You'll love this Blueberry-Lemon-Almond 'Anytime' Cake morning, noon and night

Blueberry-Lemon-Almond Anytime Cake. This loaf-pan cake was inspired by a recipe in ‘Ottolenghi Simple.’

By Leslie Brenner

I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. But I do love to treat myself, now and again (and again and again!) to a slice of cake for breakfast. Or with a cup of tea in the afternoon. I love any dessert involving lemons, and I’m a pushover for almond cakes. Blueberries? Can’t get enough of ‘em.

Show me a gorgeous photo of a blueberry, almond and lemon cake, and that plan I had for shedding those extra Covid 19 pounds (yes literally 19, sorry to say) goes straight out the window.

There it was, on page 277 of Ottolenghi Simple, nestled seductively on brown parchment, its top looking like woodland berries nestled in a blanket of icing-snow. I had to have it. I couldn’t even wait for the right ingredients: Lacking fresh blueberries, I used a pack of frozen “wild” ones I’d been stashing just in case of this kind of emergency.

Blueberry-Lemon-Almond Anytime Cake

The Ottolenghi cake was very, very good. So good, I had to make it again — this time with fresh blueberries, which I knew would give it more juicy, bright pop. As Ottolenghi intended.

But being that person who is not exactly a sweet tooth, I’d cut back the sugar a bit. And because I’d always rather eat whole grains than white flour, I’d try making a swap. I wasn’t sure whether whole wheat flour would be odd with the almond meal that made this an almond cake, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. And because I love citrus, I’d make it more lemony — adding more zest and juice to the batter, and more juice to the icing.

I went for it — not revealing my nefarious, health-conscious tweaks to the rest of my household, two of whom are sugar-loving dessert-maniacs.

They loved it! No one noticed the whole-wheat flour or the missing quarter-cup of sugar. The texture was even nicer, and the extra blueberries I threw in were a bonanza.

The top lost its snowy look, a casualty of the added lemon juice, which turned the icing into more of a glaze — but I preferred it this way.

Especially because of this: Now we had a cake that didn’t look so much like a dessert. I could eat it for breakfast! I could eat it after lunch! I could eat it with tea, or with coffee, in the afternoon!
Say hello (and then goodbye!) to the Blueberry-Lemon-Almond Anytime Cake.

RECIPE: Blueberry-Lemon-Almond Anytime Cake

Take a moment to honor 98 year-old Diana Kennedy, the "Queen of Mexican regional cooking"

By Leslie Brenner

Editor’s note: Women have a history of writing the best cookbooks. That’s why throughout March — Women’s History Month — we’ll be featuring cookbooks by our favorite female authors.

International Women’s Day feels like exactly the right part of Women’s History Month to celebrate Diana Kennedy. The trailblazing cookbook author — who turned 98 last week — has devoted no less than six decades of her life to studying and documenting the richness, tradition and techniques of the regional cuisines of Mexico.

If you haven’t seen Elizabeth Carroll’s 2019 documentary about her, “Nothing Fancy,” do treat yourself. The 1 hour, 8 minute film does a wonderful job at explaining why British-born Kennedy is widely regarded — even in Mexico — as the world’s foremost expert in traditional Mexican cuisine.

“I think she’s a legend,” says Gabriela Cámara, chef and owner of Contramar in Mexico City and Cala in San Francisco, in the film. “Many Mexicans are against admitting that Diana knows more than they do about their food.”

“I think Mexico as a country will be eternally indebted to her efforts,” was celebrity TV chef Pati Jinich’s take.

The author of eight books on Mexican cooking, including the seminal 1972 book The Cuisines of Mexico, Kennedy was the pioneer who evangelized to the English-speaking world about the depth, breadth and fabulousness of traditional Mexican cooking, the way it is done in cities and villages throughout Mexico. That book is out of print, but it is collected — along with The Tortilla Book and Mexican Regional Cooking — in The Essential Cuisines of Mexico. It is a must-have for anyone interested in Mexican cooking.

It was The Cuisines of Mexico that prompted me to buy an aluminum molcajete and a tortilla press 36 years ago, when I was in my 20s. I still have both, though I’ve graduated to a giant wooden tortilla press.

I’ve learned so much from Kennedy’s books over the years, starting with the proper way to make guacamole, grinding white onion, serrano chiles, cilantro and salt in the molcajete — and no garlic, as Kennedy emphatically exclaims in the documentary. Her books are always the first place I go whenever I have any question about any Mexican dish.

I had the amazing opportunity, back in the early 1990’s, not just to meet Kennedy, but to spend a long weekend cooking with her at my friend Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch’s house in Dordogne, France. As you’ll see if you watch the documentary, Kennedy is famously crotchety, which was my experience as well. But I’ll always treasure the time, which I wrote about a few years ago, in a story about making tortillas.

If it’s interesting or vexing to contemplate the idea of honoring a British-born woman as the “queen of Mexican regional cooking,” as a Los Angeles Times story by Daniel Hernandez did last year, consider the comments in the documentary of Abigail Mendoza. The chef and owner of Tlamanalli, a restaurant in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, had been friends for 35 years at the time the documentary was filmed. “Ella está una hija adaptiva en México — She’s an adoptive daughter of Mexico,” she said.

“She’s very Mexican in her soul and heart. I believe Diana is a Mexican, who does not have to have been born in Mexico. But she is in Mexico and lives in Mexico, is working in Mexico and is a Mexican.”

Happy International Women’s Day. I’m off now to make a batch of guacamole.

In celebration of gumbo z'herbes, a gloriously green, soul-nourishing Louisiana Lenten tradition

Chloé Landrieu-Murphy’s vegan gumbo z’herbes / Photograph by Chloé Landrieu-Murphy

By Chloé Landrieu-Murphy

Unless you’re from Southern Louisiana, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of gumbo z’herbes — an essential dish across the region, particularly for those who abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent. 

Often referred to as “the queen of all gumbos,” its name is a Creole dialect contraction for gumbo aux herbes, meaning “gumbo of greens.” (It’s also known as “green gumbo.”) Earthy, delicious and comforting, it is built like other gumbos, but it also includes an entire garden’s worth of leafy greens. 

Though traditional Lenten preparations of the dish don’t include meat, part of the appeal of gumbo z’herbes is the flexibility with which it is prepared, using any combination of greens, and optional meats. Meat versions may include ham hock, chaurice (a spicy Creole pork sausage), smoked andouille sausage, chicken, brisket and/or veal.

While the combinations of greens and meats that can be used are endless, tradition says that the number of greens included in your gumbo represents the number of friends you’ll make in that year, and that an odd number of greens should be used for good luck. Theories surrounding the symbolism of the greens vary, with some suggesting that nine varieties should be used as a representation of the nine churches visited by Catholics in New Orleans on Good Friday in remembrance of Jesus and his walk to crucifixion. 

A bowl of New Orleans’ most famous and sought-after version — the one served at legendary Dooky Chase’s Restaurant — earns the person eating it nine new friends, the late great chef Leah Chase told Southern Living magazine in 2016. “And I always hope that one of them’s rich,” she added. Chase died in 2019 at the age of 96.

Since 1941, the establishment — founded by Emily and Dooky Chase, Sr. (chef Leah Chase’s mother-in-law and father-in-law), and now run by Leah’s grandson chef Edgar “Dooky” Chase IV and her daughter Stella Chase Reese —  has served the city as a gathering place not only for Creole classics like gumbo, fried chicken and red beans and rice, but also as a vital space for everything from the arts to community organizing. Dooky Chase’s was a place where civil rights leaders, both black and white, came together for strategy sessions with luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the upstairs dining room.

Dooky Chase’s Gumbo des Herbes, prepared from a recipe in ‘The Dooky Chase Cookbook’ / Photograph by Leslie Brenner

Only once a year, on Holy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter, which falls on April 1 this year), does Dooky Chase’s serve its famous gumbo z’herbes. Featuring roughly equal parts meat (smoked andouille sausage, hot sausage, ham hock, chicken, brisket and veal brisket stew) and greens (collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, beet tops, cabbage, lettuce, watercress, spinach and carrot tops), it reflects the culinary traditions of the city’s Creoles of color.  

To achieve gumbo z’herbes greatness, chef Edgar boils the greens, then purées them. He then steams the meats, covers them with a quick roux, combines that with the puréed greens and their potlikker and simmers it all together before stirring in filé powder and serving it over rice. He generously shared the recipe with us; you can also find it Leah Chase’s The Dooky Chase Cookbook. 

Still, if you make it at home, there will be something missing. 

“You can put pretty much anything in it, if it’s green,” says Poppy Tooker, a New Orleans culinary ambassador and close friend of the late chef.  “But Leah had a secret ingredient, something you couldn’t buy in the store. Here in New Orleans, there’s a weed that grows wild in the levees and the medians called peppergrass. That was one of Leah’s secret ingredients, and there were some gentlemen who would walk the levees to gather the peppergrass for Leah to put in her gumbo every year.” 

While gumbo z’herbes is most certainly a gumbo, thanks to all those greens, it differs greatly in look and taste from more familiar gumbos. In her book Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at The New Orleans Table, Sara Roahen notes its uniqueness: 

“The only ways in which gumbo z’herbes resemble more common meat and seafood gumbos are that it’s eaten with a spoon, often crammed with sausage, and thickened with a roux —  and the latter only sometimes. In preparation, gumbo z’herbes is a multiplicity of smothered greens united in a communal pot likker. Its flavor and its origins are more mysterious: no two bites, or theories are the same.” 

So what makes gumbo z’herbes a gumbo? “You’ve still got a stock, you’ve still got a roux, you still have filé and you’re still adding all your meats and all that, so all that is the same base as a gumbo,” says chef Edgar. 

As with so many dishes in Louisiana’s culinary canon, the dish is reflective of a deep and complicated history with both West African and European influences. “All of this can be traced to the West African way with greens and to West Indian callaloo,” Toni Tipton-Martin explains in her 2019 cookbook Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking, which also includes a wonderful version.

Toni Tipton-Martin’s gumbo z’herbes, from ‘Jubilee’ / Photograph by Leslie Brenner

In The Welcome Table: African American Heritage Cooking, culinary historian Jessica B. Harris speculates that the dish could be a cousin of the West African stew Sauce Feuille. There could be some German influence as well; in his Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cooking, author John Folse postulates that the dish came to Louisiana in the 1700’s with German Catholic settlers who traditionally ate a German seven-herb soup on Holy Thursday.

Today, while the Creoles of color in New Orleans generally reserve their meat-filled gumbo z’herbes for Holy Thursday festivities, few New Orleans restaurants besides Dooky Chase’s serve it, so it’s typically made at home. 

That said, you only have to look at two Holy Thursdays for a sense of how important the Dooky Chase’s gumbo z’herbes tradition is in the Crescent City: April 13, 2006 and April 9, 2020.  

Following the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding and closure of Dooky Chase’s, the tradition was put at risk. Restaurateur Rick Gratia opened the doors of his own establishment, Muriel’s, to chef Leah and her team, according to Tooker, who was by her friend’s side throughout. “He turned his beautiful restaurant on Jackson Square over to Leah so that the city of New Orleans wouldn’t be deprived of their Holy Thursday tradition.” 

In many ways, Holy Thursday of 2020 was even harder, Tooker explained to me. “It was the first year without Leah,” she says. On top of that, a week before Holy Thursday, Stella Chase Reese’s husband of 50 years died suddenly of Covid-19.  “But the Chase family still did Holy Thursday, and they did it as a drive-by pickup. There were police, there was traffic for a mile, and there were people lined up. It was a really big deal.”

While gumbo z’herbes is a direct reflection of the Catholic identity and traditions that are so deeply ingrained within Louisiana culture, it’s also a delicious, body- and soul-nourishing dish that can and should be enjoyed by all — which was my thought in developing my own recipe for a Vegan Gumbo Z’herbes.

“When you maintain traditions like gumbo z’herbes, it gives people a sense of hope, a sense of community and a sense of normalcy,” says chef Edgar. 

So if you can’t make it to Dooky Chase’s this year for Holy Thursday, why not bring the tradition into your own home?

🌿

Chloe Landrieu-Murphy is a recent graduate of New York University’s Masters in Food Studies program and a lover of all things food and culture related. This is her first story for Cooks Without Borders.

RECIPE: Dooky Chase’s Gumbo des Herbes

RECIPE: ‘Jubilee’ Gumbo Z’herbes

RECIPE: Chloé’s Vegan Gumbo Z’herbes

Outstanding cookbook author Toni Tipton-Martin puts history at the center of the American table

By Leslie Brenner

Editor’s note: Women have a history of writing the best cookbooks. That’s why throughout March — Women’s History Month — we’ll be featuring cookbooks by our favorite female authors.

It is history itself that animates the books of Toni Tipton-Martin, a culinary historian, writer, editor and cook who has become a powerful force for amplifying, celebrating and honoring the voices of Black cooks throughout American history.

Toni Tipton-Martin / Photograph by Pableaux Johnson

In 2015, Tipton-Martin published her award-winning The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks, which she followed in 2019 with Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking.

[Read more about Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee.]

Its pages are filled with delicious recognition of the contribution of African American cooks and chefs — and include some of our favorite recipes of the last year. I’m forever attached to Jubilee’s Pickled Shrimp, to Tipton-Martin’s Country-Style Potato Salad and to her Pork Chops in Lemon-Caper Sauce.

Pickled shrimp prepared from a recipe in ‘Jubilee’ by Toni Tipton-Martin

Its historical depth is just as appetizing — for instance a deep dive into green gumbo — gumbo z’herbes — that inspired an upcoming Cooks Without Borders story.

In September, Tipton-Martin — who began her career at the Los Angeles Times, and later led food coverage at the Cleveland Plain Dealer as its food editor — was named editor in chief of Cook’s Country.

Dorie Greenspan knocks it out of the kitchen with books about baking and French cooking

By Leslie Brenner

Women have a history of writing the best cookbooks. That’s why throughout March — Women’s History Month — we’ll be featuring cookbooks by our favorite female authors.

[NOTE: This story was updated Feb. 16, 2022.]

Cookbook author Dorie Greenspan / Photograph by Heather Ramsdell/Food Network

It seems fitting to lead off our series with an appreciation of the woman who launched my own food-writing career: Dorie Greenspan. In the early 1990s, Dorie was the editor of a stapled-together newsletter from a cooking organization that had only been created a few years earlier: The James Beard Foundation. Dorie gave me the opportunity to write for that flier, called “News from the Beard House.”

Dorie was a wonderful editor to work with back in the day; in the decades that followed, she has proven again and again that she’s a splendid story-teller, and a great cook. Her recipes work beautifully, and they’re always delicious.

Dorie’s cookbooks include (among others):

• Around My French Table

• Baking with Dorie

• Baking Chez Moi

• Baking: From My Home to Yours

• Dorie’s Cookies

• Everyday Dorie

Around My French Table is one of my favorite French cookbooks — as is Café Boulud Cookbook, which Dorie co-wrote with chef Daniel Boulud.

An apple-Calvados cake adapted from a recipe in ‘Around My French Table’

A couple weeks ago, I thought about an apple cake I love in Around my French Table, swapped the rum in the recipe for Calvados, and we were all sweetly rewarded.

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating our favorite female cookbook authors

By Leslie Brenner

Women have a history of writing the best cookbooks. That’s why throughout March — Women’s History Month — we’ll be featuring cookbooks by our favorite female authors. 

When we think about our favorite cookbooks of all time, the titles that endure, the cookbooks that we reach for again and again over the years — the ones that survive the period purges of our bookshelves — far more often than not, they are written by women. 

Throughout the month, we’ll be spotlighting female cookbook authors. Sometimes we’ll be honoring an entire long, distinguished career; other times a new author with a wonderful recent title; and occasionally someone who didn’t write many books, but gave us one or two truly great ones. 

As March is also our entry into spring, it feels like a great time to edit the bookshelf; bid goodbye to cookbooks that no longer “spark joy” (to quote Marie Kondo). Of course that’ll free up space — and we’re sure you’ll discover authors among those we’ll feature to add to your collections.

The first spotlight is coming shortly. Meanwhile, you might like to browse around our new list at Bookshop: “Women Have a History of Writing the Best Cookbooks.” Note that it only includes books available at Bookshop, so it’s missing some older titles we love. We will be featuring them, along with recent releases, in coming days and weeks in our stories.

Happy browsing!

Cookbooks We Love: Marcus Samuelsson’s ‘The Rise’ celebrates Black cooks in America

By Leslie Brenner

The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food, by Marcus Samuelsson with Osayi Endolyn, recipes with Yewande Komolafe and Tamie Cook, photographs by Angie Mosier, 2020, Little, Brown, $38.

Backgrounder: A good deal has been written about The Rise — the cookbook super-chef Marcus Samuelsson published late last year. Most of the coverage came right around pub-time, in the form of new-title roundups or best-of-the-year cookbook stories (it made the Washington Post and New York Times’ lists, among others.) Samuelsson and co-author Osayi Endolyn gave an excellent interview to Food & Wine magazine shortly after the book was published.

Many of the universally enthusiastic write-ups did a great job focusing on Samuelsson’s goal for the book. As he expresses it in his introduction:

“Black food is American food, and it’s long past time that the artistry and ingenuity of Black cooks were properly recognized.”

Samuelsson, of course, is the Ethiopia-born, Sweden-raised chef with a nearly three-decades-long history in New York. He made his name in 1995 as the youngest chef to earn a three-star review from The New York Times when he was executive chef of Aquavit; he opened his own restaurant, Red Rooster Harlem, in 2010. The chef has since built an empire of dozens of restaurants in the U.S., Canada, Bermuda, Britain, Sweden, Finland and Norway.

What I haven’t found much of are reviews and stories that dig into The Rise’s 119 recipes (plus 48 Pantry recipes).

Why We Love It: Endolyn’s essays about the chefs, activists and cooks who have inspired the recipes in the book are wonderful, enlightening reads. Spinning through them is a fabulous way to understand something about the future, present and past of Black cooking in America. Endolyn sheds thoughtful light on who has done, and is doing, and will continue informing some of the most exciting cooking anywhere.

Meanwhile, Samuelsson himself is one of the most talented and accomplished chefs of our time, and his recipes — developed with Yewande Komolafe and Tamie Cook — are often thrilling.

We wasted no time weighing in on Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits two weeks after the book was published. The dish, inspired by Ed Brumfield, executive chef of Red Rooster Harlem, is heart-breakingly delicious, literally the best shrimp and grits I’ve ever had. Unless you have access to frozen okra, you’ll have to wait till it’s back in season in order to taste what I mean.

The very first recipe I took for a spin was the lead-off recipe in the book: Baked Sweet Potatoes with Garlic-Fermented Shrimp Butter. I’m a sucker for a roasted sweet potato in any guise, and as this is Samuelsson’s tribute to David Zilber — a Toronto-born chef who’s the former director of fermentation at Noma in Copenhagen — the recipe beckoned that much louder. It’s almost decadent in its lusciousness. The shrimp paste (which I keep on hand for Thai dishes) gives the avocado-butter a wild and wonderful funk.

Nor can I resist a boozy dessert, and this one — a vanilla cake soaked in dark rum and frosted with whipped cream — didn’t disappoint. Montego Bay Rum Cake is Samuelsson’s tribute to chef Herb Wilson, whose trail-blazing upscale Caribbean restaurant in New York City’s East Village, Bambou, was an early inspiration for him. As originally published, the recipe requires a stand mixer; I’ve adapted it so you can use a hand-mixer, if you like.

You’ve gotta try this: Dressed up with minced dill pickle, onion, sambal oelek, fish sauce, celery salt and paprika, the jazzy mayo that tops these roasted cauliflower steaks is worth making on its own. (What a dip for boiled Gulf shrimp this will be!) And slathering it on cauliflower steaks dusted with the Moroccan spice blend ras el hanout is out of this world. (I do wish there were a recipe for ras el hanout in the book. I didn’t have any on hand, and used this one from Paula Wolfert via the San Jose Mercury News.) The recipe honors Nina Compton — chef and owner of Compère Lapin and Bywater American Bistro in New Orleans. The ingredients in the mayo sauce reflect that city’s “diverse African, Haitian and French populations.”

Still wanna cook: Circling back to okra season, the moment those pods start popping into markets, I’ll make Leah Chase Gumbo. Chase — the legendary chef-owner of Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, who died at in 2019 at age 96 — is one of the chefs to whom Samuelsson dedicates the book. (You’ll have to pick up the book to read the wonderful anecdote about what Chase did to President Obama when he sprinkled hot sauce on her gumbo without tasting it first.) Samuelsson’s tribute gumbo includes shrimp, andouille sausage and filé powder, along with the okra.

Asparagus season will precede okra season, though, and at that moment I’ll pounce on The Rise’s recipe for Shrimp Fritters with Bitter Greens and Grapefruit — a West African-inspired recipe in honor of Jonny Rhodes. Rhodes is the highly acclaimed young Houston chef behind Indigo, a neo-soul food restaurant “focusing on the history, culture, and social experiences that have shaped and guided African American foodways.”

There are many more enticing recipes besides — and all those cool essays.

Here’s a great way to celebrate Black History Month: Buy yourself a copy of the The Rise. While you’re at it, buy one for a friend interested in exploring the delicious, dynamic diversity that is Black American cooking.

BUY The Rise at Bookshop

BUY The Rise at Amazon

RECIPE: Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits

RECIPE: The Rise Sweet Potatoes with Garlic-Fermented Shrimp Butter

RECIPE: Marcus Samuelsson’s Montego Bay Rum Cake

RECIPE: The Rise Roasted Cauliflower Steaks with Nola East Mayo

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Cooks Without Borders to host Tara Wigley — Ottolenghi and Tamimi's co-author — for a special live video event

Tara Wigley is co-author of ‘Falastin,’ ‘Ottolenghi Simple’ and other cookbooks. / Photo by Jenny Zarins

By Leslie Brenner

If you are a fan of Yotam Ottlenghi and his books (is there anyone who isn’t?), you’ll want to join Cooks Without Borders when we host Tara Wigley for a special Live Video Q & A on Thursday, Feb. 25. The one-hour event will begin at noon CST (10 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. MST / 1 p.m. EST). For participants in Britain, where Wigley lives, it begins at 6 p.m. GMT.

Wigley has collaborated with Ottolenghi since 2010, when she assisted him, working out of his flat in Notting Hill, London, on his cooking column for The Guardian. She has since become an important part of the Ottolenghi family, having worked on many of the cookbooks it has produced, including Plenty More, Nopi and Sweet — and co-authored several with the chef, including Flavor (the most recent) and Ottolenghi Simple — which is probably our favorite of them all.

[Read our review of Ottolenghi Simple.]

Wigley also co-authored, with chef Sami Tamimi (Ottolenghi’s business partner), Falastin — another Cooks Without Borders all-time favorite. You can see her in this video preparing a dish we absolutely adore — Chicken Musakhan — and other Palestinian treats with Tamimi.

[Read our review of Falastin.]

Wigley’s involvement with the Ottolenghi-sphere began when she was just out of Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, having left behind a career in publishing. After a brief stint working at Nopi, she was trying to figure out her life when she got an out-of-the-blue phone call from chef Ottolenghi, who was her “complete hero” — and she thought it was her husband playing a practical joke on her. She tells about it, including how things played out in this wonderful video.

About the Live Q & A with Wigley

Cooks Without Borders Premium Members will have exclusive access to participate in the live event on the 25th, which I’ll be hosting. If you’re not yet a Premium Member, don’t worry — you can try out Premium Membership for one month for free! Or take advantage of our special Charter Annual Membership opportunity.

YES! I’d like a Free Trial Premium Membership. SIGN ME UP!

I have so many questions I’m excited to ask Wigley, and I’m sure you do, too! Hope to see you there.

Live Q & A with Tara Wigley, Thursday, Feb. 25, noon CST (10 a.m. PST, 11 a.m. MST, 1 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. GMT). Sign up from the premium members’ home page.

Cookbooks We Love: 'Ottolenghi Simple' is one of the most inspired — and inspiring — cookbooks in a decade

By Leslie Brenner

Ottolenghi Simple, by Yotam Ottolenghi with Tara Wigley and Esme Howarth, photographs by Jonathan Lovekin, 2018, Ten Speed Press, $35.

Backgrounder: Unless you’ve been cooking under a rock for the last decade (or only started cooking recently), you probably know who Yotam Ottolenghi is. The London-based, Israeli-born chef probably has had greater influence than any other in the world on contemporary American (and other Anglophone) cooking in the last decade. His kind of free-form, casual, herb-strewn, plant-based (whether vegetarian or vegan or not), sun-kissed, Mediterranean-inflected aesthetic informs the creative endeavors of cooking writers, chefs and recipe developers for mainstream generalist sites like New York Times Cooking or Washington Post Voraciously, as well as a generation of cooking bloggers, restaurant chefs and Instagram posters. If formal, carefully arranged, tweezer-food plates feel out-of-date, it is largely thanks to Ottolenghi.

Ottolenghi’s first title, Ottolenghi: The Cookbook — co-written with his business partner, chef Sami Tamimi, was published in Britain in 2008, followed by Plenty (2010); Jerusalem (2012, again with Tamimi); Plenty More (2014); Nopi (2014, with Ramael Scully); Sweet (2017, with Helen Goh); Ottolenghi Simple (2018, with Tara Wigley and Esme Howarth); and Ottolenghi Flavour (or Flavor, for the U.S. edition, 2020, with Ixta Belfrage and Tara Wigley).

Puy lentils with eggplant, tomatoes and yogurt from ‘Ottolenghi Simple’

Why we love it

Simple may not be as exciting or groundbreaking as Plenty or Jerusalem were when they were published (they are still two of my favorite cookbooks), but it is packed with an astounding number of recipes we want to cook over and over again, as well as recipes we can’t wait to try. As with his other books, the recipes work; rarely is there anything about them I’d change or tweak. Yet unlike many of his other books, these recipes are do-able by ordinary cooks who don’t want to chase down a long list of obscure ingredients or start preparing sub-recipes the day before you want to eat.

Most are designed to be simple enough so that you can achieve them on a busy weeknight — which is a big part of why the book is so incredibly appealing. It’s a book for the way so many of us want to eat — we want dishes that are delicious, plant-forward, interesting, healthful, satisfying and unfussy, and that’s what this book delivers, over and over again. If you keep a few key ingredients in your pantry (things the author calls “Ottolenghi Ingredients” — sumac, tahini, preserved lemon, black garlic and za’atar, to name half of them), plus staples like yogurt and green lentils and basic seasonal produce, you can often pull together these dishes without making a special shopping trip. Other times, there’s an easy swap you can make, if, for instance, you don’t have the suggested herb.

Two cases in point

Puy Lentils with Eggplant, Tomatoes and Yogurt (pictured above) is fabulous garnished with the fresh oregano leaves it calls for, but I’ve also subbed in parsley, mint or cilantro when I didn’t have any oregano, to delicious effect. I’m sure basil would be great as well.

And for a dish of Chickpeas and Swiss Chard with Yogurt, Ottolenghi grants permission in the headnote to leave off his suggested cilantro garnish should you find yourself without. The night I made it — entirely pulled together from stuff I had on hand — parsley and mint did the trick perfectly. The dish is the kind of satisfying and interesting main course I’m always wishing for on days when I want to do without meat. That night, I happened to whip it together to go with a dish my son Wylie had spotted and was making also from Simple — Lamb and Pistachio Patties with Sumac Yogurt Sauce. Both were wonderful.

You’ve gotta try this

Brussels Sprouts with Browned Butter and Black Garlic. When I spotted packages of black garlic (intensely umami-forward fermented garlic) at my supermarket a few weeks ago, I grabbed one; it lasts for two or three months unopened. Then, the other day when I was trying to imagine how not to be bored by the pound of Brussels sprouts I’d envisioned for that evening, I found this exciting-looking recipe in Simple. Fortunately I happened to have some pumpkin seeds and caraway seeds (of course those are easy to find). The dish was brilliantly quick to prepare: a 10-minute roast in a blazing oven, followed by a toss with browned butter and a quickly made paste of black garlic, caraway seeds and thyme. A big squirt of lemon juice, a drizzle of tahini and dinner is served. It was insanely good.

Maybe you’ve already tried this — Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa. We wrote about it last summer in a story about zucchini. I’ve also made and loved more dishes than I could fit in this story: Cucumber and Lamb’s Lettuce Salad; a mezze spread called Crushed Zucchini; Roasted Eggplant with Anchovies and Oregano.

On a sweet note

I wanted to try one of the twelve great-looking desserts in the book, but for every one I was missing an ingredient. (I’ve been snowed in for four days!). I baked a Blueberry, Almond and Lemon Cake from the book anyway, subbing in a bag of frozen wild blueberries and I had for the fresh ones. It was a treat, but I think it’ll be even better with fresh berries, as the frozen ones were a bit dull. Stay tuned for an update once the ice melts. Come summer, I’ll be excited to make his Plum, Blackberry and Bay Friand (a friand is a light almond cake that the headnote tells us is popular in Australia, New Zealand and France).

Also still wanna cook

Most of the book! The minute it’s asparagus season, I’ll make Roasted Asparagus with Almonds, Capers and Dill. And I covet Cavolo Nero with Chorizo and Preserved Lemon; Cauliflower, Pomegranate and Pistachio Salad; Roasted Baby Carrots with Harissa and Pomegranate; Roasted Beets with Yogurt and Preserved Lemon; Orzo with Shrimp, Tomato and Marinated Feta; Pasta with Pecorino and Pistachios; and Lamb Siniyah — “the Middle Eastern equivalent of a shepherd’s pie, with a tahini crust standing in for the layer of mashed potato.”

Do yourself a favor. If you don’t have this book, and these are the kind of dishes that appeal to you, treat yourself to a copy today. Flavor has been getting lots of great press — and it’s a good book — but the recipes don’t scream “cook me” (in my ear, anyway!) as loudly as they do in Simple.

RELATED: “Exuberantly delicious and beautifully told, ‘Falastin’ is one of those life-changing cookbooks”

BOOKMARK THIS: All Cooks Without Borders cookbook reviews

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RECIPE: Moussaka for the Ages

Made in a flash, intensely chocolatey and ludicrously easy, molten chocolate cake deserves a comeback

By Leslie Brenner

There was a time when chocolate molten cakes were so ubiquitous that they became a runny joke — especially because the more it went, the less they were cooked. In went your spoon, and liquid eggy chocolate spilled out all over the plate. Ick.

Over the years, we’ve been subjected to so many mediocre versions of the dessert that we forgot how appealing they were way back when, as they poofed — pillow-like and fabulous — onto the scene. They were like small chocolate dreams — something between a soufflé and a mini-flourless chocolate cake, but preternaturally light, and intensely chocolatey. The middles were molten, but not liquid, just a bit oozy and soft. They were a way to show off great chocolate.

That was back in 1991, in New York City. I was a fledgling food writer there, molten chocolate cakes were everywhere, and they were wonderful.

I remember eating one at JoJo, Jean-George Vongerichten’s restaurant (his first), where he called it Chocolate Valrhona Cake. They’d been invented sometime before that, either by Vongerichten himself or by star pastry Jacques Torres, or maybe by someone in France, depending on whom you talked to. Vongerichten had served them a few years earlier, when he was chef at a restaurant called Lafayette, in the Drake Hotel, but apparently they were too early for their time. (I was still a starving grad student when Vongerichten was at the Drake, so I never made it there.)

In any case, as a society, in the intervening decades, we OD’d on them.

Now, at a time when we need small, easily achieved pleasures, it feels like a great time to rediscover them. A molten chocolate cake may be the biggest dessert bang you can in under a half hour, start to finish, and it’s ludicrously easy. All you need to have on hand is two good chocolate bars, four eggs, a stick of butter, a quarter cup of sugar, a pinch of salt and a couple spoonfuls of flour. If you want to impress a date, a spouse, a friend, a child — or anyone else in your orbit — you can whip this together in a flash and make quite a splash.

I thought about them the other night when my pod clamored after dinner for dessert, something rare and special in our small world. What could Wylie (our 24 year-old son) and his girlfriend Nathalie conjure quickly? I thought about this recipe, verified that we owned two bars of chocolate, and we found a perfect recipe penned by Vongricheten, published in Food & Wine magazine, 22 years ago.

Five seconds later, there Nathalie and Wylie were in the kitchen, melting the chocolate with butter, whipping eggs with egg yolks, folding in the melted chocolate and butter with a spoonful of flour and a pinch of salt, turning the batter into soufflé molds and baking. The cakes spend just 12 minutes in the oven. Maybe leave them in one extra minute, so they’re glossy and molten in the center, but no longer liquid. Pull ‘em out, let ‘em sit for one minute, and unmold.

Anyone can do this. And any of us — event the most well traveled and sophisticated — might well be dazzled all over again.

Happy Valentine’s Day! ❤️

RECIPE: Molten Chocolate Cake

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Cookbooks We Love: Exploring Chinese cooking? ‘Every Grain of Rice’ is the first book you should buy

Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, by Fuchsia Dunlop, photographs by Chris Terry, 2012, W.W. Norton & Co., $35.

Backgrounder: If you think a British woman shouldn’t be writing Chinese cookbooks, you haven’t read — or cooked from — Fuchsia Dunlop’s books. Dunlop was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Central China; she’s fluent in Mandarin and has traveled, eaten and cooked all over China. Cambridge-educated, she has been called the best writer in the West on Chinese food. “The recipes in this book are a tribute to China’s rich tradition of frugal, healthy and delicious home cooking,” Dunlop writes in the introduction. “They include meat, poultry and fish dishes, but this is primarily a book about how to make vegetables taste divine with very little expense or effort, and how to make a little meat go a long way.”

Why we love it: Dunlop has a fabulous palate, and though the recipes in this book are generally simple — it is, after all, about home cooking — everything I’ve cooked from it has been nuanced and gorgeous-flavored, as well as beautiful to behold. Hers is a finely tuned and delicious aesthetic that runs through all her books, and her recipes work magnificently.

When you cook with Dunlop, she holds your hand in the nicest way, and you wind up learning a whole lot about technique without even realizing you’re being taught. Dunlop makes it feel easy and natural.

Her Yangzhou Fried Rice is a great example. It includes pork fillet, ham, cooked chicken, shrimp, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots, scallions, egg and peas, but she gives you permission to change it up according to what you have; “the key is to have a tempting selection of colors and tastes amid the rice.” You can make it a meal on its own, or serve it as part of a special meal, such as a Chinese New Year’s celebration.

Silken Tofu with Soy Sauce, prepared from a recipe in ‘Every Grain of Rice’ by Fuchsia Dunlop

Simple yet elegant: One example of a simple dish that’s way more impressive than you’d imagine is Silken Tofu with Soy Sauce (Xiao Cong Ban Dou Fu). It couldn’t be more basic: It’s just sliced scallions scattered over silken tofu with hot oil poured over to make the scallions sizzle, quickly followed by soy sauce and sesame oil. The result is stunning.

Other simple recipes I’ve loved are Bok Choy with Fresh Shiitake and Chinese Broccoli in Ginger Sauce.

Pa Pa Cai — Tender Boiled Vegetables with a Spicy Dip

You also can get a keen sense, with many of the recipes, of what it’s like to eat like a regular person in a Chinese home, so if you’re interested in understanding the culture, this book is a treasure. One recipe that really did that for me was Tender Boiled Vegetables with a Spicy Dip — Pa Pa Cai in Chinese. In her headnote, Dunlop writes that it’s a “staple of the rural Sichuanese supper table” that she likes to make after “a day or two of eating rich food.”

It’s so plain, I’m going to skip giving you a formal recipe; it’s just boiled vegetables (without even salt added) set out, with some of the cooking liquid, in a serving bowl. On the table are small bowls of ground chiles, ground roasted Sichuan pepper, finely sliced scallion greens and toasted sesame seeds. Everyone serves themselves some of the vegetables, an in a separate small bowl mixes the condiments to their own taste, adding in a bit of the cooking liquid, as a dipping sauce.

You’ve gotta try this: Dunlop calls her Cold Chicken with a Spicy Sichuanese Sauce “one of the most marvellous of all Sichuanese culinary ideas.” I call the dish Fuchsia Dunlop’s Spicy Sichuanese Chicken Salad. It’s basically slivered cold poached or leftover chicken dressed with scallions, sesame seeds and a sauce of soy, Chinkiang vinegar, chile oil, Sichuan pepper and sesame oil. It’s so good.

Still wanna cook: Oh, so many things. Silken Tofu with Pickled Mustard Greens. Sour-and-Hot Mushroom Soup. Stir-Fried Chopped Choy Sum. Sichuanese Wontons in Chilli Oil Sauce. Steamed Sea Bass with Ginger and Spring Onion. That last one would be just the thing for a Chinese New Year celebration.

I also love Dunlop’s Land of Fish and Rice. But if I could have only one Chinese cookbook in my library, it would be this one.

RECIPE; Yangzhou Fried Rice
RECIPE: Silken Tofu with Soy Sauce

RECIPE: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Spicy Sichuanese Chicken Salad

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Around the world in chicken soup: Here's how the elixir is enjoyed in 7 delicious cultures

Chicken soup is a nearly universal expression of love, nurturing and care-giving — one that deliciously manifests itself from culture to culture.

In this series of stories, we have explored chicken soups on five continents and one sub-continent. (Excuse us, Austrailia! Sorry Antarctica!) We thought, as the Northeast is blanketed in snow, that it would be cozy to round them up.

Thailand: Tom Kha Kai (Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup)

“If you can smash things, cut things and boil water, you can pull off this classic on the first try,” writes Leela Punyaratabandhu in the headnote to her recipe for coconut-galangal chicken soup in Simple Thai Food, from which this recipe is adapted. (Read our review of the book.) She’s right: Once we had those key fresh ingredients, which we found at a local Asian supermarket, making the soup was remarkably quick and easy — and stunningly delicious.

It has lovely richness from the coconut, tang from lime juice and beautiful perfume from lemongrass and makrut lime leaves. Though it was based on store-bought chicken broth, it was as fabulous as any we’ve had in Thai restaurants.

RECIPE: Tom Kha Kai (Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup)

Brazil: Canja de Galinha

In Brazil, chicken soup comes with rice. “Canja de galinha is the soup my grandma used to make — not just for me but for our whole family,” says Junior Borges, a super talented Rio-born chef in Dallas.

The chef still enjoys his canja. “I think it’s definitely one of those comforting, comforting things. For us, it’s our chicken noodle soup.” (Read more about it here.)

For this one, you’ll start with chicken parts, so it’s a homemade broth, soothing and aromatic. It’s finished with cilantro and parsley.

RECIPE: Junior Borges’ Canja de Galinha

Ethiopia: Ye Ocholoni Ina Doro Shorba (Peanut-Chicken Soup)

Thick, warm and satisfying, Ethiopian ye ocholoni in doro shorba gets its richness and body from peanuts; it’s beautifully spiced with Berbere spice mix. Ours is adapted from Jenn Louis’ The Chicken Soup Manifesto — a marvelous cookbook that explores chicken soups and stews from 64 countries. Lately Louis, a well-known chef in Portland, Oregon,has devoted herself to feeding her city’s homeless people, who have been suffering terribly during the pandemic. (There’s a link on her website to help her with donations, or even with cooking.) Thank you, Chef!

RECIPE: Ye Ocholoni Ina Doro Shorba

Eastern Europe: Ashkenazi Jewish Chicken Soup

This is the chicken soup I grew up with, which is in the same vein as the chicken soup Jewish mothers all over the United States have made for their families for eons. I happen to think the one my mom taught me is the best in the universe. It starts with a whole chicken. Very basic, very delicious.

RECIPE: Joan’s Chicken Soup

Mexico: Sopa de Lima (Yucatán-Style Chicken-Lime Soup)

I love this bright, light chicken soup from Mexico’s Yucatán region, which also comes to Cooks Without Borders via Louis’ The Chicken Soup Manifesto. It’s a good one to make when you don’t have time to make homemade broth. I do like to take the time to fry up some tortilla chips — which is also a great way to use up stale corn tortillas. If you miss Mexico as much as I do — or always wanted to go there — you’ll love this.

RECIPE: Jenn Louis’ Sopa de Lima

Tibet: Thukpa (Tibetan Chicken-Noodle Soup)

Thukpa, a fiery chicken-noodle soup from Tibet, is just the thing when you want super-flavorful chicken soup with lots of veg — it has cabbage, green beans, tomatoes, carrots, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots and bell peppers. It comes together quickly, as it’s based on store-bought chicken broth.

We found it in Maneet Chauhan’s Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets and Railways of India. Read more about it here.

RECIPE: Maneet Chauhan’s Thukpa

Iran: Abgusht-e Morgh Ba Kufteh-ye Nokhodchi (Persian Chicken Soup with Chickpea and Lamb Meatballs)

I saved my favorite for last: a Persian chicken soup with tender lamb meatballs and an incredible garnish of dried rose petals, herbs and garlic.

This is the most aromatic and interesting chicken soup I've probably ever tasted — tinted with aromatic saffron and redolent of cardamom and cumin. It’s adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks — Food of Life by Najmieh Batmanglij. We wrote about it last month.

Making this soup is a huge project, so reserve a whole afternoon for it — it’s the perfect project for this weekend!

RECIPE: Persian Chicken Soup with Lamb Meatballs

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Gloriously lush but not overly rich, this is quite simply the perfect creamed spinach recipe

You might think that when it comes to creamed spinach, the richer the better. You’d definitely think so if you took a spin around the internet looking for recipes: They’re laden with daring amounts of heavy cream, sometimes even cream cheese. Often they’re so white from cream that the spinach nearly disappears. That’s not creamed spinach; that’s spinached cream.

I take the lighter view: I love a version that’s creamy in texture, but relatively light on the palate. I want to taste that lovely spinach more than the phat mouthfeel of heavy cream, but still want enough of a sauce to bind it deliciously together and soften the spinach’s astringency. A dash of nutmeg supplies a sweet middle note, a touch of perfume.

This recipe — which is delightfully simple — delivers maximum wonderfulness. For my money, it’s the perfect creamed spinach recipe.

It’s easy to shop for. You need one pound of baby spinach, which is one of those oversized clamshells. Part of a white onion, diced fine. Two tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of flour, which you probably already have. A quarter teaspoon salt, and a little less freshly ground white pepper and freshly grated nutmeg.

If you have a kid learning to cook, or a pod-mate who thinks creamed spinach can only come from the kitchen of a steakhouse, have them watch; it’s actually pretty cool if you’ve never done it. Next time, you might not even need a recipe because the proportions are so simple.

Start by cooking the spinach on top of a couple inches of boiling salted water, so it doesn’t lose too much volume. Drain it well, but don’t squeeze it dry, then chop it medium-fine.

Now make a béchamel plus onion: Melt the butter, cook the onion in it till soft, sprinkle on the flour (equal to the amount of butter), stir and cook about three minutes, then slowly whisk in the milk. Cook, whisking frequently, until it’s thick and creamy. Add salt, white pepper, nutmeg, then stir in the spinach.

Now taste: It’s shocking that something that delicious can be so easy. Make this a couple times, and it’ll become second nature — something you can whip up without thinking about it to serve with any kind of chop or steak, roast chicken, simple pan-seared or roasted fish. Because it’s almost like a sauce itself, that main thing can be on the plain side — and the creamed spinach is a feather in its cap.

RECIPE: Perfect Creamed Spinach

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This sheet pan chicken dinner, with spices that evoke Morocco, is easy and spectacular

We love the idea of sheet pan dinners — the notion that you can plop everything on a pan, shove it in the oven and pull out something fabulous.

Unfortunately, most sheet pan dinners suck. Either some components are overcooked and others undercooked, the cooking instructions are so involved it might as well not be a sheet pan dinner, or, well, it’s just kind of blah.

I think you know what I’m talking about.

But I kept thinking a glamorous one could be dreamt up. Something with deep, interesting, evocative flavors — a dish so transporting that by the time it floated to the table you’d forget it was a sheet pan dinner. And yet it needs to be easy. And to work as advertised.

I love the smell of Moroccan spices cooking with tomato and cinnamon (as it does in a chicken and lamb couscous, for instance), and I thought that would be lovely to inhale on a busy weeknight. I put that together with that thing canned diced tomatoes do when you roast them, getting nice and concentrated and deep, and imagined them — zhuzzhed up with cinnamon and harissa — on top of chicken thighs with Moroccan-ish root vegetables. And onions cut so the edges get a little charred. Like that couscous dish, the one I dreamt of would have turnips and carrots.

I didn’t realize the dish would make its own pan sauce. What a delightful bonus!

So, how to you put together this dreamy deal?

First make a spice mix — toasted and ground cumin and coriander seed. Stir a little into a glug of olive oil, and toss the root vegetables in that. Put the turnips on the sheet pan first, and give it a 15-minute head-start in the oven, while you coat chicken thighs in the same mix plus cinnamon and a little harissa.

When you pull out the sheet pan to add the chicken (skin-side down), the pan is hot enough to give a little sizzle — perfect. Scatter the spiced carrots and onions around and back in it goes. Fifteen minutes later, flip the thighs and spoon on top of the tomatoes, and slide it in the oven again. Your kitchen fills with those beautiful smells, you have 35 minutes to relax with a glass of wine while the chicken finishes cooking.

It’s so simple you’ll have had time to clean up everything even before that last 35-minutes of roasting.

In fact, you’ll even have time to make a green salad — or roast some broccolini — and still enjoy that glass of wine.

For the broccolini, you don’t even need a recipe (though we’ll supply one just for kicks). Here it is in talk-through form: Toss two bunches of broccolini on another sheet pan with a thin-sliced lemon, a tablespoon of olive oil, half a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of Aleppo pepper. Pop it in the oven during the last 20 minutes of your Moroccan-spiced sheet-pan chicken dinner, and everything comes out at once.

Easy peasy. And pretty damn good.

RECIPE: Sheet Pan Chicken Thighs with Turnips, Carrots and Harissa

RECIPE: Roasted Broccoli with Lemon and Garlic

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Rose petals, saffron and tender lamb meatballs: Now that's a chicken soup!

This is the fourth story in our series, Around the World in Chicken Soup.

The Great Confinement has been for me, as much as anything, a year of cooking. My time in the kitchen — chopping, simmering, marinating, braising, baking, slicing, stirring, researching dishes, poring over recipes — has kept me sane, kept me focused, provided escape, resulted in joy and kept my family well fed. We are extremely lucky that we can afford to eat and that we have access to food — facts that have not escaped my consciousness for a single moment, and for which I’m continually grateful.

During these 11 months, if there’s one dish that took me out of myself and away from that narrow physical and mental place that the pandemic has wedged us into, it would be the Persian chicken soup with chickpea-and-lamb meatballs called abgusht-e morgh ba kufteh-ye nokhodchi.

The obvious and immediate miracle of the dish is its incredible flavor and aromas: the perfume of saffron, the gorgeousness of mint leaves and rose petals strewn on top, the tender lusciousness of the lamb meatballs, the soothing comfort of the rich and aromatic chicken broth. I still have a hard time conceiving that we ate something so delicious, so unusual, in our own home. Honestly, it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve eaten ever, anywhere.

But equally (if not even more) transporting was the experience of cooking this soup. The afternoon I spent discovering its mysteries was one of the most pleasurable I’ve spent all year long.

Consider the premise: You stuff a whole chicken with rice, spices and dried rose petals. (Rose petals!) Wrap it in cheesecloth, submerge it in a broth scented with cardamom, rosewater, saffron and more, and simmer it gently for an hour and a half. Remove the chicken and debone it. Then drop in meatballs you’ve made from ground lamb, aromatic spices, onion and chickpea flour. Chickpeas go in the broth as well, along with the chicken meat and stuffing, and all that wonderful stuff cooks some more. 

Your home now smells heavenly, and for a grand finale, here comes a whopper of a flourish: Chopped mint or cilantro, plus garlic and more dried rose petals. You’ll pass that in a bowl around the table for everyone to add on top just before eating. 

The meatballs are spectacular. The scents of rose and saffron and cardamom and cumin and herbs are intoxicating. The garnish sends it into a transcendent dimension. 

After I made the soup and recovered from my saffron-and-rose-petal high, I wanted to learn more about the recipe, so I called Najmieh Batmanglij — the Washington, D.C.-based author of Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, in which I found it. The 1986 cookbook is widely considered to be the definitive tome of the genre; Yotam Ottolenghi called Batmanglij “The goddess of Iranian cooking.” 

She and her husband fled Iran in 1979 during the revolution, relocating to Vence, in the south of France, where she wrote her first cookbook, Ma Cuisine d’Iran. Recently Batmanglij spent three years researching her latest book, Cooking in Iran, published in 2019. “I traveled all over Iran,” she said, “and I noticed they love meatballs.” 

Persian chicken soup with chickpea-and-lamb meatballs — abgusht-e morgh ba kufteh-ye nokhodchi. The Iranian dish is served with sabzi khordan, the fresh herb platter ubiquitous on Iranian tables.

Talking with the author was nearly as much fun as making the soup. I knew from her headnote that it’s traditionally served by Jews in Kashan and Hamedan for sabbath dinner (those two cities are south and southeast respectively from Tehran), that it should be served with “saffron flavored rice, pickles and a platter of herbs,” and that it was inspired by one Professor Abbas Amanat, who had gotten the recipe from his mother. Batmanglij told me that Professor Amanat teaches history at Yale University. 

She also revealed that she brought a couple of her own thoughtful touches to the dish — among them, deboning the chicken.  “Traditionally,” she told me, “they use the whole chicken, and when they serve it, the whole thing is in the soup. Wrapping it in the cheesecloth, that’s my French background.”

Diluting the saffron in rose water rather than plain water was her innovation as well, inspired by a technique she’d seen in a medieval Persian cookbook. The two ingredients together do something truly magical.

I made a couple of slight modifications of my own, including adding an option to use canned chick peas rather than soaking overnight and pre-cooking dried ones. More significantly, I also suggest passing of the rose-petal-and-herb garnish at the table. Batmanglij’s recipe calls for stirring it all before in serving it. 

Nan-e-barbari — Persian Bread. We fashioned ours from store-bought pizza dough.

Of course the author’s way is culturally correct. A soup like this, Batmanglij told me, is usually eaten “by people from humble backgrounds. They put the garnish on top, and they put the pot in the middle of the table, with plenty of bread. Serving individual things means more labor.” 

While at our house, we skipped the saffron-flavored rice accompaniment, I did serve the soup with nan-e-barbari, Persian flatbread, and a sabzi khordan, the fresh herb platter Batmanglij suggested, and which is ubiquitous on Iranian tables. (Here’s a hack for making home-made nan-e-barbari from store-bought pizza dough, courtesy of Nilou Motamed, former editor of Food & Wine.)

The herbs of the sabzi khordan brought beautiful freshness to each bite.

Obviously, building this marvelous soup is a project, something to take slowly and enjoy, not something to be rushed through on a busy weeknight. But should you find yourself wondering how to fill a long and lazy Sunday or Saturday afternoon, I can’t think of a more delicious undertaking.

RECIPE: Persian Chicken Soup with Chickpea and Lamb Meatballs

RECIPE: Sabzi Khordan

RECIPE: Nan-e-Barbari (Persian Flatbread)

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Italian ham & eggs team up (with cheese!) in a delightfully indulgent winter salad

We love salads starring winter greens, like endives, chicory or escarole — especially when they’re zhuzzhed up with snazzy and rich co-stars.

One of our all-time favorites is this escarole salad chock full of crispy prosciutto, six-minute eggs and shaved Parmesan.

Cooking the eggs for six minutes results in yolks that are still custardy, but not runny — perfect for mingling with the ham and cheese. The bright acid of lemon juice in the dressing balances all that richness, lemon zest adds beautiful citrus flavor, and a touch of anchovy brings extra umami depth.

Use your best olive oil with this one, and don’t skimp on the freshly ground black pepper. If you don’t find beautiful escarole, chicory (curly or otherwise), frisée or endives make good substitutes. If you threw in a little raddichio, that could be lovely, too.

It makes a royal lunch on its own; with a nice bowl of soup, it’s the perfect winter dinner.

RECIPE: Escarole Salad with Egg and Crispy Prosciutto

Chinese-American culinary culture finds delicious, multi-generational expression at The Woks of Life

By Leslie Brenner

[Updated Dec. 27, 2022.]

I was shopping at our local 99 Ranch Market last week with my son’s girlfriend, Nathalie, and somewhere in the giant freezer case, arrayed attractively next to the frozen fish balls, Nathalie spotted frozen tofu.

“Frozen tofu?” she wondered.

Not something I was familiar with! Frozen tofu? Why would tofu be sold frozen? Was frozen tofu a thing? Item no. 4,727 of things to look into!

The answer to the question floated — unbidden — into my email inbox on Tuesday. Subject line: “How to Make Frozen Tofu (and Why You Should!).”

Sender: The Woks of Life.

In case you’re not familiar with the 8-year-old website run by the delightful Leung family, it is a wealth of rich information, culinary inspiration, first-rate recipes and wonderful stories about Chinese and Chinese-American cooking and culture. Want to know how to buy a wok, season it, wash it or easily prevent food from sticking to it? Dive into its Complete Wok Guide. Wondering about the difference between light soy sauce and dark? Check its guide to Chinese Sauces, Wines, Vinegars and Oils. Need to know the difference between gai lan and choy sum? Check its compendium of Chinese vegetables.

All four members of the New Jersey-based family — Bill (father/husband), Judy (mother/wife), Sarah (elder daughter) and Kaitlin (younger daughter) — contribute recipes and stories. Sarah, a 30-year-old Vassar graduate, founded the site in 2013, with the support of her parents and sister.

The Leung family behind The Woks of Life (from left): Bill, Judy, Kaitlin and Sarah / Photo by Sarah Yeoman, courtesy of The Woks of Life

“We began to get the idea for The Woks of Life, when my family — once together every night for dinner while we were growing up — found ourselves living across two time zones,” Sarah says. That was in 2011, when her father Bill (born and raised in upstate New York to immigrant Cantonese parents) and mother Judy (a native of Shanghai who immigrated to the U.S. when she was 16), were relocated to Beijing for work. (They have since moved back to New Jersey.)

“We realized that though we, the younger generation, loved to cook, we didn’t know how to make many of the traditional Chinese dishes my parents had made for us growing up,” Sarah explains.

Two years later, when Kaitlin was in college at the University of Pennsylvania and Sarah, who had recently graduated from Vassar in Media Studies, was dividing her time between New Jersey and Beijing, the site was launched. Says Sarah: “The blog became the place to record those recipes for ourselves, and — as it turns out — many others who also didn’t know how to make their childhood favorites.”

Part of The Woks of Life’s charm is that it’s so personal. Bill, who cooked in his youth at his family’s Chinese restaurant where his father was chef, recently shared a photo of his 101-year-old grandmother putting up preserves in a story about making pickled mustard greens (haam choy). Kaitlin might write about making home-made chili oil, the hot condiment of the moment. Sarah not only writes stories and recipes, but handles the business side and makes the beautiful photos. Judy, who’s fluent in three Chinese dialects, in addition to English, might send an email, seemingly out of the blue, about frozen tofu — linking to a story from which you’ll learn that freezing changes its texture, making it hold up better in soups and hot pots.

I’ve cooked quite a few of the recipes on the site, always with very good results. Some are Cantonese or Sichuanese as might be cooked in China, while others are Chinese-American, reflective of the rich and Chinese-American restaurant culture Bill grew up in. I love that there’s a section of “Chinese Take-Out” recipes.

Egg Drop Soup is a good example. It’s something you can whip up on short notice with few ingredients on hand. I tried the version in The Woks of Life Top 25 Recipes e-cookbook you get when you sign up for their newsletter; I skipped the optional yellow food coloring — a nod to Chinese-American popular restaurant culture. The version on the website calls instead for turmeric, which sounds like a better idea. Both teach a useful mini-lesson: Decent (or better, home-made) chicken broth, a pinch of white pepper and a splash of sesame oil equals a legit-tasting Chinese soup base.

My favorite recipe so far is The Woks of Life’s Turnip Cake — Lo Bak Go. The steamed-then-usually-pan-fried treat, a dim-sum favorite, is made not with turnip, but with lo bak — which Bill, though unsure, believes is the same as daikon. (All the other recipes I’ve seen call for daikon.) I’d looked far and wide for a workable recipe, and even tried (in despearation!) developing my own, before finding this one, which is superb. We have adapted it with very slight changes, most notably cooking the filling ingredients a bit less than the original calls for.

Bill writes that most Chinese restaurants “skimp on the filling ingredients,” namely shiitakes, Chinese sausage and dried shrimp, as well as the lo bak. “Most of what you get is rice flour and starch.” He’s right. We love the fact that you can now make one at home that’s even better than what we get in our favorite local dim-sum place.

The dish is traditional for Lunar New Year, as the word for daikon is a homophone for "good fortune" in the Hokkien language spoken in Fujian province — so keep it in mind for the holiday next month.

I also tried The Woks of Life’s Basic Stir-Fried Bok Choy Recipe, which turned out very well. I skipped the optional MSG; next time I’ll add a little more salt and stir-fry a minute or two longer. It’s definitely super-useful as a basic blueprint for stir-frying bok choy and similar greens.

I love the fact that Bill first encountered char siu — Chinese barbecue pork — at the Catskills Holiday Inn where his father was chef when he was a kid. His recipe is one of the best I’ve found — mostly because the marinade (Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, hoisin, molasses and spices) is so good. Also because Bill has you roast the marinated pork shoulder slabs on a rack in a roasting pan with water under the rack, to make clean-up easier. (That marinade would otherwise drip down and burn, as I can attest having tried other recipes that don’t suggest the water trick.) Min char siu (pictured above) doesn’t look as rosy-red as what you find in most American Chinese restaurants, because I skipped the red food coloring.

Juliet, our Cooks Without Borders designer and partner, has cooked The Woks of Life Stir-Fried Mustard Greens and Pork Larb, and loved both. (Yes, there are also recipes from other Asian countries besides China on the site.)

Juliet and I have both bookmarked The Woks of Life, and plan to continue visiting it — and cooking from it — often.

In the meantime, we’re excited to announce that in preparation for Lunar New Year, which will usher in The Year of the Ox beginning February 12, we’ll be featuring Sarah Leung in a live video Q&A on Thursday, January 28 from 5 to 6 p.m. Central Time. Registration for the event is available to Cooks Without Borders Premium Members.

We’ll also be spotlighting Chinese cooking this month. If that sounds enticing, bookmark Cooks Without Borders Latest Stories and sign up for our free newsletter (if you haven’t already, to receive our stories and recipes directly to your inbox). And watch this space!

RECIPE: The Woks of Life Turnip Cake

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A chocolate mousse for every mood: This classic, easy-to-make French dessert is yours to customize

The first time I had chocolate mousse was when I was five or six years old and my dad took me out to lunch — just the two of us — at a fancy French restaurant. I don’t know what the restaurant was called, but it was on the same plot of land in Los Angeles where Eataly now stands, in Century City. The restaurant was cozy, dark, and — to my five-year-old mind — terribly elegant. I wore white gloves.

I don’t remember most of what we ate, only that I couldn’t wait for dessert. We were going to have a chocolate moose, my dad told me. How fantastic — a chocolate moose! An edible Bullwinkle!

And then it landed, and it was something much better than a moose: It was a Champagne coupe filled with something chocolate, crowned with a dollop of whipped cream and topped with a candied violet.

A sugar-coated tiny purple flower you could eat! This was the best thing ever. And that mousse! In that Champagne glass! I still remember the sensation, the flavor, the mouthfeel: It was like eating a rich, chocolate cloud. Heaven.

Recently, my extreme bouts of culinary adventurism have been punctuated with longings for nostalgic French foods. Onion soup. Quiche. Chocolate mousse.

Anyone can make chocolate mousse, but you do need the right recipe. I like a classic one, which is basically melted chocolate with egg yolks mixed in, folded gently into egg whites. Chill it for three hours, and dessert is yours.

The nice thing is you can dress it up or dress it down for any mood. Spoon it into Champagne coupes if you’re feeling fancy, or jelly jars if the vibe you want is chill. Some people like to leave it in a big bowl and serve it from that, or just give everyone a spoon. You could use pretty tea cups, or ramekins or custard cups — whatever you have.

Make the mousse as sweet or dark chocolatey as you like. We’ve based our recipe on two 3.5 ounce bars of chocolate; choose the one you most love to eat. If you’re a 70 or 72% cacao person, use that. If you like sweeter (60%) or darker, adjust accordingly. My chocolate of choice is 85%. That might be a little un-desserty for dessert, so I use one 72% bar and one 85% bar: That’s perfect for me.

You can really get creative in that melting bowl of chocolate. I like to add orange liqueur, such as Grand Marnier. David Lebovitz, whose chocolate mousse proportions informed our recipe, favors Chartreuse. Julia Child called for strong brewed coffee as well as orange liqueur (which she whipped into the egg whites). Cognac could be nice, or Turkish coffee kissed with cardamom. You can use vanilla or almond extract, or even peppermint (just a touch).

Serve it naked for the full-on, chocolate-forward mousse experience, or top it with whipped cream, lightly sweetened or not, depending on how sweet you went with the mousse.

And then the (totally optional) final flourish, geared to your audience or expressive of your mood. Multi-colored or chocolate sprinkles! Slivered candied orange peel or cacao nibs! Dried rose petals! A candied violet!

If you love this recipe as much as I do, you’ll want to keep a couple of extra chocolate bars on hand for whenever you might want to conjure something special with very little effort. As long as you have four eggs, you’ll be good to go.

RECIPE: Your Favorite Chocolate Mousse

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A stellar Quiche Lorraine (custardy, bacony, buttery-crusted!) is much easier to make than you might think

For many cooks, making a quiche is a big deal. That’s not the way it’s seen in France, where it’s considered a simple, everyday dish. Really!

“Nothing fancy; I’m just making a quiche,” is the way a friend will issue a casual dinner or lunch invite. Often there will be more than one kind. The friend never seems to have broken a sweat.

That’s why when we set out to develop a recipe for quintessential quiche Lorraine, we wanted to keep things quick and simple as possible.

And we did! Our Quintessential Quiche Lorraine can be accomplished with less than an hour of active work — and that includes prep, making the crust, and cleaning up, which I’m able to nearly finish just as the filled quiche is going into the oven. While the quiche bakes (35 to 45 minutes) and rests 10 minutes or so, you can make a simple green salad, and voilà — a fabulous dinner or brunch.

How simple did I want to go? Not as simple as what I did a hundred years ago when I was learning to cook: Buy a pre-made crust and fill it with scrambled eggs and grated jack and cheddar and call it a day. But it had to be decidedly simpler than the majestic, lofty, ethereal version Thomas Keller offered in his 2004 Bouchon cookbook.

Here’s the way Keller described the ideal quiche:

“A great quiche has a rich, flaky crust and a custard about two inches deep. When it is sliced, the edges should be clean, and the exposed custard should have a smooth, almost liquid sheen. When it arrives hot, it should tremble as if were on the verge of collapse. It maintains its form—just—but you can see what’s going to happen when you take a bite. It collapses on the plate, molten, spreading out luxuriously.”

So what was quiche Lorraine originally supposed to be like, back when it was invented? Unlike moussaka, or butter chicken, there is no charming origin story attached to quiche Lorraine. Or at least I was unable to turn one up. In fact, I was able to find little reliable information about its history.

Larousse Gastronomique, generally accepted to be the authoritative encyclopedia of French cuisine, says that quiches in general originated in Lorraine in the 16th century, and it defines quiche as “an open tart filled with a mixture of beaten eggs, crème fraîche and pieces of bacon, served hot as a first course or hors d’oeuvre.” It points out that the word quiche derives from the German Küchen, meaning “cake.” In Nancy, the former capital of the Lorraine region, its local name is “féouse.” Originally it had a bread-dough crust.

So if once upon a time a quiche Lorraine’s filling was just eggs, crème fraîche and bacon, what is it today? It can be a few things. At its most essential, it is still just that: eggs, cream and bacon. More often there are also onions, which happen to go beautifully with the bacon. And also quite often, there is cheese.

Where did the onions come from? The entry for Quiche lorraine on Wikipedia France has a helpful clue, citing Guy Cabourdin, author of Everyday Life in Lorraine in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Éditions Hachette, 1984). Cabourdin, according to the entry, points to a kinship between the original quiche and tarte flambée — the famous onion-and-bacon tart of Alsace, Lorraine’s neighbor. So perhaps we don’t have to wonder too hard where those onions came from.

When I started developing this recipe, I naïvely assumed there was supposed to be cheese in a quiche Lorraine. Keller put both onions and cheese (Comté or Emmenthaler) in the Quiche Lorraine recipe in Bouchon. But once I dove into the history a bit — and saw that Julia Child did not use cheese, I thought I’d try it without. (Julia also does without onions.)

You know what? It’s good both ways — with cheese and without.

Paradoxically, leaving out the cheese allowed me to get the texture I was after — Keller’s “smooth, almost liquid sheen.” That’s why it is the cheese-less version that I prefer: It’s wonderfully custardy, a bit lighter and loftier.

The photo below gives a sense of its custardy texture (see the sheen on the top half of the custard?), while the photo at the top of the story shows the cheese-ful one. I think they give a sense of the difference.

Quintessential Quiche Lorraine, made with bacon, onions, eggs and cream — hold the cheese. Our recipe also offers a variation that includes Gruyère, Comté or Emmentaler.

Again, both are legit. Our recipe for Quintessential Quiche Lorraine is cheese-free, but a variation at the end tells you how to easily add some Gruyère (or Comté or Emmenthaller, or whatever you want.)

Our crust, inspired by one my friend Danièle Delpeuch taught me years ago, is a pâte brisée (short crust) that comes together in a snap in the food processor. Because it’s made so quickly and handled so little, glutens don’t have time to develop, and it stays tender, even if you don’t chill it before and after rolling it out. It’s really a wham-bam-thank-you-madame kind of crust.

That crust is a pleasure to work with it. It’s easy to handle, it stays together and it’s generous enough to easily fit a deep-dish pie pan without having to roll it out too thin. If you do get a tear or hole once you fit it into the pan, don’t worry — you can patch it with the trimmings.

And the crust is good — super buttery and pretty flaky. Is it as fabulous as the one that takes an entire giant page, a heavy-duty stand mixer with a paddle attachment, several trips of the dough in and out of the refrigerator to chill and 50 to 65 minutes of blind-baking before it is filled? Um, no. But it’s so easy to throw together that it puts us in the mood to make a quiche every couple of weeks. With a little practice, you can have it in the oven in 20 minutes.

I hope you like it as much as we do at our house. In normal times, with all that cream, it might seem like a ridiculous indulgence. These days, it has been one of those special treats that make the current state of the world just a little more tolerable. I’d say that you could just have a thin slice and focus on the salad, but that would be dishonest.

I’m pretty sure you’ll want a second piece.

RECIPE: Quintessential Quiche Lorraine

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Around the world in chicken soup: Flavors of the Yucatán shine in Jenn Louis' Sopa de Lima

This is the fourth story in our series “Around the World in Chicken Soup.”

I really miss traveling, and especially traveling to Mexico — which in the last five years had become almost an addiction for my husband and me. Our last two trips were to the Yucatán Peninsula, where we mostly explored the beautiful towns and cities inland — Valladolid and Mérida — and coastal towns like Sisal and Campeche and Champotón. And of course the archeological sites: Chichen Itza, and Uxmal and Ek Balam.

The peninsula’s bright and sunny flavors came back to us deliciously in the form of a recipe I found in Jenn Louis’ delightful new book, The Chicken Soup Manifesto: Sopa de Lima — the region’s tangy, limey chicken soup.

As Louis writes at the start of the book, it’s always great to use homemade chicken stock in soups “because the end result is worth the time, and your home will smell amazing.” So true.

But there’s not always time to make stock. And when you jazz up a chicken soup with assertive flavors, like the exhilarating spices that went into the Tibetan Thukpa we wrote about in December, the convenience of using store-bought broth or stock as a base becomes much more attractive.

That’s definitely the case with Louis’ Sopa de Lima. The original version in her book calls for starting with either home-made chicken stock or water, but because the chicken pieces cook in the liquid less than 20 minutes, I chose store-brought broth instead of water.

In the Yucatán, the lime they use for this soup is the region’s native lima ágria. Because we can’t get it here, Louis brilliantly swaps a combination of regular (Persian) lime and grapefruit juice, and that works great. Spices and herbs — cinnamon stick, black peppercorns, cloves, garlic, oregano and bay leaves — add some depth of flavor and balance the brightness; a big handful of chopped cilantro and hot, crisp tortilla strips are the finishing touch.

You could certainly swap the tortilla strips for store-bought tortilla chips if you don’t feel like frying the strips, but just-fried, they do add a lovely flourish. (And it’s a great way to use corn tortillas that have seen better days.)

OK, now I’m craving that soup, and that crunch. Hope you like it as much as I do.

RECIPE: Jenn Louis’ Sopa de Lima
Read: “Around the world in chicken soup: First stop, Rio de Janeiro, for a comforting bowl of canja de galinha”

Read: “Jenn Louis’ new ‘Chicken Soup Manifesto’ celebrates the feel-better elixir as expressed in 64 countries”

Read: “Around the world in chicken soup: Next stop Tibet, for a fresh and fiery bowl of thukpa”