A Homemade Life

by Molly Wizenberg

  Anyway, one person can only cook for so many people, but by giving away a recipe, you can become, as word of the recipe spreads far and wide, the Amazing Cook Who Had That Amazing Recipe. Just imagine it. It’s our best shot at fame. What on earth did you think I was giving you all these recipes for?

  Sharing is nice. Take it from me. I learned the hard way, because for the early part of my life, I was really, really bad at it. I can think of several instances in which a grade-school classmate, having forgotten his or her pencils at home, tried to borrow one from me. I’d shake my head and refuse, reminding my poor, innocent classmate that we were supposed to come to class prepared. By some miraculous stroke of luck, I was not maimed and killed by my peers, à la Lord of the Flies, and I lived to tell this story today. But I won’t tempt fate again. I’ve become a pretty good sharer. In fact, I actually like sharing. I’ve made such strides that sometimes I even show up for meetings unprepared, sans pen or pencil, which makes me feel liberated and wild, like wearing racy lingerie under my clothes.

  But what I really wanted to tell you about, or rather who, is my father’s younger brother, my uncle Arnold. He’s a very good recipe sharer.

  Arnold, who I call Arnie, is an excellent home cook. He lived in New York until several years ago, when he retired and moved to Maine, to a little house that he and his wife Reva call “The Bear Cottage.” The two of them are terrific to eat with, mainly because they ooh generously and pause in mid-sentence to moan appreciatively over things. They love to cook and they love to eat, and luckily, they also love to share.

  At least once or twice a month, Arnie sends me a new recipe to try. I can’t begin to keep up with him, but it’s always a treat to get his letters, with recipes for things like cioppino, or beef-and-bean chili with bittersweet chocolate, or Indonesian spiced chicken. Arnie is also full of smart kitchen tips, which he regularly throws in. Take note, for example:

  The next time you make a fruit crisp, if you’re tired of cutting/rubbing the butter into the dry ingredients for the topping, try the Maine Weisenberg Method. Freeze the stick(s) of butter. Combine all the dry ingredients in a work bowl. Lay a grater across the bowl. (If you use a box grater, chill that in the freezer, too.) Coarsely grate the frozen butter from the small end of the stick, so that the shreds are only an inch or so long. Every ¼ or ½ stick, stir the butter shreds under the dry mixture until you’re done. Dump it onto your prepared fruit and bake.

  Unc Arn

  I haven’t tried his method yet, but Arnie usually knows his stuff, so I’ll bet it works like a charm. And in case you’re wondering why his last name is spelled differently from mine, the answer is that my father’s last name was misspelled on his birth certificate. He didn’t know that, however, until he was in his twenties and in the process of finishing medical school and, according to my mother, he didn’t have the money or the desire to go to the trouble of changing it. So he was a Wizenberg in a family of Weisenbergs. I’ve always liked that.

  Arnie also has quite a way with fish. Some time ago, he gave my parents a recipe he’d dreamed up for fillets of salmon poached in apple cider and then sauced in a cider-cream reduction. I’m not much of a sauce person, so it sounded a little fussy to me, but the idea stuck there, in one of the dusty back corners of my mind, and not too long ago, I decided to give it a try.

  My mother calls this recipe “Salmon with Apple Glaze,” but Arnie calls it “Saumon Gelée à la Louis XIV,” a completely fanciful title that, as it turns out, actually kind of suits the dish. It’s very elegant and impressive, and were a hungry king to stop by to water his horses, it would not be a bad thing to make him for supper. It starts with a few fillets of the best salmon you can find—I like king or sockeye and always buy wild when I can—and a jug of fresh cider. You don’t want the kind with spices added, nor do you want regular apple juice, the kind babies drink from bottles. This is the perfect occasion to buy some real unpasteurized cider, if you can get your hands on it. Here in Seattle, I make do with a local unfiltered brand in the refrigerated section at the grocery store.

  The rest is very straightforward. You poach the fish in the cider, remove it from the pan, and then reduce the cider to a pretty syrup. To that, you add a good glug of cream, and then you let it simmer a little while longer. What you wind up with is a moist, perfectly tender piece of fish, coddled gently in a warm cider bath and then wrapped in a silky caramel-colored sauce that’s both sweet and savory and entirely sigh inducing. In fact, I should warn you in advance that the sauce is quite beguiling. You will be tempted to get greedy with it (maybe even hide in the pantry with the skillet and a spoon), but please, save some for your fellow diners. As long as you promise to share, I will, with no further ado, give you the recipe.

  CIDER-GLAZED SALMON, OR SAUMON GELÉE À LA LOUIS XIV

  Adapted from Arnold Weisenberg

  for this recipe you’ll need a large (12-inch) skillet with a lid. The pan should be large enough to hold the salmon without crowding and to provide plenty of surface area for boiling down and thickening the sauce.

  1 tablespoon (½ ounce) unsalted butter

  1 medium shallot, peeled and halved lengthwise

  2 cups fresh unfiltered apple cider

  4 (6-ounce) salmon fillets

  Salt

  ½ cup heavy cream

  In a large, heavy skillet, combine the butter, shallot, and cider. Place over medium-high heat, and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 5 minutes, then remove and discard the shallot.

  Place the fillets gently in the pan. Spoon a bit of the liquid over them, so that their tops begin to cook. Cover and simmer very gently. The fillets will cook for 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness. To test for doneness, make a small slit with a paring knife in the thickest part of the fillet: all but the very center of each piece should be opaque. (It will keep cooking after you pull it from the heat.) Transfer the cooked salmon to a platter, and cover loosely with aluminum foil to keep warm.

  To prepare the glaze, raise the heat under the pan to medium-high, add a pinch of salt, and simmer, stirring frequently, until the liquid is reduced by about two-thirds. It should be slightly thickened and should just cover the bottom of the pan. Reduce the heat to medium, and add the cream. Stir well to combine. Boil, stirring frequently, for a few minutes, until the mixture darkens to a pale golden caramel—like those Brach’s Milk Maid caramel candies, if that helps—and is reduced by one-third to one-half.

  Place the salmon fillets on 4 plates and top each with a spoonful of sauce. It should coat them like a thin, loose glaze. Serve immediately.

  NOTE: If you’d like to make this for only 2 people, halve the amount of salmon, but not the sauce quantities.

  Yield: 4 servings

  WITH CREAM ON TOP

  Sometimes I worry that with all I’ve written about my father, you might get the wrong impression. He was a real character, a very kind person, and even sort of a sap, but he could also be very difficult. He was not some mythic figure sent from on high. He and my mother almost separated when I was ten. The night before I left for college, when I was overwhelmed and scared and wanted his sympathy, he told me coldly, “You’d better get used to it, because this is the way life is.” I hated him for saying that, though I don’t think he really believed it. No one who lived as large, or ate as many croissants, as he did could possibly believe that life is cruel. But he could be gruff and hard all the same.

  The thing is, now that he’s gone, I don’t really remember the bad things. When someone dies, we tend to tell the same stories over and over: the happy ones, or the funny ones, or, at the very least, the poignant ones. We turn those stories this way and that, studying them like diamonds or ancient scrolls, taking note of every detail. We don’t tell the sad stories, or the ugly, warted ones. After a while, they fade like old newsprint, and we start to forget.

  Part of what I love about writing is that it helps me to remember things. A computer or a scrap of paper is about eight million times more reliabl
e than my brain. But sometimes, when I sit down to write, the stories are already half-gone. This happens especially often with the ugly ones, the ones I hid away behind something prettier or more important. When I go to look for them, they aren’t there anymore. So it’s hard for me to show you exactly who my father was, because I don’t know anymore. And, to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to. I’m not interested in wrapping him up in a box with a tidy bow. He would hate that.

  One of the details I remember about my father is that he loved cream. In retrospect, it’s kind of an endearing quality, I think, and very illustrative of his priorities, but at the time, it was an ongoing source of tension. He always had that big gut, that sagging shelf above his skinny birdlike legs, and he didn’t seem the least bit interested in doing anything about it. It looked precarious, like a glass of water balanced atop a teetering stack of papers, and given his substantial back problems, it was. It’s not uncommon, I understand, for doctors to be bad at taking care of themselves, and my father certainly was. Both he and that gut of his were maddeningly stubborn. My mother and I used to struggle to hold our tongues when he took a third scoop of ice cream or, late at night, sneaked into the kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal doused in heavy cream.

  Of course, none of that, not his belly or any amount of cream, is what killed him. The cancer had its own plans, and it didn’t need any help. And in light of that, I’m actually sort of glad he didn’t listen to us.

  Until a couple of years ago, I used to be a little scared of cream. It was probably a reaction, now that I think about it, to my father’s decadent tastes, although at the time, I thought I was just being sensible. Once, at a bistro in Paris, I ordered a velouté de potimarron, a velvety pumpkin soup, and when it arrived at the table, my stomach did a flip-flop. It coated the spoon like crème anglaise, and its color tended more toward white than any shade of winter squash I’d ever seen. I only took three bites, though I had to admit, it was delicious. Of the remainder of the evening, the only thing I remember is the man sitting next to me, who leaned into my ear and breathed lustily, “Ma cherie, tonight you are Cleopatra.” I was going through a smoky eye makeup phase.

  But if ever there were a reason to change my tune, creamwise, it’s winter. The cold months make us all feel a little hungrier, I find, and a little more generous with ourselves and our measuring cups. A couple of winters ago, I discovered that I like to be especially generous with cabbage. I like to give it the better part of a cup of cream.

  I first tried braising vegetables in cream because of food writer Molly Stevens, who wrote an entire book about braising. She has a recipe for cream-braised Brussels sprouts, which is insanely good, but I think green cabbage is even better. Cabbages may be homely, hard-headed things, but with a little braising, they’re bewitching. Cut into wedges and cooked slowly in a Jacuzzi bath of cream, they wind up completely relaxed, their bitter pungency washed away and replaced with a rich, nutty sweetness. My stomach coos like a baby at the thought of it.

  My father would have loved cream-braised cabbage. I’ll bet he would have served it with one of his roasted chickens and some boiled, buttered potatoes. Just thinking about it makes me want to go fix myself a bowl of cereal with cream on top. I just might.

  CREAM-BRAISED GREEN CABBAGE

  this recipe calls for a fairly small cabbage. I like to use small ones because they’re often sweeter and more tender than their big-headed siblings. If, however, you can only find a larger cabbage, you can certainly use it. Just be sure to use only as many wedges as fit in a single layer in the pan, and take care that each wedge is no thicker than 2 inches at its outer edge. Otherwise, the cabbage won’t cook properly.

  You can also try this method on halved or quartered Brussels sprouts.

  1 small green cabbage (about 1½ pounds)

  3 tablespoons (1½ ounces) unsalted butter

  ¼ teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

  2/3 cup heavy cream

  1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

  First, prepare the cabbage. Pull away any bruised leaves, and trim its root end to remove any dirt. Cut the cabbage into quarters, and then cut each quarter in half lengthwise, taking care to keep a little bit of the core in each wedge. (The core will help to hold the wedge intact, so that it doesn’t fall apart in the pan.) You should wind up with 8 wedges of equal size.

  In a large (12-inch) skillet, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the cabbage wedges, arranging them in a single crowded layer with one of the cut sides down. Allow them to cook, undisturbed, until the downward facing side is nicely browned, 5 to 8 minutes. I like mine to get some good color here, so that they have a sweetly caramelized flavor. Then, using a pair of tongs, gently turn the wedges onto their other cut side. When the second side has browned, sprinkle the salt over the wedges, and add the cream. Cover the pan with a tight-fitting lid, and reduce the heat so that the liquid stays at a slow, gentle simmer. Cook for 20 minutes, then remove the lid and gently, using tongs, flip the wedges. Cook for another 20 minutes, or until the cabbage is very tender and yields easily when pierced with a thin, sharp knife. Add the lemon juice, and shake the pan to distribute it evenly.

  Simmer, uncovered, for a few minutes more to thicken the cream to a glaze that loosely coats the cabbage. Serve immediately, with additional salt at the table.

  Yield: 4 to 6 servings

  HAPPINESS

  The word happiness has many definitions. For some, it involves cotton candy and peonies and babies that coo. For others, it involves ice cream, reruns of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and warm sun on your face in early March. I’m quite certain, though, that if you looked it up in one of those visual dictionaries, what you’d see is a pan of slow-roasted tomatoes.

  I first tasted slow-roasted tomatoes one hot summer several years ago, the summer after I returned from working in Paris and before I moved to Seattle. I was in Oklahoma, staying with my parents for a few months, and one day, a glut of tomatoes from the garden sent us running for the cookbook shelf. Each spring, my father used to start tomato plants in tiny pots in the laundry room, and by mid-July, they were so big, so top-heavy, that they would droop over the driveway until he tied them to the fence. That summer was an especially good one. The fruits were sweet and fat, coming ripe by the dozen. We needed to get rid of a bunch of them all at once, so we set out for ideas. We’d scoured two shelves of cookbooks when we stumbled upon a technique called slow roasting. It called for the tomatoes to be halved lengthwise and put into a low oven for several hours, so that their juices went thick and syrupy and their flavor climbed to a fevered pitch.

  Following the loose guidelines, we sent two pans of tomatoes into the oven, and six hours later, we opened the door to find them entirely transformed. They were fleshy and deep red, with edges that crinkled like smocking on a child’s dress. When we bit into them, they shot rich, vermilion juice across the table. We were sold.

  Over the course of those few months, we must have roasted a half-dozen sheet pans’ worth. We ate them plain, straight from the pan, or with mozzarella and basil. We put them into sandwiches. We used them to sauce fresh pasta that my father had flattened with a rolling pin and cut into small, rustic rags. It was a very good summer. Which is a good thing, as it turns out, because it was his last.

  One day that fall, when he was lying in the hospital bed in the den, he had a dream about the tomatoes.

  “There were so many,” he told me sleepily, staring out the window. “We must have grown ten thousand.”

  I followed his eyes to the spindly patch outside. One could do much worse, I decided, than to go out that way, on a swan song of ten thousand tomatoes.

  I think of Burg now every time I see a flush of those red fruits. In honor of that summer, I try to slow-roast them whenever I can.

  I make mine the same way that we did back then, but in recent years, I have begun to add a few pinches of ground coriander. It’s an idea I borrowed from a sandwich shop in Paris called Cosí, where one of the off
erings is tomates confites à la coriandre. I used to ask for them fanned atop a smear of fresh ricotta or goat cheese, and the bright fragrance of the coriander always seemed to give the tomatoes a subtle boost.

  Slow-roasting tomatoes may take time and planning, but straight from the oven, it’s instant gratification. It’s almost impossible to keep stray fingers out of them. They’re like rubies in fruit form. And though they’re delicious plain, their sweet acidity also plays remarkably well with other flavors, especially those dishes at the rich, robust end of the spectrum. I’ve served them alongside cheese soufflés and plates of pasta with pesto. When teamed up with fresh goat cheese, basil, and arugula, they make for a delicious, if drippy, sandwich, and laid over the top of a burger, they’re like ketchup for adults. You can whirl them in the food processor with some basil and Parmesan and turn them into a pesto of sorts. You can even make them into a pasta sauce. Just slice a handful into a bowl with some capers, slivered basil, and sea salt, and add splashes of balsamic and olive oil. It’s the sauce we ate all those summers ago atop Burg’s fresh pasta, and it works on pretty much any noodle that happens to land in the pot. And on nights when the stove is too much to consider, few things make for a happier picnic than a hunk of crusty bread, a wedge of blue cheese, and some slow-roasted tomatoes. You don’t even need a patch of grass. I can tell you from experience that the living room floor works fine.