Blue Cayenne

Stone fruits!

I’m pretty sure I could eat my weight in plums. Don’t even get me started on nectarines. And apricots! What velvety beauties they are! The Greeks called apricots “the golden eggs of the sun.” How pretty is that?

They’re all in season right now (from May to September), so you can easily find them in your market.

Apricots occupy a particularly sweet space in my heart. My birthday cake was always a “Paradise Cake”—a white box cake with an apricot and coconut frosting. 

Here is a great Apricot Crumble Tart recipe–a paean to the sweet-tart wonderfulness (is that a word?) of apricots. You’ll love the contrasting textures and flavors in every bite of this tart. I guarantee that you will keep coming back again and again (and again) for just one more taste. (You’ve got the irrefutable evidence of that last statement right in front of you. Look at the cake in the background above. Keep in mind that I live alone.)

This recipe is adapted from David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen cookbook. The book is available through your local bookstore. Lebovitz, an alum of the iconic Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, and now a resident of Paris, also has a newsletter online. You can find the newsletter here.

She was so gifted a writer that W.H. Auden said of her: “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”

She was so elegantly beautiful that the Dadaist artist Man Ray begged to photograph her, fascinated as he was by her striking bone structure.

She almost single-handedly invented the modern narrative genre of food writing and collected legions of admirers (and some fierce critics) along the way.

She was Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher– MFK Fisher to her readers.

Fisher was a cook, an “influencer” before that term was even imagined, a supremely-talented writer and an unrepentant free spirit. She wrote twenty-seven books, hundreds of stories for The New Yorker Magazine and countless articles in magazines like Vogue, Gourmet and The Atlantic. Among her most important works were her depression-era how-to-cope tome How to Cook A Wolf,  a translation of Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (She was deeply influenced by years spent in France and by French cooking.), and The Art of Eating, a book Alice Waters says should be required reading for all cooks. Improbably, she also worked for Paramount Studios for a time writing gags for Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

What made Fisher’s food writing so novel? She saw (and wrote about) food as a cultural metaphor.

In her personal essays, her writing ranged from the personal to the historical to just about every subject touching human existence. A “food piece” by Fisher was never just a food piece. She explained her wide grasp for subject matter in The Art of Eating: “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.”

Fisher called minestrone, for example: “Probably the most satisfying soup in the world for people who are hungry, as well as for those who are tired or worried or cross or in debt or in a moderate amount of pain or in love or in robust health or in any kind of business huggermuggery, is minestrone.”

So…that’s you and me and everyone else. Right?

We need minestrone. Today. Now. Whenever.

So… here is a recipe for an early summer minestrone–a very good one–  adapted from The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop. No huggermuggery here.

This recipe is adapted from The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop. The book is old–1997–but it is still available at a price. You can find it at used bookstores and on Amazon here.

Every month Blue Cayenne features one post from our archive of more than 350 recipes. Here is a Cranberry Beans With Polenta recipe.

You don’t want to miss this great recipe…again.

Want to dive deeper into our recipe archive?  Just click one of the categories at the top of this page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of this page.

Here is the link to the recipe: Cranberry Beans With Polenta.