Adler Tamar - Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Reconsidered

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ALSO BY TAMAR ADLER

An Everlasting Meal

For Peter, whose Yankee constitution was corrupted with cream in the making of these pages, and who bore it with bravery and love

Is there anything of which one can say, Look! This is something new ?

It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

Ecclesiastes 1:10

by Mimi Sheraton

W e cook for many different reasons, ranging from the basic needs of the reluctant and penurious home cook to those heady demands placed on professional chefs whose livelihood depends upon it.

These days, more serious concerns add complications to the work and psyches of cooks, restaurateurs, food writers, and all who tell us how and what to eat. The big, serious word now is responsibility . It might mean considering sustainability of a crop; relying only on locally sourced food, healthy diets, naturalness, and purity (whatever they are); or fair trading of wages for workers. Above all, perhaps, we expect recipes in books and periodicals to be exact, with the implied promise You cant go wrong. (Fortunately, we humans still can, and in so many lovely ways...)

Generally absent from our culinary zeitgeist are romance, spirituality, independence, and a will to preserve the past.

Enter Tamar Adler, a spiritual, free-willed cook and writer with an Impressionists eye and palate. Insistent on conserving bygone classics, she determines that their past meanings need reinterpreting for modern lifethat time constraints might limit cooking processes, that ingredients need to change. She sets out to make those edits, and succeedswith skill and humor.

Vitally, her recipes are doable , and the reader is encouraged to prepare these dishes to his or her taste.

An elegant writer and inspired researcher of food history, Tamar guides us through her thoughts and reasons with references to oft-forgotten past authorities, quoting and taking tips, for example, from Cooking at the Ritz , published in 1941 by the Ritz chef Louis Diat, or the writings of M.F.K. Fisher and Craig Claiborne, or from an early edition of The Joy of Cooking , or the 1867 Le livre de cuisine by Jules Gouff, chef at the Jockey Club in Paris.

A typical example of her tolerance follows a recipe for vegetables la grecque inspired by M. Gouff, letting us off the hook this way: From here, you can do what you like, exchanging any vegetable but the nightshades for mushrooms or cauliflower and following M. Gouffs discreet footsteps.

As I read through this inspiring work, I noted references to many dishes that I never realized I missed, while others that were new to me invoked an instant nostalgia. Among such: gelatina di pomodoro that I knew better as tomato aspic, petits pois la franaise, boeuf la mode , and shrimp scampi, now rarely found in Italian restaurants in the States. Also classic but new to me are gentle desserts such as a honey flummery. Others have been too long neglected in my home cookingpeaches Melba and charlotte Russe being two feminine sweet endings that I am determined to revive.

I hope you will spend as much time enjoying this books prose as you do preparing the recipes. Both have the power to nurture and sustain, to delight the mind as well as the palate, and to bring respect for some things old by reimagining them as new.

S ome years ago I found myself drafted into service, at first only dimly consciously, by culinary inventions I encountered in old cookbooks or on menus. They sounded elegant and subtle, or fantastical, or basic and rugged and good, but for one reason or another not reproducible in my own kitchen today. Reflexively, I collected them and did what I could to give them a second life.

Eventually I had a bookful. None had passed out of use because it was bad , but because the passage of time prompts inevitable changes: in the language of kitchen instruction, and in fashion, and in us. We and the world reorganize ourselves regularly, and the recipes of one era are left behind at the dawn of the next. Some of those that enlisted me were mired in old languagethe word boil once meant cook in liquid; now it refers specifically to a joggle with bubbles at 212 degrees; scallop meant either a way of cutting or broiling under a hot flame; now it is only a hopping mollusk. Some come from forgotten days when seafood and vegetables in cans and Ritz crackers were considered modern and fresh fish and vegetables and coarse bread atavistic, or when meat was bathed in bottles of Bordeaux as though, to crib from Charles Lamb, wine were as cheap as ditchwater. Some, owing to the cuisine they imitated, leaned so heavily on butter and cream they lost their balance. In other instances, perfectly practical culinary habits slipped out loose pocket seams and blew errantly away.

As I gathered examples of each case, I repeated an eventually maniacal mantra: This will be delicious when made anew with less butter, less wine, less time, less cost!

That is how and why I wrote this book.

* * *

I also found intelligence, grace, and common sense in the wording of much older culinary advice as it was.

This I have included verbatim. It possesses perspective and often prose too good to change. For example, Rufus Estess turn-of-the-century deliberations on lunch: Yesterdays dinner perhaps consisted of roast turkey, beef or lamb, and there is some meat left over; then pick out one of my receipts calling for minced or creamed meats; baked or stuffed potatoes are always nice, or there may be cold potatoes left over that can be mashed, made into cakes and fried. Recipes from similar sages of a similar age contain, as well, what Oronte Churm calls a poetry of lost specifics. I trust their points of view and poetry to explain why I was so drawn to certain particularly old preparations that are nearly extinct, or very far down the dark hallway, toes upand why I so want to help them back to their wobbly feet. Also for poetic and practical purposes, there are perceptive illustrations by Mindy Dubin and wine pairings by the regal Juliette Pope.

* * *

The third reason for this funny little cookbook is what made it a good fit for me. I am a lazy cook. Though I once did it professionally, I do not take kitchen work seriously. I am frugal, at least compared to the voluptuary souls whose recipes Ive revised. In other words, though I did not mean specifically to make a book of old-fashioned dishes for faster times, that is what it became.

What was once precise is now estimated, what once took four steps now takes one (or two). If a shortcut exists, I have found it, out of blunt habit. Any technique that demanded too much seriousness has been unsentimentally removed, any effects that demanded true precision abandoned in favor of resiliency. This instinctual pragmatism has affected the selection of recipes. If any couldnt withstand my somewhat truculent treatment, it was excluded. If I caused those I did include any systemic harm, it was in spite of an almost Hippocratic will to avoid it. And, in the end, if dishes seem difficult, I venture that it is because they are unfamiliar: they are old, and so, new.