 | | Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas. |
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Orange cake, orange chicken and gumbo (which is also kind of orange) |
Good morning. Lisa Donovan is a pastry chef who happens to be an exquisite writer. "You cannot understand New Orleans, truly," she wrote in "Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger," her 2021 memoir, "until someone who was raised by her, someone who loves her and is loved by her in return, takes you there." Which is both a true statement and a wonderful sentence. |
So I'm thrilled to report that Lisa has joined The New York Times Magazine as a columnist, where she'll write about food and cooking and life. Her first column, about an orange cake (above) she learned to make when she was a bantam pastry chef in Nashville, is from a recipe she found in Paul Bertolli's 2003 cookbook, "Cooking by Hand." The cake is a paean to the ways in which chefs develop, building on the work of those who came before. (Lisa kept a photograph of the chef Edna Lewis taped to the wall by her work station.) From Bertolli, she reported, "I learned how to take an idea and make it my own, to shape it into something that feels true to my tastes and experiences." |
So Lisa's orange cake isn't made with blood oranges, as Bertolli's was. It's baked in a cast-iron pan, in keeping with her Southern roots. She adds nut flour to the wheat and, crucially, adjusts the amount of salt to blur the lines between sweet and savory. |
And I hope that you will make her recipe yourself, then start to make it your very own. That's how this game works. |
Also worth your time this weekend: Naz Deravian's new recipe for gumbo, roux-thickened and studded with andouille sausage, chicken and shrimp. |
And there's Vivian Chan's new recipe for takeout-style orange chicken to consider as well, miles better than most takeout orange chicken, to serve over rice. I might add sazón to the rice and serve the dish with maduros, to recall the Cuban-Chinese cooking at the late, lamented La Caridad on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. |
Alternatively, you can cook without a recipe, as I did recently, riffing off instructions from the indispensable Woks of Life for pork riblets with 1-2-3-4-5 sauce. That's a tablespoon of Shaoxing wine, two of low-sodium soy sauce, three of black vinegar, four of sugar and five of water. Brown the pork in a hot wok slicked with neutral oil, add a few coins of ginger, get some color on them and then add your five other ingredients. Cover the wok and allow everything to burble away for 20 or 25 minutes, then take the top off and reduce the sauce to a glaze, tossing the ribs often to coat. |
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Now, it's nothing to do with making granola or flipping omelets, but a friend gave me an old paperback copy of "Beautiful Swimmers," William W. Warner's 1976 book about blue crabs and the Chesapeake Bay watermen who trap them. I hadn't read it since I was a kid. It's about 10 times better than I remember, and I remember it fondly. |
Man, does Jason Farago make me want to get to Paris immediately to see the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which he calls "a show of monumental dispersion" and "a pull-out-all-the-stops blockbuster where life passes into vapor." |
Finally, Jon Pareles put me onto this new Flyte track featuring Laura Marling, "Tough Love." Listen to that while you're cooking, and I'll see you on Sunday. |
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