Recipes By Sara Bonisteel
35 recipes found
‘Twin Peaks’ Cherry Pie
This is a composite sketch of the perfect cherry pie. The buttery, well-seasoned crust is adapted from the Cherry Pie That’ll Kill Ya at Butter and Scotch, a bar and bakery in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that holds an occasional Twin Peaks Tuesday, with cocktails and diner foods named after the characters in David Lynch’s quirky 1990s television show. It uses a mock buttermilk crust, meaning that you curdle regular whole milk with apple cider vinegar instead of having to buy buttermilk. Instructions are given for a lattice top, but you could make it with a double crust or the chevron shown here, depending on your mood. The filling is all about maximizing the flavor of pure sour cherries (sometimes labeled pie cherries). This is the pie to make at the height of sour-cherry season, or using a bounty you freeze yourself (see the tip below). Frozen sour cherries are also available online. The pie will keep for up to five days, refrigerated and wrapped in plastic.
Cutout Sugar Cookies
This recipe is adapted from a 1981 Mimi Sheraton recipe for Murbeteig, a pie and sugar-cookie dough from Germany. This buttery cookie isn’t too sweet, which makes it an excellent canvas for sugary holiday adornments, like Royal Icing. The dough warms quickly because of the high butter content, so work fast to roll, cut out and transfer the dough to the baking sheets to get the best results.
Shoofly Pie
Shoofly pie is often thought of as the cake baked in a pie shell, or so wrote Jean Hewitt, The New York Times food writer who offered this recipe in the paper in 1965. This pie was served at a Pennsylvania Dutch luncheon hosted by the International Cuisine Group of the College Woman’s Club of Westfield, N.J., in the spring of that year. One of the organizers dug up the recipe from her mother’s “Housekeeper’s Scrap Book, 1896.” There were four versions of the pie in the book; this was the one marked: “We like this one better.”
Raspberry Cream Pie
Here's a pie for the middle of summer, when the raspberries are ripe and dessert should be cool and creamy. Think of it as vanilla pudding in a pie shell, a messily delicious way to showcase the flavor of fresh raspberries. Ruth P. Casa-Emellos, The Times's home economist, developed this recipe in the summer of 1952. It was published as French raspberry pie but later appeared in the recipe booklet “Fruit Pies: Delightful Confections Starring Fresh Fruits” as raspberry cream pie. We’ve made the red currant jelly optional. If you choose to include it, you’ll get a gemlike glow and a crust-and-jam combination reminiscent of a homemade Pop-Tart.
Korean Spicy Chicken Stew (Dakdori Tang)
This recipe, from the Brooklyn chef Sohui Kim, is an ideal one-pot weeknight meal, as everything — chicken included — is thrown into the pot. Soy sauce, fiery gochugaru (Korean dried red-pepper flakes), fish sauce and radish kimchi give this stew a deeply funky, satisfying flavor. During the summer, Ms. Kim grills a few of the chicken pieces (see note) and tosses them into the sauce to braise with the sauce. The kimchi called for here is not cabbage kimchi, it is kkakdugi, sometimes listed as cubed radish kimchi or cubed moo radish kimchi, available at Korean grocery stores.
King Cake
This Carnival cake is more like a brioche, with a bitingly sweet frosting and sugared pecans for crunch. Browse the baby shower section of a party supply store for the Mardi Gras king cake baby, where plastic babies are often sold by the dozen. A large dried bean works too. Tradition dictates that whoever finds the baby is king or queen of the party (and also has to bring the king cake to the next Carnival celebration).
Scrapple
Most recipes for scrapple, a dish popular at diners in eastern Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic, call for offal rather than cooked pork. But ours, first published in December 1953 and later in the Food News Department’s booklet “Encore for the Roast,” was devised as a way to use up leftover pork loin. You can substitute in 1 1/2 cups puréed pork loin or start from scratch with ground pork. You’ll need a food processor and a double boiler for this recipe. The latter will save you 45 minutes active stirring time.
Citrus Layer Cake With Orange and Chocolate Frosting
This cake appeared in The Times in 1954 as Halloween Cake, the centerpiece for a children’s party. When you strip away the original instructions for decoration (dyed yellow frosting and a black cat of piped chocolate), you’re left with a luscious citrus cake that works for any occasion, All Hallows’ Eve included.
Chinese Wheat Wrappers
These Chinese wheat wrappers are popular in northern China, where they are paired with anything stir-fried in small shreds, such as moo shu pork. The author Carolyn Phillips is a proponent of using Korean flour, which is lower in gluten than American all-purpose flour. Adding a layer of oil between the dough before rolling it into a circle is a trick that allows the layers to be peeled apart after cooking for a thinner wrapper. But even unpeeled, these wrappers are fairly thin.
Moo Shu Pork
This is not your corner takeout's moo shu pork, but it is popular in China, where its northern origins are debated, according to the author Carolyn Phillips. The egg is thought to resemble the flowers of the sweet olive (osmanthus fragrans) shrub, hence its Chinese name, muxi rou, or osmathus blossom pork. The ingredients are stir-fried in batches to cook evenly and retain the vibrancy of the colors. The sauce is intentionally salty, so underseason the stir-fry and add just a dab of sauce to each wheat wrapper.
Bananas Foster
The New York Times food editor Jane Nickerson first published this recipe in 1957 as part of an article on New Orleans-style Creole cooking. Adapted from Brennan’s restaurant, this recipe is meant to be a showstopper. But it’s deceptively easy. Be sure to have a lid at the ready to extinguish the flame in case things get out of hand. If you cannot find banana liqueur, just add a teaspoon more rum.