Dispatches From Whitcomb Street

popovers

Our favorite popovers are Marion Cunningham’s, by way of Julia Child. And oh! What lovely popovers they are—big, handsomely popped beauties with melting-crisp crusts and custardy-smooth interiors. They’re delightful to bake—watching them climb up their tins and then steadily puff-puff-puff their way up and over the rims is so entertaining you can’t help but watch, crouched on the kitchen floor with your face pressed to the glass of the oven door. They’re fun to eat, with their layered textures and swirling bottoms that show food physics at work. It is impossible to leave a dish of heaped and napkin-wrapped popovers alone, even if breakfast is over and you are already full.

I will just tell you now that T is the best popover maker in the known world. You should probably just come to our house and eat the ones he makes. But seeing as how the logistics on that might be difficult, here’s a recipe. 

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big dutch baby with apples

Though beloved of diners and pancake chains everywhere, each and every big Dutch baby is always new and always interesting. It’s a kissing cousin of the delightfully named apfelpfannkuchen (which I think literally means apple pan cake, awesome) by way of the Pennsylvania Dutch. 

Yes, yes, okay. This Dutch baby is a big, puffed, gloriously sticky-sweet and rich thing, basically an enormous popover with its crisp edges and almost custardy center. Studded with caramel and tart apples, it’s an amazing breakfast that looks super-impressive while requiring a minimum of work. Prep the dry ingredients, the liquid ingredients, and the fruit (toss with the white sugar and spices to prevent browning) the night before, and all you need to do the next day is turn on the oven and hit a button on the blender.

Big Dutch Baby with Apples

Recipe adapted from a million places

You need about four medium apples, cored and sliced into 1/3”-1/4” slices, for one 12” cast-iron pan’s worth of Dutch Baby. Use tart-sweet varieties that cook nicely. 

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Melt a big knob - say 1/4 cup - of sweet butter in a well-seasoned cast-iron pan. Swirl it over the bottom and sides of the pan, and then scatter 1/4 cup of brown sugar over it evenly. Spread out your apple slices on top of this proto caramel; sprinkle with 1/4 cup of white sugar and then with a healthy sprinkle of powdered ginger and a teaspoon of cinnamon. You can do this on the stovetop or in the heating oven while you prep the batter.

The batter:

Whisk

• 4 oz AP flour;
• 1/2 tsp salt; and
• a healthy pinch of ground nutmeg

together to combine. 

In a blender or a food processor, whir

• 4 eggs; 
• 1 cup + 2 tablespoons of milk; and
• a splash of vanilla

until the eggs are well and truly broken up. Add the dry ingredients and process for thirty seconds or so, until the batter is completely mixed and looking foamy. When you take the cover off to check it, air bubbles should rise from its depths every second or two. 

(You can mix this by hand, too, just whisking hard for a couple solid minutes, but the machine will do the job more efficiently).

Your pan should be now be very hot and the sugar should be bubbling. Pour the batter carefully over the apples in the pan; it should sizzle at least a little as it hits.

Bake in the center of the oven for 25-30 minutes. Don’t crack the oven door at all, or at least not in the first 15 minutes if you absolutely must. The cake will rise and swell mightily, straight up out of the pan. It’s done when the center is set—a little jiggle is acceptable—and the curling edges are a deep toasty brown. Call everyone to the table and make them sit down.

Pull the cake out of the oven and serve in wedges straight from the pan. It will fall as soon as you cut into it (or it cools a little, whichever comes first—see below), so work fast. Serve with powdered sugar and lemon wedges, maybe a side of bacon or sausage. Take a long walk later; come back and eat the leftovers.

tiny pies to freeze

Tiny pies! I made these back in January or February with the very last of the apples. We stuck them in the freezer and rediscovered them in the past few weeks; I can confirm that yes, tiny pies are good.

Make these in the summer and fall with seasonal fruit and eat them in midwinter. OMG, tiny pies!

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payday spoonbread

There are two schools of spoonbread. You can always make a moister, wetter, cornbread leavened with baking powder and call it good. Or you can make old-school spoonbread leavened with egg whites. 

The second kind of spoonbread lives somewhere at the intersection between a pudding, a cornbread, and a souffle. And if you’re going to whip some egg whites anyway, you might as well go all the way and make it like this, with a ridiculous number of eggs and only the barest amount of cornmeal. This is Luxe Spoonbread: it bakes up into a lofty, puffy, crisp-crusted, custardy-centered mass, with a suave jiggle and big sweet corn flavor. It sighs when you break into it (with a spoon, natch). It has the most beautiful interior—bits of corn suspended in a solid-foam-like matrix of egg white and milk-plumped cornmeal. It is an excellent base for soup, or stew, or alongside a roast, or with maple syrup and sausage in the morning. Spoonbread, man. 

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plum torte

Plum season!

I bought a couple pounds of beautiful little Italian prune plums at the market yesterday—some of them are destined for jam, some of them for plums preserved in honey. And some are for eating fresh.

Here they are in Marian Burros’ plum torte, which has been printed in the Times like every year for two decades. It is very, very, very good—the cake is light and tender-crisp, studded with jammy, concentrated plums halves. The crust is shattering-light, with an amazing browned butter aroma. It’s almost too pretty to eat* 

*Note: But you should definitely eat it.

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five spice snickerdoodles

I like simple cookies—gingersnaps, oatmeal raisin, shortbread, kid’s cookies like those. Snickerdoodles are, like, the Platonic ideal of a cookie for me—simple flavors highlighted with just a little spice, interesting crisp-going-soft texture, good with tea or coffee, plain.

Even I get bored, though. So here are snickerdoodles made with five spice powder instead of cinnamon. They’re just interesting enough.

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kitchen weekend

I had a backlog of kitchen projects to get through this weekend.

It was insane.

We had some duck legs lying about, so I got another duck, broke it down, rendered its fat, and made confit.

I made banana bread to use up the half a dozen blackening bananas and some very sour sour cream.

We had some quinces. I cooked it down to pulp and juice, and made membrillo and quince jelly with them.

We had thirty tiny limes - not true key limes, but close enough - so I juiced them for a pie. And I made some more candied grapefruit.

Phew!

A candied citrus peel recipe after the jump.

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shortbread with candied lemon and rosemary

I am generally not a cookie person. I like baking cookies, but I don’t like eating them all that much - too sweet, usually, and too much stuff crammed in. I am boring; I would rather eat a sugar cookie or a gingersnap than a three-kinds-of-chocolate/craisin/nut extravaganza. 

This shortbread is a happy medium between my eight-year-old-girl cookie tastes and those of more discerning people. As shortbread should, it tastes first and foremost of good butter. It is only lightly sweet, in pleasing layers: sweet/bitter candied lemon; barely-sweet cookie; a purely sweet sanding layer on top. It is interesting, what with the herb and the complicated citrus, but not overly so. It has a light, sandy texture but it’s not a mess to eat. Best of all, it skips all the messiness of rolling and cutting sticky shortbread dough; you just spread it in a pan and bake. Easy!

Shortbread fingers with candied lemon and rosemary

Butter a quarter-size sheet pan and line it with parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 325 F.

Whisk together:

• 315 g all-purpose flour
• 50 g chopped candied lemon
• two or three tablespoons of chopped rosemary
• 1/4 tsp salt

Cream:

• 340 g (3 sticks) room-temperature sweet butter

at medium speed in a mixer with a paddle until light-colored and full of air; 3 minutes or so. Add:

• 110 g confectioner’s sugar

and beat until all the sugar is incorporated and the mixture is fluffy; 2 minutes. Add the flour mixture and stir on low speed just until combined. The dough will be very soft, but should not feel wet or greasy. 

Spread evenly in the prepared baking sheet with an offset spatula. Bake for 40-45 minutes, until the shortbread has barely begun to color at the edges.

Set the pan on a rack; sprinkle immediately with granulated or sanding sugar. Use a thin knife or metal spatula to cut into fingers while still hot. Let cool completely in the pan. 

This is a cake.

More properly, it is a kuchen, at least according to Maida Heatter - and it does have that very-moist-fluffly-custardy-batter thing going on. We made this one with pears and walnuts, and glazed it with pear-vanilla jam. Not so bad.

Pear Kuchen

Adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts. We add more liquid to the batter for a softly puffy cake that bakes up and around the fruit.

Sift together:

• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

Cut in 2 oz of butter to coarse crumbs.

Whisk together:

• 1 egg
• 3/4 c milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

Blend with the flour just to combine.

Pour the thin batter into a preheated, generously greased cast iron skillet. Quickly scatter a cup of roughly chopped walnuts over the top and add peeled and sliced pears or apples.

Bake in a 400 degree oven for 35 minutes, covering with a sheet pan for the first 20. Glaze the top with a little melted pear or apricot jam. Eat warm.

I love late summer. A lightly-cooked ratatouille; frenched romano beans with a loose tapenade-ish relish of chopped kalamatas, capers, and lemon; frisée from the garden with goat cheese and pine nuts; good new bread baked by T earlier in the day to sop up runny juices. Ahhhhh.

The romanos are turning out to be quite prolific, despite their toppled-over trellis. We’re collecting more than we can eat, so - pickled beans, one jar with lemon and rosemary and the other with lemon and coriander. Both spicy. They are sort of an experiment - we’ll see.

Late Summer Ratatouille

This lightly cooked, still-pretty ratatouille borrows from Julia Child’s recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, simplified with the shortcuts that height-of-season vegetables let you take - tiny Thai eggplants and small, tender summer squash need no salting. And we are not Russian aristocrats dining during the dying days of the tsars or anything, so I generally don’t feel the need to skin tomatoes.

Gather equal weights of very good paste tomatoes; small, tender summer squash (we mixed pattypan, crookneck, and zucchini); and small eggplants - we used about a pound each. Slice squash and eggplant into 3/8” slices and quarter tomatoes. Cut an onion and a red bell pepper into thin slices; chop a clove of garlic, and chop some parsley.

Warm a film of olive oil in a skillet. Brown the eggplant and squash slices lightly; salt and pepper; set aside. Add oil if necessary; turn down the heat, and sweat the onion and pepper thoroughly. Stir in the garlic and add the tomato pieces on top, cut sides down; cover and cook for five minutes. Salt and pepper; set aside.

Add a little more olive oil. Spread a third of the tomato-pepper mixture in the bottom of the skillet and add a palmful of parsley; now an eggplant layer; another third of the tomatoes and parsley; a layer of squash; finish with the last of the tomatoes. Cover and cook over low heat for fifteen minutes or so; uncover and cook for a few minutes more, just long enough for the juices to cook down to a concentrated puddle in the bottom of the pan. Scatter basil on top; eat hot, warm, or cold, with plenty of good bread.

Garden Log

A pound of beans for Bob and Jane; another pound and a half for us. A half pound of Juliets and a half pound of romas. And the arugula is getting close.