Elaine’s fettuccine alfredo.

If it was good enough for Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, this fettuccine alfredo recipe is worth a try. (Kennedy-Onassis said it was “terrific, ” by the way.)

As recipes go, this is a simple one. Like so many  gourmet dishes, the magic is in the ingredients. A fine quality cheese is essential. The cup and a half of heavy cream doesn’t hurt, either.

So, who was this Elaine after whom the dish was named?

Elaine was the infamous New York restauranteur Elaine Kaufman, proprietress of the eponymous upper east side Manhattan restaurant that attracted the who’s who of the New York celebrity and intellectual scene from 1963 until its closing in 2011 after her death. Her restaurant was so quintessentially New York that Woody Allen filmed a scene from Manhattan in the restaurant. Billy Joel mentioned the restaurant in the lyrics of Big Shot.

Kaufman was designated a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2003.

Her eccentricities were legendary. 

After graduating from high school, she dyed her hair green (this was in the 40s!) and refused to seek permanent employment in the limited range of mostly office jobs open to women. (I don’t know for sure, but I suspect dyeing one’s hair green would pretty much foreclose most job interviews in the 1940s.) Eventually, she opened a restaurant in a then-unfashionable section of Manhattan.

Kaufman’s Elaine’s, a saloon and a salon, was less known for the food than it was for the scene–a fact that irritated Kaufman to no end.

Elaine’s was far from a luxe destination. Comedian Alan King described the restaurant as being decorated “like a stolen car.”

Kaufman said of her venture, “I live the party life. Elsa Maxwell used to have to send out invitations. I just open the door.” And flock they did. From Sinatra to Allen. From Mailer to Styron. From Baryshnikov to Ephron. Even Trump. They came. (I bet Elaine didn’t take any ‘tude from Trump! Just sayin…)

Like Seinfeld’s “soup nazi,” you didn’t cross the mercurial Kaufman. She regularly railed at the mediocre reviews her restaurant received for its food. She once punched a belligerent customer in the face. Regularly, she yelled at customers who took her restaurant for granted and didn’t order enough food. She was fiercely protective of her customers, once hurling a garbage can lid at paparazzi photographer Ron Galella.

She had a sense of humor, too. Once when she was asked for directions to Elaine’s restroom, Kaufman, without missing a beat,  told the customer “Take a right at Michael Caine.”

Here is a link to the obituary that the NY Times ran when Kaufman died. It is worth your time to read if only for the Normal Mailer anecdote.

Elaine’s Kaufman’s Obit in NY Times

This recipe was adapted from a recipe that originally was published in the New York Times. The link to the original recipe appears at the end of this post.

Ingredients: Elaine’s Fettuccine Alfredo.
2 T. sweet butter
1 small clove garlic (finely chopped)
1 1/2 C. heavy cream
1 large egg yolk
1 pound fresh fettuccine
1 C. freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Asiago cheese
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Garnish with minced parsley or basil leaves

Directions:

Melt sweet butter in a large saucepan. Add garlic and sauté until it is fragrant but not brown. Whisk cream and egg yolk in a bowl and pour mixture into butter/garlic mixture. On medium low heat, cook cream mixture until it reduces and thickens a bit. Do not let mixture boil.

Boil fettuccine in a pot of water until it is al dente. Drain.

Pour cooked fettuccine into the cream sauce and stir until the fettuccine is well mixed in the sauce. You can add a bit of pasta cooking water if you need to make the sauce more liquid as you cook it. Add grated cheese and toss to mix.

Garnish with parsley or basil and lots of freshly-ground pepper.

Enjoy.

Here is a link to the original NY Times recipe for Elaine’s Fettuccine Alfredo:

Elaine’s Fettuccine Alfredo from The New York Times

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

                    –Pablo Neruda

I’ve always loved lemon cakes. 

Back in the 1980s, I remember that the Miss Grace Lemon Pound Cake set the standard. Do you remember that cake? It was moist. It was beautiful. It was bold; the tart lemon flavor that infused the cake grabbed you by the lapels.

Recently, in the grip of a moment of nostalgia, I went online to see if Miss Grace cakes are still available. Apparently they are, but, according to Yelp reviews, customers aren’t altogether happy with the current iteration of the cake. And, a Miss Grace lemon cake costs $37.07 on Amazon (with a collectible gift tin!).

So, I set out looking for a cake that could live up to my sweet memories of the cake and one that could stay within my budget.

Here it is. If you like to pucker up with a jolt of lemon flavor, this buttermilk pound cake is for you!

The link to the original recipe appears at the bottom of this post.

Ingredients: Lemon Buttermilk Pound Cake

For the Cake
3 C. all purpose flour (spooned into a measuring cup and leveled-off with a knife, plus more for the pan)
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter (softened)
2 1/4 C. granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1 C. buttermilk
2 T. grated lemon zest (packed)
2 T. fresh lemon juice

For the Syrup
1/3 C. water
1/3 C. granulated sugar
2 T. fresh lemon juice

For the Glaze
1 C. confectioners’ sugar
2 T. fresh lemon juice
1/2 t. lemon zest (packed)
1 t. unsalted butter (melted)

Directions:

Prepare your oven and your pan. The oven should be preheated to 325 degrees F. Your bundt pan should be sprayed with a generous amount of cooking spray (or buttered) and then should be dusted with flour. My cake was a little cranky about coming out of the pan once it was cooked, so I can’t emphasize enough the importance of properly preparing your pan and being careful when removing the finished cake from the pan.

Place flour, baking soda and salt in a medium-sized bowl and whisk. Set aside.

Cream butter and sugar in an electric mixer at medium speed (using the paddle attachment) until the mixture is light and fluffy. This will take 3-4 minutes. Scrape down the batter from the sides of your mixer bowl and then add the eggs one at a time. Beat the mixture well after each egg addition. Again, scrape down the sides of your mixer bowl.

Combine the buttermilk, lemon zest and lemon juice in another bowl. Set aside.

Turn your mixer on to a low speed and mix one quarter of the four mixture into the butter/sugar mixture. Then, mix in one third of the buttermilk mixture. Repeat until all the flour mixture and buttermilk mixture have been incorporated into the batter. Again, scrape down the sides of the bowl. Using your mixer, give the batter one last fast mix.

Spoon the batter into the prepared bundt pan. Use a spatula to smooth out the top of the batter.

Bake for one hour and five minutes at 325 degrees F. A cake tester should come out clean when the cake is done.

Remove the cake from the stove and cool the cake on a rack on your counter for at least ten minutes. I gave my cake about 20 minutes and loosened the cake from the sides of the pan with a knife. Take your time with this step.

While the cake is cooling, make the syrup by combining the water and sugar in a pan and bringing it to a boil. When the mixture boils, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Invert the cooled cake onto a wire rack, being careful to ease the cake out of the pan. (Keep your counter clean by slipping parchment paper or aluminum foil under the rack to catch the drips of syrup.)  Using a pastry brush, brush the cake with the hot syrup. The brushing should be done slowly so that the syrup has time to be absorbed into the cake before you brush on more syrup. Once all the syrup has been brushed on the cake, let the cake cool for at least one hour.

Finally, once the cake has cooled, make your glaze combining confectioners’ sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and melted butter in a bowl. Stir the glaze until it is smooth. Your glaze should be thick but pourable (the consistency of thick honey). You can add more sugar or lemon juice to achieve the right consistency. Drizzle the glaze over the top of the cake and down the sides of the cake.

Here is the link to the original recipe:

http://www.onceuponachef.com/2015/01/lemon-buttermilk-pound-cake.html

The vocabulary word for today is umami.

Now don’t go getting all “low energy” on me. I really don’t want to see any of you putting your heads down on your desks and hyperventilating like this is just too hard.

                                                           U- M- A- M- I.   (  Just.   Sound.   It.   Out.  )

Simply put, umami is a Japanese word that roughly translates as “delicious.”

In 1908,  Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda discovered that kombu, a brown algae used for thousands of years as a soup stock base, is a rich source of a distinctive compound called glutamate. Also found naturally in a number of other foods including tomatoes and cheeses, Ikeda found that glutamate intensified a unique savory flavor in the mouth and could be extracted from food in powder form as monosodium glutamate (MSG). He named the new flavor umami.

Once Ikeda’s research findings were securely patented, commercial production of this new flavor-enhancer/creator began almost immediately with the Japanese company, Ajinomoto, producing a “MSG” powder grown from wheat gluten proteins (and later from bacteria) as a seasoning. (Today, MSG is produced by fermenting starch, sugar beets, sugar cane or molasses in a fermentation process similar to that used in making yogurt.)

In the years since Ikeda’s research, scientists have found still other umami substances– in cured skipjack tuna and shiitake mushrooms, for example. Like MSG, these substances ramp up the savory (umami) flavors of foods. When they are combined with MSG, there is an explosion of flavor in the mouth.

Finally, in 2001, the “fifth flavor” science was irrefutable.  UC San Diego biologist Charles Zuker proved conclusively that there are specialized receptor cells on the human tongue that respond to MSG. Those receptors produce a unique taste and mouth feel (Ikeda’s umami) that cannot be adequately described as sweet, sour, salty or bitter–the traditional terms used to describe the variety of human taste sensations.

So, what does umami taste like?

Mellow. Just ask Garrison Keillor.

That’s what I think Keillor was talking about in those glorious For the Good Times with Barb and Jim “catchup” skits that touted ketchup’s “mellowing agents.” If you have time, take a moment to enjoy one of the classic ketchup skits from Keillor’s satirical radio show, The Prairie Home Companion, and learn for yourself about ketchup’s seductive powers. The bit is guaranteed to make you laugh, particularly if, like Jim in the skit, you are hanging on to some of those adolescent humiliations:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AhBXpoqkGU

Others have described umami as  “brothy,” “savory,” “creating a (pleasant) coating sensation over the tongue,” “imparting a long-lasting aftertaste.” The Umami Information Center (Yes. There is one.) describes umami’s effect this way: “Umami signals that we have consumed protein… and triggers secretion of saliva and digestive juices.”

Ikeda wasn’t the first to recognize umami’s effect on taste. Cooks have understood and applied the umami concept to their food preparation for a very long time.

The ancient Romans enjoyed a umami-rich fermented fish sauce (like modern-day anchovy paste) on their foods. The medieval Byzantines and Arabs incorporated a fermented barley sauce into their cuisines and Chinese cooks are believed to have used fermented soy and fish sauces in their kitchens as early as the 3rd Century.

Innovations in cooking ingredients and techniques are often not without controversy, however, and in the midst of MSG’s surging wave of popularity, there was a health scare in the 1960s. MSG as an additive was blamed for “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” a bad reaction reportedly experienced by some people who ate MSG-enhanced foods. According to Harold McGee’s highly-regarded On Food and Cooking, the “Chinese restaurant syndrome” theories rested on decidedly-shaky ground and toxicologists eventually exonerated MSG. McGee notes, however, that the real harm from MSG was that it was all- too-often used so heavy-handedly as to obscure rather than enhance foods’ flavors. The FDA is still hedging its bets on MSG, however, and categorizes the practice of adding MSG to foods as “generally recognized as safe.”

But, you ask, is umami really a full-fledged”fifth taste?”

Scientists and foodies have ruminated over this question for decades.

Finally, in 1982, research scientists attempted to put the matter to rest by organizing The Society for Research on Umami Taste (SRUT) and, in a 1985 symposium in Hawaii, declared umami a legitimate scientific term that “characterizes the unique taste imparted by compounds such as monosodium L-glutamate and 5′-nucleotides, inosinate and guanylate.”   (One can only imagine the wild partying that must have gone on at the SRUT umami convention. I’ll bet the souvenir tee-shirts are now worth a small fortune on e-bay.)

So, how can you get your umami “fix” this Labor Day?

You need go no farther than your closest purveyor of ketchup and fries. Both contain a high number of free glutamates and, when combined, will synergistically send you into umami heaven.

Or you could make this Fresh and Wild Mushroom Stew.  It’s delicious.

Happy Labor Day.

The link to the original recipe from the New York Times appears at the bottom of this post.

Ingredients: Fresh and Wild Mushroom Stew

1 1/2 lb. cultivated brown mushrooms (shiitake, cremini or portobello–I used baby bellas)
1/2 lb. pale wild mushrooms (chantrelle, King trumpet or oyster–I used oyster but I would use chantresses in a heartbeat if they were available)
Extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion (diced)
Salt and pepper
1 t. chopped thyme
1 t. chopped sage or rosemary (I used sage)
Pinch red pepper flakes or cayenne
1 T. tomato paste
3 Small ripe tomatoes (peeled, seeded and chopped)
1 T. all-purpose flour
Heated broth (Mushroom or vegetable)
1 T. butter
3 garlic cloves (minced)
3 T. chopped parsley

Directions:

Clean mushrooms and trim tough stems from  mushrooms. Keeping different types of mushroom separate, slice mushrooms about 1/8 inch thick.

Dice large onion.

Heat olive oil in a large skillet or Dutch oven and saute chopped onion over medium high heat. Season onion with salt and pepper, lower heat to medium and cook onion for about ten minutes until onion is soft and browned. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add 1 T. oil to pan and, over medium to high heat, saute brown mushrooms until they turn a little bit more brown, seasoning lightly. This will take 3-4 minutes. Lower heat a bit and add spices (thyme, sage, red pepper) and tomato paste and stir. Add chopped tomatoes and stir into spice mixture until well mixed. Cook for about one minute.  Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle 1 T. flour over the mixture. Stir for one minute and continue to cook for one minute more. After one minute, add reserved onions.

Add 1 C. broth to the mixture and stir until thickened (1-2 minutes). Add more broth (up to a cup more) as needed to bring sauce up to a gravy-like consistency (I did not need to add the additional broth but you might)  and cook for an additional two minutes. Adjust seasonings.

When you are ready to serve, melt butter and 1 T. olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Cook just until the butter begins to brown and takes on a nutty flavor. Add wild mushrooms and salt and pepper and saute for about two more minutes. The mushrooms should be heated through, lightly cooked and slightly brown. Add garlic and parsley and stir, cooking for one more minute.

Combine brown mushroom mixture with wild mushrooms and serve in a warm serving bowl.

Serve with pasta, polenta, biscuits or over a toasted slice of sourdough bread. Garnish with chopped parsley, sliced cherry tomatoes and/or grated Asiago.

Here is the link to the original recipe:

http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015198-fresh-and-wild-mushroom-stew

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