Cookery by the Book

Just Cook It!
145 Built-To-Be-Easy Recipes That Are Totally Delicious

By Justin Chapple

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast, with me, Suzy Chase.

Justin:                  My name is Justin Chapple, and my new cookbook is called, Just Cook It!

Suzy Chase:                  You graduated from the French Culinary Institute, then you went on to become the Deputy Test Kitchen Editor at Food and Wine Magazine, in addition to being the host of Mad Genius Tips, your James Beard nominated video series. What does a Deputy Test Kitchen Editor do? That sounds so official.

Justin:                  Believe it or not, it's actually a little more official because I was recently promoted to Culinary Director of Food and Wine.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, well look at that.

Justin:                  Basically what it means is, I get to cook, and I get to eat all the time, but most importantly I get to develop recipes and food content for everyday people, which is really what I love about my job.

Suzy Chase:                  Basically, the home cook, me?

Justin:                  Yeah, exactly. Basically what I do is ... I've been at Food and Wine for over eight years, and in that time I've had various roles, but the thing that I like to say is my favorite part of my job is I basically translate difficult recipes for the home cook. I've spent so many years testing recipes from famous chefs, or even chefs that really nobody knows about yet, but who would like to run recipes in Food and Wine Magazine. Basically it's been my job for so long to look at the recipes and streamline them, maybe reduce the number of ingredients, simplify the technique so that it's something that is really approachable. Then, I basically redo the recipe, still keeping in mind the chef's vision, and just make it so much easier for the home cook.

Justin:                  When I started writing this book, I thought to myself well, how can I do something that not only has my point of view, rather than so many of the great chefs that I work with, but that teaches people all of the things that I've learned along the way? That's what I've done in, Just Cook It.

Suzy Chase:                  It struck me by how many different types of cuisines are in this cookbook, but it's not discombobulated. It all works together. Is this how you cook at home?

Justin:                  Yeah, it really is how I cook at home. A lot of that is just because over the years I was cooking food from so many different people, I've learned so much about different cuisines. When I started writing down and figuring out what I wanted to put in the book, I thought, okay, well what type of cuisine should it be? Should it be American? Should it be Italian? Should it be French, which is what I'm trained in? But then I thought to myself, I should actually really put all the different types of recipes and cuisines that I cook at home, because I cook very globally. That said, none of the recipes are truly authentic. They're really inspired by a region, or a type of cuisine, or a recipe that I've had at some point. Then I've reinvented it with my own perspective. I think it worked out well.

Suzy Chase:                  I do too. I live for nostalgia, just like you. I'm dying to hear about Grandma Barbara.

Justin:                  Oh, Grandma Barbara, she was my savior, really. She's really the first person who introduced me to home cooking. Part of how she did that was she plopped me down on sofa next to her. She'd say, we're going to watch these shows. We'd watch Yan Can Cook, and we'd watch The Two Fat Ladies, Jacques Pepin, Julia Child. This was before food television was really what it is today. This is back when most of the time when you watched cooking shows, it was on PBS. I love it. I fell in love with it. I remember as a kid I used to say, I want to be a chef. Or at that time, I probably said cook. She encouraged me. She would teach me, started out simple, she would show me how to make tuna salad. One of the most advanced things that she taught me as a kid was how to poach eggs. Of course, I think my poached eggs have come very long way now, compared to the watery mess they were when I was a kid.

Justin:                  She just taught me so much. What I think is so amazing when I look back is, how much she taught me that she doesn't realize, because we didn't grow up with a lot of money, and we didn't have a lot of resources. We didn't have a lot of fancy kitchen equipment. Still, every day she made incredible meals that were so inspiring. Throughout the book, I've taken some of the things that I learned from her and I've made them a little more modern, maybe changed a few ingredients here and there, but really tried to achieve what I remember having as a kid.

Justin:                  A couple of examples are that are my bacon and egg ramen, because growing up she used to take little packaged ramen noodles and she'd put them in the microwave with an egg, some scallions, and maybe a little chicken broth. It ended up becoming something that was totally different than what you think of when you think of packaged ramen. I tried to recreate that in my book. I think I did pretty well. I think she'd be happy with it.

Suzy Chase:                  In the cookbook you wrote, don't tell anyone, but I might have been a little bit dorky as a kid. Not that I've changed much. I was freckly and quirky with all sorts of big bizarre dreams. I would read cookbooks and food magazines, watch Two Fat Ladies, and Yan Can Cook, and fantasize about becoming a chef. What advice would adult chef Justin, tell young, quirky Justin?

Justin:                  Actually, that's a really good question. I'm glad you asked, because I recently was able to speak to this high school culinary program. They had asked me to come. It was actually my high school which since I left they drew out this incredible culinary program for high school students. They asked me to come back and speak to the kids, and I did. One of the things I told them was, don't let anyone tell you that going to trade school or vocational school is a bad thing. Because when I was growing up, you were strongly encouraged to go off to a four year university. I went off to school, yet all I really wanted to do was cook. In our industry we call ourselves career changers, because I had established myself as an adult before I decided to go to culinary school. Then one day I said, you know what? I've always wanted to cook. I still want to cook. I'm going to cook. So I went to culinary school. That was almost 10 years ago.

Suzy Chase:                  I've talked to quite a few cookbook authors who were unfulfilled by working in a professional kitchen because the personal link to the customer was missing. Talk about your connection between the food and the people you make food for.

Justin:                  Well, that's exactly right. When I worked in restaurants, you cook all day. But I was in fine dining, and so you're really kept in the back. You're kept in the kitchen. You don't really get to see reactions. You don't get to see if people are enjoying it. You don't get to hear the feedback of whether or not they want something different. But since I've been at Food and Wine, and I've been creating recipes for the masses, for lack of a better way of describing it, especially nowadays with social media, I get so much feedback. I hear what people want. I hear the types of foods people want to eat, and the types of food people would like to prepare at home. I change what I do based on that. It's what I love about what I do now, is that I get to interact with the people who are actually cooking my food, or the people that I'm cooking for.

Justin:                  When I developed the list of recipes that I was going to put in the book, I really considered all the things I've heard over the years, all the favorite dishes that people like to make at home, all of the types of foods that they'd like to learn more about, which is why, if you go through the pages of Just Cook It, you'll see a lot of vegetable recipes. Because more recently, people are just obsessed with vegetables. They're obsessed with side dishes. That's one of the things I really focused on when I wrote this book, was providing all the different types of vegetables. Some of them are more involved than others, but for the most part they're all super, super easy, really approachable, and they teach you to use ingredients in fun new ways.

Suzy Chase:                  You have a must-have equipment section in the cookbook. One of your must-haves is a cast iron pan. As a New York City apartment dweller, I wish I could grill. How do you grill indoors?

Justin:                  It's really hard, because I also live in New York City, and I have a small apartment, so it's really hard to grill indoors, but I like to use a grill pan. Rather than getting it as hot as possible, if you just reduce the temperature just a little bit, you are better off with the fear of setting off your smoke alarm.

Suzy Chase:                  I've heard you say hacks are one thing, and shortcuts are another. What's the difference?

Justin:                  I get asked that question a lot, because I do have the video series through Food and Wine, which is called, Mad Genius Tips. It's all about food hacks. It's all about finding really bizarre ways of creating a shortcut. Technically a hack is a shortcut, but nowadays the term hack has really become a term for shortcut when the shortcut is really outrageous. Whereas a shortcut is just a smart, often times professional way of making something easier. Throughout my book you will find a few hacks here and there, but for the most part I wanted to include just a ton of shortcuts so that people wouldn't be intimidated, so people weren't afraid to get in the kitchen, so that you can make all the things that you perhaps thought you could never make.

Justin:                  Just for an example, I have my new school beef bourguignon, which is really inspired by a classic beef bourguignon, which if you're not aware of what it is, it's a beef stew made with red wine, probably made famous by Julia Child. In order to make it at home you'd normally dry all your meat and then you cook it in three or four batches in your big pot. Then you have to brown all your vegetables separately. Then you have to braise your meat separately. At the end you put it all together.

Justin:                  But really, I've streamlined the process by first, rather than cooking the meat in so many different batches, I dry it all and I spread it on a baking sheet. Then I broil it so you brown it all at once. Then I put that into the pan, into the pot with the red wine, and your aromatics, and then you braise the meat that way. Then of course rather than browning all your vegetables in different skillets, I add them all in. It's definitely a shortcut, and the recipe is definitely still delicious. I really think it's reinventing how a very classic French dish can be made at home.

Suzy Chase:                  Another shortcut that caught my eye in, Just Cook It, is preserved lemons that can be made in 10 minutes on the stove. Describe that.

Justin:                  I haven't yet been asked about that recipe, so I'm so glad that you did because it's really a brilliant cheater version of preserved lemons. Preserved lemons are lemons that have been salted and basically cured for upwards of a month. They have an incredible, incredible, deep very floral flavor. You don't actually use the flesh of the fruit. Some people do. They like to spread it on toast, or they like to stir it into stews. But for the most part when we talk about using preserved lemon, we talk about just using the rind, because the rind gets really soft once it's been cured. It mellows out and you can actually just eat it, but it's still intense. But, it's used as a condiment, so you can put it into vinaigrette. You can put it into aioli’s. You can put it into a stew, or into a chicken braise, or something like that.

Justin:                  You can buy them in the store. That's definitely something that you can find pretty much at most stores nowadays, but I developed this trick for doing it at home. It's a shortcut that I think is really phenomenal. When you want to use preserved lemons in a pinch, and really what you do is you scrub the lemons and cut them into wedges. Then you cook them in a saucepan with just water, and salt. What it does is it softens the rind, much like the month long curing process would, and with the amount of salt that I use ... Which I think I use three or four tablespoons in the recipe. It gives it that kind of flavor that you would get from the salt curing process.

Justin:                  In my opinion, it's such a smart shortcut for something that could take upwards of a month. Now you can do it at home in really 10 minutes. The best part is once you make them, because they're technically salted still, they can be in the refrigerator for six months. You can do a double or triple batch. Cook them in 10 minutes. Put them into a jar or container, like a plastic container with a lid, put it in the back of the refrigerator, and they'll be there for six months. Every time you need a little, you just take it out, you chop it up, and it's ready to go.

Suzy Chase:                  One thing I hate to do is cut up cucumber. I can never make perfectly diced cukes. Thank you for telling us to smash our cucumber. Talk about that.

Justin:                  That is probably one of my favorite techniques in the whole entire book. Throughout the book you'll find little things like that, like little ideas that don't require more effort. They often times require less effort, but huge reward. That's what smashing the cucumbers is for me. Because what I do is I basically put the cucumbers onto a cutting board. I like to use Persian cucumbers, because I love their really, really, really crisp texture, and the fact that they have very little seeds. You can find them pretty much everywhere now. They're the perfect snackable cucumber.

Justin:                  I basically put it flat on a work surface. I put my knife flat on top of that, with the blade facing away from me. Then I just use my palm, and I just smash them. Then I tear them into pieces. What's so great about that is because the crushed cucumber has all these nooks and crannies now, it absorbed the dressing so much better than if you just sliced them or chopped them, and it makes it more fun to eat.

Suzy Chase:                  That is so smart. That's totally a game changer.

Justin:                  It's 100% a game changer. The salad that goes with it, in my book, Just Cook It, is so simple. It's an Asian inspired salad with just a couple ingredients, and then some herbs which are optional. I just think it's the perfect recipe for now.

Suzy Chase:                  The other evening I made your recipe for shumai stew on page 100, and your peel and eat shrimp on page 191. Now, that stew-

Justin:                  Thank you.

Suzy Chase:                  The stew was so different and delicious. How did that recipe come about?

Justin:                  That recipe came about because I'm a little bit of an addict when it comes to buying frozen dumplings, and frozen raviolis, and stuff like that from the store, because living in New York City, I work until 06:00, and often times the only time I have people over, it'll be on a weeknight. I tend to like shortcuts like prepared raviolis and prepared pot stickers, in this case, shumai. I had bought some shumai from a corner store. Here in New York we call them bodegas. Because I was just craving some little dumplings. I think I remember the ones that I bought, they weren't that great. I ate them, but I had some leftover in the fridge, and I said to myself, how can I use theses up? So I made a stew out of them. It was such a weird, happy accident, because what I really did was just sauteed a little aromatics, like ginger and shallots and garlic, threw in some chicken broth, added the shumai, added some greens, and it became this really hardy Asian inspired dumpling stew that now I make it all the time.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh my God. I've never seen anything like it.

Justin:                  This too, in my opinion, is a game changer because it really shows you a new way of using something. You go to the supermarket. They always have that section of frozen pot stickers, and frozen dumplings. They even have often times the frozen udon noodles in the same area. Those ingredients, believe it or not, you don't have to use them in the traditional way. You can reinvent the way you cook at home very easily. That's what I really wanted to show in this book, was how with just a couple smart ideas, you can change the way you cook forever. That's why I like to say this shumai stew is a game changer as well, because it teaches you something simple like putting those frozen dumplings into a soup.

Justin:                  It's something that you'll walk away from the book with and you'll do it. You might not follow the recipe next time. You might do something else. You might say, well okay, I don't have mustard greens, or I don't have shiitake mushrooms on hand, so what can I do? Maybe you take those shumai dumplings and you do an Italian inspired soup with tomato, and basil, and with your dumplings in there. Because you're using them as a condiment. You're using them as an ingredient as opposed to making them the focal point.

Suzy Chase:                  Here's my problem with the Trader Joe's frozen shumai, is that when I steam them, they get crunchy around the edges. I've decided to never buy those again, but I used them for the shumai stew, and in the stew the shumai stays moist. It doesn't get that weird crunch on the edges.

Justin:                  Right. That's true for a lot of frozen ingredients. Because they get a little frostbitten, and then they start to dry out. That's a really good point. Because they're in the stew, they're going to absorb all that delicious broth and just get really nice and tender and juicy.

Suzy Chase:                  With the peel and eat shrimp, I never knew that if you cooked them in the shell, they stayed juicy and tender. The green chili butter on the shrimp was so luxurious.

Justin:                  That green chili butter, which I sometimes I use jalapeno, other times I use the serranos. It's such a smart secret weapon. It really is, because what I do is sometimes when I make that recipe ... So, for those of you listening, basically my peel and eat shrimp has two really, really smart tips to it. The first one is to cook your shrimps in the shell, because they stay really moist and tender, and you don't overcook them. What I like to do is take little scissors and then I just cut down the back, which not only allows you to remove the vein, but it exposes the meat so that you can spread it with this chili butter. That's the first tip.

Justin:                  The second tip in this recipe, which is a secret weapon in my opinion, is making this green chili butter. You just mash butter with chilies. Like I said, I use jalapeno, or I use serrano, some chives, some lemon zest, and then just salt and pepper. That's it. You blend it in a bowl with a fork, and then you spread it on the meat under the shell of the shrimp. Then you chill the shrimp, and then when you roast them in the oven, they get perfectly cooked and the chili butter is just the little kick that you want, because it doesn't overwhelm the shrimp. But, it makes them even more juicy and more tender.

Justin:                  But the reason I say that green chili butter is a secret weapon is because sometimes I make a double or quadruple batch. And then I use some for the shrimp, and then save the other for anything I want. Sometimes I toss it just on boiled noodles. Sometimes I just put a little pat of it on top of the grilled steak. Sometimes I spread it on top of a grilled, or roasted piece of skinless chicken breast. It just adds this little bit of oomph that you're looking for something that's really simple at home.

Suzy Chase:                  I used jalapenos and I was a little worried because I was feeding my 11 year old. I'm like, just eat the shrimp. I was standing back watching him. But it doesn't absorb the heat. It just had the flavor of the jalapeno.

Justin:                  Right. That's because to make the butter, you first seed the chilies. You seed them and then you mince them, and so because you're removing the seeds and the ribs, that's where all the heat is in the chili. You're really just using the pepper itself. The pepper, sometimes they can be hot, but I have a really smart trick for knowing whether or not a chili is going to be really spicy. We've all been there where a recipe calls for one or two peppers, and you can choose. You never know how much to use because you're not sure how hot they are unless you taste one.

Justin:                  But, I actually learned this trick from my friend Melissa Clark who works for the New York Times. She said, what you do is you cut the jalapeno or the chili in half, and then you smell it. If it smells like a bell pepper, then it's sweeter. But if it smells really spicy then you know it's going to be a really hot chili, and you should maybe start with less before you add more. She taught me that, and I was like, why have I not ever known that? It's such a brilliant trick.

Suzy Chase:                  Right. Well, thank you Melissa Clark.

Justin:                  Yes. So smart. Now I do this. I wish I had known that right before I did the book, because I would have put it on every recipe that has a hot pepper in it.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Justin:                  Well, you can find me all over social media and on the web at, Justin Chapple, just my full name. My last name is spelled C-H-A-P-P-L-E. I really do hope that people reach out, because I'm really responsive on social media and on the internet, just because I love talking with the people that are making my recipes and eating my food. It's one of my biggest pleasures in life.

Suzy Chase:                  Well, I will echo what Valerie Bertinelli said, this is for all of us home cooks who want to up our game in the kitchen. Thanks Justin, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Justin:                  Thank you so much.

Suzy Chase:                  Subscribe in Apple Podcasts and while you're there, please take a moment to rate and review, Cookery by the Book. You can also follow me on Instagram, @Cookerybythebook. Twitter is IamSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes. music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. Thanks for listening.

Booze and Vinyl

By André Darlington and Tenaya Darlington

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with me, Suzy Chase.

Andre:                  I'm Andre Darlington, this is Tenaya Darlington and we're talking about our new book, Booze and Vinyl.

Suzy Chase:                  In Booze and Vinyl, you wrote, "in the semi-darkness, the amp and tuner of our father's hifi glowed like the dashboard of a car on a dark highway."

Suzy Chase:                  Talk about memories of listening parties at home.

Andre:                  Our father was a musician, so he would have other musicians over and the turntable really played a central role, almost like a fireplace in our household. Some of our earliest memories were lying on the carpet in the living room listening to mostly classical music.

Tenaya:                  Yeah, I can remember our parents having friend over. Our parents had us when they were pretty young, and so we didn't have a lot of money for going to movies and things like that. Their friends would come over in the evenings. I can remember guys coming over with records under their arms.  Our mom and dad making gin and tonics. Candles coming out; the lights would go down, and the adults would all kind of sack out on couches in the living room and listen to records all evening long. Because our parents were musicians, they met in an orchestra, and all their friends were musicians. These were deep listening sessions. (laughs)

Andre:                  Multiple versions of Mahler or Brahms.

Suzy Chase:                  Wow.

Andre:                  Recorded in different years with different conductors, argued over.

Tenaya:                  We really grew up only with records, and we also listened to records every night with our parents when we cooked and ate dinner. It was like a ritual.

Andre:                  That's when the Ravi Shankar came out.

Tenaya:                  Yeah, Ravi Shankar, I forget. Simon & Garfunkel. Our mom had a brief affair with John Denver, not literally, but she heard him on Johnny Carson. (laughs)

Tenaya:                  So records came into the house pretty regularly. And, of course, Andre and I would go to the library and we'd get rock and roll records. We'd play them when out weren't home. (laughs)

Suzy Chase:                  So your parents were okay with the rock and roll records? Were the stuck in a genre or were they fine with everything?

Tenaya:                  They were not fine with everything. Our dad hated anything that was slightly out of tune or anything that he called, "to raucous."

Suzy Chase:                  "Raucous."

Tenaya:                  So we could only play our own music when he was out of the house, which was pretty regular because he was traveling a lot. He'd work in the summers.

Andre:                  I think, like most people, it was a rock and roll self-education. (laughs)

Tenaya:                  Yes. It was rock and roll self-education.  We spend time at the roller rink; we'd be like "Oooh, Another One Bites the Dust, what's that?"

Suzy Chase:                  What was the criteria for the albums that you chose for the book?

Andre:                  We really wanted to make sure that, for one, the vinyl was available. There was a lot of albums that we love that still haven't been reissued, and when we looked they were in the $100, $200, $300 range. We had to cull some of those. Some of those have actually been re-released since we put this book out.

Andre:                  And then, we wanted to have really good diversity, but overall it was albums that are still really selling on vinyl. We really took an eye to what are people really gravitating to? Which, surprisingly, are albums like "OK Computer," which is not from the vinyl ear but is one of the most purchased albus on vinyl.  And ACDC...

Tenaya:                  Yeah.

Andre:                  ...which is the perineal top-seller, if not the number one seller always. It seems if somebody goes and gets a turntable, they put ACDC on it first thing.

Andre:                  So there's some attention to that, and we just wanted good albums. There are so many albums that are great albums but they have three or four songs in a row that are real dogs and that you just don't want to listen to. So we wanted to make sure that they were albums that were really listenable as well.

Tenaya:                  We also gave a lot of thought to the huge number of people in their 20s and their 30s getting into vinyl with the great resurgence that's underway. We wanted to help people build a collection, so that's why we organized the book according to chapters, and we really do include everything from jazz to a little bit of country to dance music to great women vocalists because we wanted people to be able to seed a collection from this book.

Suzy Chase:                  Give us a few tips for hosting a boozy listening party.

Tenaya:                  We do this all the time, so (laughs).

Andre:                  I always like to have a drink in peoples hands first thing, so if that means batching a cocktail or just throwing bubbles in a glass for people, it makes people more comfortable. And, it makes people willing to bring out that weird album that they brought that they weren't sure if they were going to bring out or not. (laughs)

Tenaya:                  That's right, and that means chilling your glassware before they come over. We just keep our glasses in our freezers at this point, so there's always a party on the verge of happening. Fashioning some ice a night or two before hand so your ice is fresh. Going to the store and picking up fresh...

Andre:                  Garnish. Citrus.

Tenaya:                  ...garnish, some mints, some lemons, oranges, squeezing those or making it really easy for your guest to do that. And then just kind of setting the scene. For each of the albums in the book, we imagined a listening party for it, and we offer tips.  If you're going to have a boozy brunch, we suggest cocktails but also what you eat with them.

Andre:                  It's really "choose your own adventure," and you can be as fussy as you'd like. It can be everything from just making sure you have clean glassware and ice, which is a nice base-line to setting a certain mood with pillows or whatever.

Tenaya:                  Absolutely. You don't need to have all the proper cocktail tools even. We always say a mason jar and a chopstick will get the job done.

Tenaya:                  But if you are building your own wet bar or bar cart, this can be a really fun time to test drive it.

Suzy Chase:                  So the musical categories that you covered are rock, dance, chill, and seduce, and I wanted to through one album in each category. Let's kick it off with rock, and I chose Sticky Fingers 1971 from the Rolling Stones.

Tenaya:                  First album in the book.

Andre:                  This is really a louche album, from its cover by Andy Warhol with the iconic zipper. It's basically a crotch-shot with a zipper, and the music follows through with that. The lyrics are kind of sleazy and sexy. This is sort of what we consider "peak Stones," just a great listening album, a great drinking album. This obviously could have gone in the "seduce" category as well, like so many of the other not hard and fast rules. But, we did want to have a rock sections, where people could dance and know what kind of albums were going to be in there.

Tenaya:                  This is one of the first albums that we agreed to put in the book. We had so much fun thinking "Sticky Fingers...do you want cinnamon rolls? Is this a breakfast album?" And we did end up choosing the theme of a boozy brunch because we've often brunched with Sticky Fingers. This is the sort of album where we'd imagine people getting up, putting it on on a Saturday or Sunday, making some pancakes or heating up some cinnamon rolls, and then pouring a tequila sunrise for Side A, which you've got our orange juice, you've got your tequila in this beautiful red and gold drink...

Andre:                  The story goes that Mick Jagger had a tequila sunrise while they were on tour for this album, and they never left his hand after that tour. He was obsessed with them.

Tenaya:                  I'd forgotten about that.

Andre:                  So they call this the "tequila sunrise tour." And, our other cocktail is just a simple Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola and Coors, which were, for whatever reason, the three brands that got into Keith Richard's hands, and there's multiple pictures of him on stage with all three of those lined up on the guitar amp. We just thought that was fun; those were kind of the iconic things that he was drinking and were kind of breaking into mainstream at the time, certainly Coors, Jack and Coke for a long time. And it turns out it's a pretty good combination.

Tenaya:                  Yeah, you've got your Side A cocktail and your Side B cocktail, or you can let guests choose with one the want, or you can do the Jack and Coke and Coors throughout the rest of late morning while you're cooking with other records.

Andre:                  (laughs) Just have them on hand.

Tenaya:                  Yeah, just have them on hand.

Suzy Chase:                  And this also was the album that debuted the red, black, and white logo, with the tongue and the lips.

Andre:                  Yes, which is a version of Kali. They had seen the Indian goddess and decided that they wanted to have something like that, and it became a famous icon for them. This is one of those albums where a lot came together for them and, of course, it was recorded at Muscle Shoals, in Tennessee, which is maybe where Keith got his pension for Jack Daniels.

Tenaya:                  That would make sense.

Andre:                  We just love this album. It's got Andy Warhol. It's got the Kali lips. It's got Rolling Stones singing away.

Suzy Chase:                  It's a little country-ish too. You could tell that it was recorded at Muscle Shoals.

Andre:                  Yeah, they really had this obsession, I think it started in the album before this, this kind of obsession with that Tennessee, Muscle Shoals sound. I think it was such a perfect move for the Stones to go away from the rit, boy-band to kind of mature into this country-Americana sound.

Tenaya:                  Plus, we were just down there in Nashville for and event, and it just permeates the air, permeates your skin, the sound of honky-tonk music rolling out onto the streets at night.

Andre:                  It's a great place to get inspiration, to make an album.

Tenaya:                  Exactly. We couldn't stop listening to old-time country after we went to the Johnny Case museum and the Country Music Hall of Fame. Even if you don't like country, I think if you go down there and...

Andre:                  Get the Jesus.

Tenaya:                  (laughs) You get the Jesus.

Tenaya:                  I ate the wafer. (laughs)

Suzy Chase:                  For the dance category, I chose Thriller 1982, Michael Jackson.

Tenaya:                  Such a great album. I can remember hearing this in a friend's basement on vinyl, full on shag carpet and everyone wearing parachute pants. This was a no-brainer for us. It was another one of those easy to choose albums.

Andre:                  Yeah, really the watershed album of a whole generation.

Tenaya:                  Exactly.

Andre:                  It really changed music, I think.

Tenaya:                  When you think of all those kids in the 80s with the little turntables that were plugged into the walls because turntables were...

Andre:                  Parachute pants.

Tenaya:                  Putting this on there...

Suzy Chase:                  (laughs) Parachute pants.

Suzy Chase:                  I have this on cassette.

Andre:                  Oh yes.

Tenaya:                  Do you really?

Suzy Chase:                  And I listened on the dock of my dad's lake house in Texas. And, I wore that cassette out, so I had to buy another one.

Tenaya:                  Understandable.

Andre:                  Yeah, just...

Tenaya:                  That's how good it is.

Andre:                  Everything about it just came from another planet.

Tenaya:                  It really did. It really did. These cocktail pairings wrote themselves, because, of course, you have to have a zombie. If you've watched Michael Jackson videos you know the importance of zombies, so that's our Side A cocktail. And then, our Side B cocktail is a moonwalk, which is a really fun cocktail to be able to include in this book because it's not very well-known, but it is a classic drink. It was invented at the Savoy Hotel in London, and it was actually created in honor of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. But it tied into Michael Jackson perfectly. It's a delicious drink. It's a little bit like a very glamorous mimosa. It's Grand Marnier, fresh grapefruit juice, a few drops of rose water, and then you stir, and you top it off with champagne and add a grapefruit peel on the side. You can serve this in a champagne flute, or you can do it in a glass. It's really just a spectacular drink. It's so delicious.

Suzy Chase:                  It's pretty too.

Tenaya:                  It really is. It really is.

Suzy Chase:                  For the chill category, I chose the Eagle's 1975 Hotel California.

Andre:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative). Great chill album. That a lot of people from younger generations think is overplayed and the song comes on too often.

Suzy Chase:                  No!

Andre:                  Put the vinyl on, and it's just to amazing. It has a really, really unique sound. I mean, it almost defines a whole genre of chill Americana, I guess, in a way. It's just an amazing album. It really was one of the albums that we fell in love with all over again writing this book.

Tenaya:                  And it just says "summer." It says, "get out your Batik blanket, hang those paper lanterns in the trees..."

Andre:                  Cowboy boots, no socks.

Tenaya:                  Exactly.

Suzy Chase:                  (laughs)

Tenaya:                  There's a weeping willow or a palm tree nearby. And then, make some of those delicious summer drinks with parasols and cherries and pineapple wedges on the side. We have a beachcomber cocktail for Side A and a classic mojito for Side B. It just gives a listening party around the Eagles a whole new level of nuance.

Andre:                  What's fun about this album is, like Thriller, and like the Frank Sinatra album and a few other albums, they're really thought of as concept albums. I think that the Eagles thought of this as telling this story. The albums kind of tell this cohesive story. It tended to make it into this book because, not only are they among the greatest things ever recorded, but that story telling keeps that similar vibe throughout the entire album, from A Side and B Side, and makes a really good hanging out and drinking album.

Andre:                  You can kind of go into the Eagle's world, the same way you can go into the Michael Jackson world or go into a Simon & Garfunkel world or go into Frank Sinatra world.

Tenaya:                  Right, and it's almost discussing a piece of literature because you listen to it and you think, "What is going on?" I listened to Hotel California as kind of reading …

Tenaya:                  "What is this really about?" (laughs)

Suzy Chase:                  What do you think it's about?

Andre:                  Well, they say that they were headed into the Los Angeles basin and that it sort of came to them...the idea of being in this house, and American pop access at that time references drugs and greed and just all of these really negative things, which is kind of fascinating because this is such a beautiful song. But, you know, it's a weepy song. It's a song of melancholy, I think or lost innocence. You can read a lot into it.

Andre:                  But you can hear these young gents sort of getting eaten alive by Los Angeles and what they see there.

Suzy Chase:                  Last summer, I went to the Classic East concert here in New York city and saw the Eagles with Deacon Frey.

Andre:                  Wow!

Tenaya:                  No way!

Suzy Chase:                  And he looks just like Glenn, and everyone was just crying in the audience.

Andre:                  Wow.

Tenaya:                  What drink did you have in your hand?

Suzy Chase:                  I had a $15 can of Stella.

Suzy Chase:                  (laughs) Because you know it's so expensive.

Andre:                  (laughs) I hope it was great.

Suzy Chase:                  (laughs) It was the best Stella I've ever had.

Tenaya:                  No doubt.

Suzy Chase:                  So for the seduce category, I chose Marvin Gaye 1973 "What's Going On."

Tenaya:                  Oh yeah.

Andre:                  Has to be that.

Tenaya:                  This is breakfast in bed. The last chapter in the book is seduce, and we just wanted those mellow morning vibes, where you feel like "I just want to stay in bed and flip records." Or, it's the record you put on when you bring somebody home at the end of the night and you're like "Yeah, let's just hang out on the couch and listen."

Tenaya:                  But Marvin Gaye seems like the classic seduction album. His voice is so rich and buttery, so we imagined bringing in a tray of breakfast with a mango avocado toast and a couple of drinks. Our Side A pick is Soul Kiss No. 2, which is a whiskey drink.  It's a little heavy. It still keeps you in dream land.

Andre:                  I think we both secretly hope that every day you wake up and it's Marvin Gaye.

Tenaya:                  (laughs) And a Soul Kill No. 2. A Soul Kiss also has freshly squeezed orange juice in it, so it's like a more masculine mimosa.

Andre:                  And there Velvet Hammer...

Tenaya:                  That's Side B.

Andre:                  ...is just a milkshake for adults.

Tenaya:                  Exactly.

Andre:                  (laughs) Essentially.

Tenaya:                  Yeah, the Velvet Hammer is just three ingredients, so it's very easy to keep this on hand. Or, you could batch it the night before. It's Cointreau, coffee liqueur, and half-and-half, just equal parts. Very simple drink to make, and it's like a lot of drinks in this book. We try to keep you in the zone of listening rather than spending all your time prepping in the kitchen, so a lot of the drinks in this books are two or three ingredient books just like the Velvet Hammer.

Suzy Chase:                  The two guys that were engineering this album accidentally mixed Marvin's two lead vocals together and produced a multi-layering effect that you can hear throughout the album, and I think that's what makes it good too. He's kind of harmonizing with himself.

Andre:                  It's one of the amazing accidents that I'm not sure happens any more with digital recording, but back in those days, when they were on tape and somebody was a little drunk and little stoned, you get these stories of, "Well, I don't know! I actually hit the wrong button and it was amazing!"

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, you don't get that anymore.

Andre:                  You don't get that anymore. You know, if you don't go flipping through vinyl records, you're not going to find that vinyl album that you pick up just based on the cover. That's one of the things that was fun about doing this book too is just how the vinyl stores and these social spaces and that it has accidents like that that analog has that digital just doesn't. You get suggestions from Spotify and whatnot, which is really helpful, but it doesn't have the same magic, I think. Some of my favorite albums were just albums that had a great cover and you can buy them.

Tenaya:                  Absolutely, I feel like a record store...you go in and it engages your senses. There's the smell of dust. There's the visual allure of an album cover and then there's the sound of what's ever playing and people flipping around you. I always feel like they are maybe church-like. They're like one of these holy places.

Andre:                  They're like an apothecary for the ears.

Tenaya:                  (laughs) Yes, totally!

Suzy Chase:                  And I spent hours reading the liner notes.

Tenaya:                  Oh, right?

Andre:                  It's so fun when you get an album and the art drops out and you just think...all of these kids, when they were growing up and having vinyl, us included, living in the middle of nowhere, socially isolated, and even if you're not socially isolated you could be in the East coast and your parents are conservative...you buy one of these albums and have these liner notes fall out of these pictures of these crazy, kooky dressed up people...

Tenaya:                  (laughs) Yeah.

Andre:                  ...and you're like, "I don't know what this is, but it's amazing coming into my world," and the album art is amazing.

Andre:                  We got really lucky that our graphic designer for this book really knocked it out of the park and really was a vinyl person themselves, really holds the visual vernacular from each book, making these pages for this, for Booze and Vinyl. It's just a beautifully done book.

Tenaya:                  It's so many albums at the set or the photo shoot, and we did a four day photo shoot in a couple of AirBnb spaces, and it was so much fun between the shots to just sit on the bed and flip through albums that people brought in. We were swapping albums. We were playing music.

Andre:                  Yeah.

Tenaya:                  It was one-forty a listening party.

Andre:                  We were DJ-ing the whole shoot.

Tenaya:                  It just takes you back. Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  Well, I grew up in Kansas, and I would get all sorts of soul music albums. They weren't playing this on the radio, so it was only in my albums. I would sit there and read it and flip through and sit on the floor. You have to sit on the floor, right?

Andre:                  Yeah.

Tenaya:                  You do. (laughs)

Andre:                  You do. (laughs)

Suzy Chase:                  Tell me about your book tour and the Crosley Record Truck.

Andre:                  We had reached out to Crosley, and they had done a tour with Dogfish Head last year just before Record Store Day. Our publisher moved the date of the book to capture Record Store Day. We really wanted to be a part of Record Store Day, which is, for listeners, I'm sure all your listeners know, but it is basically Christmas for small, independent record stores. It's such and important days. When we were on this tour, we'd be in record stores. Basically, we went on tour in a 30-foot, mobile vinyl van. What is it? A mobile listening station, maybe?

Tenaya:                  It's an old bread truck that had been rehabbed.

Andre:                  Converted so you can...

Tenaya:                  Full of a jukebox, turntables, and couches.

Andre:                  So you can go inside and listen to all the albums. We went from New York City to Nashville. Stopping all along the way, we did a number of various record stores in the United States from New York to Nashville, and they all said how important Record Store is and what a huge draw that keeps many of them in business or at least in the black.

Andre:                  So, we really wanted to be a part of that, and Crosley had been a part of that with Dogfish Head before. We thought Crosley is making these, I think they start at $60, suitcase turntables, which really is a great way to get people engaged in vinyl. When I was growing up, you had to have a very expensive hifi system, so you'd go in a record store and ask, "How do I get into vinyl?" And they're likes, "Well, its $200 for the turntable, $300 for the amp, and then you have to spend about $500 on your speaker." But nowadays, there's a number of companies selling these kinds of lower-end turntables that are just magnificent to experience vinyl on. 

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Tenaya:                  We're on Instagram at "WithTheDarlingtons," and then we also have two websites: withthedarlingtons.com, which is sort of our general website for all of our books, and then BoozeandVinyl.com is our splash page for the book, and that includes upcoming tour dates.

Suzy Chase:                  I just adore this book because my whole childhood was literally sitting in front of the record player for hours on end, and I also DJ in New York City, so thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. This was so much fun.

Tenaya:                  Love your podcast. Thank you for having us on.

Andre:                  Thank you so much for having us.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at Cookery by the Book. Twitter is IamSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes, music to cook by, on Spotify at "Cookery by the Book," and as always, subscribe at Apple Podcasts.

The Vintage Baker
More Than 50 Recipes from Butterscotch Pecan Curls to Sour Cream Jumbles

By Jessie Sheehan

Suzy Chase:         Welcome to the Cookery By The Book podcast with me Suzy Chase.

Jessie:                    Hi. I am Jesse Sheehan and I have written a cook book called The Vintage Baker that I am very, very excited to talk to Suzy about.

Suzy Chase:         Your vintage baking booklet collection inspired you as you wrote this cookbook. Tell us a little bit about your collection.

Jessie:                    Sure. So it was over ten years ago that I first discovered these booklets. I'm actually a former lawyer which I kind of try to keep a secret, but I'm just gonna come right out and tell everyone right now and I was on this extended, I joke, this extended maternity leave whereby I had left to have one child and then I left to have another child and then I never went back. So I sort of had my kid, left my law firm and never returned and after my second child was about a year old I loved being at home with my kids but I also didn't love being at home with my kids and wanted to find something to do that would take me outside of the home and I didn't want to go back to being a lawyer and I had started working as a junior baker in a bakery in Red Hook Brooklyn where I live called Baked.

                                    I had sort of just walked in the door and said, "Please hire me. I don't really know anything, but I will be a hard worker and I really want to learn what you guys are doing here," they of course looked at me like I was a crazy person, because what kind of mom does that or person of a mom's age does that, but long story short, they took me in as an intern. I started baking with them and it was around that same time that I was with ... One of my kids was, I don't know, in an art class somewhere and I was strolling around Cobble Hill with another one of my kids and stumbled, or Carroll Gardens and stumbled upon this junk shop that had all these amazing booklets in this barrel, not barrel, but basket on the floor of the shop and I zoomed in with the stroller and grabbed a bunch of them. They have these incredible covers with cakes on them and ice cream and candy and the illustrations are just so whimsical and at least for me very kind of provocative and exciting.

                                    I grabbed a bunch of these booklets and took them home and the rest was history. I started working with the booklets just at home, making things from them. Being inspired by them while still working at Baked and learning the craft of baking as it were. The booklets are special. Their recipes tend to be ... They're not the most ... It's funny I was just listening to your podcast with the woman from Betty Crocker and that new cookbook.

Suzy Chase:         Yes.

Jessie:                    And she was talking about how you really have to change the flavors of these old recipes for our 21st century palette and that is absolutely true. What I would find ... What I loved about the recipes is they're full proof. They've been tested. They really are tried and true, but they may not have the kind of pizzazz that you want them to have. So I think she mentioned this, and I'll mention this, like almost no recipes call for salt. She mentioned things being too salty. I actually never found anything to be too salty. Although she was talking about savory and I'm talking about sweet, but 90% of the recipes don't even call for a little bit of salt as we all know a little bit of, not that we all know, but a little bit of salt will help bring out other flavors, so you kind of need salt not to make something salty but to make something flavorful in general. So things like that, or even vanilla.

                                    You know maybe they would call for a teeny bit of vanilla or none whereas so many baking recipes today obviously call for that or some kind of flavoring like that. Just having fun with the booklets at home, making the recipes and thinking about well that's good but not great. How can I make it better? That was what got me started playing around with them and at Baked, at the bakery where I was learning my craft as it were, they're style is very like Americana and old school and big billowy cakes and big chunky cookies and cupcakes and scones and sticky buns and coffee cake and all of that. Those are all recipes you're gonna find in these booklets. So it was sort of this kind of perfect storm of finding the booklets, beginning to be a baker at Baked and then the journey that that took me on to where I was able to pitch this idea to ...

                                    I wrote a book called Icebox Cakes before I wrote this book and I was able to pitch this idea about booklets to my editor who worked with me on Icebox Cakes and she loved it. So it was that's maybe too long winded an answer, but that's where booklets came to be part of a book.

Suzy Chase:         It's never too long winded.

Jessie:                    Okay. Good.

Suzy Chase:         So what years were these booklets put out and who put them out?

Jessie:                    So, sure, so they ranged or at least the ones in my cookbook, the one's that I'm using are from the late 19th century like the 1890's though, I think I have a McCall's booklet in there from the 1970's, but I would say mostly the heyday of the booklets would be like the 20's, 30's, 40's, and 50's. Essentially ingredient companies like Domino Sugar or Swans Down Cake Flour, or appliance companies like Frigidaire would distribute these booklets when a customer bought a bag of sugar or bought a refrigerator and the booklet's called for the ingredient or the appliance being purchased in all of the recipes. So obviously with the Frigidaire book, every single thing was gonna be something that you needed to make cold, whether it was ice cream or some kind of pie. Then if it was Swans Down Cake Flour, everything in there calls for Swans Down Cake Flour and the booklets were and amazing advertising tool. They encouraged the women to use the product.

                                    They, depending on the era in which the booklet was published, kind of the message to the homemaker as it were, would differ, for instance during the depression the message would be let's talk about how frugal you can be. You can use our product and you can make these things and you're gonna save money in the 20's earlier on there was a, I forget the exact date, but there was a pure food health law passed. I'm bastardizing the name, but something like that. During that period of time, all the recipes were supposed be good for you. So it would be like you must buy this kind of Knox gelatin because it's gonna make sure that you never get a cold or that you have strong bones or whatever it is. Then in the 1950's, which I just love, it was all about, I mean very sexist, but I love it anyway, just all about the glamour associated with cooking. So suddenly cooking went from something that your chubby granny was doing with an apron on, like to be frugal in the 20's.

                                    Now the pictures were all showing these glamorous gorgeous woman stirring up a souffle and how excited your husbands gonna be when he gets home and there's a souffle on the table. So the booklets were just this amazing advertising tool and for the collector today, just this amazing sort of look into Americana and history and also food history and they offer so much as well as, just something that I love about them, which is just these like amazingly yummy unusual recipes. When I was picking recipes for the book, what I tried to do is sometimes I was just picking things that I just love like, of course I'm gonna have chocolate cake with a seven minute frosting, 'cause I love that, but also tried to pick things the booklets and if it wasn't the booklets, it was the time period had ...

                                    They were just the most wonderful names for different treats. For instance like the sea foam ... the seven minute frosting in my book is made with brown sugar and called sea foam frosting 'cause that's what it was called back in the day and I just adore that or fig newtons were called fig pincushions or almond cookies that kind looked like a sand dollar. You place three small slivered almonds on the top of the cookie, those are called sand tarts. So I was just in love with the names and so chose some recipes in the book because of the names that they were given in the booklets and some because I love them and some because they were just so ubiquitous and you just felt like I can't really write a cookbook based on these booklets unless I put in a coffee cake because every booklet has a coffee cake.

Suzy Chase:         Speaking of names, I never knew sticky buns had so many derivations like rolls…

Jessie:                    Oh I know. That's a great one. So in my book they're called pecan curls 'cause that's what they were called, but yes they had a variety of different names and it's just again it's just so ... I found that really fun and special just to see how creative and different what the stapes, not staples, but the things that we love to eat. These baked goods that we love to eat. All the derivations of their different names.

Suzy Chase:         And they were called curly Q's, isn't that cute?

Jessie:                    Yes. It makes so much sense right? Because that's the shape.

Suzy Chase:         Totally.

Jessie:                    We just called them buns, but really there should be some reference to the way you make the dough and how you roll up the log and it is a curly Q.

Suzy Chase:         Yeah. They're so not a bun.

Jessie:                    I know right? True. It's true.

Suzy Chase:         When did you realize that you had a passion for recipe development?

Jessie:                    Oh good question. I would say what purchasing all those booklets early on brought me was not only this exciting connection between the more modern version of these old school desserts that I was learning to make at Baked, but also my own efforts at home to kind of twist and tweak the recipes myself and I almost feel like doing that at home encouraged me to think about development in a whole different way. I was so committed to just learning how to do things. I'm a rule follower and I kind of, which is probably why I like to bake, I don' mind if you don't have to ... I'm not one of those people that always wants to, "shake it up" and put my own label on it. I'm like, what, here's a recipe I'm gonna follow it.

                                    Anyway, working at home with the booklets definitly inspired me to play around a bit more and then what was amazing about the opportunities that I ended up having at Baked, at the bakery is that Matt and Renato who own the bakery and are the founders began writing their own cookbooks and they needed a home baker to test their recipes, 'cause they wanted to make sure the recipes worked in a home kitchen and everyone I worked with was a true on professional, who'd gone to cooking school. So I was a perfect person to test the recipes. Then from testing, I started developing recipes for their books. So definitly it was my work with them and the bakery that gave me my first opportunities to do so, but that was sort of coupled with my own kind of experimentation at home.

Suzy Chase:         I love that you referenced the 1942 booklet, My Bananas, How To Serve Them on the chi banana fritter page.

Jessie:                    Oh.

Suzy Chase:         In that booklet, it recommends serving banana fritters for dinner with roast beef and cauliflower.

Jessie:                    It's crazy.

Suzy Chase:         I mean that's hilarious.

Jessie:                    Yeah. That was really fun too. I didn't spend, it's funny, I definitly brought that up in that head note to that recipe, but there was crazy things they wanted you to do with some of these sweets and particularly the jello booklet. I had this amazing recipe that was actually cut. By the time it's time to put the whole book together often you have to cut a few recipes to make everything fit once design gets involved in how it's gonna look, but I had a recipe for whipped jello, which is actually this amazing concoction of jello that you end up before it's really hard, it's just starting to set up, you add a lot of whipped cream to it and whip it up and it's almost like this delicious fruity mousse. I fell in love with the name whipped Jello. I saw it everywhere.

                                    I have a lot of jello booklets and so I saw it in all of my booklets and I was like this is absolutely going in my book and then I did my twist and tweak for that recipe 'cause all the recipes in the book are, I say I twisted and tweaked them for the 21st century baker. The twist and tweak was that you just make the jello from scratch. You just are buying gelatin and I had ... The recipe was a passion fruit whipped jello and you bought passion fruit juice and gelatin and it was this amazingly light fruity deliciousness, but I forgot why I went ... Oh, I know why I went on that tangent. But the jello booklets are an amazing example of things like this banana booklet where you're like, "Huh, you want me to serve jello with what?" We think of jello as a sweet thing that maybe we had for dessert in elementary school in school lunch. Do you know what I mean? Not something that you're serving as a main course as it were.

                                    The jello booklets are just, not go off on a little riff on the, are just some of the most extraordinary. There's one maybe from the 1920's which is literally like a story. On the first page a woman marries her young husband and is very fearful about the first meal she's going to make for her in laws and but jello saves the day, because she makes them jello and then her husband calls her at 6:00 pm and says, "I'm bringing folks home from the office. Is that okay?" And she panics, but then she makes them jello and it literally takes you through the milestones of this woman's life. Dinner party with the husband's friends from work, the in laws, the baby comes, the baby's first birthday, you know all the ways up until she's having tea and she's a granny and every occasion is marked with jello and I just think that is like beyond amazing. I love that booklet so much.

Suzy Chase:         Here's a clever piece of vintage advise. For even browning and less browning, bake your cookies on the back side of a rimmed baking sheet. Why is this?

Jessie:                    OH, the idea is for the ... It's better ... What do they call it? It's almost ventilation for the cookies as they bake. They're not being encumbered by any little walls of the sheet and if they're baked up a little bit higher with the heat being able to go up underneath the pan as it were, it just makes for this terribly crispy deliciously baked, or perfectly baked shall we say, cookie. It was the advice you could get from the booklets. It's funny, when I first started writing the book, I thought that was gonna be ... When you write a cookbook, and you know how you have a [inaudible 00:15:33] and you're trying to get an editor or a publisher to buy your idea essentially, you try to have ... they want you to have a hook. What's the ... You couldn't just say, "OH I want ... I have these booklets I'm gonna write recipes from them." That's not enough.

                                    At first, I thought my hook was gonna be all the advice from the booklets. In the end it seemed like either a combo of other people putting old school advice in books or just not really ... I wasn't really sure it would be robust enough. That I would come up with enough advice to really make that move the book forward as it were, but I still held onto the idea, and my editor did, of just putting one little piece of advice before each chapter.

Suzy Chase:         You have included a darling pamphlet inside the cookbook. Tell us about that.

Jessie:                    Sure. Well I wish I could take credit for it, but really that was Chronicle Books is my publisher and they're amazing and they make the most beautiful books and it was they're idea. I don't know if it was my editor, just with her colleagues discussing the book, but it literally, for those that don't know about these little booklets, they're four by six, I mean they vary in size, but they're pretty tiny. They're made of paper. There's no cardboard. They're stapled and what Chronicle has done, is placed a little tiny faux book into the pages of the cookbook. What is sort of both cool and made writhing the book or designing the book somewhat difficult is that ... So for instance, in this booklet, all of the recipes are pre 1923 recipes and therefore are not copyrighted.

                                    So what we put in the booklet, which is sort of amazing I think it's at least 20 if not more, recipes, original recipes, so you can sort of go look at my butterscotch pecan curl recipe and then look in the booklet to see what an original sticky bun recipe would have looked like. Same thing with the sand tarts, the almond cookie. I think I put the chocolate cake in there. So what's nice about the booklet is you can see the original and then you can see what I did and not every recipe in the tiny booklet is the one that I used to create the recipe in my book, but you get a sense of what an early recipe for one of these items would have looked like. The issue is this, post 1923, all of the art work and all of the recipes are copyrighted.

                                    Now I didn't need recipes for my book because I was creating my own, but I definitely needed to use the artwork from the booklets to really make the book special and back to this idea of finding your hook when you're trying to come up with a book proposal. The hook was going to be that I was gonna have original art from the booklets contrasting with more modern art by a contemporary photographer. So that was part of the process of writing this book and a laborious part of the process was contacting all of the companies and trying to track down who owned the booklets and who owned, or who owned the copyrights to these booklets now.

Suzy Chase:         Oh my gosh.

Jessie:                    Yeah, I love Chronicle, but they did not offer to help me with that. So that was my job and it was really hard. Some of them like Kraft actually now owns all, like so, so, so many of my booklets, or knows the copyright to them because Kraft folded in General Foods and all of these other big, big companies that had produced so many of the booklets that I was interested in. Right before my manuscript was due, Kraft said, "Yeah, you can use our booklets," and that was an incredible coo. It was early on in the writing process, most of the art was pre 1923 because it was the only art that I knew I could use without permission. So I was so excited to be able to use art form all of the different decades so that it didn't seem like, "okay, this is really cool, she has ... this is all recipes from before." Before the 1920's. But anyway the booklet is super special and sweet and cute and can be used. I mean you could try to make recipes form it if you so desired.

                                    But it's just a nice contrast to the revamped recipes throughout the books well as they use the old fashioned font in it and then the pictures and it just gives a real sense of what an early book looks like.

Suzy Chase:         Now how has Bonny Slotnick of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks here in New York City helped you add to your recipe booklet collection.

Jessie:                    Oh my gosh. How has she not helped me? I mean she's incredible. So I kind of knew Bonnie a little bit anyway. I had certainly been to her shop before I started writing this book, but at least it would've been three years ago. 2015 when my book Icebox Cakes came out. I started going to her shop and really embellishing or ... I started buying a lot more booklets. I had a few. I had some from when I had found them in that shop with my son all those years ago and I had certainly been collecting them over the years since then, but once I really got this idea to write the book, I ended up purchasing more books from her and she is such an extraordinary human being and she lent me many of her booklets. So ones that I didn't have that maybe are impossible to find at this point, she let me use.

                                    So I was about to photograph them as well as use recipes from them and that was huge, huge, huge and she's just an incredible resource. She knows so much about food history. She loves the booklets. That's why she has this vast collection in her apartment. We had this really fun day. She joked. It was like we were playing with Barbie's except we were playing with booklets and I came over and we sat on the floor and looked through her booklets and she let me borrow as many as I wanted which was incredible. I hope to do something in her shop in the fall. A little book signing and chat and she's so knowledgeable. She could probably ... She'll be teaching me and talking to everyone and I'll be listening, but she's amazing.

Suzy Chase:         I live for a good icebox cake, so I made your recipe for coconut chocolate icebox cake with toasted almonds on page 131.

Jessie:                    Yay.

Suzy Chase:         That definitely took me back. First off, describe what an icebox cake is.

Jessie:                    Oh sure. So an icebox cake is a cake that consists of layers of usually cookies and whipped cream, but it could be lady fingers and pudding or it could be graham crackers and pudding and you layer these items in a dish and then place the dish in the refrigerator to set up as opposed to in the oven and what happens in the refrigerator over an 8 to 16 hour period of time is that the cookie, or the graham cracker, or the lady finger absorbs, I call it the cakey component, absorbs the whipped cream or the pudding and so what happens is the whole cake is transformed into this very creamy, still with some texture from that cakey component, but it's not crisp anymore. It's soft. It's transformed into this soft delightful creamy, yet slightly, I wouldn't say crunchy, but you know ... It's almost like cake, literally.

                                    Like you can imagine what it feels like to put your fork into a slice of really yummy chocolate devils food cake that those chocolate cookies when they've absorbed the whipped cream, become cake like. I think they are, obviously since I co wrote a book about them, I adore them and always have. I didn't grow up in a house where anyone was making icebox cakes, so I can't even really recall when I had my first one, but once I figured out that that was an option and this was something you could make on the regular because they're incredibly easy, I was all over it. The book that I wrote is all about using homemade ingredients. So you make your own cookies, you make your own graham crackers, you make your own lady fingers, pudding, whipped cream, as well as other interesting components, like a layer of caramel, or a layer of ganache. So the book requires a lot of the reader, although I hope that people get it that you can always substitute. Store bought lemon cookies. You don't have to make your own lemon cookie, or store bought lady finger, or even Jello pudding.

                                    Make a pudding out of a box if you don't want to do it on the stove top. So I hope the book will have some legs for people that are like, "Hmm, that sounds yummy, but I don't think I want to do all that work." I hope people will understand that when using that book, they can use things they find in the grocery store. So when I wrote The Vintage Baker I was very conscious of that. I love icebox cake so I put two recipes for icebox cakes. I have a vanilla rhubarb icebox cake and then I have the coconut chocolate one you mentioned. I made sure that, yeah they took a little bit of work, the vanilla rhubarb, you make a rhubarb compote on the stove top or the coconut almond icebox cake, you make this really fun coconut whipped cream from a can of coconut milk combined with some heavy cream. There's a little bit of actual, oh not actual work.

                                    There's a DIY aspect to it, but I'm not asking you to make any cookies. I'm asking you to buy some chocolate cookies for the coconut chocolate cake and I'm asking you to buy some vanilla wafers for the vanilla rhubarb cake. I just think that makes it more accessible for people. I think people hear icebox cake and they think that that's gonna be something easy that I throw together and stick in the fridge. That's what I wanted it to be in this particular book. I'm so glad that you made that recipe. Again back to my ... I have a lot of anxiety about putting this book out in the world. I'm very excited, but I'm also nervous 'cause it's like ... It's funny I was just listening to Deb Perelman who is a friend of mine and someone I've worked with. I was listening to her on Serious Eats and she was, "This is Deb Perelman," like incredible blogger, and cookbook writer and et cetera, et cetera, talking about the fear of when her second book came out. Like not sure it would have legs, or what would happen to it.

                                    I'm not in anyway comparing myself to Deb only in that I feel that same sense of anxiety. Rather than be confident like, "Yeah, my book is great. I love all my recipes. Can't wait to share 'em." I'm like the opposite, like "Oh my God, Suzy's making the coconut cake. What if she doesn't like it? What if it doesn't work?" So I gotta work on my confidence a little bit here, but the thing that's fun about this cake and that I wanna talk to you about 'cause I'm hoping it worked out for you, is it does, as I mentioned before, it requires you to take these cans of coconut milk, put them in the refrigerator-

Suzy Chase:         Turn 'em over.

Jessie:                    Until the fat, yeah, and you turn 'em over. The fat hardens ideally and in 24 hours you take the cans out, you open them, you scrape out the fat, you put the watery milk to the side, use it for another purpose, and then that's what you whip. I call for whipping it along with some heavy cream. It just makes it a little more stabile, but the first tester of this recipe tested it, fine, loved it, everything was perfect. Second tester, she got bum cans of coconut milk and despite the fact she'd left them in the refrigerator for a day, when she opened them it was all water and she tried to make it any ... I mean, oh I won't even bore you with the details, but that's why I have a little note in the recipe, like when you're in the grocery store, please pick up the can of coconut milk and just shake it slightly. You need to hear something that sounds slightly solid to begin with, 'cause if it's all watery when you get it at the grocery store, it ain't gonna change once it hits your refrigerator.

                                    Talk to me Suzy, did you have any problems with that?

Suzy Chase:         No, well with the coconut milk, no.

Jessie:                    Yeah. Oh, good.

Suzy Chase:         But with layering the chocolate wafers, I didn't know whether, how to put the wafers on the edge. You could put a full wafer down the middle, and then do you crack it in half and put it down the edges?

Jessie:                    Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, what I wrote is you cover as much of the cream as possible with a layer of wafers filling any gaps with broken wafers to create a solid layer.

Suzy Chase:         Okay. That was my only-

Jessie:                    So that's exactly-

Suzy Chase:         No, it was amazing and if you love coconut, you're gonna love this.

Jessie:                    Yeah.

Suzy Chase:         So where can we find you on the web and social media.

Jessie:                    Yes. Great question. So on the web I am at jessiesheehanbakes. That's my website where I have my blog and information about events that I'm doing and articles that I've written and the whole nine. Then on Instagram I'm at jessiesheehanbakes, same thing and same thing on Facebook and I have a Facebook page and I think Twitter is jessiesbakes.

Suzy Chase:         Great. Thanks Jessie for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.

Jessie:                    You're so welcome Suzy. I loved chatting with you.

Suzy Chase:         Follow me on Instagram at CookerybytheBook. Twitter is IamSuzyChase and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery By The Book and as always subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

The Flavor Matrix
The Art And Science Of Pairing Common Ingredients to Create Extraordinary Dishes

By James Briscione with Brooke Parkhurst

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery By The Book Podcast with me, Suzy Chase.

James:                  I'm James Briscione, author of the new book The Flavor Matrix, which I wrote with my wife Brooke Parkhurst.

Suzy Chase:                  Let me just start with a few of your impressive titles. Director of Culinary Research at the Institute of Culinary Education, ICE. Celebrity Chef. The first ever two-time champion of Chopped. I'd like to add culinary scientist to the list because you teamed up with IBM super computer Watson to discover flavor combinations based on different foods compatibility. Before we dig into the book, I'm dying to hear about your time at IBM and cooking with Watson.

James:                  Thank you so much for having me on, Suzy. That was really an incredible experience that changed so much for me in the way I cook, and the way I think about cooking, and flavor. That opportunity, working with chef Watson, which all began in my role at ICE, the Institute of Culinary Education. IBM came to us at ICE with this idea about how they wanted to use a computer to help people be more creative. I kind of heard that pitch and just kind of laughed in their faces, like "Yeah, right. Like a computer knows more about cooking than me." I was very skeptical going in. But I thought "You know what? Let's give it a shot, let's see what happens. If anything, I can say that I beat the computer." I was feeling very cocky.

                                    We went through this kind of experiment really. No one really knew what was going to happen or how it was going to turn out. Where a computer was suggesting ingredients that we would then take into the kitchen and use the created dish really from scratch. No measurements, no quantities, no instructions on how to use ingredients, just Watson told us that you could use these ingredients to create a dish, and it's going to taste good if you do it right, basically. Immediately as I saw these combinations of ingredients were coming, I was like "Why? Why does it say that those ingredients would be good together?" Then, we'd started kind of working backwards through the system and finding some of the science, and some of the connections that Watson was making just using this incredibly dense data essentially about flavor.

                                    I was absolutely fascinated by the process, and really just kind of ignited me to want to go learn more about it. I realized, that information didn't really exist anywhere outside of the most powerful super computer in the world. That's what put me on the journey to start creating The Flavor Matrix.

Suzy Chase:                  I'm going to read a passage from the book that blew my mind. "Strong pairings in a flavor matrix like citrus or olives indicated that there may be a greater connection between the ingredients. It shows that the ingredients have something in common, maybe they're native to the same area, or have a botanical relationship, or similar flavor profile." Was that something that Watson kind of came up with?

James:                  It was something that, as I kept looking at the data and seeing these connections, and in research, I mean, just a massive amount of research that went into creating The Flavor Matrix that I started seeing and we saw these really strong pairing scores between different ingredients. There was a reason for them. We could often trace them back to something I think olive, olive is one of the most interesting examples. It also kind of sent us down this path ... there's the age old adage of what grows together goes together. There seems to be a lot of evidence through a lot of these pairing scores that we saw that a lot of flavor in ingredients is derived from the environment. Plants that are native to similar geographical areas tend to be good matches. Because there's things from that environment that are kind of imprinting certain parts of the flavor into that food, which to me was really fascinating.

                                    That thing can be a whole other rabbit hole to go down at some point, and spend another couple of years researching.

Suzy Chase:                  Talk about the old and new model of combining flavors.

James:                  For me, as a chef, I learned, it was just something you learn. You cooked a lot as a young chef, I was going to create a new dish, I was going to make something with oysters. If I didn't know immediately what the best ingredients to pair with oysters, or I just go to my massive collection of cookbooks and pull down every single one, or the ones that I like the best, and go to the index and look up oysters and start looking at the ingredients that other chefs use. You learned a lot from what you saw and tasted in other places and through your own experience. Building what we call taste memory, so that in my mind I know the flavor of an oyster now, and I know the flavor of a shallot, and I can kind of mentally combine those two without actually having to taste them.

                                    But it relies so much previous experience, or having some familiarity with an ingredient. I think nowadays we have such incredible access to ingredients. We can have ingredients from all over the world at our door in 24 hours if we just click a button and pay enough money for it. To me, I think it's helpful to have another tool in your arsenal, another way to think about flavor and analyze flavor to make decisions about what ingredients go together. That's The Flavor Matrix, which is, for sports fans, I liken it to the analytics of cooking. In Baseball, and other sports analytics are big, and you're looking at stats, and using data to kind of make evaluations. That's the same thing we do in The Flavor Matrix. In this case, the data is the chemical compounds in each ingredient that create the flavor in that ingredient.

                                    We're talking that we're down to the molecular level, talking about each one of these individual little compounds and in something like a strawberry, there are just over 400 different compounds that combine to make the flavor of the strawberry. Only a few of those are readily perceptible by nose. When you slice into a strawberry, you're going to be able to detect some of them. There are so many more that make up the flavor of the strawberry that we don't necessarily, wouldn’t necessarily detect on our own with the nose. But, when we're able to look at those ingredients, or look at those compounds in analysis, then we can start finding these hidden connections between ingredients because when two ingredients have a bunch of these compounds in common, we can very accurately predict that they're going to taste good together when we combine them in a dish.

                                    Just how we land at something like mushrooms and strawberries together in a dish. Where that doesn't make any sense, and I would never put those together on my own. But through the research, we see that connection and go on. That's kind of an interesting weird thing, but it actually tastes really great.

Suzy Chase:                  God, it's so logical. No one has ever talked about this. That's crazy.

James:                  We talk about it in the book, kind of the origin of this whole concept. It is quite new, especially if you look it at the scope of all cooking. It's less than 20 years ago, Heston Blumenthal and his research team at The Fat Duck kind of put this theory forward, the flavor pairing theory. Yeah, it's been kind of quiet in a few chef nerd circles just for a little bit. It hasn't moved much beyond that, and really it didn't kind of make its way into my radar until five, six years ago when we started working with chef Watson, who was using flavor pairing theory to make some of its decisions about ingredients.

Suzy Chase:                  You mentioned taste memory earlier, and this book relies on chemistry rather than taste memory. Explain what taste memory is.

James:                  I think it's important, with the book, and I think, often when we're dealing with anything new to kind of remembering with The Flavor Matrix I really love to encourage people to learn this, and use it as another tool in their arsenal, a way to make decisions about ingredients and think about the flavor pairing, so that you can add that to what you already have in what we call taste memory, which is basically, it's not like those memories you cherish from grandma's roast chicken, or whatever grandma used to make for you. But, you do remember the flavor of that. You also remember the flavor of a lot other things that you've tasted before. The more eat, the more you travel, you start to build taste memory. Chefs, it's some we kind of work in our careers. It's a bit of training your palate as well, it's kind of knowing flavors just inherently, and being able to kind of combine them in your minds to put two flavors together and sort of know what it's going to taste like without actually having to taste them together.

                                    But I think that really kind of elite level of taste memory to be able to do that, it's something that just professional chefs have. You kind of spend your whole life developing it. It's not easy.

Suzy Chase:                  Talk about the difference between taste and flavor.

James:                  Yeah. This is really one of the things we like to focus on in the book, and we talk a lot about. It's an important difference really. Because we tend to use those two words interchangeably, but in reality they come from different places. Taste comes from the tongue, flavor comes from your nose, it comes from all of your olfactory senses together, not just in your nose, but in the back of your throat, and sort of all around. Taste really only refers to six specific sensations, which is the tastes that we know, sour, sweet, salty, bitter, those are kind of the four classic ones, then two more that we've recently added with umami, and fat. These are things that are actually detected on the tongue, a chemical reaction happens on the tongue and relays that information to the brain about what's in the food that you're tasting.

                                    The tongue, I like to kind of describe the tongue's job as being a nutrient and toxin detector. It's just kind of the gatekeeper for your body. When your tongue recognizes sugar, it signals your brain, your brain is happy, it knows that things with sugar in them are things like ripe fruits, so they have good nutrition. Or it's just sugar, and it's something that your body can easily and quickly utilize for energy. Your body likes that, so it wants to take in more. With umami it means protein, it's amino acids coming in, and your body knows it needs that as building blocks. When it tastes something that's very sour, that's often a sign of under ripe, fruits or vegetables, they all tend to be sour. They don't offer much benefit to our body, so we tend to not like those quite as much.

                                    Things that are bitter are often a sign of toxin. When your tongue detects a toxin, it kind of makes you pause and be a little more cautious about what you're eating and wonder if you actually want to swallow it or not. This is really ... I think another great example is like when you're at the beach and you get hit in the face with a big wave, and you have that mouth full of sea water, you immediately start coughing and trying to spit it out because your tongue instantly recognizes that high concentration of salt is not good for your body and doesn't want to allow it in. That's really what our tongue is doing.

                                    Then, everything that we perceive as flavor is coming through our nose. It's coming through these chemical compounds that we've talked about that are in the food that actually create flavor. That part of the equation, when we talk about taste and flavor, is so much more complex and so much more nuanced. But often, when we describe food, it's just savory, or salty, or sweet. We don't get into talking about all these wonderful, rich, complex flavors that exist in food. Just like we do in wine, or coffee, or beer.

Suzy Chase:                  Three factors help form a complete picture of flavor, you wrote in the book, taste, aroma and texture. But you said that aroma is far more influential. Talk a little bit about that.

James:                  When we take a bite of food and there is so much ongoing research and kind of developing science around, there's a really understanding the physiology of taste and perception, and all of this very well, we're starting to understand it much better than we ever have before. We now know that about 80% of what we taste when we have a bite of food, that 80% is coming through the flavor receptors, through olfactory, through aroma. About 20% is relayed by the tongue. Things like texture, sound, actual sound can influence how we perceive food, lights. All of our senses really combine to change how we perceive a bite of food, but the heavy lifting is fairly being done by the nose and the tongue.

Suzy Chase:                  I bought my very first durian in Chinatown a few weeks ago, and I can vouch for that in terms of aroma. It was so smelly.

James:                  It is, it take a day or two to clear that out of the house.

Suzy Chase:                  And out of your nose. You wrote this book with Brooke Parkhurst. Tell us about her.

James:                  She is my wonderful wife. We live together here in the West Village in New York, but not for much longer, we're actually about to head down to Florida to open our first restaurant down on the Gulf Coast in Florida. That's super exciting. Brooke will be the Wine Director there, and I'll be the chef. It's a whole new adventure for our little family, but very exciting. Brooke has been, obviously, she has been my life partner for over 10 years now. But also my cooking partner and writing partner. She is a wonderful writer, and before we met she was finishing her first novel about a small town Southern girl moving to New York City, who stayed connected to home through the recipe she made.

                                    Our pairing of being chef and writer has been a really great one. This is our second book that we've written together. We're finding a way to take all of this complicated scientific jargon and put it in a form that really is accessible to anybody and everybody.

Suzy Chase:                  I think one of the many special things about this cookbook is that it has 150 of the most commonly used ingredients that surprisingly work together. You're not out there searching for weird, oddball ingredients.

James:                  Yeah. We really wanted to focus on ingredients that people are using every day, because I think, often, when you open a book, and you go through an ingredient list, and you see two ingredients ingredients "I don't even know what that is, I don't know where to find those." It can be a big turnoff. We've really wanted this to be a book that worked on different levels for different people. For professional chefs, and really big foodie home cooks, and just kind of the average, everyday cook, who has their dishes that they make all the time, and love, but was looking for a way to sort of change things up a little bit. Even if you just want to find one new ingredient to add to your favorite dish that you always make just to kind of change it up, or get a little different take on it, I find you can find that in The Flavor Matrix.

Suzy Chase:                  Last week, I made your shrimp and lamb gumbo on page 89. The spices in this dish were so minimal, but the flavor was huge.

James:                  Yeah. Thank you so much, I had a lot of fun following along on Instagram watching as you were making all these dishes, I think it looks like you did a fabulous job.

Suzy Chase:                  Thank you, in my tiny West Village kitchen.

James:                  I'm glad you were digging in there, and making these, they looked great. That to me was one of these just wonderfully, surprising combinations, was shrimp and lamb. Two things I would never think about putting together. But their flavors match up so well. Like you said, when you start with kind of flavor first in a recipe, you don't need as much to really bring it all together and to make it happen. That's a quick, simple recipe that I think really comes together so nicely because we start building on those common flavors from the beginning with the shrimp and the lamb.

Suzy Chase:                  I also made the lemon curd with crunchy olives on page 181. I have no words for this. It was so good. Can you describe this heavenly dish?

James:                  I think anyone who's eaten at any form of Mediterranean style restaurant, you've probably had a seafood dish that has lemon and olives in it, or a vegetable dish with lemon and olive. It's not a surprising combination, but as I looked at it, and saw just what a really, really strong combination it was, I thought [inaudible 00:19:49] thinking about "Why don't we use that more? What are other ways we can use that fantastic combination that are a little more interesting or a bit more surprising?" Naturally, I was like "Let's make a dessert out of them." That's exactly what we did. Starting with kind of ... it starts like a classic lemon curd with just egg yolks and sugar, and lemon juice, and lemon zest to really get the most intense flavor.

                                    But then, once the curd is cooked and is nice and thick on the stove, and it has just kind of that creamy, beautiful, smooth consistency, take it out and start whipping it. As it cools, emulsifying olive oil into it, instead of the classic butter. That olive oil gives it a smooth, beautiful shine and really gorgeous consistency and such a unique flavor. I finish it with a little bit of butter as well, just because it kind of needs it for the structure, it's too runny if it's made with just olive oil. Just to kind of give it a little bit of structure, we add that butter. But the flavor and shine that that olive oil gives to lemon curd is just so, so fantastic. Then, we top it off with these little dehydrated olives that we just coat with a little bit of honey and bake in a low oven until they're crunchy, and they're salty, and sweet. Just the perfect match to that lemon curd.

Suzy Chase:                  I also made the crab, mango, dill and poblano salad on page 241. That was like perfect for summer. I wanted to talk to you about the cucumber in this recipe. I felt like the chopped poblano was enough crunch. What did the cucumber bring to this dish?

James:                  The chopped poblano does give some nice crunch and a bit of spice. The cucumber has these really great kind of ... it's almost sort of a bridge in those ingredients, because the two most prominent aromas in cucumber are just green grassy and melon. They're kind of the link between the pepper and the herbs, which peppers tend to have whatever type of pepper we're talking about, in this case the poblano, tend to have a little bit of that kind of melon and fruity flavor. The dill, which I think is such a great herb that's just not nearly used enough, but [inaudible 00:22:31] match it back to the mango. That cucumber is sort of there as that bridge. I think it adds just another great layer of crunch to the dish.

Suzy Chase:                  In your opinion, what was the most surprising flavor combination that you came across for this book?

James:                  I think I tipped it earlier with the strawberry and mushrooms.

Suzy Chase:                  Mine was the blueberry and horseradish jam.

James:                  That is another great. The blueberry and horseradish really is a lot of fun. You, I think, would love this. We ran an event down in Florida that we did down in Ocala, Florida. We had a bunch of local chefs and they got together and they all had different pairings from The Flavor Matrix. We had this great, big kind of local chefs gala where they all made different dishes of their own design from pairings out of The Flavor Matrix. We had a mixologist there who made a blueberry and horseradish cocktail. Really, rally great, unique, just wonderful flavor. But yeah, blueberry and horseradish jam is such a great condiment. One of different ways you can use that ... blueberries on their own have just these little tiny hints of kind of pine, and almost, like [inaudible 00:24:01] like rosemary. These little hints of pine in them.

                                    That's a really prominent aroma in horseradish as well. It's one of those things that, again, you wouldn't necessarily perceive on your own, but when you start to see the flavors in those ingredients, and then you start to make those connections, it all makes sense, and kind of shows you the way. That's really with a lot of the recipes in The Flavor Matrix, they're more like the blueberry and horseradish jam. They're meant to be something wonderful that you can make and use in a bunch of different ways. That can be a great condiment on a cheese plate or charcuterie board. It's wonderful to spread on sandwiches, and there's lots of different ways you can use it.

Suzy Chase:                  I saw The Flavor Matrix book cover on a Times Square billboard. Is this the first ever cookbook that's been featured in Times Square?

James:                  Oh, boy. I don't know, I should hope so.

Suzy Chase:                  I've never seen a cookbook in Times Square.

James:                  That was very exciting. Once again, my wonderful wife knows all of the right people who were able to make that happen, but yes, you saw The Flavor Matrix up in the big, bright lights of Times Square. It was really a thrilling moment.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

James:                  Brooke and I write together at The Couple's Kitchen, so thecoupleskitchen.com. Also The Couple's Kitchen on Instagram. On Twitter and Instagram you can also find me under James Briscione, just my name. Basically, if you just throw my name into Google Search, you'll probably find out more than you ever wanted to know about me.

Suzy Chase:                  What a wonderful conversation. Thanks, James, for coming on Cookery By The Book Podcast.

James:                  Thank you for having me, Suzy, it's been a lot of fun.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram @CookeryByTheBook. Twitter is @IamSuzyChase. Download your Kitchen Mixtapes music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery By The Book. As always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook
Recipes Inspired By The Extraordinary Produce Of California's Most Iconic Market

By Laura McLively

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast, with me, Suzy Chase.

Laura:                  I'm  Laura McLively, and my new cookbook is the Berkeley Bowl Cookbook.

Suzy Chase:                  Epicurious just named the Berkeley Bowl Cookbook one of the it cookbooks for Spring 2018. Tell us about Berkeley Bowl and the owners.

Laura:                  So, Berkeley Bowl is a family-run market. They, Glenn and Diane Yasuda are the owners, and they opened up shop in a former bowling alley back in 1977, so a lot of people think that the store is called Berkeley Bowl because of the bowl alluding to some sort of edible culinary adventure, but it's actually named after the bowling alley, and so they opened up shop there back in 1977 because they used to live behind that location, and Glenn and Diane spent some time living in Japan, and that arrangement really reminded them of how shops were set up in there in Japan, where people had their store front and they lived behind it, and so, they bought the property, turned it into a grocery store that was mainly produce, and from there it evolved into what is now 40 years later a very big grocery store with over 600 employees.

Suzy Chase:                  I found it really interesting that local farmers asked Berkeley Bowl what they should plant.

Laura:                  Yeah, I do too. I think that that's the unique aspect of Berkeley Bowl, and that because it's still a family-run market, they're able to work directly with farmers and local growers to source and ask them to produce items that they want to have in their grocery store, that large grocery franchises can't really do that because they have to provide such huge quantities and take them to a centralized warehouse and distribute them to all the locations. They can't really work with a small farmer to produce some niche item, and so it's a really nice arrangement because in that way, Berkeley Bowl can ask a small farm to produce, for instance, food at hand, knowing that they have a huge customer base that wants that item, and then the small farmer has a guaranteed market for that item. They're not taking that huge risk of growing something that's maybe a little bit wacky or unknown to most people and risking no one buying it.

Suzy Chase:                  The LA Times has called Berkeley Bowl one of the nation's most renowned retailers of exotic fruits and vegetables. Describe the first time you saw an African Horned melon at Berkeley Bowl, and what is it?

Laura:                  So, that's a great question. If you have my book, it's right on the cover because it's such a unique item. It's on the back side, and it's a neon orange orb that is covered in darker orange spikes, and when you cut into it, it literally oozes this lime green juice and all these seeds, and it seriously looks like some sort of spiky hand grenade or a weapon from outer space, and in fact, the first time I saw it was featured on a Star Trek episode, where aliens in outer space are eating this fruit, and it's actually an African Horned melon. It's not something that they CGI'ed or created for the show. I think it's really interesting that it's ...

Suzy Chase:                  That's funny.

Laura:                  it's on Star Trek, but my first time seeing it in the store was I had moved here from Sonoma county. I moved to Berkeley to go to college, and I had heard about Berkeley Bowl, and I immediately went there because I wanted to check it out for myself, and I was, of course, struck by the variety they had. Even though I'd heard about it, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. They had so many amazing fruits and vegetables that I'd never seen before, and I think, by far, the most extreme one is the African Horned melon, and I picked it up. I looked at it. There happened to be one that was cut in half, and I smelled it, and it just, it was kind of intoxicating. It smells like lime and banana and melon and cucumber all mixed together, but something in me didn't feel like I could take it home and eat it. It was almost like all these unusual fruits and vegetables that weren't part of my culture, I almost felt like I didn't have permission to take them home and cook with them, like they weren't mine.

                                    And it wasn't until years later, after an experience of living in Spain and having a cooking club there, where we were basically just challenging ourselves each week to cook with something we'd never cooked with before, it wasn't until coming back from there that I was really yearning to continue that spirit of adventurous cooking, that when I went back to Berkeley Bowl for the first time, and I saw these fruits and vegetables in that new context, I was like, well, hey, why aren't I doing this now? Why don't I continue that spirit of adventurous cooking from my own home? And so that's when I picked it up, brought it home, and played around with it and had so much fun developing recipes for it that I decided to start a blog where I would chronicle my adventures with doing that with each and every item in the store I could find.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, before we talk about your blog, you have a line in your book that says, "Foods unfamiliar to me are as much a part of someone else's everyday diet as tomatoes are to my family."

Laura:                  Exactly. Yeah, and so that fruit, every fruit and vegetable in my book is normal to someone, right?

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Laura:                  And for good reason, so these things are really amazing, and they may be popular in other cultures, other countries, but even within the United States, other regions, and once you get over that fact of, once you realize that fact that these things are normal to someone, it kind of [inaudible 00:06:18] some of the intimidation in working with these fruits and vegetables because maybe at first glance they look like, oh, well I've never seen that before. I wouldn't possibly know what to do with it, but someone somewhere is cooking with that, otherwise it wouldn't be in the store, and it's probably for a very good reason.

Suzy Chase:                  That's a really good thing to remember.

Laura:                  Yeah, I think so.

Suzy Chase:                  So, you chronicled your journey cooking with the market's ingredients on your blog called My Berkeley Bowl. Tell us about your blog.

Laura:                  So, my blog was really just a personal challenge. It was a ... where I just chronicling my own personal challenge. Like I said, once I brought my first exotic or unfamiliar food home and had so much fun developing a recipe for it, I sort of just challenged myself to make my way through all the unfamiliar fruits and vegetables at Berkeley Bowl, and I thought, why don't I chronicle this adventure because there's bound to be some interesting discoveries and mishaps, which there were, and it could be some fun, and so I really was just writing for myself, and I was surprised that when I posted my first entry, it's kind of crazy how the internet works. I don't know how someone found it, but within a minute, I had a like, and I was kind of like what? How did someone find it? It's been ...

                                    At that point, I didn't even know how to tag my posts in a way that they were searchable. It was really just so fun, and so I was surprised to see it kind of grow, and people starting to comment and saying they really liked the concept, and even on Wordpress you can see in which countries people are reading your blog, and so really quickly, there were people all over the world reading it, and I don't know if it's maybe because they were excited to see maybe something that they grew up eating being featured on a blog, but it was really neat to see that it was being appreciated outside of the Berkeley area, and so I did that for ...

                                    Let's see. I started it in spring of 2015, and it was that December of the same year that Parallax Press approached me about turning it into a cookbook, and it just seemed like a great idea because it was such a finite project with a very specific aim of cooking with unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, and it just really seemed like it would work as a cookbook because part of what I wanted of this is to see, to really shine the spotlight on these fruits and vegetables, and so to have a beautiful, almost coffee table-like book with luscious photos by Erin Scott, that really capture how beautiful these fruits and vegetables are, is sort of a dream come true for me.

Suzy Chase:                  In the book, the recipes are organized by type and ingredient. Talk a little bit about that.

Laura:                  So, I didn't go the traditional route of organizing it by courses because this is really an ingredient-driven book. That's how my process was for developing the recipes, and so that's how the cookbook is laid out, so what I mean by that is I literally would walk into the store not knowing what I would find that day because it's different every day, based on what's in season, and I would pick up something new and bring it home, and after trying that one item in a jillion different ways, I would develop a recipe for it, and so it makes sense to me to organize the book in a way that really honors the fruit or vegetable itself rather than organize it by course because that's not how I developed the recipes. And in addition, I think it's really, it's kind of a poetic way to think about these things, but in a chapter, that if you want to delve into a chapter, you're working with spores and succulents, or you can work with flowers, seeds, and pods, and so I think it's a kind of poetic way to think about these things and just to treat them as the superstars or as the hero of the dish, rather than as an ingredient in a breakfast or in a dessert or in a dinner.

Suzy Chase:                  You have a whole chapter dedicated to stems. What exactly are stems?

Laura:                  Stems are basically anything that would be the stalk or the stem of a plant, and so, some examples in the book are things like Bạc Hà, which is the stem of the Elephant Ear plant, so it's a really spongy stem that once you cook it, it's like a sponge. It literally soaks up the broth, so it's really commonly used in, for instance, hot and sour soup type dishes, and I use it in a Spanish-style garlic soup. Other stems that maybe don't even look like stems are, like one that surprises people who are familiar with it is kohlrabi. The kohlrabi is, people think it's the bulb of the plant or the tuber, but it's actually a stem that's kind of in a round shape, so that one is, that's the kind of surprising one in that chapter.

                                    And then I have things like white asparagus and lemongrass, which is in a lemongrass coconut ice cream, [inaudible 00:11:44], cardoons, rhubarb, so all different colors and shapes and sizes that when you weigh them out, and if you have the book, you can see them laid out in the spread, and it's like art. It's these beautiful different shapes and sizes and colors.

Suzy Chase:                  When I go to an ethnic market that has exotic produce, I'm so intimidated by the fruits or vegetables that I can't identify. What advice would you give someone like me, who's daunted by the unknown?

Laura:                  Have some fun. There's no harm in making mistakes, and there's really, you really can't make mistakes first of all, but if you take it home and you try using it in a way that you don't like, no harm, no foul. You can just try again, but I think I would say that you would quickly find that the fun of doing it outweighs the fear of the unknown, and there's also of a lot of resources available to you. One thing I would say is if you're at a market and you're looking at something you're considering cooking at home, but you're not sure what to do with it, just stick around and wait because someone is bound to come up and reach for it, and it's a great way to interact and to share between cultures because you can ask the person, hey, what are you doing with that? And that's what I often did at the store, is I would sit around and wait for someone to reach for the burdock root, and I'd ask them, what do you do with that?

                                    Also, the staff at those places are usually very knowledgeable, and so you can ask them questions, and if they don't know, someone else might know, and they'll go grab them, so that happened a lot at Berkeley Bowl, where the staff is diverse with the community and is diverse with the offerings at the market, and so I was always able to get an answer from them. And then, of course, most of us have iPhones or smart phones, and so you can look it up. There's some great resources out there. You can find a lot of them on my blog, My Berkeley Bowl, but also Specialty Produce is a great website that has a lot of information on specialty produce as well.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, I took the book with me to Chinatown because there's a bit of a language barrier, and that helped a lot, getting the produce that I needed to make some of these recipes.

Laura:                  Oh, good. Yeah, I was hoping ... I'm hoping this book can sort of be a companion because of the nature of the items in it, a lot of times they have a short season or you have to go to a specific market to find them, and so my idea is that you just pack this up and take it there because you don't really know what you're going to find until you get there, so it's better to go see what's there, and then maybe look it up, and in the back there's a key, where all of the produce is pictured with numbers, and you can look up the name of it so that you can easily find it and identify it and make sure you're picking up the right thing.

Suzy Chase:                  As a food explorer, and I love that title, how did you determine how to cook a mysterious fruit or vegetable? Walk us through how you developed these recipes in the book.

Laura:                  Generally, once I got the item home, I started a process of what I call playing around with it, so generally I would try it raw to see what it tastes like in its pure form and really identify its flavor, and if it's something that needs to be cooked, I would usually cook it a couple different ways, and not necessarily the most, the way that it's most commonly used in that culture. So, I wanted to see if there were other ways to bring out its structure and flavor, so I'd broil it or braise it or roast it, grate it. I'd try as many ways as I could to see how I liked it the best, and then once I identified the way in which it, the way which truly honored its texture and its flavor, I was usually inspired by that point to incorporate some other flavors, so for instance, something like a green papaya, when I tried that on its own, it's really bright and acidic, and I knew I wanted to have it in a gazpacho because gazpacho should be very bright and acidic.

                                    So, from there, I fiddled around with what I wanted in the gazpacho. I threw in some avocado for creaminess and some cucumbers and limes and ultimately tried and tried and adjust and adjust until it's to the point where it can be tested, and then I would send it to a huge team of friends and recipe testers, I think there's about 35 of them all over the world, and someone would try it at least three times, and we would adjust it from there.

Suzy Chase:                  So, I made a few things out of this cookbook. First was the pickled kumquats on page 197. The flavor was definitely different. I expected the kumquats to be very sweet.

Laura:                  Yeah, I think a lot of people expect oranges but they're not ...

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Laura:                  ... as many oranges.

Suzy Chase:                  Exactly.

Laura:                  Exactly. So, I think what I love about pickled kumquats is that they're not sweet, and it's not supposed to be candied or like a fruit that you would eat on its own. It's really meant to brighten and add acid to pair it with, so I always had a jar of pickled kumquats in my fridge to throw in salads. It's really great to throw on a salad, or just something to make it more beautiful and acidic and tangy, and guests are always surprised because they sort of look like cherry tomatoes, but the Sun Gold tomatoes, so when they bite into them and instead they find this citrusy, pickly taste, they're always like, wow, what's that? And then they're also really great on a cheese plate because creamy cheeses like Brie or Camembert can really finish it from having a little touch of brightness and acid.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, they were definitely tangy. I'm going to try them on a cheese plate.

Laura:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  I also made the purple cauliflower quesadilla with curry crema. Try saying that three times fast on page 73, and I cooked the cauliflower until it was super, super soft, and the curry cream was such a nice surprise with it.

Laura:                  I'm so glad you liked it, and yeah, I'm glad you brought up that recipe because, actually, both the recipes you brought up. One thing that people have told me when I tell them that I have this cookbook is they say, "Oh, I'm not a good cook. I probably shouldn't cook anything out of your book," and I'm always surprised by that because just because ingredients are extraordinary and unique and sometimes look intimidating doesn't mean that the recipes are. I'm a home cook. I'm not a classically trained chef by any means ...

Suzy Chase:                  Me, too.

Laura:                  ... and I'm cooking for my family, right? So it's like these are things that I should cook, and purple cauliflower quesadillas is about as easy as it gets, so the things that are meant to be accessible and to take the intimidation out of these fruits and vegetables.

Suzy Chase:                  And my 11 year old loved this quesadilla. It's really a great weeknight fast dinner.

Laura:                  Good, I'm so glad that you're daughter liked it, too.

Suzy Chase:                  He's a son, but that's okay.

Laura:                  Oh, sorry. Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  So, I also made the starfruit almond torte on page 198, and I didn't have a springform pan, so it was rough getting it out, but it was really delicious, and I was surprised by how almondy, is that a word,? Almondy it was.

Laura:                  Yeah, that ... This tart was inspired by Tarta de Santiago, which is the St. James cake that they serve in Santiago de Compostela, which is the end of the pilgrimage that you can do across northern Spain, and so when you arrive in this town, there's sort of cake in every window, and it's an almond based cake, and I've always loved it, and my mom used to make it when we were growing up, and it's really simple to make, too. It's kind of a foolproof dessert, and so when I saw the starfruit, I knew I wanted it to decorate the top of the cake, but rather than just laying it on there raw, I thought it would be really cool to bake it into the cake, so there's like a pineapple upside down cake and flip it over, and so there's a sort of a combination of those two things, and I think it comes out beautifully, and if you serve it to guests, they can be like, oh, my gosh, how did you cut the fruit in that beautiful shape, and they don't realize that it just comes that way.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, it's really pretty. Last night, I made the broiled pomelo with cinnamon crème-fraiche on page 172. Now, what's the difference between a pomelo and a grapefruit?

Laura:                  A pomelo is much larger, and it has a much thicker rind and pith, whereas grapefruit is obviously smaller and has a thinner rind. I also think pomelo is a bit sweeter. It's sweeter and it has less bitterness, so if you always wanted to like grapefruit, but you just can't get over the fact that it has that bitter taste, you should try pomelo, and the reason I like it in this preparation is because when you slice it in half and you broil it, there's more, the pith is bright white, and it just looks prettier than grapefruit. It has that nice contrast between the pith and the fruit, and it kind of caramelizes and burns a little bit on top, so I think it works really well in this recipe.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on social media?

Laura:                  So, my social media, my Twitter handle and my Instagram handle is @myberkeleybowl, and I have a Facebook page as well that's My Berkeley Bowl. My website, the blog is myberkeleybowl.com, and you can also me on my personal website lauramclively.com.

Suzy Chase:                  With this cookbook as your handy guide, sourcing produce is fun. Thanks, Laura, for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.

Laura:                  Thank you so much, Suzy, for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at CookerybytheBook. Twitter is IamSuzyChase, and download your kitchen mix tapes, Music To Cook By, on Spotify at CookerybytheBook, and as always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.