When legendary editor Judith Jones returned stateside in the early 1950s after years of living in France, she was dismayed to find that there was little joy in American cooking:
Julia Child, with Jones’s help, did more than anyone to spark a change in that outlook, showing Americans that cooking at home was something to be enjoyed—could even be a source of pride—and that novice cooks could make delicious meals for their families and friends. Child, and cookbook authors Marcella Hazan, Lidia Bastianich, Madhur Jaffrey, and others modified recipes from their countries based on what was available at American grocery stores and introduced international flavors into American home kitchens.
In the decades since, we have become far more interested in what goes on our plates. “Farm to Table” is now stamped almost by default on the menus of chic new restaurants (we non-farmers consider agriculture very romantic). Many city-dwelling “foodies” take an obsessive interest in where their ingredients come from. Williams Sonoma, alongside its cookware and cutlery offerings, now sells for $1,500 a cedar chicken coop with a small enough footprint to fit a townhouse garden.
But intrigued as we may be by the possibility of thoughtfully planned and carefully prepared meals, dinnertime still comes once a day, and most American families run on two incomes—which means someone has to put dinner on the table after working all day. Appropriately, a lot of the most popular sources for recipes are focused on getting a nutritious dinner on the table quickly and painlessly. Who wants to make a recipe with 15 ingredients and 5 steps at 6 o’clock on a Tuesday?
Deb Perelman does. And she believes that in your heart, you do too. Because sometimes, after working all day and getting home late, a person needs a win. “What I have always loved about cooking is the way a happy discovery . . . has the power to completely change the course of a day,” she writes in the introduction of her new book, Smitten Kitchen Every Day. “I like the way following a recipe to the letter can feel like handing the reins over after a long day of having to make all the decisions, but also that pulling off a good meal when you least expected is the fastest way to feel triumphant, even if your day left you short of opportunities to.”
It’s this kind of everyday victory that Perelman has aimed to deliver for over a decade on Smitten Kitchen, now one of the longest-running food blogs around. There, Perelman interacts with her readers, who can feel assured that the recipes will work in their kitchens because she tested them in hers—hampered for years by a very old, unreliable oven and no dishwasher—and identified potential problems. She’s quick to find shortcuts, but if you really do need, say, to sift the flour, she’ll insist. In her blogging, Perelman usually sticks to ingredients that can be found at normal grocery stores, but for tough-to-find items she provides Amazon links. And there are beautiful photographs at every step.
With her distinctive, self-deprecating tone, Perelman convinces readers that if she can do it, we can too. She more or less taught me, and countless other women in my generation, how to cook—and convinced us that we could teach ourselves.
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Perelman’s first cookbook came out in 2012 to acclaim, hitting the New York Times bestseller list and winning the Julia Child Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Smitten Kitchen Every Day is her much-anticipated follow-up. Most of the recipes are new, though there are a few favorites from the blog. This book is consciously different from her first: As she notes in the introduction, Perelman has two kids now, so the recipes in this book are more time-conscious than those in her first. But time constraints are only one factor and are secondary to deliciousness; there is nothing triumphant about a bland pork chop, even if it took only 20 minutes to make.
A case in point is the pea tortellini with parmesan broth. The recipe starts with this warning: “I once read that if someone makes you homemade-from-scratch tortellini they must be absolutely in love with you, because it takes a hellacious amount of work.” To make the task less onerous, Perelman substitutes premade wonton wrappers for homemade pasta dough. This shortcut puts homemade tortellini within reach (though maybe not after work). Wonton wrappers were easy to find in the tofu section of my local Giant (likely a testament to my neighbors’ adventurous food habits), and Whole Foods was happy to sell me parmesan rinds. Folding 100 tortellini took about 45 minutes, but the broth had to simmer that long anyway. The effort was worth it: The final product was bright and delicate, surprising for a homemade soup.
The one-pan farro with tomatoes is a favorite from the blog archives. True to its name, it requires just one pot—which is all the advertisement necessary for anyone without a dishwasher. It tastes like a light risotto and only takes about 40 minutes, including cutting up the cherry tomatoes. The “fall-toush salad” (a pun on the Middle Eastern fattoush) is another weeknight favorite from the archives that made the book. It calls for sumac, a paprika-like spice with a distinctive lemon flavor that is hard to find at the grocery store—but Amazon can deliver it in two days. Ordering an ingredient online for the first time can feel like succumbing to the worst impulses of our modern age, but it’s hard to get overly exercised about this when it’s in the service of family dinner—or at least it’s easy to rationalize.
The wintry apple bake with double ginger crumble took just 20 minutes to throw together. I already had everything I needed in the kitchen, so it was the first thing I made when the book arrived. Perelman credits Nigella Lawson with teaching her to add baking soda to her crumb, which she promises makes a more cookie-like topping, and the thicker crumb somehow made it passable as breakfast food.
The chocolate pecan slab pie is another recipe that is better with help from Jeff Bezos. Unless you live in New York or somewhere near a very special grocery, you’ll have to order the golden syrup, but this magic ingredient is worth the trouble. (Perelman suggests using maple syrup as a substitute, but I found it’s a little too much.) This recipe is adapted from a blog post, newly presented in slab form—basically a thinner, sheet-pan-sized pie—which makes much more sense, because one pecan pie is not going to suffice, no matter how many people are going to be at the party.
In my spot-testing, I encountered only one significant problem—the strawberry cloud cookies. I was excited to make these: I wanted to use my new sandwich-bag piping technique from the tortellini (an unnecessary step, but a fun and tidy way to deal with the sticky meringue dough). When I took them out of the oven, they looked like perfect pink river rocks, but 10 minutes later they had collapsed. They still tasted like cotton candy, but the texture was more the chewy end of a cotton candy than the cloudy beginning.
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One of the best things about cooking from a website is the process pictures that illustrate the trickiest parts. When you’re beating egg whites and wonder what “stiff peaks” are supposed to look like, there is a picture to show you. When developing her first cookbook, Perelman worried that the obsessive documentation of every step would be impossible to replicate in book form, so the publishers made it work: In the first book, the really tough steps were documented, even if the prettier, final product was pushed to the corner of the page. The new Smitten Kitchen Every Day doesn’t follow this approach, which is too bad, as I could have used some help with the tortellini-folding technique.
But the photography that is included is nonetheless helpful in getting readers excited about making dinner—even though none of us has as much time as we would like. Many of Perelman’s longtime readers have growing families too and face the same challenge she does of getting dinner on the table at a reasonable hour. New readers and frequent blog commenters alike will be happy to find weeknight dinners that don’t feel like compromises and, silly as it sounds, give them a chance to feel triumphant, even on a Tuesday.
Emily MacLean is managing editor at National Affairs.
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Bakery-Style Butter Cookies
With permission from Smitten Kitchen Every Day
Ingredients
Cookies:
1 cup (8 ounces or 225 grams) unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup (135 grams) granulated sugar
2 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 cups (260 grams) all-purpose flour
To finish:
1/2 cup (160 grams) jam of your choice
1 cup sprinkles, chopped nuts, or finely shredded dried coconut
10-to-12-ounce (285-to-340-gram) bag semisweet chocolate chips or chopped chocolate
Make the cookies: Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper.
Combine the butter and sugar until well blended and light. Add the egg yolks, vanilla, and salt, and beat to combine. Scrape down the bowl and beaters. Add the flour, and mix just until the flour disappears. Fit a piping bag with a medium (approximately 1/2-inch opening) French star tip, or you can use a large plastic bag with the corner snipped off.
Pipe the dough into about 1/2-inch-wide, 1-and-3/4-to-2-inch-long segments, spaced about 1 inch apart, on your baking sheets. It’s possible a professional would have a better way to do this, but since I am not a professional, I use a knife or scissors and simply snip off the dough for each cookie, giving it a clean finish. Bake the cookies for 11 to 13 minutes, or until they are golden at the edges.
You can cool these completely on the baking trays, or for at least 2 minutes, to make them easier to lift to a cooling rack. Let the cookies cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough.
Assemble: Meanwhile, place your jam in a sandwich bag, but don’t snip off the corner until you’re going to need it, to limit messes. Place the sprinkles on plates with rims or in shallow bowls. Melt the chocolate chips in the microwave or in a small saucepan until they’re three-quarters melted, then stir to melt the rest. (This will keep the chocolate from burning or overheating.) Place the melted chocolate in a bowl with a good depth for dipping. Line two large baking sheets with parchment, or just use the cookie trays you baked on, wiping off any excess crumbs.
Once the cookies are completely cool, flip half of them over, to become the bottom half of your sandwiches. Snip a little corner off your jam bag, and squeeze a little down the center of each flipped cookie, but not so much that it will squeeze out when sandwiched. Sandwich with the other half of the cookies. Dip each a third to half of the way into the chocolate and (trust me) let it drip off, wiping away any excess. (I know we all love chocolate, but the sprinkles will slide off if it’s too thick.) Roll the cookies in sprinkles, then return them to the baking sheets to set. You can pop them in the freezer for 5 minutes to hasten this process along.
Do ahead: These keep at room temperature in an airtight container for a week.
