Best Food Writing 2013 (39 page)

What this suggests is that cooking with these aromatic plants may involve something more than simply overcoming their chemical defenses so that we might avail ourselves of a source of calories other
creatures can't. It's much more ingenious than that. Cooking with onions, garlic, and other spices is a form of biochemical jujitsu, in which the first move is to overcome the plants' chemical defenses so that we might eat them, and the second is to then deploy their defenses against other species to defend ourselves.

 

 

C
OOKING
W
ITH
F
RIENDS

By Katie Arnold-Ratliff

From
Tin House

Most cookbook reviews come out when a book is first published, yet the real test may be how much it gets used over the years. Katie Arnold-Ratliff–a novelist (
Bright Before Us
) and senior editor at
O: The Oprah
Magazine—testifies to the staying power of one not-so-obvious cookbook.

A
mong the gifts awaiting me on Christmas morning 1995 was a cookbook entitled
Cooking with Friends—
“Friends” as in
Friends,
the former Thursday-night NBC tent pole now in weeknight syndication, which the most honest of us will admit to watching when nothing else is on. (Or when emerging from a bad trip: a friend of mine once successfully reoriented herself to reality by watching an episode and repeating the mantra “Monica is the clean one; Chandler is the mean one.”) I liked the book in 1995 because I liked the show (I was thirteen), but I like it now because its recipes are low-impact and surprisingly good. It's full of meals that are doable on weeknights, or when you have a bad cold. This food is not splashy or innovative. It's solid. It's the toothsome coffee cake you eat in pajamas, or the sturdy lasagna you serve your brother-in-law. It's the leftovers you actually eat the next day, nothing being lost in the reheat.

CWF
arrived under the tree just as I was getting really serious about food, the way some girls get really serious about boys or ponies. I watched the entire
Great Chefs
franchise on PBS, nerded out hardcore on my
Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs
CD-ROM, and developed an enduring nonsexual crush on Susan Feniger. Right
there with me for all of this was my Aunt Karen—the woman who exposed me to both high-end kimchi and fried-baloney sandwiches, the woman who taught me to like sashimi at eight years old but who kept Frosted Flakes around for when I stayed over. She taught me to appreciate the highbrow stuff and the trashy crap in equal measure.

So I knew enough to discern that
CWF
's recipes were exceedingly basic. What I didn't know yet was that, whether or not we food snobs want to admit it, it's simple fare and not fancy-pants cuisine that lingers most indelibly on the tongue. For example, I had a spectacular meal at Daniel two years ago, but when I say “spectacular,” I'm just queuing up a mental reel of each dish. I remember the sweetbreads and duck terrine and oysters with seawater gelée in my head, not my mouth. But I can instantly taste the eight-dollar plate of arterially apocalyptic food I had at Cracker Barrel a while back—the mouthfeel of the Dumplins™, the juicy give of the fried okra, the shattering crust of the Chicken Fried Chicken. Ask yourself what
means
more to you, what you can most easily conjure—Le Bernardin's buttery black bass or your aunt's stuffed bell peppers (and my aunt makes a mean stuffed pepper)—and you'll get my point.

The
Friends
cookbook lands squarely in the middle of these two extremes and draws inspiration from both sides, which is why it's great. I've moved from apartment to apartment, relocated across the country, sold off God knows how many tired old books for cash—but I've hung on to
CWF
for nearly two decades. (Though I will admit to having thrown away the dust jacket, lest anyone see the title.) I've made the pine nut cookies, and the Onion Tartlets à la Monica, and the dated but tasty Peaches Poached in Red Wine with Lemon and Fennel. I've baked Marcel's Banana Bread (named, of course, for Ross's capuchin) at least a dozen times, and—God help me—the Trendy Tiramisu. I doubt I told my husband this, but for our first Thanksgiving together, I re-created the book's entire holiday menu, from the cranberry-orange relish to the apple crisp. And each time I used a recipe, I sifted through background blurbs about each star (“Lisa Kudrow, who has a degree in biology from Vassar . . . ”), ancient cast photos (one nearly weeps to see the young, larger-nosed Jennifer Aniston and the poignantly fresh-faced Matthew Perry), and, in the margins, quotes from the first season (“Ugly Naked Guy's got gravity boots!”).

After all, this cookbook isn't really a cookbook—or at least, it is one only incidentally. It's a marketing conceit, designed to provide an easy holiday gift for a niece or neighbor (or daughter, evidently). In fact, its whole raison d'être seems to have been the Christmas season of 1995, for which the book was rushed into print. So says Bryan Curtis, who green-lit the project as the vice president of marketing at Rutledge Hill Press (and who was charmingly unfazed by my barrage of questions about a tie-in to a show that ended eight years ago). “We'd done a number of TV-themed cookbooks,” Curtis told me.
“Aunt Bee's Mayberry Cookbook, Mary Ann's Gilligan's Island Cookbook, Alice's Brady Bunch Cookbook.
We also did ones based on
The Young and the Restless
and
The Beverly Hillbillies.”
Amy Lyles Wilson, now a theologian and a columnist for a Nashville magazine, was the Rutledge Hill editor asked to write the text—which involved reading the scripts sent over by Warner Bros. to find story arcs that could translate into menu items. (Ross being dumped by his pregnant lesbian wife = a chapter on comfort foods.) Wilson doesn't remember much about the project, other than the process being “a delight”; to her, it was just an assignment. But Curtis recalls that it was a bona fide bestseller; that it inspired two moments of levity on latenight talk shows (Leno monologued about it on one, and David Schwimmer dissed it on another); and that he himself used it for years (“The pepper jack crackers and the cherry tomatoes marinated in pepper vodka are great for parties.”). “Some of the food was from the show,” Curtis told me. “After all, Monica was a chef. And the rest Jack Bishop came up with.” Bishop, who developed the recipes, has all but scrubbed his involvement with the book from his bio—which reveals that he helped launch
Cooks Illustrated
and set the tasting protocols for America's Test Kitchen, the venerable lab in which food scientists work toward a more perfect pancake and the like. In other words, Bishop is legit, and it would seem that he believes
Cooking with Friends
is not.

It's a shame Bishop doesn't embrace
CWF in
his CV. He ought to claim it proudly. Whatever lameness or cynicism may be inherent in its packaging, it's a worthy cookbook, as evidenced by many incredulous
Amazon.com
reviews (“My wife and I still make the macaroni and cheese . . . it's just the perfect recipe for some reason”; “The recipes are more complex and refined than you would expect.”). This cookbook
should
have sucked, because it didn't need to be good—all
it needed to do was exist, to be visible in various B. Dalton outlets in various malls that winter, to sell enough to cover its production costs. What it's done instead is sit on an improbable number of bookshelves for sixteen years, doing its part to bring people sustenance and joy.

Maybe that sounds overblown. But how often does a cleverly timed piece of merchandising really last, and really mean something to someone? These things are born to die, created only to be discarded as tastes evolve. Yet this artifact of the mid-nineties remains, and even, in the case of a half dozen recipes, transcends. (Despite the name, I'm especially devoted to the Monkey Lovin' Mocha Mouthfuls, the recipe for which appears here.) If, in our throwaway culture, that doesn't move you, I don't know what would.

There's a parallel fickleness in the food world—we eager eaters jump wholeheartedly onto the bandwagon du jour, and then claim to tire of our pastel-colored iced cupcakes and braised pork belly and authentic ramen once the
new
new thing arrives. But we're not actually tired of cupcakes and bacon and noodles. (If you are, I suggest you undergo medical testing.) We're leaving behind the fad, not the food. Your mouth is a fundamentally stable environment: you will always love to eat the things you love to eat. It's not 1991 anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't still like sundried-tomato pesto. And I'm no longer ten years old—I've eaten all kinds of crazy, wonderful things in the twenty years since I was—but that doesn't mean I don't still love those simple, homey stuffed peppers. When it comes to food, what matters, what
lasts,
is the good, middle-of-the-road stuff like that found in
Cooking with Friends.
That's the stuff people crave. I've never thought to myself,
I could go for some seawater gelée,
but I've sure as hell wished I could come home to a platter of Mrs. Tribbiani's Roast Chicken.

Before that Christmas morning, my preoccupation with food and cooking had been a solitary one, explored while holed up in my bedroom, making lists of restaurants to visit and poring over Martha Stewart's collected recipes, but more than that, it had been wrongheaded in its estimation of what constitutes worthy cuisine. I thought good food had to be complex and intimidating, but the
Friends
cookbook widened my perspective: it showed me that eating well is mostly about simplicity, about approachability and inclusion.
And with its focus on, well, friendship, the book makes it plain that cooking is not solitary at all. Food is about enjoying the company of those you care about—those who'll be there for you, because you're there for them, too.

After I spoke to Amy Lyles Wilson and Bryan Curtis, and after I learned that Jack Bishop is a respected food professional who evidently needed some extra pocket money in 1994, and after I took a quick glance at the book and was reminded that Matt LeBlanc used to be a Levi's model and that Matthew Perry's father famously starred in a series of Old Spice commercials, a question occurred to me. So I gave my Aunt Karen a call. “Oh, yes, of course I watched
Friends,”
she said. “I loved it. I still do. I never cared for Monica, though—she was just too fussy.”

Monkey Lovin' Mocha Mouthfuls

(adapted from
Cooking with Friends)

           
4 tablespoons unsalted butter

           
2 ounces semisweet chocolate (I use Scharffen Berger, and I double it to 4 ounces)

           
⅓ cup sugar (I always substitute brown sugar—in this and in all desserts)

           
1 large egg

           
1 tablespoon coffee liqueur, such as Kahlua (though a tablespoon of brewed espresso does just fine in a pinch)

           
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder (though I like to use actual coffee grounds, for the texture—which may be an acquired taste)

           
⅓ cup flour

           
⅓ cup chopped walnuts, plus 12 walnut halves

           
(The recipe doesn't call for it, but I add a ½ teaspoon of kosher salt and a teaspoon of vanilla extract.)

           
Preheat the oven to 350. Generously grease a twelve-cup mini-muffin tin and set it aside. (If you only have a regular muffin tin, it's fine—just let the cupcakes bake a little longer, until a knife stuck into the center emerges clean.)

           
Melt the butter and chocolate together in a double boiler (or, like me, in the microwave), stirring until smooth. Set mixture aside to cool slightly. Stir in the sugar until smooth. Whisk in the egg, liqueur, and espresso powder. Fold in the flour and chopped walnuts.

           
Spoon the batter into the prepared tin, filling cups about three-quarters full. Place a walnut half in the center of each cup. Bake about twenty minutes. Let the cupcakes cool in the tin for five minutes, then turn them out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

           
Note: If cupcakes without frosting make no sense to you, (a) I understand, and (b) feel free to make use of those tubs of frosting at the grocery store. I always do.