Recipe Redux: The Community Cookbook

Six years ago, I decided to write a cookbook that would gather the best New York Times recipes ever. I was sure it was a great idea, because the paper — which began publishing recipes in the 1850s— has been one of the leading voices in the evolution of American food. But it turned out to be a terrible idea logistically, because The Times has published tens of thousands of recipes. So I turned to the paper’s readers — you! — a group of people I barely knew, for help, placing a small author’s query in the Dining section, soliciting readers’ “most stained recipes” from The Times.

The following morning, coffee in hand in my gray cubicle on 43rd Street, I was greeted by a tidal wave of e-mail. People told me about classics like paella (a recipe that took the former Times food editor Craig Claiborne five tries to perfect), Le Cirque’s spaghetti primavera (a recipe so renowned that three people claim to have invented it) and forget-it meringue torte (which billows like a cloud in the oven). And for the next four years, Times readers continued to send tattered clippings, multipart e-mails and handwritten note cards detailing their favorite barbecue sauce, a treasured apple tart and showstopping Malaysian fish stew.

In a memorable letter that I feature in the book, Neal O’Donnell of Corning, N.Y., recalled when The Times published Jacques Pépin’s cold curried zucchini soup in 1975. O’Donnell wrote: “. . . during the week after the article appeared, I made that soup for a small dinner party to great acclaim. On the weekend, I was invited to another dinner, and the hostess served the very same soup. On Sunday the hosts of the Saturday party and I were invited to a large bash up on Keuka — one of our Finger Lakes and not far from the Dr. Frank winery. As our lakeside hosts ladled their chilled soup into bowls and sprinkled the top with the julienned zucchini strips, the three of us guests broke out in . . . boisterous laughter that I’m sure could have been heard across the lake and over the hill. You guessed it!”

The letters also contained readers’ passionate accounts of relationships with dishes they had been cooking for decades. They wrote me about recipes that held together their marriages, reminded them of lost youth, gave them the cooking bug and symbolized their annual family gatherings.

I began to see the Times community not as an amorphous, anonymous mass but as bands of rabid partisans. There were the seasonal-cooking fanatics, the chocoholics, the Claiborne devotees. And there were simply readers who, for decades, waited each weekend for the thwump of The Times on their doorsteps so they could tear out the recipes and dash to the store.

These letters, and this project — which neither my publisher nor I thought would take so long to finish (it was originally due in 2006) — first led to this series of columns, which looks back at some of the most notable recipes. And then they changed the shape of my career.

My talented assistant (and now business partner), Merrill Stubbs, collated all these reader suggestions into a document 145 single-spaced pages long, comprising more than 6,000 recipes. That file sums up what, exactly, Times readers really love to eat — gazpacho, chicken, shrimp, salmon, crab cakes, meatloaf, chocolate cakes, cheesecakes, apple desserts, lemon desserts and coffeecakes — and which writers’ recipes seemed most inventive and easiest to make. I often joked that I should call the book either “Chicken and Dessert” or “Forever Bittman: The Best Recipes From the Recipe Writer We Love.” (W. W. Norton opted, alas, for the more sensible “Essential New York Times Cookbook.”)

Four of the top five most-recommended recipes were desserts; more surprisingly, four of the five were more than 20 years old:

1983: Purple plum torte (265 votes).

1966: David Eyre’s pancake (80 votes).

1973: Teddie’s apple cake (37 votes).

2002: Chocolate dump-it cake (24 votes — my mother’s recipe and a terrific one but surely a biased result as I asked for the suggestions).

1973: Ed Giobbi’s lasagna (23 votes).

For five years, Merrill and I cooked our way through that stack. It was a survey course in the food of the last two generations in America. As became clear, desserts experienced a major renaissance during the 1970s, when Times writers served ambitious cakes, extraordinarily sweet American pies and a novel concept called the French tart. We ate a lot of duck in the 1990s and none at all in recent years. We discovered faki, bobotie and baumkuchentorte, then promptly forgot about them. We learned to cook pasta and to sauce it properly, as well as how to roast vegetables, but we left a lot of great Germanic foods like goulash and spaetzle by the curb. We tried and largely failed to adopt Chinese cooking at home.

Next, I began to investigate the century of recipes that predated living cooks. The Times’s vast 19th-century recipe archive was largely user-generated and was published under the rubric “The Household.” Readers submitted housekeeping tips, health remedies and loads of recipes — much like an online forum. None of this material seems to have been vetted by editors, so readers were free to propagate a conviction that noses should be wiped by alternating left and right sides to prevent “deformity,” or that anxious people should eat fatty foods because fat around the nerves “smoothes them out.” “The Household” also inspired an inordinate number of antidotes for asthmatic canaries.

These early recipes were dominated by a remarkably vigorous community — the equivalent of today’s “power users” — with frequent contributions from such readers as Aunt Addie, Mollie and Bob the Sea Cook. No one could outcook Aunt Addie: if you sent in a recipe for tomato soup, she’d raise you three tomato soups the following week. Mollie was hard-working and determined, if not the best recipe writer. (Measurements and techniques eluded her.) And Bob the Sea Cook was an amusing storyteller, if occasionally sexist and racist. In a recipe for lobster-and-chicken curry, for which garlic must be peeled, he wrote, “If there are any ladies on board, make them do it.”

Along the way, I created this column, Recipe Redux, to showcase both lost gems and reader favorites like raspberry vinegar or corncakes with caviar. Julia Moskin, a writer for the Dining section, gave me the idea to ask a chef to use the old recipe as a jumping-off point to create something new, as a way of capturing the evolution of recipes and recontextualizing the past. A 1907 onion soup, for instance, was reimagined as a sweet and savory rice pudding by a chef in San Francisco. Maida Heatter’s savory popovers from the 1960s were tweaked to become sweet, cinnamon-scented puffs.

As the testing for the book wore on and as the pile of “yes” recipes grew — we tested 1,400 recipes in all — the manuscript began taking shape. It wasn’t going to be a dutifully comprehensive collection or a thoroughgoing history of American cooking. It was going to be an eclectic panorama of both highfalutin masterpieces and lowbrow grub, a fever chart of culinary passions. It was going to be by turns global and local, simple and baroque, ancient and prescient. And its foundation would largely reflect the tastes of the thousands of readers who wrote in to guide me.

Andrew Rasiej, a futurist and the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, told me recently, “Newspapers think they’re just in the information business, but they’re really in the business of community building as well.”

The Times’s food section, which has been around in various forms since the 1940s, had always thought of itself as having had a planet-and-moons relationship with its readers. When I started writing about food for the paper 13 years ago, I essentially had two kinds of interactions with the Times “community”: the letters of praise, which perked you up, and the complaining, you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about ones you wanted to forget, usually because it was too late to fix your mistake. But mostly I wrote in a vacuum. And Times food readers mostly talked among themselves.

Or so I thought. I began to see that readers had always been integral to the Times food pages, whether they contributed recipes, as Aunt Addie did, or were featured by people like Craig Claiborne, many of whose most famous recipes — David Eyre’s pancake, an incredible date-nut bread, Shirley Estabrook Wood’s zucchini bread — came from friends and readers. Whether readers fell in love with Mark Bittman’s article on Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread and e-mailed it to everyone in their address books, or read a Michael Pollan article and changed the way they bought food, the shape of our food culture, I saw for the first time, did not live in the hands of chefs or the media. It lived in the hands of regular people — home cooks, foodies, whatever label you want to give them — who decide what sticks.

It’s not planet and moons but a large asteroid belt.

During my testing, I realized that not only did the 19th-century archive consist almost entirely of recipes by home cooks, but so did many of the most-recommended recipes. Four of the five most-recommended recipes — the apple cake, pancake, chocolate cake and lasagna — originated with nonprofessionals.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Taste of Home, the largest cooking magazine in the country, with a circulation of 3.2 million, is entirely made up of reader recipes. So were the beloved and often wildly successful community cookbooks of yore.

Home cooks have always sought recognition, but over the past decade the food movement and technology have converged, fundamentally changing the way recipes and food information were distributed. Suddenly there were regular people everywhere who were knowledgeable about food, and there was a new medium through which they could express themselves: blogs. The number of food bloggers has proliferated into the thousands, and a few of them, like the Pioneer Woman, Smitten Kitchen and 101Cookbooks, have become brands.

There were lots of quasi-communities online — some of them very good ones like Chow and Serious Eats — but there was no online platform for gathering talented cooks and curating their recipes. So Merrill and I decided to dive headfirst into a new community-building venture with a Web site called food52. We began by focusing on recipes as a starting point and came up with an idea we could package: in 52 weeks, we’d create the first crowd-sourced cookbook. We’d announce the themes: your best pie or your best asparagus recipe. Anyone could enter. We’d name the finalists, and anyone could vote. It would be democratic and fun, and with two contests per week (plus a few wild cards thrown in for kicks), we’d end up with about 140 recipes — which, as it happens, is the size of a standard cookbook.

We had no idea who would show up to our tiny atoll in the Internet sea other than friends and relatives we arm-twisted into participating. But soon enough there was lastnightsdinner from Providence, R.I., a self-described “desk jockey” by day and an extraordinary cook by night. There was Antonia James, a lawyer in the Bay Area with two sons in college who bakes her own bread and sends us maternal notes on how to improve the site’s user experience. And thirschfeld, a father and former chef in Indiana, who not only creates sophisticated recipes but also takes lovely photographs of them. Plus another 100,000 or so regulars.

Week after week, there were exceptional entries like risotto rosso made with pancetta and cremini mushrooms, and “wishbone chicken,” which has butter and herbs tucked under the skin and is roasted in a tube pan. People visited from Slovenia and Australia. People fought, and we gave them timeouts. People said we changed their lives and cried when the 52 weeks were over.

The Times’s food community has been around for more than 150 years. The paper provided a playing field with established parameters, to which readers like Aunt Addie and Claiborne’s followers conformed; they sent in their recipes and letters and expected little in return.

Now it’s a different kind of conversation. The Internet’s elimination of geography means molecular-gastronomy enthusiasts can crawl out from behind their immersion circulators and find one another; so can the thousands of cupcake bakers. And its compression of time allows the community to make instant and intense connections. On food52, we just introduced the Foodpickle feature, inspired by StackOverflow.com, which allows anyone to ask a cooking question through Twitter and receive a prompt, informed answer from a fellow cook. Now you can take the community to the stove with you and get instant help with your pan sauce.

Today there is no defined playing field — you just give the viewers the ball, and they make up their own game. Our community members have organized potlucks in the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Tex., and Washington. They’ve debated authenticity and shared ideas for slow-cookers. And we like it this way. Merrill and I have gone from careers of broadcasting our work to collaborating with strangers. While we don’t believe the wiki model works for food — personal voice and style are invaluable — we are now total converts to the power of crowd-sourcing. We trust the crowd. And so far, at least, it hasn’t begun to obsess about asthmatic canaries.

RECIPE
1967: Veal Chops Beau Séjour

Lotti Morris from Bennington, Vt., wrote:

“I’m still using the original copy from the paper, now deep yellow with age, fragile, held together with Scotch tape. We were married 13 years when I first found it and tried it. It has been 50 years now, and this favorite dinner, I think, has contributed to the longevity of our marriage. It’s so easy, so quick. I couldn’t do without it.”

Note: It’s crucial to brown the veal well on every surface, even the edges, because it pays off in the end with a rich, dense sauce. The vinegar is a key flavor detail, and the garlic a lovely garnish. Don’t use a cast-iron skillet, or the addition of the vinegar will make your sauce muddy.

6 veal chops, preferably cut from the rack, each 1½ inches thick and frenched (ask the butcher to do this)

Flour

¼ cup vegetable oil

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

6 cloves garlic (peeled, if you like)

2 medium bay leaves

½ teaspoon dried thyme

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

½ cup chicken stock.

1. Lightly dredge the chops on all sides in flour. In a lidded skillet large enough to hold all 6 chops, heat the oil and 3 tablespoons of the butter. Brown the chops on all sides, 8 to 10 minutes total.

2. Scatter the garlic cloves around the chops. Cut each bay leaf into 3 pieces. Place 1 piece on each chop. Add thyme, salt and pepper. Cook the chops, tightly covered, over moderate to low heat for about 20 minutes, or until they are cooked through and the natural sauce in the skillet is syrupy. Transfer the chops to a hot serving dish and keep warm. Leave the garlic and bay leaves in the skillet.

3. Add the vinegar to the skillet and cook over medium-high heat, stirring, until it has evaporated. Add the stock and ¼ cup water and reduce to your liking. Check the seasoning. Turn off the heat and swirl in the remaining tablespoon of butter. Pour the sauce over the chops and garnish each chop with 1 clove of garlic and 1 piece of bay leaf. Serve immediately. Serves 6. This recipe originally appeared in the article “Beau Repast,” by Craig Claiborne, in 1967.