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The New York Restaurant Cookbook: Recipes from the City’s Best Chefs
Florence Fabricant
By
Published: Apr 23, 2009
Category:
Food and Wine
In a previous lifetime, we went out to dinner. Often. Then our kid arrived. Now we go out less — much less. And read cookbooks more — much more.
Especially welcome are books with recipes from New York restaurants that are now, for us, as remote as Lapland. We remember them — and some of these dishes — fondly. And it’s not in any way sad that the closest we may get to them is to recreate them at home.
The New York Restaurant Cookbook: Recipes from the City’s Best Chefs is a revised edition of a local favorite. This edition features more than 100 recipes from the city’s best restaurants — with no chef, even the most prolific, getting more than a single recipe here. Florence Fabricant is an ideal tour guide. A regular contributor to The New York Times, she’s the author of eight other books, including Park Avenue Potluck: Recipes from New York’s Savviest Hostesses; if you own it, you know she can go high and special as well as mid-range and effortless. Here, in an introduction that will take New Yorkers and aging visitors down Memory Lane, she also offers — so gently that you don’t feel you’re being schooled — some useful advice: shock blanched vegetables in ice water, add a dollop of butter to sauces, add the pasta to the sauce instead of pouring the sauce over the pasta. And, at the end, she presents a handy list of food sources and restaurants.
Most to the point, she’s collected recipes that taste like home cooking even when you have them in a restaurant: the Second Avenue Deli’s chicken soup, Tavern on the Green’s Caesar salad, onion soup from Capsouto Frères. And then she works up the complexity chain to recipes you may not dream of ordering, much less cooking: Felidia’s ricotta and spinach dumplings, Bernadin’s codfish with garlic sauce and chorizo essence, Blue Hill’s poached duck with farro.
Tasting is always the best convincer. So here are some recipes.
Rigatoni Alla Buttera (from Centolire)
serves 6 to 8
1/2 pound each, sweet and hot Italian sausages
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/2 cup, fresh or frozen green peas
1 cup canned tomato puree
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese, grated
1 pound dry rigatoni
Coarse salt, black pepper from a mill
Peel the casings off the sausages and crumble the meat. Cook over medium-low heat in a heavy pan. (Don’t use any oil; the natural fat in the sausages renders enough grease to keep them from sticking). The sausages will crumble even more once the fat is released. When the meat is cooked through, drain the excess fat from the pan, season with black pepper, and set aside.
Wipe the pan clean. Over medium heat, melt a generous spoonful of butter, and add the cooked sausage, the peas, and the tomato puree. Mix well. Cook until the sauce thickens and the peas are tender, about 3 to 4 minutes. Stir in the cream and cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Stir in one tablespoon of the Parmesan cheese to thicken the sauce; it should be uniformly thick but moist. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Meanwhile, cook the pasta in boiling salted water until al dente, about 10 minutes. Drain, reserving half a cup of the pasta water. Place the pan with the sauce on low heat, add pasta and toss gently. Sprinkle on the rest of the Parmesan cheese. Stir the pasta, adding a little of the pasta water if necessary. Serve on heated plates.
Sauté of Zucchini with Toasted Almonds and Pecorino (from Red Cat)
serves 4
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup sliced almonds
1 and 1/2 pounds zucchini, trimmed and cut into matchsticks Salt and freshly ground pepper
3 ounces Pecorino Romano, thinly sliced
salt and freshly ground pepper
Heat the oil in a large skillet. When it is hot but not smoking, add the almonds to the pan. Cook them, while stirring, until the almonds are golden-brown, approximately a minute or two. Use a slotted spoon to scooop them out, leaving the oil in the pan.
Add the zucchini to the pan and stir-fry for about 30 seconds. The idea is not to cook the zucchini so much as warm it.
Remove the pan from the heat. Season with salt and pepper. return the pan to the stove to rewarm on medium heat, transfer the zucchini to a warm serving plate, top it with the cheese and almonds and serve immediately.
To buy “The New York Restaurant Cookbook: Recipes from the City’s Best Chefs” from Amazon.com, click here.
