Palca - The Margaret Palca Bakes cookbook: cakes, cookies, muffins, and memories from a famous Brooklyn baker

Copyright 2018 by Margaret Palca

Photography 2018 by Michael Harlan Turkell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Mona Lin with special thanks to Katie Kalin

Cover photograph by Michael Harlan Turkell

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-3267-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3268-1

Printed in China

This book is dedicated to my brilliant, beautiful, clever, thoughtful, and devoted mother,
Doris Caryl Wilk Palca with all my love and gratitude.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

My sister was not supposed to be a baker.

She was supposed to pursue a career in some art-related professionpossibly a curator or an art historian or art publisher. She even worked for a time at an art institute, so everyone in the family was a bit taken aback when Margaret left that job to work as an apprentice baker in a fancy food shop in Manhattan.

I guess we shouldnt have been surprised. Margaret would spend endless hours with our grandmother making cookies, jelly rolls, and something Grandma always referred to as those bars you love, a three-layered affair with a plain cookie base, chocolate chip middle, and coconut on top. We both liked these bars, but neither Margaret nor I were entirely sure why Grandma had determined that these were my favorite. I might point out here that Grandma never asked me if I wanted to bake anything with her. (She did, however, allow me once to help her make chopped chicken liver, and to this day I cant chop an onion without thinking of that experience.)

One of the things that impresses me most about my sisters baking is her commitment to excellence. Good enough is never good enough for Margaret. Recipes that call for butter get butter, not lower cost margarine. Theres a right way to make her signature rugelach dough, and a wrong way. Its always the right way for Margaret.

At the same time Margaret never gives me the impression that baking is a magical art to be mastered only by a select few. One time I needed to bring a dessert to a party, and I asked Margaret what I should make. She sent me the recipe for her remarkably simple carrot cake. I followed her directions, and produced a dessert that was sublime, quite to the astonishment of my friends. Id say that even a clod in the kitchen like me can get it right with Margarets directions.

But if baking is straightforward, it is still not something to be trifled with. Hedge fund managers or TV celebrities who decide to try a new challenge by becoming bakers drive my sister nuts. When they produce glitzy cookbooks sharing their newly discovered secrets, Margaret just shakes her head. For my sister, baking always presents new challengesmaybe making her own sourdough starter and creating magnificent rolls, maybe concocting a recipe for whoopee piesbut baking is never a new challenge. Its the only challenge.

Im so proud of my sisters success as a baker, and so happy this book will let her share her years of baking wisdom with others. You can decide for yourself if her coconut bars deserve the title of those bars you love. But if they dont do that for you, thats okayanother recipe in this book certainly will.

Joe Palca, science correspondent for NPR

(and Margarets brother)

INTRODUCTION

I have an early memory as a little girl standing on a chair in my Grandmas tiny kitchen in her beautiful New York City apartment. This extraordinary woman was an accomplished pianist, an art collector, well read, a plant lover, as well as a natural born bakera talent she liked to share with me. I couldnt wait for our dates. Often, she would let me watch her make blintzes, and her yeast coffee cake was celebrated but too complicated for an afternoon visit, so we usually stuck to chocolate chip cookies ()licking of little fingers was always compulsory. Her old hands never lost their skill.

My next excursion into the food world took place in high school. As seniors, we were given a six-week work period to explore different professions, so our families opened their offices and businesses and shared them with the class. I wanted to work in a restaurant and was lucky enough to find a spot in one of the most elegant French restaurants in New York: Le Pavillon. The pastry chef known as Willy took me under his wing, shared his techniques, and introduced me to the walk-in refrigerator. I had never seen so many quarts of heavy cream. After separating eggs for hours and hours, Willy would reward me with a small version of that nights special dessertonce a Grand Marnier souffl. The best part of the job was taking home samples. Even my Grandma was impressed.

Willy and me at Le Pavillon

After my taste of French cuisine in New York, I was anxious to see the real thing so I persuaded my parents to send me to Paris the summer before college. Paris, what a wonderful city to be in if you love foodand pastry. For two months, I studied French at the Alliance Francais and cooking at cole de Cuisine Le Pot au Feu.

Then came college and the trauma of the newly independent years. I was laid off from my first job at the American Federation of Arts and thought now what? Could I possibly be a baker, what I really yearned for? It began to take shape in my mind. I had a notion that to be professional I had to create a product most people wouldnt make at home. I decided on the madeleine, a small shell-shaped sponge cake made famous by Marcel Proust. It turned out to be a temperamental little so-and-so with clarified butter, well-sifted flour, and everything at just the right temperature. I tested every version of the recipe I could find until I arrived at the perfect madeleine. My father, my champion who believed I could do anything, offered to be my sales agent but I was much too scared. Off he went anyway to deliver my samples to Joel Dean, the owner of the then-brand-new and elegant Dean & DeLuca in Soho. Mr. Dean loved it and ordered six dozen.