A favorite winter comfort in our house is that classic bistro standard, French Onion Soup Gratinée (28 October 2014: Mastering the Art of French Onion Soup Gratinéed). Since it's at its best made with a rich homemade broth, making it is a two day process.
But taking that extra step is so worth it, for its side benefit is that there's always boiled beef and extra broth left over for lovely things like another of our favorite winter comforts, pot pie. Read More
Our first full winter in Virginia has been typical of the Mid-Atlantic South. There's been just enough snow to be fun without getting tedious, and we've enjoyed as much clear, crisp sunshine as rain. Temperatures have dipped just enough to make fires, soup, and hot toddies welcome, but not too cold for attacking the weeds and vines that have overrun our garden while they're dormant.
It's the kind of weather that's perfect for chicken soup, and hardly a week has passed without a pot of broth simmering on the back of my stove, filling the house with its warming, appetite-stirring fragrance. Read More
Buttermilk pie is an old-fashioned standard of Southern baking whose history rivals that of the most put-upon heroines of any soap opera or romance novel. A humble, homespun pastry, it was as taken for granted as it was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It suffered gross neglect during the "gourmet" 1970s, and in the so-called "nouvelle southern" movement 1980s, survived a tarted-up comeback (with "reinvention" that sometimes bordered on abuse), then once again faded in the early part of this century. Happily, it's lately enjoyed yet another revival, Read More
It's been a typical frosty January here in Petersburg, with just enough snow to be pretty and fun without getting tedious, and just enough frost in the air to make a fire on the hearth welcome but not absolutely necessary.
In other words, it's perfect pot roast weather.
After years of watching my mother and maternal grandparents assemble dozens of this Sunday dinner staple, and almost half a century of making it on my own, I never even glance at a recipe. Yet, except when I'm really homesick, it but rarely comes out exactly like the pot roasts of my childhood—by design.
The lovely thing about dishes like this is that once we've mastered the basic technique and keep in mind which flavors work well together, we're free to be in the moment and just cook. Read More
I don't know how you all greeted the new year, but I hope it wasn't the way we did: in bed with head colds. Whenever I'm under the weather, if I can stand upright for more than two minutes, I drag myself to the store for a chicken and make a big pot of broth for chicken soup. (The one good thing about being in the middle of a pandemic is that the discipline of wearing a mask and constant hand-washing meant that there was little danger of passing that cold around.)
Yes, I could've just opened a can, and have been known to do that while waiting for heat to work its magic on the chicken, water, and a handful of vegetables. But the mass-produced contents of a can aren't at all the same and simply don't have the healing power of homemade soup. Read More
As our first full Christmastide in our Virginia home comes to an end, we're finally beginning to settle in and feel as if we're really at home here. It would be nice to report that settling in included an exuberant outburst of creativity in my sweet, sunny kitchen.
Well, no.
The upheaval of moving, the loss of my car thanks to being broadsided by a careless driver, unexpected changes at the church, the worrying decline of my elderly parents, and the new spikes in the pandemic have led instead to a full retreat into all our comfort food favorites.
We celebrated the season with the usual treats and have had more than our quota of eggnog, cheese straws, country ham biscuits and rolls, roast turkey, potato gratin, homemade fruitcake, and cookies. And, despite being laid out with terrible head colds, being good Southern boys we saw in the new year with plenty of collards and black-eyed peas.
But our day to day staples have been homey comfort favorites that I can make blindfolded. Read More
As new variants of the Covid virus sharply remind us that the pandemic is far from over, some are choosing to once again forego large family gatherings and keep the holidays in a more intimate way with only their immediate household.
Never mind that this provides many of us with a convenient excuse to avoid some of our more tedious relatives, most of us have had just enough freedom for it to still be disappointing, especially those whose households are just two or even one person.
It also makes the large roast that's the centerpiece of the traditional feast impractical. But there doesn't actually have to be a honking big turkey, goose, standing rib, or crown roast in the middle of the table for the meal to be sumptuous and festive. Read More
Last night, we ventured out to a neighborhood holiday pot-luck. It was the first time we'd done anything like it since our move, and I'm a little out of practice with cooking for crowds, so my contribution was a standard that I could do without thinking about it, an extravagant but very easy potato gratin.
And as it always does, my gratin dish came home scraped clean.
It's a simple concoction of thinly-sliced potatoes, cream, and good cheese for which I can't take any credit, since the recipe is a timeless classic French one, Read More
Thanks to a move across three states, all the usual upheaval that goes with it, and a few unexpected wrenches thrown in along the way, we're still adjusting to our new home and life in Virginia. The consequence is, that my holiday baking has gotten a very late start. While that's probably not a bad thing for my waistline, it hasn't helped my spirit.
Yesterday, however, at long last I finally tied on an apron, got out the mixer and processor, and began my baking ritual with a batch of Christmas Cheese Stars.
That's just cheese straws with a little bit of a holiday spin that happened completely by accident. Read More
Since we had Thanksgiving dinner away from home, to give us "leftovers" other than my contributions to the feast, I'd not only made broth but later roasted a turkey breast on a bed of diced carrot, celery, and onion and baked a small pan of sage and onion cornbread dressing.
The weather here has turned brisk, with temperatures dropping below freezing at night, so the obvious end for those leftovers was a nice, thick soup. Read More
Y'all, I cannot seem to help myself.
For our first Virginia Thanksgiving, we're not hosting but are going to another family member's home. My part of the meal is my grandfather's macaroni pie, cranberry relish with apples and oranges, and a sweet potato souffle from a fondly remembered Savannah friend.
So I'm not cooking the turkey, gravy, or dressing. And yet: There's a big pot of turkey broth simmering away in my sunny yellow kitchen as I write this, and I'll roast a turkey breast later on for sandwiches, creamed turkey over dressing, and turkey soup.
The thing is, it's just not Thanksgiving if my house doesn't smell like roasted turkey and broth, Read More
Most of us have heard that old saw about how moving is as stressful as the loss of a job, the death of a spouse or close family member, a divorce, or a debilitating illness. Well, having been through all of those things, I can't say it's quite up to their level, but what I can tell you is that it gets more difficult with age.
Two months into our new life in Virginia, people ask if we're unpacked and settled; we look at one another, let out a sigh, and then laugh. On the surface, the house is beginning to look as if we've lived here for a long time. The boxes are all unpacked, a lot of the pictures are hanging, and shelves are filled with books.
But unpacked isn't settled Read More
As we settle in to our home in the foothills of Virginia, one thing that has become apparent over the last month is that we may have left the marsh-laced lowcountry, but my cooking hasn't. After four decades (almost my entire adult life) in a Savannah kitchen, the patterns and flavors of that unique coastal cuisine have become an indelible part of my cooking.
No matter how one looks at it, moving and resettling in another place, even a beloved one, is daunting and stressful. So it's no surprise that, once the kitchen was settled, our meals have been a steady stream of comfort food favorites. It was also no surprise that many of those comforting dishes go back to our childhood—steaming bowls of cheese grits, country-style steak, macaroni pie, my mother's baked chicken.
What did surprise me—and shouldn't have—is how many of them came from those four decades in the lowcountry. Read More
20 October 2021: Making a Vacation Kitchen Home and an Autumnal Salad
This weekend we will have been gone from Savannah for a month. We're settling in at our house in Virginia and it's finally beginning to sink in that we're not on a vacation that will soon end: We're really and truly here to stay.
The most challenging and yet welcome transition for me has been the kitchen. Bright, sunny, and more inviting than any of my many kitchens have been, it's also been better equipped than those of most vacation houses. But while perfect for the on holiday cooking I've done in it, there's still been a lot of making-do.
Now that all the equipment has been reunited in one place, you'd think it would've been perfect. Read More
Among the best things of all the wonderful summer produce that used to come from my mother's now dormant vegetable garden were delicate, sweet summer squash. It yielded our familiar Southern yellow crooknecks by the bushel, but also produced slim little green zucchini in equal quantity, because our whole family loved both.
They're what I miss most from her garden. We cooked them in all the usual ways and never tired of any of them: Read More
30 June 2021: Summer Squash and Pasta
Last week I was finally able to visit my parents, whom I had not seen since December of 2019. It was bittersweet: Finally seeing and actually touching them was undiluted joy; witnessing the toll that age and pandemic isolation have taken was heartbreaking. Hearing it in their voices on the telephone, and in regular reports from my brother, was one thing, but experiencing it in person was something else altogether.
One of the single saddest things of all was that my mother is no longer able to do the thing she loves best: garden. Her large vegetable garden plot is now indistinguishable from the rest of the yard. And there was not one single green vegetable to be found in that house.
Still, it was good to actually see them and, if only for a few days, take some of the burden off my brother, and do things Read More
People often ask why I never considered opening my own restaurant. My ready answer is that I'd as soon climb onto a chair, put a noose around my neck, and jump. I like cooking and want to keep it that way. But it's actually deeper than that: the truth is I've cooked professionally—only a little, but just enough for me to promise myself I'd never do it again.
While awaiting the publication of my first cookbook back in the early nineties, in what can only have been a moment of complete insanity, I let myself get talked into running the kitchen of a lunch café in downtown Savannah. The owner, who I suspect was a few bricks shy of a load (for goodness' sake, she'd hired an ex-architect who'd never cooked professionally to run her kitchen), had decorated the place without any idea of what kind of food it would offer.
Nor had any thought been given to how that food would be prepared. Read More
One of my early mentors and friends in food writing was the late Marie Rudisill, whom you may have known as the outrageously frank Fruitcake Lady on The Tonight Show. Her first and best advice was, "Don't change your phone number, sugar: Half the fun you're gonna have from this thing is the phone calls you'll get."
The trouble was—and is—that I chose a profession that imposes solitude for a reason. I'm not outgoing by nature. But she was right; the best compensation for being reluctantly pushed into the public eye is that rare, unexpected call or letter that comes out of nowhere and lifts the spirit just when you need it most.
Over the years, they've sparked many treasured friendships, but none has meant more than the one that bloomed over a duck. Read More
The people who complain about long-winded recipe introductions will be happy with this one. I'll be short and sweet. Lillie Castleberry King was a lovely dowager from Talladega, Alabama. A true Southern lady in every sense of the title, she was noted for her baking, and these simple puddings were an after-school treat for her children when they were growing up in the 1940s.
She shared the recipe with me almost forty years ago. Read More
Dropping by Charles J. Russo's, my neighborhood fish market, for the shrimp that went into that sauté with new potatoes a couple of days back, some lovely fresh bay scallops caught my imagination and, like a child in the grocery, it started begging me to take some home.
A nice, simple gratin seemed like just the thing for them, with a touch of garlic, scallions, and a little hot pepper to season them, a few soft crumbs to soak up the juice they inevitably shed, and a few buttered dry crumbs to finish their top.
What could possibly go wrong? Well. It wasn't exactly wrong, but the garlic turned out to be way more than "a touch." Read More
Over the course of my newspaper column's twenty year run, I but rarely developed original recipes for it. It wasn't laziness; it just wasn't cost effective. To fully develop a recipe from scratch requires a great deal of time and a lot more money than the column earned.
Still, every now and again, a column would inspire an idea for a dish that just wouldn't leave my imagination alone. And when, on those rare occasions, I gave in to the call and the recipe turned out well enough to make it into the column, it was always met with a hollow promise that I'd repeat it until it was perfected.
All too often, though, it got filed away and never made again.
Last year when panic hoarding created so many shortages of basic staples, just such an idea reared its little head and demanded to be noticed. Read More
To round out an intimate Easter dinner with elegant simplicity, one can do no better than the classic Italian semifreddo. At first glance, the name seems contradictory, since it means "partly cold (frozen)" and yet the thing is actually completely frozen.
The usual explanation is that the light, mousse-like texture remains soft even when frozen solid, and doesn't feel quite as cold in the mouth as gelato, sorbet, or ice cream. Read More
Arguably the easiest and best way to prepare asparagus is to cook it whole in a large pan of boiling salted water until it's just crisp-tender—as little as two and no more than four minutes if the spears are nice and fat, then carefully drain, drizzle it with melted butter, and serve it forth. Second to that is to spread it on a baking pan, sprinkle it with olive oil and salt, and roast it in a very hot oven.
The drawback to both those methods is that they're best done just before serving and require the cook's almost undivided attention. When I know my attention is likely to be spread out over several things at the last minute, this sauté is what I turn to.
The asparagus is already mostly cooked, so it's really just a matter of warming it up in the pan, Read More
For those who prefer potatoes as the starchy side at Easter, an alternative to the pasta suggested earlier is this luxurious but simple potato gratin. Based on a classic French one, it's usually made with caramelized onions, but here thinly sliced scallions and a few spring herbs give it a fresh lift and make it a fine accompaniment for either lamb or ham.
Actually, it's pretty compatible with just about anything, and is also lovely with poultry (especially roasted), fish, pork, and venison.
The only real work is grating cheese and scrubbing, peeling, and slicing potatoes. And, actually, those probably don't even have to be peeled if you like the skins. Once those chores are done, it's just a matter of tossing it together and popping it into the oven. Read More
Thin spaghetti simply dressed with butter, freshly-grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and thinly sliced young scallions has long been a spring standard at my table. I start making it when the first beautiful, slender little scallions appear in the market in late winter, and have it at least once a week throughout the season.
It's the very essence of spring and so perfectly balanced that even thinking of adding a thing risks falling into an exercise in gilding lilies.
But whenever I happen to have fresh thyme on hand, a few of its leaves inevitably find their way into the bowl. Read More
All my life, the way holidays were celebrated has been determined by family obligations. Easter was the lone exception. It was the one holiday with no prior claims on it, the one where we could create our own traditions.
For most of my time in Savannah, I've hosted Easter dinner in my own home or at the very least have planned and executed it from the kitchen of a friend.
Last year laid waste to that tradition. Read More
The older I get, the simpler my cooking seems to become. Whether it's because our aging palates develop a taste for simpler flavors or we just get lazy is a toss up, but the change has been so gradual that it might've gone unnoticed had it not been for the pandemic.
Through this time of isolation, our comfort favorites have been repeated over and over, and I've begun to notice how they've gotten simpler, both in their composition and execution. And it's had its merits. Stripping away extraneous layers, steps, and ingredients has made for cleaner, more direct flavors, not to mention a whole lot less fuss.
This soup is a good example. Read More
It's been one of those cold, wet Sunday afternoons in Savannah, the kind that's perfect for having a hearty, comforting stew simmering in the kitchen.
"Stew" for most of us brings to mind chunks of red meat or poultry simmering for hours in rich brown gravy. But there was no meat in the house nor time for an endless simmer. Happily, "stew" is a technique that isn't just for meat; it can be applied to just about anything. And the time it takes depends on what's in it. Read More
That hackneyed saw about old dogs and new tricks has never felt more depressingly true than it has in my kitchen over the last few months.
The pandemic lockdown might, for some, have been a challenging adventure into previously unexplored culinary avenues. But let's face it, most of us are really not all that adventurous. For every undauntable wanderer there are probably a dozen or more of us who'd just as soon stay in with a good book and cup of tea.
This tired old dog is one of the latter. I settled into a nest lined with an endless cycle of repeated comfort food favorites, emerging only when forced into dipping my toes into new territory out of necessity to keep my newspaper column interesting.
The end of the column brought with it an end to any motivation to go exploring. Read More
Braising may well be my favorite way of cooking. Not only does it concentrate flavors and tenderize tough foods, it actually keeps delicate foods moist and succulent.
While it's ideal for winter and for the hearty but tough cuts of meat that we favor in cold weather, this versatile method really knows no season. I turn to it year round. It's really ideal for this strange time in our lives, too, since any quantity of food, large or small, can be braised.
But probably the best thing about braising is that it's easy on the cook: Read More