Appetizers

Chartreusedrivers

A shipment of ripe-right-now citrus from the fine folks at Friend’s Ranch in Ojai, California, is a gift I look forward to every January. (Thanks, mom and dad! Also, hi!) But this year, for some reason, the prospect of all that peeling struck me as oddly burdensome. This, and the rediscovery of a manual, lever-style countertop citrus press gathering dust in the basement, led to a torrid, weekend-long love affair with a rather unlikely cocktail: the screwdriver. It turns out that a tall glass of cold vodka and sunkissed, just-squeezed Cali navels is every bit as eye-poppingly delicious as that water bottle of warm Popov and Tropicana that you remember from high school was foul. (And is really something when you add half an ounce of green Chartreuse to the mix.) After one too many, seeing that cheery case dwindle, I may or may not have panic-bought an entire case of organic grapefruits; stay tuned for the greyhound report. —A.B.S.

We’ve Got Gourmail

After publishing Alison Roman’s recipe for Pork Cooked in Milk a few weeks back, we got a note from a reader named Florence Fabricant, who also happens to be a storied food writer, current New York Times columnist, and author of the forthcoming memoir Salty, Not Sweet: A Life in the Food World (due out in October). She correctly pointed out that the recipe has a long pedigree:

Memory is all too brief. Pork braised in milk by Alison Roman? Please! That was a recipe (using loin, not shoulder) that famously attracted much attention in Marcella Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook,” her first, groundbreaking volume, from 1974. Do a little homework and give a little credit. “Whenever I teach this dish I am greeted with more or less polite skepticism, which usually turns to enthusiasm…” Marcella said, explaining, along the way, that the dish is of Bolognese origin.”

Noted! (And thank you to the other readers who wrote in about the earlier recipe.)

But a stroll through the stacks shows that Hazan might have been a little hasty claiming the dish for her Emilia-Romagna home team. Ada Boni, whose Il talismano della felicità became the Italian cookbook per excellenza when she published it in 1929, wrote that maiale al latte was a dish of the Veneto in her book of regional recipes. Further confusing things, no lesser authority than the Italian milk industry promo website thinkmilkbesmart.eu calls it a ricetta tipica della Toscana. Porca vacca!

East Coast Editors Eat

While 40% of our enterprise traipsed around Los Angeles eating “tacos” and drinking “cocktails” the other three of us…well, we did that too, just not for the eyes of the Grub Street Diet. Sam had us all ducking and weaving through his New York Magazine food diary (feat. significant cameos from resident Angeleno Alex), but exclusively for Gourmet, we present The Diet That Also Was.

A weekend pleasurably stranded in Philadelphia by last weekend’s snowstorm brought me: two Miller High Lifes for $8 at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar (I sang “The Winner Takes It All”; my friend Lily sang “Confessions Part II”); an excellent drip coffee from Rival Bros. on Tasker Street; a short-for-NYC, long-for-Philly line at Mighty Bread for the house kale salad and their last cranberry curd-filled donut; a tramp through snow-clogged South Philly to drop in on the writer Malcolm Harris, his wife, and their cute kid, who sent me off with a jar of Cameroonian black peppercorns. —N.S.

Went to the latest Hot Tortilla Joint to hit Brooklyn, Border Town (highlights: the flour tortillas, duh. Also, the salad and the guacamole with all the accoutrements); made the Weissman Family classic tofu pot pie for some folks (this relies on an alchemical nutritional yeast-packed gravy from a ’70s-era vegan commune in Tennessee, perhaps I’ll share it with y’all); had big plans to make a snow day feast, but instead got a little too drunk at Peg’s Cavalier because a regular kept pouring shots of Jäeger for the bar (which Peg’s does not sell—he brought his own bottle in!) and instead ate a couple pizzas at my favorite Ridgewood spot Pizzeria Panina; woke up the next day with headache.—C.G.W.

A very good solo mid-week lunch of beans stewed with tongue and trotter (and a lovely Old Ale from Suarez Family Brewing) at Cafe Mutton; impulse buying an entire bin of chicken carcasses at the Meat Hook, which became one gallon of staggeringly rich stock; a marathon pre-blizzard soup-making session (pureed carrot-ginger and minestrone, both miraculously accomplished while the children napped) for a friend who had a gnarly woodshop accident; the unparalleled satisfaction of a chicken perfectly roasted, served with rice, ginger scallion sauce, and wedges of iceberg topped with my wife’s rendition of her mother’s “famous” tomato-lemon dressing (the secret ingredient of which is an 8-ounce can of tomato sauce). —A.B.S.