May Jennifer - Chelsea Market cookbook: 100 recipes from New Yorks premier indoor food hall

More than 22,000 people walk through Chelsea Market every day to visit the extraordinary vegetable, meat, and seafood shops, top-notch restaurants, kitchen supply and bookstores, and everything food-related in between. New Yorkers, and tourists in the know, understand that the Market is one of the best places for culinary inspiration.

To celebrate their fifteenth anniversary, Chelsea Market has carefully collected the most interesting and famous recipes from both the Markets eclectic vendors as well as such famed local chefs, food personalities, and restaurateurs as Bobby Flay, Hugh Acheson, Giada De Laurentiis, Anita Lo, Alex Guarnaschelli, and Marc Vetri. This keepsake cookbook offers 100 delicious recipes for every time of day, from breakfast treats to lunchtime salads to dinner and drinks. With archival images, gorgeous food photography, and cooking and entertaining tips, the Chelsea Market Cookbook brings the spirit and tastes of this immensely popular food emporium to your home kitchen. Profits from the sale of the book are being donated to two charitiesWellness in the Schools and Charity: Water.

by Jennifer May
Cover design by Rachel Willey

115 West 18th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.abramsbooks.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I ts late on a spring Wednesday morning at Chelsea Market. Behind the big plate glass window at Sarabeths Bakery, four bakers are deftly stretching and dividing huge mounds of dough into loaves, mesmerizing passing tourists. The butchers at Dicksons Farmstand Meats set out specialty cuts of beef and trays of fat homemade sausages. Behind her small worktable outside Bowery Kitchen Supply, the knife lady is at work, skillfully honing knives on her whetstone for the Markets vendors as well as for local cooks. Food Network crew members, identifiable by their headsets, pass through the brick concourse on the way to their studios. A neat line forms inside Amys Bread, as walkers fresh from a constitutional on the High Line try to decide what to purchase. The greengrocers at Manhattan Fruit Exchange are arranging the delicacies of the season, including tight scrolls of fiddlehead ferns and tied-up bunches of pale green garlic. At The Lobster Place, customers are carefully choosing freshly steamed lobsters, soon to be devoured at one of the Markets dining tables. And gathering his group (one of four in the Market at this moment) in front of a brass-framed glass case full of memorabilia from the buildings past, a tour guide begins to tell the story of Chelsea Market.

A block long and a block wide and just a short walk from the Hudson River in the section of Manhattan known as the Meatpacking District, Chelsea Market has becomein just fifteen yearsone of the greatest indoor food halls of the world, with more than thirty-five vendors purveying everything from soup to nuts, wine to coffee, cheese to cheesecake. Attracting six million national and international visitors annually, it is one of the most trafficked, and written-about, destinations of any kind in New York City, and countless New Yorkers use it as their everyday market. Chelsea Market is a neighborhood market with a global perspective.

The area has always been the locus of food in the city, beginning with the Algonquin Indians, who traded their game and crops on the banks of the Hudson River at this same spot. The trains of the High Line once served the wholesale butchers who lined the streets beneath the tracks and cooled their provisions with blocks of Hudson River ice, and the National Biscuit Company established its factorynow reclaimed as Chelsea Markethere to take advantage of the butchers lard in the nineteenth century. This long historyand the stripped-down brick architecture of the buildinggives the Market a unique character. For foodies and even casual tourists, it is possible to enter the Market at one end in the morning and not exit the other until lunchtime, without ever growing boredand certainly without ever going hungry.

Now, to celebrate its first fifteen years, here is The Chelsea Market Cookbook. Weve gathered over ninety recipes from the array of shops, as well as friends and family of Chelsea Market and Jamestown, the firm that manages and operates the Market. This book is a veritable market basket of goodies, with a little of this and some of that, all adding up to a very tasty repast.

Many of the recipes are authentic international classics, such as the Carne Asada Tacos (), and frozen treats from LArte del Gelato, Ronnybrook Farm Dairy and Peoples Pops. Eateries that sit at the top of many New Yorkers Top 10 listsMorimoto, Buddakan, and The Green Tablehave shared their best dishes. Celebrity chefs Giada De Laurentiis, Alexandra Guarnaschelli, and others (some of whom are associated with our tenant, the Food Network), who have learned to love the Market for its huge selection of the very best ingredients, have also contributed. The Markets annual sold-out dining events Sunday Supper and Chilifest are both represented so you can feel like you attended. Youll discover recipes for every occasion, from a casual breakfast to a special dinner party with friends.

In addition to the recipes themselves, along the way weve collected Market Voices, where the vendors talk about their business in personal terms and our expert purveyors expound on their specialties, with information on everything from how to set a table to making the perfect pot of coffee. There are also Tips from the Pros, with concise advice on how to make your home cooking better.

As linchpins in the Chelsea neighborhood, Jamestown and the Market have a long history of giving back to the community. In this philanthropic spirit, proceeds of the authors share from this book will benefit both Charity: Water, an organization bringing clean, safe water to people in developing nations, and Wellness in the Schools, which inspires healthy eating, environmental awareness, and fitness as a way of life for kids in public schools across the country.

With The Chelsea Market Cookbook, you can re-create the delicious and varied food from the Market in your home kitchen.

Michael Phillips

January 2013

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHELSEA MARKET, THE MEATPACKING DISTRICT, AND THE NEW YORK CITY FOOD SHED

C helsea Markets motto is Building Community through Food, a concept that New Yorkers, with their famously diverse appetites for good food, completely understand, and live every day. Cultural historians call the various ways that a community feeds itself a food sheda virtual structure of producers, purveyors, sellers, and more. The area around Chelsea Marketcentered on Fourteenth Street near the Hudson Riverhas long been a vital part of New York Citys shed.

Before refrigeration and jet planes made it possible for us to buy foodstuffs from around the world, all of the food for a community was locally produced. Crops were planted, grown, and harvested locally, within an easy transport distance to market, and many of the grains were processed into flour at the town mill for baking. Fish were caught from nearby bodies of water. Livestock, from chickens to cattle, were sometimes raised within the city limits.