Author: howard@bertha.com

Chicken with Artichokes, Shallots, and Tomatoes with whole grain mustard

Chicken with Artichokes Scallions and tomatoes and whole grain mustard

 

Chicken with Artichokes, Shallots, And Tomatoes with whole grain mustard

Course: Main Course
Cuisine: Caribbean | Provençal
Prep Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Cook Time: 30 minutes
Total Time: 2 hours
Calories: 747 kcal

Chicken en cocotte with vegetables in a savory sauce

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Ingredients

  • 4 thighs Chicken whole, with skin and bones
  • 2 tbsp Olive oil EVOO
  • 1 tbsp Duck fat rendered, substitute butter if necessary
  • Sea salt as needed, fine, not coarse grind
  • Black pepper freshly ground as needed
  • 3 large Shallots peeled and split into cloves, cut each clove in two vertically
  • 8 oz Artichokes hearts, frozen defrosted, but not heated
  • 1.5 c Chicken stock home-made or unsalted/low sodium variety of boxed
  • 2 oz White wine or dry vermouth
  • 1 tbsp Wholegrain mustard preferably Dijon
  • 1 tbsp Dijon mustard strong
  • 6 oz Grape tomatoes cut in half, or substitute small slicing tomatoes, cored and cut into quarters or sixths depending on their size
  • 1 tsp Balsamic vinegar aged
  • 1 tsp Dried basil
  • 1 tsp Dried French thyme
  • 1/2 tsp Fish sauce

Instructions

Preparation of chicken

  1. Handle the chicken as little as possible, optionally wearing gloves, to prevent cross contamination. Dress the skin on each to cover the flesh. Leave any fat deposits except exceptionally large ones. Place the thighs on a thick layer of paper towels on a cutting board, skin side up. Cover the thighs with another thick layer of paper towels and press onto the surface of the skin. The chicken should be as dry as possible, for best searing without sticking.

  2. Uncover the chicken after no less than two or three minutes and discard the paper towel that was on top. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water.

  3. Generously cover the skin first with the sea salt, and then with a generous grind of black pepper, to your preferred level of coarseness. I prefer a coarser grind.

  4. Allow the chicken to sit while you prepare the cooking pot.

Cooking

  1. Heat the pot over medium high, large enough to hold all the chicken comfortably in the bottom in a single layer.

  2. As the pot begins to heat up, add the duck fat and the olive oil to the bottom, and swirl occasionally to coat the bottom. When the fat is ready it will shimmer and will be on the verge of smoking.

  3. Carefully place each thigh in the hot fat, using tongs if you need them, salted and peppered skin side down. The chicken will begin to sputter immediately. Work quickly and when all the thighs are in the pot, adjust their positions to make sure they each have some room. You can partially cover the pot to help minimize the fat splatter while it cooks. Before covering, though, salt and pepper the exposed fleshy side of the thighs evenly.

  4. Check the thighs occasionally. They should eventually brown to a deep golden color. This will take from six to eight minutes. Halfway through the estimated time, turn each thigh 180° to ensure even browning. After the skin side is browned satisfactorily, turn each thigh over and repeat the process of browning, though the reverse side will take less time. Turn each thigh through 180° on this step also.

  5. When the thighs are thoroughly browned on both sides, remove them, setting them aside on a plate or platter in a single layer. And remove the pot from the heat. Extinguish the burner to prevent accidents.

  6. Carefully remove the hot liquid fat from the casserole, and reserve three tablespoons of it, which will be returned to the pot. Discard the remaining fat safely or reserve it for some other use (it is a combination of the original duck fat or butter, EVOO, and the rendered chicken fat, and is a particularly rich fat for browning foods for other dishes, where appropriate).

  7. Replace the pot on the burner and turn up to medium-high. Add the reserved 3 tablespoons of cooking fat. It should take only a minute or two to reach temperature. But watch it carefully and be sure not to let it begin to smoke. Add the split and halved shallots carefully distributed so they can all brown at once. Move the shallots around with tongs and as each section browns turn it to brown another side of it.

  8. Browning all the shallots slightly should take only a minute or two.

  9. Add the artichoke hearts, evenly distributed in the fat in the pot, and with the tongs make sure each is coated in fat. Keep the shallots and artichoke hearts moving in the pot. The artichoke hearts will begin to brown immediately. Give them only a minute to brown.

  10. Add the white wine and stir. Using a wooden spoon, as the wine boils, stir the ingredients, scraping the bottom of the pan. All browned bits should dissolve and come off easily. Stir until the wine is almost all boiled off and lower the heat to medium.

  11. Add the chicken stock and stir gently with the wooden spoon. As the liquid begins to simmer, add, in any order, the balsamic vinegar, the thyme, the basil, the two kinds of mustard, and keep stirring as they dissolve and distribute.

  12. When the mixture has reached a steady simmer, lower the heat to medium low.

  13. Now, carefully and gently place the four chicken thighs in the casserole evenly, skin side up. Be sure to add the liquid that has collected in the plate on which you reserved the chicken to the pot and stir it in. The chicken thighs should sit in the liquid comfortably without being submerged. The rest of the ingredients should rise no higher than half-way up their sides.

  14. Make sure the simmer continues gently, and cover the pot.

    After about half the remaining time has elapsed, add the tomatoes to the pot, distributing them around and between the chicken. Gently use the wooden spoon or tongs to coat the tomatoes with the liquid in the pot. Re-cover, and allow to continue to simmer.

Finishing

  1. When the chicken is completely cooked, which should take no more than a half-hour, remove the thighs to a heated platter or plate. Unless the thighs you used are unusually large, or you did not preserve the simmer on the covered casserole, the meat should be cooked through and tender. To be absolutely certain, use an instant read meat thermometer, with a probe, to test the temperature, being careful to test the thickest part of the thigh and not to touch the bone with the probe. Chicken is done at 165°F.

    Once removed from the pot, the chicken will continue to cook to even more tenderness and doneness and the juices will recede.

    Meanwhile raise the temperature under the pot to medium or medium high, so that it simmers more forcibly and allow it to cook further, in order to reduce and thicken. Remove it from the heat after five minutes.

    You may replace the chicken into the pot, or serve this dish separately from the two containers: the chicken from the platter, and the stew from the pot.

Serving

  1. This dish is excellent served with broad egg noodles, or with whole grains (like barley, farro, or wheat berries), or with whole grain (i.e., brown) rice, either short of long grain.

    Serve each diner in a deep-bowled plate, first with a portion of the grain or pasta, place a chicken thigh on top of the grain, and then ladle or spoon a portion of the other ingredients over the chicken and grain.

Nutrition Facts
Chicken with Artichokes, Shallots, And Tomatoes with whole grain mustard
Amount Per Serving
Calories 747 Calories from Fat 432
% Daily Value*
Fat 48g74%
Saturated Fat 10g50%
Cholesterol 27mg9%
Sodium 1224mg51%
Potassium 1634mg47%
Carbohydrates 55g18%
Fiber 15g60%
Sugar 18g20%
Protein 21g42%
Vitamin A 1766IU35%
Vitamin C 41mg50%
Calcium 140mg14%
Iron 6mg33%
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.

Poor Man’s Caviar

Smoking eggplants on a grill [Shutterstock]

It’s also called Jewish Eggplant Caviar, Sephardic Eggplant Caviar, Greek Eggplant Caviar, Turkish, and, to round it out, Israeli… and all these variants somehow, for obscure reasons, tied to the Jews, regardless of provenance.

It was my father who introduced me to this dish. He did it the best way possible. He cooked it for me, without ceremony or preamble. He was a far better cook, it turned out (I came to realize, having learned this only in retrospect), than my mother, but he hardly ever prepared anything in the kitchen. His devotions to work, which were not, fundamentally, at a conceptual level very much different from cooking, prevented it. He was a pharmacist and for most of my early youth – until I was seven or eight – he pursued his vocation, for which he was licensed of course, and graced with a degree from the Columbia University College of Pharmacy. He graduated in 1930. From then until he sold his last drugstore, in 1953, he practiced his trade with virtuosity and great seriousness.

As he learned the trade, and the underlying science of pharmacology, at a time when most prescriptions were written for drugs that had to be compounded from elementary components as pure chemicals, and dispensed in whatever form the pharmacist could contrive for ingestion by the patient: sometimes a powder to be dissolved, sometimes a tablet, sometimes a capsule, sometimes an emulsion, sometimes an elixir. It was then common practice – what is now nearly 100 years ago, when, freshly minted as a pharmacist he began to make a living at it, my father got his first job in a working pharmacy. He must have had something of an entrepreneurial spirit, because it was not long before he had gone through a succession of jobs, working for others in junior positions, that he formed his first partnership in a store in the Bronx.

I am not sure how long this first partnership lasted, and don’t recall if there was a second, but I do know that somewhere in the progression of his career, he went solo, and he had at least two stores of which he was sole proprietor, and largely sole employee. It meant, practically speaking, that as a child growing up from infancy – when I was born, he owned what was fated to be his last store: Fenton Pharmacy, on the corner of Fenton Avenue and Boston Post Road in the Bronx, literally across the street from the extensive housing project I called home for the first nine years of my life – I hardly ever saw my father, as he opened very early in the morning, and came home late in the evening. A measure of his devotion to his clientele.

Anyway, my point was, he made up concoctions, from prescriptions, and a variety of ingredients as designated, and prepared in a certain formal order of procedures, and they had to work, which meant no mistakes. Analogously, it has always been suggested to me, no doubt by the self-same practitioner of the pharmaceutical arts that I called my dad, recipes for dishes for cooks to prepare to order, from a variety of ingredients as stipulated in precise measurable amounts (more or less) were more or less the same operation. And called for the same innate skills.

Whatever the confluence (or mere coincidence) of requisite skills, the fact was, in my experience (and, even as a very little boy, I was discerning and discriminating about what “tastes good” to the point of fussiness and censoriousness when a dish didn’t meet my standards; this charmed my father no end, and it was a good thing he would always chuckle when I made my pronouncements, because I am sure this helped mellow what was clearly an over-compensating tendency to carp—a fault I am sorry to say persists into my declining years, when it is at least a little more appropriate to the gerontologic stereotype), all in all, my father was a really good cook.

If I was showing the engagement and attention of true interest in what must have been one of those rare occasions of his leisure coinciding with the opportunity to indulge one of his many culinary favorites, it must have been still some early stage in my development. I had to have been old enough to retain the details of his instruction, however, because I have remembered how to make this dish ever since. Let’s say, I had to have been somewhere between ten and twelve years old. By then, we had moved to Providence RI, because he had changed careers, given the opportunity, and was made sales manager of a small pharmaceutical company that made some very popular over-the-counter items whose success derived from the efficacy of one ingredient, which was virtually a miracle cure, adored by parents around the country for its usefulness in controlling a rampant and unavoidable nuisance ailment of infants: diaper rash.

This all has nothing whatever to do with the cooking lesson my dad decided to bestow on me one day. I forget all specific contextual details. Time of day, day of the week, the weather are absent from memory, but not the ingredients, and not the general order of battle in the preparation of this amazingly simple and delicious dish. It may have been one of the warmer months, and it may have been a weekend, because there was charring of the skin of the main ingredient involved. I do vaguely recall that there may have been a charcoal grill involved – the use of which to some other supercedent application, for example, the grilling of a main course of meat of some kind, necessitated this supplemental cooking device.

I do know we did have an electric cooktop and oven in our kitchen (very much the latest in domestic appliances of the high end variety—it was how I was introduced to the still premium brand of Thermador, which made our excellent kitchen devices). And I do know such a means of producing high heat, otherwise applicable in a great range of methodologies, was not a very efficient way of scorching the outer surfaces of foodstuffs, but especially vegetables.

I remember distinctly my father telling me “I’m going to show you how to make poor man’s caviar,” which he proceeded to suggest, without an outright assertion, that it was perhaps magically even more of a delicacy than the namesake dish that, however old I was, I knew was rare and therefore dear. I also knew eggplants were what you bought at the grocery store. I would have been hard put to find a source for the real thing, though I had already been introduced to the luxury roe by virtue of a very special trip to New York, something of a gustatory baptism, that included a visit to The Russian Tea Room, the acknowledged shrine of celebrants in quest of such piscatory pilgrimages. It’s probably superfluous to add that I loved caviar from my first bite from the statutory spoonful (on a spoon made of bone, the traditional implement for tasting).

In any event, if my father could extract magic from the dubious innards of this strangely gourd-shaped fruit, so be it. And yes, as we always surprisingly learn, usually early in our education of domestic matters, the eggplant, like the tomato, is a fruit, a berry, in fact. Indeed it is related to the tomato and the potato, and like those other two trans-genus indispensable comestibles, it is treated almost exclusively as you would any vegetable. Though I am sure there is some renegade or anarchist chef or wannabe in some overlooked corner of the culinary-industrial imperium, who is feverishly discovering ways of turning the eggplant into some form of bonbon: a foam or a custard, or more like (and not unexpectedly, as you will be able to infer from this recipe) a pudding.

Before leaping right into the recipe, which is straightforward and simple enough, with a modicum, indeed, a minimum of ingredients, I’ll first state that the last few times I went to the trouble of scorching an eggplant somewhere artfully short of incineration, it was to make a dish I also love, called baba ghanoush – an Asian/Middle Eastern/Aegean/Bosphorus kind of a specialty, especially good for dipping, a wonderful accompaniment, a complement really (like a viola to a violin), to that far more popular and ubiquitous vegetal paté called hummus, which is, in contrast, a legume-based meze (to categorize it properly). Baba ghanoush is delicious, smoky, and savory, and, if made right, with all the necessary umamiesque features that are now de rigeur in our regimens.

And as I say, it’s usually baba ghanoush I have as the objective when going to the trouble of singeing an eggplant or two, leaping right over the opportunity of making this equally savory, equally lubricious, equally umami delicacy which is so much simpler and easier and faster to make. It’s easier and simpler and faster (and also cheaper, as it turns out) given that it omits a key additive in so many Middle Eastern meze, not the least of them hummus (the Queen of meze herself), and that is, tahini. Not every household has a supply on hand, and if not, it’s a particular hardship to come by in these days of Covid precautions venturing out for the rare ingredient (though tahini has become almost, but not quite, a regular household grocery stocking item in most super markets).

Plus, poor man’s caviar is the purer product, in terms of concentrating on the core flavors of smoked eggplant (smoked anything really… there being no savory as primeval and beckoning as the flavor of smoke, that evanescent residue of burnt organic matter).

So here is poor man’s caviar

Two medium eggplants
Three tablespoons of olive oil (spring for the better grades of EVOO)
Juice of ½ a fresh lemon
Two cloves of garlic, minced
[optional] ¼ to ½ tsp of ground sumac
[optional] ¼ to ½ tsp hot smoked paprika
[optional] ¼ of a red bell pepper or tomato, minced
[optional] ¼ of a small yellow onion, minced

First, pierce holes around the neck and the base of the eggplants with a coarse sewing needle, or an awl or ice pick will do

Using tongs (and cooking mitts), over a grill or other very hot open flame keep turning the eggplant so all surfaces are exposed to the flame until the skin is scorched, but short of allowing the skin to break down and fail.

The alternative, if a gas or other open flamed device is not available, is to place the eggplant on a lined sheet pan under a broiler in the oven, perhaps between three and five inches from the element. You’ll have to be vigilant about turning the eggplant periodically to ensure uniform scorching of all surfaces.

When the eggplants are done, and are cooled sufficiently to handle without injury, on a clean surface or within a very large bowl, remove all the scorched skin and discard it. There will be a significant amount of fluid inside the eggplant, most of it probably trapped, but perhaps already escaping, so be prepared to drain this fluid (which can be reserved for other cooking uses – which I will not go into in this recipe).

Cut away the stem end, and any remnant of the base that did not get cooked in the process, and discard (I assume you discard such remnants into a compost collector).

Mash the resulting total amount of cooked eggplant flesh, redolent of the smoky residue of the cooking method with a fork. Add one or two tablespoons of the olive oil and the lemon juice. Add the minced garlic, cutting back if you’re not a devotee. And sprinkle in the optional sumac and hot paprika (or either). The latter spices add that frisson of tangy spiciness that brightens up many Middle Eastern and Turkish dishes—and a good replacement for that tang of sea water embedded in the taste of the real mccoy of caviar, the fish eggs, that squirt of our salty primeval roots every time we bite down on the tiny morsels..

At this point, you have a choice for blending the ingredients to the right consistency. You can do it by hand, as I know my father did, steadily and patiently, using the tools you have at hand. A granny fork is a good place to start and potentially the most fatiguing and frustrating, as it will be slowest.

You could also use a mashing device, like a potato masher of the type you hold in your hand. Personally, I like a dough cutter, that crescent shaped hand-held device that has six or seven “blades” (sometimes they’re stout wires), and which conforms to the shape of the inside of a medium to large bowl.

The idea is to break down the cooked flesh of the eggplant into a uniform paste or jam, but no further, that is, so it retains some of the texture of the “eggs” that were part of the eggplant and so its not chunky, but not liquid either.

You can accomplish the same thing, very carefully, using a food processor. The trick is to pulse the ingredients (and the volume is such that you’ll have to be using a very large capacity food processor, as there’s a lot of semi-liquid ingredients that will leak from a smaller processor—most processors have a mark in their bowls to set the limit of the volume of liquid it can contain). Pulse until you have reached the desired consistency of a loose paste. And no further.

What you risk with a food processor is that you will puree the ingredients so it loses all integrity except as a liquid, at which point, you may as well procure some tahini, add some other solid ingredients, and especially the optional onion or tomato and pepper, and make yourself some baba ghanoush.

If you’ve gotten to the right consistency, that’s the time to add the optional tomato and pepper bits, and simply stir them in uniformly. They are meant as much, if not more, for the texture and the bit of color they add, as for any flavor.

When you serve it, drizzle on the last tablespoon of olive oil. I used to like to serve it like real fish-egg caviar: with garnishes of chopped sweet onion, shredded hard-cooked egg yolk, and triangles of toast, preferably pain de mie. Some people also like minced or chopped cornichons as well, as a garnish.

Done right, Poor Man’s Caviar should taste deeply smoky and should linger as a texture and a flavor on the tongue. You can also add some sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste, but that’s up to you. If you go this latter route, Maldon Smoked Sea Salt Flakes are a real bonus.

Poor Man's Caviar

Course: Apéro, Appetizer, Side Dish
Cuisine: Greek, Mediterranean, Sephardic, Turkish
Keyword: eggplant, EVOO, smoked
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 30 minutes
Servings: 6
Calories: 106 kcal
Author: howard@bertha.com

A classic meze with claims as to origin from all over the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Arab Gulf

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Ingredients

  • 2 medium eggplants
  • 3 tbsp olive oil EVOO
  • 1/2 lemon juiced
  • 2 cloves garlic minced
  • 1/4 tsp ground sumac
  • 1/4 tsp hot smoked paprika
  • 1/4 bell pepper minced
  • 1/4 yellow onion minced

Instructions

  1. Follow the instructions in the accompanying essay

Nutrition Facts
Poor Man's Caviar
Amount Per Serving
Calories 106 Calories from Fat 63
% Daily Value*
Fat 7g11%
Saturated Fat 1g5%
Sodium 4mg0%
Potassium 367mg10%
Carbohydrates 10g3%
Fiber 5g20%
Sugar 6g7%
Protein 2g4%
Vitamin A 231IU5%
Vitamin C 11mg13%
Calcium 16mg2%
Iron 1mg6%
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.

Dressed Tuna Fish (tuna fish salad)

jars of tuna fish in olive oil
the right stuff

I’m always interested to learn what others do to make what they think of as tuna fish salad. Not interested enough ever to ask – I mean, if I think my preferences are not so much my business, but, simply, my preferences and unaccountable to anyone, everyone else is entitled to the same magnanimity; and there’s too much risk opening the conversation by asking, because too many people think it’s an invitation to friendly debate, and I’m not interested; it’s kind of like explaining your fierce loyalty, if you have it, to the local sports franchise, and choose your own sport, it’s all of equal indifference to me… when you start talking you have to realize, with even a gram (one twenty-third part of an ounce) of self-awareness, that there is no scientifically provable reason to root for the Pats or the Sox or the Sixers or the Hornets or the Wasps or the Bees – but when the information about tuna fish comes up spontaneously, I pay attention).

I’ve come to prefer to call it dressed tuna fish. I think tuna fish is the main attraction, and whatever is added surely should be there for its own alluring and tasty properties to be savored in their own right for sure, but added to provide a mutual enhancement, kind of like a chamber music piece with the tuna primus inter pares. I mean, most people wouldn’t, under ordinary quotidian circumstances at any random time of year, cut themselves a healthy slice of fresh onion (whatever kind of the usual suspects: white, yellow, red, etc.) and dine on it as a snack. I’ve been known to, but usually it’s around this time of year when the inestimable Vidalia (the AOC kind, not those anonymous “sweet onion” varieties available almost year-round at WFM (say) appears in the produce section in abundance) appears in the produce department.

To me, onion is the first thing to think of adding. I’ll get to the few other additions in a minute. But back to the star ingredient.

As I see it, usually the darker the meat, the tastier the tuna, and so, like the Europeans, but especially the French, the Italians, the Portuguese, and the Spanish (you can admonish me if I’m leaving somebody out, but there’s a limit to what’s available to me – and serves as context – to buy with regard to sourcing of the tinned and jarred varieties), I think the best tuna to use, if you’re not starting out fresh (to utterly different objectives) are the cuts of this noble fish usually abstracted from the Bonito, which is not strictly a tuna fish, but very close, and otherwise known, especially to Americans, as the Skipjack. The designation as to species sometimes reduces, depending on what country you’re in, to a matter of legalities and labels. But though it’s the same family as tuna, as I say, it’s a different species. However, the important thing is, seeing bonito on the label is assurance you are getting a darker, i.e., a gamier and somewhat tastier, usually, bit of fish flesh.

The best packing is olive oil. And it needn’t even be EVOO, though it’s out there in the form of more luxe products, with concomitant prices to match. But olive oil, with or without salt, and the fish of course, should be all the ingredients you see listed. Before I learned about the more premium brands, and alternatively, the more abundant equivalent, though ordinary supermarket, brands over in France, I used to buy tuna that was Pastene or Goya branded, i.e., in the “international food” section of what are otherwise white bread groceries in this country. Even the biggest chains today sequester a much smaller selection of much tastier foreign (and nothing says exotic, which it isn’t and shouldn’t be, like “foreign,” or “imported” or, yeah, “international,” which is a euphemism for “them” and “other” and always has been, and I don’t care what you say). And they congratulate themselves for doing so.

And the reason I bought it was because this was the authentic – or as close to that quality as one can find in urban centers, especially outside of New York and Los Angeles, and certain ethnic neighborhoods, if they exist, in other American cities – choice of tuna to crown the only thing I would eat that genuinely joins the words salad to tuna. I mean, of course, salade Niçoise, that amazing, and amazingly simple, and straightforward concoction that is a staple of my Mediterranean summers, when I am over there. It entails what you’d expect in a salad – fresh vegetables – and is garnished with three absolute essentials, the only natural food items that have anything done to them aside from being cleaned of surface deposits, with nothing stronger than fresh water: anchovies, small black olives (there are two or three optimal varieties, any one of which can be, and is, called Niçois), not pitted, and fillets of anchovy. But the crown, as I say, is a significant mound of tinned (or canned, if you prefer not to be British, or the jarred, which are usually the premium brands) tuna. And it’s usually dark meat, and it’s usually glistening with oil and nothing else, the oil it was packed in.

But back to my main subject: dressed tuna fish.

I like to use either of two brands, both caught and packed in Portugal (Ortiz brand) or Costa Rica (Tonnino brand), and usually to be found in one of three varieties of the fish species we all, let’s face it, basically crave periodically for inner peace: yellowfin, bonito, and albacore, or name your species. And unpredictably it’s available in greater or lesser abundance in either of two cuts. There’s the one that’s called “white” or “white meat,” and usually sources from the albacore, as well as from the bonito. And from the latter, also, the meat may have a much ruddier hue naturally, and there’s the one that’s called “ventresca,” which is what Sicilians call the Italian word for the belly of the fish, the “ventre.” And this latter cut is meatier, juicier, fatter, and hence more flavorful. And it’s also costing a prettier penny.

In any event, from those two brands, and from, admittedly, a good number of others, but these are the ones I see in my local stores, but there’s, for one, Genova Seafood, an Italian brand, and eminently typical of what can be found in even the most pedestrian of super markets in rural France (let’s say). These brands are a bargain, actually, as the same fish and the same cuts are packed in the same olive oil, and tinned usually in somewhat smaller packs (doubtless to keep the prices from seeming exorbitant). And you couldn’t go wrong with this category either.

I open the tin, but, purely as a matter of purely personal subjective preference, I prefer the glass-jarred products (maybe it’s that I can see what’s “swimming” in there; maybe it’s the somewhat false perception that glass is more readily sterilizable and clean than sheet metal, usually steel – I say all this, and then I’ll admit, when I’m in Provence, I do as the Provençals do, and I buy my thon [tuna, tonno, whatever] in a can). I upend the container with the fish and the oil into a strainer bigger than the opening of the jar and let the oil drain out into a fat and oil receptacle I keep nearby to keep the oil out of the household trash.

When it’s fully drained, I empty the chunks, and they are usually large whole bits, intact, of even larger cuts of fillet, into a non-reactive bowl, usually stainless steel, and I gently break it up for a minute or so with a cooking fork, of the skinny three pronged variety. I then rinse the skin and towel dry a whole fresh lemon. I cut it into halves across the middle (that is, a latitudinal cut through the middle, rather than a longitudinal cut from stem end to south pole) and I use a juice squeezer to squeeze out of every drop of juice, and withhold every pip or seed, on top of the tuna.

I add the following (and these are approximate measures; as with so many dishes of casual, but still very vital and compelling, intimacy in my usual diet, I do it by eye and by hand… true enough, but if I told you “a scant handful,” it would mean very little, because you have no idea the size of my paw):

3-4 Tbsp of walnut halves, roughly chopped
3-4 Tbsp of your favorite fresh onion (Vidalia if you got, but this makes the result particularly mild), finely diced
1-2 Tbsp of poppy seeds (make sure they’re still fresh)
¼ – ½ tsp of celery seed

That’s it.

Now gently break up the tuna and blend with the other ingredients, until the tuna is in large shreds (at their smallest) and has blended evenly with everything else, and the tuna has absorbed the lemon juice, and so that all the ingredients mildly adhere to one another, so they would make a mound in a tablespoon without crumbling.

I like my dressed tuna in a sandwich of really good crusty bread – but it works in a ciabatta roll, or on strips of the same bread you prefer otherwise for a nice croustade or avocado toast. Really, it’s good on any decent bread you’ve got left before you can justify venturing out (literally, or virtually online) to get your hands on some more bread – unless of course, you’ve taken up baking your own. I will admit to liking mayonnaise, in incredibly moderate amounts. However, I’m not crazy for the iconic American diner version of tuna fish salad, in which the fish, and whatever else is added, which you can’t usually discern identifiably, is drowned in a sea of mayonnaise, so it’s more an unctuous tuna spread, and far removed from being “tuna salad,” never mind my more dainty designation of dressed tuna fish.

So I may (and I may not, though I usually do) put a thin layer of mayo, spread on at least one slice of the sandwich, as long as the mayo is really good and still fresh.

My thinking is, simply, in terms of culinary philosophy, the star and main attraction of this dish, if it’s to be glorified by even this clinical designation is… (the further I get in writing this, the more “dressed tuna fish” sounds not just kind of dainty and hoity-toity; it’s not honestly, this is just the way I like it)… the tuna. The other ingredients? Not just there for the ride, but as enhancements and amplifiers of the pleasure of eating this delicious fish. They are not there just to season it in a somehow organically complementary way, but to help glorify it a bit further.

I’ve made this version of this indubitable comfort food staple for at least 25 years now. I try variants, mainly by way of adding other ingredients, and sometimes by way of adding tinned (or jarred) tuna prepared in something other than olive oil. But I always come back to this basic recipe.

It’s tuna, and it’s the other ingredients working together, to their mutual esteem as a dish. And maybe to solemnize it, to the degree it really does deserve, as does all good food, however seemingly humble, to be thought of and consumed as having a sacramental quality, along with being pleasurable and nutritious and life affirming.

Dressed Tuna Fish (tuna fish salad)

Course: Quick Lunch
Cuisine: American
Keyword: lemon juice, onion, poppy seed, tuna
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 0 minutes
Servings: 4
Calories: 59 kcal

My favorite

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Ingredients

  • 1 jar bonito tuna in olive oil Ortiz, or Tonnino, or Genova brand (or other variety of fish: albacore, etc.)
  • 1 lemon halved and pitted and juiced
  • 3-4 tbsp walnut halves chopped
  • 3-4 tbsp onion finely diced; white, yellow or red, or Vidalia
  • 1-2 tsp poppy seeds
  • 1/4-1/2 tsp celery seed
Nutrition Facts
Dressed Tuna Fish (tuna fish salad)
Amount Per Serving
Calories 59 Calories from Fat 45
% Daily Value*
Fat 5g8%
Saturated Fat 1g5%
Cholesterol 1mg0%
Sodium 2mg0%
Potassium 44mg1%
Carbohydrates 3g1%
Fiber 1g4%
Sugar 1g1%
Protein 1g2%
Vitamin C 3mg4%
Calcium 18mg2%
Iron 1mg6%
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.

Old-fashioned Potato and Egg Sandwich

When I lived in Boston and Cambridge, my dentist, the redoubtable Racowsky, in addition to caring fastidiously for my teeth, introduced me to the simpler pleasures of the neighborhood adjacent to his. His office technically was in a converted wharf building on what had been the inner Boston harbor, the neglected Boston “waterfront.” In the late 60s, urban renewal saw the start of a long revitalization project – essentially the gentrification of what had for even longer been an abandoned part of the landscape, immediately adjacent to a thriving urban ghetto. The Italian North End, even in the 80s, had for decades been a mecca for tourists because of its many vital historical sites dating to the American Revolution, and for foodie tourism, because of the proliferation of Italian restaurants, bakeries, and cafes.

But the North End was also, and had long been, a living, highly vibrant neighborhood for its many residents. It was an enclave for a native population made up of first, second, and third-generation Italo-Americans who took enormous pride in their quarter, sequestered, in an ironic way more or less perserved, by the barrier of the infamous “Central Artery.” This had been a controversial project costing vast sums, planned in the late 1940s and early 50s, constituting an elevated limited access expressway intended to make access to the city from the northern and southern suburbs more expedient, while easing significant traffic in the cramped streets of downtown, which had first been laid down when Boston was an important colonial center and capital of what had started as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Instead, the “Artery” became jammed with an overabundance of traffic, usually stalled high above the teeming streets for most of the daylight hours. In the meantime, it also saw, precipitated really, the obliteration of the West End of Boston, an ethnic residential center, and, in its day, also a vibrant neighborhood for wave after wave of immigrants, as the decades of the nineteenth century passed one to another.

[I’ve decided to insert an editorial interpolation here – decidedly and consciously a meta-commentary – about how this evolving elaboration might have occurred, perhaps, at best, pre-verbally, though I’m not sure how we refer to the mode of interiority that relates to how we form our conscious thoughts, and I will not get bogged down in a meditation on “voice” or “words” or any essentially nihilistic Wittgensteinian dead-end aperçus concerning “that whereof we cannot speak” – wherein some readers may be wondering how a very simple recipe, demonstrably so, especially for the prescient reader-cook if all you do is look at the highly resolved photograph of the product, an assemblage of not much more than cooked eggs and potatoes on two slices of toast, probably – in the illustration, the proverbial “beauty shot,” overly toasted to some tastes – has ended up threatening to be a short history of late nineteenth century through mid-twentieth century immigration movements in the metropolitan Boston area. As well as what might, at any moment, turn into a screed on the monstrous cluelessness of so much American urban renewal. And I will say unto you, wondering or not, this is how I tell it.

Even the simplest of dishes is invested with a whole universe of associational facts and matters of chronologically ordered sequences of events, and without that particular and peculiar sequence which led to my consumption of my first potato and egg sandwich crafted at the grill of some now anonymous Italian grocery/delicatessen at the fringes of the, let’s face it, perpetually mean streets of the North End, and the series of similarly concocted luncheon sandwiches the consumption of which culminated in my internally persuasive perception that I had mastered a sense of how to craft such a rough delicacy myself, the recipe and the product of following might have ended up a decidedly different entity, substantively, sensibly, and gastronomically. And not only that, but to bestow upon myself, through temerity and an innately incalculable level of confidence, the idea that I could formulate a recipe or receipt the following of which would permit any but the most inept of cooks to replicate the sandwich sufficiently well not only to satisfy a hunger for such a means of satiation, but to essay further, repeated, attempts until the reader has achieved a level of a sense of mastery to permit adding this receipt to whatever repertoire of dishes they call upon in the need.

But, to the point, suffice it to say, I don’t believe even this highly interpreted – not to mention idiosyncratically so – and derivative formulation could not have resulted in the form it takes, virtually for sure here on the channels of the internet, and literally, however fortune and the specific qualities (or lack of them) of the ingredients the reader has assembled have pre-determined aspects of the results of concocting this delicacy (a word derived from delicatessen, not surprisingly a word of either German or Dutch origin, further derived from the, let’s face it, more French sounding, well, no other way around it, French, word for “delicacy,” which I have taken to mean, always, having grown up with what is now indelicately called a largely secularized Jewish upbringing – more cultural than religious, more gustatory than liturgical – not so much dainty foods, as foods that require some care in preparation, if not as well in the consumption, and not the least of the characteristic qualities is the savory aspect, however simple, even in a sample size tid-bit. I mean, at the very least, it’s not a bludgeon-sized St. Louis pork rib, done to a turn and dripping barbecue sauce onto a sheaf of paper towels, let’s say cheap paper towels, held roughly in the hand around the already gnawed bone; there is nothing dainty about this sandwich, but it also is not only a step or two above mere raw paleolithic sustenance, but much more, so much much more).

And so, I submit to you, every bite is not only informed somehow, let’s say spiritually, and let’s not get silly about it, as well as seasoned and made more savory, however subtly, by every moment of the immigrant experience in the aggregate: every instant of striving, ambition, frustration, anger, triumph, longing, and fulfillment. I would like to ascribe the accretive aspect of how the product of this recipe manifests perceptible, if not strictly analytical separable, qualities it could have acquired only through the passage of time, of history I mean to say, and spiritually imbuing the result with an ineffable strain of definition that is differentiable from some other, in all other respects virtually inseparable set of qualities that are similar but not precisely, not minutely, the same – occurring a block over and a week later, if you will – but I won’t in the end talk about these matters spiritually. I am innately ultimately driven by a faith, if in anything, in science, and also, and likely more importantly, because mentioning anything spiritual will get me into a very trying position vis à vis certain friends of mine, whose relationships I do not mean to or want to disturb about a matter too many people, wholly unrelated to my life, might consider a relentlessly trivial matter. An inconsequentiality. In other words, not Chinatown, but merely a potato and egg sandwich. For some people nothing at all depends on a potato and egg sandwich. Unlike what does depend on a red wheelbarrow.

So I’ll stick to concrete matters, especially when the ingredient list is so short.

Like the French omelet and, more pertinently, like the Italian frittata, there is a whole tradition, if not a sub-cuisine, a genre unto itself, of avian eggs whisked into a simple aerated batter, and fried with, more often than not, animal fats, in a pan with bits of whatever vegetables, fresh, and perhaps even on the way out, but still quite flavorful and nutritious, that have been cooked first, for softening, tenderizing, and caramelization and which become immersed in the emulsive and binding embrace of the eggs allowed to cook to a soft doneness, firmer than scrambled, and more tender than a custard—because yes, if you are tempted to add cheese, preferably grated, any cheese really would do, but provolone and cheddar and swiss are the usual choices in the salumeria-derived original, you should go ahead and do so.]

The potato, native in terms of modern botanical history essentially to what are now called “the Americas,” were first introduced to Europe by the Spanish, who brought them from the Andes (where some 3000 species originate) and who somehow or other first propagated them not on the mainland of the continent, but on the Canary Islands (among their posssessions at the time), and from around the start of the 17th century they proliferated and were added to the cuisines of the usual suspect nations. There are not many recipes which feature, never mind highlight, the potato as a significant ingredient in Italian cuisines, but there are a fair number of recipes in the authoritative, if not canonical, cookery book in English of what the title of the book calls “Classic Italian” preparations by the estimable Marcella Hazan. And in fact, one of these is a frittata featuring, in a reduced set of key ingredients, besides the requisite eggs, not much more than onions and potatoes.

For me, the key factor in preparation, though not out of the ordinary in the way of the preparation of most versions of this versatile dish, is that the potatoes are cooked in oil to a specified level of crispiness in advance.

Precisely as with this sandwich recipe. If either dish, but especially this lowly sandwich, deserves elevation to a place in some taxonomy of dishes worth bothering about, however little actual bother their concoction represents measured in energy expended, it is because it falls under the category of what do with leftovers. Who hasn’t prepared more potatoes than needed for other purposes for more formal dishes and been left with a small bowlful that sits in the fridge, waiting for the inspired and sudden yearning for a satisfaction that fits neatly and trimly between two slices of bread?

Old-fashioned Salumeria Potato and Egg Sandwich

One of the most affordable pleasures of the North End, Boston

  • 2 large eggs
  • 1/2 cup roasted red potato
  • 2 slices whole-grain sandwich bread
  • 1 Tbsp duck fat (or butter)
  • 1 pinch sea salt (or kosher salt)
  • 1/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper

Prepare ingredients

  1. Chop cooked potato into bite-size chunks (about 1/2 inch cubes or equivalent

  2. Crack eggs into a stainless or glass bowl and whisk thoroughly as if for scrambling

  3. Heat cast iron skillet over medium heat

  4. Place two slices of sandwich bread into toaster, ready to be toasted

Cooking

  1. Heat duck fat in skillet until starting to shimmer

  2. Add potato chunks to skillet and coat with hot fat well. Keep stirring and moving in the pan until potatoes begin to brown very slightly.

  3. With a spatula concentrate potato chunks to one side of skillet

  4. This would be a good time to start your toast.

  5. Pour whisked eggs over potatoes.

  6. Moving quickly, with the spatula scrape egg that runs over onto the potato mound. After egg has begun to set, flip the whole melange over to allow cooking on the other side. Watch carefully and adjust heat so eggs do not brown. Flip the egg and potato mixture once or twice, like an omelet, to ensure eggs cook through.

  7. Remove pan from heat.

Final Steps

  1. Place toast slices on your plate side by side.

  2. With the spatula, lay the cooked potato and egg on one slice of the toast. Salt and pepper to taste and cover with the other slice of toast.

  3. Heaven with five simple ingredients.

 

Living to eat

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I’ve been eating my whole life. And I’ve been eating my own cooking for the greater part of that time, as well as feeding and (I’m told) giving pleasure to thousands of guests in the process.

I figured suddenly—I’m a fast study, but a slow learner—it was well nigh time I had a food blog. I already have several other blogs over the years, since 2002, that virtually no one, but the diehards and the most devoted of friends read. I might as well just add another, or at least give myself half a shot at fame, as fortune is out of the question, by writing about something in which most people are actually interested.

Maybe you’ll learn something. Surely I will.

I have a backlog of writing on the subject that I will gather here, to give this meal a little substance right from the start.

I’m just getting started. So stay tuned, and welcome to my virtual table!

Howard Dinin, proprietor, chef, and man-of-all-work

The Reading

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Saturday of this past weekend was a banner day for the household. The book tour for MG’s latest opus (co-edited with her collaborator on this and other projects) began, auspiciously enough, at one of the destinations on everyone’s short list of great independent bookstores: Politics and Prose, in Washington DC. Setting aside the universal plight of all independent bookstores—how to stay viable and profitable in a world of online discount selling—we can take comfort that the strongest and most appealing of these stores, and Politics and Prose is one of them, seem to thrive. Sometime, in another post, I may end up musing on the qualities of these stores that allow them to survive where they are beaten every time on price, the factor that seems to trump all others in the book buyer’s decision process.

The book that was the focus of the event is an anthology of food writing, a collection born of a mutual interest on the part of the co-editors long since to teach this genre, drawing from a growing library and history of such works. Several years ago, in tandem, but on separate campuses, they offered what turned out to be very popular courses. One editor, whose expertise skews toward fiction, and scholarly inquiry into the nineteenth century novel in English, taught a curriculum that demonstrated a similar predisposition. Jennifer Cognard-Black is Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, an institution whose constituents, all and sundry, seem reflexively to add to the name, “the public honors college,” is a respected, if small, liberal arts college that is actually part of the State of Maryland system of higher education institutions. Hence it operates at the fiscal discretion of the Governor and the Maryland Senate and House of Delegates. All of which is by way of seeing that there’s an analogy here, between the plight of the independent bookstore, and the plight of the small college of liberal arts—also a struggling breed, except for quality institutions like St. Mary’s, which holds its own, with far smaller budgets, though at far less cost to its students, with its peer institutions, far better funded, more prestigious, and highly competitive in their selectivity.

One co-editor, Melissa Goldthwaite [full disclosure: she’s my wife], is a Professor of English, at St. Joseph’s University, a specialist in Rhetoric and Composition, and Creative Writing. St. Joseph’s is one of a whole network of Jesuit-affiliated institutions of higher learning throughout the country. The aims of the education have, still, at their core a dedication to providing a solid liberal arts education. I say still, because the challenge for any U.S. institution of higher education today is how to continue to instill not only a love for learning and an understanding that a broadly based education steeped in the cultural history of the world, with some requisite skills in analyzing the relevance and meaning of the substance of that history.

The impediment confronted on many campuses, regardless of how you categorize the institution, and not strictly an antithetical stumbling block, but in seeming counterpoise, is the acquisition of credentials through the study of more marketable subject matter. Strictly speaking, and increasingly, this means courses in business, or marketing, or economics—or any of the broadening array of sub-disciplines—that constitute a more practical species of specialized skill sets. It’s well and good to be able to suss out meaning that appeals to the heart and the mind in a poem; it’s another thing altogether to understand the arcane relations between columns of numbers in a balance sheet and what they might augur for the continued prosperity of an enterprise.

Smarter dispassionate heads struggle to prevail in the argument that these are not antithetical capabilities. Indeed, the subject areas in the classic curriculum collectively still referred to as the humanities provide a foundation in discovering a successful way of coping with life in the real world. Not every argument is won by the humanists. There has been a progressive retrenchment in traditional curricula and it’s likely at least three decades, if not longer, that colleges and universities have introduced, in a first wave, new departments and areas of specialization: women’s studies, gender studies, and targeted ethnicities, including African-American and Latino studies, being prime examples.

More recently, and in tandem with rising tuition costs on almost all campuses around the country (rising at rates that far exceed the rate of increase in almost any other critical economic marker), the entire industry, for that is, alas, what it has come to resemble, of higher education, has added courses of study that are directly and unambiguously platforms into seeking and achieving paying jobs within highly defined areas of specialization, in technology, finance, and entertainment. In ways that test the elasticity of meaning of a word that originally sustained little ambiguity given its roots, I mean the humanities, the new designers of academic missions and the supportive educational infrastructure argue—usually by way of mere lip service—that being human endeavors, the new subjects and courses are merely latter-day manifestations of this classic epistemology. Others, in a sense less cynical, say that the study of the humanities per se, with no qualification or abridgment of the standard meaning of the term, have become at best a luxury, and at worst a useless anachronism.

There is one constant, however, and not paradoxically. If anything, the importance of the ability to communicate, especially verbally, has never been more of a manifest value. Which brings me back to the substance of the spanking new Goldthwaite/Cognard-Black opus. In food writing, I suggest, there is a rare amalgam, a blend of the two still viable contemporaneous disciplines: effective communication (dare I say, at the apex of its expressive qualities, attaining to literary worth?) and the subject of food in every conceivable aspect. The latter has long since been monetized in the still major media channels of radio, television, the Internet, and that strange space coextensive of the World Wide Web, proprietary social media. Food has become competitive sport, obsession, confessional, practical, salvational, healing, spiritual, and technological.

Books that Cook: The Making of A Literary Meal is, frankly, not an exponent of all these salient if divergent methods of inquiry into the subject. The editors being who they are, and with a more singular mission in their noble day jobs as pedagogues and mentors to would-be writers, have chosen not a more conservative course of activity, so much as a classic one. And on the Saturday, just passed, in question, seven of us read from our work, including the co-editors who were also contributors: Cognard-Black wrote a short story specifically for this volume, and Goldthwaite included one of her excellent poems. The other five of us, including myself (with a poem, commissioned for the volume, “How to Make the Perfect Fried Egg Sandwich”), and two other poets, an essayist, and memoir author.

We didn’t exactly wear our academic credentials on our sleeves—for one thing it was a very hot, beyond sultry, Washington DC day, and the majority of us were in short sleeves, if there were sleeves at all to our garments. In fact, to some greater or lesser extent each of us, as well as all the other writers in the book, were or are published authors. Our bona fides preceded us. The only criterion the works selected had to meet, aside from manifestly having food as a major theme, motif, or subject, was that each include a bona fide executable recipe within the text.

The publisher bankrolled a generous adjunct to the gathering, especially generous to the attendees who met no other criterion of admission than to show up, in the form of a smorgasbord of sample tastings of five of the recipes featured. In short, they paid a caterer to prepare and provide small, but ample, tastes of two kinds of cake, a vegetable soup, and a beverage, a punch. Anecdotally, I’d say, from the amount consumed and the overheard comments of approbation, the crowd was pleased.

The audience settled in, many of them with tiny cups of soup, sipped with even tinier spoons, and the reading began with a greeting from our merchant host, which, courtesy again of the publisher had provided stacks of volumes for purchase, and a traditional signing after we had all performed. We read in turn, taking from five to ten minutes each. Some of the readers bolstered the rendering of their contributions as published with yet more works of theirs along the same lines. In an hour, we were done. There were few questions, all asked with that earnestness that characterizes self-consciously literary crowds. And then the queue formed.

I was surprised to see that several folks bought multiple copies, each receiving a requested and different personalized greeting. The book is not costly, and I did not inquire as to any discounts, but three copies, let us say, which at least one generous soul had purchased, plus the local sales tax ate up most of a hundred dollar bill. I was further surprised to be asked myself to sign several copies, and I easily fought the temptation to disabuse the pilgrim of the likely value of my scrawl in any conceivable future.

I will admit personally to a certain sense of a kind of temporary dissociation. I for sure knew where I was, but I also wished I weren’t. I loathe crowds of strangers of any size. They intimidate me, and put me on guard. When it came time to read, I stood up, and didn’t quite entirely put aside my usual sense of confidence (bolstered by a rehearsal the day before at home, before my editor and our pooch, who both listened raptly as I easily gave a flowing reading of my free verse) as I hugged the podium and barely glanced at the equally rapt crowd. As I read, with the same well-paced cadences I’m sure in retrospect, all I could hear was a tremulousness in my voice, which I certainly felt. By all accounts that reading was as free of defect as the run-through, though it had seemed interminable to me. Barely noticing the applause, which had justifiably greeted each of the other readers, I regained my seat, as the sense of otherness enveloped me again.

Other than the pride in my wife’s accomplishment (and I was one of very few, present or not, with any acquaintance with the trials the editors together had undergone in seeing the book through its long gestation) my memory of the afternoon is hazy. It was, undoubtedly, a success, which I knew, having seen the number of copies the store had rung up. For all that, this was, I admit, my first opportunity to participate in a reading of this sort, from the other side of the lectern. Seeking no prior indoctrination, and even knowing my antipathy for crowds of strangers, I was interested to take in as much as I might perceive. For all the sales of the book that day (and to date, as it enjoys its inaugural weeks on sale nationally), the publisher had shipped what proved to be a significant surplus, no doubt in an established protocol of cautious optimism and preparedness. I happened to be at the check out at the front of the store, as the staff prepared for the next event, hard on the heels of our own. I admit as well, I cannot step into a well-stocked bookstore without spending some money (and I bested the outlay of the hundred dollar lady, with quite a much larger sum in a fit of spreading the wealth—I should disclose that my own copy of Books that Cook had arrived weeks ago at home, gratis). As I paid for my second purchase of the day, for another book, another audio CD, and a Lamy rollerball pen I couldn’t resist, I watched as two of the staff members, expertly stuffed what was left of an unsold pile of volumes of the literary feast into two sizable cartons, festooned with labels that looked familiar from a shipment long ago of my one published volume—probably the same production house. They had those cartons packed and sealed and ready for shipment back, all in the time it took to swipe my card and for me to sign the check.

All in all, and nevertheless, I am sure it was a good day for NYU Press, and Politics and Prose, and the co-editors. Later that same weekend, a check on Amazon of how the book was selling showed it had, for what it appears was a shining moment, achieved “best-seller” status, making it to the “Top 100” in three different sub-categories. I have no doubt with our next reading, scheduled for New York City, the home turf of the publisher, at a rare book library on campus, it will attain a few more moments of fame, and once again, even a few grains, like scattered salt crystals, will reach me.

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The book is available on-line, here http://www.amazon.com/Books-That-Cook-Making-Literary/dp/1479830216/ref=pd_rhf_ee_p_img_1, and here http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books-that-cook-jennifer-cognard-black/1119220500?ean=9781479830213. And, of course, at your local independent bookstore. I know where I’d go.