Winter Pate
You’ve made meat loaf, right? You’ve eaten cold meat loaf, yes? Then you’re halfway to being a an ass-kicking, name-taking charcutier. “Ooooh…pate, I don’t know.” Please. Campagne means “country” in French–which means even your country-ass can make it. Anthony Bourdain (who else?) Les Halles Cookbook Today’s recipe came about after…
Beef Stew for a Rainy Day
The soaring cost of living has not escaped me, here or in real life. So it’s with some hesitancy that I offer beef stew, as even tougher cuts of beef meant for the stewpot have become costly. I do have a reason for making this, though: I bought the roast…
Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce
Also known as Cote de Porc a la Charcutiere. (The ability to add accent marks appears to have vanished.) Do know this recipe is French, and comes from the late Anthony Bourdain’s Le Halles Cookbook. Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce is all about the sauce, which is made from butter,…
Cheap Steak (flap steak in a Port Marinade)
“Cheap” is a relative term, of course. At a time when the cost of living is soaring, and the price of food along with it, steak isn’t featuring in many diets. While porterhouse and prime rib are off the menu for the forseeable future, flap steak, a cut resembling skirt…
Laurie Colwin’s Boiled Beef
Last week, between bouts of doomscrolling, I remembered Laurie Colwin’s essay about boiled beef. The best boiled beef I ever ate was at the Ukrainian Restaurant at the Ukrainian National Home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I would gladly go out in a violent storm and walk over…
Roast Pork with Carrots and Fennel Seed
Roast Pork with Carrots and Fennel Seed represents a womanful effort to make something besides Judy Rodgers’ peerless recipe for Mock Porchetta, which appears in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. This recipe asks the cook to create small pockets in the roast along the natural muscle divisions. You then stuff these…
Cottage Pie
In How To Eat, Nigella Lawson describes the British traditional Sunday lunch thus: Proper British Sunday lunch is everything contemporary cooking is not. Meat-heavy, hostile to innovation, resolutely formalized, it is as much ritual as meal, and an almost extinct ritual at that. With their military vocabulary and timetables, my…
Hot and Sour Soup
I cannot lie and say hot and sour soup is an easy prospect. Not that it’s especially difficult. It’s not, exactly. Hot and sour soup is a hassle. Here is a recipe resistant to streamlining, to convenience, to ease. It clings stubbornly to each and every little bowl, to every…
Deconstructed Cabbage Cake with Sausage
Just as some people marvel at flour, water, and yeast becoming bread, I never cease to be amazed at the transformation that occurs when cabbage, some sort of pork product, and fat encounter a pot, low heat, and time. This decidedly dour vegetable softens into tenderness, its fumes turn…
Pot Au Feu revisited
Pot-au-feu is one of the big classics. As such, it never goes out of style. I’ve yet to hear of attempts to veganize it, keto it, or substitute cauliflower for the meats and call it “clean” (this is not a suggestion. Food is not dirty unless you drop it on…