Deb Perelman - The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2012 by Deborah Perelman

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, and in Canada by Appetite by Random House, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Smitten Kitchen and SK Logo are registered trademarks of Deborah Perelman.
Used by permission.

Portions of this work were originally published on SmittenKitchen.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Perelman, Deb.
The smitten kitchen cookbook / Deb Perelman.1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: The long-awaited cookbook from the food blogging phenom, Deb Perelman
home cook, mom, photographer, and celebrated author of SmittenKitchen.com.
Provided by publisher.
Includes index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96106-8
1.Cooking.I.Title.
TX714.P4432012
641.5dc232012007711

Photograph by Elizabeth Bick
Jacket photograph by Deb Perelman
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

v3.1

FOR JACOB HENRY,

the best thing I ever baked

W elcome. Welcome to my tiny kitchen. Wouldnt it be great if we could all fit in here? Id make us mulled cider and gooey cinnamon squares. We could talk about pie. Jacob would probably bust out his guitar (actually, its a ukulele, but dont tell him that) and sing baa baa blakk shee! because hes a total ham, and my husband would pour us some drinks. Wed have a great time.

Of course, unless you can squeeze yourself onto a fraction of a six-inch tilegrumbling, no doubt, that this was the worst party everthis is probably not going to happen. I always wanted a kitchen big enough for a crowd, but instead, I chose to live in New York City, a place where the kitchens are barely usable but nobody complains because theres no reason to cook when theres a great restaurant on every corner. Besides, as my friend Jenn informed me shortly after I moved here in 2000, ovens are for sweater storage.

And then, as if Id missed the joke (I, um, often do), I decided to cook in my tiny kitchen anyway. I think I got my if theres a will, theres a way attitude from my mother. You could say theres no way to fit the ingredients you need in two cabinets or the enormous roast youd like to prepare into a two-thirds-size oven; you could declare it impossible to prep any meal on a single two-by-three-foot counter, with only a few square feet to stand on or you could clear the decks, get to work, and an hour later maybe pull a killer pan of brownies out of the oven. I have a hunch that our great-grandmothers didnt refuse to cook because they couldnt fit their Vitamix on the counter. Well, perhaps other peoples grandmothers. It should surprise absolutely nobody that I come from pesky stock.

Whenever Im asked how I got herepresumably, to a place where youd have my cookbook in front of you, not my writing lair with a bay window overlooking the sea my sofa with an explosion of wooden train tracks around meI always wish I had a better kitchen story to share. Just tell us your story! people say, but I think that theyre lying. I think that people want me to tell them a good story.

They want to hear that Im a fifth-generation chili maker from Texas or that I only eat food that I hunt, forage, or find under the wheel of a car. That I went to cooking school and spent years on the line being yelled at by a French guy with his name over the door. Or maybe I was at a thrift store and found a collection of handwritten Hungarian recipe cards and made it my lifes work to bring an old ladys cooking back to life. People want a story with drama and excitement. They dont want to hear that Ive been a record store shift supervisor, a swirler of soft-serve frozen custard, an art therapist, and an IT reporter.

They dont want to hear that I just like to cook.

But I do, I really do.

That said, what drives my cooking is hardly so lofty. I never set out to build a website that would draw more than five million visitors a month. I never expected to have to quit my day job just to keep it up. I never looked into a crystal ball and saw my site flash across the television screen during a Google commercial, and when I read those last three sentences together, I still have to sit down until the spinning stops.

The reality of what drives me into the kitchendespite living in a neighborhood where I can get the most tender meatballs or the most ethereally smooth hummus delivered in twenty minutesis something far less bragworthy: I am picky as all hell.

And also, a little obsessive.

Its not enough for me to go to a restaurant and have a chicken dish that was mostly good but possibly in need of more acid. I have to go home and read about chicken for an hour. I have to figure out where I am most likely to find the best chicken that afternoon and then I have to buy that chicken and go home and weigh all the ingredients and make note of what size the potatoes were and exactly how far into the cooking time I turned them and the texture of the salt and the brand of the vermouth and tweak it and make it again and again until the chicken is just as I had hoped it would be on that day I first ordered it.

And then I have to tell you about it. I cannot possibly spend all of this time fine-tuning what I think makes for the most incredible roast chicken there could be and then let you make another recipe. It would seriously bum me out.

These thingspickiness, bullheadedness , I mean, obsessiveness can be terrible traits on their own but when I put them together, they seem to have grown into something so much better than their parts. And that, my friends, is because of you.

I may have known how to cook and known what I wanted my food to taste like when I registered the SmittenKitchen.com domain name in the summer of 2006, but I didnt know a thing about the way people outside my head cooked until they started coming forward, through comments, and asking me questions.

Did you mean table salt or kosher salt?

Would waxed paper work too?

Does this still work with store brand butter?

How on earth am I supposed to know if a dark chocolate cookie has become golden at the edges?

What if I dont have and dont want to buy cream of tartar?

I hate sifting. Can I skip it?

Do I have to use the really expensive olive oil for this?

How is this brownie different from every other brownie on your site?