The Perfect Pantry

How my father learned to cook (Recipe: traditional spaghetti gravy)

Guest post and photos by Sarah in Boston.

When my mother passed away, two days before their anniversary, she and my dad had been married almost 15 years.

While I doubt he ever got over the shock, my dad stepped into the role of single parent and, all things considered, he did a pretty good job. As we moved through those first weeks, one thing that became apparent was that he didn’t really know how to feed two growing daughters. His ideal pantry consisted of dried Great Northern beans, rosemary, sage, bay leaf, table salt, rock salt, pepper, onions, chicken broth and elbow macaroni.

After the funeral my maternal grandmother offered to stay on for a couple of weeks to help him design a week’s worth of recipes. They’d work with what he knew and incorporate some of what she called her "tricks". I can still see them sitting across the table from each other, supposedly talking about food, eating hot pickled peppers, the tears running down their cheeks, laughing and goading each other like kids trying to see who could eat the most.

Harissa (Recipe: Moroccan carrot salad)

An updated post from 2006, with a new recipe, photos and links.

The chile peppers on the can gave it away.

Before I even knew what harissa was, I knew it was hot.

Head-sweating, hair-tingling, tongue-numbing, nose-dripping hot.

And I love hot.

Linguine, spaghetti (Recipe: pasta with clams and vegetable sauce)

A favorite post from the archives, updated with a new recipe, photos and links. 

One noodle, two noodles, red noodles, blue noodles.

Red sun-dried tomato ravioli. Blue curacao linguine from Giacomo Rizzo, our favorite pasta shop in Venice. Pasta shaped like sombreros, ear lobes, wagon wheels, stars, and corkscrews.

And the "long and stringies": linguine, capellini, fedelini, vermicelli, bucatini, spaghetti, spaghettini, spaghettoni.

Roll the names around on your tongue. You can almost taste the pasta.

Carnaroli/arborio rice (Recipe: three mushroom risotto)

My grandmother called her refrigerator "the frigidaire", and tissues "kleenex".

Though both were brand names, she meant them in the lower-case sense. The brand became the generic.

I can't remember when I first saw a package of "risotto" in the supermarket, but I remember groaning. When did carnaroli and arborio rice lose their identities to the generic?

Sherry vinegar (Recipe: bread salad with roasted tomato vinaigrette)

Ten things I know about sherry vinegar (you'll be glad to know them, too):

Feta cheese, and a cookbook giveaway (Recipe: baked shrimp with tomatoes and feta)

When I was younger, I learned a lot of what I knew about boys in summer camp, from my girlfriends who had older siblings or whose mothers had had "the talk" before mine ever worked up the courage to give it a try.

Similarly, I learned a lot of what I knew about food from my friends who had grandparents and parents from Italy and Puerto Rico and the American South. Pasta and parmesan, enchiladas and chicken fried steak -- all were new to me.

I didn't know any kids from Greek families, though, so it took years before I learned about feta cheese.

Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (Recipe: Broccoli and cauliflower sformatino)

 

When my friend Ben, who goes to the local high school, asked me to give him the test for his Boy Scout cooking merit badge, I figured it would be easy.

After all, Ben had been taking cooking classes with me since he was 12 years old, so I knew that he knew how to cook cool stuff like quesadillas and meatloaf and deviled eggs and vegetable sushi.

What I didn't expect is that I'd have to question him about botulism and E. coli, kitchen safety and serving sizes, or that as part of the test he would have to plan meals for six days of wilderness camping, with no refrigeration.

Six days without ice cream or fresh milk for morning coffee? I could handle that. But six days without Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese? Maybe not.

Baking spray (Recipe: Lucia's walnut cake)

Baking spray changed my life.

I don't bake often, or very well, and when I do, I can be a bit of a lazy baker.

Up until a couple of years ago, when a recipe said to "butter and flour the pan", I'd drench my cake pans with cooking spray. Then I'd watch little puddles form in the corners as the spray slid down the sides of the pans.

One day my friend Cindy, an executive pastry chef, introduced me to baking spray -- cooking spray with flour added -- "butter and flour" in a single can.

No sliding, no pooling. You spray, and it stays.

Fennel seed (Recipe: potato and swordfish tortino)

If you grew up in Rhode Island, or spend your summers on the beaches here, you know certain things about food.

You know about stuffies and doughboys, jonnycakes and dynamites. You know a coffee cabinet from a kitchen cabinet. You know that an Awful Awful® isn't awful at all.

And you know pizza sausage, the kind of Italian sausage crumbled onto pizzas everywhere around here, the kind of sausage that gets its traditional flavor from fennel seed.

You might not know, though it is true, that Italian-sausage manufacturers are the major end users for most of the world supply of fennel seed.

Thank goodness they save some for the rest of us.

Dry bread crumbs, and a cookbook giveaway (Recipe: baked cherry tomatoes)

Since the age of seven or so, I've worn eyeglasses.

As a little kid, I hated them, and when I reached high school, I couldn't wait to get contact lenses. But in college, the combination of my night job and early-morning classes made it difficult to pry my eyes open and put the contacts in every morning.

So, reluctantly, I went back to glasses. I had one pair, which began to bore me after a week or so, and I shoved them on my nose every day and never gave them a second thought.

One day, my mother said to me, Glasses are just a fashion accessory. You have more than one jacket, why not more than one pair of glasses?

Aha!

Accessories -- like a colorful scarf or red Birkenstocks, Lego cufflinks or a bug bra -- dress up whatever they're with, and in cooking, that's exactly what dry bread crumbs do.