May 20, 2024 • 45 mins
We've only just met, but I'm confident Claire Saffitz and I will be friends
Claire shares the challenges of baking and life in general. She's a star in a new era of food writers who are experts in their knowledge, passionate about their craft, rigorous about their work.
Claire majored in history and literature at Harvard, then one day, almost by accident, she became the host of her own cooking show.
She has written two cookbooks, Dessert Person and What's For Dessert, both New York Times bestsellers.
I've come to New York to meet Claire - we have a lot to discuss.
This episode of Ruthie's Table 4 is made in partnership with Moncler.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
We've only just met, but I'm sure Claire Saffatts and
I will be friends forever. Being a modern woman, I
know all about her from her beautiful and brilliant YouTube
and instagrams, the closest I guess I'll ever come to
dating online, though I'd have a lot of competition dating Claire.
She has over a million followers who love her. Claire
(00:26):
is open and she is honest. She shares with us
the challenges of baking and of life in general. She's
a star in a new era of food writers who
are experts in their knowledge, passionate about their craft, rigorous
about their work. Claire measured in history and literature at Harvard,
pursuing her career as an academic. Then one day, in
(00:47):
her own words, almost by accident, she became the host
of her own cooking show. Claire has also written two cookbooks,
Dessert Person and What's for Dessert, both of which are
New York Times best sellers. I've come to New York
to meet Claire the Dessert Person, and most of all,
my new best friend. One million other friends. I'm not worried.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Thank you, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's great to see you. And here we are in
New York, beautiful day after the eclipse. Did you see
the eclipse?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
It was clowny where I was. Oh, it was Hudson Valley.
We're in Orange County, sort of far from the Cat's Skills.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, so it was born in Monticello.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Oh, we're not too far. We're actually very close. It
was clear all day until about three pm, and then
I couldn't see anything.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah. Great thing about being here yesterday was the amount
of people on the streets, in the on the rooftops.
The people want to share seeing something, don't they. You know,
it was so beautiful to see the kind of movement
on the streets of everybody on the streets.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah. New York comes alive in spring.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Absolutely, yeah, I really And today is a beautiful day.
So we're here and I am so happy to meet you.
And my favorite dessert is vanilla ice cream, and it's
the one you went right too. So would you like
to read it?
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I'd love to, Okay, vanilla ice cream one point seventy
five liters double cream four hundred and fifty mili liters
whole milk, four fresh vanilla pods, split lengthways, fifteen egg yolks,
three hundred and fifty grams cast or sugar. Combine the
cream and milk in a large saucepan. Scrape the vanilla
seeds out of the pods into the pan using a knife.
(02:25):
Then add the pods to heat until just below boiling point.
Remove from the heat. Beat the egg yolks and sugar
together until pale and thick. Pour a little of the
warm cream into the eggyoak mixture and stir. Return this
to the rest of the cream in the saucepan, and
cook gently over a low heat, stirring constantly to prevent
the custard from curdling. When the custard is thickened enough
to coat the back of the spoon, strain it into
(02:47):
a heatproof bowl and leave to cool. Pour into an
ice cream machine and churn until frozen.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
What made you choose a vanilla ice cream?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I have a memory of culinary school and went to
culinary school in Paris at age. It was twenty four
to twenty five, and I did a sort of general
culinary program, so I didn't focus on pastry, even though
now I'm mostly a baker, but we had one day
a week of pastry and I was very influenced by
our chef. Chef Antoine was our pastry chef in culinary school.
(03:16):
And I remember the day that we made vanilla ice cream.
We were doing all the custards and he, you know,
he was late in his career. He had worked at
lots of Tivanut, like lots of three Michelin star restaurants
in Paris, and we made vanilla ice cream and he
took it out of the ice cream machine and he
tasted it, and he just got this look on a
total sort of like exalted look on his face, and
(03:37):
he was just like, I love anel ice cream. It's
the best thing there is. And so that was really formative,
and he was right. It really is the most delicious dessert.
I love dairy based desserts. I love dairy in general.
Vanilla is one of the most unique, incredible flavors that
you know, that comes from the earth. So I just
think it's the most perfect dessert that there.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Is, because I do too when I go to the
River Cafe now, and I know every dessert I've made,
every dessert, and I love, you know, I just love them,
but they almost don't ask me anymore. They just bring
ice cream, right, And I think, do you make your
ice cream in the same way? Do you use the
vanilla pods?
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yes, I mean I like, I like this recipe because
it has a lot of vanilla, which is great. But
I do make ice cream at home. I got an
ice cream maker last year, a good one. Finally a
good one, so you have a good result. But I like,
you know, I went to colony school in France, so
I like the cramong glass base and lass egg yolks
and make the most delicious ice cream.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And so if we're going back, because I would love
to talk to you more about coming, you know, to
pastry and how you came there and going to France
to learn to cook, because again there's a similarity there
that my living in Paris, as I did as an
adult working in an architect's office. It was there that
I decided to become a cook, and I went to
(05:01):
do you know, the Mastering in the Art of French cooking.
Of course, I'm so old that Simone Beck was living
in Paris, and I somehow got in touch with her
and asked her if I could have some time with her,
and so I used to go to her apartment in
the sixteenth Wow, this is about me, and I want
to talk about you. So tell me. Tell me about
growing up in your house, Tell me about your parents
and food.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
I grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the Midwest.
I would say it was a very typical kind of
suburban childhood of the nineteen nineties. But both of my
parents cooked all the time. Mostly both did, yeah, mostly
my mom who was home more. My dad worked more.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
What did he do?
Speaker 1 (05:39):
He was actually recently retired. He worked at Washington University
Medical School, so he was an academic physician. And that's
what brought my family to Saint Louis. They are not
originally Midwesterners. My parents there from the East Coast, so
they moved out to the Midwest, where my grandma was
sure we'd never get a bagel. She was very worried.
She came, my family came to No, she was just hell.
(06:00):
Family was on the East coast and she was very
scared that no one would get a bagel. Turns out
we had a great bagel shop nearby. So and I
have two older sisters. We were all born in Saint Louis,
and I just come from a house where cooking was
very central and we all ate dinner together every night
at the table. My mom made dinner almost every night,
(06:20):
and I think as a child of the nineties, I
learned later in life that that wasn't so typical. That
it's like a lot of my friend's parents both worked,
and my mom worked as well, but she was a teacher,
so she had more time in the afternoons, so she'd
come home and it wasn't uncommon for her to bake
a loaf of bread in the afternoon, and so we'd
have fresh bread for dinner, and she'd make lots of
(06:42):
soups and everything homemade from scratch. So I grew up
with that very normalized and very kind of typical. We
started every meal with a green salad where she'd you know,
cut up crunchy vegetables and mostly romaine, and she'd put
all of oil and redwhe vinegar and some grated parmesan
on the salad, and that was how we started our meal,
(07:03):
and it was really ideal. I think that taught me
from a young age about the importance of cooking, and
I think my parents also modeled really healthy behavior around food,
which I think again as a child in the nineties
was not so common really. That was the era of
like everything was low fat or no fat, with a
lot of you know a lot of snack foods and
(07:24):
prepared foods. So that wasn't really a thing in our house.
I think I learned I gave me good habits as
an adult because I'm not a snacker, you know, I'd
like to eat a proper meal. So I'm really grateful
for the modeling around food and cooking in our house.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
How do you think she did that that she would
teach and then she would go shopping or do you
think she'd wake up in the morning and think, I
know what I'm going to cook today? Or did you
I have di.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
I really ask her. I mean she has still today
a really extensive and well curated recipe box. She did
me multiple boxes, really, But I think my mom really
liked cooking, so it wasn't it was a chore for her,
because you know, with family of five, I think it's
always going to feel like a chore if you do
it every night. But she also liked it, so I
(08:09):
don't really know how she decided what she would make,
but we would have dinners of she would have. To me,
looking back, I think that they were really inspired meals.
We'd have like french onion soup and crocs one night,
and then we'd have what were other sort of typical
meals that she would make. We would have like baked
potatoes and steak and broccoli another night. So we had
(08:31):
really well rounded, abundant meals.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Would you ever go in the kitchen?
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I would help her. We all had chores, my sisters
and I, So it was setting the table, clearing the table,
not so much helping with the dishes. My dad is
sort of a mania called dishwasher, and so we were
not actually didn't want our help with that, and so
I would bake with my mom more often. I was
a really studious child, so I would be doing my
homework when my mom was making dinner. But on the
(09:00):
weekends we would, you know, I would help her baking
baking projects.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Would you have dessert? Also? Every night you'd have screen salad,
but go on to the dessert.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
We would have dessert every night. Yeah, it was, I
mean it was small. It was like a little bit
of ice cream after dinner on you know, everyone kind
of doing We wouldn't like properly have it at the table,
but it was everyone can kind of help himself and
there was no restriction or judgment around food, which is
really important.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And you said your father cooked as well.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, my dad cooked. It was more of a weekend project.
You'd make us breakfasts and we'd always have It was
very common in my family to had like a Sunday
brunch with bagels and scrambled eggs and fruit and that
kind of thing, and he would cook. One of my
earliest food memories is my dad sawteg sliced garlic and
olive oil to make linguini with clams.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
So where did you live, Where was it you were
near the We know.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
We were in Saint Louis. We had like kind of
so in those days, I think he would use canned clams.
We had a pretty good fish market where a lot
of the fish came up from the Gulf because we
were in Saint Louis. So I grew up eating fish,
but not like not like here in New York. But
that memory, and especially the smell memory of the garlic
and olive oil, I still to this day I think
(10:12):
that there is no better smell in the entire world
than garlic and olive oil.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
And sometimes you need that smell that you I mean, yeah,
you know there have been times that I just need
to have that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
It's very grounding to me just because of how early
on I remember that. So in my family, we always
joke that we discussed the next meal. At the current meal.
I'll be sitting out for dinner, then we talk about
what what are we gonna eat tomorrow?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I think that might that might become more common, that
there's something about because I remember saying that to my mother.
She said, well, you know, what are we going to
eat tomorrow? So you just was slightly groaning from it.
And but then it's it's fun. Yeah, it's fine to
get a bed thinking what are we going to eat tomorrow?
What are we going to wake up to tomorrow?
Speaker 1 (10:52):
We loved a meal plan and yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And so your father more about your dad cooking, so
you would do at the breakfast and he would do
the weekends. Was it his family that came from Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
It's very fuzzy, yes, and no Ukraine or Russia. We
don't really know. It's been actually very difficult to find
on my mom's side. My mother's grandparents came from Ukraine
and only spoke Yiddish, and her grandfather before coming to
the United States was a baker, which I didn't know
this until I was an adult, like not even that many. Yes,
(11:30):
I was working on my first cookbook and I was
with my mom because my mom and I cooked together
all the time now, and she kind of offhandedly mentioned this.
We were in the kitchen together and she said, oh, yeah, well,
you know, my grandpa was a baker, and I had
truly never heard that before. But it makes sense because
we have a small but really important collection of family
(11:51):
recipes from her side in the family of you know,
sort of Jewish baking recipes, so apple cake and mondel
bread and poppy seed bread, all these sort of like
Eastern European Jewish and.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
They would have come from your grandmother who has got
them from her.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yes, mother, Yes, So we have Aunt Tilly's apple cake,
which is my grandmother sister was Tilly.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
I haven't Aunt Tilly.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Yeah, A famous a famous apple cake recipe. Actually, my
mom submitted it to this is like in the nineties
the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, our local paper, and it
won recipe of the year. So it's a famous apple
cake famous. It has some it has orange juice in it,
and it has sour cream, so it's like a very
(12:39):
very tender cake and it just has mostly it has
just a ton of apples in it, and it's delicious.
I've made it in a very long time.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Did your entertain They did.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
They entertained a lot, And it gave me a false
sense of how easy entertaining is because my mom made
it look so easy. She was so organized and would
always have like be dressed and ready and flowers arranged
fifteen minutes before people started showing up.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Not like us, right right, right, yeah, right.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
But I grew up, Yeah, I grew up with those
kinds of like parties my dad's you know, fellow faculty
from the hospital would come over for parties, and I
grew up with that kind of as a kid from
the top of the stairs looking down at the party
and the kind of little chit chat and you know,
some sort of sound effects of a good party. I
grew up with.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
And when you left this dream and you went off too,
was the first time you left when you went to college? Yes,
And did you what was the food like there? I
know the university, and I know Harvard, and I know
so I don't you know, what would be interesting to
know what was it like as in terms of food.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
It was at Harvard. It's most common for students to
live on campus all four years, so it's not typicult
to be in an apartment where you have may kitchen
and can prepare your meals. So that's what I did.
I lived in the dorms and we ate in the
dining halls, which was sort of typical dining hall food.
(14:13):
They I think right around the time I was a student,
they had begun a program to work with local farms,
but in Boston that just means you're eating winter squash
for most of the year. We were just limited in
our options.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
But I would go.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I would Actually an interesting anecdote is that my parents
moved to the Boston area when I started college. My
dad's switch shops, so my parents have been in Boston
for the last eighteen plus years. But it meant that
I had a home that I could go to if
I wanted to cook. So I would go home on
the weekends and bake. Sometimes I bake pies, and if
I just really felt like I wanted to have that
(14:50):
kind of domestic time from away from school and academics,
and I would do that, so I was lucky that
I also got to do that.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Do you think the smell of baking was powerful as
the smell of garlic and oil frying in the pan?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
I do.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
It is about smell biking, right.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
My mom. I know when I am so funny in
my When I first started working up on Epite magazine,
we worked in what was the former Gourmet Test kitchen
where they really didn't have hoods, and I could I
always knew when something was done because I could smell it.
And then we moved facilities into a much bigger, newer
(15:27):
kitchen where they had really powerful hoods and I couldn't
smell anything, and it really kind of screwed me up. Yeah,
but baking is very evocative for me of my childhood.
My mom, we had a outside of my sister's window,
we had a sour cherry tree, which is very special.
Sour Cherries are partly because of my childhood and partly
just because they're incredible, always my favorite baking fruit, and
(15:51):
they're so temporary, so fleeting.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
What is this season for us? Out?
Speaker 1 (15:56):
It's really early July. It was just about a week
or two where you get window because they're very, very fragile.
When they're ripe, they are so soft, and so they
just they go bad so fast. So my mom would
bake pies with Sara cherries, and we would pick the
cherries out of my sister's window from her bedroom. My
mom would be terrified, we're gonna fall out of the window.
(16:18):
So before the birds could get them, we'd try to
pick enough cherries.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Would you preserve them? Would you put them into ours?
Speaker 1 (16:23):
We didn't. I wish we had done that. I would
do that now.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
One of my favorite things is is cherries and grappa,
you know, really strong alcohol, and I don't like so
much in syrup, but the French do it in that
kind of de v and the and yeah, yeah, I
love that.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yes, my mom would bake pies, just bake pies. Yeah,
so the smell of pie baking is to me very
reminiscent of my childhood.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
So you'd go home at the weekends and bake. And
you were saying, as saying in the introduction that you
were studying literature and history and the liberal arts education.
But then you had a moment was there a moment
that you sort of an epiphany when you said, actually,
what I want to do is cook? What was that
a gradual thing to do it?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
It feels like it was both in a way. When
I graduated from college, I didn't really know what I
wanted to do. I moved back home for the summer,
and I started cooking basically NonStop. It became the only
thing that I really I wasn't really motivated to find
a job, but I was highly motivated to cook dinner
every night for my parents, me and my parents, and
(17:35):
they kind of loved it, but they also wanted me
to like figure some stuff out. So that's when actually
I got an internship. I moved to New York. That's
when I became even more serious about cooking and eating
and exploring New York's restaurants to the extent that I
could on being like living on a stipend from an internship.
(17:57):
Then I applied to culinary school because which one was
a fernde in Paris, which I only applied to one
I was the only one I really knew that much
about that had been recommended by, you know, a friend
of a friend of a friend. So I pursued culinary
school more as a means to moving to another country.
(18:19):
I wanted to live abroad. I wanted to get that
education and have that experience. I am a you know,
I'm a lover of Julia Child, and I just wanted
to be her basically. But I always had the plan
to presume academics. So after I did that, I went
back to school and I did a master's in It
(18:42):
was a master's in history, but with their study a
focus on culinary history, basically looking at the sort of
intellectual history of food. And I loved doing that. But
about halfway through my master's program, I just decided that
I missed cooking. I missed that feeling of making something
with my hands that had always been so important to me.
(19:03):
So I finished my master's program and that's when I decided, like,
I think that I have to be making food and
not just reading and writing about it.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
And what did you think that having that academic knowledge,
knowing the history, knowing influenced your actual cooking. Do you
think you would have been with that all that a
different kind of cook if you didn't know or have that.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
I think it just informs my perspective, my perspective is
just very long, I think when it comes to cooking,
because when I would read these like early modern cookbook texts,
some of it would seem very contemporary.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
What year when when you say early modern, what.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Year seventeen hundreds for the most part, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
So that I'm making in seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Oh so most of the books from that period were
written by professional chefs, all men of course, who worked
in big houses, big noble houses or in you know,
royal households, and they were in the same genre as
household manual, So how to how to keep a house
in France and England. Yeah, so this is really when
(20:09):
the these are kind of proto cookbooks like these are
sort of the first examples of cookbooks as we know them.
And they would talk about how to throw a banquet,
you know, make this kind of pie, you know, they
would how to make these sort of sculptural pieces that
would go sort of in between courses, and you know,
very like heavily spiced food, sort of food that was
not so unlike food of the Middle Ages. Really also
(20:32):
where sweet and savory were not divided between. There really
was no concept of courses. Everything would just be laid
out together, so sweet and savory would be mingled. I
loved I love reading these books. Yeah, and they were illustrations.
It's like fascinating. But really just knowing having that knowledge
makes me realize that, like when I am creating a recipe,
(20:53):
I'm never really making anything new ever. You know, everything's
already been made before, and I'm just maybe putting a
little touch on it or something or changing the proportion.
So it just gives me that perspective of like someone
before me has already done this. You know. I'm not
the kind of cook that is so motivated by the
(21:13):
idea of originality, you know, because I just things are
classic for a reason, you know, these combinations that are
tried and true, It's because they taste the best, you know.
So I'm never really trying to innovate so much. I
just want to make the best version of the thing
(21:34):
that I want to eat, you know. So you know,
when I'm recipe developing, I try to be very honest
and up front of it.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
I noticed that with your food. I noticed that it's
classic and it's I said, rigorous, you know, And I
think we can all find those ideas recipes, you know,
let's do this, or let's do that. But what we're
interested in is how to how to make the perfect
I don't know, tartantan, how do you make I'd like
(22:04):
to learn how to make a kind of chocolate moss
that actually has that depth of flavor and not by
putting something in it that we've never seen or making
it higher. Which is not to say try it, you know,
try the experimentation. But yeah, that's what we do. That's
what I like about your food, and I like about
the recipes that you cook. The River Cafe is excited.
(22:33):
We're opening the River Cafe Cafe. Come for a morning
Briosian cappuccino, a plate of seasonal antiposity on the terrace,
or an ice cream or a paratubo in the sun.
We can't wait to open and we cannot wait to
welcome you. So you're becoming a chef in New York
(23:01):
right doing with Bone Appetite. And then how did you
seg by into doing it on your own and working
by yourself?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
So I started working at Bone Epetee in the test
kitchen almost right out of grad school. I got so
lucky to have gotten that job when I did, and
I was thrilled. I could not have been happier. I
get to move back to New York, which I really
wanted to do, and I just thought that food media
was truly like the perfect place for me because I
got to make food and I got to write about it,
(23:31):
and that it really was. I started as a recipe tester,
so I wasn't developing recipes, but the food editors would develop.
They would go through a series of tastings and then
write the recipe and then I would get it and
I was sort of the last person to touch that
recipe in the kitchen before it would get published. So
it was my job to flag anything that didn't work.
And I learned so much about recipe writing and development
(23:55):
during that time. I think it's so essential to learn
how to test a recipe if you want to do development.
And then I got promoted and I became, you know,
went through all the different levels in the magazine world
of like associate editor, you know, assistant editor, associate. I
think I was senior associate, and then senior finally, so
(24:18):
I was there for five years and developing recipes the
whole time, and I just got to the point in
the magazine cycle of like, I don't know if I
can do another Christmas issue. I don't know if I
could do another Thanksgiving issue, summer grilling. It's very repetitive.
So I just sort of thought after five cycles of
doing that that it was time to move on. But
(24:40):
I had also begun to do video as part of,
you know, my job in the test kitchen. I worked
for bonn Epte, which was part of Conde Nast, and
they had this big, beautiful new space at the World
Trade Center and they had, you know, a video team.
So I started doing some video hosting app on epetit
(25:01):
with you know, basically like no training in that I
hadn't had any experience in front of the camera. I
didn't really want to do that as part of my career.
It just happened, so and it was extremely successful. And
I did this show called Gourmey Makes where I like
reverse engineered I basically knew that I liked to bake,
and they were like, well, we can have Claire. We
(25:21):
could hire a pastry chef, you know, from a restaurant
in New York to come in and do this where
we could just have Claire do it. And she's already
on staff and we already pay her. So I started
doing that show. She was really successful, but I just
was like, I think I've been doing this long enough.
I want to kind of do my own thing.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So did you like the desserts that you were being
given to before?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
You know, I mentioned earlier that like I didn't really
grow up with a lot of store bought food. Yeah,
so I was sort of you know, like the first
thing they had me make was a Twinkie. It's like,
I don't even know if I'd ever eaten it before.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
It's not to describe a tweaky that audience, the American
audience when the Twinkie is a kind of roll with cream.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, it's like a bar shaped cake individually wrapped with
a cream filling. But it's not cream c R E
A M. It's c R E M E, which is
they can't actually call it cream filling because it has
the area.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
So, you know, a lot of the things that I
was trying to recreate were not in and of themselves
really food. They were like things that are edible but
are really not food because it's all packaged stuff. So
that was really my job was like I'm going to
make this into you know, actual food that someone could
make and that you could eat. So I learned a
(26:43):
lot doing it. I don't think that like in and
of itself, the task of making a I'm trying to
think of other swinging. I made Twizzler the other you know,
it was like so useful. But I learned a lot,
and I think it helped me become a better recipe
developer and also just to understand more of the problems
solving process. So I left in twenty eighteen, so I
(27:06):
was no longer on staff, and that's when I started
writing my first cookbook, which is Desert Person.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Well, yeah, tell us about Dessert Person.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, Dessert Person is a book of all the stuff
that I like to bake and eat. It's not all sweet.
There's some savory baking because baking. Part of the thesis
of the book is that baking can be many different things,
and it can be dinner, and it can you know,
it's not just sweets. But really it's a book about
kind of not restricting your sting oneself and not sort
(27:39):
of assigning morality to food and not saying that some
food is good or bad or thinking that you know
you're doing something wrong by eating dessert. You know, it's
just not how I think about it, and so that's
kind of what that's kind of the underpinnings of the book.
It's sort of like, it's okay to eat dessert, and
we should celebrate it, and you know, food is one
(28:01):
of life's great pleasures, if not a great pleasure, so
you might as well enjoy it. I still look upon
it so fondly and with a lot of pride, because
it was a book that really felt at the time
like the culmination of everything I had learned about pastry
and cooking, but also about eating and about the kinds
of foods that I like to eat, and about my
(28:23):
style of baking. And so it's very you know, fresh
produce driven, it's very seasonal. There's fruit deserts are kind
of my favorite kinds of dessert, so there's tons of
fruit in it.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Tell us about food deserts. If somebody is listening to
this and you want to tell them about which they
should be thinking about when they think about fruit desserts.
What is this month now? This is April, yes, So
what are we thinking about right now? Oh?
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Right now, I'm just waiting until we get strawberries, which
a New York will still be you know, at least
a month. So I have a kind of a hierarchy
of fruit desserts. Okay, I think the top fruit dessert
is as I mentioned, sour cherry. I think there is
like no better baking fruit. And then after that apples.
Apples are just an incredible specific Actually my favorite apple,
(29:12):
and you know, I live in New York, which is
truly like the land of apples. There's like hundreds and
hundreds of varieties. My favorite is called gold rush. Have
you ever had a gold rush apple? They are It
is the firmest apple I've ever tried, to the point
where if you want to eat one out of hand,
it almost hurts your mouth to bite into. But the
flavor is incredible, like honey and lemon and even almost
(29:36):
like tropical fruit. It's so complex and is so amazing
for its sweet tart balance, and they hold together incredibly
well when you bake them.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
So if you were making a tarta time back to
the Tarta tent.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Would you use that for gold rush? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Because it is challenging. I think when you when you
make it, let's talk about.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
I love I love making it, and I love eating it.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Yeah, and what is your and so you have these
star with the apple. Can you tell me about your tartata?
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yes, I've made it so many different ways. So the
kind of classic way is just to make your caramel
and your skillet and then add your apples and cook them.
And there's all these tricks of like you can dry
out your apples in advance by peeling them and cutting
them and keeping them in the fridge.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Do you cut the apples in HALFA? Do you cut
them in pieces?
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I sort of cut them in lobes, like I cut
around the core, so I end up with pieces that
are slightly different sizes, which can be useful for tucking
them into the gaps because there is a lot of
they lose moisture and with a shrink, shrink, So I
like to actually pre cook my apples. I think it
just takes out some of the variability. So I like
(30:43):
to cook. I actually roast my apples in caramel before
I assemble the whole thing. Because what doesn't make sense
about tartata is putting cold pastry on warm apples, and
I like to avoid doing that because it just feels
so wrong. So I like to I roast my apple
in caramel covered really tightly in a low oven until
(31:05):
they're soft, and then they cool in the caramel and
they kind of absorb. Like the best thing about tart
tatan is the way the apple's candy in the caramel
and you cut into them, but apples have absorbed the
caramel all the way through. It's not just like they
have a ring of it around, and then the flesh
is white on the inside, so this really facilitates that.
And then I just lay the apples there. You know,
(31:25):
there's already they're already sort of imbued with that caramel.
I lay them in, put the pastry on top. Everything's cold,
which is great, and then into the oven. It was
more work. It's not that kind of spontaneous like cooking
on the stove and throwing the whole thing in the oven.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
But I came back from Paris. That was always the
dessert that I wanted to perfect, and we had a tiny,
tiny kitchen, was so tiny that you couldn't actually put
an oven in there. So we made a window and
stuck back that looked like an air conditioner from the road,
but it was the oven. And I actually it's interesting
(31:59):
to hear you say that because That's how I did
the dark dead to him, because what you will, they
do shrink and they do. The whole point is to
have the caramel and to have them dark brown, and
to have them really strong. And I think that's how
I ended up making them in two stages.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
That texture of like a soft but not mushy apple
that's sort of caramelized all the way through and that's
spooning into it is just one of the most satisfying
food textures for me.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
There are so many books out there, cookbooks and dessert books,
and this book was a huge success, wasn't it. What
do you think that was due to? Why do you
think your book reached so many people?
Speaker 1 (32:39):
I do think a lot of it was the timing.
It came out in the fall of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Oh was it.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Not a great time all around, but a great time
for a cookbook, for a baking book. People were making
banana bread.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Like crazy in England as well. I have more text
messages which include a loaf of bread than practically anything
right else? Right?
Speaker 1 (33:00):
How do I make the s people text? How do
I make it right?
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I would zoom cool? And you know, FaceTime cooking with
friends of mine's children or trying to get I tried
to get perfect. Do you have a perfect chocolate chip cookie?
Speaker 1 (33:13):
I do, and it's a dessert person. Yeah, it's so good.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Oh good? Is it a thin one?
Speaker 1 (33:18):
It's a thin with like the very outer edges crispy
and the rest of it is chewy, and it gets
it kind of wrinkled because it's a thinner cookie has
a higher proportion of butter, so it gets it kind
of wrinkled edge, which I love. And it has both
dark chocolate and milk chocolate in it. You just break
it up, yes, yeah, so chopped up from a bar
and a brown the butter which oh that combination of
(33:41):
the brown butter plus brown sugar plus vanilla, it gives
you so much of that intense butter scotch flavor, which
I love.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Do you think that this book in your books and
your influence? How much does that coincide with being visual online,
being on YouTube, being Instagram? What do you feel about
the New Revolution and food?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
I mean, I have to say that I am in
favor of it because I'm a part of it, but
I have my I have my mixed feelings. I think overall,
I think there's it's so easy to be to feel overexposed,
and to just think that you can turn your normal
daily activities into content and to sort of always be visible,
(34:27):
which I don't like, don't I don't actually post on
Instagram that frequently, and I'm told that I need to
do it more. But you know, I like to keep
very private actually, and I like to keep my private
life private. But I try to remain rooted in the
idea that visual medium for food is the best. It's
(34:48):
so much easier to teach someone how to make something
when you can think to write the words on a page.
So that's where I come from. I come from a
place of teaching when it comes to YouTube and you know,
just video and social media in general. I hope that
we still need cookbooks. I think that cookbooks are important
(35:08):
from like it's not really about individual recipes. It's about like,
what is this a book really saying? What is it
sort of like what's the lifestyle? It's it's advocating for
what is the kind of approach to food that is
taken as a whole. When you look at the entire book,
it's not just you know, one hundred recipes put together
(35:28):
in a specific order. It's really much more than that.
It's about a sort of whole, the way this person
is conceiving of, you know, the work, the work that
they're doing, and the work of home cooking. So I
do think we still need cookbooks. I wonder for myself
if I am going to keep writing them, because it's
like once you said everything there is to say, I'm like,
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
I always say that. I think that, you know, often
thing we've done thirteen or fourteen, I can't remember, but
I think that I often say, does a world need
another cookbook? Yeah? And I do keep doing them because
I just love doing them. For me to actually work with,
it's so collaborative. We work in a very collaborative way.
So we immediately start working with the photographers, with the designers.
(36:10):
We sit around the table and we always cook something
and then we taste it and then we say, let's
do it this way, let's change the recipe. And so
for us, I think it's one of the joys of life.
It's about informing and it's always aspirational. I think that
people I think they once did a study of Gourmet magazine,
which you mentioned, and I grew up with and I
(36:31):
think maybe Nora Efron wrote an essay saying, have you
ever cooked a recipe from Gourmet? And it was kind
of true that you'd buy the magazine and you'd say,
I'm going to make that, I'm going to be a
better person, I'm going to do this, and then put
the magazine down, and you know didn't.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
So right, That's how I tend to read cookbooks, and
I'm not ever I'm basically never making recipes out of cookbooks.
I mean, I shouldn't say maybe literally never am I
making recipes out of cookbooks? But I read them. Yeah,
And that's exactly why, because I want to sort of
see I love the photography, and I want to see
the types of recipes and the I love the other
(37:07):
sort of ancillary writing. Sometimes there's essays, so like Martha,
the same thing with Martha Stewart, who's her one hundred
book is coming out, which is blows my mind, but
I think one hundred yeah, So yeah, like I'm That's
why I'm buying and reading cookbooks, not so much because
I think it's going to help me, you know, make
dinner on a Tuesday. I can already make dinner on
(37:29):
a man.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for Would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, o, wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
We went to London a few months ago and we
had lunch at the River Cafe and then we took
the train to Paris and we're in Paris for a while.
And I hadn't been back to Paris since I lived
there for Connory School had been over ten years. So
it was a very emotional trip for me and I
had the best time, and I want my husband. We'd
never been to Europe together.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Who is a chef?
Speaker 1 (38:20):
So it's a chef, yes?
Speaker 2 (38:21):
What is he doing?
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Before we met, he had been a chef in New
York restaurants for ten years at a couple of places
that are now closed. Then he really left kitchens for
a long time and went into sort of restaurant operations.
And so he has a restaurant that he runs in
Chelsea Market. It's Burgers and Sheiks and they partner with
this incredible dairy farm in the Hudson Valley called Ronnie Brook.
(38:45):
Maybe Ronnie Brook Dairy, Yeah, just like a big New
York Dairy. Actually they're not big, but in New York
they're just very sort of an iconic like New York
Dairy brand. And now he's actually returned to kitchens and
he's cooking at a place in the Catskills. It's called
the Tasting Room at Catskill Distillery. So he's partnering with
(39:06):
this woman named Claire Marin and she has this distillery
up in Calicoon and she makes honey and maple syrup.
And so he's cooking at the restaurant there.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
There's a real emergence or emergence of local produce, isn't
it People going back to the fairy, to the farms
to know, especially in the Hudson River Valley.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, we're surrounded by farms everywhere we look.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
And what are you working on now?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Right now? I've really begun pretty serious, dedicated work on
my next book, which is Savory, mostly savory. The sort
of central thesis of this book is that if you
want to live the best life, you have to cook.
So it's really kind of a meditation on how to
live well by cooking for oneself and for you know,
(39:57):
your friends and family. So it's pretty it's pretty expansive
and comprehensive. It's sort of it's like kind of meals
for every occasion, from breakfast to a snack to entertaining
to holidays. So it's really it's actually very driven by
eating rather than cooking, because I always make a distinction
(40:19):
between there's the things that you love to cook and
the things that you love to eat.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
That distinction.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
For instance, I love cooking. I mean I love French food,
so it's like I love cooking kind of multi step
French recipes, like I love cassoulet. I love cooking it.
I don't totally love eating it. It's a lot, it's
very heavy, just very like nutrient dense. You know, it's
(40:46):
beans and lots of different meats. But I love cooking it.
So it's like I love making it for an occasion.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
What do you love about cooking?
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I love slowness, the slowness. I love simmering beans. The
beans themselves are so delicious, that tar bay beans, which
I always make a point to get. I love the process,
the kind of layering of the flavors and the long cooking,
and I love assembling that kind of when you get
to like layer the beans with all the different, you know,
(41:15):
the garlic sausage and the dot confie and all that,
but not my favorite thing to eat. So this new
book is really driven by the things that I'd love
to eat most.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
So give me five.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Oh my goodness, okay too well, so it's funny. The
book is savory, but of course there's lots of dessert.
There has to be, because that's it's proportionate to the
amount of dessert that I eat in my life compared
to savory food, which is maybe like five, you know,
one to five or something. I just made like a
very simple pistachio cake, super simple and make it in
the food processor because you start just by grinding toasted
(41:51):
pistachios and then you just add all your.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Other ingredients in pour butter, sugar.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah, basically eggs, very egg heavy.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Do you do it in love?
Speaker 1 (42:01):
I did it just as a single layer so that
you can get I just sprinkled some confection of sugar
and toasted pistachios over top. Not too sweet, you know,
all my desserts are really not too sweet, so you
can taste it's supposed to taste like something else with sugar.
What else? Lots of salads I mean, I'm a vegetable lover.
I haven't talked about that yet, but I know I haven't.
(42:22):
I love vegetables like I love like a soft cooked
green beani, just really simple. Like. One of the ingredients
that I use most in the kitchen is rock garlic
because I think that heat is so important and nothing
else is really like it. So the other day I
was just I made some sort of soft cooked green beans,
but just olive oil and lemon and a lot of
rock garlic, a lot of sort of flaky salt.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
And better, aren't the I think the other difference between
Italian food and French food is that Italians don't understand
the word identic except for pasta, and all their vegetables
are really cooked. You know. I don't know why, and
i'd be careful because he is British. But when the
British overcooked vegetables, you can't eat them, and when the
(43:05):
Italians overcome vegetables, they are really delicious. I think it
is the olive oil. I think that you know, it's
a very and also the ingredient, but it is. You know,
my mother in law, who's at time never had anything
crispy and a vegetable, undercooked broccoli or undercooked green beans. Yeah,
it's very whereas the French do have you know, just
blatched green beans right, which you're delicious too, But I
(43:27):
do like would you call soft.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
I don't want them to be so cooked that they
lose their color and vibrancy and that the freshness of flavor.
But I don't want it to have some of the
I want all the rawness gone. So it's that kind
of special like window of cooking. I just I mean,
all the food I love is simple.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
It's like I.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Just want like them.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
And this book will be at one twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Oh okay, I have a while, but I really need
to work on it.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Okay, I better go home and work. Before you do,
go home and work, I'd like to ask you one
question I ask everyone. Food is sharing? Food? Is what
your mother did to get her children around the table,
to have her children around the table too. I'd love
to meet your mother because it sounds like she created
this home and comfort for you all, And so I
(44:15):
would ask you, Claire, well, if you had a comfort food,
the food that you went to for comfort, what would
that be?
Speaker 1 (44:24):
When I think of comfort food, I think of potatoes,
you know, something I eat from such a young age
and is truly still one of my favorite things to eat.
And you can make a potato a million different ways,
but to me, just like a buttered a buttered potato,
which is something that we ate when I was a kid,
like a steamed or boiled potato with some salt and
(44:46):
pepper and butter on. It is still something that like,
I would eat it every day. It's so delicious and
the kind of heat and steam from the inside, and
the starchiness and the kind of you know, the kind
of blank slate that potatoes are, and then just like
a little bit of a little bit of butter, last seasoning. Yeah, yeah,
(45:07):
my mom would make like parsley potatoes. Yeah, just just
butter and parsley and salt, pepper, And to this day
is such a comforting food for me. I love it well.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
I look forward to seeing the recipes for potatoes in
your book and to seeing more of you. And thank
you so much for coming.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you,
thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership
with Montclair
You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
We've only just met, but I'm sure Claire Saffatts and
I will be friends forever. Being a modern woman, I
know all about her from her beautiful and brilliant YouTube
and instagrams, the closest I guess I'll ever come to
dating online, though I'd have a lot of competition dating Claire.
She has over a million followers who love her. Claire
(00:26):
is open and she is honest. She shares with us
the challenges of baking and of life in general. She's
a star in a new era of food writers who
are experts in their knowledge, passionate about their craft, rigorous
about their work. Claire measured in history and literature at Harvard,
pursuing her career as an academic. Then one day, in
(00:47):
her own words, almost by accident, she became the host
of her own cooking show. Claire has also written two cookbooks,
Dessert Person and What's for Dessert, both of which are
New York Times best sellers. I've come to New York
to meet Claire the Dessert Person, and most of all,
my new best friend. One million other friends. I'm not worried.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Thank you, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's great to see you. And here we are in
New York, beautiful day after the eclipse. Did you see
the eclipse?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
It was clowny where I was. Oh, it was Hudson Valley.
We're in Orange County, sort of far from the Cat's Skills.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, so it was born in Monticello.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Oh, we're not too far. We're actually very close. It
was clear all day until about three pm, and then
I couldn't see anything.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah. Great thing about being here yesterday was the amount
of people on the streets, in the on the rooftops.
The people want to share seeing something, don't they. You know,
it was so beautiful to see the kind of movement
on the streets of everybody on the streets.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah. New York comes alive in spring.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Absolutely, yeah, I really And today is a beautiful day.
So we're here and I am so happy to meet you.
And my favorite dessert is vanilla ice cream, and it's
the one you went right too. So would you like
to read it?
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I'd love to, Okay, vanilla ice cream one point seventy
five liters double cream four hundred and fifty mili liters
whole milk, four fresh vanilla pods, split lengthways, fifteen egg yolks,
three hundred and fifty grams cast or sugar. Combine the
cream and milk in a large saucepan. Scrape the vanilla
seeds out of the pods into the pan using a knife.
(02:25):
Then add the pods to heat until just below boiling point.
Remove from the heat. Beat the egg yolks and sugar
together until pale and thick. Pour a little of the
warm cream into the eggyoak mixture and stir. Return this
to the rest of the cream in the saucepan, and
cook gently over a low heat, stirring constantly to prevent
the custard from curdling. When the custard is thickened enough
to coat the back of the spoon, strain it into
(02:47):
a heatproof bowl and leave to cool. Pour into an
ice cream machine and churn until frozen.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
What made you choose a vanilla ice cream?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I have a memory of culinary school and went to
culinary school in Paris at age. It was twenty four
to twenty five, and I did a sort of general
culinary program, so I didn't focus on pastry, even though
now I'm mostly a baker, but we had one day
a week of pastry and I was very influenced by
our chef. Chef Antoine was our pastry chef in culinary school.
(03:16):
And I remember the day that we made vanilla ice cream.
We were doing all the custards and he, you know,
he was late in his career. He had worked at
lots of Tivanut, like lots of three Michelin star restaurants
in Paris, and we made vanilla ice cream and he
took it out of the ice cream machine and he
tasted it, and he just got this look on a
total sort of like exalted look on his face, and
(03:37):
he was just like, I love anel ice cream. It's
the best thing there is. And so that was really formative,
and he was right. It really is the most delicious dessert.
I love dairy based desserts. I love dairy in general.
Vanilla is one of the most unique, incredible flavors that
you know, that comes from the earth. So I just
think it's the most perfect dessert that there.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Is, because I do too when I go to the
River Cafe now, and I know every dessert I've made,
every dessert, and I love, you know, I just love them,
but they almost don't ask me anymore. They just bring
ice cream, right, And I think, do you make your
ice cream in the same way? Do you use the
vanilla pods?
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yes, I mean I like, I like this recipe because
it has a lot of vanilla, which is great. But
I do make ice cream at home. I got an
ice cream maker last year, a good one. Finally a
good one, so you have a good result. But I like,
you know, I went to colony school in France, so
I like the cramong glass base and lass egg yolks
and make the most delicious ice cream.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And so if we're going back, because I would love
to talk to you more about coming, you know, to
pastry and how you came there and going to France
to learn to cook, because again there's a similarity there
that my living in Paris, as I did as an
adult working in an architect's office. It was there that
I decided to become a cook, and I went to
(05:01):
do you know, the Mastering in the Art of French cooking.
Of course, I'm so old that Simone Beck was living
in Paris, and I somehow got in touch with her
and asked her if I could have some time with her,
and so I used to go to her apartment in
the sixteenth Wow, this is about me, and I want
to talk about you. So tell me. Tell me about
growing up in your house, Tell me about your parents
and food.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
I grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the Midwest.
I would say it was a very typical kind of
suburban childhood of the nineteen nineties. But both of my
parents cooked all the time. Mostly both did, yeah, mostly
my mom who was home more. My dad worked more.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
What did he do?
Speaker 1 (05:39):
He was actually recently retired. He worked at Washington University
Medical School, so he was an academic physician. And that's
what brought my family to Saint Louis. They are not
originally Midwesterners. My parents there from the East Coast, so
they moved out to the Midwest, where my grandma was
sure we'd never get a bagel. She was very worried.
She came, my family came to No, she was just hell.
(06:00):
Family was on the East coast and she was very
scared that no one would get a bagel. Turns out
we had a great bagel shop nearby. So and I
have two older sisters. We were all born in Saint Louis,
and I just come from a house where cooking was
very central and we all ate dinner together every night
at the table. My mom made dinner almost every night,
(06:20):
and I think as a child of the nineties, I
learned later in life that that wasn't so typical. That
it's like a lot of my friend's parents both worked,
and my mom worked as well, but she was a teacher,
so she had more time in the afternoons, so she'd
come home and it wasn't uncommon for her to bake
a loaf of bread in the afternoon, and so we'd
have fresh bread for dinner, and she'd make lots of
(06:42):
soups and everything homemade from scratch. So I grew up
with that very normalized and very kind of typical. We
started every meal with a green salad where she'd you know,
cut up crunchy vegetables and mostly romaine, and she'd put
all of oil and redwhe vinegar and some grated parmesan
on the salad, and that was how we started our meal,
(07:03):
and it was really ideal. I think that taught me
from a young age about the importance of cooking, and
I think my parents also modeled really healthy behavior around food,
which I think again as a child in the nineties
was not so common really. That was the era of
like everything was low fat or no fat, with a
lot of you know a lot of snack foods and
(07:24):
prepared foods. So that wasn't really a thing in our house.
I think I learned I gave me good habits as
an adult because I'm not a snacker, you know, I'd
like to eat a proper meal. So I'm really grateful
for the modeling around food and cooking in our house.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
How do you think she did that that she would
teach and then she would go shopping or do you
think she'd wake up in the morning and think, I
know what I'm going to cook today? Or did you
I have di.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
I really ask her. I mean she has still today
a really extensive and well curated recipe box. She did
me multiple boxes, really, But I think my mom really
liked cooking, so it wasn't it was a chore for her,
because you know, with family of five, I think it's
always going to feel like a chore if you do
it every night. But she also liked it, so I
(08:09):
don't really know how she decided what she would make,
but we would have dinners of she would have. To me,
looking back, I think that they were really inspired meals.
We'd have like french onion soup and crocs one night,
and then we'd have what were other sort of typical
meals that she would make. We would have like baked
potatoes and steak and broccoli another night. So we had
(08:31):
really well rounded, abundant meals.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Would you ever go in the kitchen?
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I would help her. We all had chores, my sisters
and I, So it was setting the table, clearing the table,
not so much helping with the dishes. My dad is
sort of a mania called dishwasher, and so we were
not actually didn't want our help with that, and so
I would bake with my mom more often. I was
a really studious child, so I would be doing my
homework when my mom was making dinner. But on the
(09:00):
weekends we would, you know, I would help her baking
baking projects.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Would you have dessert? Also? Every night you'd have screen salad,
but go on to the dessert.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
We would have dessert every night. Yeah, it was, I
mean it was small. It was like a little bit
of ice cream after dinner on you know, everyone kind
of doing We wouldn't like properly have it at the table,
but it was everyone can kind of help himself and
there was no restriction or judgment around food, which is
really important.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And you said your father cooked as well.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, my dad cooked. It was more of a weekend project.
You'd make us breakfasts and we'd always have It was
very common in my family to had like a Sunday
brunch with bagels and scrambled eggs and fruit and that
kind of thing, and he would cook. One of my
earliest food memories is my dad sawteg sliced garlic and
olive oil to make linguini with clams.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
So where did you live, Where was it you were
near the We know.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
We were in Saint Louis. We had like kind of
so in those days, I think he would use canned clams.
We had a pretty good fish market where a lot
of the fish came up from the Gulf because we
were in Saint Louis. So I grew up eating fish,
but not like not like here in New York. But
that memory, and especially the smell memory of the garlic
and olive oil, I still to this day I think
(10:12):
that there is no better smell in the entire world
than garlic and olive oil.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
And sometimes you need that smell that you I mean, yeah,
you know there have been times that I just need
to have that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
It's very grounding to me just because of how early
on I remember that. So in my family, we always
joke that we discussed the next meal. At the current meal.
I'll be sitting out for dinner, then we talk about
what what are we gonna eat tomorrow?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I think that might that might become more common, that
there's something about because I remember saying that to my mother.
She said, well, you know, what are we going to
eat tomorrow? So you just was slightly groaning from it.
And but then it's it's fun. Yeah, it's fine to
get a bed thinking what are we going to eat tomorrow?
What are we going to wake up to tomorrow?
Speaker 1 (10:52):
We loved a meal plan and yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And so your father more about your dad cooking, so
you would do at the breakfast and he would do
the weekends. Was it his family that came from Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
It's very fuzzy, yes, and no Ukraine or Russia. We
don't really know. It's been actually very difficult to find
on my mom's side. My mother's grandparents came from Ukraine
and only spoke Yiddish, and her grandfather before coming to
the United States was a baker, which I didn't know
this until I was an adult, like not even that many. Yes,
(11:30):
I was working on my first cookbook and I was
with my mom because my mom and I cooked together
all the time now, and she kind of offhandedly mentioned this.
We were in the kitchen together and she said, oh, yeah, well,
you know, my grandpa was a baker, and I had
truly never heard that before. But it makes sense because
we have a small but really important collection of family
(11:51):
recipes from her side in the family of you know,
sort of Jewish baking recipes, so apple cake and mondel
bread and poppy seed bread, all these sort of like
Eastern European Jewish and.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
They would have come from your grandmother who has got
them from her.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yes, mother, Yes, So we have Aunt Tilly's apple cake,
which is my grandmother sister was Tilly.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
I haven't Aunt Tilly.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Yeah, A famous a famous apple cake recipe. Actually, my
mom submitted it to this is like in the nineties
the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, our local paper, and it
won recipe of the year. So it's a famous apple
cake famous. It has some it has orange juice in it,
and it has sour cream, so it's like a very
(12:39):
very tender cake and it just has mostly it has
just a ton of apples in it, and it's delicious.
I've made it in a very long time.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Did your entertain They did.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
They entertained a lot, And it gave me a false
sense of how easy entertaining is because my mom made
it look so easy. She was so organized and would
always have like be dressed and ready and flowers arranged
fifteen minutes before people started showing up.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Not like us, right right, right, yeah, right.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
But I grew up, Yeah, I grew up with those
kinds of like parties my dad's you know, fellow faculty
from the hospital would come over for parties, and I
grew up with that kind of as a kid from
the top of the stairs looking down at the party
and the kind of little chit chat and you know,
some sort of sound effects of a good party. I
grew up with.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
And when you left this dream and you went off too,
was the first time you left when you went to college? Yes,
And did you what was the food like there? I
know the university, and I know Harvard, and I know
so I don't you know, what would be interesting to
know what was it like as in terms of food.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
It was at Harvard. It's most common for students to
live on campus all four years, so it's not typicult
to be in an apartment where you have may kitchen
and can prepare your meals. So that's what I did.
I lived in the dorms and we ate in the
dining halls, which was sort of typical dining hall food.
(14:13):
They I think right around the time I was a student,
they had begun a program to work with local farms,
but in Boston that just means you're eating winter squash
for most of the year. We were just limited in
our options.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
But I would go.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I would Actually an interesting anecdote is that my parents
moved to the Boston area when I started college. My
dad's switch shops, so my parents have been in Boston
for the last eighteen plus years. But it meant that
I had a home that I could go to if
I wanted to cook. So I would go home on
the weekends and bake. Sometimes I bake pies, and if
I just really felt like I wanted to have that
(14:50):
kind of domestic time from away from school and academics,
and I would do that, so I was lucky that
I also got to do that.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Do you think the smell of baking was powerful as
the smell of garlic and oil frying in the pan?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
I do.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
It is about smell biking, right.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
My mom. I know when I am so funny in
my When I first started working up on Epite magazine,
we worked in what was the former Gourmet Test kitchen
where they really didn't have hoods, and I could I
always knew when something was done because I could smell it.
And then we moved facilities into a much bigger, newer
(15:27):
kitchen where they had really powerful hoods and I couldn't
smell anything, and it really kind of screwed me up. Yeah,
but baking is very evocative for me of my childhood.
My mom, we had a outside of my sister's window,
we had a sour cherry tree, which is very special.
Sour Cherries are partly because of my childhood and partly
just because they're incredible, always my favorite baking fruit, and
(15:51):
they're so temporary, so fleeting.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
What is this season for us? Out?
Speaker 1 (15:56):
It's really early July. It was just about a week
or two where you get window because they're very, very fragile.
When they're ripe, they are so soft, and so they
just they go bad so fast. So my mom would
bake pies with Sara cherries, and we would pick the
cherries out of my sister's window from her bedroom. My
mom would be terrified, we're gonna fall out of the window.
(16:18):
So before the birds could get them, we'd try to
pick enough cherries.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Would you preserve them? Would you put them into ours?
Speaker 1 (16:23):
We didn't. I wish we had done that. I would
do that now.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
One of my favorite things is is cherries and grappa,
you know, really strong alcohol, and I don't like so
much in syrup, but the French do it in that
kind of de v and the and yeah, yeah, I
love that.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yes, my mom would bake pies, just bake pies. Yeah,
so the smell of pie baking is to me very
reminiscent of my childhood.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
So you'd go home at the weekends and bake. And
you were saying, as saying in the introduction that you
were studying literature and history and the liberal arts education.
But then you had a moment was there a moment
that you sort of an epiphany when you said, actually,
what I want to do is cook? What was that
a gradual thing to do it?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
It feels like it was both in a way. When
I graduated from college, I didn't really know what I
wanted to do. I moved back home for the summer,
and I started cooking basically NonStop. It became the only
thing that I really I wasn't really motivated to find
a job, but I was highly motivated to cook dinner
every night for my parents, me and my parents, and
(17:35):
they kind of loved it, but they also wanted me
to like figure some stuff out. So that's when actually
I got an internship. I moved to New York. That's
when I became even more serious about cooking and eating
and exploring New York's restaurants to the extent that I
could on being like living on a stipend from an internship.
(17:57):
Then I applied to culinary school because which one was
a fernde in Paris, which I only applied to one
I was the only one I really knew that much
about that had been recommended by, you know, a friend
of a friend of a friend. So I pursued culinary
school more as a means to moving to another country.
(18:19):
I wanted to live abroad. I wanted to get that
education and have that experience. I am a you know,
I'm a lover of Julia Child, and I just wanted
to be her basically. But I always had the plan
to presume academics. So after I did that, I went
back to school and I did a master's in It
(18:42):
was a master's in history, but with their study a
focus on culinary history, basically looking at the sort of
intellectual history of food. And I loved doing that. But
about halfway through my master's program, I just decided that
I missed cooking. I missed that feeling of making something
with my hands that had always been so important to me.
(19:03):
So I finished my master's program and that's when I decided, like,
I think that I have to be making food and
not just reading and writing about it.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
And what did you think that having that academic knowledge,
knowing the history, knowing influenced your actual cooking. Do you
think you would have been with that all that a
different kind of cook if you didn't know or have that.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
I think it just informs my perspective, my perspective is
just very long, I think when it comes to cooking,
because when I would read these like early modern cookbook texts,
some of it would seem very contemporary.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
What year when when you say early modern, what.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Year seventeen hundreds for the most part, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
So that I'm making in seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Oh so most of the books from that period were
written by professional chefs, all men of course, who worked
in big houses, big noble houses or in you know,
royal households, and they were in the same genre as
household manual, So how to how to keep a house
in France and England. Yeah, so this is really when
(20:09):
the these are kind of proto cookbooks like these are
sort of the first examples of cookbooks as we know them.
And they would talk about how to throw a banquet,
you know, make this kind of pie, you know, they
would how to make these sort of sculptural pieces that
would go sort of in between courses, and you know,
very like heavily spiced food, sort of food that was
not so unlike food of the Middle Ages. Really also
(20:32):
where sweet and savory were not divided between. There really
was no concept of courses. Everything would just be laid
out together, so sweet and savory would be mingled. I
loved I love reading these books. Yeah, and they were illustrations.
It's like fascinating. But really just knowing having that knowledge
makes me realize that, like when I am creating a recipe,
(20:53):
I'm never really making anything new ever. You know, everything's
already been made before, and I'm just maybe putting a
little touch on it or something or changing the proportion.
So it just gives me that perspective of like someone
before me has already done this. You know. I'm not
the kind of cook that is so motivated by the
(21:13):
idea of originality, you know, because I just things are
classic for a reason, you know, these combinations that are
tried and true, It's because they taste the best, you know.
So I'm never really trying to innovate so much. I
just want to make the best version of the thing
(21:34):
that I want to eat, you know. So you know,
when I'm recipe developing, I try to be very honest
and up front of it.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
I noticed that with your food. I noticed that it's
classic and it's I said, rigorous, you know, And I
think we can all find those ideas recipes, you know,
let's do this, or let's do that. But what we're
interested in is how to how to make the perfect
I don't know, tartantan, how do you make I'd like
(22:04):
to learn how to make a kind of chocolate moss
that actually has that depth of flavor and not by
putting something in it that we've never seen or making
it higher. Which is not to say try it, you know,
try the experimentation. But yeah, that's what we do. That's
what I like about your food, and I like about
the recipes that you cook. The River Cafe is excited.
(22:33):
We're opening the River Cafe Cafe. Come for a morning
Briosian cappuccino, a plate of seasonal antiposity on the terrace,
or an ice cream or a paratubo in the sun.
We can't wait to open and we cannot wait to
welcome you. So you're becoming a chef in New York
(23:01):
right doing with Bone Appetite. And then how did you
seg by into doing it on your own and working
by yourself?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
So I started working at Bone Epetee in the test
kitchen almost right out of grad school. I got so
lucky to have gotten that job when I did, and
I was thrilled. I could not have been happier. I
get to move back to New York, which I really
wanted to do, and I just thought that food media
was truly like the perfect place for me because I
got to make food and I got to write about it,
(23:31):
and that it really was. I started as a recipe tester,
so I wasn't developing recipes, but the food editors would develop.
They would go through a series of tastings and then
write the recipe and then I would get it and
I was sort of the last person to touch that
recipe in the kitchen before it would get published. So
it was my job to flag anything that didn't work.
And I learned so much about recipe writing and development
(23:55):
during that time. I think it's so essential to learn
how to test a recipe if you want to do development.
And then I got promoted and I became, you know,
went through all the different levels in the magazine world
of like associate editor, you know, assistant editor, associate. I
think I was senior associate, and then senior finally, so
(24:18):
I was there for five years and developing recipes the
whole time, and I just got to the point in
the magazine cycle of like, I don't know if I
can do another Christmas issue. I don't know if I
could do another Thanksgiving issue, summer grilling. It's very repetitive.
So I just sort of thought after five cycles of
doing that that it was time to move on. But
(24:40):
I had also begun to do video as part of,
you know, my job in the test kitchen. I worked
for bonn Epte, which was part of Conde Nast, and
they had this big, beautiful new space at the World
Trade Center and they had, you know, a video team.
So I started doing some video hosting app on epetit
(25:01):
with you know, basically like no training in that I
hadn't had any experience in front of the camera. I
didn't really want to do that as part of my career.
It just happened, so and it was extremely successful. And
I did this show called Gourmey Makes where I like
reverse engineered I basically knew that I liked to bake,
and they were like, well, we can have Claire. We
(25:21):
could hire a pastry chef, you know, from a restaurant
in New York to come in and do this where
we could just have Claire do it. And she's already
on staff and we already pay her. So I started
doing that show. She was really successful, but I just
was like, I think I've been doing this long enough.
I want to kind of do my own thing.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So did you like the desserts that you were being
given to before?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
You know, I mentioned earlier that like I didn't really
grow up with a lot of store bought food. Yeah,
so I was sort of you know, like the first
thing they had me make was a Twinkie. It's like,
I don't even know if I'd ever eaten it before.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
It's not to describe a tweaky that audience, the American
audience when the Twinkie is a kind of roll with cream.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, it's like a bar shaped cake individually wrapped with
a cream filling. But it's not cream c R E
A M. It's c R E M E, which is
they can't actually call it cream filling because it has
the area.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
So, you know, a lot of the things that I
was trying to recreate were not in and of themselves
really food. They were like things that are edible but
are really not food because it's all packaged stuff. So
that was really my job was like I'm going to
make this into you know, actual food that someone could
make and that you could eat. So I learned a
(26:43):
lot doing it. I don't think that like in and
of itself, the task of making a I'm trying to
think of other swinging. I made Twizzler the other you know,
it was like so useful. But I learned a lot,
and I think it helped me become a better recipe
developer and also just to understand more of the problems
solving process. So I left in twenty eighteen, so I
(27:06):
was no longer on staff, and that's when I started
writing my first cookbook, which is Desert Person.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Well, yeah, tell us about Dessert Person.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, Dessert Person is a book of all the stuff
that I like to bake and eat. It's not all sweet.
There's some savory baking because baking. Part of the thesis
of the book is that baking can be many different things,
and it can be dinner, and it can you know,
it's not just sweets. But really it's a book about
kind of not restricting your sting oneself and not sort
(27:39):
of assigning morality to food and not saying that some
food is good or bad or thinking that you know
you're doing something wrong by eating dessert. You know, it's
just not how I think about it, and so that's
kind of what that's kind of the underpinnings of the book.
It's sort of like, it's okay to eat dessert, and
we should celebrate it, and you know, food is one
(28:01):
of life's great pleasures, if not a great pleasure, so
you might as well enjoy it. I still look upon
it so fondly and with a lot of pride, because
it was a book that really felt at the time
like the culmination of everything I had learned about pastry
and cooking, but also about eating and about the kinds
of foods that I like to eat, and about my
(28:23):
style of baking. And so it's very you know, fresh
produce driven, it's very seasonal. There's fruit deserts are kind
of my favorite kinds of dessert, so there's tons of
fruit in it.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Tell us about food deserts. If somebody is listening to
this and you want to tell them about which they
should be thinking about when they think about fruit desserts.
What is this month now? This is April, yes, So
what are we thinking about right now? Oh?
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Right now, I'm just waiting until we get strawberries, which
a New York will still be you know, at least
a month. So I have a kind of a hierarchy
of fruit desserts. Okay, I think the top fruit dessert
is as I mentioned, sour cherry. I think there is
like no better baking fruit. And then after that apples.
Apples are just an incredible specific Actually my favorite apple,
(29:12):
and you know, I live in New York, which is
truly like the land of apples. There's like hundreds and
hundreds of varieties. My favorite is called gold rush. Have
you ever had a gold rush apple? They are It
is the firmest apple I've ever tried, to the point
where if you want to eat one out of hand,
it almost hurts your mouth to bite into. But the
flavor is incredible, like honey and lemon and even almost
(29:36):
like tropical fruit. It's so complex and is so amazing
for its sweet tart balance, and they hold together incredibly
well when you bake them.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
So if you were making a tarta time back to
the Tarta tent.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Would you use that for gold rush? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Because it is challenging. I think when you when you
make it, let's talk about.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
I love I love making it, and I love eating it.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Yeah, and what is your and so you have these
star with the apple. Can you tell me about your tartata?
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yes, I've made it so many different ways. So the
kind of classic way is just to make your caramel
and your skillet and then add your apples and cook them.
And there's all these tricks of like you can dry
out your apples in advance by peeling them and cutting
them and keeping them in the fridge.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Do you cut the apples in HALFA? Do you cut
them in pieces?
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I sort of cut them in lobes, like I cut
around the core, so I end up with pieces that
are slightly different sizes, which can be useful for tucking
them into the gaps because there is a lot of
they lose moisture and with a shrink, shrink, So I
like to actually pre cook my apples. I think it
just takes out some of the variability. So I like
(30:43):
to cook. I actually roast my apples in caramel before
I assemble the whole thing. Because what doesn't make sense
about tartata is putting cold pastry on warm apples, and
I like to avoid doing that because it just feels
so wrong. So I like to I roast my apple
in caramel covered really tightly in a low oven until
(31:05):
they're soft, and then they cool in the caramel and
they kind of absorb. Like the best thing about tart
tatan is the way the apple's candy in the caramel
and you cut into them, but apples have absorbed the
caramel all the way through. It's not just like they
have a ring of it around, and then the flesh
is white on the inside, so this really facilitates that.
And then I just lay the apples there. You know,
(31:25):
there's already they're already sort of imbued with that caramel.
I lay them in, put the pastry on top. Everything's cold,
which is great, and then into the oven. It was
more work. It's not that kind of spontaneous like cooking
on the stove and throwing the whole thing in the oven.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
But I came back from Paris. That was always the
dessert that I wanted to perfect, and we had a tiny,
tiny kitchen, was so tiny that you couldn't actually put
an oven in there. So we made a window and
stuck back that looked like an air conditioner from the road,
but it was the oven. And I actually it's interesting
(31:59):
to hear you say that because That's how I did
the dark dead to him, because what you will, they
do shrink and they do. The whole point is to
have the caramel and to have them dark brown, and
to have them really strong. And I think that's how
I ended up making them in two stages.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
That texture of like a soft but not mushy apple
that's sort of caramelized all the way through and that's
spooning into it is just one of the most satisfying
food textures for me.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
There are so many books out there, cookbooks and dessert books,
and this book was a huge success, wasn't it. What
do you think that was due to? Why do you
think your book reached so many people?
Speaker 1 (32:39):
I do think a lot of it was the timing.
It came out in the fall of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Oh was it.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Not a great time all around, but a great time
for a cookbook, for a baking book. People were making
banana bread.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Like crazy in England as well. I have more text
messages which include a loaf of bread than practically anything
right else? Right?
Speaker 1 (33:00):
How do I make the s people text? How do
I make it right?
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I would zoom cool? And you know, FaceTime cooking with
friends of mine's children or trying to get I tried
to get perfect. Do you have a perfect chocolate chip cookie?
Speaker 1 (33:13):
I do, and it's a dessert person. Yeah, it's so good.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Oh good? Is it a thin one?
Speaker 1 (33:18):
It's a thin with like the very outer edges crispy
and the rest of it is chewy, and it gets
it kind of wrinkled because it's a thinner cookie has
a higher proportion of butter, so it gets it kind
of wrinkled edge, which I love. And it has both
dark chocolate and milk chocolate in it. You just break
it up, yes, yeah, so chopped up from a bar
and a brown the butter which oh that combination of
(33:41):
the brown butter plus brown sugar plus vanilla, it gives
you so much of that intense butter scotch flavor, which
I love.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Do you think that this book in your books and
your influence? How much does that coincide with being visual online,
being on YouTube, being Instagram? What do you feel about
the New Revolution and food?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
I mean, I have to say that I am in
favor of it because I'm a part of it, but
I have my I have my mixed feelings. I think overall,
I think there's it's so easy to be to feel overexposed,
and to just think that you can turn your normal
daily activities into content and to sort of always be visible,
(34:27):
which I don't like, don't I don't actually post on
Instagram that frequently, and I'm told that I need to
do it more. But you know, I like to keep
very private actually, and I like to keep my private
life private. But I try to remain rooted in the
idea that visual medium for food is the best. It's
(34:48):
so much easier to teach someone how to make something
when you can think to write the words on a page.
So that's where I come from. I come from a
place of teaching when it comes to YouTube and you know,
just video and social media in general. I hope that
we still need cookbooks. I think that cookbooks are important
(35:08):
from like it's not really about individual recipes. It's about like,
what is this a book really saying? What is it
sort of like what's the lifestyle? It's it's advocating for
what is the kind of approach to food that is
taken as a whole. When you look at the entire book,
it's not just you know, one hundred recipes put together
(35:28):
in a specific order. It's really much more than that.
It's about a sort of whole, the way this person
is conceiving of, you know, the work, the work that
they're doing, and the work of home cooking. So I
do think we still need cookbooks. I wonder for myself
if I am going to keep writing them, because it's
like once you said everything there is to say, I'm like,
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
I always say that. I think that, you know, often
thing we've done thirteen or fourteen, I can't remember, but
I think that I often say, does a world need
another cookbook? Yeah? And I do keep doing them because
I just love doing them. For me to actually work with,
it's so collaborative. We work in a very collaborative way.
So we immediately start working with the photographers, with the designers.
(36:10):
We sit around the table and we always cook something
and then we taste it and then we say, let's
do it this way, let's change the recipe. And so
for us, I think it's one of the joys of life.
It's about informing and it's always aspirational. I think that
people I think they once did a study of Gourmet magazine,
which you mentioned, and I grew up with and I
(36:31):
think maybe Nora Efron wrote an essay saying, have you
ever cooked a recipe from Gourmet? And it was kind
of true that you'd buy the magazine and you'd say,
I'm going to make that, I'm going to be a
better person, I'm going to do this, and then put
the magazine down, and you know didn't.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
So right, That's how I tend to read cookbooks, and
I'm not ever I'm basically never making recipes out of cookbooks.
I mean, I shouldn't say maybe literally never am I
making recipes out of cookbooks? But I read them. Yeah,
And that's exactly why, because I want to sort of
see I love the photography, and I want to see
the types of recipes and the I love the other
(37:07):
sort of ancillary writing. Sometimes there's essays, so like Martha,
the same thing with Martha Stewart, who's her one hundred
book is coming out, which is blows my mind, but
I think one hundred yeah, So yeah, like I'm That's
why I'm buying and reading cookbooks, not so much because
I think it's going to help me, you know, make
dinner on a Tuesday. I can already make dinner on
(37:29):
a man.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table for Would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, o, wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
We went to London a few months ago and we
had lunch at the River Cafe and then we took
the train to Paris and we're in Paris for a while.
And I hadn't been back to Paris since I lived
there for Connory School had been over ten years. So
it was a very emotional trip for me and I
had the best time, and I want my husband. We'd
never been to Europe together.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Who is a chef?
Speaker 1 (38:20):
So it's a chef, yes?
Speaker 2 (38:21):
What is he doing?
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Before we met, he had been a chef in New
York restaurants for ten years at a couple of places
that are now closed. Then he really left kitchens for
a long time and went into sort of restaurant operations.
And so he has a restaurant that he runs in
Chelsea Market. It's Burgers and Sheiks and they partner with
this incredible dairy farm in the Hudson Valley called Ronnie Brook.
(38:45):
Maybe Ronnie Brook Dairy, Yeah, just like a big New
York Dairy. Actually they're not big, but in New York
they're just very sort of an iconic like New York
Dairy brand. And now he's actually returned to kitchens and
he's cooking at a place in the Catskills. It's called
the Tasting Room at Catskill Distillery. So he's partnering with
(39:06):
this woman named Claire Marin and she has this distillery
up in Calicoon and she makes honey and maple syrup.
And so he's cooking at the restaurant there.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
There's a real emergence or emergence of local produce, isn't
it People going back to the fairy, to the farms
to know, especially in the Hudson River Valley.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, we're surrounded by farms everywhere we look.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
And what are you working on now?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Right now? I've really begun pretty serious, dedicated work on
my next book, which is Savory, mostly savory. The sort
of central thesis of this book is that if you
want to live the best life, you have to cook.
So it's really kind of a meditation on how to
live well by cooking for oneself and for you know,
(39:57):
your friends and family. So it's pretty it's pretty expansive
and comprehensive. It's sort of it's like kind of meals
for every occasion, from breakfast to a snack to entertaining
to holidays. So it's really it's actually very driven by
eating rather than cooking, because I always make a distinction
(40:19):
between there's the things that you love to cook and
the things that you love to eat.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
That distinction.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
For instance, I love cooking. I mean I love French food,
so it's like I love cooking kind of multi step
French recipes, like I love cassoulet. I love cooking it.
I don't totally love eating it. It's a lot, it's
very heavy, just very like nutrient dense. You know, it's
(40:46):
beans and lots of different meats. But I love cooking it.
So it's like I love making it for an occasion.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
What do you love about cooking?
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I love slowness, the slowness. I love simmering beans. The
beans themselves are so delicious, that tar bay beans, which
I always make a point to get. I love the process,
the kind of layering of the flavors and the long cooking,
and I love assembling that kind of when you get
to like layer the beans with all the different, you know,
(41:15):
the garlic sausage and the dot confie and all that,
but not my favorite thing to eat. So this new
book is really driven by the things that I'd love
to eat most.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
So give me five.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Oh my goodness, okay too well, so it's funny. The
book is savory, but of course there's lots of dessert.
There has to be, because that's it's proportionate to the
amount of dessert that I eat in my life compared
to savory food, which is maybe like five, you know,
one to five or something. I just made like a
very simple pistachio cake, super simple and make it in
the food processor because you start just by grinding toasted
(41:51):
pistachios and then you just add all your.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Other ingredients in pour butter, sugar.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah, basically eggs, very egg heavy.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Do you do it in love?
Speaker 1 (42:01):
I did it just as a single layer so that
you can get I just sprinkled some confection of sugar
and toasted pistachios over top. Not too sweet, you know,
all my desserts are really not too sweet, so you
can taste it's supposed to taste like something else with sugar.
What else? Lots of salads I mean, I'm a vegetable lover.
I haven't talked about that yet, but I know I haven't.
(42:22):
I love vegetables like I love like a soft cooked
green beani, just really simple. Like. One of the ingredients
that I use most in the kitchen is rock garlic
because I think that heat is so important and nothing
else is really like it. So the other day I
was just I made some sort of soft cooked green beans,
but just olive oil and lemon and a lot of
rock garlic, a lot of sort of flaky salt.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
And better, aren't the I think the other difference between
Italian food and French food is that Italians don't understand
the word identic except for pasta, and all their vegetables
are really cooked. You know. I don't know why, and
i'd be careful because he is British. But when the
British overcooked vegetables, you can't eat them, and when the
(43:05):
Italians overcome vegetables, they are really delicious. I think it
is the olive oil. I think that you know, it's
a very and also the ingredient, but it is. You know,
my mother in law, who's at time never had anything
crispy and a vegetable, undercooked broccoli or undercooked green beans. Yeah,
it's very whereas the French do have you know, just
blatched green beans right, which you're delicious too, But I
(43:27):
do like would you call soft.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
I don't want them to be so cooked that they
lose their color and vibrancy and that the freshness of flavor.
But I don't want it to have some of the
I want all the rawness gone. So it's that kind
of special like window of cooking. I just I mean,
all the food I love is simple.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
It's like I.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Just want like them.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
And this book will be at one twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Oh okay, I have a while, but I really need
to work on it.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Okay, I better go home and work. Before you do,
go home and work, I'd like to ask you one
question I ask everyone. Food is sharing? Food? Is what
your mother did to get her children around the table,
to have her children around the table too. I'd love
to meet your mother because it sounds like she created
this home and comfort for you all, And so I
(44:15):
would ask you, Claire, well, if you had a comfort food,
the food that you went to for comfort, what would
that be?
Speaker 1 (44:24):
When I think of comfort food, I think of potatoes,
you know, something I eat from such a young age
and is truly still one of my favorite things to eat.
And you can make a potato a million different ways,
but to me, just like a buttered a buttered potato,
which is something that we ate when I was a kid,
like a steamed or boiled potato with some salt and
(44:46):
pepper and butter on. It is still something that like,
I would eat it every day. It's so delicious and
the kind of heat and steam from the inside, and
the starchiness and the kind of you know, the kind
of blank slate that potatoes are, and then just like
a little bit of a little bit of butter, last seasoning. Yeah, yeah,
(45:07):
my mom would make like parsley potatoes. Yeah, just just
butter and parsley and salt, pepper, And to this day
is such a comforting food for me. I love it well.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
I look forward to seeing the recipes for potatoes in
your book and to seeing more of you. And thank
you so much for coming.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you,
thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership
with Montclair
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