THE COOKBOOK TEST #0022: AN UNCATERED AFFAIR: COOKING FOR FRIENDS
INSTALLMENT #0022 (FREE) COOK VS. BAKER REPRISE / DAMN GOOD SALMON / A GOURD-GEOUS CHEESECAKE
Dear Readers,
In some ways, finding myself writing about cookbooks every week while being squarely middle aged is kind of a surprise. I grew up obsessed with military history, politics, and espionage, and started my career editing Middle East news for an international newspaper. There was every indication I was gravitating toward the hard stuff. That was my trajectory.
Then: something happened. It's easy to say that something was 9/11 and the right-wing crackdown on civil liberties that followed, but I honestly think it happened earlier. It was editing story after story about the Israel-Palestine conflict - with all of its suicide bombings and missile strikes on apartment complexes - that kind of peeled away the magic. If you pry deeply enough into any conflict that seems to suggest simple moral absolutes, you'll find a lot of shadows and incomprehensible muddy shades of gray. Some people find that endlessly fascinating. I found it disconcerting.
If there's an opposite to poring over lines of type about asymmetric warfare, it may well be cooking dinner for friends. And here I am, 25 years later: hip-deep in cookbooks and obsessing over recipes and ingredients rather than drones and IEDs. To be perfectly honest, I still have mixed feelings about it, but I am happy to embrace the good rather than obsessing over the bad wherever I end up in life.
Somewhere along the line - before I was totally checked out of war and politics and before I was married to a deeper study of eating, drinking, and hospitality - I found a little bookstore named Rabelais, located conveniently between the airport in Boston and the especially beautiful part of Maine near Bar Harbor where my family vacations for a week or so most summers. Rabelais is “appointment only” these days (and I've made a couple of appointments there in recent years), but it used to be a spot that I'd just pop into after pulling off the highway. Sometimes with a baby or a small kid in tow, always rushed, never enough time to pore through the rare and vintage culinary titles that are the bookstore's specialty.
It's at this store that I found a book with a plain red cover. I can't really say what drew me to AN UNCATERED AFFAIR: COOKING FOR FRIENDS initially. It may have been the incongruous match of a vanity printing and the obvious quality of the book - cleanly written, elegantly typeset, beautifully bound, this was like no self-published cookbook I'd seen before. It may have been author Joan Harris's voice: direct, poised, wasting no time. We live in an age of search engine-optimized blather; An Uncatered Affair was self-evidently written by someone who didn’t tolerate having her time wasted, but also refused to waste the time of others.
Once I dug deeper into the book I found, to my delight, an echo of one of the key findings of this newsletter: that in the world of home cooking, there is the heart- and soul-guided Cook and there is the text- and reason-guided Baker, and there is a spectrum of intermediate philosophies that connects and separates them both. For Harris, the cooking of her Yiddish-speaking grandmother (or "Bubba") was the very essence of the "use the force" Cook.
The magic lay in the fact that Bubba cooked and baked from no given recipe. What was not in her head she made up as she went along. She was a natural cook with an instinctive sense of how to put ingredients together.
...
The real point of our hanging around the kitchen was to quiz Bubba on her baking technique. She put ingredients together by taking fistfuls of flour and sugar from the jars, pinching small amounts of salt between her first finger and thumb and pouring milk straight from the bottle.
There was a punchline we waited for each time we asked her how much flour, how much sugar or salt she used. Her answer was all we wanted. "Ah," she would shrug, "I just shit a rein." I suppose the translation would be "throw in a little." We didn't care what it meant. All we knew is that we had connived once more to get her to use the forbidden "s" word. So much for loving grandchilden.
My mother, born in America, spoke perfect English and had a desire to do things right. She cooked with care and was a slave to recipes. She owned a few cookbooks that proselytized American-style cooking. Fortunately, she relied primarily on the rich exchange of recipes with her friends. Jenny, who came from as far away as Boston, brought recipes. Eva and Gertie and Stella had their specialties. For reasons I don't fully understand, all the "girls" were better bakers than cooks. At any rate, we were all left with a desire to recreate their wonderful feel-good desserts... and have the extra pounds to prove it.
Anyway, it's a weird book, kind of singular, and hard to track down online. In fact, the first good result I got researching this newsletter was a catalog listing from Rabelais:
Octavo (23.5 x 16 cm.), 145 pages. FIRST EDITION. A privately printed cookbook, by one of America's leading patrons of the arts, a Smith College alumna, creator of the Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance, in Chicago's Millenium Park, and recipient of the National Medal of Fine Arts. Fine copy in gilt-stamped red cloth. No dust jacket, as issued. Scarce. [OCLC locates no copies].
Huh. Flipping through the book, you get a sense of the author's personal life - her friends, her family, her various homes in Colorado and Michigan and Illinois - and you get a sense of her priorities when it comes to entertaining. Practical. Sensible. Upscale, but effortlessly so - timelessly so. A number of fruit soups, which seem to be a thing among ladies of a certain age. As always, the question is: how do these recipes pan out in the kitchen?
at your service,
James
AN UNCATERED AFFAIR: COOKING FOR FRIENDS
BY JOAN W HARRIS
SELF-PUBLISHED, PRINTED BY STINEHOUR PRESS | 2004 | $60
Normally I have another sort of hand-waving, contextual introductory segment here, but I am looking at the vital stats for this newsletter and we've already hit 2,000 words, which is just ridiculous. So let's make some salmon already.
GRILLED SALMON WITH CITRUS AND HERBS
An Uncatered Affair has a number of different salmon recipes - the only other protein that's quite so prominent is chicken. This one stood out for its simplicity and for how passionately it leaned into the citrus side of things.
Cooking and Tasting Notes: I ended up using 1/2 tsp of dried thyme rather than a Tbsp of the fresh stuff because the grocery store was completely and inexplicably out. And while the recipe called for about six minutes under the broiler, I'd say we went for more like 10 before it was done - possibly a factor of cooking the fish skin on, without flipping, as a single large piece. My oven rack wasn't super close to the broiler, also; this could've slowed things down.
Otherwise, my one central comment would be: Wow. This is one of the most flavorful, compelling, and easy-to-execute fish recipes I've ever made. It's maybe 5-10 minutes of stupid simple prep, about 10 minutes of cooking, and it's ravishingly good; bright, bold, fully flavored, terrific with a starch like rice or (as I made it) couscous. This one goes right into the family cookbook PDF. It's a bullseye of a dish.
GRILLED SALMON WITH CITRUS AND HERBS
Serves about six
2 tsp grated lemon zest
2 Tbsp grate lime zest
1 1/2 Tbsp minced garlic
1 1/2 tsp coarse salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp chopped fresh thyme or 1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 1/4 - 1 1/2 pound salmon filet
Combine all the non-salmon ingredients in a small bowl and mix well.
Put your salmon filet on a cooking sprayed piece of tinfoil on a sheet pan. Rub the mixture onto the fish evenly. Broil for 6-12 minutes, checking and rotating halfway. Salmon should appear opaque in the center when done.
PUMPKIN CHEESECAKE
I had an epiphany somewhere back in my early 30s that while cheesecakes seem really intimidating, they're actually... not really intimidating, at all? Every time I've tried to make a cheesecake it's turned out pretty well, or excellently. They're not terribly difficult to make. And when they're good, they're really really good.
This pumpkin cheesecake is a little bit of a twist on the norm what with the heavy pumpkin content and the interesting baked sour cream topping thing, but it's not a heavy lift, and the ingredients are easy to source.
Cooking and Tasting Notes: It was difficult to get the graham cracker crust to crawl a whole inch up the side of the pan; not quite enough material to get the job done. But ultimately, the cheesecake held together fine. Putting this together was fairly easy, but then, the actual taste of the thing: Wow.
Did I say "wow" for the previous recipe? I guess I did. But, still: wow. This pumpkin cheesecake has to hover in the top 5% of desserts I've made at home, which comfortably puts it amongst the best desserts I've eaten. Silken, tart, not-oversweet, with the sugary crunch of the crust to balance the pie and topping. Good strong pumpkin flavor, spices present but not overwhelming. Just frickin' delicious. I don't like the health implications of this thing sitting in my fridge for the next few days, but those are the risks you take when you accept this job.
PUMPKIN CHEESECAKE
Crust
1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs (about one sleeve's worth)
1/2 cup melted butter
1/4 cup granulated sugar
Cheesecake
3 8 oz. packages of cream cheese
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 eggs
1 3/4 cups (15 oz. can) pumpkin
2/3 cup evaporated milk
2 Tbsp cornstarch
1 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
Topping
2 cups sour cream, room temperature
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Combine graham cracker crumbs, butter, and sugar in a bowl. Spray bottom and sides of a springform cheesecake pan with nonstick spray, and pat the crumbs into a crust, climbing about an inch up the side of the pan. Bake for 6-8 minutes and then cool for 10 minutes on a wire rack.
Beat the cream cheese and sugars until fluffy, then add eggs, pumpkin, evaporated milk, cornstarch, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Beat well and pour into crust. Bake for 55-60 minutes, until edge is set, and center has a slight wobble.
Combine sour cream, sugar, and vanilla; mix well. Spread over surface of warm cheesecake and bake for 5 minutes. Cool on wire rack and then chill in fridge for several hours or overnight.
THE VERDICT ON AN UNCATERED AFFAIR: COOKING FOR FRIENDS
(***BUY IT*** / BORROW IT / SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)
Should you ever have the opportunity to find a copy of An Uncatered Affair available for purchase, I suggest that you spring for the cost and enjoy owning this weird, rare, highly personal collection of extremely functional and well-written recipes. I liked it just fine when I enjoyed it as a memoir and strange literary artifact. Now that I know that it's serious business, I'm going to keep cooking out of it - who knows how many more culinary thunderbolts lurk within its covers?