Three Things
A restorative Sunday dinner, a summer cooking project for kids, an American food icon you've probably never heard of
Greetings eaters and readers! I’ve just returned from my daughter’s college graduation, which are words that defy all logic to her mother and perhaps to a few readers here who still think of Phoebe as the 8-year-old on a stepstool making chili. The weekend was beautiful, and we wandered around her sunny campus steeped in that very distinct energy of any graduation: The gratitude and pride (look at her, look at us, and all we’ve been able to give her) alongside the heaviness of missing her two grandfathers, both of whom would’ve been overjoyed by all that runnethed-over. This is the way it’s supposed to work, is what I kept telling myself. And it is! I’m letting myself ride the high for as long as possible, so thank you in advance for your patience! In the meantime, here are your Three Things…
1. A Restorative Sunday Dinner
We might’ve returned from graduation exhausted and emotional, but not too exhausted or emotional to make a solid Sunday dinner. On the plane, I finished Editor, the Judith Jones biography (more below), and one theme that came up again and again was how recalibrating cooking had always been for Jones and her husband. I had that in my head when, still on the plane, not yet noon, we started talking about what kind of dinner we were all in the mood for — what can I say, dinner will always be an all-day conversation in our house — and I don’t know where it came from but I instantly thought “a simply prepared fish with potatoes and salad.” It felt so right for that particular Sunday dinner: Simple, satisfying, restorative, the kind of meal the Jones would make together in their New York kitchen at the end of a long work day. The salmon was based on a Martha Stewart recipe we used to make the girls when they were little — I remember how much they loved the sweet glaze.
Salmon with Sweet Mustard Glaze
Makes 4
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 medium yellow onion, minced
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup red wine vinegar
¼ cup whole-grain mustard
¼ cup packed brown sugar (light or dark)
1 1/2-2 pounds salmon (or char), cut into four pieces
Preheat oven to 425°F. Add the oil to a small saucepan set over medium heat. Add the onions, salt and pepper, and cook 2 to 3 minutes until softened. Add the vinegar and cook another minute. Whisk or stir in the mustard and brown sugar and turn the heat to medium-high, cooking for another minute or two until the sugar has dissolved and the consistency looks glazey. Remove from heat.
Place the salmon on a foil- or parchment-lined baking sheet. Spoon or brush about a tablespoon of the glaze on top of each filet and bake for 10 minutes. Crank the heat to broil and cook another minute or so until the top looks slightly browned. Serve warm. Extra glaze can be frozen in a ziptop bag for up to 3 months.
And on the side…
We served the salmon with a green salad (shown is arugula, shaved fennel, red onion, minced golden berries, with a simple dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper); pan-fried potatoes (parboil 1-inch chunks of peeled Yukon Golds for 8-10 minutes; dry, then fry in a good amount of vegetable oil with salt and pepper until brown and crisp); and spicy mayo (1 1/2 teaspoons Sriracha for every 3 tablespoons mayo). Or, book owners, just go with Andy’s Spicy Potatoes recipe, page 182 of The Weekday Vegetarians.
2. A Cool Summer Project for Kids
For those of you lucky enough to have young kids at home this summer, might I suggest picking up a copy of Priya’s Kitchen Adventures? In the energetic, brightly designed cookbook, Priya Krishna, the New York Times food journalist (famous in my house for her Matar Paneer and pantry-superstar Khichdi) teaches kids how to cook recipes from around the world. Think…
…Dahi Bhalla from India (above), Pozole Verde con Pollo from Mexico, Tea Sandwiches from England. More importantly, she shows how cooking can be an accessible way to explore and understand different cultures. Priya herself racked up an impressive number of international miles as a kid and telegraphs her enthusiasm for travel infectiously:
Consider this book your guide to endless adventuring…in your kitchen! I believe cooking is one of our greatest superpowers. It allows us to travel back in time, to our memories of birthday parties and Christmas dinners and family breakfasts, and outside the borders where we live. You can be at a ramen shop in a subway station in Tokyo, or a roadside chaat stand in Delhi, or a cozy trattoria run by an Italian grandmother in Rome. Most importantly: Cooking allows us to eat delicious things. And I am at my happiest when the food is tasty.
Cooking through this book country by country feels like just the sort of project we would’ve taken on when the girls were back in grade school and now why am I crying typing that sentence. To be honest, I might just cook from Adventures as a bonafide grown-up. As with all great childrens’ cookbooks (Alice Waters’ Fanny at Chez Panisse, America’s Test Kitchen’s Kids Can Cook Anything!), there are helpful instructions for recipes that I’ve always wanted to make or that have always intimidated me for one reason or another…
…like tiramisu from the Italy chapter. Look at how Priya breaks it down. I just love it, and plan to tackle that recipe this week, along with Dahi Bhalla, the popular Indian street food that hits every note — sweet, salty, creamy, crispy, spicy, sour. You can head over to DALS for that one.
P.S. Speaking of Tiramisu ❤️
3. Judith Jones, a Biography
I devoured Editor, Sara B. Franklin’s biography of Judith Jones, whose work you are most likely intimately acquainted with even if you’ve never heard her name. Wielding her signature green pen, Jones edited some of the most towering figures in American cooking and American literature, launching the career (and our country’s love affair with) Julia Child, but also oversaw the work of Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, and Claudia Roden, as well as John Updike, Anne Tyler, Sylvia Plath (Sylvia Plath!), and John Hersey. She also famously fought to publish Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in America after her boss placed it in the rejection pile. (“What, that book by that kid?” he asked incredulously when Jones made her case.) Jones was the Zelig of the book world, present at seemingly every major literary milestone during her lifetime and in Editor, I felt like I was getting two stories: An insidery peek inside the world of New York publishing and a history of home cooking in America. Franklin writes:
After the war, American women had been pushed from the public realm when they were ousted en masse from paid jobs. Now, with their culinary skills recast as old-fashioned and obsolete, they were being edged out of the private space of their kitchens, too. It was almost as though women themselves were falling into disuse. Judith wanted to resist, and she understood that Julia Child did, too. While living in Paris, both women had come to see the kitchen as a place of purpose and sensual pleasure, and one of power as well. In their view, cooking wasn’t drudgery (though it certainly was work), and it wasn’t a gendered trap to be escaped. Rather, they saw the culinary arts as a gateway to the wider world and a richer, more autonomous life.
I’m sure Priya Krishna in particular would’ve appreciated that last sentence. The biography really picks up when Judith meets Julia Child, and they begin collaborating on the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Jones had spent some heady years in Paris in her twenties, falling in love her husband Dick “Evan” Jones in the kitchen as they experimented with the market-driven cooking style of the French, cooking for each other and their ex-pat friends. When she returned to New York, she was determined to find a book that would recreate this world, and introduce this way of cooking — way of life, really — to convenience-obsessed Americans. Child’s manuscript (which she co-wrote with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) landed in her lap after being rejected by multiple publishers for being too complicated.
[Mastering] was different from all the other French cookbooks. Judith saw that right away. “I knew from the tone, from the writing,” Judith told me, “that I was going to learn things.” Judith took the book home in pieces to cook from it with Dick; cooking together remained the anchor of their domestic life. They started with the boeuf bourguignon. “First [Julia] told what kind of meat to use, which is so important…and what kind of fat to use— if you brown the meat just in the butter, the butter burns. She told you not to crowd the pan, because you steam rather than brown the meat, and doing the mushrooms and the little onions separately. It just went on and on, these suggestions, I couldn’t believe it! Well, it was the best boeuf bourguignon we’d ever had!” Judith said [the book] actually taught readers how to cook. Judith thought it was revolutionary.
Mostly, as you can tell from both these quotes, it was clear that Jones believed in cooking and eating well as the gateway to living a full, rich life, and as a way to learn about people, connect with them, and love them fully. Also, when she stayed in her Vermont cabin (in the Northeast Kingdom), she began and ended every day with a swim in her backyard pond, which somehow feels like the secret to life. She died in 2017 at 93.
Thanks for reading, see you later in the week!
Jenny
I was lucky to see Judith Jones speak at the old Rabelais bookstore in Portland, Maine when her memoir, The Tenth Muse, came out. I was in my 20s at the time, and I remember her saying, "So many recipes call for a lot of fresh herbs and that's nonsense, they're too expensive for young people! You can use dried." And that small comment felt very freeing as a young person who could not afford to buy a pile of fresh herbs at my NYC grocery store in February.
Judith Jones also pulled The Diary of Anne Frank out of the rejection pile - what an impact she had on our world.
not me crying at work over Phoebe graduating! First discovered DALS right as I was leaving college and entering the world myself, and to think that Phoebe is the same age I was as I splattered my DALS cookbook with oil in my first attempt at crispy chicken cutlets... nope, I refuse to believe that time is passing! But as someone who feels like they grew up under your watching eyes and guiding hand, Jenny, I know Phoebe is going to do amazing things with you and Andy behind her. <3