Recipes By Tamar Adler
22 recipes found
Braised Lettuce on Anchovy Toast
For this braised lettuce — especially ambrosial if, as suggested here, a discreet anchovy or 10 are permitted — everything is fast and minimal. Put thin wedges of lettuce to quickly and lightly wilt in warm butter and broth and spoon it over hot bread. That’s all.
Cauliflower With Capers, Black Olives and Chiles
This bold-flavored cauliflower dish is a perfect riposte to winter blues. It combines three sunny Mediterranean flavors with white and wintry cauliflower, which is brightened hardily. It all takes under half an hour, because the only real cooking is boiling the cauliflower, and the rest is just letting the olives, capers, chiles and some garlic and lemon get acquainted.
Chilaquiles a la Lydia Child
These chilaquiles are better made with old tortillas than with young ones — though the latter will work, as long as you let them get stale in a 200-degree-or-so oven for an hour. The other important ingredient is bacon fat, which can be old or new, but must be the result of cooked bacon past. Together, with garlic, pepper, onion, chile and tomato, the two become the very rich and appealing base of this dish that is somewhere between a solid and a stew. At the very end, there is an egg, which is filling and enlivening at once.
Leek or Spinach Soufflé Pudding
When a soufflé is cooked slowly, as this one is, in a water bath, it often has the word ‘‘pudding’’ appended to it. I like the word, so I don’t mind the practice, but this soufflé is airy and closer to its Webster’s etymology — ‘‘a murmuring or blowing sound’’ — than the appendage suggests. It has less flour than a regular soufflé. It needs less scaffolding. This soufflé is equally good with either vegetable; it can be made hours ahead and will rise again upon reheating.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes With Yogurt And Sesame Seeds
You can live happily now and feel prudent enough to live tomorrow if you cautiously employ your seeds on the last of last autumn’s sweet potatoes. This is my favorite of all the dishes my brother has ever served at the very seasonal Franny’s, the restaurant in Brooklyn where he is the chef. It disappears from his menu the instant the plants that grow from seeds begin to sprout, making it, like the plants themselves, available for only a few months each year.
Egg Drop Soup
This soup is very easy to make and very delicious. It is in fact so easy to make that it really is the sort of thing you can summon the will to cook even when you arrive home from work hungry. I originally made it out of nostalgia for a soup I had in college that endows its eater with good soup manners. I think it would work just as nicely with beef broth.
Health Soup
This is a recipe for a very big batch, because it freezes well; in addition to death and taxes, we can be confident of future illness. If you want less soup, halve the recipe. If the sick person likes noodles when sick, I add a single serving of rice noodles for each serving, in the last few minutes of warming it.
Cold Fried Chicken
This is the first cold fried chicken I ever tasted, at Prune, in the East Village, where the chef, Gabrielle Hamilton, makes everything as slanted and far-fetched as nature itself. I don’t know why she served it cold, not hot; I only know that I loved it, and do still. She served it with butter lettuce and buttermilk dressing, and it is very good that way. It is also very good with hot sauce.
Unmeasured Crepes
Disorienting as this may seem, there is no unit of measurement for the recipe below. If I added “teacup,” I worry that it would prevent you from using an au lait bowl, a Champagne coupe or a coffee urn, when in fact they will all serve very well. (Figure that a pint glass will feed four.)
Roast Oysters and Tomato Butter
These oysters are a good way to start a festive meal. One reason is that oysters seem to have built-in festivity — even when they were abundant to the point of local glut, they were eaten happily in bars that served only them, festively. The part of this recipe that requires any skill or focus is the shucking. This is a good skill to have anyway, and can't be gotten other than by practicing, meaning an hors d'oeuvre that is both nice for your guests and an exercise in self-edification. Once they’ve been opened, the oysters need little other attention.
Sweet-Corn Salad
Here's a recipe for sweet-corn salad designed to preserve the dignity of the solitary diner. The salad itself requires minimal cooking, which means the small amount of time you spend on it can all be attentive and quite personal. It amounts to simple cutting of kernels from the last of the season's corn cobs, and warming them in good olive oil with garlic, some scallions and a bit of chopped fresh vegetables, then finishing it all with chopped herbs. If corn season has ended, tender butter beans from a can, drained and rinsed, make a perfect substitute. Served with a wedge of good cheese and a thick cut of bread, the salad becomes part of a simple but complete meal, to be eaten in your own good company.
Pickled Shrimp
Shrimp season is summer and fall in marshy coastal Georgia and South Carolina and in the Louisiana Gulf. If you can find shrimp from any of those places at those times of year, get enough for eating for several weeks, and make this marinated or pickled shrimp, which lasts that long. There is a version of a recipe for this everywhere, over eons, including in Sciappi’s "The Works." His recipe is for a fish called gilthead, but the method and result are almost identical. Something very similar to this exact recipe was popular through the middle of last century as Pickled Shrimp, or Shrimp Sea Island. And the Alabama chef Frank Stitt has a recipe almost exactly like this one, in one of his fine cookbooks.
Boeuf à la Mode
At the apogee of cooking in vino is this dish, which involves a whole beef roast. As befits a thing that humans have been eating since before computers, before cars, before guns — perhaps before science itself — boeuf à la mode tastes less invented than it does discovered. The best strategy is to cook it a day before you plan to serve it; it tastes better reheated than immediately, and the seasoning is most even and best distributed when it has time to spend in its rich broth.
Herbed Tomatoes
Tomatoes grow so many places that all herbs seem to have some sort of agreement worked out with them. And the polyamorous tomato seems, among a lucky few ingredients, to carry on genuine and stirring and entirely unique relationships with each herb. Here is a recipe for herbed tomatoes inspired by something my friend Emma made years ago, which she called, enigmatically, Tomatoes Provençal. In any case, mine are neither Provençal nor provincial, but à l’Americaine, using herbs that I usually eat in food from Vietnam and Thailand but that grow happily beside tomatoes in each of those countries — as well as in ours — in what may or may not be a French provincial preparation.
New Crab Louis
Crab Louis is a rather perfect meal for a summer night, particularly in this slimmed down, very homemade, ketchup-less version. With nothing processed or sweetened, an updated Crab Louis is simply good American crab, Little Gem- or Boston Bibb-lettuce, and pickle- and caper-studded mayonnaise whisked from olive oil and the best, richest-yolked eggs you can find. The effect is as straightforward as the original's, but the details are resolutely contemporary.
Baked Clams
This recipe for baked clams tried to bridge the gap between the glory of a clam pulled from a clambake and the unfortunate, common mediocrity of ubiquitous baked stuffed clams. It contains some of the usual suspects — onion and celery — and some unusual ones, like clam juice and vermouth. Importantly, it doesn't require clam shucking, which is a dangerous occupation, best avoided unless you are very brave.
Blancmange
A good blancmange will have a slight wobble but not be so firm that it feels (as Amanda Hesser once wrote) like “eating a rubber ball.” I like the amount of gelatin here; if you don’t, decrease it by ¼ teaspoon and say a prayer, which will probably be answered. Your chosen mold doesn’t matter: I have used tart pans and spring-form pans and old blancmange molds, which are easy to find (or at least fun to seek).
A Very Updated Vegetable Chartreuse
This is the rare recipe for which I think it important to look at the picture — this updated one, not an intimidating old one — before beginning. A single glance confirms that the dish is not technically difficult to make, though it is a bit laborious. The leaves hold all the fillings, and the whole thing retains an odd calm beauty, the way a tree in bloom does.
Chilled Beet-and-Sauerkraut Soup With Horseradish and Crème Fraîche
This recipe — invented by Camino’s Russell Moore because he couldn’t bring himself to discard the salty, pickly liquid left over from sauerkraut — is often on Camino’s menu in the winter. He tells me it is an especially good one to make at home, because so many of us have old jars of sauerkraut cowering in the backs of our refrigerators. If my own refrigerator is any gauge, he is correct.
Steak Haché
Salisbury steak is an instance of an old recipe with enduring value. It is a good idea and a good name, though its reputation as a TV dinner has stained the prettiness somewhat. All that the old recipe — and its many variations — needed was a little updating. Here is a Frenchier and more contemporary version — rich with porcini butter, piquant with salsa verde. It is old-fashioned enough to be fun and elegant enough for a dinner party — and most definitely does not need a hamburger bun.
Vegetables à la Grecque
I wrote that I found these perfect — the ur-preserves — and then tasted them again. And I can only affirm it as a truth. They are richer than plain vinegar pickles, which lets them be their own hors d'oeuvre, in a small chilled bowl, with olives perhaps alongside. They are deeper tasting and more eloquent than crudité. They are piquant enough to awaken the appetite without sating it. I love them, and they are very simple to make.
Fireplace Trout
Here is a recipe for trout like the one we ate in Maine. I now add garlic cooked in olive oil, because I have watched enigmatic Basques add it to regal white hake they cook above coals burned from oak. It goes well with the simple trout's innate subtlety and faint whiff of wood smoke, and it all ends up resolutely likable. This takes only a few minutes, and mostly needs only the fire that's already in your fireplace. I think it prudent to cook the garlic in a separate pan on the stove, leaving the fish the only thing to attend to on the actual fire — at least until you are confident and happy before the old Egyptian monster. It is doable all in one pan, but it is quite important to not let something simple and fun and ancient begin to seem complicated.