Food

Looking for some Valentine’s Day inspiration the other day, I ventured into one of those mega-blocklong-bookstores. Surely there will be a lovely display of Rumi’s love poems, Shakespeare’s sonnets, or perhaps some bodice-ripper novels. Anais Nin? 

Will Jordin Sparks have a wardrobe malfunction while singing the national anthem? Will Tom Brady be able to play? Will his gazelle of a girlfriend, Gisele Bundchen, be an albatross as Jessica Simpson has been for Tony Romo? Will I have enough spicy chicken wings to last through the halftime show? Is my TV screen big enough? 

These are the burning questions gnawing away at me in anticipation of Super Bowl XLII. 

Baking homemade holiday treats is one of my favorite traditions. Cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg are as much holiday scents to me as pine, balsam, and paperwhite narcissus.

Shared recipes. Old, old family recipes. What a treasure trove of history! I couldn’t wait to dig into them. Some had helpful notes scribbled on them. One even had “very bad recipe” scrawled on it, and yet it had been saved with the others to live on.

The name “soul food” gained popularity in the 1960s when the word "soul" became associated with all things African-American. But its origins go way back to the Antebellum period, when slaves in the South would create meals out of discarded meat parts (pig’s feet, ham hocks, tripe) and the tossed-away leafy tops of vegetables such as beets and turnips, and otherwise would rely on whatever they could catch, fish, or farm for their meals.

I got a great recipe for granola from a famous bakery in Los Angeles last year. I have fiddled with it so much, this is now my recipe. Besides, I've conveniently forgotten the name of the bakery. I even put this granola on top of salads!

Football for a person who likes to cook is an excuse to pull out an arsenal of retro junky recipes. Chile con queso made with Velveeta cheese! Deviled shrimp! Guacamole, chips ’n’ dips galore! Buffalo wings, spicy killer chili with corn bread. I think the only requirements for being appropriate football food is it must be fattening and easy to pick up.

Ireland is the only other country I know of that has any special food for Halloween. There’s a famous dish made with potatoes. Dawdling along through my treasured Irish cookbook by the doyenne of Irish cookery, Theodora Fitzgibbon, I came upon some recipes and lore about my favorite Irish dish: colcannon.

Wine labels are highly regulated by the federal government, more methodically even than food labels. It is mandatory to identify in some detail at least seven items, some so boring that it led to the invention of a second label on the back of the bottle to split the tedium and give us a bit of relief and respite while reading the primary label.

My major point in a recent column about storing wines was that there is a difference between keeping wines for up to a few years in a condition where they are ready to drink and aging important wines for the future. Even if you are doing both, serving wines correctly is at least as important as how they were stored.

These savory potatoes could serve as a main course for lunch with just a small green salad to balance their richness. They’re really much too interesting to play second fiddle in a meal. Select large, blemishless Idaho baking potatoes for this dish.

Are you ready for some football? America is. That day of days, Super Bowl Sunday, is upon us and it’s the most-watched television event in the country. So chances are that, wherever you are, some football will be part of your consciousness on February first. 

Casseroles come in so many shapes and sizes and ethnic backgrounds, and with the right ingredients they are splendid for entertaining variable numbers of people and also have the virtue of staying reasonably hot on buffet tables.

Peaches are so delicate and easily bruised, it’s obvious that the beauties from California cannot possibly be tree-ripened. But they are fine for making jams, conserves, and chutneys — anything cooked.

Asparagus are the crocuses of vegetables, the very first edible herald of spring. Of course, like most exotic luxuries, asparagus can be seen in fancy food shops as early as the January white sales.

War news, which increasingly comes in curt briefings from the Pentagon, rivets the country's attention and also serves to distract citizens from what is either a recession or a depression depending on whose ox is being gored. Sales of yellow ribbon may be up around here but nothing much else is. And February. Can't something be done about this wretched month — like shortening it to 10 days?

"The older it is, sourdough fanciers say, the better bread it makes; some Alaskan families have sour­ dough 50 years old." — Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, “Eating in America” 

Pioneer women carried leaven “mothers” across the plains to California, where sourdough bread has remained popular to this day. Sourdough got started in places where no yeast could be brought so had to be made naturally, capturing whatever wild yeasts were ini the air. Hops and beer helped, but plain flour and water ferment after 18 to 24 hours at nor­mal room temperature.

This combination of fresh haricot beans and dried garbanzos (chickpeas) is beautiful, nutritious, and delicious. Even the crankiest of eaters will find nothing to object to.

“By the beginning of the 18th century . . . all the arguments which were to sustain modem vegetarianism were in circulation.” — Keith Thomas, “Man and the Natural World,” 1983

These arguments were: that slaughtering animals has a brutalizing effect on human behavior; that consuming meat is bad for the health; that it inflicts untold suffering on humans’ fellow creatures; that it is simply wrong to kill any animals at all (the dominant view of theologians from the Renaissance on was, and I believe still is, that animals were created by God for the benefit of mankind).

This amazingly tender and juicy pork roast is the result of cooking at high temperature a relatively short time in a covered Weber grill, and butterflied leg of lamb has been seen on fashionable grills for over 20 years but whole leg of lamb is far less commonplace.

Trout with bacon and vinegar sauce is a sophisticated dinner version of an old-time fisherman's breakfast, while flounder takes on an interesting flavor and appearance when stuffed with herbs.

“Man is an epicure just as he is an artist, a scholar, a poet. The palate . . . is as delicate and susceptible of training as the eye or ear, and equally deserving of respect.”  — Guy de Maupassant, Madame Husson’s Rose-king 

This spicy blend of fish, shrimp, and okra isn’t at all difficult to make, but the timing of each ingredient added must be adhered to precisely, because cooking times are brief and overcooking ruins the dish.

"Memory recalls dishes that have pleased the taste; imagination pretends to see them; there is something dreamlike about the whole process." — "On Appetite," Brillat-Savarin

Here we are — locked in the drears of January with nothing much active and pleasurable to do. Except cook! And think about food we shouldn't have and still stick to the traditional New Year's vow to lose 10 pounds.

This fudge pie is a “gooey-on-the-inside, crunchy-on-the-outside, heavenly piece of chocolate wickedness,” and the lemon-curd tarts have a rich filling that can also be used in lemon meringue pie or a layer-cake filling.

This is one of the world's great peasant soups, the emblematic soup of Quebec, in fact. Despite this, with our normal maddening indifference to our 'friendly giant to the north,' Canada, there are no recipes to be found for this great soup in any American cookbook I've seen. I tracked it down through a friend in Montreal.

The bald eagle may be the emblem of the United States, but I think Benjamin Franklin got his wish even though it has not been proclaimed by any official source: Turkey is the national bird.

“Often called 'poor man's meat' and, in one form, 'poor man's caviar,' the eggplant is one of the staple foods of the Middle East. It is extremely versatile." — Claudia Roden, “A Book of Middle Eastern Food”

Corn has ears and we’d all better sneak up on it as rapidly as possible.

“The varieties of plum are legion, and have been at least since Roman times when Pliny spoke of the ingens turba prunorum, the enormous crowd of plums.” — Jane Grigson’s "Fruit Book"

The great menagerie of plums begins now and goes on through August, with this luscious stone fruit ranging from blue-black, through the reds and rubies, and on to yellow and the pale, almost translucent green of greengages.