cover them. Rub the chicken with lemon, and salt it, and pepper it. Stuff it with a tomato which should in turn itself be stuffed with a clove or two of garlic and salted and peppered. It should also, if possible, be stuffed with a few sprigs of rosemary and of thyme. (When I first started making this chicken in the winter of 1975, we were staying in a house in Provençe, and part of the cooking of the chicken consisted of running out into the garden at the last moment before the chicken went into the cover with scissors, a flashlight, an umbrella sometimes, often in a long skirt and high heels, to pick a few sprigs of rosemary and of thyme and a leaf or two of sage. [I used three sprigs of rosemary, five of thyme, and one of sage.] The chicken has always been good, but the fragrance never so intoxicating as there in Provençe with the herbs fresh from the night garden.)

Potatoes should be peeled [I did not peel them] and placed around the chicken to roast with it. [I threw a couple sprigs of rosemary and a couple of thyme on top.] I’ve never yet lived in a house with an oven that had a temperature regulator, so one of the secrets of this chicken seems to be a very hot oven, so the chicken gets crispy and brown on the outside. [I preheated my oven to 475°.] It needs constant attention. The potatoes need to be turned so they get brown on all sides [I need to do this next time], and at the same time the chicken should be basted with the hot olive oil it is cooking in, at least 4 or 5 times. Before it goes into the oven a little olive oil should be smeared on top of it, too. [I also put some on the potatoes.] It needs about an hour and 15 minutes, perhaps a little more, depending on the size of the chicken. [Mine was almost 4 pounds, and it took about 90 minutes. It never did get very crispy -- maybe I used too much olive oil? -- but it was moist & garlicky all the same.]

At the last minute, take out the potatoes and put them in a serving bowl, and throw in a little boiling water, perferably the water of the green vegetable, which should just itself have finished cooking. Asparagus is wonderful if it is in season. But broccoli or green beans or spinach are also good with it. [I wilted some spinach.] If there seem to be too many people for one chicken it is a good idea to make hollandaise sauce for the broccoli or the asparagus.

This makes a fine dinner for 4 people or even six [I wouldn't say six], but it is also a great dinner for two… Perhaps I should add that the chicken should be served with a red wine. [Some of us had red, others white.] I supposed that a Chateauneuf du Pape would be the ideal wine, but it also does quite well ith a Chaors, a Medoc, a Chianti. A green salad with oil and vinegar — no spices — should be served after it. [Our salad was dressed with a little lemon, olive oil, salt, and pepper.] The first course should be something light — perhaps watercress soup or sliced tomatoes with parsley, oil, and vinegar. [We had no such course.]

When the chicken is gone, throw the bones into a pot, cover it with water, add a few sprigs of celery leaf and an onion, and boil it for about two hours. Take out the chicken bones, pick off all the chicken, to put back into the soup, add some white beans, another onion, leeks, potatoes, carrots, a bit of cabbage, and a few pieces of pumpkin or melon, and you have a wonderful soup…

Something I learned this Thanksgiving, and really should have known or at least researched beforehand: a 19-pound turkey for seven people is ridiculous, ridiculous overkill, especially when one of those people is a vegetarian. The past few days have been punctuated by ever-more-creative (and unappetizing) turkey concoctions, and endless naps.

Today, in search of a recipe to counteract the dismal sameness of the bird and its tryptophan hangovers, I pulled my old copy of The Great American Writers’ Cookbook down from the shelf, and flicked around till I arrived at Harry Crews’ instructions for preparing snake steak.
 

Not only am I pretty sure I can’t find the ingredients here in Brooklyn, but even if I were down south, I’m thinking it’s possible that the author is pulling our legs about how easy it is to smoke out, bag, and gut a rattlesnake.

Once upon a time, there was apparently a Tampa-area town called Rattlesnake, where a cannery mass-produced the delicacy in “supreme sauce,” to be shipped around the world. But the place has been renamed, and rattlers are scarce now. All my time in Florida, even hiking out in the Everglades or on Paynes Prairie, or descending into the Devil’s Milhopper, I never saw a diamondback in the wild. Nor was I itching to.

But at the moment I’d happily agree to prepare and eat rattlesnake (caught and killed by someone else) rather than turkey next November. It’s in that spirit that I post Crews’ recipe here. Follow — or read — at your own risk…

Snake Steak

Take one diamondback rattle snake.

(Fifteen feet of garden hose, a little gasoline in a capped jar, a croker sack, and a long stick will be all you’ll need to take the snake. On a cold day, 32 degrees or colder, find the hole of a gopher — the Southerner’s name for a land tortoise. Run the hose down the hole until it is all the way to the bottom. Pour a teaspoon of gasoline into the hose. Cover the end of the hose with your mouth and blow. Shortly, the rattlesnake will wander out of the hole. Put the stick in the middle of his body, pick him up, and drop him in the sack. On the way home, don’t sling the sack over your shoulder, and generally try not to get struck through the cloth.)

Gut and skin the snake. No particular skill is needed for either job. Cut off the head six inches behind the eyes. Cut off the tail 12 inches above the last rattle. Rip him open along the stomach and take out everything you see. Peel him like a banana using a pair of pliers as you would to skin a catfish. Cut the snake into one inch steaks. Soak in vinegar for ten minutes. Drain and dry. Sprinkle with hot sauce, any of the brands out of New Iberia. Roll in flour and deep fry, being careful not to overcok. Salt to taste and serve with whatever you ordinarily eat with light, delicate meat.

Figure one snake per guest. Always better to have too much than too little when you’re eating something good.

Amazon’s Search Inside feature doesn’t turn up Crews’ snake steak in the second edition of the book, The New Great American Writers Cookbook. But William Harrison does tell you how to cook a timber rattlesnake. Also, should you go rattlesnake hunting and catch one that bites itself rather than you, here’s a what to do.

Image of the Rattlesnake, FL, post office, taken from the St. Pete Times.

Now she’s also test-driving recipes. “Cookbooks can force you into moments of great vulnerability,” she observes, before confirming what you’ve always suspected: that the slickest celebrity chef volumes aren’t tested before “being slapped with a $35 price tag and shipped off to bookstores.” Below Crispin shares one of her own standbys.
 

When I lived in Cork, Ireland, there was a small bakery that sold the best brown bread. It wasn’t the traditional brown bread, which is made only of whole wheat flour, oats, buttermilk, salt, and baking soda. That particular form of torture taunted you with its earthy aroma and the way it crumbled in your mouth when pulled from the oven and immediately slathered with butter and jam. An hour later it had the texture and flavor of a rock. Then the only thing you could do with it (besides throwing it at the small children yelling outside your window) was chip off wedges to scoop the last bits of egg yolk, baked bean sauce and rasher grease into your mouth without directly licking your breakfast plate.

In the ten years since, I occasionally tried recipes for brown bread but ended up mostly with rocks, and hardly ever with the crumbly, moist bread with a crust so thick you could tip the loaf onto its cut side and leave it out overnight. It couldn’t be so hard to find a bread with a shelf life of over an hour, could it?

My sister gifted me with the cookbook Irish Puddings, Tarts, Crumbles, and Fools by Margaret M. Johnson, which also included a recipe for brown bread. I gave it a shot, and was pleasantly surprised. It was almost exactly the bread I remembered and loved. Over the years I’ve made this recipe a hundred times. There’s half a loaf sitting on my countertop right now, cut side down. Here is my slightly modified version of Johnson’s recipe:
 

Kinsale Brown Soda Bread

4 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup quick cooking (not instant, nor steel cut, unless you want to break a tooth) Irish oatmeal
1/4 cup wheat bran
1 teaspoon baking soda
generous pinch of salt
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup canola oil
2 cups buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan.

In a large bowl, mix flour, oats, wheat bran, baking soda and salt. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in buttermilk, oils, and honey. Whisk the wet ingredients, gradually incorporating the dry as you go. Switch to a wooden spoon when your whisk gets clogged. Stir until dough forms, then switch to your hands and knead. (You can do this directly in the bowl, save yourself the countertop mess.) Form into a loaf, put in pan, and bake for about 50 to 55 minutes.

There’s no need to eat it directly from the oven, since this one actually keeps for a couple days, but just try to stop yourself. Serve with salted butter and jam.
 

Lizzie Skurnick, poet, YA novelist, critic, and longtime (in blog years) friend to MaudNewton.com, will be publishing a book based on her marvelous Fine Lines, a weekly Jezebel column in which she takes “a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books” she loved in her youth.

I’ve been sitting on the news since she told me over salade nicoise a few weeks ago, so it’s fitting that she shares her own recipe below. Enjoy while thumbing through your tattered copy of The Secret Garden.
 

Unless you go back 10 generations to some Heberts in New Orleans, I’m not French. However, I am overly fond of salty oily crunchy vegetabley fatty eggy things — the ne plus ultra of which, combined, is the salade nicoise, which in my estimation stands even above frisee aux lardons. (Which has BACON!)

I chanced upon the best recipe for the divine assemblage this winter, as I fighting off a series of fevers that made me alternately crave malted milk balls and Omega-3 acids. One December evening, having slept off the worst of a fever, I woke starving, starving, craving crunch and oily snap. I would like to say I immediately headed to the grocery store, but I actually headed to the phone, where I called a nearby brasserie to see if it was on the menu.

The owner and maitre d’ informed me it was out of season — “You know, thees is a beautiful salade for summer, when zee vegetables are beautiful” — but then thoughtfully took charge the moment I said I was willing to forge ahead anyway.

“You ‘ave shallots? Some shallots in the house?”

“I have nothing,” I said.

“Okay, you put together a pen,” he said briefly, and covered the phone. I heard the voice of a waiter, anxiously querying. “I am on zee phone!” he said angrily, and came back. I immediately put together a pen. “You are still there?”
 

Salade Nicoise (Whole Foods, my opinion, organic actually tastes better edition)

Ingredients:

1 head Boston bibb lettuce (that organic Whole Food plastic box one is good)
1 handful haricot verts (make sure they’re skinny and fresh)
1 egg (organic)
3-4 small fingerling potatoes, red or yellow (organic!)
5 cherry tomatoes (you know the drill)
3 teaspoons capers
6 black olives, with pits
1 can anchovies (I like the Genovo brand, rolled with capers)
1 can tuna (Genovo brand is nice, in OIL, light, not white)
Any other crudite you desire

Dressing:

1 shallot
3-4 heads of garlic
2-3 teaspoons red wine or champagne vinegar
1 tablespoon mustard (I like the yellow polish kind, but you can use Dijon if you must)
Olive oil
Freshly ground salt and pepper to taste
Glass jar with lid
 

Since they need to be chilled, immediately start the potatoes boiling on high and the haricot vert steaming. Chop your garlic and shallot very fine, and place in empty glass jar (an old jelly one works best). Add one or two teaspoons vinegar, enough to just cover the pulp without much extra liquid. Add your teaspoon or two of mustard. You should have a yellow-ish mass the consistency of chewed grapefruit. Cover, and set aside.

By now, your haricot vert should be steamed. Place in fridge, or, if it’s December, outside on the window sill. Check your potatoes — they may well be done. If so, follow suit. Either way, start your egg. Use the Patti LaBelle* method.

Take your Boston lettuce, rinse, dry, chop or tear into bitable bites, place in large bowl.

Did you check your potatoes? Okay, they should be done now. Place those in fridge/outside now too.

Go back to your dressing. Open the jar, open your olive oil. Fill with a LOT of olive oil — say, two-three inches above the pulpy mass. Grind some salt and pepper in, a few rounds. Cover and shake until it they emulsify, maybe 30 seconds. Taste, and add more of anything that seems off to you. Set aside.

How are your potatoes and beans? Are they chilled enough? Probably. Go back to your lettuce, and add your dressing, as much as you like. Toss the lettuce. Add it whatever receptacle you’d like. Take all your crudites — tomato, haricot vert, potato, olives, capers — and place them on top of the lettuce. Don’t mix — put them each in a little area, like a patchwork quilt. When you add the tuna and anchovies, glop some oil on too, you wuss. Slice egg into quarters and place on top too. Eat an anchovy, just for the hell.

Now, cover it all with a bit more dressing. Assess for oily crunch. Eat!
 

* Place egg in pan, cover completely with water, cover. When water is on high boil, turn off, move off burner, and let sit, covered, for about five minutes. Drain and set aside.

It’s been almost three years since Hurricane Katrina, so you don’t hear much about New Orleans these days. After all, the whole painful rebuilding (and, unbelievably, collections) saga doesn’t make for a sexy news hour, and you wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of Anderson Cooper’s ability to spend two months asking the same three talking heads whether Reverend Wright’s comments will be the death of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Has anyone ever left The Big Easy without pining for a bowl of spicy seafood black magic intermittently ever after? If so, it wasn’t Mark Twain, who observed that “New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.” Get your chopping knife out, and enjoy.
 

I didn’t grow up eating gumbo. I grew up eating seafood boiled, straight out of the shell, or freshly scaled and cleaned. I’ve always been an impatient eater, and to this day I generally prefer to eat things nearly in their wild state. I did grow up eventually, though, and I did come to understand the appeal of the big pot boiling away for hours, containing whatever you felt like throwing in it or, in some cases, containing everything you had. Gumbo became my dish, and I cook it nearly always for other people.

I learned my recipe from some very close friends in Greenville, Alabama, and I used to cook it whenever we stayed on Dauphin Island at the entrance to Mobile Bay, one over from Petit Bois Island. Although I learned the recipe from my friends, I watched it done by their ex-housekeeper, a woman who was with them for more than fifty years and no longer cooks or cleans, but still goes over to their place every day. The editorial comments are my own, but nearly all of them came from watching and listening to this woman as she cooked. There’s love in the gumbo, you know. All that chopping, you know. I can’t make this gumbo on Dauphin Island anymore because the place was nearly ruined by Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina. I haven’t made gumbo at all in a long time. Maybe this summer.
 

First you get a big pot, not the ones from Wal-Mart with the thin bottoms, but your mama’s pot. The one all the way at the back there, behind all the others. Get the dust off.

Here’s what else you need:

This is a seafood gumbo, but there are dozens of other kinds. You make it with whatever you’ve got, which could be sausage — very popular, local sausage on the Gulf Coast is terrific — or chicken, or game. Squirrel is great if you’ve got one or two. My wife, a public defender, was once driving one of her clients to court when she swerved to avoid a squirrel in the road, and her client shouted from the backseat, “Go on and hit it, I’ll put it in a pot.” She told me that story a couple times before I caught on that she thought it was funny. It sounded merely practical to me.

There’s even a gumbo z’herbes dish, sometimes called green gumbo, which should be nearly entirely vegetarian and very delicate. (Maybe a hambone in there for a bit, but that’s it.) By tradition gumbo z’herbes is a Holy Thursday/Good Friday dish, but like red beans and rice (traditionally a Monday meal in New Orleans) it’s pretty delicious any day. I especially like gumbo z’herbes in the summer when you want to something lighter, or when my vegetarian friends come over and I don’t want them to be left out.
 

That said, on with the seafood gumbo:

1. Fry up the bacon in a heavy iron skillet until there’s no more fat on it. Fry it at medium-high so you don’t burn anything. Save the bacon for sandwiches, snacks. Leave the drippings in the pan, and if you’ve got the time, sift out some of the bacon bits and charred things left behind. Turn it down to low-medium, just keeping the drippings hot.

2. Make the roux! Add flour to the bacon drippings a little at a time, stirring constantly with a wood spoon over low-medium heat. You don’t want any clumps, and you don’t want to burn it, so keep stirring and don’t stop for 10-15 minutes until the roux is smooth and about the color of a slightly used copper penny. Keep some oil (or fatback!) nearby in case the roux starts to get too thick and clumpy, like a paste. It should be just short of being a paste. It should be a thick, saucy looking thing.

3. Meanwhile, in that large, heavy pot, melt a chunk of butter and add the onions, peppers, and celery. Sautee them until they’re wilted, not fried.

4. When the vegetables get to that nice, wilted and tender point, take the iron skillet with the roux off the fire and pour it over the vegetables in the big pot, slowly, stirring the whole time so that the peppers, onions and celery get nicely coated.

(If you’re really good with roux, you can sautee the onions and peppers in it, saving yourself a step. But be careful and do not let it burn. Then the flavor gets ashy and dark and overpowering.)

5. Once you’ve got the roux together with the onions and peppers in the big pot, add the stock, the okra, and the tomatoes.

6. Bring the whole mess to a boil, and then turn it down to a simmer.

7. Add the thyme, the bay leaves, and the other spices to taste. You could also add a little wine and oregano if you’ve got it.

8. Simmer for 30 minutes, check the spices, amend as needed.

9. After an hour of simmering, the gumbo should be reduced by half.

10. After that hour, add the crab meat and let it cook for 10-15 minutes before adding the shrimp, which should be allowed to cook another 10-15 minutes.

11. You’re done! Serve it with white, long-grained rice. Not over the rice, just with a dollop of rice on top to be mixed in with the gumbo. If the gumbo seems too thin for your taste when you’re about to serve it, add some file´ (powdered sassafras leaf) to each bowl before serving it. Some people say you must have file´ in your gumbo, but I say bull. File´ is a thickener, but if you’ve used an adequate amount of okra (which will fall apart and disappear, leaving only its seeds as tell-tale evidence of its sacrifice), it should be thick enough. The hardcore file´ aficionados claim that it adds a kind of citrus flavor to the gumbo, something like lemon, but I can’t taste it. You try it, see what you think.

12. The first thing you may notice about this recipe is that I haven’t suggested using crawfish. Crawfish is probably the most common thing you’ll see in a gumbo on the Gulf Coast, usually coupled with andouille or some other Creole or Cajun sausage. There are no real rules, but generally you wouldn’t find shrimp and crawfish in the same pot. Crawfish is great in gumbo because, like shrimp, it doesn’t fall apart after two hours on the stove. The problem is that unless you live near a crawfish fishery, the crawfish you’ll find in your grocery store likely comes flash-frozen and pre-cooked from Vietnam and isn’t even the same species. Either send down to Louisiana for crawfish (or Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, which all have crawfish fisheries), or find something else to put in your pot. Like squirrel. The same goes for crab and shrimp, by the way — a lot of it’s imported, but you can usually find it fresher and more local if you do a little looking.

Anyway, since people who live around crawfish already know how to make gumbo, and don’t need to be told what to put in it, I’ve modified this recipe for those who don’t live close to crawfish and need a little more guidance.

13. Gumbo ages well and it also freezes well. (Never freeze oysters, though!) Make it ahead and keep it in the refrigerator for a couple days before heating it and serving. Gumbo is best when it’s had some rest.
 

Below the Alabama native shares a sausage and peppers recipe inspired by Mario Batali and Goodfellas. “I am sure I make [it] the exact wrong way,” he says. “I apologize to everyone who cares!”
 

For the first several years of my unemployment, during which I was “finishing” my extremely ill-fated 400-page sequel to Tom Sawyer, I mainly sat around the apartment and watched TV. One thing that made me happy every single day was watching Molto Mario starring Mario Batali on the Food Network. I don’t think that show comes on anymore. But Mario Batali led me to believe that I might do exciting things with my time. He helped me come to my decision to make sausage and peppers.

I don’t believe I ever saw Mario make sausage and peppers, but I had heard them discussed in great movies like Goodfellas. I learned a general trick from Mario, though, which was to add some of the salty, foamy, carbohydratey water from your cooking pasta to your pasta sauce at the very last minute. That comes in later!
 

I improvised my sausage and peppers recipe based on some of the things I had seen Mario do and some things from movies. First I put some olive oil in the bottom of a nice big pot made out of something called “Magnalite.” It was my grandmother’s pot, and it’s great to cook sauce and soup in. I put the oil on about medium or medium high, and browned some (three? four?) links of spicy Italian sausage, squeezed out of their casings into the pot, in several pieces. (This was on a gas oven, which I miss. I still haven’t figured out how to judge things correctly on an electric oven.)

Then I removed the browned sausage and put in some chopped onion, chopped red bell peppers (or sometimes orange or yellow) and chopped garlic, all three chopped poorly. Sometimes I put in a whole bunch of peppers, like six. I let the onions and garlic get pretty brown, the way Mario likes them, then I dumped in a good bit of wine, as much as I could stand to dump in rather than drinking. Oh, before I dumped in the wine, I threw in a whole bunch of red pepper flakes and let them sizzle in the oil, but just for a second — not so they turned black or anything, just a heartbeat.

Now, adding the wine so early is something I never saw Mario do. He always adds the wine after the tomatoes. He would probably faint to be associated with my practice! But I seemed to recall reading in the New York Times that adding the wine first, and letting it cook WAY down (like to half the volume it was before) can give a tomato sauce a “deep, smoky flavor” (or something like that). So I let the wine cook way, way down, on a simmer. After that, I added a box of tomatoes – there are these delicious chopped Italian tomatoes that come in a box rather than a can. I threw the sausage back in, brought it to a boil for a couple of minutes and turned it down to a simmer.
 

Should I mention that I never salted the sauce? Sometimes I would put in a little sugar (because they do it in The Godfather). Sometimes just a tiny bit of dried basil toward the end. I was never in a big hurry to start cooking the pasta because I liked to really, really let the sauce cook down, simmering. As I had seen Mario do, I would scrape the dark, nearly burnt specks of sauce that had hopped up the side of the pot (I believe technically it might be a Dutch oven) and make sure they made it back into the sauce, all caramelized and everything. It was only after all of this that I would fill another pot with water and put it on to boil. Making the pasta so late helped me be patient with the slowly cooking sauce.

I cooked the pasta a minute or two less than instructed by the package. This is something I learned from Mario! I favored a very long curly (and expensive) pasta which is exactly wrong to have with sausage and peppers, I am sure. The reason that Mario likes to undercook the pasta in the first stage is this: You drain the pasta, turn the heat way up on your sauce, and throw the pasta in there, where it and the sauce finish cooking together. Stir, stir, stir! (I learned about the stirring from Goodfellas. I always wanted to slice the garlic with a razor blade like Paul Sorvino, but I’m too lazy.) Oh, and don’t forget, as mentioned above, right before you drain your pasta and it’s still roiling, scoop out some of the pasta water and throw it in your sauce. I always salted the pasta water pretty heavily, as Mario seemed to do (even when he called it “a pinch”). I made it almost briny. And that’s where the salt in the sauce comes from, vestigial salt was the way I liked to think of it. It made it healthier in my mind.

Of course I grated that really fancy Parmesan on top of each serving.
 

Once, my parents (who love my sausage and peppers) came for a visit, bringing fresh shrimp from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, my hometown. I added them to the sauce at the last possible moment (five minutes? Ten? Anyway, long enough to cook them through). It made something like jambalaya, sort of.

Another time (sans shrimp, which I only tried once) when I didn’t have any Italian sausage, I used Conecuh County sausage, a fantastic sausage from Alabama (don’t squeeze it out of the casing, just chop into a few pieces). I can’t remember if it turned out to be a success with the Conecuh County sausage, but if not, don’t blame the great sausages of Alabama! You can find a more appropriate use for Conecuh County sausage (an actual jambalaya, for example) and you’ll be glad you did. Spicy Italian sausage is the thing to use. I’m sure I’m leaving something out.
 

P.S. DON’T be tempted to stir your onions, peppers, and garlic too soon! Mario always lets them sit and cook undisturbed. I wouldn’t push them around until time to make a little swimming pool of oil for the red pepper flakes.
 

Her recipe contribution (illustrated below) appears in her entertaining first novel, Petropolis, which was published last fall. The protagonist’s mail order fiancee teaches her to make this uniquely American delicacy — a food, Ulinich explains, “that my mother-in-law calls a ‘cheese crisp,’ despite its soggy nature.”
 

(I used to eat something similar in college, but my version entailed slapping some refried beans — straight from the can — onto the tortilla, then adding plain shredded cheddar. Also, salsa, when I had it.)

Below he shares his and his wife Nuvia’s St. Patrick’s Day tradition-in-the-making: the mighty — and spicy — Irish tamale. Better stock up on Guinness in preparation. Or maybe just look for last-minute deals on flights to San Diego.

 
My wife is second-generation Mexican-American. I’m third-generation Irish-American. We couldn’t be more different, but we share a lot of traits (hot tempers, hostility toward the clergy, an inexplicable fondness for accordion music). We’ve both tried to be as open as possible to each other’s respective cultures. In Mexico, I ate everything from crickets to armadillo. Whenever we go to a new city, we end up in Irish pubs. As I write this, Lila Downs is blasting through the speakers (followed by The Tossers, Café Tacuba, Blood or Whiskey, Shakira).

The Mighty Irish Tamale has been in development for years. We first talked about it at Nuvia’s abuelito’s rancho in Valle de Guadalupe. It resurfaced during our travels in Oaxaca (where I ate fourteen tamales in eight days) and yet again during our honeymoon deep in the jungle of the Yucatan Peninsula. This winter we made our first attempt at a Hibernian-Mexicana fusion and it was a huge success, so we’ll be serving the Mighty Irish Tamale again at our first, but certainly not the last, St. Patrick’s Day party as a married couple. Want to join us?
 

Here’s what you’ll need:

* 1 tamale pot (also known as a lobster pot on the Eastern seaboard)

* 5 pounds of masa made with lard

* 1 8oz. package of dried corn husks

* 1 large Irish brisket (a.k.a. corned beef)

* 6 red potatoes

* 12 bottles of Guinness draught

* 4 dried chili peppers

* 2 white onions

* 1 small green cabbage

* 1 package of baby carrots

* 1 cup of rice floor

* 1 bottle of horseradish

* ½ teaspoon of ground chili pepper

* 1 jigger of Jameson’s Irish whiskey (Q: What’s a jigger? A: Enough)

* 1 shot of Don Julio Blanco (of course)

* Several dashes of Tapatio (never Tabasco)

The night before your tamale-making adventure, place the corned beef in the crock pot with not-quite-enough water to cover the meat. Don’t trim the fat as it will help hold it together and add flavor. Add a bottle of Guinness draught and cover the brisket with foam.

Chop up the 4 dried chili peppers and toss them in the pot. If your corned beef came with a seasoning packet, throw that in there, too. Add a ½ teaspoon of ground chili powder. We use the concoction we bought on our honeymoon in an outdoor market in Campeche for 10 pesos and stored in a Gerber baby food jar with no label. Irish food has a reputation for being bland. Not anymore.
 

If you have a particularly big piece of meat — and I’m talking about the corned beef — consider putting the potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and onions in a second crock pot. Chop up the vegetables and top them off with more Guinness. You’re probably thinking that if you leave a potato in a crock pot soaked with Guinness for 12 hours, you’re going to end up with mush. That’s exactly what you want.

Turn the beef over every few hours to prevent it from drying out. Add Guinness as needed. Prepare the corn husks by soaking them in warm water.

Before you go to bed, separate the husks and set them out to dry. Take some of the corn husks that have tears in them and rip them into long threads that you can use as string. Now get a good night’s rest. You’re going to need it.
 

When you wake the next morning, your house should smell like a Knights of Columbus assembly hall on St. Patrick’s Day. Trim all the fat off the meat, cut into slices, and shred. It should have the same consistency of machaca, only redder. Ensure that no sliver is longer than your knuckle.

Bring the masa to room temperature and knead it on a butcher block. Sprinkle in a quarter cup of rice flour and knead it some more. Repeat until the rice flour is gone. The masa should be firm, but cooperative, like the elastic in your underwear.

Take the masa preparada and spoon it onto the husk. Use the Guinness broth to help make it more malleable. Spread the masa almost all the way out to the edge like a blanket too small for its bed.

Add a mixture of corned beef, potato mush, and a dollop of horse radish with some of the Tapatio mixed in. Roll the tamal up tight and tie it off like a tootsie roll.

One down. Forty-seven to go.
 

Go ahead and crack open a Guinness because this is going to take a while. And don’t be surprised if, an hour later, you’re still at it. You might want to do this while sitting down. And bring some of that Guinness with you.

Stand your tamales on end in the pot and steam for up to an hour-and-a-half. Serve hot with shots of Jameson’s and Don Julio.

Slainte and salud!
 

(If you’re going to be in San Diego on March 17, drop us a line: verminonthemount [at] yahoo [dot] com. Seriously.)

My friend Pia Z. Ehrhardt first published in webzines. She quickly developed a legion of online fans and started winning prizes. Last year MacAdam Cage published her debut collection, Famous Fathers and Other Stories. At the moment she’s working on

I’ve been hoping to bake and eat her coffee cake on a lazy, snowy Sunday, but I haven’t experienced one of those in a while. Moving, you know. Here’s the recipe, for those with weekends more tranquil than mine.
 

I grew up with a young, restless mother who had old ladies for friends, lovely women with good manners and coiffed hair who treated her like a daughter who could never get on your nerves. Both of my parents toured with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians after I was born, and when they came off the road and picked me up from my grandmother’s, we settled down in Minisink Hills, PA.

My mother would take me with her to visit Aunt Yvette, a friend-aunt and the wife of Fred Waring’s drummer, Poley. Aunt Yvette wore flowered dresses and her furniture was upholstered in chintz. Cut flowers from her garden filled vases: nasturtium, foxgloves, peonies, which my mother called Pia’s Knees.

Aunt Yvette sewed costumes for the Pennsylvanians and she taught my mother how to knit — a soft scarf and matching hat studded with a pompom, a mohair blanket to keep your legs warm while you read in the chair by the window that leaked cold air. She kept a crystal candy dish on the coffee table, within easy reach of a five year old, and her next door neighbor was Mr. Greenjeans from Captain Kangaroo, but I was too taken with him to make eye contact the few times he waved from his yard.

My mother had other friendships with older women, a rail-thin Israeli stewardess when we lived in Italy, a funny, fiery Parisian violinist when we lived in Canada, but I think Aunt Yvette came the closest to being the mother she hoped for but didn’t have. She seldom visited her own, but at Aunt Yvette’s she seemed calm, daughter-happy, like she was right where she wanted to be.
 

This recipe is for Aunt Yvette’s Mother’s Friend’s Coffee Cake. My mother wrote it out for me in her immaculate handwriting twenty-something years ago, before I married my second husband.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

1 stick butter
1 cup sour cream + 1 teaspoon baking soda (combine before adding)
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix the above ingredients together into batter.

Topping:
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons chopped nuts
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Turn 1/2 of batter into a greased layer cake pan. Sprinkle 1/2 of topping. Pour remaining batter over and sprinkle top with rest of topping.

Bake approximately half an hour in 350 degree oven.
 

Add boiling water to (in the biggest cup in the house; this is no time to fuck around with anything dainty) the juice of 1 lemon, a big wad of honey, a slug of good whiskey [Ed. Note: I've been using Maker's Mark], and as much cayenne pepper as you can tolerate. If it’s morning, add a tea bag.
 

For variation, try Lizzie Skurnick’s lemon and onion brew, or Christensen’s second option:

Nuke a cup of College Inn chicken broth till it’s good and hot. Squeeze a wedge of lemon over it and add a dash of cayenne. Sip. Toss back a shot of good whiskey (or Bourbon) on the side.
 

Stay well, everyone, and have a good weekend.

I’d planned to post his Nana’s recipe in late December, right around the time my site went belly-up. That’s okay, Goldberg told me, “kugel keeps.”
 

For the first twenty-five years of my life, I was under the impression that my Nana was a fabulous cook. Her meat pie was positively heavenly. She was the master of cream pies. Her crusts were so flaky and delicious that she could have made a pie out of unleaded gas and dandruff and it would still taste lovely. Her cookies would have left Mrs. Fields blushing with envy. Her baked chicken melted in your mouth. Her potato salad made every picnic at Pioneer Park in Walla Walla, Washington a culinary experience.

Since she was my grandmother, all of these dishes were delivered with a healthy serving of love and affection as well, thus cloaking each dish in a kind of romantic reverie. And yet, of all the dishes she’d prepared over the years, nothing topped her recipe for lochshen kugel.

For non-Jews, the mere idea of kugel often seems incongruent, depending upon the particular sect of kugel being prepared, since every family has a different recipe, some involving vegetables, some incorporating odd fruits, some with potatoes and cheeses. Some come ripped from the pages of a long forgotten portion of the Midrash which talked specifically about White Trash Jews, a subject best not discussed in a public forum. (I’ve tried to wipe from my memory a kugel that included frosted corn flakes, but alas, I can still see it: A relative of a relative via marriage, standing in a kitchen with a box of Frosted Flakes, ready to pour them into a bowl with noodles, an onion and bing cherries. Somewhere, a Star of David was being burned on a front lawn, I just know it.)
 

I regaled my then-girlfriend and now-wife Wendy with descriptions of Nana’s delicacies prior to our trip to visit her the summer of my 25th year. Ever a dutiful grandmother, on that very first night she’d prepared all of my favorite dishes. Baked chicken, a meatpie, a kugel, plates and plates of cookies, cream pies and a bowl of potato salad so dense a Sherpa was needed simply to get a serving on my plate. With a few bites from Wendy, however, it all came crashing down:

Wendy: Nana, how do you get the chicken to stay so moist?

Nana: I baste it with mayonnaise every ten minutes for five hours.

That was all Wendy needed. She danced delicately around the rest of the food on the table, giving me what could only be called the Stink Eye as I plowed straight through the dishes, never stopping to ponder the culinary genius behind it, though hopeful that mayo wasn’t a chief ingredient in the pies, too.
 

When we got home a few weeks later, Wendy took out the cookbook Nana gave each of her grandchildren and began thumbing through it. “You do realize,” she said, “that all you need in order to make her chocolate cream pie is instant pudding and Cool Whip, right?”

Intellectually, I’m sure I did realize that. When I looked at the recipe and actually saw it, well, it felt… wrong. Sordid. Ugly. But right there was the truth: Mix instant chocolate pudding in a bowl with Cool Whip, add to pie shell, top with Cool Whip and cool for two hours. (Now, to be fair, there was a recipe for a pie crust in the book, but in later years Nana just used Mrs. Smith’s.) I flipped through her recipes and found that these favorites of mine were typically not all that extravagant — meat, vegetables, a pie crust and… voila!

When I finally got to the page with the kugel recipe — which Wendy had decried as “Just wrong. Who eats sweet noddles? Blech!” — the experience was far different. It was like looking at the hand of God.
 

Every time I’d felt blue in my life, Nana made me a kugel. Every time something good happened in my life, Nana made me a kugel. Every time I visited unexpectedly when we lived in the same city, she’d pull a kugel out of the freezer and we’d eat a few slices. And now here it was!

I immediately ran to the store and picked out the ingredients, came home, made it and… it sucked. It was awful. It tasted starchy and dry and without much flavor. Could Nana’s love really be what made it taste so good? I called my older sister Linda to lament.

“Don’t you know that all of the recipes in Nana’s cookbook are just slightly wrong?” she said. “The measurements are off or there’s a missing ingredient in all of them.”

“Why would she do that?” I said.

“Oh, probably so when you make her recipes they wouldn’t taste as good as when she makes them herself,” she said. “But don’t worry, I’ve backwards engineered them all.” Linda then proceeded to give me the correct recipe for the world’s greatest lochshen kugel. I went out and bought all the ingredients again and made another kugel and it was like Nana was sitting in my kitchen with me. Or, well, the nice, sweet Nana I’d always known, not the evil one who’d screwed with her own cookbook just so her grandchildren wouldn’t be able to make her recipes as well as she did. (There’s no telling how much mayo you’re really supposed to baste the chicken with…)
 

Nana died a few weeks ago at the age of 95 and in her honor I came home from the funeral and made myself a kugel. It tasted like being seven and losing a soccer game; like being twelve and dining as the sun set over Loon Lake, Washington; like being thirty and sitting on her porch in Seattle; like being all the ages I’ve ever been. Here’s how you do it.

You’ll need:

1 12oz package wide egg noodles
1 cup of sugar
1 grated apple (I prefer a Macintosh, though really any good red apple will work.)
1 handful of raisins (about a half cup)
1 to 2 tablespoons of cinnamon (I like to use a lot of cinnamon, so I go for 2 tablespoons, though my mother uses 1 and my sister uses 3…)
1 egg
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Pre-heat your oven to 375

Boil the noodles until they are done. Drain the noodles, add the rest of the ingredients and stir until all mixed. Pour into a greased metal pan. This is important: don’t use a glass pan. For some reason, cooking this in a glass pan makes it burn more easily and taste not as good. Through extensive trial and error, we’ve learned that a really cheap 9 X 11 pan is the way to go here.

Bake for between 45 minutes and an hour. For a crisp top layer, an hour should be perfect. If you prefer it a little less crisp, watch the cooking from about 45 minutes on to check for browning. Let it cool before cutting into squares.
 

2007 was a year of restraint. I got through a Thanksgiving without invoking Donald Barthelme.

Still, no writers’ recipe project would be complete without a mention of Don B.’s soup recipes or event catering strategies. And Soft Skull gives me the perfect excuse: a reprint of The Teachings of Don B., complete with Pynchon introduction, is forthcoming next month. Here’s a brief excerpt:

FINE HOMEMADE LEEK SOUP

Take one package Knorr Leek Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take two live leeks. Chop leeks into quarter-inch rounds. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth. Throw in chopped parsley. Throw in some amount of salt and a heavy bit of freshly ground pepper. Eat with good-quality French bread, dipped repeatedly in soup.

FINE HOMEMADE MUSHROOM SOUP

Take one package knorr Mushroom Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take four large mushrooms. Slice. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth, parsley, salt, pepper. Stick bread as above into soup at intervals. Buttering bread enhances taste of the whole.

There’s more at overnight to many distant cities.
 

Since the weekend ancestry posts have started to feel a little rote on this end, I’ll be alternating them with writers’ recipes and love letters to bookstores. I’m soliciting the recipes from particular writers as the mood strikes, but send praise for your favorite indie bookshop anytime.

Mockett is hard at work on a novel, but sometimes I lure her away from her desk to join me for meals. Fluent in Japanese, she is familiar with some of the city’s best, most obscure, and reasonably priced Japanese restaurants — and she’s introduced me to, among other things, the wonders of bamboo and lotus root. Below she explains how to prepare them with chicken.
 

A few months ago, my mother showed up in New York carrying three bamboo shoots in her handbag. In my novel, I’ve a scene in which a mother and daughter prepare similar shoots for dinner; my mother thought it might be smart to put the fictional recipes to the test. The delicate top of the shoot went into a salad dressed with miso. The middle was thinly sliced and used to season white rice. The bottom of the shoot was coarsely chopped and cooked with chicken.

The good news; the food tastes great! The bad news; real bamboo shoots like this are difficult to find. Your best bet is a Chinese grocery store, but Japanese shops may well carry a pre-prepared shoot in shrink wrap. I’m not sure how my mother came by these, nor have I asked.

I’ve always been told that real bamboo — the iridescent stalks so atmospherically used in classic samurai films and the contemporary Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — doesn’t grow in the west. We have a kind of wimpy bamboo that’s much thinner and while edible, doesn’t have the rich flavor of the fat shoots you see here.

Bamboo pride is one of the many ways in which Japanese friends — and chefs in particular — often remind me of the superiority of Japanese culture. But my grandfather recently told me that this kind of thick bamboo wasn’t actually native to Japan either; he swears it only came over from China in the last couple hundred years. “Everything comes from China,” he said wonderingly, in the manner of a humbled Japanese scholar made aware of his roots over time. Regardless, the flavors below are 100% Japanese — and delicious.
 

Prepare the Shoot

First you’ll need to prepare the shoot for cooking. Submerge shoots in a pan filled with water. Add one quarter cup of brown rice (measurements are approximate, and do depend on the size of the shoot). Bring pan to a boil. Turn down the heat so the boiling stops, but the water is still gently rolling. After about fifteen-minutes to a half an hour (depending on shoot size), turn off the heat and leave the bamboo to soak overnight. The next day, drain the water and peel the husk; it should come off easily, revealing gorgeous blond meat.

(Yes, I know this is more than 3 shoots. I didn’t like the photo of the original 3 shoots after they were peeled. And, yes, that means these recipes were tried more than once).
 

Bamboo Salad

Cut off the top part of the shoot–this is the most delicate meat. Slice into thin pieces; you want to have about a quarter cup.

Next, cut a half a green onion into inch long pieces. Parboil these for a few minutes, then drain and cool.

In the meantime, prepare the dressing. Mix two teaspoons of miso, a third of a teaspoon of sugar and two teaspoons of vinegar (I use rice vinegar). Mix this till it is smooth, then combine the shoots, the green onions and miso dressing together.

Bamboo Rice

Wash rice, drain, and put into a rice cooker. Add 2 tablespoons of sake and water to the appropriate level as indicated by the rice cooker. Add thin slices of bamboo from the middle of the shoot (about a half cup for three cups of rice) and
thin-sliced strips of fried tofu (age: 2 squares). Finally, add one-and-a-half teaspoons of dashi on top of the rice.

When the cooker begins to boil hard, open it up and the mix rice and thoroughly. Replace lid. When the rice cooker indicates that the rice is cooked, immediately
“fluff up” rice from the bottom using a rice paddle. Wait another 30 minutes before serving.

Chicken and Bamboo or Chikuzenni

Saute chicken thigh meat (tastier than the breast, which tends to be dryer). When the thigh meat turns whitish, add the following ingredients: carrots, lotus root, soaked shiitake, (save the juice) and the bottom part of the bamboo shoot. After a few minutes, add some “satoimo,” or Japanese sticky potato.

Add the shiitake soaking juice almost to the top of the ingredients. Bring to a boil then turn down heat so the juice rolls gently, and cook for about 20 minutes.

Add 2 tablespoons of sake and 1 teaspoon dashi. Cook for another 10 minutes. Add snow peas for the color if desired.

Enjoy!

Below — in a slightly modified excerpt from Leap Days — Lanpher divulges her strategy for staving off existential doubt.
 

By the end of my first year in New York, I suffered from a mood so grim that I coined my own diagnosis: displacement dysphasia. I would be walking down a street and suddenly the oddness of my surroundings would hit me with a painful clarity. This wasn’t home; these weren’t my streets. What was I doing here?

To root myself back in the world, to show myself I still existed, I cooked. My dictum in New York became: when in doubt, roast a chicken. I’m not referring to the doubt you suffer when you aren’t sure what you should eat. I’m talking about existential doubt, the gloom that gnaws at you as question your place in the universe.

I have few memories of actually eating these chickens, but then their preparation isn’t about that kind of hunger anyway. What I remember, actually, are the smells — the way rosemary tickles your nose with pine, the almost floral sharpness of a cut lemon. With each deliberate motion of my hands, I am willing myself to the next. Most days, I like to think that I am constructing a life; but on these bleak evenings, I am settling for an hour and the hour after that and the hour after that.

Cooking is the way I stave off the hunger pangs I feel for a rooted life. These small kitchen acts are like the tracery I did as a child, when I would place a piece of translucent paper over a beloved illustration and carefully, carefully trace with my pencil. Now, I am tracing acts of sustenance.
 

When-in-doubt Chicken

1 roasting chicken, around 5 pounds, preferably organic
Carrots and leeks, chopped in one-inch or so pieces
A handful of cloves of garlic, peeled or not, to your taste
Rosemary
Lemon
Butter (it’s worth it to splurge on the European style)
Salt and pepper
White wine or vermouth
Optional: chicken stock

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Rinse the chicken and then pat dry with paper towels. Take a nice helping of the butter — this effort is aided if you let it sit out for a while and get soft — and massage it into the skin of the chicken. Take the carrots and leeks and garlic cloves and sprinkle them over the bottom of a Dutch Oven or roasting pan. This will function as your roasting rack. Take a few sprigs of rosemary and a lemon cut in half; place in the cavity of the bird. Slosh some chicken stock or white wine in the bottom of the pan.

Put the bird, uncovered, in the oven for 15 minutes. After that, turn the oven down to 350 degrees. Figure 15 minutes per pound. I add more stock or white wine as the hour or so progresses, basting the bird more than I need to. You can do it every 20 minutes or so and be fine. After the allotted time is up, pierce it with a large fork. If the juices run clear, it’s done. Put the bird to rest on a carving board.

Remove the vegetables with a slotted spoon. These will be the best carrots you have eaten in a long time. Put them in a small bowl and cap with foil to keep them warm. Then pour a large splash of white vermouth or wine into the pan, turn up the heat and stir while you reduce the sauce. Once you think you have boiled off the alcohol, pour into a separator to reduce the amount of fat you’ll be eating. By now, your chicken is ready to carve.

Below Kinsella shares his grandfather’s coleslaw recipe. (Or so he claims. His twin brother, Keith, remembers the ingredients a little differently. Everyone, however, agrees on the Canadian Club.)
 

Injun Joe Thompson, my grandfather, rode boxcars east in the late 1930s from Going Snake, Oklahoma, to Detroit, and then Greyhounds all the way to Newport, Rhode Island. Born Joseph Bearpaw, he dropped his family name because he thought it was “too Injun,” an unwanted distinction for which he left the reservation in the first place. People came to recognize him on the street late at night when he would stumble home drunk from one bar or another. Drunkenness was another of my grandfather’s marked characteristics, but Newporters nevertheless nicknamed him Injun Joe, as opposed to Drunken Joe, which, when you think about it, was rather kind.

After a stint as a small-time bookmaker for a local organized crime concern, Injun Joe married my grandmother, the daughter of a chauffeur and a cook for Philadelphia coal baron Edward Julius Berwind, who owned the Elms Estate on Bellevue Avenue. In the fifties, they opened a small but remarkably successful restaurant — The Hilltop — that specialized in American country cooking and catered to the needs of the Hollywood celebrities attending Newport’s Summer Theater.

Here is the recipe for the remarkably wholesome cole slaw recipe that you would never suspect was made day in and day out — or vicey versy, as Injun Joe would say — by a man who had more whiskey running through his veins than blood, and eight major cardiac events to prove it. I can still hear him cussing and singing Hank Williams as he showed me how to use the bell grater.
 

Injun Joe Thompson’s Reservation Cole Slaw

1/5 Canadian Club whiskey, “furtively” imbibed
1 head green cabbage, shredded
2 carrots, grated
1 sweet vidalia onion, thinly sliced
2 green onions (white and green parts), chopped
1 fresh red chile, sliced
1 1/2 cups mayonnaise
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 lemon, juiced
3 pinches sugar
Several dashes hot sauce
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Take a deep swig of Canadian Club, then combine the cabbage, carrots, onion, green onions, and chile in a large bowl. Indulge in another swig of Canadian Club as though your grandson weren’t in the room. In another bowl, stir together the mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, and sugar. Set aside a tumbler of whiskey for garnish. Pour the dressing over the cabbage mixture and toss gently. Season the cole slaw with the hot sauce, salt, and black pepper.

Chill for 2 hours and enjoy with half a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey, and, as Hank and Injun Joe Thompson might say, you’re a long gone daddy.