Old-School Comfort Food: The Way I Learned to Cook

402 Pages·2013·10.8 MB·English

by  Alex Guarnaschelli

Copyright © 2013 by Alexandra Guarnaschelli
Photographs by Squire Fox copyright © 2013
by Squire Fox
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/
Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com
CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark
of Random House, Inc.
FOOD NETWORK and associated logos are trademarks of Television Food Network, G. P.,
and are used under license.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
eBook ISBN: 9780307956569
Hardcover ISBN: 9780307956552
Cover design by Marysarah Quinn
Cover photography by Squire Fox
v3.1_r1

contents
Introduction
What Kinds of Stuff I Like to Use in the Kitchen
Snacks Always Bring a Family Together
Salads for All Seasons
Meat: My Favorite All-American Recipes
Poultry: A Love Affair
Fish Is Easier to Make Than You Think
Vegetables Like I Remember Them
Dessert: It’s Never About Hunger
Sunday Brunch Dishes from My Mom’s Pantry to Yours
Make It from Scratch for the Fridge Door
Acknowledgments
Sources
Index
About the Author

Introduction
My love affair with food began in the simplest of settings: my
childhood kitchen on 55th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan. My
mother was whipping up a cheese souffl‘ (a “casual” recipe, I should
add, that included taking an entire wheel of Camembert and
pushing the creamy insides through a strainer with a wooden spoon)
and I was kneading bread dough from a Beard on Bread recipe. She
folded in the fluffy egg whites, huffing and puffing over the bowl as
she tried to retain all of the volume and still mix the ingredients. The
batter made the tiniest, barely audible but intoxicating sound as it
hit the bottom of the souffl‘ dish. She dashed from one end of the
kitchen to the other and quickly (but gingerly) placed the dish in the
center of the oven and closed the door. Her movements were more
fluid than I had ever seen. I was mesmerized.
“Back that chair up against the oven door to keep it closed as the
souffl‘ cooks, willya Al?” my mother instructed, wiping sweat from
her forehead. The hinge on our oven door (a vintage 1940s GE model
oven) was loose and would hang open slightly. That wouldn’t work
for a souffl‘. I rinsed the bread dough off my hands and pushed the
chair against the oven door. I stared through the small, grease-
stained window as the souffl‘ doubled in volume. I sat in that chair,
in fact, like a security guard would stand in front of the Hope
Diamond. It was almost as if I could smell the various cheeses
baking and browning as the souffl‘ cooked. Opera was blaring in the
other room, the air conditioner blasting so hard it almost blew out
the lit candles on the dining room table. The silverware was
mismatched at each setting (I had even gotten a Mickey Mouse baby
spoon into the mix). Various trivets and bowls littered the table. It
was a hodgepodge haven of quality things. A stack of manuscripts
(future cookbooks) and potential new projects (“Al, I just got in a
great book proposal for a thousand-page book about garam masala.
What do you think?”) were in the mix as well.
Once the souffl‘ was done cooking, my father, my mother, and I
sat at the table, almost transfixed, as if watching a baby utter its
first word. I swear the spoon made a sighing noise as it scooped out
that first (boiling hot!) bit of cheese and eggs onto my plate. The
steam coming off the souffl‘ snaked its way up my nostrils and my
stomach growled. I think my ankles growled! “Eat it with a spoon,”
she instructed. There was some dry sherry and mustard that I
remember tasting but not being able to identify. Just an alarm bell
in my brain that something life-changing had occurred. And to tell
you the truth, I had no idea what it was.
ME, AROUND AGE 3
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do not come from the type of Italian
American stock that one might quickly assign me to, given my last
name. I did not have a grandmother who weighed 95 pounds but
could carry an ox up a hill with a block of ice on her back. I didn’t
have an aunt who could make perfect gnocchi on the hearth with one
potato and a small twig. The love of food simply emanated from my
parents and their (still to this day) eternal push-pull collaboration-
argument that surrounds the creation of a meal. The kitchen still
has drawers filled with various utensils (I counted twenty-two
paring knives), an astounding array of spices, and more china
(“that’s Ginori china,” my mom whispered as if she were in church as
I set the table with white plates with a simple orange rim) than one
family of three could ever hope to use. The books, the shopping, the
choices were the very thing that started it all for me and there is only
one way to describe it: old school.
Old school:
Any thing or things that refer to
a previous generation of a
subject/idea/object/etc. Typically, they are
highly regarded and sometimes the very things
that started it all.
What an exciting definition. And one that resonates deeply with
my journey as a young eater all the way to the cook I am today.
So many books offer a dizzying array of “useful go-to tips” on how
to get the same result in half the time with half the money or how to
use half the ingredients or get a meal straight from your freezer to
the table in 20 minutes.
I promise none of this.
This book is, instead, a result of my father’s cooking, my mother’s
painstaking search for the ultimate pecan pie, mixed with the
professional wisdom I have accumulated from sheer repetitive
cooking in some pretty amazing restaurant kitchens. And these
recipes, and my story, are old school because they are recipes that
started something in me (a technique, a certain use of an ingredient)
that became a common thread in my own cooking, because they
consistently tip their hat to my culinary mentors (from my parents
to Guy Savoy), and because they will make you feel like you are
mixing a recipe with the spontaneity of the act of cooking itself.
It seems we chefs often describe the start of our culinary