Bobby Short's Chicken Carlyle

 (Courtesy of NYPL)

Forget cleanses. Forget atoning for gastronomical sins.

That's what I try to remind myself every January when it seems as though everyone and their sister (and by sister, I'm looking at you Bon Appetit) is forgoing something -- alcohol, meat, whipped cream -- for the betterment of their health and well-being.

Not that it's not a noble cause. And I wholeheartedly support my loved ones who choose to detox even if I, myself, choose not to participate. I prefer to drink water to cleanse my body -- in between glasses of wine and forkfuls of pasta alla Bolognese. It's January, for Pete's sake! The coldest, most miserable month of the year and a ginger broth is not going to make me feel better, even if it certainly will make me feel better.

As a gift to myself for standing firm, while progressively getting soft, I made a lovely dish that is bound to make me softer still: Bobby Short's Carlyle Chicken Hash. The recipe, named for the Mr. Short, the great singer and piano player who graced the Carlyle Hotel lounge for over three decades, includes cleanse-verboten ingredients such as cream, white bread, and foie gras.  The recipe was featured in an article by Sam Sifton in the New York Times in 2009 and was introduced to me by my friend Diana, whose love for this dish knows no season.

The recipe is super simple. Chicken stock, cream, and truffle oil is added to reduced sherry. That combination gets reduced again, and is mixed with cooked chicken and foie gras. If foie gras isn't handy (plebeian!), and in my case it certainly isn't (librarian!),  just leave it out. I also used, and immensely enjoyed, sauteed mushrooms. The best part comes at the end: toasted white bread points. And no, Ezekiel 4:9 doesn't cut it.

I'd be lying if I told you it wasn't rich. And decadent. And not terribly pleasing to the eye (which is why I didn't photograph it). But this is your chance to practice moderation for the new year. And if that doesn't work, you have twelve months to diet it off.

Bobby Short's Chicken Carlyle Hash
(courtesy of the New York Times and adapted from James Sakatos of the Carlyle)

One three to four pound kosher chicken
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup medium-dry sherry
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon truffle oil (optional, but don't be a hater -- the truffle oil is really good here)
4 ounces foie gras (optional)
Toasted white bread

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and roast until its juices run clear, 60 to 70 minutes. Let cool. Remove the skin and meat from the bones. Cut the breast meat into cubes. Shred the thigh and leg meat.

In a large saucepan, reduce the sherry by half over high heat. Add the cream, chicken broth and truffle oil, if using, and boil over high heat, stirring constantly, to reduce by half again, about 10 minutes.

Add the chicken meat and blobs of the foie gras, if using, to the reduction and bring to a light simmer. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve hot with toast points.

Schmatz! Lunches at Steidl

I have a complicated relationship with lunch.

As much as I'd like to say that I take my full lunch hour to savor every delectable bite of my homemade meal, and that I use real silverwear, a cloth napkin, and glass stemware, and then take a refreshing walk around the block -- just to clear my head and feel the fresh air on my skin -- I can't.  In fact, that would be a bold-faced lie.

The truth is that the utensils are plastic, the Diet Coke is taken straight from the can, and the plate is either a plastic bento box (Cafe Zaiya), a swath of tin foil (Olympic Pita), or a folded box with "window" (Pret a Manger). The hour is more like 12 minutes and my walk around the block is, well, sitting at my desk reading Lifehacker.com.

I don't feel very proud of how I spend my lunch hour every day, but I felt a lot worse after reading Schmatz! Lunches at Steidl.

The Thanksgiving Project

Norman Rockwell

This Thursday, many Americans of different religions, ethnicities, and backgrounds will be chowing down on Thanksgiving fare. For some, the Norman Rockwell scene above offers a mirror onto one's own dining table, with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pie taking center stage. But for other Americans, Thanksgiving dinner means tofu instead of turkey. Or rice instead of potatoes. Or Bird's Custard instead of pumpkin pie. And then there are those who forgo the holiday completely, either by choice or necessity.

That's where you come in. The New York Public Library wants to capture your Thanksgiving menu. We want to know what you eat, what you don't eat, and why. 

Lunch Break

Berenice Abbott, 1938, courtesy of NYPL

It's the first meal regularly taken outside the home, it's associated with school children, workers, women, power players, and with charities. It's an hour in the middle of a quick-moving, industrial, modern city. What happens in New York at noon?

In eight months, June, 2012, the New York Public Library will open an exhibition on lunch in New York, curated by culinary historian Laura Shapiro and me.

Co-curating an exhibition has been a tremendous honor, challenge, and undertaking and it's been a large reason why this blog has been left unattended for many months. But as you can see with the new redesign (TA DA!), I'm inching my way back, anxious to share menus, recipes, interesting books, and of course, lunch stories.

Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, Grove Art Online

And I also hope to share, in the coming months, the general process of putting together the lunch exhibition ("What to Expect When You're Exhibiting"). What our thought process has been, what materials we're finding (and not), and the books, articles, and movies that have inspired us.

One thing I can divulge right away. Working with someone as sharp, funny, witty, and grounded as Laura Shapiro has been the highlight of the experience. If you're not familiar with her work, become so immediately! She has taught me, by example, how to work, how to write, and most importantly, how to read. I thank the gods above that she said yes when asked to take on this project with me.

But first, a pressing question: Why lunch? I'm glad you asked.

The Red Lobster and the Red Flag

I've always loved this menu for the Lobster Oyster and Chop House. It reminds me of the lobster image on this Soviet children's book featured on a wonderful McGill University library project. The menu, with its reds and pinks and quirky illustration, is a bit more playful than the children's book, with its ominous looking crustaceans and block lettering. But capturing the lobster from above, claws open, climbing up the page, grabs my attention on both.

The inside of the Lobster Oyster and Chop House is equally fantastic:

What's on the Menu?

This past Monday evening, the New York Public Library launched What's on the Menu?, a web site which invites the public to transcribe our digitized historical menus. 

It all started about a year ago, when my beloved former colleague Amy Azzarito*,  NYPL Labs manager Ben Vershbow, and I were thinking of new and interesting projects for the culinary collection. Having worked with the menu collection for a few years, I had begun noticing an increasing number of researchers coming in to research specific dishes. Although nearly 10,000 menus in the collection had been digitized, we didn't have an efficient way to search their content. At first we considered, optical character recognition (OCR) software to transcribe the menus, but quickly realized that the menus weren't optimal OCR candidates, due to being hand-written, being mimeographed, using funky fonts, etc.

Then Amy had the brilliant idea to open the digitized menus to the crowd, and invite our hungry public to help us transcribe them.  A year of talking, meeting, and pow-wowing -- with fellow NYPL'ers  Michael Lascarides, Kris Kelly, and Michael Inman -- followed, but it happened! WOTM launched last week.

We're five days in, still fixing and tweaking and planning out our next steps, but so far, so tasty!

Big thanks to everyone at the Library who has helped make this happen, and to the site visitors helping us create a robust catalog of dishes.

I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!


*Amy is now full-time at Design*Sponge

Tabla's Unleavened Bread Bar

Danny Meyer's beloved Tabla closed a few months ago after twelve years in business. And although I wish the Library had more Tabla menus than the small handful from 2007, I am pleased that one of them includes Chef Floyd Cardoz's Unleavened Bread Bar menu, created for Passover week. 

I'm not sure when restaurants began to offer meals catering to the Passover crowd; most kosher restaurants close for the duration of the holiday because a thorough cleaning of any leavened bread product (biur chametz) is a serious chore, and add to that the requirement to use different pots, pans, plates, etc. and you've got a lot of work on your hands, especially for a restaurant.

Non-kosher restaurants don't have those restrictions, so they can offer seders and Passover meals to anyone interested.  In New York this year, there are quite a few seders taking place: Savoy in SoHo, Capsouto Freres in Tribeca, JoeDoe in the East Village, Sammy's Roumanian on the Lower East Side, and Julian Medina's Toloache, Yerba Buena, and Yerba Buena Perry.  And Joan Nathan writes about others joining the trend in the Times this week.

I'll be contacting the above restaurants to add their menus to our Passover collection, and if anyone is attending a seder, or simply dining, at a Passover-friendly restaurant this week, please let me know.