Saveur Cooks Authentic American - Editors Of Cook's Illustrated Magazine [1]
These are the dishes that we’ve always celebrated in the pages of saveur magazine: soulful, honest, traditional fare that transcends trend and defines the way people eat all over the globe. Every cuisine has its canon of comfort, the foods that folks crave above all others and the ones they eat day in and day out. Those are the recipes you’ll find in this book: for good, old American stick-to-your-ribs fare, like Texas chili, Rhode Island stuffed clams, chicken pot pie, and patty melts; and for international dishes like guacamole and French onion soup, whose comfort the world has claimed as its own. There are the great pastas of Italy, like fettuccine Alfredo—that irresistible tangle of pasta, butter, and cheese—and homemade tagliatelle egg noodles with slow-simmered, meaty ragù bolognese. There are the lusty one-pot meals, like boeuf à la bourguignonne, and oven-baked triumphs like potatoes gratin—dishes that French cooks affectionately call cuisine grand-mère, or grandma’s cuisine. All told, this compendium represents some of the best traditional home cooking on the planet.
There’s also something new about this collection of comfort foods. It reflects just how much the category has grown. If you’re like me—I came of age in postwar California, raised by parents who loved to cook—you might have grown up on a far-reaching diet of foods like tamales, bagels and lox, Chinese spareribs, and, yes, meat loaf. But today, our comfort-food vocabulary is even broader. We have access to it all: fresh lemongrass, Israeli couscous, handmade corn tortillas, dried baccalà. We travel more. America’s population continues to become more diverse. And we’ve learned volumes about the way the world eats.
Hair and makeup artists, working at a fashion show at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, break for a lunch of burgers.
Shoppers at the Mercato Orientale, a busy market in the heart of Genoa, Italy.
Diners enjoy peel-andeat boiled shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico.
At SAVEUR, we’ve always been interested in where these foods come from, and we’ve trekked to the places where they’re produced. We’ve marveled at the producers’ ingenuity: the gristmills that grind wheat into flour, the aging rooms where cheeses develop their flavors. We’ve come to understand the historical and cultural contexts that shape a cuisine’s character: the trade routes, the agricultural traditions, the ways people obtain their food. We’ve learned to use cooking tools like seasoned woks for making Chinese stir-fries and clay tagines for Moroccan stews, and we’ve embraced techniques for everything from extracting the flavor from lemongrass to evenly slicing carrots.
Most of all, we’ve come to know and admire the people who acquainted us with these dishes. Some of them are chefs, to be sure, but most are people making a living serving great food—like José and Gloria Fonseca of Los Angeles’s La Abeja café, whose huevos rancheros introduced me to the pleasures of Mexican breakfast; and the Mississippi Delta line cook Brandon Hughes, who deep-fries catfish like nobody’s business. They’re home cooks preparing meals for family and friends: people like saveur contributor Alia Yunis, who gave us her Palestinian-Lebanese mother’s exemplary recipe for hummus; Aggeliki Bakali, from the Greek village of Pertouli, who taught us how to make hortopita, a savory pie of wild greens wrapped in homemade phyllo dough; and even my dad, Larry, whose method for marinating and grilling flank steak yields a charred, salty crust and a perfectly pink center.
This book is a tribute to those great cooks and to all the valuable lessons we’ve learned from them over the years. In the sidebars and notes that run alongside the recipes, our editors and contributors share their stories, as well as kitchen wisdom