by Julia Reed
Also, if a sauce is perfectly tailored for a particular burger, you don’t need a lot more stuff—some sweet onion and/or a kosher pickle sliced vertically, along with a couple of leaves of Boston lettuce will do just fine. For buns, I go with English muffins brushed with melted butter and lightly toasted in the oven or plain old soft buns that are crisped up in a sauté pan to mimic a diner’s flattop. Just heat enough butter to make a thin film in the pan and add the buns cut-side down for a minute or two.
Like Ripert, I use ground chuck with an 85-to-15 ratio of meat to fat for a beef burger, and if I’m cooking it in a skillet, I finish it off with a couple of shots of Worcestershire sauce. For an everyday burger I dress it with the aforementioned fixings and the basic mayo below, mixed with an extra teaspoon or so of Dijon. My late friend and mentor Kenneth Haxton turned me on to topping a burger with kim chee, which I love with nothing but a bit of the basic mayo. If I feel especially deserving, I reward myself with the black truffle burger that the great Jeremiah Tower always has for his Christmas Eve supper. (For four people, he adds three quarters of a chopped two-ounce truffle to two pounds of ground sirloin or chuck, while the remaining truffle is folded into a fourth of a cup of mayonnaise. He puts each cooked burger onto a buttered, toasted English muffin half, tops it with a tablespoon of the mayo and the other half of the muffin, and serves them all up with a fine red wine.)
Another of my favorite chefs, Suzanne Goin of Lucques, A.O.C., and Tavern, all in Los Angeles, makes a delicious pork burger. At Tavern, she serves it with aïoli and sauce romesco and melted Manchego cheese. Again, I prefer a less-sloppy version with plain mayo or my favorite spicy mayo below (when using the latter, the peppers in the burger should be omitted). But the possibilities are almost endless. The pork burger, for example, would also be good with a chutney mayo (mix a tablespoon or so of Major Grey’s Chutney into the basic mayo and zap it for a few seconds in the Cuisinart). For lamb burgers, I augment the basic mayo with a tablespoon of chopped mint, a half teaspoon of grated lemon zest, and pinch of sugar.
Finally, if you are dying for a bacon cheeseburger, you can achieve a less-sloppy version with a sauce as well. Just fry three or four strips of bacon until crisp. Use the resulting grease for half the oil in the mayo recipe, stir in crumbled bacon when you’re done, and add a pinch of good paprika if you want a lovely smoky taste. Use it to dress a burger along with a slice of the best sharp cheddar you can find and you’re good to go.
As far as accompaniments, I like the burger to be the main event, and I’d always rather treat myself to French fries someone else has made. Instead, I opt for a side of my mother’s tangy coleslaw, which is also really yummy with barbecue.
BASIC MAYONNAISE
( Yield: 1 cup )
1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
2 to 3 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard (I like Maille)
¼ teaspoon salt
¾ cup Wesson oil (you can also use saff lower or canola)
In a medium bowl, whisk together the egg yolk, lemon juice, mustard, and salt until smooth. Still whisking, slowly dribble in the oil until mayonnaise gets thick and the oil is easily incorporated. At this point, you can add the rest of the oil in a thin stream instead of drop by drop. If it gets too thick, add a teaspoon of water.
Spicy Mayonnaise
To 1 cup of the basic mayo, add 1½ teaspoons of Sriracha red pepper paste, 1 pressed garlic clove, 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro, and a squeeze of lime.
SUZANNE GOIN’S PORK BURGERS
( Yield: 6 burgers )
Olive oil
¾ cup diced shallots
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 small chiles de árbol, thinly sliced diagonally, or any dried chili
Kosher salt
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves (or a pinch of dried thyme)
3 cups ground pork (about 1½ pounds)
½ cup (4 ounces) Mexican chorizo in small pieces
1 cup finely chopped applewood smoked bacon (about 1⁄3 pound)
¼ cup roughly chopped parsley
Freshly ground black pepper
Cover bottom of a medium sauté pan with a thick slick of oil. Place over medium-low heat, and add shallots. When oil begins to sizzle, add the cumin and chiles. Stir, then season with salt. When shallots become translucent, stir in thyme leaves, and turn off heat.
In a bowl, combine pork, chorizo, and bacon. Add shallot mixture and parsley. Season with salt and pepper. Using your hands, lift and fold ingredients together until blended. Do not overmix.
Cover bottom of a medium sauté pan with a thin layer of oil, and place over medium-high heat. Form meat into patties that will fit buns; do not make them too thick.
Sauté burgers until browned on bottom. Turn them, basting with fat in pan. When browned on both sides, cut a slit in one patty to check doneness; it should be only slightly pink.
JUDY’S SLAW
( Yield: 6 servings )
3 tablespoons Wesson oil
¼ cup cider vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon Colman’s dry mustard
1 teaspoon celery seed
2 tablespoons sugar
3 cups chopped cabbage
¼ cup finely chopped green pepper
½ teaspoon grated white onion
Whisk oil and vinegar together in a large bowl. Add salt, pepper, mustard, celery seed, and sugar and whisk until blended.
Chop cabbage, either by hand or in a food processor (if you use the food processor, do it in three batches to ensure it chops evenly). I like mine pretty finely chopped, but you can chop it in pieces up to a half-inch square. Fold cabbage into dressing. Fold in onion and green pepper and check for seasonings.
10
Summer on a Plate
I am in England as I type this, out in the countryside near Northampton at my friend Alexander Chancellor’s stunning Inigo Jones house, where, between fleeting moments of sunshine, it is gray and cold and generally pouring down rain. But it is also the day before summer officially begins and I am about to make a salad. In fact, we’ve been rather determinedly making salads at every meal for the last three days now—running out to the garden with head down and hood up to grab a handful of rocket (arugula) and snip a few herbs. These we’ve tossed with endive and little gem lettuces, olive oil from Tuscany, a squeeze of lemon, and a judicious pinch of Maldon sea salt. It may not feel like summer outside, but inside we have summer on a plate.
The Brits have long gotten a bum rap about their cuisine. These days, of course, there are brilliant chefs cooking all over London, but people who should know better persist in thinking of English food as mostly bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, lots of overboiled potatoes, and great haunches of meat. It turns out, though, that what they’ve always been very big on are salads.
My friend and former Vogue colleague Vicki Woods, whose own English garden is overflowing with rocket and mint, and basil and chives (not to mention masses of gorgeous English roses), turned me on to Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook. May, one of England’s first professional cooks, published his recipe for Another Grand Sallet in 1660, but it sounds almost exactly like what I’ve been doing for the last few days: “All sorts of good herbs, and little leaves of red sage, the smallest leaves of sorrel, and the leaves of parsley pickt very small, the youngest and smallest leaves of spinach, some leaves of salad burnet, the smallest leaves of lettuce, white endive and charvel, all finely pickt and washed and swung in a strainer of a clean napkin and well drained from water: then dish it out in a clean scowered dish … with good oil and vinegar.”
Three hundred years later, the great English food writer Elizabeth David wrote, “It seems to me that a salad and its dressing are things we should take more or less for granted at a meal, like bread and salt.” Her seminal A Book of Mediterranean Food reintroduced her war-deprived countrymen to the pleasures of olive
oil and herbs, as well as such exotica as gazpacho and “a salad of aubergines.”
Now, fifty years on, we have Nigel Slater, the food columnist for the Observer, whose book, Tender, is a beautifully illustrated chronicle of the bounty from his London garden. There are all sorts of wonderful recipes—Vicki swears by the celery gratin, which elevates that humble garnish to a grand main event—but you can tell that salad is Slater’s number one love. “If there was a recipe that stood for everything I believe about good eating,” he writes, “it would be the quiet understatement that is a single variety of salad leaf in a simple bowl. Each leaf should be perfect, the dressing light and barely present, the whole effect one of generous simplicity.”
As they say over here, good point, well made. Below, you will find his recipe for A Lemon Dressing for Summer. I also include a lovely cucumber salad from David’s Summer Cooking that I’ve tinkered with ever so slightly to allow for the almost toxic quality of most grocery store tarragon vinegars. Like May’s seventeenth-century recipe, both are written plainly in the way that people actually talk.
Slater’s recipe is pretty much the same thing I make most nights, and is similar to one that Deborah Madison, the great vegetarian chef, uses to dress a fennel, mushroom, and Parmesan salad, that has long been a favorite. The trick with the mushrooms is to marinate them for a bit in some of the vinaigrette—I’ve never been able to fathom why anyone would add raw mushrooms, which have the taste and texture of Styrofoam, to a salad when it is so easy to infuse them with flavor first. Elizabeth David knew that, of course—in Summer Cooking, she includes a mushroom salad that couldn’t be simpler. First, she says, put a half pound of sliced white mushrooms in a bowl. Next, “squeeze lemon juice over them, stir in a little chopped garlic, season with ground black pepper, and pour a good deal of olive oil over them. Immediately before serving salt them and add more olive oil, as you will find they have absorbed the first. Sprinkle with parsley, or, if you have it, basil, or a mixture or fresh marjoram and lemon thyme.” I can attest that the latter combination is especially delicious.
NIGEL SLATER’S A LEMON DRESSING FOR SUMMER
( Yield: 1 cup )
Mix together a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, and the juice of half a lemon. Beat in a scant cup of olive oil and a teaspoon of grated lemon zest. Leave for a few minutes for the ingredients to get to know one another.
ELIZABETH DAVID’S “CUCUMBER AND CHIVE SALAD”
Adapted from Summer Cooking
( Yield: 4 servings )
A cucumber, a few chives, a few tarragon leaves, and, for the dressing a ½ cup of cream, a teaspoonful of sugar, olive oil, salt and pepper, a teaspoonful of sherry wine vinegar.
Peel the cucumber and slice it paper thin. Sprinkle coarse salt over the cucumber and leave it in a colander to drain for half an hour.
Mix the sugar and vinegar together, then add the cream, pepper, and salt. Add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and the chopped chives and tarragon, and pour the dressing over the cucumber in a shallow dish.
NOTE: One of my very favorite outdoor suppers consists of this salad with a simple roast chicken and the best premier cru Chablis I can afford. You really don’t need much else, though some warm crusty bread and salty butter wouldn’t be bad and neither would some roasted mushrooms—just add a pound of trimmed white mushrooms to the roasting pan with the chicken about 30 minutes before it’s done and roll them around in the pan juices with a little salt. For a completely perfect evening, finish off with something cold and lemony like the lemon soufflé.
DEBORAH MADISON’S FENNEL, MUSHROOM, AND PARMESAN SALAD
( Yield: 4 to 6 servings )
1 garlic clove
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt or kosher salt
2 to 2½ tablespoons lemon juice
2 strips of lemon peel, minced
1⁄8 teaspoon of fennel seeds, crushed under a spoon or in a mortar
4 to 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
8 ounces large, firm white mushrooms, wiped clean
Freshly ground black pepper
1 fennel bulb
1 tablespoon fennel greens, chopped
1 tablespoon Italian parsley, coarsely chopped
Salt
3 ounces Parmigiano-Reggiano, shaved into paper-thin slices
Pound the garlic and the salt in a mortar until smooth. Stir in lemon juice, lemon peel, fennel seeds, and olive oil.
Thinly slice the mushrooms. Dress them with a few tablespoons of the vinaigrette, and season them with plenty of pepper. Lay a piece of plastic wrap directly over them to keep them from browning and set aside for about an hour to marinate.
Trim the fennel bulb and cut into quarters. Remove most of the core, then slice it lengthwise, very thinly, leaving the pieces joined together. Dress it with most of the remaining vinaigrette and half the herbs, and season with salt and pepper. Add the rest of the herbs to the mushrooms.
Layer the mushrooms, cheese, and fennel on each plate and spoon the remaining vinaigrette over the top.
NOTE: This salad does not have to be composed. I’ve made extra dressing and done it as a tossed salad using a handful of whole parsley leaves or a combo of parsley leaves and romaine leaves, either torn up or sliced about an inch wide. You still need to marinate the mushrooms, but then you can just throw everything else in a bowl with the parsley and lettuce and toss. Made like that, a bit of extra cheese doesn’t hurt.
11
The Tyranny of Summer Produce
Every summer I make at least one or two visits to my parents’ house in Mississippi, and I don’t think I’ve ever departed without the following image in my rearview mirror: my mother running down our gravel driveway, slightly wild-eyed, and carrying an armload of corn, which she is screaming at me to take. “Wait, wait, you have to take these, please take them with you, please.”
Now, I am crazy about corn but by the end of every trip, I’ll have already consumed a ton of the stuff in almost every possible incarnation, including corn pudding, corn fritters, corn “fried” in butter or bacon grease, and, of course, corn on the cob, either grilled or steamed or zapped in its husks in the microwave (a procedure that not only instantly steams the corn, but makes it easier to remove the silks). But every summer I stop, and every summer she fills up my backseat with countless ears.
Welcome to the Tyranny of Summer Produce. Depending on where you are, by August or early September late-summer corn abounds, squash and zucchini are falling off the vine, birds are after the figs, tomatoes and blueberries are bursting, peaches and plums shriveling. Then there are the herbs: parsley and dill are going to seed; basil and tarragon and mint are becoming impossibly leggy. The pressure to keep up with it all is just too much—and so is the guilt. There’s almost a moral obligation to consume such wondrous bounty, but Mother Nature moves a lot faster than we do. “You can’t even feed the hungry,” says Bobby Harling, the playwright and screenwriter (Steel Magnolias; Soapdish) who is also a great cook. “You could try, but you’d have to do it in two days.”
Bobby reports that at this time of year in his hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana, the church parking lot after Sunday services is in a constant state of “vegetable gridlock,” while amateur gardeners like his father try to pawn off bushels of okra and corn and peaches on friends not equally burdened. Professional farmers have the same sense of urgency—or, perhaps, disgust. “It gets to the point where the folks selling the tomatoes at the farmers market are like, ‘Just take them—we don’t even want any money,’” says my friend Stephen Stryjewski. One summer he took so many he ended up making ten gallons of ketchup he had no idea what to do with.
I’m not actually complaining. I love Stephen’s salad of shaved summer squash with mint and goat cheese, for example, and my mother’s kitchen is always an excellent place to be—especially when her kitchen counter is crowded with late summer Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, which she peels and slices at every meal. Most nights during this period of vegetab
le tyranny, we don’t even bother with meat. Mama will make her corn succotash with baby butter beans, or I’ll make mine with okra and tomatoes. She’ll make her sublime fried eggplant or an eggplant casserole with tomatoes and shrimp; I’ll make my eggplant salad. We are both big on casseroles that utilize at least two overabundant vegetables, thereby emptying out twice the fridge space—I was ecstatic a few years ago when I discovered Craig Claiborne’s cheesy gratin of both corn and zucchini.
I’m even more ecstatic when our neighbor Mary Lou Sandefur, who cultivates an entire field of basil each summer, turns up at the door with jars of her homemade pesto. We toss it in pasta, of course, but it also it perks up slow-roasted plum tomatoes and sautéed summer squash with onions (the yellow and green together is gorgeous). I add some to the food processor with butter beans to make a great spread for toasted slices of baguette, and my friend M. T. smashes it with fingerling potatoes that she’s boiled or roasted to excellent effect.
But back to the corn. The pesto is delicious slathered on grilled corn on the cob, too—there are few herbs, in fact, that don’t go well with corn. I sauté it in butter with mint and chives, and in olive oil with chopped jalapeño and cilantro. A long-ago Hamptons houseguest turned me on to a dish comprised of half steamed rice and half corn, mixed together with a ton of butter and chopped parsley. In her book Sunday Suppers at Lucques, Suzanne Goin includes a delicious sauté of corn and thin-sliced cabbage with green onion, thyme, and bacon that she tops with seared salmon, and she combines corn, brown butter, and sage as a starting-off point for lots of pasta sauces (Try tossing the latter with lump crab and fettuccine, but it’s delicious on its own.)
