The reasons I chose this particular book are first, that I love Mario’s food. His sweetbreads at Babbo rocked my world the first time I ate them nearly 15 years ago. (“It’s all about the duck prosciutto,” he said when I interviewed him for my book, Foods of the World: New York). And then there was the book’s subtitle, which contains both the words “simple,” and “home,” two words that should warm the heart of any home cook.

Which is why the first question I asked him in an email today, was whether it was even true…

1. Are these recipes really from your home?  ABSOLUTELY! THESE DISHES HAVE ALL BEEN PERSONALLY TESTED BY MY WIFE AND KIDS. thereby assuaging my first Fear of Cooking New Things, which is that I am working with recipes that don’t work.
2. Seriously though: do you cook at home? YES! I COOK BREAKFAST FOR MY BOYS EVERY DAY. I DO COOK DINNER A FEW TIMES A WEEK BUT MY KIDS’ BABYSITTER, LEO, IS AN AMAZING COOK AND I CAN’T MATCH HER MOLE – SO SHE COOKS ON THE DAYS I DO NOT. gotta love a man who loves mole, and who has a woman babysitter named Leo.
3. Would you ever cook dishes from The Babbo Cookook at home?  I WOULD, OF COURSE, BUT ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO JUST GO TO BABBO! Since I don’t plan on making duck prosciutto in this lifetime, I’ll take his suggestion. Now if he can please help me with a reservation…

Questions 4 and 5 were just the sort of stupid questions I’d have a wisecrack at a blogger for asking. Grazie, Mario, for sparing me by ignoring them.
6. What’s the best piece of advice you could give to me, the skilled home cook, cooking for friends at home? LEAVE IT ALONE! HOME COOKS ALWAYS WANT TO SHAKE, STIR AND RATTLE UNNECESSARILY. IF YOU LET YOUR COOKWARE DO ITS JOB IT SHOULD COME OUT WELL WITHOUT THE ADDED ENERGY. Or: why I love my All-Clad.

Number 7 was a question that I lifted directly from the handbook of Narcissists Anonymous. Mario did answer it, but I deleted it to save myself from my worst enemy: me.
8. And from the Dept. of It Really Is All About Me: What do you think of The Mozza Cookbook? No, really….  IT’S BRILLIANT – NANCY IS SO TALENTED AND YOU HELPED HER SHINE. COULDN’T BE HAPPIER WITH HOW IT TURNED OUT. ah, shucks…

Looking through Molto Batali, the first thing that struck me (other than how exciting it was to imagine cooking things I hadn’t already made hundreds of times!) was just how many words and terms I didn’t know in the table of contents alone. Bra tenere? Scafata? Farsumagru? This was exciting! I thought as one by one, I looked them up. The thrill of learning! Which brings me to the last reason I chose this book, and that is that for no one particular reason, I have long since decided that Mario Batali, born and raised in Washington and having lived most of his adult life in New York City, knows more about Italian cuisine than any other human being on the planet. Which is why, even though I have the book, I am going to Mario’s Los Angeles book signing on Friday afternoon. To play Stump the Chef, that is, and find out if there is anything about Italian food the man doesn’t know.  In the meantime, I’ll be drumming up a question… Any ideas?

Not having been there, one obvious difference between San Diego and LA, as I saw it, was that in San Diego, we don’t have movie stars. For another, we have the busiest international border in the world, which, being that our dad lived in Tijuana, we crossed an average of once a week. (LA-Tijuana, not same thing.) But most importantly, and back to the way this whole conversation started, in San Diego, we have avocados. San Diego is the biggest avocado growing region in the country. Maybe even the world. I grew up surrounded by streets with names such as Fuerte and Calavo (short for California-Avocado), and thirteen of our very own avocado trees in our very own backyard.

Occasionally, I used to harvest those avocados and sell them from a fold-up card table down the hill, at the same “intersection” where I caught the school bus. I use quotes around intersection to indicate the lack of traffic that passed through that little dirt quadrangle on any given day. And what nice people stopped to buy them, I wish I knew, since 13 was like the minimum number of trees you needed to live on that hill. Avocados, I’m trying to tell you, were just a part of life.

Often after school, my sister and I would walk down into the canyon that was our backyard, pick ourselves some avocados–ours were shiny and green–most likely Fuertes, Bacons, or Gwens. (The ones you see in the supermarkets these days are pretty much all Hass, with the occasional “Florida avocado” thrown in (whatever that is), but there are other great avocados out there, and all you lovers of the heirloom varieties should make it a point to try some someday.) Plucking those “avos” as my sister and I called them, in our cut-off denim shorts, or the denim shirts our mother embroidered with flowers and rainbows and astrological symbols, when she wasn’t making stained glass windows or macrame plant hangers, is where the farm-to-table fantasy ends and where the suburban 1970′s begin. With avocados in hand, we’d walk up the slate stairs that led us back to the house, perched on a cliff, on stilts. Upstairs in the kitchen (yes, the kitchen was upstairs), we’d cut the avocado in half with a knife whose tip was invariably missing due to my mother’s habit of using the closest thing she can find as a screwdriver. And, once the pit was removed, we’d pour, into the holes left by that pit, Wish-Bone Red Wine Italian or, in homage to our Tijuanese roots, Golden Caesar dressing.

When we were feeling particularly patient, we’d toast a piece of Orowheat Honey Wheatberry Bread, which my mom let us eat despite her pre-fad, bread-aversion, because of the seeds. Wee’d slather the toast with Best Foods mayo, smash an avocado on top, and sprinkle the avo with salt. It’s still, hands-down, one of the best afternoon snacks I know. The only thing I change when I make this snack today is the salt. I use Maldon. And I no longer eat my slices lying on my belly, on the shag carpet in the sunken living room of our glass house, in front of the Brady Bunch. But let it be known: I would if I could. Ahhh, to be ten again…

Three nights in April: one in a comfortable booth at the Dutch, Andrew Carmellini’s terrific pan-American clubhouse in SoHo, where I ate crabmeat dressed in bloody-mary sauce, a rib-eye steak and some apple pie; another at a sticky table at La Joya de Ceren on Rockaway Beach Boulevard in Queens, where a fried pork chop came flanked by pupusas, rice and garlicky beans; and a third at Masa, the sushi temple in the Time Warner Center.

I like Sam Sifton’s writing, pretty much, and he’s treated me kindly and with respect in all of the few interaction I’ve had with him but, I don’t know… Why does food writing so often have to get so… weird?

And then there is the brilliance of these last two graphs:

But the best meal I had on the job? It was in the garden of Frankies 457, on Court Street in Carroll Gardens, on a summer evening with my wife, my children and my brother. We had what everyone always has at Frankies: crostini and some romaine hearts, beets, cold rib-eye salad, cavatelli and sausage and brown butter, meatballs, braciola marinara. The kids hovered while the adults talked family over cold red wine, and a little breeze moved through the trees, and around us other people did the same.

There was bread as we needed it, water, more wine. The food was simple and elegant. The children behaved as they do when they are starving, and in love with what they are eating. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right. It would have been nice if it could have gone on forever.

In a sense, those two paragraphs beg the question: why do we review restaurants? Because a perfect meal isn’t about the perfect anything. It’s about good food, enjoyed with people you enjoy, and unless you’re traveling, ideally, close enough to home that you can comfortably go back— again and again. That’s a message I can get behind. The writing is still a little fancy but we’ll give Sam a break on fancy. He went to Harvard.

“Did you like the dessert?” I asked Howard.

“It was fine,” he said. He’s nicer than I am, at least when it comes to pudding. “But it’s not really my thing.”

“So what’s your thing?” I asked. “Apple pie?” I pride myself on being a little bit psychic or intuitive, or maybe just a good guesser, so I was proud when Howard said, “Yes. That’s exactly right.” And then he said something that is sure to keep me busy for the next several weeks, and that is: “I can’t find a good apple pie in Los Angeles.”

I worked a summer in the Hamptons as the pie baker at what may be the most expensive food store on the planet, Loaves & Fishes. I went in never having made a crust in my life (“We’ll teach you,” they said, with almost palpable desperation four days before the start of the summer season), and by the end of the summer, I got to where I could put out 60 pies a day, with the crusts made in small batches, and two hours to spare. I also worked selling fruit from what is probably the premier apple farmer selling at the Union Square Greenmarket, Locust Grove Fruit Farms. In addition to a whole bunch of wonderful summer fruits, we sold 26 types of antique apples, and were the only farm then that sold quince, a fuzzy, aromatic fruit that some scholars believe was the variety that fell from the tree of knowledge, the original forbidden fruit. I earned seven dollars and hour, paid in cash, plus fruit, paid in fruit, so I took advantage of these unforbidden fruits to try to get me up around nine dollars an hour. In the fall, when berries and stone fruit were no more, I made apple bread, apple spice cake, apple sauce, baked apples, apple crisp, and of course, apple pie. I became, for a few seasons, such a guru of the apple (okay, so maybe I exaggerate) that customers would come on Saturdays to ask me what type to buy for what they were making, and other times they would bring in the fruits of their fruit labors for me to try. So when Howard made that comment about the apple pie, of course I took it as a challenge. “I’m going to make you an apple pie that will make you happy,” I said.

“Many people have walked before you,” Margaret warned me. “I think Nancy even walked before you,” she added, referring to Nancy Silverton whose baked goods do have their fans.

I’ve started my research. I emailed my friend Bob Blumer who won third place in a Vermont apple pie baking contest a couple years back for his TV show, Glutton for Punishment. (He gave me his recipe, which includes bacon fat in the pie crust!) I asked Nancy what she does to elevate this humble American dessert: apple cider vinegar jelly and creme fraîche stirred into the apples. Both of which deviations beg the questions: Are we getting too fancy here? Have we lost our way?

Margaret tells me there are things Howard likes about the Costco apple pie, which I am willing to wager, without ever having seen or tasted one, contains neither apple cider vinegar jelly nor bacon fat. Margaret says I also need to try the slice they serve at Pasquale’s, the famous shoe repair place on San Vicente. A baking challenge that includes bacon fat, takes me to a shoe repair shop that specializes in Christian Louboutins, and that could also involve a road trip to the apple growing orchards of Tehachapi? This is why I do what I do—because as much as I’d like to be able to tell you otherwise, it certainly isn’t for the thousand dollar shoes.

“Anyone can say anything!”

“The only qualification as far as I can see is the ability to type.”

“And besides, who cares what you ate for dinner last night.”

And then, on August 11, as if my only qualification were the ability to type, I went and issued this tweet. Umami Burger’s “burger crack” = MSG. No, thank you. Why do we need chemically good? What’s wrong with just “delicious.”

It was a nice thought from the Department of Grumpy, but the truth is, I had no idea what I was talking about. This is no excuse but by way of explanation, I saw the word “crack” and “Japanese” in the same sentence and  immediately blinded by visions of MSG. I have major issues with MSG–bigger issues than I have with food bloggers even. And I fired off that tweet, as if it were okay to just to go around, you know… saying anything.

I started to feel pretty bad pretty quick when a friend emailed me:

Hi Carolynn [He even spelled my name correctly!]
[I'd always heard] that the “umami” means naturally occurring msg- not fake chemicals- and that’s what’s in [Umami's] food- all natural.
Not true?

The fact that my friend ended the email with a question mark was the part that made me feel really bad. Because it implied that he thought I knew what I was talking about. And generally I do, or at least I do my best to not just blow smoke.

I told him I’d shot the tweet off in haste and would do some research. And six weeks later [eons in blog time], I did. I read up on the subjects of umami and MSG, and learned what I can digest here as: First, this is too complicated for me to understand without more research than I actually want to do on the subject, at least here in a blog (e.g., for no pay). And second, If I was not wrong when I accused burger crack of being MSG, then that is sheer coincidence.

So this is essentially an apology, to anyone out there who might have read what I said and, in any fiber of their being, believed it. And now, onto lighter, brighter things. Wanna know what I had for dinner last night?

Complain as I might, the truth is, I put as much care into writing these books as I would if they were my very own, and the other truth is that I’ve fallen in love with almost every person I’ve written a cookbook for, in part because I’ve been lucky to work with the people I have, and in part because my job is to draw the best out of them, and when it comes right down to it, people, when you’re paying attention, are pretty great. The other thing that makes the labor all worth while is seeing the book in its final, hardcover, copy-edited, graphically-designed, photograph-enhanced, glossy-paged, for sale version. I’ve been through this before, but I’ve never been as excited as when I saw The Mozza Cookbook, which I did for the first time, oddly enough, at the media party that our publisher, Knopf, hosted for the book last Wednesday. (A party hilariously chronicled in this Food Republic story by the intrepid former NY Times Style section reporter, Allen Salkin, whose eye for story never ceases to amaze me.)

The book isn't really this big, but it is big. Not that size matters. (Photo: Tom Caltabiano.)

While I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by such superficial things, what struck me as I held the 350-page testament to two years of my life in my lamb-chop-greasy fingers, was how fat it is. And how heavy. It feels like an important book. Even the paper feels good. Of course how a book feels isn’t really what matters, but since I am intimately acquainted with every last word, and since I tested every last recipe (with help, of course), I feel like I’m allowed to be superficial and say: the book is pretty.

As pretty as it is, my secret favorite thing about it, which is the case with all the books I’ve written for Knopf, is that the book lies flat when you open it.

See?

This has to do with how the book is bound, a process, more expensive I’m sure, that means, for the home cook, that you don’t have to stick a bottle of wine on the book to keep it from bouncing to some random page while you’re checking the olive oil cakes for doneness. This is good news for those who plan to do something other than feel the paper, because this is a book that’s meant to be cooked from. I can tell you that for sure.

A review like the one in today’s LA Weekly Blog almost makes all that labor worth it, but only because it is by now but a vague and delicious memory.

During the time I got the pleasure of knowing Sara, by writing two of her cookbooks, she introduced me to a lot of things, including pimento cheese (“pimenna cheese”), Ole Miss and Oxford, Mississippi, tailgating the way only southerners can, Lake Placid, and a kind of generosity that–other than the Chino family, who are famous for theirs–I have never known before or since. All you can do with people like that is try to give back, but for better or worse, you’re pretty much assigned to a life of generosity debt with them. Still, I try.

“Anything,” I said.

“Can you look at what Sam Sifton wrote about the book and tell me if it’s good or bad.”

Sara was talking about her new book, Sara Foster’s Southern Kitchen, which came out this summer and which I didn’t write. Sam is, or was until something like yesterday, the New York Times restaurant critic, had done a round-up of summer cookbooks for the Times Book Review that week, which I had yet to read. “I can tell you right now that he liked it,” I told her. “Because it’s a round-up of book’s  he’s recommending, not a review.” Nevertheless, I read the write-up and I could see how she could be confused. He seems to like it when he writes that it’s, “Lavishly illustrated and… very likely destined for kitchen shelves in coastal weekend homes and rentals from Montauk to Hilton Head.” But then he goes on to say that the recipes are, “neither surprising nor problematic,” and, “not going to change your life.” So now, thanks to Sam, we know what the cookbook is not, and if Sam were not in the position he is, he would have an editor who insisted on a rewrite stating what the cookbook was. Before getting back to Sara, I emailed a friend who has one of the savviest minds I know in the book biz, and asked her what she thought of Sam’s write-up. She’s also a woman of few words. “Inscrutable.” was the one that came back.

Yesterday, just to add to my debt, Sara sent me a case of Fresh Everyday, which was recently reprinted–with a much livelier cover. Inside the same box was a bottle of Foster’s Market Seven Pepper Jelly, which I always have to have around in case of entertaining emergencies, and then there was a copy of her Sara Foster’s Southern Kitchen.

Even though he gave it a weird review, I can see why Sam chose the book in his round-up: It’s one of the rare cookbooks—among them I would include Judy Rogers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook, Classic Home Desserts, by the late Richard Sax, and Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen, by Lidia Bastianich—that feels like a life’s work. The life’s work of a cook who is in his or her own way significant in the landscape of American cookery. Plus the food in this book looks and sounds delicious, and I know that Sara’s recipes are tested within an inch of their lives. Whether or not you have a house in Montauk, Hilton, or Lake Havasu, this is definitely a cookbook you want to have on your short shelf. I only wish I could say that I wrote it.

My acting teacher, Ron Stetson, is a man who likes to call it like it is, and since I was 25 and still basically just pretending at life, this pretty much always worked to my disadvantage. “You remind me of the princess in the tower,” he said in one of our first classes. “Waiting to be saved.” I wanted to take this as a compliment because until then I was more likely to have been described as having “linebacker shoulders,” than as a princess. But then he added, wadding up a piece of paper and throwing it at me at the same time. “It makes me sick!” Another time Ron told me: “You think you can get by on a good rap and great hair.” He was right, or course. Me Today would have hated Me Then, and I probably wouldn’t have given myself the time of day, but unlike me, Ron cared enough, and had enough faith in the human ability to improve upon itself, to take the time. “That may work where you come from,” he said. “But here—in this city—what you’ll discover is that the people you want to respect you are going to think you’re a twit.”

When the first year ended, I was bewildered and amazed when I got a letter from Ron stating that I was not invited back for the second year of the program. I had gotten into NYU’s master’s program in American Studies and the honors program in the Intellectual History department at U.C. Berkeley and I couldn’t get invited to the second year of an acting class only remotely affiliated with an actual school, which took place in a falling-down loft building in Hell’s Kitchen, when Hell’s Kitchen really lived up to its name??? I called Ron and asked if we could discuss it. He told me, essentially, that he just knew he’d done the right thing, and that someday I would understand.

Eight years later when my nephew came to live with me in New York in order to pursue his dream of being an actor–unlike me, he actually liked acting–I saw Ron again. I didn’t know if he would remember me. “Remember you?” he said. “I’ve thought about you so many times over these years!”

“Why?” I mean, I remembered him, as over the years his words had been almost like guiding lights while I went about saving myself from that tower, and developing something other than a great rap, a version of myself that people could accuse of a lot of things, but not of being a “twit.” But I had to be one of hundreds of students to wander into those four black walls and be put under Ron’s glaring gaze. “When you walked into my class,” he told me. “I thought: She’s Katherine Hepburn with sex appeal. I’m going to make her a star.” I began to feel a slight flush from flattery just then, but this was Ron, and I should have known better. He went on. “But it was quickly apparent to me,” he said. “That you had absolutely no talent. I mean none. I learned a great lesson from you,” he said. “I can teach acting. But I can’t teach talent.“

Ron was also the first one who knew that I was a writer. “If you only had for acting what you have for books,” he said to me once during class as we talked about Love in the Time of Cholera and Hemingway and whatever else we were reading.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“See!? Never mind! You’re just so fucking literal!” Then he threw a pencil at me.

I thought about Ron today, as it is clearly a day for remembering. Plus, every year, he sends out a letter that he wrote on the first anniversary of 9/11, remembering his experience of that day. I’m posting it here. Thanks, Ron, for this letter, and for setting me on the right path, such as it has been.

September 11, 2002

There is a beautiful sky today in NYC. Very much like a year ago.  But it’s windy.  Eerily windy.  It’s just an eerie day in general.

So many things came flooding back from my experience a year ago.  I was there you know, as I think I mentioned to some of you before.  Although I am almost never in that neighborhood it just so happened that I was on jury duty and was headed to the courthouse to continue deliberations on a drug case the judge had handed us the day before.  I just walked out of the #1Train stop at West Broadway and Franklin and was crossing West Broadway toward Centre Street when the first plane hit. I thought the pilot must have had had a stroke or something.

A crowd gathered on my corner and watched the flames. We just shook our heads and said very little.  I remember thinking two things; first I thought: ‘well the plane hit pretty high in the building and it’s early, maybe there aren’t too many people up there yet,’ and ‘I better get going so I won’t be late for court.’

I pulled myself out of the daze I was in and started walking toward Centre Street again, slowly, always looking back at the fire when the buildings allowed it. When I got to Church Street I saw a huge fireball come out the side of the second tower.  My angle of vision didn’t allow me to see the plane, only the explosion.  I thought it must have been an explosion from the first building that was so powerful the second building was hit by it.

By this time sirens were blaring everywhere and fire trucks were flying past me headed south.  As the city’s savior arsenal raced by, I thought: ‘well these guys have this under control you better get to court.’

I kept dumbly moving toward 100 Centre Street.  By the time I arrived at the courthouse they were evacuating the building.  I still didn’t know there had been two planes.  The courthouse evacuation irritated me. I wanted to finish the case and get my jury duty over so I could go on with my life.  I thought the evacuation was an overreaction.

New York is a funny place in terms of its physical and emotional geography.  Unlike any other place I know. Hundreds of people can be standing right near each other and yet not have had the same experience only moments before.  Like walking out of a movie theatre in midtown.  A few hundred people may be in the theatre watching the same movie, essentially sharing the same emotional experience.  Then the movie ends and you exit the theatre  and before you have taken more than ten steps, you are surrounded by a sea of people that are so far removed from what you have just experienced they might as well have been on the other side of the country.  In that sense, on the courthouse steps, the WTC felt very far away.  “Those guys are doing that and we should be doing this,” is what I felt.   I still hadn’t grasped the enormity of it, not by a long shot.  But there was no trial today so there was nothing for it but to head home and wait till tomorrow.

I started back to the subway station. When I arrived at Church Street the first building fell.  It looked as though some unhappy, invisible artist had simply reached out of the sky an erased it.

I knew now that this was a big deal and I had better get the hell out of there.

I was still quite detached from the whole thing; my emotional reaction wouldn’t come for days yet.

I went down in the subway to wait for the #1 Train; fastest way I could think of to get out of there.  I waited for quite a while.  There were lots of people on the platform.  The train obviously never came. Slowly, and I do mean slowly, people began to trickle out of the station.  Finally, when there were only about four or five of us left on the platform, an announcement came.  The familiarity of it, the ordinariness, was astounding in retrospect.  It was a subway PA announcement that all New Yorkers have heard countless times. The location changes but the announcement is always the same:  “DUE TO A POLICE ACTION AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER THERE IS NO UPTOWN SERVICE AT THIS TIME.”

I left the station and emerged onto the intersection of Franklin and West Broadway and watched the second building fall to the ground. I stood and looked at the hole in the sky.

I stood there for a while, detached and numb, wondering how many miles it was to my apartment on the Upper West Side and how long it would take to walk it.  When I started thinking of home, my daughter came to mind.  She was at school in the 90′s between Broadway and Amsterdam. She was safe.  I began to wonder if any of her classmates had parents that worked in the WTC.

By this time people covered in debris had reached my spot. We all started walking north together.  Those of us who had just taken a shower and were as clean as the early fall sky and those who had just emerged from a cloud of destruction a few blocks south and were covered, head to toe, in gray dust.  Side by side we processed.  Like Zombies. No one spoke. No one.

Days later a message came on the Internet, one of those mass e-mails suggesting that everyone go out on the street and light a candle at some specific time.  My wife and daughter wanted to do it.  I didn’t. I thought it was silly and that we would probably be the only idiots on the street carrying candles.  After all, I live on the Upper West Side, the most liberal voting district in all of America, not exactly a bastion of patriotism, more a cauldron of dissent.  But my wife and daughter won out and we went outside to light our candles.

The entire neighborhood was there.  Hundreds of people with hundreds of candles. Little by little, pulled by some invisible force, we all started moving to the local firehouse on 83rd Street.  A one engine firehouse.

The street was closed off and the engine sat proudly in the middle, its lights flashing, no siren.  It was covered with flowers and firmly wrapped in the flag. It was beautiful.

The surviving firemen from our humble neighborhood firehouse were standing in the garage greeting the public, accepting flowers and cards and kisses from the old ladies.  A photo of the fireman we lost and the wife and three children he left behind was taped to the wall in a makeshift memorial; a scene repeated at firehouses throughout the city. I wasn’t detached any more.  We stood there, my wife and daughter and I, along with hundreds of other familiar strangers form our neighborhood, and cried. And cried.

Ron Stetson

11 September 2002

Ron Stetson