pie for the people

more excerpts from Mary Cooks.....   

thank you, Mom, for making such delicious memories!  

excerpts, Pies and Tarts..... Mary Cooks

Happy Thanksgiving, stay home, stay safe, eat pie! 

xoxo

mary had a little lamb

Easter, Ventosa Drive, from our Mary Cooks family calendar

i promised you the Lamb Cake recipe before Easter!

it is in the final installment of the food memoir created for my mom's 70th birthday.
i called the chapter Next Generation and the focus was on all the fun baking and cooking shared between Mary and her two granddaughters, Abigail and Charlotte, and with and for her Butterworth neighborhood of kids, many of whom adopted my mom as their own, and vice versa....

but, i was never able to finish assembling and publishing all the remaining chapters so here it is piecemeal, along with a story about the recipe and cake mold used to bake it. enjoy!!

the story of the lamb cake

mom, about the darling rabbit and duckling and hen shaped butter cookies on the platter with the lamb cake.  do we have the recipe for those in our Cookies chapter?  i think you gave me the cookie cutters when you moved from Ventosa to Mendham!

cookie cutters ...

the recipe, typed for the cookbook 

and, i see the chocolate and marzipan glazed egg cakes in the photo as well but did not come across the recipe. i think you made it with a Dromedary pound cake mix as well, and with Shirley's Chocolate Glaze but am not sure?  perhaps you can refresh my repertoire with those recipes, along with the pastel marzipan frosting, too?

mom's original notes 

mini egg cake molds 

mom, backyard egg hunt for the neighborhood

Ventosa Drive kids taking swings at the pinata...

happy baking! happy memory making! stay safe! xx

baking bread

the recipes that follow are from the Daily Bread installment of Mary Cooks, a food memoir and recipe collection my family created together just over 15 years ago to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday. 

as a child, i loved the Casatielli, though i did not know its formal name back then.   it was my Uncle Richard who offered that detail when he shared the recipe for the cookbook project.  

as at Christmas, my Grandmother Marie made this for her family along with other traditional Italian treats.

to me, it indeed tasted like a buttery brioche and had the added magical feature of the egg tucked beneath the 'cross' of dough in the basket ...  

the Easter Braid was another favorite, with sugar glaze, lemon and raisins flavoring the bread.
this recipe is credited to one of my mom's friends in our  neighborhood.

my mother is famous for her cakes, too.

Easter in our house is traditionally time for the Lamb Cake, baked in a cast iron lamb shaped mold and decorated with marshmallow icing and coconut sprinkles, and for Glazed Egg Cakes, delectable pound cakes with either chocolate or marzipan glaze and decorative rosettes on top.  

i will feature those by the weekend as we move closer toward the holiday. 

wire baskets in my city kitchen along with a butter mold from my mom's collection....

stay home, stay safe. stay connected, 

xx

cafe curtains

altro paradiso

cook together

Mom, how surprised and delighted and then again surprised i was upon the release last month of HRH The Duchess of Sussex Meghan's community cookbook, a collaboration with the Hubb Community Kitchen and  women affected by the Grenfell Tower tragedy in West London.

photo credit, TOGETHER
with forward by HRH The Duchess of Susssex

Meghan refers to her book project as a "tremendous labor of love."  Like our family food memoir, it took nine months to create!  In her foreward she speaks to the power of food to tell stories and create meaningful connections: "The cookbook is a celebration of life, community and the impact of coming together." (p.9)

photo credited to TOGETHER cookbook

Aside from gathering your recipes and the reminiscences of family and friends to create Mary Cooks fifteen years ago this month, one of my favorite parts of the process was researching the social history of the fund-raising community cookbook in a scholarly work called Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (Janet Theophano, 2002). The author's words offered an added dimension to my own endeavor and today lend credence to Meghan's culinary and community driven instincts as well:

"The antecedents of the ubiquitous community fund-raising cookbook with which we are all familiar reach back... at least to the 1600's. Women generated their culinary knowledge collaboratively and wrote their cookbooks cooperatively."

She brought the meaning of community cooking home to me in literal terms,  so much so that i named the first chapter of our project The Community Cooks as a nod to your local women's auxiliary and the food and recipes we kids knew through the TWIG community cookbooks you published to benefit the township hospital.  It seemed the perfect place from which to begin. 

Fast forward to Together: Our Community Cookbook launch party at Kensington Palace in mid September: bouquets of assorted fresh flowers were placed in simple glass vases in the tented area, with perfectly printed luncheon menus featuring highlights from the women's recipes taken from the new book.  The details and care were apparent, from the geometric blue motif on the tent which both echoed the book design and reflected the heritage of The Hubb women, to the warmth of the words on the menus placed on the tables: TO SHARE... TOGETHER.  It was truly a stunning and symbolic celebration of coming together, all lovingly coordinated before Meghan's wedding and official role with the Royal Foundation.

Kensington Palace book launch party,
photos courtesy Simon Pearce, People Magazine, twitter

Flashback. How I remember dashing along Broadway on a perfect October day to buy roses and sunflowers and miscellaneous fall blooms for your 70th surprise birthday party, then having my recipe typist and default party assistant Victoria drive me to New Jersey with the flowers and the party favors in the trunk and your favorite Saint Honore birthday cake on my lap, artfully recreated by my bakery owner neighbor Nacer since importing the confection from San Francisco was out of the question. Before the party, I quickly cut stems, formed bouquets and placed flowers on each table in colorful, hand crafted market baskets.  

The mini jigsaw puzzle party favors assembled from photos of various "signature Mary" cakes and packaged in small white bakery boxes tied with red and white twine were the final touch, with black and white xeroxed images of family, friends and food from the book pages scattered as well on each guest table to suggest the contents of the soon to be published cookbook chapters. 

Abigail and Charlotte, just little girls at the time, had the added surprise of a small "doll-scape" at their places, incorporating my old dollhouse furniture and figures to set a small baking scene before them.  

We had balloons, too but i think they were delivered - i would have remembered driving with them in the car, no?!  

Pam penned the calligraphy place cards (Meghan would approve!) while Eleanor delivered my toast to spare me the stage fright (Meghan would not approve) and Hugh and Dad managed the music,  Neapolitan canzoni, of course, a nod to Grandma Marie...

My mistakes with the book project and party were several. For starters, i should have limited myself to 50 recipes as Meghan did. I realized this at the end of the nine month book "gestation" when i was assembling the final chapter, Next Generation.  

• Had i focused on only the purely authentic Italian family recipes, even just the biscotti, breads and cakes, along with the handwritten and typed letters sharing family tales and cooking tips, perhaps i may have had a more edited version and a sweet story that could have been professionally published as a children's book.  Alas. i did not know this at the start or see how the project would unfold even to me!  (In truth, even before Meghan, Alice Waters sent her daughter off to Yale with a 50 recipe keepsake volume as a gift.  In so doing, she happened to inadvertently launch a sustainable food movement at the University, too!) Lesson learned, scale is everything! 

• Additionally, i should have filmed or recorded your brother Bobby's toast at the party, as in it he shared essential family history about your mother and you -- how Grandma Marie's vision for her own entertaining was big, in a way too big to execute, and that you became her right hand, in the kitchen and at home in general.  He also spoke about how you would hide all the biscotti around the house so that he and Richard and Artie could not find and eat them but that they always managed to do so anyway....  

• And, though the party photos were fun keepsakes and we created a Mary Cooks calendar and notecards post fete, the photographer i hired, probably through Craig's List, was not quite a fit for our intimate gathering and added unwanted anxiety to the event, alas. 

Nonetheless, no regrets! We celebrate your milestone 85 years on October 25th and embrace that i must come by my own "too big" vision honestly, given that the family history chapter plus five recipe volumes managed to be self published with the help of three different graphic artists, leaving about seven subsequent installments still remaining, neatly stacked in their draft formats in the rustic painted pie safe that doubles as storage space in my office.  

Maybe in this ever changing digital age, i will still find a way to get the remaining pages off to press.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday to you!  Let's continue to #cooktogether for years to come! (Meghan would approve!) 

Love,

p.s. see you later today and yes, i will be traveling with yet another cake on my lap!

The f Word

I caught the end of Gordon Ramsay's cooking show The f Word last night and was reminded that I had not yet written about last week's conversation at STORY on Women in Food, at which the f word got dropped a bit in a wide range of topics masterfully moderated by proprietor Rachel Schectman: 

fresh

fresh story

fashion

food

food & wine magazine
foodies

freda

jack's wife freda

front door

frustration

feminism

friends

family

fashion

film

firsts

focus

founders

fun

follow your heart

I loved co-founder Maya Jankelowitz's expression that part of the recipe behind Jack's Wife Freda's success is the dedicated daily practice of empathy, generosity and hospitality.

For her, everything starts at the front door, where a connection with the visitor must be made and a tone set for an environment in which to recognize the guest.

She learned this during her arrival to New York from Israel and initial stint as hostess at SOHO's iconic Balthazar but I have the impression that it is simply who she and Dean are as human beings.

Maya's instinctive and adept focus on the guest was beautifully exemplified at STORY.
Upon pulling up in a cab outside for pre-event set up, she noticed a few of us early bird attendees starting to wilt in the heat on the sidewalk outside (or maybe we were whining about it just a bit...)

"Do you need any help?" we asked her and her husband as they set down a large plastic thermos and several paper shopping bags on the sidewalk.

"No," she declined." Then, as she slipped through the store's front door, she turned to us.
"I will bring you a glass of lemonade once we set up, " she said.

The doors to the store opened for us a short time later and we fashionable foodies filed inside to collapse into seats, sighing in relief at the blast of cool air that greeted us.

We then noticed a small bar area and as made our way there, I overheard Maya saying to one of the store team, "There she is."

As I stepped toward the counter, she expertly navigated the crowd to hand me a glass of ice cold minted lemonade.

"Oh no," I smiled, "please don't do that."
Making eye contact and smiling back, she replied matter of factly, "You were first to arrive outside. I promised."

As a lifelong merchant who has spent a few years opposite the customer myself, my heart warmed to this genuine gesture and laser sharp focus on the art of intuitive hospitality.

The lemonade was as magical as the moment Maya created for me.
The recipe below was perfectly printed on STORY's vibrant mural wall: 

When Maya signed my cookbook following the talk, she asked me if I had been to the restaurant.

"Yes," I replied, "I have visited them both, once with a friend from Vienna who loved the cafe ambiance." I promptly named the lavender waffles as a breakfast I had tried and loved.

Of course, this delicate dish, included in the new cookbook, is officially called Rose Water Waffles and has nothing to do with lavender.  It is inspired by the floral distilled water preparation used in the Middle Eastern pastries Maya knew growing up. 

I attribute my flub to the high heat and to my small shopping frenzy involving the purchase of the cookbook and happy discovery of the restaurant's signature striped t-shirts offered for sale by STORY (more fab than Comme des Garcons, I exclaimed to Maya), and the complimentary issue of Food & Wine presented to us by powerhouse Editor in Chief Nilou Motamed and finally, to my being slightly starstruck by evening's f-antastic end...

Apologies to Chef Julia!  

Jack's Wife Freda cookbook, Food & Wine Magazine...
www.thisisstory.com 
http://jackswifefreda.com
(event photos are mine, STORY mural by Claudia Pearson)