Stories

A few months ago I had an amazing dinner among friends at Vino's, a local family-run Italian restaurant in Fairfield, CT. We enjoyed all their best Italian dishes and their desserts accompanied by live music. One dessert stood out in particular, the almond cake. My friend demanded that I make one soon.

I took it upon myself to bake one that captured the best of an almond cake: a soft yet textural interior, buttery color, crisp exterior, and most importantly a noticeable fragrance and flavor of almonds. It turned out that baking the cake was far from the hardest part of this recipe. The biggest feat was finding almond paste in my area. I visited every grocery store and supermarket and could not find a can or tube of it. Luckily I was reminded of the Italian market. How could have I neglected to look there first?

Almond paste has a sort of grainy texture due to all the ground almonds. But to further play on that texture, this cake combines cornmeal with flour. The cornmeal lends a homey quality and along with the butter and egg yolks, a beautiful pale straw color.

New York, sometimes you just step in it.

My shopping and Jill’s are very different animals – she buys cute little things for other people, whereas I buy food for myself. Well, other people will get some of it, too. I don’t eat alone. And grocery shopping in the Village – if you know where to go – is one of the great joys of living in New York City. All the stores I have in mind exist in time warps – as if they haven’t changed a bit since the early 1900’s – which is exactly the truth.

They are — each store – of Italian origin, family-owned-and-operated and scrupulously dedicated to a kind of hands-on, personal involvement in each transaction. They have pride in what they sell. We quickly dispensed with Jill’s shopping list – a gift certificate for a special restaurant, a scarf for me(!), some tchochkes (that’s Jewish for cheap, little crappy things) for drop-in gifts, the best of which is something called, “Uh Oh” — it’s a little box with a pair of emergency underpants inside — and then we set off for my shopping spree – first to Bleecker Street for a double espresso at the fabled Porto Rico Coffee Company store. Just step through the door and you shed a hundred years. A double espresso is crucial when one sets out on a shopping trip. It gives one focus, energy and a skittery sense of optimism. I also picked up a pound of their Cent’anni espresso beans for home consumption.

From the LA Times

I ate my share of lobsters while spending summers in Rhode Island. My family still talks about the 10-pounder we bought from a shop in Galilee. We spent an hour scouring the neighborhood looking for someone who owned a pot big enough to cook it. Lobster is still one of my favorite foods of summer — that's when it is the cheapest, when they move closer to shore and the fishing conditions are better.

A good lobster is something to be relished, eaten with your hands, the buttery juices wiped from your chin and licked from your fingers.

The easiest way to cook lobster is simply boiled and then served on a picnic table spread with newspaper. Select a pot that is large enough to accommodate all the lobsters. Add enough salt to the water to approximate the salinity of the sea, about 3.5%. Add enough vinegar that the water tastes slightly acidic.

Bring the water to a boil, add the lobsters and cover the pot. The water should maintain a simmer but no more — that makes more tender meat. The general rule for cooking lobster is to allow 7 to 8 minutes per pound. I think lobster tends to be better when slightly less than fully cooked, but most people want their shellfish well done. This is totally understandable, but a hint of translucence in the flesh is not a bad thing. 

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There were no more than 300 students in grades 1-12 at Baker Academy and I graduated with pretty much the same 17 people I started 1st grade with. Needless to say, I knew these people quite well and knew exactly what I wanted their mother's to make when I came to visit. Lisa's mother, Ms. Martha made an 'apricot nectar cake', Susan's mom "Ms. Betty" made a 'peach pie' and the list goes on. My mother has many of these recipes saved in a nice little recipe box after her Baker Academy cookbook was reduced to shreds.

The "Baker" cookbook was the first one I ever used. It's a compilation of the best recipes from all the families I grew up with. I wish we would have been more gentle with it as was typed on plane paper and bound with spiral plastic; no doubt a project a group of mother's took on, probably 'assembly-line' style in the school lunchroom. 

Several years ago, when my grandmother died, guess what we found? An old Baker Academy cookbook. The cover is missing but it's in pretty good shape. I'm thinking about making copies of it and giving them to all my friends, who ask me for the same recipes that I always ask my mom for that come from the Baker Academy cookbook.