August 2, 2019 • 27 mins
When it comes to inventing recipes, every expert has their own signature style. In the final episode of this season, Marc is joined by New York Times columnist and veteran recipe writer Melissa Clark. Marc and Melissa discuss how they think about ingredients and flavor profiles, the easiest way to communicate the steps involved in cooking a dish, and what inspires them when they’re whipping up something brand-new.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. I probably have written a million recipes
like that in terms of sandwiches, and it's still struggle
to figure out the exact way to tell people to
put the bread together a peanut, butter and jelly recipe.
You think that's going to be easy, and that's one
of the hardest. Welcome to Food three sixty, the podcast
(00:23):
that serves up some serious of food for thought. I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know me
as a chef and a New York restaurateur. In today's episode,
we're going to explore the art of cookbooks and recipe writing.
That was Melissa Clark you heard at the start of
the show. She's written over forty cookbooks and over fifty
recipes a year for The New York Times. She's also
(00:44):
collaborated with some amazing chefs out there. She's written cookbooks
with Daniel Balloud, David Boulet, Claudia Fleming. She also wrote
a pretty popular article about deep fried twinkies. Melissa, thanks
so much for joining me deep fried Twinkies. Why did
you do that to the world. I love the fact
that I can die knowing that I started the deep
fried twinkie phenomenon. I broke that story. I didn't invent
(01:06):
the twinkies, but I broke the story as a journalist.
So this is what happened. There is a restaurant in
Brooklyn that was a chip shop and I loved this place.
I used to go and get fish and chips all
the time, and they had a deep fried twinkie on
the menu and I thought, no, I got to do
a story about this, because who's ever heard of a
deep fried twinkie? And I interviewed the chip friar and
(01:26):
he said, well, you know, when you're in Scotland and
you're frying chips, you put anything that doesn't move into
the deep friar because you're so bored because it's an
overnight job. You know, people get fish and chips late
at night. That's how the deep fried mars bar became
a thing in the UK. So he was in America.
He was doing it here and he went to the
deli and what did they have but twinkies, And he figured,
let me try it. And it was fabulous because when
(01:48):
you deep fray a twinkie, the sponge cake really absorbs
the oil and gets so crunchy. And then this is
the best part. The cream inside vaporizes so you don't
get that creamy feeling. But it abused the higher cake.
It's so good. And I wrote the article and then
all of a sudden, all of those you know, um
state fairs that have the deep fried this and that
on the stick got the idea, Hey, let's put a
(02:11):
deep fried twinky on a stick. If that's my only
claim to fame, I'm I'm happy. So you and I
have known each other for quite a while. Um, how
did we mean? I remember we did this article together,
but we met before then. We met at a dinner
at the French Culinary Institute when it was called that,
and it was a truffle dinner, and I think we
sat next to each other, and I remember I did
a truffle cream spinach with a fried oyster on it.
(02:32):
Do you remember that dinner? I do remember that dinner.
Now did I like that dish? I hope I liked it?
Or did I say something nasty? Well? I don't know.
If you were writing about so your third generation Brooklyn night,
how would you say New York has influenced you? You know,
there's a Jewish New York food culture that's very much
part of me and that I embrace. In fact that
I'm embracing it right now. I'm doing a story on
black and white cookies, so it's always part of everything
(02:53):
I write. Bagels and locks, black and white cookies, pastrami,
chicken soup, all of these things I am made of them,
was brought up with them. But then I think about
the other really big influence, and that is French cuisine,
which you and I have in common. I grew up
spending every single summer in France eating French food, and
my parents were big Julia Child disciples, and they cooked
(03:13):
every recipe out of her book, and they'd have these
dinner parties, and then you know the rest of the year,
which was very Brooklyn centric. So those two things are
always there that I'm not going to speak to you
in French. Arc There's no way I'm going to speak
to you in French. My French is abysmal. If I'm
(03:34):
ever in France with you, I'll speak French because when
I'm there, you have to do it. But I can't
do it here. You know, going to France didn't make
me want to write about food. It made me want
to eat and cook food. What maybe want to write
about food? Was reading about food was MFK. Fisher and
was just having this burning desire to right and then
figuring out, well, how can I do this? How can
I write about the thing that I think about the most?
(03:54):
I mean, that's the thing I think about the most,
so I should write about that. Right. It seems to
be working for you. Who else you look up to
in food writing world? You know, there's a lot of
writing about food that takes place in regular novels, and
I would zero in on that. Every time I read
a novel, I go to the food part of it,
like Tolstoy. You know, it's like I wanted to eat
a million oysters because of Anna Karenina or Don Quixote,
(04:16):
where Sancho Panza is romancing this idea of eating bread
and onions together with salt and olive oil. You know,
when I start thinking, I'm like, Okay, that doesn't sound
very good on the surface, bread, olive oil, salt, onions.
But then when you think about it, you're like, Okay,
this is a really good bread, right, It's really good
sour dough bread. You toast it, or you know, warm
it over fire, and then you take your onion and
(04:38):
you also put that over the fire, and so it
gets juicy and kind of charred, and then you rub
it on the bread and then you pour a ton
of olive oil and salt on top. And now that
sounds delicious. You just wrote a recipe there, but you
made it so it wasn't just like bread olive oil.
So when you're writing cookbooks, do you think about like
a novel and like, all right, I'm gonna make this
(04:58):
so sexy like you just described it. Like when you're
writing a cookbook, do you miss that part of just
being very sort of one cup of this d D
and like listing the ingredients? How do you differentiate the two. Yeah,
it's always a struggle. It's funny. That is a constant struggle.
And I have come out on the side of clarity
and specificity. I want my recipes to work, so I've
got to leave all that other stuff. I can't do
(05:20):
this sensuous stuff in there. You know. That's either in
the head note or that's just when I'm having a conversation.
But that can't be in the recipe because the most
important thing for me is not my writing ego. It's
getting people to cook delicious food. That is so interesting
to hear you as a writer. Recipe writing. It's such
a beautiful thing. I mean, it's Did I just make
you hungry? Yes? We have to hurry this interview up.
(05:42):
We're got to go for lunch. So now let's talk
about when you were younger, when you were in high
school and college. From what I understand, you did work
in restaurants. Were you just like everybody else, I need
a job, I need to pay the bills. I'm going
to work in the restaurant. Or was it like, all right,
I'm really into food, And did it help direct your life? Both?
When I was working in the kitchen, it was because
I want to learn. But I spent most of my
restaurant career working in the coat room. I was the
(06:04):
best coach check girl. No, but you know what I did.
I would snuggle up against the minx while you were
having your dinner. I was like petting your fur coat.
I didn't have a fur coat, right, I still don't
have one. Well, I was petting your dates for coach.
I liked being close to the food culture, close to
the kitchens, close to the chef. I mean, I worked
(06:24):
at an American place with Larry for June, and he
would like send out food and I would get to
go and eat all this yummy stuff, and I was
developing my palette. You know, Larry for June. I ate
at his restaurant all the time and as a coach
check girl. But for people who don't know who Larry is,
Larry for June is considered the godfather of American cuisine. He,
along with Alice Waters, started the movement of and it
seems so obvious now, but just local food, local American
(06:46):
food during a time when all of our influences and
cuisine were French. So you know, I was the coach
check girl. But I learned so much from just being
in that mil Yeah, it is amazing how people, just
being amongst all those people, you can just sort of absorb. Sure,
you had to walk through the kitchen, You'd see the produce,
you'd see the food. There would just got you going,
I guess in certain sense O walk through the kitchen.
I would hang out in the kitchen. I would just
(07:07):
I mean I would all those line cooks. I were
just like, Yeah, what do you want? Can I try that?
What's that? And they would but I was again, I
was the baby. I was, you know, I was really young.
They would feed me all those you know, macho line cooks,
which is love to feed me, and it was amazing.
I got to try all kinds of things. So then
I ended up leaving that job because I got a
job in a food magazine at that point. That also
started my career in writing in magazines and journalism. So
(07:31):
so when is it you put the food and the
writing together. So you just said you went from coach
checking into what was this first job? So the first
job I ever had was at a magazine called Great
American Home Cooking. And this was a magazine that Endeaver
actually launched. It was a test food magazine from a
company I think they were in Scandinavia somewhere, and they
(07:51):
had this bank of recipe content that they needed to
have it reframed as a magazine. So they had these
recipe cards in Edish and they owned the picture and
I had to create a recipe that looked just like
the picture. It was a crazy job, but they also
had this magazine. I started working for the magazine and
I was working with some of the most amazing people
(08:12):
who had been at Food and Wine. A woman named
Pamela Mitchell, another woman named Tracy Seman, and they were
crack recipe editors and food editors, and they really taught
me the rope. So I learned how to edit a
recipe for clarity, and how to put the ingredients in
the right order, and all of those skills that would
become so valuable. So you basically learned how to write
recipes on the job. Basically, it's sort of like me.
(08:33):
I learned how to cook on the job. I mean,
you just get a job and you get thrown into
it and you gotta figure it out. And you probably
went home and go, oh, this is none of this
is work, And I got to fix it later, and
you work twice as hard to get to where you
need to be. Yeah, you just say yes and then
you figure it out, right, I mean, that's that's the
way I did it. I actually sent my whole team,
my directive of communications, all my chefs. I sent them
to a recipe writing class. So the first thing was
(08:53):
they had to write a recipe about making a peanut
butter and jelly. I had no idea. They came back
and told me how hard it was to write a
recipe because if you followed the action specifically, some of
them ended up with no peanut butter and jelly in
the middle, but the peanut butter and jelly was on
the outside because they didn't specify you had to put
the peanut butter against the jelly side when you put
the sandwich together. That's so fun Sorry, I think that's hilarious,
(09:15):
but it's very funny. But I think people that never
write recipes have to understand how meticulous you have to
be in your description. How are you going to put
the recipe together. I probably have written a million recipes
like that in terms of sandwiches, and it's still struggle
to figure out the exact way to tell people to
put the bread together. Like it's that's actually a peanut
butter and jelly recipe. You think that's going to be easy,
and that's one of the hardest. It's pretty crazy, it
(09:36):
really is. I mean, I just was writing a recipe
for crooked Masis as a matter of fact, which is
a ham and cheese sandwich and France and it's burled,
and just telling people how to layer the ham and
the cheese and the bread and it sounds like this
is the easiest thing in the world, but just try
to put it into words. Yeah, I think it's very hard.
I mean I wrote a cookbook and I obviously did
not physically write the recipes. I worked with a writer,
(09:57):
and you've done this a lot with other chefs, and
to me, it was great to be able to sit
down and talk to someone who actually writes recipes and
take my mind and put it on a piece of paper,
because for me, I think it would have been extremely
difficult to be able to actually do a whole book
that way, it would I'd still be working on it.
I think chefs should be chefs and writers should be writers,
and the rare person who can do both that's amazing.
(10:17):
But what you do is so creative and specialized in
its way, and then you hire a writer, I mean,
there's nothing wrong. I think it's perfect. I think hire
specialists to do the things that you're not good at.
Just in life. If you can do that, you know,
if you can collaborate and work with other people and
you guys can complement each other, that's how businesses are grown,
that's how creative products are put out there. I think
(10:37):
that's how cookbook should get written. Absolutely, I'm glad you
say that. And some people say, you know, if you
need a plumber, hire a plumber, don't get the electricity,
do the plumber's job. It's not gonna be done right.
And I think that's the same thing with cookbooks. You
gotta hire somebody that really knows what they're doing. The
other thing that I learned when I was doing my
cookbook is I couldn't test the recipes in my restaurant
because the recipe in my restaurant would be completely wrong
because I don't have a home stove where and a
(10:59):
recipe it says put it on medium, Well, I don't
have medium in a restaurant. In a restaurant, I've got
full blast. And then if I push it to the side,
it's medium or it's slow. It's a whole different way
of cooking. And people are cooking recipes out of cookbooks
mostly at home, so they have to have that home
instructions basically. And the other thing that I learned, which
I thought was very interesting, was one twelve ounce can
of beans, and for me, we don't have twelve ounce
(11:21):
canda beans in a professional kitchen. We have bags of
beans that we soak overnight. So it's a whole different thing.
But writing a recipe for the home cook is very
different than us for professional chefs. And that's where I
think it comes in very handy that people who are
writing a cookbook with a cookbook writer is so important
exactly because it's a fourteen point five ounce cannabians. There
are no twelve ounce cannabies. I got it all. But
(11:44):
I know what you're saying. So your column in the
New York Times is called the Good Appetite? Is that correct?
It is? So you write sixty five recipes every year?
Is that about right? You know I never counted, but
that sounds right. I mean, how in the world do
you come up? I got a whole bunch of questions.
Where do you get the inspiration? How do you have time?
Did your family want to kill you with all this
testing going on at home? Well? I mean the same
(12:06):
thing for you. I'm sure how many new dishes do
you come up with on your different menus across all
of the restaurants a year? It's the same thing. You
start with an idea. I mean for me, I start
with what am I hungry for? And um, Unfortunately, I
can't say what am I hungry for right now? I
have to say what am I gonna be hungry for
in two months when asparagus comes out, because I'm working ahead.
But no, really, I do start from what do I
(12:26):
want to eat? And I try very hard to keep
a kitchen diary. When I say kitchen diary, I mean
there's a really disgusting notepad stuffed in the drawer in
my kitchen that has food all over it. And I
replaced them, you know, as I use them up, and
I keep notes on what I'm actually cooking, and those
come in handy because I can look back and I
can say, okay, last year in asparagus season, you know
how you get into a thing and you do something.
(12:48):
So last year's asparagus for me was all about the
asparagus and the fried egg, and so I did it
in these fifteen different ways, and then I can look
back and say, okay, We'll say it's March, and right
now you know you're looking ahead, and asparagus season is
in May, and that's when you have to start thinking
about it. So that's one way I get inspiration. Another
way is by eating out at restaurants. Like yours and
(13:09):
other people's restaurants, and saying, well, what are people doing?
You know, what's the thing? You know, there's always trends
and restaurants, and so what are some of those trends
that I can incorporate into my cooking that might be
fun for people? For example, how about a red wine
saucer pasta. You know, it's something that I have been
seeing lately and it's not something I've ever cooked, But
how can I take red wine which I usually think
(13:30):
of as something you'd use with meat in a brase,
But how do I put that in a pasta sauce?
It's not a meat sauce, you know, that's a vegetable
based sauce. And then I start thinking, well, do I
cook into a syrup or do I maybe I do
or zo like risotto in red wine, you know, and
I just sort of start going from there. Travel is
a big part of it, too, going to different countries
and seeing different ingredients and getting inspired, and of course
(13:52):
the seasons, you know, not just I'm thinking ahead, but
being in the season and seeing an ingredient that I
want to play with. Quint's example in the middle of fall,
like I don't you know, I've seen quints, I've sort
of used it, but how do I really use it?
And taking it home and playing with it and then
remembering to write it down on my notepad and remembering
that for when Quinn season rolls around again. So you're
cooking all this for the family, no, I mean most
(14:14):
of it. You know, the family will eat what the
family wants to eat, and you know they're very specific,
like they will they will not be my guinea pigs.
When I test my recipes. I do so during the
day in my kitchen. I have a recipe tester common
work with me, and we're very methodical about it. And
then I will offer it to my family, But if
they don't want to eat it, then you know I can't.
My husband hates the idea that he has to He's like,
(14:36):
I'm not going to just eat it because you cooked it.
I want to eat it because I want it, And
I think that's fair, That is fair. My neighbors are psyched.
I mean, I have lots of people who want to
eat that food, so it never ever goes to waste.
I'm very happy to hear that, you know. Being a
big supporter of Shaff's strength, and City Harvest. The food
is not going to waste the New York Times. That's
good to hear. We'll be right back after a quick break.
(14:57):
Welcome back to Food three sixty. I'm here with cookbook
author and New York Times columnist Melissa Clark. What was
your biggest challenge when you were starting to write recipes? Clarity.
One phase that a new writer goes through is like
wanting to flex your writerly muscles. And that's great and important,
but save it for the head notes and the stories,
and when you're writing the recipe itself, be as sixcinct
but yet clear as possible. Don't be flowery, don't be purple,
(15:20):
get that information across. Don't be funny. I mean you
can be, but it's hard. Really. What's writing on your
recipes someone else's dinner and you don't want to disappoint them.
You don't want their dinner to come out wrong. Well,
I have a personal story of ruining somebody's dinner with
a recipe. Let's hear it. It literally was not my fault,
but never is. I got yelled at by this woman.
This is years ago. When I was at Lafochette. I
(15:41):
wrote a recipe and all. I remember that there was
a tuna recipe and I think I was poaching it
in olive oil, and I put all these aromatics in
the olive oil to poach my tuna. One of the
aromatics that I put in there was one star Ennis. Okay,
And I get this call from this woman. I rate
that she had a dinner party and I completely ruined
her dinner party because nobody could eat the tuna because
(16:03):
it was so strong in the star Anis. And I
am haund this phone with this woman. She's yelling at me.
I'm like, I'm sorry, Can you just tell me what
what did you do? And she goes, well, I didn't
have star in iss, so I put a tablespoon of
ground star Annis. Now one star anis floating around is
going to give off a certain amount of flavor. A
tablespoon of ground star Nis is like amplifying it by
(16:25):
a thousand or maybe two thousand. So of course the
dinner was ruined. She interpreted it wrong. How would I
say that, I'm trying to think about once, well, I mean,
she was obviously in the wrong of trying to think,
like if you don't know what a star and he says.
One thing that comes up a lot for that particular
ingredient is do I mean a whole flower or do
I mean a pedal? Yeah, it's it's tricky. I mean,
that's why I want to get into the debate of
(16:46):
why is it that in America we have not started
using the metric system for cookbooks. When I was a
cook in Paris, I cooked in Paris for two years
and everything was weighed, especially I was the pastry person
for six months. If I didn't have a gale in
the kitchen and I didn't know that the egg yolk
wade fifty five grams and you know a thousand grams
and you know a cup doesn't make sense to me
(17:07):
at all. I mean, you could put so much flour
in a cup and push it down just a little bit,
or you fluff it and put it in there. You've
got two totally different measurements. Wait wise, I don't know.
It just upsets me. Obviously you can probably hear it
in my voice. We're changing that at the times. Actually,
we do everything with metric now for baking, especially for baking.
I mean we should probably do it across the board.
But you know, some ingredients like a unit of ingredients
like one celery stalk or one carrot. We don't weigh necessarily.
(17:30):
We just have the unit because it's not important and
we don't want people to get hung up on the
weight because it doesn't matter if we're carrot is a
hundred grams or a hundred and twenty five grams. It's
not important. However, it's super important in baking, and then
we do put it in and we standardized all of that,
and that is something that we have done at the times,
and White Cooking has done it, I think since two
thousand seven or before even well, I'm glad that people
(17:51):
are waking up to that. That's definitely a good thing.
In all of the years of you writing cookbooks with
these very big chefs that you get to collaborate with,
just hanging out with Daniel Blood, you must have learned
a million things just being with him. But writing a
cookbook and sort of taking his brain and putting it
into a book must have been amazing. It was amazing
with all of the chefs I worked with, each one
taught me lessons. I mean, for sure, it was like
(18:12):
getting tutorials from the country's best chefs. It's amazing. But
really the thing I learned overall was that there's no
one right way to do it. You know. It's like
Danielle chops his onions completely differently from the way David
Boulet chops his onions, Like really, they do it differently.
And the guy, um Andrew Feinberg from Franny's Like, he
does it a whole other way, and each way is right,
(18:32):
but they each have a reason why they chopped their
onions that way. So Andrew Finberg when he chops his onions,
he'll do it root to stem, and then his slices
aren't really half moons, you know, they're a little bit thicker,
and they're a little bit different, and he's looking for
more texture and a sweeter flavor. And then sometimes if
you chop an onion and you slice it really really fine,
it will melt and disappear. And then the way you
(18:52):
cook your onion. Sometimes you want the onion to caramelize
and sometimes you don't. You want it to sweat, you
want it to brown. All of these little things are
different and they each have a purpose. And on the
one hand, it's like, ah, you want to just pull
your hair out, because like how are you supposed to
do it? But on the other hand, it's incredibly liberating
because there's no one right way to do it. They
all do it differently, And to me, I was like
(19:12):
giddy with the idea. It was so freeing for me
to see this and to really take that lesson in
because there's no wrong way. Yeah, I had that lesson.
I think I was probably when I started working at
les cerc with and maybe I was making the Hollandais
and he came up too, and he goes, just remember,
there's a hundred ways to make this. I just need
you to make it the way I want it. And
that's what happens when you work for a chef. You
have to do it the way they want it. You're
(19:33):
representing their food. And I think that was very very interesting.
So when you started writing cookbooks, obviously Instagram, Facebook and
all that stuff wasn't around. When you're writing recipes for
the Times, are you thinking about those other means of
communicating to the world as well as just writing a recipe?
Now I am. I didn't used to be. Now you
can't get away from it, and it's important, you know.
It's not that I think about it when I'm writing
(19:55):
the recipe, but when I'm conceiving the dish, you know,
when I'm coming up with the idea of the dish,
the thing that doesn't pop in my head is is
it Instagram? Morble? But that's like soon after there, I'm like, well,
what's it gonna look like on Instagram? I cook a
lot less things that are just borrown. I think about
the food styling in a way that I never thought
about food styling before. And food styling is a thing
(20:17):
that doesn't come naturally to me. You know. I'm more
of a if it tastes good, then that's where I'm
coming from. But now I have to When I think
about the dish and I'm walking it through in my head,
I'm also thinking, well, how am I going to make
it look beautiful? I mean, I remember, this is a
funny story. When I was the cheferd seller in the sky,
they gave me all the old recipes before I started.
They said, okay, there's just some examples of other recipes,
(20:38):
and I almost died laughing with my cooks. We were
reading these recipes and I was like, they put a
canell of ale cover, like they took ari covert blanched it,
chopped it up basically into baby food, and made Cornell's
out of ale covert. And I was thinking, I am
not repeating the food from the past, And it's interesting
how food does evolve. And of course you've probably since
(20:59):
you're so into this recipe writing, you see the evolution.
How do you how do you feel about the evolution?
I think we're going in the right direction myself. You know,
we're going in the I mean we're going in the
right direction because it's where we're going. You know, maybe
canals have chopped up fine ali covera delicious I wouldn't
say no to that if they were like the freshest,
nicest little green beans and you cut them and they
were just also crisp and buttery. Um. So I think
(21:20):
there's stuff to be learned from the past, and I
don't discount any of it. I do think that people's
tastes change, you know, and what we're hungry for changes,
and you have to respect that and go with that.
So I think it's important to always look toward the
future and always remember the past. Okay, maybe you're a
little bit more open minded about the ari covert canals,
but one thing I do think we have in common
is anchovies. You love anchovies. One of my favorite ways
(21:44):
to eat anchovies is a toasted piece of bread with
a piece of butter and just an anchovy on top.
Will be on the same page Greed a hundred. I
ate that for dinner two nights ago. You always have
something in the cupboard and you can always find a
cracker and some bread and anchovies. And you know, if
you're really out of crackers, you can just take those
anchovies and take that piece of utter and wrap the
anchovie around the butter and stick a toothpick in it
and eat that. That works. I do think people are
(22:06):
closed off to anchovies because when they were kids, they
had that really crappy anchovy pizza, you know in the
pizzeria where they used the worst quality anchovies and they're
really stinky, and then somebody at the table across your
news eating and you smell it, so that will turn
you off. You've got to buy good anchovies, like bad
anchovies are bad. How about anchovy paste, Yeah, that's pretty bad.
That stuffs about another question, and I think we talked
(22:28):
about this. It was around Thanksgiving, I think last year
I was talking to you I said to you, You've
been writing for The Times for many, many years. How
in the world you write about Thanksgiving again? Like do
you have You can't go back and do the same
thing you did last year or five or seven years ago.
It's the worst. Thanksgiving is the worst. I hate thanksgat
I mean I really at this point, I hate Thanksgiving.
And I'm going to just admit it right to all
(22:50):
of your listeners and don't be mad at me. But
I do it every year and it's really hard. I
just want to cook Thanksgiving and I don't want to
write about it anymore. But it is. It is a
challenge because we need to be fresh. We need to
come up with a new idea. It needs to be
a big idea. There are only so many ways to
reinvent Turkey. I feel like I perfected my turkey in
two thousand twelve, Like that was the perfect tur I like,
(23:12):
I don't what am I going to do now? But
yet you have to keep going back, and you have
to keep approaching it from a fresh perspective, and you
have to bring all your creative energy behind it. And
so you know, like I said, I did this perfectly
simple risk turkey. I think it was called the Simplest
dress Turkey. I didn't trust it, I didn't stuff it.
It was just the easiest thing you could possibly make.
And it was so good, and so many people love
(23:33):
this recipe because it really is easy and just delicious.
But then I had to do it again, and I
had to do it again. So last year I did
Anchovy roast turkey and that was delicious too. You know,
that was great because then Anchovia said it. But it
is hard to just try to find the enthusiasm, you know,
especially when you know, like, why did it? I like,
I'm happy with that two thousand twelve recipe, but but
(23:54):
I need to keep going. This is where we differ.
If I come up with a good recipe that I like,
I just leave it on the menu. I don't have
to change it every every twelve months, which is good. Well,
you know, being a newspaper, we have to be new. Yeah,
can you use out there? How many ways can you
make a potato? I mean you have to just keep
coming up with different potato recipes. Potatoes are easier than turkey, well,
probably easier to recipe test. I can't imagine that thirty
percent that your family doesn't need. It's probably before Thanksgiving
(24:16):
when it's like, oh, Mom made another turkey. Hope the
neighbors want this one, because I'm not eating. We're not
even Thanksgiving yet. You know, my family does get very
sick of We do recipe developing for Thanksgiving in August,
in July August, so you know, we've eaten a lot
of turkeys by the time we get to November. But
then we take a break, and then by November, actually
we are ready for turkey again. Oh well, that's good.
So I have a little game I want to play
(24:36):
with you. Everybody's heard of Betty Crocker. She's been around
since nineteen. Needless to say, people were left heartbroken after
Fortune magazine revealed in ninet that the Domestic icon was
a fake. I'm going to read off some brand names,
and you're gonna tell me if they're real or fake.
Sarah Lee, is that a real person? I don't think so.
(24:58):
I don't know she's real. She was a Chicago baker's daughter, okay,
Sarah Chef Boyard, No, he's a real person. He was
an Italian immigrant. Oscar Meyer caldn't possibly he's real Germany.
I just think everybody's fiction. I have no faith. He
was a butcher in Chicago in the twentieth century. Right,
(25:20):
hold on wait, I have some more of those. You're
ready ready, Famous Amos, Famous Amos, Yes, really real? Yes,
just pictures on the package of the cookies. Yes, his
name was Wallace Amos. He was a talent agent at
William Morris and he used to make cookies and send
them to Diana Ross and Simon and Garfunkele and everybody
was telling him, you're really good at making the cookies.
Go make the cookies. So in v five he opened
(25:41):
his first store in l A. Wow. No, you see
his picture on the package. I remember. Famous Amos was
actually a pretty big figure in my childhood. Really, okay,
how about Keebler? What the Keebler elves? Are they real? No?
I think the Keepler elves are not real. They're real.
Godfrey Keebler. He was a baker in Philadelphia in eighteen
fifty three. Did he have of elves? It doesn't say.
(26:01):
I didn't look at it. I didn't do that much research. Okay,
Mrs Field, Yes you're writing Debbie Field seven she opened
her first bakery. Well, thank you so much for coming
to see me and talking. Thank you for having me
recipe writing in cookbooks. I gotta say I thought that
was interesting. I hope you did too. I want to
(26:22):
thank my guest Melissa Clark for being here today. See
you soon. Food three six is a production of I
Heart Radio and I'm your host, Mark Murphy. A very
special thanks to Emily Carpet, My director of Communications, and
producers Nikki Etre and Christina Everett. Mixing and music by
(26:42):
Anna Stump and recording help from Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzel.
Thank you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weissenstein for handling research.
Food through sixty is executive produced by man guest at
ticket or. For more podcasts at my heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. M
Food three sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. I probably have written a million recipes
like that in terms of sandwiches, and it's still struggle
to figure out the exact way to tell people to
put the bread together a peanut, butter and jelly recipe.
You think that's going to be easy, and that's one
of the hardest. Welcome to Food three sixty, the podcast
(00:23):
that serves up some serious of food for thought. I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know me
as a chef and a New York restaurateur. In today's episode,
we're going to explore the art of cookbooks and recipe writing.
That was Melissa Clark you heard at the start of
the show. She's written over forty cookbooks and over fifty
recipes a year for The New York Times. She's also
(00:44):
collaborated with some amazing chefs out there. She's written cookbooks
with Daniel Balloud, David Boulet, Claudia Fleming. She also wrote
a pretty popular article about deep fried twinkies. Melissa, thanks
so much for joining me deep fried Twinkies. Why did
you do that to the world. I love the fact
that I can die knowing that I started the deep
fried twinkie phenomenon. I broke that story. I didn't invent
(01:06):
the twinkies, but I broke the story as a journalist.
So this is what happened. There is a restaurant in
Brooklyn that was a chip shop and I loved this place.
I used to go and get fish and chips all
the time, and they had a deep fried twinkie on
the menu and I thought, no, I got to do
a story about this, because who's ever heard of a
deep fried twinkie? And I interviewed the chip friar and
(01:26):
he said, well, you know, when you're in Scotland and
you're frying chips, you put anything that doesn't move into
the deep friar because you're so bored because it's an
overnight job. You know, people get fish and chips late
at night. That's how the deep fried mars bar became
a thing in the UK. So he was in America.
He was doing it here and he went to the
deli and what did they have but twinkies, And he figured,
let me try it. And it was fabulous because when
(01:48):
you deep fray a twinkie, the sponge cake really absorbs
the oil and gets so crunchy. And then this is
the best part. The cream inside vaporizes so you don't
get that creamy feeling. But it abused the higher cake.
It's so good. And I wrote the article and then
all of a sudden, all of those you know, um
state fairs that have the deep fried this and that
on the stick got the idea, Hey, let's put a
(02:11):
deep fried twinky on a stick. If that's my only
claim to fame, I'm I'm happy. So you and I
have known each other for quite a while. Um, how
did we mean? I remember we did this article together,
but we met before then. We met at a dinner
at the French Culinary Institute when it was called that,
and it was a truffle dinner, and I think we
sat next to each other, and I remember I did
a truffle cream spinach with a fried oyster on it.
(02:32):
Do you remember that dinner? I do remember that dinner.
Now did I like that dish? I hope I liked it?
Or did I say something nasty? Well? I don't know.
If you were writing about so your third generation Brooklyn night,
how would you say New York has influenced you? You know,
there's a Jewish New York food culture that's very much
part of me and that I embrace. In fact that
I'm embracing it right now. I'm doing a story on
black and white cookies, so it's always part of everything
(02:53):
I write. Bagels and locks, black and white cookies, pastrami,
chicken soup, all of these things I am made of them,
was brought up with them. But then I think about
the other really big influence, and that is French cuisine,
which you and I have in common. I grew up
spending every single summer in France eating French food, and
my parents were big Julia Child disciples, and they cooked
(03:13):
every recipe out of her book, and they'd have these
dinner parties, and then you know the rest of the year,
which was very Brooklyn centric. So those two things are
always there that I'm not going to speak to you
in French. Arc There's no way I'm going to speak
to you in French. My French is abysmal. If I'm
(03:34):
ever in France with you, I'll speak French because when
I'm there, you have to do it. But I can't
do it here. You know, going to France didn't make
me want to write about food. It made me want
to eat and cook food. What maybe want to write
about food? Was reading about food was MFK. Fisher and
was just having this burning desire to right and then
figuring out, well, how can I do this? How can
I write about the thing that I think about the most?
(03:54):
I mean, that's the thing I think about the most,
so I should write about that. Right. It seems to
be working for you. Who else you look up to
in food writing world? You know, there's a lot of
writing about food that takes place in regular novels, and
I would zero in on that. Every time I read
a novel, I go to the food part of it,
like Tolstoy. You know, it's like I wanted to eat
a million oysters because of Anna Karenina or Don Quixote,
(04:16):
where Sancho Panza is romancing this idea of eating bread
and onions together with salt and olive oil. You know,
when I start thinking, I'm like, Okay, that doesn't sound
very good on the surface, bread, olive oil, salt, onions.
But then when you think about it, you're like, Okay,
this is a really good bread, right, It's really good
sour dough bread. You toast it, or you know, warm
it over fire, and then you take your onion and
(04:38):
you also put that over the fire, and so it
gets juicy and kind of charred, and then you rub
it on the bread and then you pour a ton
of olive oil and salt on top. And now that
sounds delicious. You just wrote a recipe there, but you
made it so it wasn't just like bread olive oil.
So when you're writing cookbooks, do you think about like
a novel and like, all right, I'm gonna make this
(04:58):
so sexy like you just described it. Like when you're
writing a cookbook, do you miss that part of just
being very sort of one cup of this d D
and like listing the ingredients? How do you differentiate the two. Yeah,
it's always a struggle. It's funny. That is a constant struggle.
And I have come out on the side of clarity
and specificity. I want my recipes to work, so I've
got to leave all that other stuff. I can't do
(05:20):
this sensuous stuff in there. You know. That's either in
the head note or that's just when I'm having a conversation.
But that can't be in the recipe because the most
important thing for me is not my writing ego. It's
getting people to cook delicious food. That is so interesting
to hear you as a writer. Recipe writing. It's such
a beautiful thing. I mean, it's Did I just make
you hungry? Yes? We have to hurry this interview up.
(05:42):
We're got to go for lunch. So now let's talk
about when you were younger, when you were in high
school and college. From what I understand, you did work
in restaurants. Were you just like everybody else, I need
a job, I need to pay the bills. I'm going
to work in the restaurant. Or was it like, all right,
I'm really into food, And did it help direct your life? Both?
When I was working in the kitchen, it was because
I want to learn. But I spent most of my
restaurant career working in the coat room. I was the
(06:04):
best coach check girl. No, but you know what I did.
I would snuggle up against the minx while you were
having your dinner. I was like petting your fur coat.
I didn't have a fur coat, right, I still don't
have one. Well, I was petting your dates for coach.
I liked being close to the food culture, close to
the kitchens, close to the chef. I mean, I worked
(06:24):
at an American place with Larry for June, and he
would like send out food and I would get to
go and eat all this yummy stuff, and I was
developing my palette. You know, Larry for June. I ate
at his restaurant all the time and as a coach
check girl. But for people who don't know who Larry is,
Larry for June is considered the godfather of American cuisine. He,
along with Alice Waters, started the movement of and it
seems so obvious now, but just local food, local American
(06:46):
food during a time when all of our influences and
cuisine were French. So you know, I was the coach
check girl. But I learned so much from just being
in that mil Yeah, it is amazing how people, just
being amongst all those people, you can just sort of absorb. Sure,
you had to walk through the kitchen, You'd see the produce,
you'd see the food. There would just got you going,
I guess in certain sense O walk through the kitchen.
I would hang out in the kitchen. I would just
(07:07):
I mean I would all those line cooks. I were
just like, Yeah, what do you want? Can I try that?
What's that? And they would but I was again, I
was the baby. I was, you know, I was really young.
They would feed me all those you know, macho line cooks,
which is love to feed me, and it was amazing.
I got to try all kinds of things. So then
I ended up leaving that job because I got a
job in a food magazine at that point. That also
started my career in writing in magazines and journalism. So
(07:31):
so when is it you put the food and the
writing together. So you just said you went from coach
checking into what was this first job? So the first
job I ever had was at a magazine called Great
American Home Cooking. And this was a magazine that Endeaver
actually launched. It was a test food magazine from a
company I think they were in Scandinavia somewhere, and they
(07:51):
had this bank of recipe content that they needed to
have it reframed as a magazine. So they had these
recipe cards in Edish and they owned the picture and
I had to create a recipe that looked just like
the picture. It was a crazy job, but they also
had this magazine. I started working for the magazine and
I was working with some of the most amazing people
(08:12):
who had been at Food and Wine. A woman named
Pamela Mitchell, another woman named Tracy Seman, and they were
crack recipe editors and food editors, and they really taught
me the rope. So I learned how to edit a
recipe for clarity, and how to put the ingredients in
the right order, and all of those skills that would
become so valuable. So you basically learned how to write
recipes on the job. Basically, it's sort of like me.
(08:33):
I learned how to cook on the job. I mean,
you just get a job and you get thrown into
it and you gotta figure it out. And you probably
went home and go, oh, this is none of this
is work, And I got to fix it later, and
you work twice as hard to get to where you
need to be. Yeah, you just say yes and then
you figure it out, right, I mean, that's that's the
way I did it. I actually sent my whole team,
my directive of communications, all my chefs. I sent them
to a recipe writing class. So the first thing was
(08:53):
they had to write a recipe about making a peanut
butter and jelly. I had no idea. They came back
and told me how hard it was to write a
recipe because if you followed the action specifically, some of
them ended up with no peanut butter and jelly in
the middle, but the peanut butter and jelly was on
the outside because they didn't specify you had to put
the peanut butter against the jelly side when you put
the sandwich together. That's so fun Sorry, I think that's hilarious,
(09:15):
but it's very funny. But I think people that never
write recipes have to understand how meticulous you have to
be in your description. How are you going to put
the recipe together. I probably have written a million recipes
like that in terms of sandwiches, and it's still struggle
to figure out the exact way to tell people to
put the bread together. Like it's that's actually a peanut
butter and jelly recipe. You think that's going to be easy,
and that's one of the hardest. It's pretty crazy, it
(09:36):
really is. I mean, I just was writing a recipe
for crooked Masis as a matter of fact, which is
a ham and cheese sandwich and France and it's burled,
and just telling people how to layer the ham and
the cheese and the bread and it sounds like this
is the easiest thing in the world, but just try
to put it into words. Yeah, I think it's very hard.
I mean I wrote a cookbook and I obviously did
not physically write the recipes. I worked with a writer,
(09:57):
and you've done this a lot with other chefs, and
to me, it was great to be able to sit
down and talk to someone who actually writes recipes and
take my mind and put it on a piece of paper,
because for me, I think it would have been extremely
difficult to be able to actually do a whole book
that way, it would I'd still be working on it.
I think chefs should be chefs and writers should be writers,
and the rare person who can do both that's amazing.
(10:17):
But what you do is so creative and specialized in
its way, and then you hire a writer, I mean,
there's nothing wrong. I think it's perfect. I think hire
specialists to do the things that you're not good at.
Just in life. If you can do that, you know,
if you can collaborate and work with other people and
you guys can complement each other, that's how businesses are grown,
that's how creative products are put out there. I think
(10:37):
that's how cookbook should get written. Absolutely, I'm glad you
say that. And some people say, you know, if you
need a plumber, hire a plumber, don't get the electricity,
do the plumber's job. It's not gonna be done right.
And I think that's the same thing with cookbooks. You
gotta hire somebody that really knows what they're doing. The
other thing that I learned when I was doing my
cookbook is I couldn't test the recipes in my restaurant
because the recipe in my restaurant would be completely wrong
because I don't have a home stove where and a
(10:59):
recipe it says put it on medium, Well, I don't
have medium in a restaurant. In a restaurant, I've got
full blast. And then if I push it to the side,
it's medium or it's slow. It's a whole different way
of cooking. And people are cooking recipes out of cookbooks
mostly at home, so they have to have that home
instructions basically. And the other thing that I learned, which
I thought was very interesting, was one twelve ounce can
of beans, and for me, we don't have twelve ounce
(11:21):
canda beans in a professional kitchen. We have bags of
beans that we soak overnight. So it's a whole different thing.
But writing a recipe for the home cook is very
different than us for professional chefs. And that's where I
think it comes in very handy that people who are
writing a cookbook with a cookbook writer is so important
exactly because it's a fourteen point five ounce cannabians. There
are no twelve ounce cannabies. I got it all. But
(11:44):
I know what you're saying. So your column in the
New York Times is called the Good Appetite? Is that correct?
It is? So you write sixty five recipes every year?
Is that about right? You know I never counted, but
that sounds right. I mean, how in the world do
you come up? I got a whole bunch of questions.
Where do you get the inspiration? How do you have time?
Did your family want to kill you with all this
testing going on at home? Well? I mean the same
(12:06):
thing for you. I'm sure how many new dishes do
you come up with on your different menus across all
of the restaurants a year? It's the same thing. You
start with an idea. I mean for me, I start
with what am I hungry for? And um, Unfortunately, I
can't say what am I hungry for right now? I
have to say what am I gonna be hungry for
in two months when asparagus comes out, because I'm working ahead.
But no, really, I do start from what do I
(12:26):
want to eat? And I try very hard to keep
a kitchen diary. When I say kitchen diary, I mean
there's a really disgusting notepad stuffed in the drawer in
my kitchen that has food all over it. And I
replaced them, you know, as I use them up, and
I keep notes on what I'm actually cooking, and those
come in handy because I can look back and I
can say, okay, last year in asparagus season, you know
how you get into a thing and you do something.
(12:48):
So last year's asparagus for me was all about the
asparagus and the fried egg, and so I did it
in these fifteen different ways, and then I can look
back and say, okay, We'll say it's March, and right
now you know you're looking ahead, and asparagus season is
in May, and that's when you have to start thinking
about it. So that's one way I get inspiration. Another
way is by eating out at restaurants. Like yours and
(13:09):
other people's restaurants, and saying, well, what are people doing?
You know, what's the thing? You know, there's always trends
and restaurants, and so what are some of those trends
that I can incorporate into my cooking that might be
fun for people? For example, how about a red wine
saucer pasta. You know, it's something that I have been
seeing lately and it's not something I've ever cooked, But
how can I take red wine which I usually think
(13:30):
of as something you'd use with meat in a brase,
But how do I put that in a pasta sauce?
It's not a meat sauce, you know, that's a vegetable
based sauce. And then I start thinking, well, do I
cook into a syrup or do I maybe I do
or zo like risotto in red wine, you know, and
I just sort of start going from there. Travel is
a big part of it, too, going to different countries
and seeing different ingredients and getting inspired, and of course
(13:52):
the seasons, you know, not just I'm thinking ahead, but
being in the season and seeing an ingredient that I
want to play with. Quint's example in the middle of fall,
like I don't you know, I've seen quints, I've sort
of used it, but how do I really use it?
And taking it home and playing with it and then
remembering to write it down on my notepad and remembering
that for when Quinn season rolls around again. So you're
cooking all this for the family, no, I mean most
(14:14):
of it. You know, the family will eat what the
family wants to eat, and you know they're very specific,
like they will they will not be my guinea pigs.
When I test my recipes. I do so during the
day in my kitchen. I have a recipe tester common
work with me, and we're very methodical about it. And
then I will offer it to my family, But if
they don't want to eat it, then you know I can't.
My husband hates the idea that he has to He's like,
(14:36):
I'm not going to just eat it because you cooked it.
I want to eat it because I want it, And
I think that's fair, That is fair. My neighbors are psyched.
I mean, I have lots of people who want to
eat that food, so it never ever goes to waste.
I'm very happy to hear that, you know. Being a
big supporter of Shaff's strength, and City Harvest. The food
is not going to waste the New York Times. That's
good to hear. We'll be right back after a quick break.
(14:57):
Welcome back to Food three sixty. I'm here with cookbook
author and New York Times columnist Melissa Clark. What was
your biggest challenge when you were starting to write recipes? Clarity.
One phase that a new writer goes through is like
wanting to flex your writerly muscles. And that's great and important,
but save it for the head notes and the stories,
and when you're writing the recipe itself, be as sixcinct
but yet clear as possible. Don't be flowery, don't be purple,
(15:20):
get that information across. Don't be funny. I mean you
can be, but it's hard. Really. What's writing on your
recipes someone else's dinner and you don't want to disappoint them.
You don't want their dinner to come out wrong. Well,
I have a personal story of ruining somebody's dinner with
a recipe. Let's hear it. It literally was not my fault,
but never is. I got yelled at by this woman.
This is years ago. When I was at Lafochette. I
(15:41):
wrote a recipe and all. I remember that there was
a tuna recipe and I think I was poaching it
in olive oil, and I put all these aromatics in
the olive oil to poach my tuna. One of the
aromatics that I put in there was one star Ennis. Okay,
And I get this call from this woman. I rate
that she had a dinner party and I completely ruined
her dinner party because nobody could eat the tuna because
(16:03):
it was so strong in the star Anis. And I
am haund this phone with this woman. She's yelling at me.
I'm like, I'm sorry, Can you just tell me what
what did you do? And she goes, well, I didn't
have star in iss, so I put a tablespoon of
ground star Annis. Now one star anis floating around is
going to give off a certain amount of flavor. A
tablespoon of ground star Nis is like amplifying it by
(16:25):
a thousand or maybe two thousand. So of course the
dinner was ruined. She interpreted it wrong. How would I
say that, I'm trying to think about once, well, I mean,
she was obviously in the wrong of trying to think,
like if you don't know what a star and he says.
One thing that comes up a lot for that particular
ingredient is do I mean a whole flower or do
I mean a pedal? Yeah, it's it's tricky. I mean,
that's why I want to get into the debate of
(16:46):
why is it that in America we have not started
using the metric system for cookbooks. When I was a
cook in Paris, I cooked in Paris for two years
and everything was weighed, especially I was the pastry person
for six months. If I didn't have a gale in
the kitchen and I didn't know that the egg yolk
wade fifty five grams and you know a thousand grams
and you know a cup doesn't make sense to me
(17:07):
at all. I mean, you could put so much flour
in a cup and push it down just a little bit,
or you fluff it and put it in there. You've
got two totally different measurements. Wait wise, I don't know.
It just upsets me. Obviously you can probably hear it
in my voice. We're changing that at the times. Actually,
we do everything with metric now for baking, especially for baking.
I mean we should probably do it across the board.
But you know, some ingredients like a unit of ingredients
like one celery stalk or one carrot. We don't weigh necessarily.
(17:30):
We just have the unit because it's not important and
we don't want people to get hung up on the
weight because it doesn't matter if we're carrot is a
hundred grams or a hundred and twenty five grams. It's
not important. However, it's super important in baking, and then
we do put it in and we standardized all of that,
and that is something that we have done at the times,
and White Cooking has done it, I think since two
thousand seven or before even well, I'm glad that people
(17:51):
are waking up to that. That's definitely a good thing.
In all of the years of you writing cookbooks with
these very big chefs that you get to collaborate with,
just hanging out with Daniel Blood, you must have learned
a million things just being with him. But writing a
cookbook and sort of taking his brain and putting it
into a book must have been amazing. It was amazing
with all of the chefs I worked with, each one
taught me lessons. I mean, for sure, it was like
(18:12):
getting tutorials from the country's best chefs. It's amazing. But
really the thing I learned overall was that there's no
one right way to do it. You know. It's like
Danielle chops his onions completely differently from the way David
Boulet chops his onions, Like really, they do it differently.
And the guy, um Andrew Feinberg from Franny's Like, he
does it a whole other way, and each way is right,
(18:32):
but they each have a reason why they chopped their
onions that way. So Andrew Finberg when he chops his onions,
he'll do it root to stem, and then his slices
aren't really half moons, you know, they're a little bit thicker,
and they're a little bit different, and he's looking for
more texture and a sweeter flavor. And then sometimes if
you chop an onion and you slice it really really fine,
it will melt and disappear. And then the way you
(18:52):
cook your onion. Sometimes you want the onion to caramelize
and sometimes you don't. You want it to sweat, you
want it to brown. All of these little things are
different and they each have a purpose. And on the
one hand, it's like, ah, you want to just pull
your hair out, because like how are you supposed to
do it? But on the other hand, it's incredibly liberating
because there's no one right way to do it. They
all do it differently, And to me, I was like
(19:12):
giddy with the idea. It was so freeing for me
to see this and to really take that lesson in
because there's no wrong way. Yeah, I had that lesson.
I think I was probably when I started working at
les cerc with and maybe I was making the Hollandais
and he came up too, and he goes, just remember,
there's a hundred ways to make this. I just need
you to make it the way I want it. And
that's what happens when you work for a chef. You
have to do it the way they want it. You're
(19:33):
representing their food. And I think that was very very interesting.
So when you started writing cookbooks, obviously Instagram, Facebook and
all that stuff wasn't around. When you're writing recipes for
the Times, are you thinking about those other means of
communicating to the world as well as just writing a recipe?
Now I am. I didn't used to be. Now you
can't get away from it, and it's important, you know.
It's not that I think about it when I'm writing
(19:55):
the recipe, but when I'm conceiving the dish, you know,
when I'm coming up with the idea of the dish,
the thing that doesn't pop in my head is is
it Instagram? Morble? But that's like soon after there, I'm like, well,
what's it gonna look like on Instagram? I cook a
lot less things that are just borrown. I think about
the food styling in a way that I never thought
about food styling before. And food styling is a thing
(20:17):
that doesn't come naturally to me. You know. I'm more
of a if it tastes good, then that's where I'm
coming from. But now I have to When I think
about the dish and I'm walking it through in my head,
I'm also thinking, well, how am I going to make
it look beautiful? I mean, I remember, this is a
funny story. When I was the cheferd seller in the sky,
they gave me all the old recipes before I started.
They said, okay, there's just some examples of other recipes,
(20:38):
and I almost died laughing with my cooks. We were
reading these recipes and I was like, they put a
canell of ale cover, like they took ari covert blanched it,
chopped it up basically into baby food, and made Cornell's
out of ale covert. And I was thinking, I am
not repeating the food from the past, And it's interesting
how food does evolve. And of course you've probably since
(20:59):
you're so into this recipe writing, you see the evolution.
How do you how do you feel about the evolution?
I think we're going in the right direction myself. You know,
we're going in the I mean we're going in the
right direction because it's where we're going. You know, maybe
canals have chopped up fine ali covera delicious I wouldn't
say no to that if they were like the freshest,
nicest little green beans and you cut them and they
were just also crisp and buttery. Um. So I think
(21:20):
there's stuff to be learned from the past, and I
don't discount any of it. I do think that people's
tastes change, you know, and what we're hungry for changes,
and you have to respect that and go with that.
So I think it's important to always look toward the
future and always remember the past. Okay, maybe you're a
little bit more open minded about the ari covert canals,
but one thing I do think we have in common
is anchovies. You love anchovies. One of my favorite ways
(21:44):
to eat anchovies is a toasted piece of bread with
a piece of butter and just an anchovy on top.
Will be on the same page Greed a hundred. I
ate that for dinner two nights ago. You always have
something in the cupboard and you can always find a
cracker and some bread and anchovies. And you know, if
you're really out of crackers, you can just take those
anchovies and take that piece of utter and wrap the
anchovie around the butter and stick a toothpick in it
and eat that. That works. I do think people are
(22:06):
closed off to anchovies because when they were kids, they
had that really crappy anchovy pizza, you know in the
pizzeria where they used the worst quality anchovies and they're
really stinky, and then somebody at the table across your
news eating and you smell it, so that will turn
you off. You've got to buy good anchovies, like bad
anchovies are bad. How about anchovy paste, Yeah, that's pretty bad.
That stuffs about another question, and I think we talked
(22:28):
about this. It was around Thanksgiving, I think last year
I was talking to you I said to you, You've
been writing for The Times for many, many years. How
in the world you write about Thanksgiving again? Like do
you have You can't go back and do the same
thing you did last year or five or seven years ago.
It's the worst. Thanksgiving is the worst. I hate thanksgat
I mean I really at this point, I hate Thanksgiving.
And I'm going to just admit it right to all
(22:50):
of your listeners and don't be mad at me. But
I do it every year and it's really hard. I
just want to cook Thanksgiving and I don't want to
write about it anymore. But it is. It is a
challenge because we need to be fresh. We need to
come up with a new idea. It needs to be
a big idea. There are only so many ways to
reinvent Turkey. I feel like I perfected my turkey in
two thousand twelve, Like that was the perfect tur I like,
(23:12):
I don't what am I going to do now? But
yet you have to keep going back, and you have
to keep approaching it from a fresh perspective, and you
have to bring all your creative energy behind it. And
so you know, like I said, I did this perfectly
simple risk turkey. I think it was called the Simplest
dress Turkey. I didn't trust it, I didn't stuff it.
It was just the easiest thing you could possibly make.
And it was so good, and so many people love
(23:33):
this recipe because it really is easy and just delicious.
But then I had to do it again, and I
had to do it again. So last year I did
Anchovy roast turkey and that was delicious too. You know,
that was great because then Anchovia said it. But it
is hard to just try to find the enthusiasm, you know,
especially when you know, like, why did it? I like,
I'm happy with that two thousand twelve recipe, but but
(23:54):
I need to keep going. This is where we differ.
If I come up with a good recipe that I like,
I just leave it on the menu. I don't have
to change it every every twelve months, which is good. Well,
you know, being a newspaper, we have to be new. Yeah,
can you use out there? How many ways can you
make a potato? I mean you have to just keep
coming up with different potato recipes. Potatoes are easier than turkey, well,
probably easier to recipe test. I can't imagine that thirty
percent that your family doesn't need. It's probably before Thanksgiving
(24:16):
when it's like, oh, Mom made another turkey. Hope the
neighbors want this one, because I'm not eating. We're not
even Thanksgiving yet. You know, my family does get very
sick of We do recipe developing for Thanksgiving in August,
in July August, so you know, we've eaten a lot
of turkeys by the time we get to November. But
then we take a break, and then by November, actually
we are ready for turkey again. Oh well, that's good.
So I have a little game I want to play
(24:36):
with you. Everybody's heard of Betty Crocker. She's been around
since nineteen. Needless to say, people were left heartbroken after
Fortune magazine revealed in ninet that the Domestic icon was
a fake. I'm going to read off some brand names,
and you're gonna tell me if they're real or fake.
Sarah Lee, is that a real person? I don't think so.
(24:58):
I don't know she's real. She was a Chicago baker's daughter, okay,
Sarah Chef Boyard, No, he's a real person. He was
an Italian immigrant. Oscar Meyer caldn't possibly he's real Germany.
I just think everybody's fiction. I have no faith. He
was a butcher in Chicago in the twentieth century. Right,
(25:20):
hold on wait, I have some more of those. You're
ready ready, Famous Amos, Famous Amos, Yes, really real? Yes,
just pictures on the package of the cookies. Yes, his
name was Wallace Amos. He was a talent agent at
William Morris and he used to make cookies and send
them to Diana Ross and Simon and Garfunkele and everybody
was telling him, you're really good at making the cookies.
Go make the cookies. So in v five he opened
(25:41):
his first store in l A. Wow. No, you see
his picture on the package. I remember. Famous Amos was
actually a pretty big figure in my childhood. Really, okay,
how about Keebler? What the Keebler elves? Are they real? No?
I think the Keepler elves are not real. They're real.
Godfrey Keebler. He was a baker in Philadelphia in eighteen
fifty three. Did he have of elves? It doesn't say.
(26:01):
I didn't look at it. I didn't do that much research. Okay,
Mrs Field, Yes you're writing Debbie Field seven she opened
her first bakery. Well, thank you so much for coming
to see me and talking. Thank you for having me
recipe writing in cookbooks. I gotta say I thought that
was interesting. I hope you did too. I want to
(26:22):
thank my guest Melissa Clark for being here today. See
you soon. Food three six is a production of I
Heart Radio and I'm your host, Mark Murphy. A very
special thanks to Emily Carpet, My director of Communications, and
producers Nikki Etre and Christina Everett. Mixing and music by
(26:42):
Anna Stump and recording help from Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzel.
Thank you to Bethan Macaluso and Kara Weissenstein for handling research.
Food through sixty is executive produced by man guest at
ticket or. For more podcasts at my heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. M
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com