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Michael Manner and I were English majors at Plattsburgh State before the days of email, before the days of the fax. Indeed, the modern technology of the time was floppy disk computers, and the CD was quickly replacing the cassette tape. Manner and I have kept in touch through the years and when we are together we often argue and bicker like a married couple about love, fear, greed, envy, lust, hypocrisy, music, cats v. dogs, words et al. I think the only thing we ever seem to agree on is that chocolate milk is the greatest invention ever. But enough about me, Manner is a freelance computer consultant living with his mangy, blind cat in Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY. His love of poetry dates back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth and he first heard the words “ugga bugga” uttered by a passing Neanderthal woman. He’s been writing verse since the Iron Age and one day hopes to be cited in the OED. His fave comic book hero is Batman. Despite all this I think is is a truly talented poet and have asked him to post some poems on this blog. You be his judge.

It never rains in Brooklyn.
I dream of being cold enough to dream of being this warm.
I could wrap myself in a blanket and sit by the fire –
eat hot soup –
turn on the lights.

I would shiver nostalgically and regress to Sunday showers and TV Dinners
watching the gray gloaming fade into black.
I remember being finite surrounded by cold.
But - it never rains in Brooklyn.

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My friend Pia Z. Ehrhardt first published in webzines. She quickly developed a legion of online fans and started winning prizes. Last year MacAdam Cage published her debut collection, Famous Fathers and Other Stories. At the moment she’s working on Speeding in the Driveway, a novel set in New Orleans, where she lives.

I’ve been hoping to bake and eat her coffee cake on a lazy, snowy Sunday, but I haven’t experienced one of those in a while. (Thanks to my slumlord landlord, my place has been turned upside-down and filled with poison for weeks, and right now I’m meaner than a sack full of rattlesnakes. Acapulco notwithstanding, I can’t wait to close on our apartment and get the hell out of Greenpoint.)

Here’s the recipe, for those with weekends more tranquil than mine.

I grew up with a young, restless mother who had old ladies for friends, lovely women with good manners and coiffed hair who treated her like a daughter who could never get on your nerves. Both of my parents toured with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians after I was born, and when they came off the road and picked me up from my grandmother’s, we settled down in Minisink Hills, PA.

My mother would take me with her to visit Aunt Yvette, a “friend”-aunt and the wife of Fred Waring’s drummer, Poley. Aunt Yvette wore flowered dresses and her furniture was upholstered in chintz. Cut flowers from her garden filled vases: nasturtium, foxgloves, peonies, which my mother called Pia’s Knees.

Aunt Yvette sewed costumes for the Pennsylvanians and she taught my mother how to knit — a soft scarf and matching hat studded with a pompom, a mohair blanket to keep your legs warm while you read in the chair by the window that leaked cold air. She kept a crystal candy dish on the coffee table, within easy reach of a five year old, and her next door neighbor was Mr. Greenjeans from Captain Kangaroo, but I was too taken with him to make eye contact the few times he waved from his yard.

My mother had other friendships with older women, a rail-thin Israeli stewardess when we lived in Italy, a funny, fiery Parisian violinist when we lived in Canada, but I think Aunt Yvette came the closest to being the mother she hoped for but didn’t have. She seldom visited her own, but at Aunt Yvette’s she seemed calm, daughter-happy, like she was right where she wanted to be.
 

This recipe is for Aunt Yvette’s Mother’s Friend’s Coffee Cake. My mother wrote it out for me in her immaculate handwriting twenty-something years ago, before I married my second husband.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

1 stick butter
1 cup sour cream + 1 teaspoon baking soda (combine before adding)
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix the above ingredients together into batter.

Topping:
¼ cup sugar
2 tablespoons chopped nuts
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Turn 1/2 of batter into a greased layer cake pan. Sprinkle 1/2 of topping. Pour remaining batter over and sprinkle top with rest of topping.

Bake approximately half an hour in 350 degree oven.
 

Day two home from work with a killer cold, and my only consolation is novelist Kate Christensen’s hot toddy. Since she passed it along last fall, the drink has eclipsed spicy tomato soup as the Maud household’s preferred remedy. It proves — as we always knew deep in our hearts — that Bourbon cures everything.
 

Add boiling water to (in the biggest cup in the house; this is no time to fuck around with anything dainty) the juice of 1 lemon, a big wad of honey, a slug of good whiskey [Ed. Note: I’ve been using Maker’s Mark], and as much cayenne pepper as you can tolerate. If it’s morning, add a tea bag.
 

For variation, try Lizzie Skurnick’s lemon and onion brew, or Christensen’s second option:

Nuke a cup of College Inn chicken broth till it’s good and hot. Squeeze a wedge of lemon over it and add a dash of cayenne. Sip. Toss back a shot of good whiskey (or Bourbon) on the side.
 

Stay well, everyone, and have a good weekend.

I started reading Tod Goldberg’s entertaining blog a few years ago. Later we both contributed to When I Was a Loser, an anthology now banned in one Rhode Island high school. Goldberg’s essay begins like this: “If the truth be known, I would have preferred not meeting Zsa Zsa Gabor at all versus meeting her while covered in the pubic hair of my sisteen-year-old girlfriend.”

He’s also the author of a novel and two short story collections. I’d planned to post his Nana’s recipe in late December, right around the time my site went belly-up. That’s okay, Goldberg told me, “kugel keeps.”

For the first twenty-five years of my life, I was under the impression that my Nana was a fabulous cook. Her meat pie was positively heavenly. She was the master of cream pies. Her crusts were so flaky and delicious that she could have made a pie out of unleaded gas and dandruff and it would still taste lovely. Her cookies would have left Mrs. Fields blushing with envy. Her baked chicken melted in your mouth. Her potato salad made every picnic at Pioneer Park in Walla Walla, Washington a culinary experience.

Since she was my grandmother, all of these dishes were delivered with a healthy serving of love and affection as well, thus cloaking each dish in a kind of romantic reverie. And yet, of all the dishes she’d prepared over the years, nothing topped her recipe for lochshen kugel.

For non-Jews, the mere idea of kugel often seems incongruent, depending upon the particular sect of kugel being prepared, since every family has a different recipe, some involving vegetables, some incorporating odd fruits, some with potatoes and cheeses. Some come ripped from the pages of a long forgotten portion of the Midrash which talked specifically about White Trash Jews, a subject best not discussed in a public forum. (I’ve tried to wipe from my memory a kugel that included frosted corn flakes, but alas, I can still see it: A relative of a relative via marriage, standing in a kitchen with a box of Frosted Flakes, ready to pour them into a bowl with noodles, an onion and bing cherries. Somewhere, a Star of David was being burned on a front lawn, I just know it.)
 

I regaled my then-girlfriend and now-wife Wendy with descriptions of Nana’s recipes prior to our trip to visit her the summer of my 25th year. Ever a dutiful grandmother, on that very first night she’d prepared all of my favorite dishes. Baked chicken, a meatpie, a kugel, plates and plates of cookies, cream pies and a bowl of potato salad so dense a Sherpa was needed simply to get a serving on my plate. With a few bites from Wendy, however, it all came crashing down:

Wendy: Nana, how do you get the chicken to stay so moist?

Nana: I baste it with mayonnaise every ten minutes for five hours.

That was all Wendy needed. She danced delicately around the rest of the food on the table, giving me what could only be called the Stink Eye as I plowed straight through the dishes, never stopping to ponder the culinary genius behind it, though hopeful that mayo wasn’t a chief ingredient in the pies, too.
 

When we got home a few weeks later, Wendy took out the cookbook Nana gave each of her grandchildren and began thumbing through it. “You do realize,” she said, “that all you need in order to make her chocolate cream pie is instant pudding and Cool Whip, right?”

Intellectually, I’m sure I did realize that. When I looked at the recipe and actually saw it, well, it felt… wrong. Sordid. Ugly. But right there was the truth: Mix instant chocolate pudding in a bowl with Cool Whip, add to pie shell, top with Cool Whip and cool for two hours. (Now, to be fair, there was a recipe for a pie crust in the book, but in later years Nana just used Mrs. Smith’s.) I flipped through her recipes and found that these favorites of mine were typically not all that extravagant — meat, vegetables, a pie crust and… voila!

When I finally got to the page with the kugel recipe — which Wendy had decried as “Just wrong. Who eats sweet noddles? Blech!” — the experience was far different. It was like looking at the hand of God.
 

Every time I’d felt blue in my life, Nana made me a kugel. Every time something good happened in my life, Nana made me a kugel. Every time I visited unexpectedly when we lived in the same city, she’d pull a kugel out of the freezer and we’d eat a few slices. And now here it was!

I immediately ran to the store and picked out the ingredients, came home, made it and… it sucked. It was awful. It tasted starchy and dry and without much flavor. Could Nana’s love really be what made it taste so good? I called my older sister Linda to lament.

“Don’t you know that all of the recipes in Nana’s cookbook are just slightly wrong?” she said. “The measurements are off or there’s a missing ingredient in all of them.”

“Why would she do that?” I said.

“Oh, probably so when you make her recipes they wouldn’t taste as good as when she makes them herself,” she said. “But don’t worry, I’ve backwards engineered them all.” Linda then proceeded to give me the correct recipe for the world’s greatest lochshen kugel. I went out and bought all the ingredients again and made another kugel and it was like Nana was sitting in my kitchen with me. Or, well, the nice, sweet Nana I’d always known, not the evil one who’d screwed with her own cookbook just so her grandchildren wouldn’t be able to make her recipes as well as she did. (There’s no telling how much mayo you’re really supposed to baste the chicken with…)
 

Nana died a few weeks ago at the age of 95 and in her honor I came home from the funeral and made myself a kugel. It tasted like being seven and losing a soccer game; like being twelve and dining as the sun set over Loon Lake, Washington; like being thirty and sitting on her porch in Seattle; like being all the ages I’ve ever been. Here’s how you do it.

You’ll need:

1 12oz package wide egg noodles
1 cup of sugar
1 grated apple (I prefer a Macintosh, though really any good red apple will work.)
1 handful of raisins (about a half cup)
1 to 2 tablespoons of cinnamon (I like to use a lot of cinnamon, so I go for 2 tablespoons, though my mother uses 1 and my sister uses 3…)
1 egg
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Pre-heat your oven to 375

Boil the noodles until they are done. Drain the noodles, add the rest of the ingredients and stir until all mixed. Pour into a greased metal pan. This is important: don’t use a glass pan. For some reason, cooking this in a glass pan makes it burn more easily and taste not as good. Through extensive trial and error, we’ve learned that a really cheap 9 X 11 pan is the way to go here.

Bake for between 45 minutes and an hour. For a crisp top layer, an hour should be perfect. If you prefer it a little less crisp, watch the cooking from about 45 minutes on to check for browning. Let it cool before cutting into squares.
 

2007 was a year of restraint. I got through a Thanksgiving without invoking Donald Barthelme.

Still, no writers’ recipe project would be complete without a mention of Don B.’s soup recipes or event catering strategies. And Soft Skull gives me the perfect excuse: a reprint of The Teachings of Don B., complete with Pynchon introduction, is forthcoming next month. Here’s a brief excerpt:

FINE HOMEMADE LEEK SOUP

Take one package Knorr Leek Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take two live leeks. Chop leeks into quarter-inch rounds. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth. Throw in chopped parsley. Throw in some amount of salt and a heavy bit of freshly ground pepper. Eat with good-quality French bread, dipped repeatedly in soup.

FINE HOMEMADE MUSHROOM SOUP

Take one package knorr Mushroom Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take four large mushrooms. Slice. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth, parsley, salt, pepper. Stick bread as above into soup at intervals. Buttering bread enhances taste of the whole.

There’s more at overnight to many distant cities.
 

Since the weekend ancestry posts have started to feel a little rote on this end, I’ll be alternating them with writers’ recipes and love letters to bookstores. I’m soliciting the recipes from particular writers as the mood strikes, but send praise for your favorite indie bookshop anytime.

Earlier this year, Agni published my friend Marie Mockett’s fascinating Letter From a Japanese Crematorium, one of the most elegant personal essays I read in 2007. (Photos at her own site supplement the story.)

Mockett is hard at work on a novel, but sometimes I lure her away from her desk to join me for meals. Fluent in Japanese, she is familiar with some of the city’s best, most obscure, and reasonably priced Japanese restaurants — and she’s introduced me to, among other things, the wonders of bamboo and lotus root. Below she explains how to prepare them with chicken.

A few months ago, my mother showed up in New York carrying three bamboo shoots in her handbag. In my novel, I’ve a scene in which a mother and daughter prepare similar shoots for dinner; my mother thought it might be smart to put the fictional recipes to the test. The delicate top of the shoot went into a salad dressed with miso. The middle was thinly sliced and used to season white rice. The bottom of the shoot was coarsely chopped and cooked with chicken.

The good news; the food tastes great! The bad news; real bamboo shoots like this are difficult to find. Your best bet is a Chinese grocery store, but Japanese shops may well carry a pre-prepared shoot in shrink wrap. I’m not sure how my mother came by these, nor have I asked.

I’ve always been told that real bamboo — the iridescent stalks so atmospherically used in classic samurai films and the contemporary Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — doesn’t grow in the west. We have a kind of wimpy bamboo that’s much thinner and while edible, doesn’t have the rich flavor of the fat shoots you see here.

Bamboo pride is one of the many ways in which Japanese friends — and chefs in particular — often remind me of the superiority of Japanese culture. But my grandfather recently told me that this kind of thick bamboo wasn’t actually native to Japan either; he swears it only came over from China in the last couple hundred years. “Everything comes from China,” he said wonderingly, in the manner of a humbled Japanese scholar made aware of his roots over time. Regardless, the flavors below are 100% Japanese — and delicious.
 

Prepare the Shoot

First you’ll need to prepare the shoot for cooking. Submerge shoots in a pan filled with water. Add one quarter cup of brown rice (measurements are approximate, and do depend on the size of the shoot). Bring pan to a boil. Turn down the heat so the boiling stops, but the water is still gently rolling. After about fifteen-minutes to a half an hour (depending on shoot size), turn off the heat and leave the bamboo to soak overnight. The next day, drain the water and peel the husk; it should come off easily, revealing gorgeous blond meat.

(Yes, I know this is more than 3 shoots. I didn’t like the photo of the original 3 shoots after they were peeled. And, yes, that means these recipes were tried more than once).
 

Bamboo Salad

Cut off the top part of the shoot–this is the most delicate meat. Slice into thin pieces; you want to have about a quarter cup.

Next, cut a half a green onion into inch long pieces. Parboil these for a few minutes, then drain and cool.

In the meantime, prepare the dressing. Mix two teaspoons of miso, a third of a teaspoon of sugar and two teaspoons of vinegar (I use rice vinegar). Mix this till it is smooth, then combine the shoots, the green onions and miso dressing together.

Bamboo Rice

Wash rice, drain, and put into a rice cooker. Add 2 tablespoons of sake and water to the appropriate level as indicated by the rice cooker. Add thin slices of bamboo from the middle of the shoot (about a half cup for three cups of rice) and
thin-sliced strips of fried tofu (age: 2 squares). Finally, add one-and-a-half teaspoons of dashi on top of the rice.

When the cooker begins to boil hard, open it up and the mix rice and thoroughly. Replace lid. When the rice cooker indicates that the rice is cooked, immediately
“fluff up” rice from the bottom using a rice paddle. Wait another 30 minutes before serving.

Chicken and Bamboo or Chikuzenni

Saute chicken thigh meat (tastier than the breast, which tends to be dryer). When the thigh meat turns whitish, add the following ingredients: carrots, lotus root, soaked shiitake, (save the juice) and the bottom part of the bamboo shoot. After a few minutes, add some “satoimo,” or Japanese sticky potato.

Add the shiitake soaking juice almost to the top of the ingredients. Bring to a boil then turn down heat so the juice rolls gently, and cook for about 20 minutes.

Add 2 tablespoons of sake and 1 teaspoon dashi. Cook for another 10 minutes. Add snow peas for the color if desired.

Enjoy!

In 2004, Katherine Lanpher gave up her radio gig in Minneapolis and moved to Manhattan to serve as co-host of The Al Franken Show. A year and a half later she quit the show to write Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move. Nowadays, among other things, she interviews writers and musicians for Upstairs at the Square and guest-hosts for Leonard Lopate.

Below — in a slightly modified excerpt from

By the end of my first year in New York, I suffered from a mood so grim that I coined my own diagnosis: displacement dysphasia. I would be walking down a street and suddenly the oddness of my surroundings would hit me with a painful clarity. This wasn’t home; these weren’t my streets. What was I doing here?

To root myself back in the world, to show myself I still existed, I cooked. My dictum in New York became: when in doubt, roast a chicken. I’m not referring to the doubt you suffer when you aren’t sure what you should eat. I’m talking about existential doubt, the gloom that gnaws at you as question your place in the universe.

I have few memories of actually eating these chickens, but then their preparation isn’t about that kind of hunger anyway. What I remember, actually, are the smells — the way rosemary tickles your nose with pine, the almost floral sharpness of a cut lemon. With each deliberate motion of my hands, I am willing myself to the next. Most days, I like to think that I am constructing a life; but on these bleak evenings, I am settling for an hour and the hour after that and the hour after that.

Cooking is the way I stave off the hunger pangs I feel for a rooted life. These small kitchen acts are like the tracery I did as a child, when I would place a piece of translucent paper over a beloved illustration and carefully, carefully trace with my pencil. Now, I am tracing acts of sustenance.
 

When-in-doubt Chicken

1 roasting chicken, around 5 pounds, preferably organic
Carrots and leeks, chopped in one-inch or so pieces
A handful of cloves of garlic, peeled or not, to your taste
Rosemary
Lemon
Butter (it’s worth it to splurge on the European style)
Salt and pepper
White wine or vermouth
Optional: chicken stock

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Rinse the chicken and then pat dry with paper towels. Take a nice helping of the butter — this effort is aided if you let it sit out for a while and get soft — and massage it into the skin of the chicken. Take the carrots and leeks and garlic cloves and sprinkle them over the bottom of a Dutch Oven or roasting pan. This will function as your roasting rack. Take a few sprigs of rosemary and a lemon cut in half; place in the cavity of the bird. Slosh some chicken stock or white wine in the bottom of the pan.

Put the bird, uncovered, in the oven for 15 minutes. After that, turn the oven down to 350 degrees. Figure 15 minutes per pound. I add more stock or white wine as the hour or so progresses, basting the bird more than I need to. You can do it every 20 minutes or so and be fine. After the allotted time is up, pierce it with a large fork. If the juices run clear, it’s done. Put the bird to rest on a carving board.

Remove the vegetables with a slotted spoon. These will be the best carrots you have eaten in a long time. Put them in a small bowl and cap with foil to keep them warm. Then pour a large splash of white vermouth or wine into the pan, turn up the heat and stir while you reduce the sauce. Once you think you have boiled off the alcohol, pour into a separator to reduce the amount of fat you’ll be eating. By now, your chicken is ready to carve.

My friend Kevin Kinsella tends to find himself at the center of strange events and unfortunate misunderstandings that he, to his knowledge, has done nothing to invite upon himself. (I can relate.) So his passion for Russian literature shouldn’t come as a surprise. A few months ago he interviewed novelist Anya Ulinich. More recently, Green Integer Press published his translation of Osip Mandelshtam’s marvelous Tristia.

Below Kinsella shares his grandfather’s coleslaw recipe. (Or so he claims. His twin brother, Keith, remembers the ingredients a little differently. Everyone, however, agrees on the Canadian Club.)

Injun Joe Thompson, my grandfather, rode boxcars east in the late 1930s from Going Snake, Oklahoma, to Detroit, and then Greyhounds all the way to Newport, Rhode Island. Born Joseph Bearpaw, he dropped his family name because he thought it was “too Injun,” an unwanted distinction for which he left the reservation in the first place. People came to recognize him on the street late at night when he would stumble home drunk from one bar or another. Drunkenness was another of my grandfather’s marked characteristics, but Newporters nevertheless nicknamed him Injun Joe, as opposed to Drunken Joe, which, when you think about it, was rather kind.

After a stint as a small-time bookmaker for a local organized crime concern, Injun Joe married my grandmother, the daughter of a chauffeur and a cook for Philadelphia coal baron Edward Julius Berwind, who owned the Elms Estate on Bellevue Avenue. In the fifties, they opened a small but remarkably successful restaurant — The Hilltop — that specialized in American country cooking and catered to the needs of the Hollywood celebrities attending Newport’s Summer Theater.

Here is the recipe for the remarkably wholesome cole slaw recipe that you would never suspect was made day in and day out — or vicey versy, as Injun Joe would say — by a man who had more whiskey running through his veins than blood, and eight major cardiac events to prove it. I can still hear him cussing and singing Hank Williams as he showed me how to use the bell grater.
 

Injun Joe Thompson’s Reservation Cole Slaw

1/5 Canadian Club whiskey, “furtively” imbibed
1 head green cabbage, shredded
2 carrots, grated
1 sweet vidalia onion, thinly sliced
2 green onions (white and green parts), chopped
1 fresh red chile, sliced
1 1/2 cups mayonnaise
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 lemon, juiced
3 pinches sugar
Several dashes hot sauce
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Take a deep swig of Canadian Club, then combine the cabbage, carrots, onion, green onions, and chile in a large bowl. Indulge in another swig of Canadian Club as though your grandson weren’t in the room. In another bowl, stir together the mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, and sugar. Set aside a tumbler of whiskey for garnish. Pour the dressing over the cabbage mixture and toss gently. Season the cole slaw with the hot sauce, salt, and black pepper.

Chill for 2 hours and enjoy with half a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey, and, as Hank and Injun Joe Thompson might say, you’re a long gone daddy.

The Elegant Variation’s Mark Sarvas is my pal and writing partner — even now, with his novel due out in May, he checks in on my progress every couple days — so I can’t pretend to be objective about Harry, Revised. But I’m deeply impressed with the finished book and thrilled at the early reception.

Below Sarvas shares a favorite childhood recipe that incited mockery in elementary school. And don’t miss his recent post on the sophistry of Christopher Hitchens.

Körözött is a staple of any Hungarian kitchen and is basically a cheese spread, something consumed on toast, crackers, bagels or your carb of choice. As with egg salad, however, that’s about all anyone agrees on. There are just about as many permutations of körözött recipes as there are Hungarians. And they all feel very strongly about their individual interpretations. (When I mentioned this post to a Hungarian friend, I was sternly admonished to dump my recipe and replace it with his, which calls for soft feta cheese. A nauseating proposition.)

It’s also, frankly, a somewhat unappetizing looking little hors d’oeuvre — the paprika gives it a bright orange color and the cream cheese gives it a mushy consistency — and so it brought me no end of grief as a child when it found its way into my lunch sandwiches. My fellow fifth graders were predictably grossed out at the sight of it, and one anointed it “Wild Ape Shit,” which saddled me with an unpleasant mental image that has lingered ever since.

But no amount of teasing could make me forsake the stuff, which remains a guilty pleasure to this day. I make it for parties and share it with friends, and when they ask what’s in it, I tell them “Honestly, you’re better off not knowing. Just try it.” And they do, and they all go away converts.

So here’s the Sarvas family recipe, which my mother, in true Hungarian fashion, modified from my grandmother’s recipe, which used to include mustard and capers. I urge you to overlook the oddity of the ingredients and just try the combination. The sum of the parts and all that.
 

Find yourself a large mixing bowl. Add an entire package of Philadelphia Low Fat Cream Cheese, the kind that comes in a box, not a tub. (I’m not brand particular, it’s just the rightamount for this recipe.) Follow that with one stick of margarine. (Again, sticks not tubs.) Not butter. Sacrilegious, I know, but just bear with me. Finely dice a quarter of a small onion and throw it in. Next, take a beef bouillon cube and grind it to a powder and add that (or the equivalent amount of powered bouillon) to the mix.

The next part is necessarily imprecise because that’s what happens when my mother shares a recipe. You’ll need a tube of anchovy paste. Then add what she calls (imagine an eastern European accent) “six toothpastes of anchovy paste.” You can go a little lighter if you like — you can always add more later. Finally, you need some ground Hungarian red paprika. Sprinkle it on liberally but remember it’s mainly for color and a light paprika taste. If you add too much, the spread will taste too sweet.
 

Then just grab a fork and begin to work the whole thing — it takes time, persistence and good forearm muscles — until it becomes an evenly blended orange whole. It should ideally look something like this:

I know… but trust me. Put it on toast, an english muffin or fresh bagel — something warm is best. You’ll love it and maybe even end up giving it your own personal twist in true Hungarian fashion: Caraway seeds? Chives? Just don’t give it to your kids for their school lunches.

Dwight Garner, of the charming Paper Cuts blog, is Senior Editor at the New York Times Book Review, author of Inside the List, and former Salon Book Editor. His profile of Nicholson Baker is an old favorite.

Below Garner contributes some recipes that are nearly as straightforward as Norman Mailer’s steak instructions — and far less likely to result in a visit from the fire department.

It’s easy to cook a fairly remarkable meal in August, when farmer’s markets are fables of abundance, or if you live near a big-city market like Dean & DeLuca.

The two recipes I’m happiest to have in my mental rucksack require zero fancy shopping — the pokiest small-town A & P will usually do. No gadgets or fancy kitchenwork are required, either. These are humble yet profound, the Swiss Army knives of recipes. They have saved the day for me more than once in remote summer houses, or when a planned, fancier dinner went up in oven smoke. The recipes are: a puttanesca sauce and a lemon ice cream.
 

The puttanesca sauce I learned, when I was fresh out of college, from Raymond Sokolov’s terrific The New Cook Cookbook — a volume I no longer own. Inexpensive to prepare and almost impossible to screw up, this dish got my wife and me through the lean early years of our marriage, and we still eat it about once a month; it’s pushy, it’s got bite — it’s a palate-cleanser, something to re-set your culinary clock. The recipe exists in my head (I haven’t consulted Sokolov in ages) as follows:

Place on the counter in front of you a few cloves of garlic, some olive oil, a tin of anchovies, a can of tuna (ideally packed in oil), a big handful of cured black olives (pitted) and a big pinch or two of capers.

Chop the garlic and heat it in the oil until just fragrant. Drain and mince the anchovies, and add them, mashing with a fork. After a minute, add the drained tuna, and keep mashing, so everything gets mixed. Chop the olives pretty finely and add them, too, mashing occasionally. Add the capers and mash some more. Don’t mash so hard you turn things into pulp. You don’t want to punish your sauce. But you want the flavors very well mixed.

(If you are missing any one of the ingredients above, do not fret. Like the women of easy virtue for which it is named, puttanesca is forgiving.)

I like this straight up, on top of whatever pasta I’m in the mood for. But you can also add a glug or two of decent red sauce to the mix, if you wish, to soften the edges and extend the portions a bit.

Grab some crusty bread and put on a Junior Kimbrough record, and you are set up.
 

The ice cream recipe I stole, years ago, from John Thorne’s book Outlaw Cook. I am giving you this from memory, too, because it’s a recipe I no longer need nor want to consult.

You will need: 1) The juice and zest of 3-4 lemons. 2) One cup superfine sugar. 3) 2 cups cream (ideally non-ultrapasteurized). That’s it. Here are the directions in their totality: Place ingredients in a shallow serving bowl, mix gently with a spoon, then freeze.

The tart lemon, the rich cream — unlike most desserts, this will never let you down. Serve in pie-like slices, maybe with few cookies on the side.

Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux do pretty well with this. And that little A & P probably stocks them.
 

Image swiped from Vulture.

Tayari Jones’ The Untelling is a book I’m always giving to people. I’ve pressed it on my in-laws, hair stylist, friends bookish and not, and now there’s a growing band of us waiting for her next novel.

Although I’ve met Jones only once, when we read together back in 2005, I feel like she’s an old friend — mostly because of her blog. Nowadays a handful of literary novelists are blogging, and more than a few bloggers have become novelists, but when Jones set up her site nearly three years ago, there was a pervasive notion in The Literary World that serious writers wouldn’t waste their time on that kind of frivolity. (Less self-consciously

Macaroni and cheese is sort of a cultural thumbprint. How you make it shows exactly who you are and where you are from.

This is a recipe for southern macaroni and cheese, which means it is baked. I also want to say that it is a traditionally African-American version, in as it does not contain breadcrumbs. I am hesitant about the last part because I am sure that I will get an email from some black person who detests stereotypes or generalizations of any kind.

So, for the sake of keeping the holiday peace, I am going to say that it is a southern mac and cheese. And it is really really delicious. I promise.
 

10 oz of elbow macaroni
6 oz sharp cheddar cheese
6 oz mild cheddar
1 stick of butter
4 eggs
1 cup whole milk *
½ cup evaporated milk
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
pinch of paprika
½ small onion diced (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. Whip eggs in small bowl and put aside. Mix cheeses in small bowl and put aside.

Boil pasta in LARGE pot and drain off most of the water. While pasta in still steaming, stir in the butter and about ¾ of the cheese. Stir until everything is all melty. Add salt, pepper, and paprika. (This is your last opportunity to taste, so please do.) Next add eggs, and all milk. You can add the onion now, if you like. The whole concoction should be really soupy. Stir, stir and stir some more.

Pour mixture into a casserole dish and bake for about 30 minutes. It will rise like soufflé, so make sure that your dish is big enough. Carefully open the oven and slide the rack out halfway so you can sprinkle the remaining cheese on top. Continue to bake about another ten minutes until the cheese is bubbly. Take it out of the oven and let it sit about 10-15 minutes while it sets.

* Dieters can substitute skim or 2% milk and the butter can be cut down by half. You might be able to scale back the cheese a little, but just use less cheese, not a 2% or fat free.

Laila Lalami is a precise thinker and essayist, an equally precise fiction writer, a veteran blogger, and a longtime friend. Her first book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, has been praised by Junot Díaz, Diana Abu-Jaber, and many others. Earlier this year, Panjak Mishra admired Hope in the NYRB, lauding Lalami’s “calm sympathy,” the “evenhandedness [that] offers us no scope for easy judgments.”

In the current

I have to confess I have been barred by my husband from ever doing anything in the kitchen except eat in it or maybe wash dishes. I can’t cook. I tried to make rice two years ago, and when Alex came home he found the calcified remains of the rice at the bottom of a plastic pot. I decided to make a cheese omelette for dinner on one of the last nights in Portland before our move, and I mixed four kinds of cheeses and put in too much salt. It was, needless to say, inedible, though my father, who was helping us pack, bravely soldiered on.

There is one concoction I can make, though. (I think I would be disowned if I couldn’t.) It’s an infusion, actually — Moroccan mint tea.
 

Boil water in a kettle. Pour a little hot water in a tea pot to warm it up, then pour it out. Put in a rounded tablespoon of Chinese gun-powder green tea, then add a full handful of fresh mint. Add sugar to taste. (Most Moroccans like their mint tea extra sweet and would use about five tablespoons of sugar in a mid-size tea pot.)

Add boiling water, gently stir, and then let sit for about five minutes before serving (in a small glass, never in a cup.) If you like your tea pretty strong (i.e. Sahrawi style) place the tea pot directly on a very light fire and wait until foam forms at the top, then remove from the stove and serve. That’s about it.

This infusion is perfect with holiday cookies, or alone. I haven’t yet managed to screw this one up, and if I can make it, then, really, anyone can.

The prospect of more novels from the delightful Justine Larbalestier is one of the few consolations available to my Harry Potter-obsessed stepdaughter, A., now that the Rowling franchise has closed up shop. I don’t know what the follow-up to the Magic or Madness Trilogy will be, but recent blog posts suggest Larbalestier’s stranded in New York, working on something big. (Of course it could be a scholarly book on speculative fiction; check out the February Bookslut interview on, among other things, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction.)

Larbelestier and her husband — Scott Westerfeld, another A. favorite — usually spend winters in her native Sydney. Below she contributes a recipe that reminds her of home. U.S. readers may wish to consult the weights converter.

This recipe for pasta with salmon roe and chervil comes from my mum. Don’t know where she got it, but we’ve both been making it for several years now. Everytime I eat it I feel like I’m back in Sydney and it’s summer and the cicadas are screaming outside, the rainbow lorikeets are zooming from tree to tree, and we’re winning at the cricket.

Because I’m stuck in the dread winter of the Northern Hemisphere I’ve been making it a lot and wishing I was home.
 

500g of angel hair pasta
1 third of a cup good olive oil
2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind
1 quarter cup lemon juice
half cup chopped fresh chives
half cup fresh chervil leaves
100g salmon roe
salt and pepper

Cook pasta till almost tender and drain well. Return pasta to pan then add oil and toss gently. Toss the pastas with lemon rind and juice, herbs and half the roe. Season to taste.

Can be served hot or cooled to room temperature. (If serving cool add a little extra olive oil if needed.) Serve topped with remaining roe.

All those measurements are a bit hand waving. I tend to use more like a cup each of chives and chervil. I also use way more salmon roe. When I can’t find chervil I substitute dill.

Enjoy. It’s addictively yummy.

This month I’m posting recipes and food-related stories from some writers I like. Today Joshua Ferris, whose Then We Came to the End has been named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of 2007, explains how to make a perfectly browned grilled cheese sandwich.

I admired Ferris’ novel in

Making a good grilled cheese looks deceptively simple. It’s actually an art and requires good technique and extreme vigilance.

This recipe — such as it is — goes back to my mom. Butter two slices of bread and place as much cheese as you like (cheddar turns stringy when melted, American liquidy, pepper jack somewhere between the two) between them and place the whole thing in the skillet. Set the burner on a very low setting. BE PATIENT. It’s important that the toasting of the bread happens in harmony with the melting of the cheese. A good grilled cheese requires at least fifteen minutes to make. Turn a corner of the bread up from time to time until it’s brown and ready to be flipped. Remember the second side cooks faster than the first.

I took a vow before a hundred people in Key West, Florida on February 5th, 2005 to make this for my wife any time she required one.

James Hynes — whom Chris Lehmann has called “a pioneer of genre-bending fiction” — is one of a handful of novelists whose books Mr. Maud and I enjoy equally. He’s also an unselfish man. When we were in Austin earlier this year, he not only met us for dinner but offered to drive our rental-carless asses home from the restaurant.

Recently he’s raved about Scott Westerfeld’s Extras in the

About four years ago, I lost 90 pounds, so I don’t cook a lot of what I used to cook anymore. Not that I was ever much of a cook to begin with; I knew how to fry a hamburger and boil hot dogs, basically. These days I open a lot of bags of salad and eat lots of chicken and turkey. Now and then I still make one of the old dishes, and this is one of them, which would probably serve, say, four or five people for one meal, or one middle-aged bachelor for a week. It’s not fancy, it’s not authentic, it’s not even particularly original, it’s just one of the few dishes I know how to make without consulting a cookbook. It’s just plain old Midwestern spaghetti sauce.

First you dice a whole onion and a lot of garlic; I usually do at least four, and sometimes six cloves. I like a spicy sauce. Sauté them in oil in a cast iron pan until they’re golden brown, then add a pound or a pound and a half of hamburger. If I’m being calorie conscious, I use really lean meat or ground turkey breast, but meat with more fat in it holds the flavor better for some reason. Cook the meat and the onion and garlic together until the meat is done.

While you’re waiting for the meat to cook, empty one 28 ounce and one 14 ounce can of peeled whole tomatoes into a big pot. I can’t remember why I started doing two cans of different sizes; perhaps it was because my eyes were still watering from the onions and I couldn’t see what I was doing, but at any rate, it’s traditional now. Add one 12 ounce can of tomato paste, then fill up the empty tomato paste can with water once and maybe twice and add that, too. You might also want to kind of hack up the whole tomatoes with a knife in the pot (which probably explains why my knives are all so dull). Stir it all together and start the heat under the pot.

By now the meat is ready, so pour off the fat and add the meat to the sauce. Then add 2 teaspoons of oregano, 2 teaspoons of basil, a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of dry mustard (or a tablespoon of French’s), and a half-teaspoon of pepper. I don’t add salt, because I’m hypertensive, but feel free. Sometimes, in the past, I used to add a little Worcestershire sauce, and sometimes a couple shakes of Tabasco sauce, but these days I usually throw in some of those dried red pizza peppers. Bring the meat sauce to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for at least half an hour. Add a bay leaf in the last ten minutes, though with all that onion, garlic, oregano, basil, Tabasco sauce, and pepper, you may not even notice it.

That’s it. Serve over pasta (though it’s not too bad on a baked potato, too), with parmesan.

Through December I’ll be posting recipes — not necessarily holiday-themed — and food-related stories from writers I like. The first contribution is from Kate Christensen, whose books I’ve raved about, and whose mad skillz in the kitchen will one day be the stuff of legend. You can read more of her recipes here.
 

Wash 25 or so fresh Brussels sprouts and cut off their ends. Put them in a steamer in a large pot and steam till they’re just soft and the bright green goes a little dull, about 10 minutes. Remove lid and let them cool a little. Melt two tablespoons of butter in each of two large cast-iron skillets and sprinkle dark brown sugar and salt evenly over the butter in each.

When the Brussels sprouts have cooled enough to touch, cut them in half and put them one by one face down into the sugared, salted, melted butter in the hot pans, make sure the flame is turned to medium (lower it a little if they smoke), and wait a while till they get golden brown on the downside. When they are ready, toss them in the pan to soak up everything and serve hot.

Serves 2 total gluttons or a family of normal people.
 

American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes is a fun book to have on hand under any circumstances. But if you’re going to prepare turkey tomorrow, it could be a crucial resource.

Thanksgiving, for reasons I won’t bore you with here, was my least favorite day of the entire year growing up. I lay awake worrying about it months in advance. But one year I somehow escaped my parents and their acrimonious festivities and celebrated the holiday with a Cuban friend’s family.

Que rico, people. Gone were the foul sweet potatoes with marshmallow, the “ambrosia” (has there ever been a more misleadingly-named dish?), the squash cooked to the point of disintegration, and the turkey tough enough to be the remains of last year’s carcass.

There were frijoles negros and maduros — comfort food to any Miamian, regardless of ethnicity — and piles and piles of other appetizers and treats. And then there was the bird, succulent and garlicky, with a little hint of citrus. I can’t even begin to tell you how the Cuban roast turkey dwarfs its Anglo counterpart.
 

The secret is the mojo. And in the updated edition of American Food Writing, writer Ana Menéndez supplements a delightful essay about her Cuban family’s first Miami Thanksgivings with a recipe for this magical marinade. Here’s an excerpt from her piece:

[C]hange, always inevitable and irrevocable, came gradually. As usual, it was prefigured by food. One year someone brought a pumpkin pie from Publix. It was pronounced inedible. But a wall had been breached. Cranberry sauce followed. I myself introduced a stuffing recipe (albeit composed of figs and prosciutto) that to my current dismay became a classic. Soon began the rumblings about pork being unhealthy. And besides, the family was shrinking…. A whole pig seemed suddenly an embarrassing extravagance, a desperate and futile grasping after the old days.

And so came the turkey. I don’t remember when exactly. I do recall that at the time, I had been mildly relieved. I had already begun to develop an annoyance with my family’s narrow culinary tastes — which to me signaled a more generalized lack of curiosity about the wider world. I had not yet discovered M.F.K. Fisher, and at any rate, I wasn’t old enough to understand that a hungry man has no reason to play games with his palate. I remember that soon after the first turkey appeared, there was much confusion over how to cook this new beast. The problem was eventually resolved by treating the bird exactly as if it were a pig. In went the garlic and the sour orange, the night-long mojo bath. When this didn’t seem quite enough to rid the poor turkey of its inherent blandness, someone came up with the idea of poking small incisions right into the meat and stuffing them with slivered garlic. Disaster, in this way, was mostly averted. And to compliment the cook one said, “This tastes just like roast pork.”

If, as Virginia Woolf suggested, visits to an author’s home ought to be condemned as sentimental journeys, seeking information about a favorite writer’s diet must be the lowest form of literary boondoggle.

I have some sympathy for this line of reasoning. After all, knowing Emily Dickinson’s black cake recipe doesn’t get you closer to the ultimate meaning of her poems.

And yet, for me at least, the knowledge of what she cooked and ate creates the illusion of intimacy — just as the recipes written in the back of my grandmother’s cookbook make me feel that some part of her is still alive. (If only she’d left behind instructions for her pecan pie. Was the secret in the nuts, which fell from her own tree? Some unorthodox blend of spices? Karo? Or did she use some other kind of syrup?)
 

The Great American Writers’ Cookbook — reissued in 2003 as The New Great American Writers’ Cookbook by the University Press of Mississippi — is one of the few books I read during my recent anti-social phase. From Walker Percy’s salt steak to Peter De Vries’ “frazzled eggs” to William Faulkner’s hot toddy, the recipes are an endless source of entertainment — and ideas for quick nourishment or fortification when you’re in the middle of a writing project.

For those who may need an emergency pick-me-up over the Thanksgiving holiday, here’s Eudora Welty’s contribution (admittedly a dangerous choice in our age of more aggressive salmonella):

Charles Dickens’s Eggnog

This is the eggnog we always started Christmas Day off with. I have the recipe my mother used, though she always referred to it as “Charles Dickens’s Recipe.”

6 egg yolks, well beaten
3 Tbs. powdered sugar, sifted
1 cup Bourbon
1 pt whipped cream
6 eggwhites, whipped into peaks but not dry
nutmeg if desired

Add the powdered sugar gradually to the beaten egg yolks. Add the Bourbon a little at a time to the mixture. Add the whipped cream and the beaten eggwhites, folding gently in. Chill. Serve in silver cups with a little grated nutmeg on top if desired.

Over the holidays I’ll be posting more writers’ recipes. Please stay tuned.