Kitchen Yarns – Ann Hood (1)

The Tom Collins sat pretty and pink in a tall glass with a maraschino cherry floating happily inside. The whiskey sour had froth. Three olives bobbed in the martini. We sat down to nibble Ritz crackers and a log of cheddar cheese rolled in chopped walnuts. A silver tray of shrimp and cocktail sauce was passed around. When I was growing up, my parents didn’t have dinner parties, but if they had, this is what they would have been like.

I started to grow nostalgic for something I’d never experienced. We were called into the dining room for dinner. A white tablecloth. Silver candlesticks with white candles already lit. The table set with real china: ivory with a border of pink flowers and a silver band around the edges. On top of each dinner plate sat a fluted clear salad plate, the first course already served and waiting.

I thought, fleetingly, of my too-heavy wooden salad bowl filled with baby lettuce and shaved Parmesan and maybe fennel. This salad was iceberg lettuce, one wedge of tomato, and one perfect circle of cucumber, all of it coated with Good Seasons salad dressing, the one you mix in its own cruet. I would recognize it anywhere, that dressing. Its speckles of red and black, its greasy sheen. In college, my roommates and I played grown-up by cooking dinner for our boyfriends.

We marinated London broil in that same salad dressing and served it with Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat. For dessert, we gave them ice cream with canned cherries dumped on top and doused with brandy, which we then lit. Cherries Jubilee! Our dessert was flambé! And so were we, college kids all on fire, eating this fancy dinner just as a prelude to sex. On those Saturday nights, we traded in our blue jeans for dresses, and wore lip gloss and blush.

We were not yet sure what real adults did at dinner parties, but we felt our way along, playing Frank Sinatra records and struggling for mature conversation around the table. I hadn’t thought of those college dinner parties in years, but this dinner party in the cul-de-sac was doing funny things to me. It was making me wistful.

Recipe: Gogo’s Chicken Salad Recipe: Gogo’s Ham Salad Recipe: Glamourous Curried Chicken Salad Recipe: Chicken Salad Veronique Confessions of a Marsha Jordan Girl Recipe: Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins My Father’s Pantry Recipe: Baked Macaroni à la Poops Carbonara Quest Recipe: My Perfect Spaghetti Carbonara Recipe: Pasta Amatriciana Sausage on Wheels Recipe: Gloria and Hood’s Sausage and Peppers Dinner for One Recipe: Pork Roast with Garlic Recipe: NoHo Pork Enchiladas Recipe: NoHo Chicken Enchiladas Party Like It’s 1959 Recipe: Michael’s Whiskey Sours Recipe: Dinner-Party Cherries Jubilee Soft Food Recipe: French Scrambled Eggs Recipe: Never-Fail Soufflé Recipe: Central Mexican Guacamole One Potato, Two Recipe: Sam’s Potatoes Recipe: Grace’s Cheesy Potatoes Allure Recipe: Mary’s Peach Pie How to Butcher a Pig Recipe: Matt Gennuso’s Cassoulet Risi e Bisi Recipe: Annabelle’s Risi e Bisi Five Ways of Looking at the Tomato Recipe: Gogo’s Sauce Recipe: Matt’s Pasta with Tomatoes and Brie Recipe: Better Than a Restaurant Caprese Salad Recipe: Jill’s Tenderloin and Roasted Tomatoes Recipe: Kirsty Wark’s Bloody Mary Tomatoes How to Smoke Salmon Recipe: Smoked Salmon Inspired by Mark and Heather The Summer of Omelets Recipe: The Perfect Omelet IKEA Life Recipe: Gogo’s Swedish Meatballs with IKEA Gravy How to Cook Fish When You Really, Really Do Not Like Fish Recipe: Cousin Chippy’s Swordfish Oreganato Recipe: Green Herb Sauce Three Potato Recipe: Michael’s Baked Potatoes With Thanks to the Chicken Recipe: My Roast Chicken Recipe: Michael’s Overnight Chicken Stock Recipe: Tortellini en Brodo Let Us Now Praise the English Muffin Recipe: Italian Beef Stew Comfort Food II Recipe: Perfect Instant Ramen Recipe: Perfect Grilled Cheese Tomato Pie Recipe: Laurie Colwin’s Tomato Pie Acknowledgments OceanofPDF.com Introduction I grew up eating.

A lot. As the great food writer M. F. K. Fisher said, “First we eat, then we do everything else.” That describes my childhood home. In my mind, my Italian grandmother, Mama Rose, was always cooking. We lived with her in the house she moved to with her parents when they came from Conca Della Compania, a small, mountainous town an hour and a world away from Naples, Italy, to West Warwick, Rhode Island. When I was young, Mama Rose and her mother, Nonna, kept an enormous garden in the backyard, and they would sit on summer afternoons and snap the ends off string beans (served cold with garlic and mint), press tomatoes into sauce, pickle red and green peppers for the Christmas antipasto.

We had fruit trees—Seckel pear, cherry, apple, fig—and blueberry and raspberry bushes. They raised rabbits and chickens, too.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 067787ffb8ce00d8
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,698,263 bytes (2.573 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 188
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 267.71 minutes
• Total Words: 53,543
• Total Characters: 295,592
• Average Words per Page: 284.8
• Average Characters per Page: 1572.3

Most Frequent Words

chicken (202), one (195), like (145), recipe (133), made (128), make (126), cheese (120), food (119), salt (107), add (101), time (99), sauce (96), mother (92), even (92), dinner (85), back (85), home (84), cup (84), night (83), father (82), first (81), new (80), pepper (78), potatoes (77), tomatoes (76), oil (76), love (74), day (74), years (73), butter (73), two (72), said (71), ingredients (71), sam (70), bread (69), good (68), cook (67), pan (67), eggs (66), red (66), kitchen (66), way (66), still (66), pork (64), always (63), now (62), meatballs (62), it’s (62), every (61), tomato (60), white (60), i’d (60), top (59), oven (57), pie (56), put (56), cooking (55), cream (54), pasta (53), used (53), big (53), house (52), never (51), long (51), enough (51), came (50), life (49), family (49), around (49), chopped (48), people (47), don’t (47), know (47), salad (46), say (46), bowl (46), cooked (46), small (45), street (45), got (45), cut (45), remember (44), perfect (43), garlic (43), italian (43), dish (43), old (43), get (42), fried (42), didn’t (42), favorite (42), meat (42), soft (41), everything (41), room (41), olive (41), many (40), summer (40), ate (40), went (40).

PDF Download