Zucchini

Summer’s cute phase is over, and our neighborhood has gone to seed earlier than usual. Weeds are bolting up through the cracks in our bluestone sidewalk, merging into a mass that’s more wilderness than pavement. The trees are raining frizzled leaves from the heat wave, which has also addled the human contingent: crime is doing its annual mini-spike. Not Son of Sam type stuff, but restless, fiddly transgressions. I see the posters plastered to telephone poles ("Wanted for Deception and Burglary"), and I hear neighbors whispering of stolen bicycles during evening dog walks. Last year around this time my bike got clipped. A few nights ago, our GPS was lifted (OK, so I asked for it by not locking the car) and our patio got broken into; nothing was taken, but a woman’s sandal was left behind as a calling card.

It’s time to say good-bye to friends for the summer, too. Many, with origins and family abroad, have already flown until September: Korea, Canada, Spain. Each year, they lift away as naturally as birds migrating.

The upside? Some of those weeds in the sidewalk are wildflowers: thistles, sweet peas, morning glories, Queen Ann's lace. It’s easier to get a parking spot, and there's no need to queue up for a table in a restaurant. But still, all signs point to the inevitable: it’s a good time for me to pack up the brood and head out of town. This week marks the last one of routine, of stillness around the house while my kids sing and schvitz at day camp. From here on, I’m the camp director and we’re out of town more than in it. Once we hit the road my heart will lift with new possibility, as it should. It will also, quietly, sigh. The cover of this week’s New Yorker shows a happy family rolling out of town, car laden with sporting equipment. In the back seat, a girl stares miserably at the receding Manhattan skyline. I always secretly feel like that a tad, each time I leave. 

New York…rank July garbage and all, you're magnetic.

If you're wondering how any of these ramblings relate to food, or anything appetizing, I have just one word: zucchini. If there ever was an edible indicator of summer’s overripe, overly generous, poised-on-the-edge-of-decay stage, it’s zucchini. They recently made their yearly debut in our CSA basket, so they’re still on the delicate side. Soon they will balloon to the size of baseball bats, and even the constant baking of zucchini bread won’t be enough to keep up.

The gilt has not worn off the zucchini yet, though—on our summer table it’s featured prominently in pastas, gratins, and ratatouilles, its prodigious pulp not yet hidden away in breads and frozen for fall minestrone. My favorite at-home dinner right now is crisp, homemade pizza crowned with shaved zucchini–because also, I’m having a love affair with the no-knead baking technique in Jim Lahey’s My Bread. You can bet this book will hitch a ride wherever I go until September. And I know, I'm a bit of a late adopter of this minor craze, but better late than never: the bread turns out brilliantly every single time. If you’re a kneader by nature, you might miss the intimate, tactile interaction with the dough. The laissez-faire approach also goes against everything I learned in culinary school, about the science of having to muscle together all those good gluten strands with your hands. 

The  pizza crust recipe makes two full sheet tray sized pizzas, so you can freeze half the dough or make a few smaller, round pizzas. I whip up the simplest tomato sauce imaginable and use my beloved and scary mandoline to get those veggies paper thin, so they don’t make the pizza soggy. And the just-made, brine-dipped mozzerella from Caputo's is what I crave most of all...I might as well get my fill, because I'll miss it where I'm going. Farewell for now, Brooklyn!

You can, of course, use store-bought dough and/or sauce if you aren't in the mood for a project. On the topic of zucchini, I also like this simple pasta recipe from over at The Wednesday Chef. And, this article from last year’s New York Times offers some great ideas for using up zucchini. Readers: if you have a clever zucchini idea you'd like to share, Please! I invite you to pass it along in the Comments section.
 
Zucchini Pizza

Pizza Dough 
Adapted from Jim Lahey's My Bread

• 3 3/4 cups bread flour (500 g.) or, substitute a cup or so whole wheat flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast (10 g.)
• 3/4 teaspoon sea salt (5 g.)
• 1 teaspoon sugar 
• 1 1/3 cups room-temperature water (300 g.)
• Extra-virgin olive oil for trays

 Simple Tomato Sauce  
(enough for one pizza)

• 1 large ripe tomato or two smaller ones
• 1 small clove garlic, crushed
• Extra-virgin olive oil 
• Sea salt to taste

Other pizza ingredients  

• 1 small zucchini 
• 1 small onion–preferably a spring onion (greens still attached) 
• 1/2 ball fresh mozzerella, shaved or torn into shreds
• Optional: Fresh ground pepper, basil leaves

Instructions for Dough: 

Whisk together dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the water and mix with a wooden spoon or your hands until blended, at least 30 seconds. The dough will be a bit stiff. Cover the bowl with a dish towel and let sit at room temperature about 2 hours, or until the dough has more than doubled in volume. 

Using a large rubber spatula or bowl scraper, scrape dough from bowl onto a floured surface. Divide and gently shape dough into two balls, separate, and cover with a damp dish towel for a half hour or so. 

Meanwhile, when you're ready to use dough, preheat oven to 500 degrees (may want to do 475 degrees if your oven gets too hot). Prepare tray(s)–this dough will cover two 13 x 18 rimmed sheet trays. Oil tray–and your hands–liberally. Gently stretch dough the length of tray and then press evenly onto surface, concentrating on places where dough is thicker. Pinch together any holes that form.


Instructions for Sauce: 
Put a medium pot of salted water on to boil. Cut an "x" in bottom of tomato with a sharp knife. Once water boils, dunk the tomato for about 30 seconds, remove with a skimmer and refresh under cold running water. Then, you can easily peel the skin off. Cut out the stem end and then chop tomato into segments. Remove seeds and tomato jelly and discard, then mash up tomato flesh with your hands or a potato masher, until you have puree consistency. Stir in garlic, a few drops of olive oil, and salt to taste.
  
Assembly and Cooking: 
Preheat oven to 500 degrees if you haven't already. Cut off root and stem ends of onion and remove peel. Use a mandoline or sharp knife and, starting at root end, slice onion very thin horizontally, into rings. Slice zucchini into paper thin rounds. Top dough evenly with sauce, then cheese. Spread onions on top, then finally zucchini. I arrange slices so their edges are touching (not overlapping). They shrink during cooking. Put tray into middle rack of preheated oven, then bake for 25-30 minutes, until crust is crisp and browned and pizza looks ready. Rotate halfway during cooking, and lower heat to 475 degrees if top is getting too brown but crust doesn't seem done in the middle. When pizza is done, scatter with basil leaves and ground pepper, if you like.

Honor berries

My mom had certain rules about food when my sister and I were kids, strict lines we were not to cross or we were entering into hostile junk food territory. Let’s just say we had to sneak over to our neighbors’ house for our Twinkie fix, and the jones was fierce. Mom made sure we had salad every night, and there was no way in hell cafeteria food was passing our lips. But then, her Berlin wall-like barriers were somewhat arbitrary. For instance, she wouldn’t dare bring home Frosted Flakes, yet she plied us full of Quaker 100% Natural, which probably had twice the corn syrup and derived its crisp from hydrogenated oil. And in the kitchen she kept a gum drawer, which all the neighborhood kids were wise to and raided on the sly. It was full of Chewels. Remember those? You bit into the sweet pink gum cushion and got a squirt of sticky fuchsia syrup in your mouth. 

But Mom’s firmest line was drawn right down through the middle of Entenmann’s country. It dictated that never would a box of Entenmann’s coffee cake or doughnuts see the inside of our house, but the chocolate chip cookies were a-OK–in fact, a staple of every Safeway haul. Health food. But, there were limits on even those, and we were allotted precisely two a day, after school, before homework. We adhered to our two-cookie ration obediently, washed down with our 2% milk. But later, after retiring to my room with my books, I would creep down the back stairs in an Entenmann’s frenzy and collect a towering stack of those cookies, so tantalizingly soft, the chips so sweet they scratched faintly at my tooth enamel. I couldn’t help it–swiping was just too easy and I was a scrawny, ravenous kid with no impulse control. So much for the honor system in our house.

Today, I adore the idea of an honor system, and not because I can work it to get more goodies. No. I’m happy to say that this former cookie thief grew up to be a law-abiding citizen; Mom must have done something right. You won’t catch me fudging so much as a snow pea over the weight limit at CSA pick up. I never, ever sample chocolate almonds from the bulk bin–though believe me, the temptation is there.

When we spend time up in rural Connecticut, I delight in all the honor system offerings set out by farmers and folks with prolific chickens or bees. To me, they are an indicator that trust and honesty are sufficiently alive in the world to keep these little businesses going the way they do. Driving down a road, you might see a hand-penned sign proclaiming EGGS or HONEY, propped atop a cooler by a mailbox. Along a minor highway, an unknown someone built a rickety wooden stand, which functions as an unmanned flower booth when its owners get around to stocking it with bouquets. And our dairy staples all come from a farm where there’s a “dairy sales” room adjacent to the milking barn; inside the door a fridge offers neatly arranged raw milk and eggs, and you pay via a wooden lock box plastered with Post-it note IOU’s. You can’t even get change unless the farmer happens to be there emptying out that old-timey till.

But my most favorite honor situation by far, one I go into yearly raptures over, is the blueberry patch down the road from us. It’s the best blueberry patch on earth–I truly believe this–set back behind one of the most gorgeously bucolic roads I’ve ever had the pleasure of driving down (the same one festooned with maple syrup buckets in winter). Its owner, a lovely lady who settled there decades ago, reserves the right to open the patch at her own convenience–or whim. If a red, white, and blue flag looms into view as you round the bend in the road, your heart sinks and you know you’re out of luck. But if that musty old flag is thrown back to reveal the peeling sign, on goes the blinker.

Through a hay field, over a bumpy rise, grasshoppers pinging off the car’s grill–that’s the way to the patch, which opens up on the far side of a small apple orchard, beside a pond where bullfrogs burp and thrum. The owner of this small farm once told me the land was all apples when she first moved in, but she doesn’t much care for apples so she ripped out most of the trees and made way for the blueberries, which she adores. Welcoming the public into the patch–and her home, really–is the only way she can possibly keep up with her crop, so she hung a scale and set a little money jar on a table in the open barn. They’re organically grown, these berries, and she picks off the beetles by hand, drowning them in coffee cans of soapy water, and keeps the birds at bay by netting over the whole thing (more power to the occasional lone bird that finds its way in).  

It’s best to bring your own containers, though usually in the barn you'll find a carton or two, maybe some plastic bags or a cut-open orange juice jug for collecting. If you’re thoughtful, you will, in turn, surrender whatever surplus cartons were lying around your kitchen. That’s collectivism at work. Follow her note to find the ripest berries (because she probably won’t come out to tell you in person), go in through the mesh door, and settle into a rhythm. 

My kids are pros now, I’m proud to say. Over the 4^th, we spent a sweaty afternoon picking with our friends Tara and Josh, and the four kids between us more than contributed to the pie that night. Is it child labor if they gorge themselves purple on their favorite fruit?

Tara and I swear the berries taste different on each of the 100 or so bushes, and each time we make a game of finding our favorite, the one with just the right balance of tart and sweet. Grabbing as many as we can get becomes compulsive and hypnotic, and usually a kid at the point of meltdown is what it takes to rouse us from our stupor. We weigh our take on the scale in the barn, rounding up for those intercepted by our stomachs, and go bouncing back over the field, dreaming of the things we'll bake. 

Inevitably, someone sits on a bag or capsizes a carton on the ride back, but those squished berries don't have to be goners–they just have their own purpose now. Into the freezer they go, where they will later fill out smoothies and morning baked goods, well into the winter if we stretch them out. And plenty get devoured as is. Last year I held off on cooking them for the longest time, because I wanted to burn the taste of fresh summer blueberries in my memory. So I whipped up a lemon vanilla ice cream, super rich and custardy, and tumbled berries on top. One day I'll post that recipe for you. Then, of course, came the muffins and scones that roused the kids from bed before camp. For the 4th this year, we improvised a pie by baking a simple graham cracker crust, cooking berries down with sugar and lemon zest, and then baking it all with an easy crumble topping. Incidentally, we strained away some of the berry juice prior to nestling them in the tart shell, and it made a delicious sauce over pancakes the next morning. 

The recipe below is something a little different. Back when I was catering parties, this was my go-to dessert during blueberry season. It's taken from Claudia Fleming's beautiful cookbook The Last Course and is ever so slightly fancy, sophisticated enough for a dinner party or host(ess) gift but soothing in its interplay of childhood flavors of graham cracker, cream cheese and blueberry. If it seems too complicated and rolling your own graham cracker is not your thing, you can cut corners by using a store-bought graham cracker crust, or the simpler one I linked to above. 

Thank you, Tara and Madeley, for supplying many of the photographs in this post!

Blueberry-Cream Cheese Tart with Graham Cracker Crust
*Recipe makes two 9-inch tarts or about 10-12 individual tarts

Adapted from The Last Course, Claudia Fleming with Melissa Clark
  
Graham Cracker Crust

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened at room temperature
• 1/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Cream Cheese Pastry Cream

• 1 cup whole milk
• 5 Tablespoons sugar
• 4 large egg yolks
• 2 1/2 Tablespoons cornstarch
• 3/4 cup (6 oz.) cream cheese, cubed and softened at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup heavy cream (whipping cream), whipped to soft peaks

Blueberries

• 2 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
• 1 tablespoon sugar

Instructions: 

1. Graham cracker crust: use an electric mixer to cream together butter and sugars in a medium bowl. Mix for a minute or two, until blended and fluffy. Add honey and beat until combined. 
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together flours, salt and cinnamon. Mix the flour mixture into the butter in two additions, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Mix until well combined. Form dough into a two disks (or smaller balls, if going the individual tart route) and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate until firm, at least an hour. 
3. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. On a floured surface roll the dough to a 1/8 inch circle, or individual circles as you wish. If you are making a 9-inch tart, roll circle to 11 inches. Lift carefully and lay over tart mold, then press dough evenly into mold and trim away excess. Prick all over with tines of a fork and refrigerate for about 20 minutes, until it is firm again. Bake for about 25 minutes on the middle rack of oven, until golden brown. 
4. Pastry cream: In a medium saucepan, combine 3/4 cup of the milk with about half of sugar, and bring to a gentle simmer. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk together egg yolks, cornstarch, and the rest of the sugar. Add the remaining 1/4 cup milk to the yolk mixture. Remove milk from the heat and whisk a little bit of hot milk at a time into the yolks, whisking the whole time until yolk mixture is warmed up. You want to avoid scrambling the yolks, so keep it moving! 
5. Add the warmed yolk mixture back into the milk pot, whisking constantly, then put back over a low flame. Whisk for a couple minutes more until you begin to feel a  resistance against the whisk and the mixture becomes thicker. Remove from stove and strain into a clean bowl, using a very fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth-lined strainer. Cover surface with parchment or plastic wrap and refrigerate until chilled. Once chilled, whisk smooth and fold in whipped cream until combined and even.
6. Blueberries: In a medium saucepan, combine 1 cup of berries with sugar. Simmer gently over low heat until berries have burst and liquefied, about 5 minutes. Strain the cooked berries into a clean bowl and throw out the solids left behind. Add the rest of the blueberries to the syrup and stir together to combine. 
7. Assembly: Once tart shell is cool, spoon pastry cream into it and top with some of the blueberries.

Favas

After the happy, smoky meat-fest with friends that was our 4th of July weekend and the heavy, unshakable heat that's settled over the city, our CSA delivery arrived like a stroll in a cool forest. And with it, fava beans–just about the heartiest thing I can manage to eat right now, with temperatures locked in the 100's. It's not even the beginning of their season around here–they've been around in the markets–but I've held out this long for the local ones. Around April, some restaurants usher in a false fava season for winter-jaded diners, but I refuse to be seduced.

The mention of fava beans would have, a few years back, caused me to squirm in discomfort, and not just because of the creepy Hannibal Lecter association. In the restaurant where I used to work I hovered pretty low on the kitchen totem pole, so guess who got to peel all those infant favas for the spring salad? I also worked my fingers to the bone on the mandoline–quite literally–shaving the rest of the Lilliputian vegetables for that salad, which was so gorgeous and tender it would make you weep. Band-aids were my accessory of choice that spring, and I never could complete the task quickly enough. Hyperdrive is simply a gear I wasn't born with. Now, with no one watching over me, I don’t mind at all working through a pile of favas in the quiet hum of my own kitchen, the steady monotony a meditation. If my daughters are home, they fight to help out, since they're still too young to think it a chore.

Unpleasant associations behind me, I revel in the arrival of favas, their fur-lined green leather jackets hiding velvety, kidney-shaped beans which, in turn, have to be blanched and peeled to rid them of their rubbery hides. Do you really have to peel them twice? Some folks would say don't bother. Truly, you can get away with skipping this step if the beans are tiny and new (and you can also eat them raw at this stage, as the Italians do), but I wouldn't dare, because at one time I would have gotten fired for such negligence, and because I really do think those skins are a bitter distraction.

Since we usually receive only about a pound at pick-up, I have to make them count. I could throw them in a pasta, but I'm forever doing that with the more profuse vegetables we have trouble using up. Like zucchini. I prefer to let those favas shine after all the slaving I do over them, so I have this simple puree I make, with mint and pecorino and lemon. It tastes so, so good on crostini, or as a sort of alternate-universe hummus in a vegetarian sandwich. I also like dipping spicy-sweet little breakfast radishes into it. The assembly of the recipe is easy once you get through the shelling, and in this heat the blend of clear, bright flavors revives a wilted appetite like nothing else can.

Mashed fava beans with mint and pecorino

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. (approx.) fava beans in their pods (yields about a cup, shelled)
• zest of 1/2 lemon
• 1 heaping tablespoon lemon juice
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup finely grated pecorino cheese (or, try ricotta salata) 
• 1 heaping teaspoon finely minced mint leaves (more, if you like)
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:
Shell the favas by snapping off ends of pods, pulling out strings, and opening seams. Discard pods. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil, and have a bowl of ice water ready. Boil the beans for a couple of minutes, depending on their size. You want them to be soft but not mushy, and still bright green. If you have larger favas that are beginning to turn yellow, you may need more like 3 minutes–but test as you go. Once done, remove favas with a slotted spoon and plunge into ice water. Drain when chilled, and remove skins by slitting them with a fingernail and squeezing beans out. 


To mash, you can use a food processor, potato masher, coarse food mill, or even a fork. I use the potato masher and like a somewhat coarse texture. Simply mash together everything but the mint leaves, taste for seasoning, add anything else you think it needs, then stir in the mint and serve.

Sour Cherries

Now is the time for sour cherries in the green markets of New York, but blink and they'll be gone: they last scarcely longer than a solstice. I spied some at the Wilklow Orchards booth at Borough Hall on Tuesday and greedily loaded up, actually capsizing the stroller in the process (and I dug out that stroller for the sole purpose of hauling fruit). The guy said next week will see the last of them, so if you live around here, carpe diem!

Cherries of any variety are great American crowd pleasers, but the sour ones, petite and luminescent, pack an extra punch that brightens up just about any baked good they grace: we love 'em in clafoutis and pies, tarts and financiers. Once you add sugar, some kind of alchemy happens, and you create tangy, sweet magic. I hesitate to admit this, but I think the reason I go so wild for the flavor is that it so strongly evokes Jolly Ranchers, a childhood favorite. Today, the mercury's headed up into the 90's, so I'm making a sour cherry granita. Here's my easy non-recipe: just throw a bunch of pitted and stemmed cherries into a blender with a little water, some sugar, and a few drops of kirsch. Whir on the highest setting for a long, long time, stopping to scrape down the sides occasionally. Taste and play, adding sugar bit by bit until the flavors fall into balance. Just don't pour in too much water–it's better to hold back and add it as needed. Ditto with the kirsch, which should not announce itself. Once cherries are pureed smooth, choose a small tray or casserole dish and pour them in to just cover the bottom. Lay the tray in a flat, stable place in your freezer and let it do its thing. But you must do your part, too: rake a fork across the puree every 30 minutes to break up large crystals and ice floes. After about 4 or 5 hours you should get an icy, sorbet-like consistency. It's perfection with sweetened, whipped cream.

More than anything, I just want to hold onto this time of cherries
and sugersnaps, treasure it, and never let it go. So I decided to put up a bunch of these tart little rubies for the winter, when we'll be needing their warmth and sparkle. I love the phrase "putting up," so redolent of homeliness, ritual, and optimism. I realize, though, that in going through the motions of preserving I'm actually admitting the unthinkable: that summer will end and we'll soon be bled by the New York City winter. Something stronger than mere jam will be needed to cope with that reality, so this year I've brandied and squirreled away some sour cherries–a surprisingly easy process, much simpler than the necessary tedium of full-on water canning, which has always struck me as a bit obsessive-compulsive. Since such a high quantity of booze is involved here, you can bet any microbe that even thought of setting up camp in your jars will flee in terror. I adapted my recipe from those featured in Judy Rodgers' Zuni Café Cookbook and Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Fruit. They are similar; both specify leaving the cherries whole, pits left in for flavor–but Rodgers advises using a good-quality, inexpensive brandy, while Waters insists on "the best brandy you can afford". I took the middle road and, after much hand-wringing at the liquor store, purchased the bottle above. It set me back about $16, and I still have a ton left over for whatever other fruits I want to drown in it as summer shines on. 

Even though neither recipe calls for it, I always sterilize my jars, just in case. I'm mildly obsessed with these pretty Italian vessels; the brand is Quattro Stagioni and each holds about 5 fluid ounces; the recipe below filled five of them. Be choosy with your fruit and, er, cherry pick at the market so your jars glow with only bruise- and blemish-free beauties.

Tipsy sour cherries
Adapted from Zuni Café Cookbook and Chez Panisse Fruits

Ingredients:

• 1 pound ripe but firm sour cherries, washed, stems ends trimmed
• 3/4 cup granulated, fine sugar (I use the natural kind, which takes longer to dissolve)
• 2 cups good quality but not too expensive brandy 
• water

Instructions:
Sterilize jars: boil gently in a large pot of water for a few minutes, then set out on a clean towel to dry. Simmer lids to soften rubber seals. Once jars are cooled and relatively dry, pack cherries into them carefully, filling to just below "shoulders" of jars. Dissolve sugar into brandy by heating gently in a pot on the stove, dribbling in a little bit of water. Whisk together. Using a spouted measuring cup or pitcher, pour brandy into jars until it just covers the cherries (should reach just to bottom of rim). Tap each one to release air bubbles, then screw lids on tightly. Put in a cool, dark place, occasionally turning jars upside down to re-distribute any sugar crystals that settle out. Leave them there for about a month to allow the flavors to meld, then refrigerate for up to a year.

To enjoy, Rodgers recommends leaving cherries out for a bit to disperse alcohol, if you are serving them raw. Or, pit and stem them and cook, sautéing or roasting briefly for game dishes (picture these with duck in the fall), or sautéing in butter with a bit of their syrup and serving over ice cream. They would be dreamy with creme brûlée and other custard desserts, equally nice with cheese or pâté–or as grown-up maraschino cherries. You probably want to hide these from the kids.

Retro Strawberries

This box sat in the back of the post office for nearly a month before I finally rescued it. Those of you who happen to live on the north end of zip code 11231, as I do, are nodding your heads knowingly right now, because you’re aware that fetching missed packages equals either a hop in the car or a not too pleasant walk. It involves the smoggy BQE underpass, crevasse-like potholes, and hunting for parking in the projects. And usually, at the end of it all, a snaking line. I would rather go to the dentist, honestly, but on this day the journey and the wait weren’t so bad, and I only wish I had gotten up the gumption sooner.

Turns out, the mystery package was a box stuffed with a passel of letters and notes, sent to me by my dear aunt Katie (thanks, Katie!). The owner of all these yellowing, crumpled papers had been my grandmother, who departed this earth going on 20 years ago. Mimi, as we called her, was not just a cool grandmother, who let us rummage through her sewing kit and use her scary kitchen scissors to make jigsaw puzzles…and spackle her powder room walls with soap suds and watercolors (OK, maybe we didn’t have permission for that one), but she was also a prolific food writer–back when Julia Child was first bursting onto the scene. Mimi wrote columns for The Richmond News Leader in Virginia for 30 years, starting right after WWII. I have a manila envelope full of her newspaper clippings, cured to a soft amber hue after 50-odd years of oxidation. For the most part, she wrote recipes–traditional southern ones like Sally Lunn bread, as well as stuff that in the ‘50’s and 60’s would have been considered pretty soigné, like Kahlua Soufflé and Artichoke Vegetable Melange. She also profiled Virginia families leading exotic ex-pat lives overseas. And, one article details the renovation of her own kitchen, in 1964. The black and white doesn't do justice to the avocado green accents, but you can use your imagination:

She was helping along a generation of southern ladies who, like their mothers, had always relied on their cooks; things were changing after the war and household help was in shorter supply (or perhaps just too expensive). Many of the readers would have grown up without family cooking traditions, so they needed someone to hold their hands and talk them through dinner prep. The happy by-product of my grandmother's labors was that my Dad inherited a passion for cooking and impressive kitchen skills, and I grew up against a backdrop of ever-bubbling pots on the stove.

Although she traveled constantly and collected recipes from afar (my grandfather was a drama professor, so they had their summers) and touted the use of certain "convenience foods", she wrote in her farewell column in 1976: "Though the foreign dishes are always conversation pieces, vegetables picked from our farm's garden and cooked within minutes are the greatest favorites…That is real feasting."

I remember the farm fondly from my earliest years, and I remember most the just-picked strawberries that stained my chin on late spring afternoons. So, as I ripped through cardboard and tape some 30 years later, I mentally willed there to be some really killer strawberry recipes in there; buckets have been coming in with our CSA, and they’re delicate, old-style fruits that fade by the minute. As luck would have it, the length of the box didn’t allow for the whole alphabet to be filed, and somehow “S” had gotten strewn across the top: a pile of papers origamied into angular packets. Apparently, these once jammed every drawer of Mimi’s home office, which I picture so clearly for its chaos as much as for her state-of-the-art electric typewriter–in the 70’s it must have been quite something. My sister and I never could resist sneaking in and test-driving it when she wasn’t looking.

But the strawberry recipes I found, scrawled in various hands, weren’t my grandmother’s work at all. In fact, little in the box actually is. Mostly they are reader letters–and what an unexpected and delightful twist to find so many voices from the past crowded into that compact box, clamoring to get out. Until that moment, I hadn't really considered her relationship with her audience, nor the ongoing conversation she was kindling. These papers are a window into how correspondence used to work in a slower, politer time. 

Mimi crowd-sourced to get to the authentically Virginian, sometimes country recipes. When she put out a call for strawberry shortcake recipes, letters poured in the snail way, from Richmond proper and more distant corners of Virginia. The recipes are well-worn, some reaching back into the 1800's, with measurements given as “a teacup” or baking temperature as “in a quick oven”. It takes some imagination and guesswork to cobble them back together, but I had to give it a go. One letter, a long, chatty one written in 1953, captured my attention over the others. The writer, G. Herrmann Zank, passes along his or her mother's recipe, supplying vivid detail of technique–but no actual measurements. His/her mother used pure lard in the unsweetened biscuit dough and baked the single huge biscuit in a pie pan, rather than cutting individual ones (which (s)he asserted were more "modern"). The truth of the matter is, the writer of this letter had me at lard. Even my rural-dwelling great-grandmother used Fluffo (a "golden" version of Crisco) as her go-to baking fat, and the revisionist in me wishes it had been something more quaint and natural. And it so happens I had lard on hand, left over from our winter pork CSA, so I jumped at the chance to use it. 

The biscuit came out light and wonderfully crisp, but I've decided I prefer lard in fall and winter preparations–those featuring apples, pears, or nuts–since to me lard has a heartier, faintly savory note. In the future, I'll reserve it for my fall desserts, just as I'll treasure this recipe for that fleeting space between spring and full summer, when strawberries are as sweet and tender as memories.

Old-fashioned Strawberry Shortcake

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 stick (8 tablespoons) cold, unsalted butter cut in small pieces or 4 ounces leaf lard
• 1/2 cup cold milk
• 1 quart strawberries, stemmed and halved, quartered if larger
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 cup heavy (whipping) cream
• confectioner's sugar (optional), for dusting

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees and grease a 9" pie pan. In a large bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Using a pastry cutter, your hands, or a food processor, work quickly to cut the butter or lard into the flour, until mixture resembles coarse sand. Do not overwork. Stir in milk until mixture comes together, then press into a ball and turn out onto a well-floured surface. Roll gently into an even disk, then transfer to the pie pan and press to evenly fill the pan.

Put into the oven and bake 25-30 minutes (more, if needed), checking occasionally, until pale golden brown.

Meanwhile, sprinkle 1/8 cup sugar onto the cut strawberries and gently stir. Allow berries to macerate at room temperature while biscuit cooks. Whip cream with the other 1/8 cup sugar until it forms soft peaks. 

Allow biscuit to cool, then carefully unmold onto a flat surface. Run a long, serrated knife through the equator of the biscuit to cut into two even halves. Put the bottom one on a plate. Using a slotted spoon, transfer strawberries onto biscuit half, distributing evenly (reserve liquid in bowl), then spread cream over berries. Lay the top half of biscuit over it all, then sprinkle with confectioner's sugar. You can use the delicious leftover strawberry juice to drizzle on the plate.

Les Sardines

I've been truant from this space, but it's not for lack of eating, cooking, or writing. Perhaps too much of everything has kept me away. Our CSA season has kicked off and we're drowning in strawberries and rhubarb. The markets are spilling over and I can barely keep pace with all the asparagus and young onions and tarragon. And then there was Paris. Paris? Mais, oui! The Mr. and I got to escape for a bit, sans enfants, to one of my most favorite places on earth–a place that, some time ago, I called home. These days, I return as an unabashedly giddy tourist, navigating the streets more confidently than I did when I landed there after college: a vegan with a backpack full of too-colorful clothes, trying my best to blend, ignoring with all my might the lovely charcuterie and oozy cheeses laid out fetchingly everywhere I turned (in case you're wondering, I didn't hold out long). I know exactly what I want to eat now, and it's everything, and exactly the spots I need to head to, and they are usually markets (it's a good thing Ben, my husband, is a good sport). The Sunday organic market on the Rue de Raspail overflowed with the most amazing wispy wild asparagus and tiny strawberries, fat bulbs of purple garlic and more exotic things, like softball-sized melons from further south.

Saturday, a massive collective yard sale spread across Les Halles–an inflated version of the stoop sales that dot our Brooklyn neighborhood on sunny weekends; very briefly, I felt homesick. I can never miss the Marché aux Puces (flea market) at St. Ouen, because there's a fix for every collector junkie out there, whether the poison of choice is beads, records, vintage dolls' eyes, or old earthenware pitchers.

Of course, there are those luminous nights. 

And the food! Pain au chocolate and café serré in the mornings, draughts of wine at lunch after so much walking, a big tureen of creamy cucumber gazpacho at Les Papilles, salted caramels, and, of course, macarons. So where does the wretched sardine fit in with all this glamour? First of all, let's get something straight, in case you think you're not a fan of these glittering little fishes. Maybe you have something against tinned seafood, which, by the way, has nothing to do with the fresh version: different beasts altogether, with their quicksilver skins and heads still intact (fish heads aren't your thing? Then off with them!). Their flavor is clean and full, defying their small size, and their texture denser and more sprightly than that of canned ones. Before I hopped the plane, I had them on the brain, and I had been, before I ran out of time, planning a post on them. I boarded, promptly forgot about this blog, and then: wham! Our first meal on the other side featured the most ethereal marinated sardine fillets, artfully combined with lemongrass and citrus, tomato marmalade and olive tapenade–definitely the most dressed-up sardines I've ever tasted.

My introduction to fresh sardines occurred in Paris, so many years ago, at the wine bar where I worked during my stay there. They would come in from the market at Rungis on unpredictable Saturdays, sparkling and smelling of nothing but sea water, and they needed very little fussing. Not that the kitchen would have had space for that. They were simply slid under the salamander with heads still on, splashed with olive oil and coarse salt, and left to sizzle and pop for a couple of minutes on each side. The skin would crisp toasty brown around the edges, then a generous squeeze of lemon would supply the crowning touch–nothing else needed. Maybe some mustard, if you were so inclined.

Sardines, I've found, do fancy and basic with equal ease–and I've had them both ways in Paris. Here at home, fresh sardines are simultaneously one of the cheapest and (I think) most delicious things our fish store carries. They are sustainable, packed full of Omega-3's, and reassuringly low on the aquatic food chain–so you needn't worry about mercury contamination. You can cook them the wine bar way, under a broiler (just don't let them burn), or check out the recipe below, one I've returned to again and again, in which the fish are briefly sautéed and then marinated in an acidic mixture. Though many similar recipes call for fillets, I leave the fish whole; I suppose this is partially out of laziness, partly from a belief that cooking things on the bone enhances their flavor. The recipe works either way. The taste is vinegary, citrusy and a little spicy, and the onions pickle in there–an added bonus. There is a few hours' wait time between cooking and serving, but that makes this a great dish to prepare ahead and return to after a busy summer afternoon outside. Serve with a warm potato salad. The next day, you can fillet the sardines and serve them over heaps of arugula, along with those tangy, aromatic onions, atop crusty bread. 

  

Escabeche of Sardines

Adapted from Rick Stein, BBC Food

serves 2

Ingredients:

• 6-8 whole sardines (depending on size), gutted and scaled or fillets with skin still on
• all-purpose flour for dredging
• sea salt and ground pepper to taste
• 1/3 cup plus 2 Tablespoons olive oil
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1 pinch sugar 
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 small bay leaf
• 1 small onion, peeled and thinly sliced
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
• fresh fennel fronds (optional)
• 1 teaspoon orange or lemon zest
• 1 dried chili pepper, slitted (or, 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes)
• 1 small sprig thyme
• 1 small sprig rosemary
• 1/4 cup parsley leaves, chopped

Instructions: 

Mix together flour and a bit of salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Rinse sardines and pat dry. Dredge them in the flour mixture and shake off excess. Meanwhile, heat a heavy skillet over medium high heat, add a couple tablespoons of oil, and fry the fish about a minute or two on each side (a little more if they are especially large). 

 

Transfer cooked sardines to a casserole dish that will fit them snugly. Add remaining ingredients–except for olive oil and parsley–to skillet and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for about 15 minutes, then remove from heat and whisk in remaining oil and parsley. Pour over sardines and allow to marinate this way for 4-6 hours, refrigerated (up to 24 hours), before eating. To serve, bring to room temperature and fillet each side by working a small knife along the rib bones, from head to tail, then removing flesh from bones.