December 10, 2006
Food | In the Magazine
The Way We Eat: File of Dreams
By JULIE POWELL
People fall for all kinds of recipes for all kinds of reasons, but in the end it always comes down to the same thing: you see in it a mirror image not of who you are but of who you wish you could be. A journey through my bursting accordion file of clippings is less culinary than psychological. At one time or another, I can see, I’ve been fascinated by puff pastries and pots de crème and fillets of beef roasted with coffee or baked in salt crusts. I can’t imagine wanting to make croquembouche, but there was a time when I could. I have cast myself, in a strictly imaginary kitchen, as the cosmopolitan urban hostess, the blushing bride, the Italian mother. Plus, I’ve evidently always been looking for the perfect macaroni and cheese — a dish I never make but somehow think will make me whole.
Some of our recipe daydreams are simple; my friend Stephanie dreams of making Moroccan food that tastes like “something other than overcooked vegetables and wet cinnamon sticks.” Some are more intangible. Unlike my own practical mother, who periodically purges her files of duplicates and pipe dreams, my husband’s stepmother, Jo Ann, is a philosopher and a pack rat. She has recipes copied out in pencil on the back of undergraduate scheduling sheets and in purple ink on bank envelopes postmarked four months after I was born. Since she was 20, she has kept a recipe for a strawberry angel food cake made from a box mix, Jell-O and red food coloring. She has saved it not because of the ingredients but because of the name typed at the bottom of the card. “I wanted to be Janet Shaw Rogers,” she told me. She also once envied a wealthy housewife whose extremely exotic peach preserves called for a lot of unusual ingredients and lots of sugar, but now that the old friend is an alcoholic divorcée, the thin strip of paper inspires only a be-careful-what-you-wish-for sigh.
Perhaps my favorite of Jo Ann’s unmade recipes is for “A Good Tasty Drink.” Written on a piece of wide-ruled notebook paper with black marker in emphatic block letters, the recipe was given to her in 1982 either by a nice young Lebanese man on a bus or by George Bush. Not one of the presidents, alas, but a distant cousin who apparently attempted to seduce Jo Ann with a cooling libation of Kahlua, amaretto, milk, cinnamon and pecans.
Usually I can’t remember which magazines I plucked my recipes from, though often I can guess when. The croquembouche dates back to my first years in New York, when I was living with my eventual husband. I fantasized then about being in the Theater, having an apartment in Manhattan and holding elaborate, hip dinner parties. (Why I thought croquembouche was hip I do not recall.) In the first years of my marriage, when the city was really kicking my rear, I dreamed more homespun dreams, of retiring to the country and proving my worth by kneading and preserving rather than filing and typing. My sfogliatelle clipping dates from the end of this period. Snipped from the pages of Gourmet, even the writer called it “quite an undertaking.” It involves a pasta maker, four feet of counter space (itself a fantasy at that time) and pushing out tightly rolled rounds of dough spread with lard and butter into cones. (“Imagine a collapsible travel cup.”) I think it was the travel cup that caught my imagination. After five years of ruminating, I finally got around to making the things. I began at 10:30 in the morning and finished at around 7 p.m. The rounds of dough folded out like collapsible cups, just like Gourmet said. The pastries came out of the oven looking just like the photo.
And the texture? A little tough. Next time I’ll go to the bakery.
Just when I think all this snipping and gluing and saving has been for naught, something turns me around. Take that coffee-roasted beef with mushrooms and pasilla chili broth. I couldn’t imagine why I had ever cut it out — so busy, so restauranty. But I tried it, soaking chilies in one corner, shiitakes in another, coating the beef with ground coffee and roasting it. Stacking was involved in the plating. I brought the admittedly gorgeous dishes to the table with a cynically arched brow.
It was heavenly. And my faith was restored.
But that’s the thing with love, isn’t it? You never do wise up. Not really. As in life, so is it in recipe clippings.
Food | In the Magazine
The Way We Eat: File of Dreams
By JULIE POWELL
People fall for all kinds of recipes for all kinds of reasons, but in the end it always comes down to the same thing: you see in it a mirror image not of who you are but of who you wish you could be. A journey through my bursting accordion file of clippings is less culinary than psychological. At one time or another, I can see, I’ve been fascinated by puff pastries and pots de crème and fillets of beef roasted with coffee or baked in salt crusts. I can’t imagine wanting to make croquembouche, but there was a time when I could. I have cast myself, in a strictly imaginary kitchen, as the cosmopolitan urban hostess, the blushing bride, the Italian mother. Plus, I’ve evidently always been looking for the perfect macaroni and cheese — a dish I never make but somehow think will make me whole.
Some of our recipe daydreams are simple; my friend Stephanie dreams of making Moroccan food that tastes like “something other than overcooked vegetables and wet cinnamon sticks.” Some are more intangible. Unlike my own practical mother, who periodically purges her files of duplicates and pipe dreams, my husband’s stepmother, Jo Ann, is a philosopher and a pack rat. She has recipes copied out in pencil on the back of undergraduate scheduling sheets and in purple ink on bank envelopes postmarked four months after I was born. Since she was 20, she has kept a recipe for a strawberry angel food cake made from a box mix, Jell-O and red food coloring. She has saved it not because of the ingredients but because of the name typed at the bottom of the card. “I wanted to be Janet Shaw Rogers,” she told me. She also once envied a wealthy housewife whose extremely exotic peach preserves called for a lot of unusual ingredients and lots of sugar, but now that the old friend is an alcoholic divorcée, the thin strip of paper inspires only a be-careful-what-you-wish-for sigh.
Perhaps my favorite of Jo Ann’s unmade recipes is for “A Good Tasty Drink.” Written on a piece of wide-ruled notebook paper with black marker in emphatic block letters, the recipe was given to her in 1982 either by a nice young Lebanese man on a bus or by George Bush. Not one of the presidents, alas, but a distant cousin who apparently attempted to seduce Jo Ann with a cooling libation of Kahlua, amaretto, milk, cinnamon and pecans.
Usually I can’t remember which magazines I plucked my recipes from, though often I can guess when. The croquembouche dates back to my first years in New York, when I was living with my eventual husband. I fantasized then about being in the Theater, having an apartment in Manhattan and holding elaborate, hip dinner parties. (Why I thought croquembouche was hip I do not recall.) In the first years of my marriage, when the city was really kicking my rear, I dreamed more homespun dreams, of retiring to the country and proving my worth by kneading and preserving rather than filing and typing. My sfogliatelle clipping dates from the end of this period. Snipped from the pages of Gourmet, even the writer called it “quite an undertaking.” It involves a pasta maker, four feet of counter space (itself a fantasy at that time) and pushing out tightly rolled rounds of dough spread with lard and butter into cones. (“Imagine a collapsible travel cup.”) I think it was the travel cup that caught my imagination. After five years of ruminating, I finally got around to making the things. I began at 10:30 in the morning and finished at around 7 p.m. The rounds of dough folded out like collapsible cups, just like Gourmet said. The pastries came out of the oven looking just like the photo.
And the texture? A little tough. Next time I’ll go to the bakery.
Just when I think all this snipping and gluing and saving has been for naught, something turns me around. Take that coffee-roasted beef with mushrooms and pasilla chili broth. I couldn’t imagine why I had ever cut it out — so busy, so restauranty. But I tried it, soaking chilies in one corner, shiitakes in another, coating the beef with ground coffee and roasting it. Stacking was involved in the plating. I brought the admittedly gorgeous dishes to the table with a cynically arched brow.
It was heavenly. And my faith was restored.
But that’s the thing with love, isn’t it? You never do wise up. Not really. As in life, so is it in recipe clippings.
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