Jean Strouse's Brussels Sprouts

Many people have their own recipes for converting Brussels sprouts haters into Brussels sprouts lovers. The key to success, it seems, is adding fat.

Firmly in the lover camp myself, I had two such recipes in my arsenal, and as of today, three.

In addition to my mother's roasted sprouts (a heavy pour of olive oil), and Molly Stevens’ cream-braised sprouts (cream!), I now look forward to adding Jean Strouse’s buttery and bacony Brussels sprouts to my recipe roster.

Jean Strouse is the director of the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, which offers a nine-month fellowship to fourteen scholars and writers who require use of the Library's collections for their work. Jean also makes some mean Brussels sprouts.

I asked Jean a few questions about this recipe and some other favorites:

CB: Where and when did you first encounter this recipe?

JS: I found the recipe in The New York Times when it was first published, in 1990. [The article was in the New York Times Magazine on December 16, 1990 and is called Coming Home by Aimee Lee Ball. - CB]  I made it that first year, and forever after. The original calls for nutmeg, which I omit - not right for this mix. And you can either double the bacon or add butter.  The sprouts really absorb the fat (I wish there were a better word), and without more they stick to the pan, burn, and don't get soft enough.

CB: Who are some of your favorite cookbook authors? And which cookbooks do you most enjoy cooking from?

JS: My all-time most favorite cookbook author is Marcella Hazan - the original volumes I and II of Classic Italian Cooking. I have used them for years - one had a yellow book jacket, the other green, so I have kind of a sense memory of which recipe appears in which book. Also Julia Child, of course - I  learned to cook from her, and from my favorite aunt. I also often work from Maida Heatter's fabulous dessert books, starting with Maida Heatter's Book of Great Desserts. She actually has THE best recipe ever for chocolate chip cookies, and an amazing flourless chocolate cake with ground almonds and orange peel. And "East 62nd St. Lemon Cake" -- light, lemony, perfect. You paint a mix of fresh lemon juice and sugar on the hot cake just after it comes out of the oven, with a pastry brush; the solution soaks into the cake and forms a gentle crust.

CB: Any special bacon you use, or is it simply supermarket bacon?

JS: I ordered the bacon from a smokehouse in Wisconsin called Nueske's. They make applewood smoked hams, turkeys, sausages, bacon, and lots of other meats, all superb. This time I got two pounds, one for the NYPL recipe, and another for tomorrow's Thanksgiving dinner.

CB: What else is on your Thanksgiving menu?

JS: Another recipe from that same page in the Times for a winter vegetable puree - squashes, parsnips, turnips, rutabaga (a wonderful word), celery root - and (forget coronary arteries) heavy cream.

Also a pumpkin pie: I got the recipe from a friend in the mid-1970s, wrote it out on an index card, and still have the card. Another friend asked for it last night and I thought I'd lost it - but no, it turned up. I've got to store it on my computer.  It calls for a mix of brown and white sugar, milk and cream. Somehow those ingredients enhance and don't overwhelm the pumpkin flavor. I hate pumpkin pies that are too sweet or loaded up with cloves (I leave the cloves out of this one).


The Library was recently invited into Jean's kitchen to watch her make the sprouts with the help of Melanie Rehak, a former Cullman Center fellow (for her work on Girl Sleuth), and author of the engaging new book Eating For Beginners, which makes special mention of Jean's recipe. Check out the video above, and be sure to read more about Jean's sprouts adaptation - and get the recipe - on NYPL's Tumblr page.

Happy Thanksgiving!

New City Reader, Food Edition

I recently took advantage of Target Free Thursdays at the New Museum to view their exhibition The Last Newspaper, which uses the newspaper "as a platform to address issues of hierarchy, attribution, contextualization, and editorial bias." As someone who relies on newspaper archives almost every day, I was fascinated by the way the curators played with the print news to create new narratives based on the artists' idea of the journalistic emphasis.

The exhibition spans three floors of the New Museum; one floor is almost completely devoted to the people creating stories, including the talented editors behind New City Reader.

New City Reader is an ephemeral piece of ephemera: a pop-up newspaper exploring a different theme each week until the Last Newspaper exhibition closes on January 9th.

I was honored and thrilled to be asked to contribute a piece in New City Reader's food issue, which is still freely available at the Museum (and soon-to-be-online). 

Nicola Twilley, of the always fascinating and inspiring blog Edible Geography and one of the food issues' editors, asked me to write about commemorative cocktails.

Commemorative cocktails, as I wrote in the piece (and which you can read in full on Nicola's blog), are born out of an incredible assortment of historical events, from monumental achievements and epic heroes to fleeting trends and otherwise insignificant peculiarities, such as the Strikes Off cocktail (to mark the end of the 1929 General Strike in Great Britain) and the Moonshot (a industry-created cocktail to mark the Apollo 11 flight).

Other features in the food issue include an interview with Alan Stillman, he of T.G.I. Friday's fame; an app idea for a Coffeehouse Commons; a fantastic mapping project to chart the food prep kitchens in the city; and one of my favorite pieces called Is This a Bodega?, Jeff Sisson's crowd-sourcing project wherein users are asked to identify bodegas around New York in order to document every bodega in the city.

The Last Newspaper is on view until January, 2011 and back issues of the New City Reader can be viewed online or by going to the Museum. 

Len Deighton: The Spy Who Came In From the Kitchen

Those familiar with the writer Len Deighton most likely know him as a spy novelist. His debut in 1962, The IPCRESS File, was a big hit and many other spy works followed as evidenced by his lengthy bibliography: Spy Story (1975), Yesterday's Spy (1976), Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy (1977), Spy Hook (1988), Spy Line (1989), Spy Sinker (1990) and more.

But while a large part of Len Deighton's success came from his novels, he was also a highly regarded food writer with a column in the London Observer and two cookbooks under his belt: The Action Cookbook and  Où est le garlic, both published in 1965 between the releases of Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Billion-Dollar Brain (1966).