Good Recipes (And Cooks Who Share Them!)

"There is nothing like a good old recipe.

If it has lasted, then it is good."

-- Yotam Ottolenghi

My grandma's cookbook 11-18-14

"I hate the notion of a secret recipe.

Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared --

that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed.

To stop a recipe in its tracks, to label it 'secret'

just seems mean."

-- Molly Wizenberg

I don't use recipes a lot. 

Recipes are rules, and, well.

Recipes 11-18-14

Anyway. When I cook, mostly I just wing it. I follow principles as a general guide, but after that I like to wander off the trail and explore the landscape on my own.

Unless I'm baking. 

Baking is an exact science. It involves chemical reactions and precise measurements and combinations of ingredients and heat and cold and time.

So when I bake, I definitely stick to the recipe.

I have a shelf loaded with cookbooks full of recipes and a shoe box stuffed with hundreds more. Some of them are hand-written from friends and family, others are printed from the Internet or taken from television chefs or ripped from magazines. 

You can tell easily which recipes are my favorites -- the trusty old reliable ones that I return to again and again -- because that's where the pages in the books stick together. They're the ones on the food-stained and spattered recipe cards. They're the ones copied onto sheets of notebook paper that's been handled and folded in half so many times that the paper is soft and delicate as tissue.

One of my favorites is a recipe for Madeleine cookies that a French chef jotted down on an order ticket and sent to me via our waiter.

Anyway, all of this is by way of saying I popped my pecan pie cherry yesterday.

I baked an absolutely perfect pecan pie using a recipe from a Food Network cook after watching her bake it on TV.

Pecan pie 11-18-14

Pie crust has always been a bugaboo for me. Because if the pastry isn't good, then the pie isn't good. I make fine, serviceable pie crust. But I've always wanted to be able to make a crust so tender and flaky and buttery that it makes your eyes roll back.

It finally happened. I made a perfect crust. 

That fucker was as tender, golden, flaky and buttery as shit.

And it wouldn't have happened if someone else wasn't generous enough to share her time-tested recipe.

A tender flaky crust! 

True confessions, though.

I didn't follow the recipe exactly. 

It called for a cup and a half of cold shortening, and I'd only chilled a cup. So I added a stick of cold butter instead, and it worked beautifully. And I'd venture to say my tweak made the recipe even better, because it made it buttery.

Thanksgiving is around the corner. And Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, sure, but it's also a good time to do some plain old giving.

Good recipes will be trotted out and prepared on dinner tables across the country. If someone asks you for your recipe, don't be a Selfish McStingy Pants. Cough it up. Share it. Write it down for whoever it is. Let them know where you got it from. 

Good recipes have history. And that's part of the appeal -- knowing the path a recipe has traveled, whose hands and kitchens it has passed through. I love using a recipe that someone else gave me, especially if it's in their own handwriting. It's like looking at an old photograph. It's nostalgic and special. It makes me think of that person and evokes memories of a time and a place and the food we shared, and that feels good.

It tastes good too.

**(For the pecan pie recipe I used, click here.)**

Pie

"We must have a pie.

Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie."

-- David Mamet, Boston Marriage

Blueberry pie 10-23-14

"Never promise to make a pie and

fail to deliver on that promise."

-- Kate Lebo, A Commonplace Book of Pie

According to family lore, my favorite baby food as an infant was something called "blueberry buckle."

Apparently I lapped the stuff up.

After the trauma of watching the family dog devour my birthday cake at the tender age of 4, I started requesting pie for my mid-summer birthday.

True to form, I always chose blueberry.

My grandma was a cracker-jack pie baker. Her pies didn't always look perfect, but they were always delicious. She judged other women's pies by the "shortness" of their crusts. She'd nudge at it with the edge of her fork, and if it flaked off just right, she'd pronounce, "That's short!"

(Short, in pie-speak, means flaky and tender. Hence the use of "shortening" in the crust.)

Apple pie was Grandma's specialty. But when I asked for blueberry, I got it.

I distinctly remember my older sister bitching a blue streak about the fact that I'd ordered up blueberry pie instead of cake for one of my birthdays. She didn't want to eat it because she was afraid it might stain her teeth. (The same sister bitched about and then puked up grandma's Rum Cake on the carpet at the end of our twin beds one Christmas Eve.)

We all assured her that her teeth would be fine. So she reluctantly ate some. Then she asked my dad if her teeth were blue, and he said "Oh my God! They're black!"

She lost her shit for days.

It was awesome.

I don't bake a lot of pies. Cake always seems easier, less complicated, less messy. You can make a pretty passable cake from a box mix and everybody likes it.

But pie? Pie is a religion.

I happen to only believe in fruit pies. I will not explain myself. It's just my firm belief  that a pie crust filled with pudding or gelatin or ice cream or pumpkin or congealed corn syrup or meringue or cooked cheese is just plain yucky. Also, pie must be baked. Cold "refrigerator" pies are caca poo poo. Just my opinion.

Give me fruit pie all day long -- cherry or blueberry, apple or peach, rhubarb or raspberry.

Also, frozen, store bought pie is the devil's work and Marie Callender is one of his minions. And canned pie filling is an abomination of desolation. Frozen, store bought crust is just plain sinful, and not in a good way. And any pie filled with fruit and custard mixed together is from the very center of the pit of Hell. Someone once served me "mock" apple pie with a filling made from green tomatoes, crushed Ritz crackers and cinnamon. It tasted like Satan's asshole.

If you lack the time or talent to bake your own homemade pie, at least purchase one that comes from an actual bakery and not a box.

I've known plenty of women who boast about how great their pies are. They often look plenty attractive on the outside, but are flavorless on the inside.

I'll take tasty and ugly over pretty and bland every time.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that Leo asked me to bake him a pie yesterday. So naturally, I went back to my roots and made blueberry.

I make no pretense of being a master pie baker. But I did kind of surprise myself with this one. It turned out alright. It was still a little warm when I cut into it.

It smelled pretty damn good.

It looked pretty damn good.

It tasted pretty damn good.

And watching my kid devour three whole slices made me feel pretty damn good too.

I Found My Mitten

"The three little kittens, they lost their mittens,

And they began to cry,

Oh, mother dear, we sadly fear,

That we have lost our mittens.

What! Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens!

Then you shall have no pie."

-- Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, 

"The Three Little Kittens, They Lost Their Mittens," 

New Nursery Songs For All Good Children (1843)

Self portrait 6-5-14

OK, so I'm not exactly a kitten, and I didn't exactly lose a mitten.

I lost a glove.

It was one of my cycling gloves from my favorite pair. They're the only gloves I have that fit my paws just exactly how I like them to fit.

When one of them went missing a couple of weeks ago, I was very, very sad.

Sad is bad.

I searched and searched for my little lost glove, but alas, I couldn't find it.

In the meantime, I wore other gloves -- gloves that don't fit my paws just exactly how I like them to fit.

When my wayward glove finally turned up in a drawer today, trapped inside a tangle of cycling tights and shorts and jackets, it made me very, very happy. 

Happy is good.

Also, I think now I get pie.