Lifestyle

Hunting and Gathering: "The Essential New York Times Cook Book"

by Lisa Barlow

You don’t have to be a New Yorker to have accumulated a thick file of favorite recipes clipped from The New York Times over the years. My grandmother, who lived in Texas, kept tear sheets with recipes from the Sunday New York Times Magazine tucked into the cookbooks in her kitchen.

If the New York Times motto is “All the News that’s Fit to Print”, you could say that I was raised on “All the Food that’s Fit to Eat”. My mother, an avid cook, eagerly followed every recipe written by Craig Claiborne, the paper’s inspired food columnist during the years I was growing up. She kept her recipes for the hearty stroganoffs, ratatouilles, pistous, and even the sad soy burger, an outlier among the richly flavored favorites, in a drawer next to the grocery money in the kitchen. 

In her new magnificent compendium, The Essential New York Times Cook Book, Classic Recipes for a New Century, Amanda Hesser, a longtime food writer and staff member at the Times, gives new life to many of the fragile yellowing scraps of paper in my own file. Not only have I reconnected with the staples of my childhood: the David Eyre pancake and Welsh Rarebit, she has introduced me to the intriguingly named “Epigram of Lamb”, which first ran in the paper in 1879, and to the myriad delights of recent recipes published while I wasn’t paying attention.

Hunting and Gathering: Meyer lemons

 by Lisa Barlow

The Meyer lemons sitting on my kitchen table are like a bowl of sunshine. Rounder and deeper in color than regular lemons, they are also harder to come by, unless you live in Southern California and are blessed with a prolific tree in your back yard.  From November through January, when the lemons migrate to fruit aisles in specialty markets outside of California, you want to grab them. Don’t look at the price tag, just inhale their sweet scent and be grateful for a lucky score.

As a native New Yorker, the unique pleasures of the Meyer lemon are not imprinted on me. But for many a transplanted West Coaster, they serve as powerful triggers for sense memories, able to transport one back to childhood or into an old love affair.

Hunting and Gathering: Latkes

by Lisa Barlow

(NOTE: Hanukkah starts on the Hebrew calendar date of 25 Kislev, and lasts for eight days. THIS YEAR THROUGH 12/1 – 12/9)

What does a nice shiksa girl like me know about latkes? Bupkis! But that doesn’t stop me from gobbling them down whenever they’re on the menu. In New York you can find great latkes year round in delis and Eastern European eateries. During Hanukkah, you can find them in many upscale restaurants where they are gussied up with crème fraiche and caviar, quails' eggs or truffles. You can even find traif versions that feature bacon.

Latkes are served on Hanukkah in celebration of the liberation of Jerusalem in 168 BC, after the Maccabees drove out the Syrian-Greek invaders. When the main temple was recaptured, only enough oil remained to keep the holy lamp burning for one day. Yet it burned for eight days, long enough for the city dwellers to manufacture more oil. Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, has become the eight-day holiday that pays homage to the miracle of the oil. Not only is one candle of a menorah lit each day for eight days, but tradition holds that foods fried in oil, most usually olive oil, be served.