Baby Bistro Is for Grown Ups
Welcome to Gourmet magazine, an independently owned digital food magazine that’s not affiliated with the Gourmet magazines of yore. Our Tuesday editions are where we feature great writing about food. Thursday is for recipes.
IN THIS ISSUE: The best (?) of the P.R. emails in our inbox, a bonus lettuce soup recipe, and a little brag about our upcoming team retreat.
Appetizers
Ripped From the Inbox
An ongoing series in which we present a few gems from our press release-jammed inbox with no context or comment.
“Backyard Hosting Is Having a Main Character Moment”
“Long before farm-to-table, there was Nile-to-table”
“Does anybody really enjoy drinking hot bone broth after a workout or on a warm day as part of a morning wellness routine? [REDACTED] flipped the script on traditional bone broth and protein drinks to create the first ever ready-to-drink bone broth designed to enjoy cold and on the go!”
Sweet Greens
In the Appetizers section of our Lettuce Soup recipe last week, Alex shouted out the 800th anniversary of the Medieval Arab cookbook Kitāb al-Ṭabīḫ (The Book of Dishes) by the author known as Al-Baghdadi, and specifically its translation by the writer and food historian Charles Perry.
We’re happy to report that Mr. Perry followed up with a note on the subject(s):
But there’s more (and more lettuce) to the story. At one point in the 13th century, somebody added 240 recipes to al-Baghdadi and retitled the work as The Book of Familiar Foods. It includes a recipe for khassiyyah, a lettuce soup (we might consider it a lettuce pudding), which also appears in another 13th-century Arab book, Scents and Savors.
The recipe is as follows: boil lettuce leaves in syrup, set the leaves aside, thicken the syrup with cornstarch, add pounded poppy seeds along with a little sesame oil, then stir in the boiled lettuce leaves.
It’s actually quite nice. The lettuce contributes a sort of delicate herbal flavor.
Seems delightful for a rainy (or unbearably hot) weekend dessert. —Sam
Third Time’s the Charm
This week, the five far-flung worker-owners of this esteemed publication will convene in the same place for only the third time in history. We’ll spend our day together in an undisclosed location north of New York City talking about how to keep bringing you the best possible food magazine, without even a break for a swim in the creek because of forecasted thunderstorms. Don’t worry: a good dinner is on the books. —Nozlee
Baby Bistro Is for Grown Ups
By Alex Tatusian
Miles Thompson has spent two decades developing his Angeleno cuisine
We’re spending the week with Miles Thompson of the acclaimed L.A.-core restaurant Baby Bistro. Today we’ll dig into his life cooking in/for/with Los Angeles, and on Thursday you’ll get a simple subrecipe that can be spun off into a thousand and one seasonal delights (we’ll give you two).
California’s climate is confused. The dry season is eclipsing the wet. We are tricked by Fool’s Springs, and a foggy summer precedes the one infested with heatwaves. In some places, shade is scarce: the oak savannas cut down by citrus growers to make way for orchards are gone, and along with them acorns, a staple of Native foodways. The water that grows the food, now, is pumped and aqueducted hundreds of miles to reach the fields. Crops are budding early or late or not at all. “There is a quality,” the great muckraking Carey McWilliams once wrote, “hostile to men in the very earth and air here,” and that was well before the carbon in the atmosphere started turning up the heat.
And yet there it is, every week at the farmers’ market: produce as famous as any Tinseltown player. What does it mean to cook militantly from the fresh and local, now that the aggravated planet is changing our expectations? Why try in today’s food world, crowded as it is with plenty of farms that are apparently very close to tables? How does a chef grow from an itinerant young cook with blazing talent—whose food was once described by Jonathan Gold (mostly approvingly) as meticulous haute cuisine with an “Etsy-ish approach”—into one who transmutes those electric ingredients into deceptively relaxed food?
If you read Los Angeles’s best critics, Miles Thompson has made the leap.