Okay I know. I’ve been doing this a lot lately but I can’t help myself. There are so many exciting things happening these days and I want to reward you all for being so wonderful. I’m also dying to formally announce that one of my most favorite artists, Marion Bolognesi, will be doing the illustrations for Voracious! Marion is best known for her beautiful watercolor portraits, like the ones seen above. If you’re blown away by these, just wait until you see what she can do with food!

To celebrate this collaboration, we’ll be giving away a print of the painting shown after the jump! This is extra exciting because this particular print was part of a limited release and is completely sold out. Everywhere. It’s 18″x24,” signed and numbered on heavyweight Hahnemule textured fine art paper and I want you to have it.

You guys know the drill by now. To enter:
“Like” Yummybooks on Facebook for one entry
“Like” Marion Bolognesi on Facebook for one entry
Follow along on Twitter for one entry
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Follow along on Instagram for one entry
Post this giveaway on any one of your social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, etc) One entry for each post.
Leave a comment letting me know what you did. Be sure to use an email address that you check so that I can contact you when you win. If you already do any of these things let me know, and if you aren’t all over social media and have a limited number of accounts tell me and I’ll work it out!
Entries will close at midnight (Eastern time) a week from today on Sunday June 9.

While we’re talking social media I just want to let you guys know how much I love it when you post pictures of YummyBooks recipes that you’ve made. The one below comes from Beth, who made blackberry gin rickeys for her friend’s bachelorette party–you rule, Beth.

Have you made anything from YummyBooks? Let me know! Hashtag it #Yummybooks and give me a heads-up @caranicoletti, I’d love to start doing some weekly roundups of all your photos!
Now GO, make that print yours.

Every once in a while a literary recipe pops into my head and I have to ask myself, “Cara, are you going too far?” This might be one of them, but I just can’t help myself. Fava beans are in season, they are everywhere in the markets looking like the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of sugar-snap peas and it’s impossible not to think about the Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter series. Was anyone else as obsessed with these books as I was in high school? No? Is that why I only had one friend?

Whether you’ve read the books or not I’m sure you know a thing or two about Hannibal Lecter. Few other characters have had as lasting an impact and stayed as present in our cultural consciousness as Dr. Lecter has. Thirty-two years after he first appeared in Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon he is the star of the NBC television show, “Hannibal,” which premiered last month. The term “serial killer” had only just been coined a few years prior to Harris’s publication of Red Dragon by the FBI’s the newly established “Behavioral Science Unit” in Virginia and the notion of criminal profiling was brand new.

As research for his second Hannibal novel, The Silence of the Lambs, Harris gained access to this unit and spent weeks getting into the minds of some of the most notorious serial killers. He used Ed Gein, Jerry Brudos, Ted Bundy, Gary Heidnik, Gary Ridgway and Edmund Kemper as inspiration to create “Buffalo Bill,” one of the most bone-chilling, stomach-churning fictional killers of all time, and based Detective Clarisse Starling on the Behavioral Science Unit’s Patricia Kirby, the first female profiler to ever interview serial killers.

The success of Harris’s novels was due in large part to America’s fascination with serial killers, a fascination which was new then but that has persevered these last thirty years. Books and television are full of serial killers, from Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell series to Roberto Bolano’s 2666, from “Dexter” to “Criminal Minds” to “The Mentalist” our culture is saturated with psychopaths. These criminal profilers that Harris was studying in the late 1970’s were bringing to light a fact that we all know well now—that serial killers don’t have to be scary-looking or visibly crazy, that most often they are in fact charming and well-spoken and sometimes even handsome. They could be a law student or a nurse or even a brilliant psychiatrist.

Along with America’s morbid fascination with sociopaths, Anthony Hopkin’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs also played a large role in the character’s cultural staying power. The film was the third ever to win Oscars in the top five categories—Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Writing, and the first “horror” film to ever win Best Picture. Thanks to Hopkins “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti” is as well-known a line as “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

The line is memorable not only because of that horrible sucking noise Hopkins makes after he says it, but also because of its eerie mix of savageness and refinement. Lecter is talking about cannibalizing someone, and yet his wine and side pairings are dead on. Liver and fava beans are a classic combination, they go beautifully together, and Chianti (in the book it’s actually Amarone, but we’ll get to that later) compliments them both perfectly. Harris didn’t just throw this line in haphazardly, he knew food well, as did Dr Lecter, who “was known for the excellence of his table and had contributed numerous articles to gourmet magazines.”

Harris’s agent once said of him, “He loves cooking–he’s done Le Cordon Bleu exams–and it’s great fun to see him in the kitchen while he prepares a meal and see that he’s happy as a clam.” His skill in the kitchen is probably the reason why he is able to make even the most horrifically disgusting food scenes sound somehow appealing. Dr. Lecter doesn’t just eat brains, he “dredges them lightly in seasoned flour, and then in fresh brioche crumbs,” he “adds shallots to his hot browned butter and at the instant their perfume rises he puts in minced caper berries,” he “grates a fresh black truffle into his sauce and finishes it all with a squeeze of lemon juice.” One could almost forget what it is she’s reading about.

Almost.

We ate a good amount of liver growing up, but I was embarrassingly old the first time I ever tasted a fresh fava bean. The only favas I had ever seen had already been shucked, blanched, peeled and stuffed into rumpled bags in the freezer aisle and those weren’t even allowed in my house because of my dad’s aversion to them. The first time I ever handled a fresh one I was working in a kitchen and the chef had put them on the menu as a special for that night, but they didn’t arrive with the delivery until twenty minutes before service. Everyone was told to start shucking as quickly as possible so that they could be blanched and ready to serve by the time the first order came in. All of the cooks gathered, hunched around a table, burnt and cut fingers moving like hummingbirds. I was so in awe of the beans I popped one in my mouth, uncooked with the husk still on and immediately spit it out. The cooks laughed mercilessly at me but after service one of them handed me a heaping spoonful of the finished product–blanched and whipped into a mousse with lemon and garlic and espilette, the brightest green i’d ever seen.

I washed that fava bean mousse down with my end-of-shift beer, which I think was maybe a Full Sail Session lager, but Dr. lecter would never approve of that, so let’s talk about wine. When it comes to wine I am decidedly un-snobby, probably because I know very little about it. I’ll drink it from the jug, I’ll drink it from a box, I’ll buy it based on how great the label is, I’ll even put a couple of ice cubes in my white wine from time to time.

Are any of you still here? Good. The one thing I do know for sure about wine is that I have never met a Chianti that I liked. I can’t explain it but it tastes like a dusty basement to me. Thank the Lord for Bibber & Bell, the new wine shop that just opened up down the street from me. I brought the owners, Robyn and Damien, some samples of the chicken liver and fava bean mousse and told them that I wanted to offer up a wine pairing for them that isn’t Chianti. Amarone, which is what Harris actually mentions in the novel, is hard to find and usually very expensive so we decided to go with something entirely different. We ended up chatting and drinking and eating for two hours and landed, finally on a bottle of Alsatian wine called “Edelzwicker,” which is pictured above. It’s a blend of Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Muscat, Pinot Blanc, Sylvaner, Chasselas, and Pinot Auxerrois (Edelzwicker means “noble blend”), it’s light and fruity and a tiny bit acidic and it was so perfect with these two mousses I drank more of it than I should have.

Lastly, I didn’t forget about the giveaway! You’ve all been very patient. It was so wonderful to hear from those of you who read but never comment. The winner this time around is commenter #75–Sarah! I’ve already emailed you to let you know. If you didn’t win this time don’t be sad, I promise there will be more great stuff coming soon!

Fava Bean Mousse
Makes about 1 ½ cups, enough for 8-10 crostini
Ingredients:
1 ½ pounds fresh fava beans (about 1 cup shelled)
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
½ cup olive oil
1/3 cup freshly-grated parmesan
juice of ½ a lemon
1 tablespoon lemon zest
½ teaspoon salt
Greens for topping/texture (I used miner’s lettuce which is nice and crunchy and tastes like a cross between watercress and pea shoots)
Baguette for serving

Directions:
Shell your fava beans from the pod and set them aside. Bring water to a boil in a medium pot and get a bowl of ice water ready. Boil favas for 5-7 minutes or until they are tender and the outer skins begin to shed. Drain and immediately place them in the ice bath (this stops them from continuing to cook and preserves their beautiful color). Mince your garlic, grate your parmesan, zest and juice your lemon and place them in a blender with the favas and the rest of the ingredients. Blend until very smooth (if you’re as crazy as I am you can pass it through a fine-mesh sieve, but this isn’t really necessary). Slice and toast your baguette, top with fava bean mousse and cover with the greens of your choice.

Chicken Liver Mousse
Makes 3 8oz Jars
Ingredients:
2 small onions
1 pound chicken livers
2 tablespoons
2 tablespoons butter
2 sprigs thyme
1/3 cup ruby port or sherry
1 cup cream cheese, softened
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 Tablespoons sherry vinegar
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon anise seeds
1 teaspoon cracked black pepper
Baguette for serving

Directions:
Add a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil to a pot and add your sliced onions and sprigs of thyme. Cook over medium-low heat until onions are soft and starting to brown. While they’re cooking, clean your chicken livers of any white or greenish fibers. Once the onions have cooked down add additional tablespoon of butter and olive oil and raised the heat. Add livers and pink salt and cook, stirring and tossing them constantly for 5-7 minutes, or until they are firm to the touch but still rosy (if you have a meat thermometer the internal temp should be 165F. Be careful not to cook them too long, this will give them a grainy texture).

Remove thyme and transfer cooked liver and onions to a blender. Deglaze the pan with your port and add it to the blender with the rest of the ingredients (minus the baguette, duh) and blend until very smooth. Pass through a fine mesh strainer and transfer to 3 8oz jars. Top with olive oil or rendered chicken fat (this keeps it from going gray) and let cool at least 2 hours. Once cool, spread on pieces of baguette and drizzle with olive oil or port, or go crazy and top it with some fava bean mousse. Will keep 10-12 days.

One of my favorite high school English teachers once told me that the most beautiful line in all of literature comes from The Great Gatsby. I can still recite the line by heart after over a decade—“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

Now here’s the part where I admit something that I’ve only ever told a few people: I do not like this book. Even that beautiful sentence that has stuck in my brain all of these years, a line so cherished by one of the smartest women I’ve ever known bothered me. Why are the men men and the women are girls? Are they actually girls, and if they are then why are they hanging out with men? Are they actually women, and if they are then why are they being called “girls”?

I think I was the only kid in my class, certainly the only girl, who wasn’t completely bonkers for the novel when we read it sophomore year. I’ve held this secret close to my chest all this time, feeling like it was some sort of literature-lover-defect that would expose me as a fraud, but it’s time to come clean. I felt nothing for the spoiled, rotten, selfish characters (I know, I know, you’re kind of supposed to hate them), their excess and carelessness made me anxious (I know, I know, it’s supposed to), and the women, ugh.

Even in high school, though, I knew that mint juleps and “gin rickeys that clicked full of ice” were something worth growing up for—their names alone could cool you off.

The anniversary of my first ever mint julep is today, Derby Day. I had my first one six years ago, surrounded by a bunch of Southerners in floppy hats and starched collared shirts at a bar in the West Village where the races were turned up way too loud and the bartenders looked overwhelmed. As an East-Coaster, Derby Day was not a holiday that was on my radar at all, and walking into that bar felt a little bit like stumbling into a foreign country. I sipped mint julep after mint julep out of a plastic cup with a neon straw, feeling grown-up and giddy with sugar and brain-freeze and bottom-shelf bourbon.

Not only is today Derby Day, it is also officially less than a week until the big, sparkly blockbuster adaptation of The Great Gatsby is released in theatres, so I’m sure a lot of you have already reached your mint-julep-recipe-total-saturation point. That’s why you’re also going to get a recipe for the best Tom Collins I’ve ever had, and a chance to win something awesome.

Mint juleps have a history dating back to the 1700′s, which means that people have very strong opinions about the right and wrong ways to make them. I’m not trying to make anyone mad, so I asked my amazing cousin, Cameron, who bartends at Minetta Tavern, to help me make something unarguably delicious. The origin of the word julep comes from the Persian “julâb” which means “rosewater” so he added a tiny splash of that, and it made all the difference in the world. We used Widow Jane Bourbon, which is mashed in Kentucky but finished with limestone water in Long Island where The Great Gatsby takes place. It’s a really spectacular bourbon, but any one you like will do just fine.

The Great Gatsby Mint Julep
Make 1 10 oz Julep

Directions:
In a cocktail mixer shake lime juice, agave and gin together with ice. Strain into a Collins glass over ice and top it off with club soda. Add ½ oz of blackberry shrub (recipe follows).

Directions:
Let berries and sugar sit for at least 6 hours, or overnight, tossing them a few times. Strain and reserve the juice and add the red wine vinegar to it. Stir it until it’s mixed (reserve macerated berries for garnish if you want)

Now something I’m really really excited about. While doing cocktail research this week (tough job but someone’s gotta do it) I came across this amazingly perfect vintage traveling bar, and as much as I desperately want to keep it for myself I like all of you too much to do that. It is perfect perfect perfect for summertime picnics, rooftop gatherings or just making your friends envious. Seriously, you need to make this yours. Here’s how you can do that:

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Leave a comment letting me know what you did, be sure to leave it using an email address you check. No one but me can see this email address and I’ll need it to get in touch with you when you win! If you already do any of these things let me know so I can make sure that counts towards your entry. Or if you are short on social media accounts leave a comment telling me and I’ll make sure you get a chance to win! Entries will close at midnight May 11th.

The Emma Woodhouse Ham is officially done! A month ago it was deboned, skinned, rubbed in salt and spices and left to cure for two weeks. After two weeks it was removed from the crock, double-wrapped in cheesecloth, tied and hung to cure for ten more days.

After those ten days we removed it from the fridge, unwrapped it and smoked it at 150F for 45 minutes with chips, then another eight hours without chips until the internal temperature was 140F.

It was hung to cool in the refrigerator overnight then cut in half and sliced very very thinly (the saltiness makes this necessary). In an attempt to keep things as close to how they would have been in Emma Woodhouse’s time every component of this crostini, from the pork we used (Dustin Gibson’s farm, Ghent, New York), to the honey drizzled on top is local—much of it from no further than a mile away!

Here, the thinly-sliced ham is on a thick hunk of Roberta’s city white bread, topped with Salvatore ricotta, locally-foraged pea shoots, and drizzled in Davis honey
. It was salty and sweet and smokey and I ate a lot more of it than I’m going to tell you about.

I hope this took the scariness out of curing your own meat a little bit, and maybe even inspired you to explore your local foods. If you have any curing questions please feel free to email me with them.
Now go! Get curing!

I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort this week, the things that I do to quiet my brain without even realizing that that’s why I’m doing them.

On the Friday after the marathon bombings I was in my fourth hour of watching the news when I suddenly felt the desperate need to bake. It wasn’t the desire to eat something sweet that drove me to it, but the calm that measuring, weighing, sifting, creaming, whisking and waiting always brings me. The sadness and anxiety that I felt, that I had been feeling since that Monday, seemed bottomless, and I baked until I was out of flour, trying to reach the bottom of it so that I could come back up.

When you’re watching the same news story for six hours straight a language emerges for talking about that particular tragedy. In the hours before the suspect was taken into custody, news anchors said “manhunt” and “shoot-out” so many times that the words themselves started to sound like nonsense. Others talked of “reading the tea leaves” (code, I learned, for gleaning information by watching the movement of groups of police officers), and emphasized that Boston was a “ghost-town,” under “virtual lock-down.” There was talk of a white hat and a black hat, pressure cookers and IED’s, and the words “Boston Strong” filled all of my news-feeds.

My second Boston Marathon with my beautiful mom, 1987.

One reporter in particular clung to the word “digest,” saying it in one form or another almost twenty times in four hours—“we’re still digesting,” “hard to digest,”—an odd word to grab on to, which is probably why it stuck out to me so much. Funny things happen with digestion when tragedy and grief are involved. We can’t eat, we over-eat, we crave things we’ve never craved before or things that we haven’t eaten since we were kids.

That morning, when all of my butter and flour and sugar had been reconstituted into cakes and bars, I muted the TV and hid under a blanket with my book—Tana French’s In The Woods. This book was exactly what I needed at that very moment—the well-written murder-mystery of my comfort-craving dreams, and I read it for hours, eating nearly an entire grapefruit cake in the meantime, until I finally felt more like myself.

As murder detectives, Cassie Maddox and Rob Ryan are constantly engulfed by disaster and tragedy, forever grappling with ways to manage their grief. They drink too much, they sleep with the wrong people, they make each other greasy dinners and pop handfuls of anxiety medication and stay up all night. When all else fails, Cassie eats chocolate digestive biscuits, lots of them. She hides them in her desk drawers and buys them at the market, people bring them to her as bribes and peace offerings, and in an odd twist that I’m unsure of how to interpret they are also the last meal of the twelve-year-old girl whose murder the book centers around.

You could certainly say that the ubiquity of chocolate biscuits in this book has only to do with the fact that the novel is set in Ireland and that French is an Irish writer. Since the first digestive biscuit was created in the 19th century, digestives have become part of daily life in the UK, with an estimated fifty-two biscuits being consumed every second. Digestive biscuits were originally created to aid in digestion, the thought being that the coarse bran and heavy amounts of baking soda in the biscuits would settle the stomach and help move things along. This was of particular interest to the Victorians who were preoccupied with their finicky insides.

Exactly two years ago today Monica Hess wrote an article for the Washintgon Post about the history of the digestive biscuit (which is where I got the 52-biscuits-per-second statistic) and it has stuck with me these two years, tumbling around in the back of my head every time Cassie Maddox had a particularly traumatizing day and reached for a chocolate biscuit for comfort.

Extrapolating meaning from a tea biscuit is a bit like extrapolating meaning from tea leaves, which is to say, you can probably find meaning if you’re looking for it. But we can all agree on this: A tea biscuit means tea. Tea means sitting down with a proper cup. A cup might mean a table and perhaps a napkin. Nothing about a messy biscuit says “on the go.” Nothing about it is fast or inventive. There is no expectation that it should be particularly delicious; there is no expectation that life should be particularly delicious. Although the rest of the cooking world is obsessed with artisanal — every baked good a unique, hand-formed art project — McVitie’s is a champion of sameness.

There is immense comfort in this sameness, in the ritual and the history that is present in every bite of a digestive. During World Word II, British soldiers were given two different kinds of biscuits in their rations–two plain and two chocolate–tucked away in their rucksacks with tins of industrial-grade beans and chipped beef. I think about them, scared and young and far from home, and the comfort that these familiar little disks might have brought them in the face of tragedy and disaster and violence.

After hours of being held captive by news that was becoming increasingly repetitive, the comfort that reading and baking had brought me earlier began to wear thin, and I forced myself to leave the house and seek it elsewhere. I took the train into Union Square and visited my friend Joe at work and he made me a cocktail with burnt rosemary and good gin and it tasted like Christmas and damp earth and made my chest warm. I walked to Chelsea and smelled new books in a tiny bookstore and ate chicken liver so good it immediately brought the color back to my cheeks. I walked from Herald Square to the battery and then home across the Williamsburg Bridge and I ate a green tomato like an apple and it was good and musky and tart. I thought about the city that I’m in, but mostly I thought about the city that I’m from, with its bruised history and mixed up roads and good, good people. The Shabbat sirens wailed in the neighborhoods below me and I cried a little into my tomato as a throng of Hasidic boys rushed past me to make it home before sun-down, and I thought about the eighteen years I spent at the Boston Marathon feeling safe and happy and proud and I took some time to digest it, all of it, everything.

Directions:
Pre-heat your oven to 350F and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Place all of your dry ingredients in the bowl of a food-processor and pulse a few times to get everything evenly mixed. Add your butter and lard and pulse until the fats are evenly distributed throughout. Mix your vanilla and cream together and slowly add it to the dough with the mixer running. Turn the dough out onto a clean surface and form it into a ball. The dough will be very crumbly (see picture), but don’t worry it will come together. Place the dough between two pieces of parchment paper and roll it to 1/8” thick. Cut with a 3” cookie cutter and bake 15-20 minutes, or until golden-brown and firm.

Melt chocolate and shortening over a double boiler and whisk until smooth. Spread melted chocolate over cooled cookies and sprinkle with coarse salt.

Hi, friends! Just wanted to give you a quick update on how our ham is progressing. It’s been 18 days since we salted the ham and left it to cure. It has lost 3.8 pounds worth of water weight, it’s feeling firm and is now ready to be wrapped and hung for 10 more days of curing before being smoked.

If you’re doing this at home you are now going to remove the ham from the crock and lay it on a large sheet of cheesecloth. Wrap it tightly once and then again in another layer of cheesecloth and tie it tightly with butchers twine in four or five places, as seen in the photograph above. Hang in the refrigerator for 10 more days (ignore the date on the tag!).

Now, I hate to leave you again without some immediate gratification—waiting is hard! So this week you’re going to get a recipe for a roast pork loin that will be ready to eat in an hour and a half.

One of the many things that Mr. Woodhouse says during his pork-related stress-explosion is that they must make sure that the neighbors “not roast it, for no stomach can bear roast pork.”

All due respect, Mr. Woodhouse, that is crazy talk. A good roast pork is one of life’s greatest joys. This loin is covered in fresh herbs, garlic, salt and pepper and roasted until crispy on the outside and still pink on the inside. Eat it for dinner and enjoy your leftovers on a sandwich the next day (if there are any).

Directions:
Add all of your dry spicing and herbs together and set aside. Rub the pork loin in olive oil, then thoroughly rub in the garlic paste and the dry spice/herb combination until the loin is entirely covered. At this point you can tie your roast if you want to, but it’s not totally necessary (it just looks nice). Pre-heat your oven to 400F and allow the roast to sit out of the refrigerator until it reaches room temperature (about 40 minutes). Place the roast on a sheet pan lined with tinfoil and roast, fat side up, for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes lower the heat to 250F and allow the pork to cook until the center reaches 140F–about a 1-1.5 hours.

Find comfort in what you can today, friends, do what brings you peace. Be it reading some poetry or peeling a grapefruit or baking a cake that rises higher and stronger than you were expecting.

Meditation on a Grapefruit
By Craig Arnold
To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
To tear the husk
like cotton padding a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully without breaking
a single pearly cell
To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
so sweet
a discipline
precisely pointless a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

Get the recipe here

Today is the three year anniversary of Yummy Books! Three years ago I had just quit my job as a barista and was working as a baker at a Southern comfort food restaurant called Pies N’ Thighs in Brooklyn. I was still sunburnt from my first ever trip to California, heartbroken over the boy I now live with, running a literary supper club out of my tiny apartment, and reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Throughout the novel they are always drinking a cocktail called an “orange blossom.” It sounds so refreshing and elegant doesn’t it? Well, turns out it’s just gin and orange juice, which we all know isn’t really that elegant.

So I had Dave from Richlane in Brooklyn help me come up with something a little bit more interesting and infinitely more delicious–a cocktail worth celebrating an anniversary with, a cocktail that, I think, the booze-loving Truman Capote would definitely have approved of.

In Cold Blood Orange Blossom Cocktail
makes 1
Ingredients:

1 1/2 oz gin (we used Dorothy Parker gin by New York Distilling Company because it’s made right down the street and it’s darn good)
1 1/2 oz vermouth
1/2 oz cointreau
2 dashes of orange bitters
1 thick sliver of orange peel

Directions:
Pour all of your liquid ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake well , strain into a cocktail glass, squeeze orange peel into cocktail and around the edges of the glass then place it in the cocktail as a garnish. DRINK!

Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse is perhaps the most flawed of all of Austen’s female protagonists. Even though she is beautiful and witty and smart, many Austen fanatics dislike her, calling her jealous and self-centered, snobbish, obstinate, insensitive. Out of curiosity, I took a poll amongst my Jane Austen-loving friends, asking which of her characters they most disliked, and more than half of them said Emma. This shocked me, especially because of the existence of the insipid Fanny Price! I can’t help but think that Cher Horowitz has something to do with this.

I love Emma and I’ll tell you why: when it comes to pork, Emma knows her stuff. Emma is not my favorite Austen novel, but it has by far my most favorite food scene of all of them. Two pages of the novel are taken up with the description of what to do with a newly-killed pig from their property. Emma’s father, ever the worrier, is overwhelmed by the task of sending pork to a neighbor, but Emma’s complete confidence on the matter immediately puts him at ease. The scene is a rare glimpse into the unglamorous everyday tasks of running a household in Jane Austen’s time, a time when even a woman as priviledged as Emma would have been knowledgable about the raising, killing and preserving of her family’s livestock.

(There are pictures of a whole ham following, if you are averse to those kinds of things I wouldn’t continue)

“Now we have killed a porker, and Emma thinks of sending them a loin or a leg; it is very small and delicate—Hartfield pork is not like any other pork—but still it is pork—and, my dear Emma, unless one could be sure of their making it into steaks, nicely fried, as ours are fried, without the smallest grease, and not roast it, for no stomach can bear roast pork—I think we had better send the leg—do not you think so, my dear?”
“My dear papa, I sent the whole hind-quarter. I knew you would wish it. There will be the leg to be salted, you know, which is so very nice, and the loin to be dressed directly in any manner they like.”
“That’s right, my dear, very right. I had not thought of it before, but that is the best way. They must not over-salt the leg; and then, if it is not over-salted, and if it is very thoroughly boiled, just as Serle boils ours, and eaten very moderately of, with a boiled turnip, and a little carrot or parsnip, I do not consider it unwholesome.”

In her letters, Austen herself writes often of the livestock kept at Steventon where she lived with her family. In one letter she tells her sister, Cassandra, about providing a neighbor with pork from their land, much like Emma and her father discuss in the novel: “My father furnishes him with a pig from cheesedown; it is already killed and cut up, but it is not to weigh more than nine stone; the season is too far advanced to get him a larger one. My mother means to pay herself for the salt and the trouble of ordering it to be cured by the sparibs, the sous, and the lard.”
Each member of the Austen family is involved at some level in the keeping and processing of livestock, something which wouldn’t have been at all uncommon at the time or unladylike to discuss.

Even though I’m grateful for the advances that we’ve made in refrigeration since 1815, I wish that we were still as connected to where our food–especially our meat–comes from. I think about this daily, especially when I’m at work and someone “eww”s what I’m doing behind the butcher counter but is okay with buying a pound of sliced ham or three pounds of ground beef.

Today we are going to cure a ham, and we are going to do it as close to the way someone in 1815 would have done it as possible. I won’t be able to show you the end product for a couple of months, but I’ll keep you updated on our ham’s progress, and by summer we’ll be slicing it paper-thin and putting it on everything.

Ingredients:

• 1 whole ham– skin, tail, sirloin, and thigh-bone removed. Keep the knee-cap and hock intact for hanging. Mine weighed 19.2 pounds after this process. Refer to the table entitled “cure #1″ here for how a guide on how much pink salt to add by weight
• .80 oz. pink salt (see note above)
• 2 pounds kosher salt
• 6 oz sugar
• 1 1/2 oz whole peppercorns
• 1 Tbl cloves
• 1 Tbl juniper berries
• 20 bay leaves
• 20 sprigs fresh thyme

Have your butcher skin and tunnel-bone your ham (be patient, this can take a minute), leaving the knee-bone and hock intact for hanging. If the pig is freshly-killed you will have to hang it for 3 days in the refrigerator over a bucket to drain any excess liquid. The pigs at our shop have already gone through this process before coming to us so I skipped this step. With a mallet or baseball bat give the ham a few good whacks to release as much liquid as possible (if you’re having a bad day this is a great great thing to get to do). Add all of your ingredients together and mix them around until they are all combined. Rub your ham very thoroughly with the cure, making sure to really get it inside of the cavity where the thigh bone was. Put two handfuls of the cure on the bottom of a heavy crock like the one shown (thank you to Brooklyn Kitchen for this beauty) and lay your ham on top of it. Pour the rest of the cure around it and rub it all over until the ham is completely covered. Place something non-reactive on top of the ham (I used a plastic cambro lid) and weight it down with a 10 pound can of tomatoes (or beans or whatever you have). Leave it to cure in the refrigerator for 15 days.

Hang tight, more in two weeks!

Spring is coming to Brooklyn, you can feel it everywhere. Even though most days still require heavy coats and knit caps, my neighborhood is buzzing with sun-warm energy. Bulbs are pushing their coneheads up through every patch of mud, cafes are pulling tables and chairs from storage and placing them along the sidewalks. The other day I nearly wept with joy upon seeing asparagus at the farmers market, and that night for dinner ate two whole bundles, roasted with nothing but olive oil and salt, wiggling my toes with satisfaction after every magic-wand-stalk.

I love New York in the Springtime. New Yorkers can make anything into their own yard. We sunbathe on the melty tar roofs that our landlords have explicitly banned us from, stretch out and read on rusty fire-escapes that haven’t been inspected since the 1970’s, place seat-cushions on cement stoops and line the sidewalks with lawn chairs. We lay towels over goose poop and dodge shards of broken glass in public parks from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge, and we Ooo and Ahh with jealousy over people who actually have “backyards,” which are almost always just private alleyways that we pack ourselves into, shoulder-to-shoulder over tiny Webber grills and think “this is living.”

In the Spring there are long, aimless bike rides and afternoons spent laying in the park, eating yolk-yellow mango slices from the man with the push-chart and sipping from enormous Styrofoam cups filled with Turkey’s Nest frozen margaritas (which, let’s be serious, are really just green Gatorade mixed with tequila), shifting with the position of the sun like houseplants bending and stretching toward the window.

Every year as the days get longer my attention span gets shorter and I find myself scouring the bookstores for page-turners—pulse-pounding mysteries and thrillers, filled with grizzled detectives and sassy, quick-witted heroines—the pulpier the better. In my younger years I held these cravings close to my chest, skittering furtively to those back shelves of The Strand and glancing around to make sure none of my classmates saw me thumbing through a copy of Scarpetta, but these days not so much.

The other day, with my arms full of asparagus, I got that familiar hankering and headed straight to the bookstore. Rather than ducking surreptitiously to those dimly-lit back shelves I asked a store employee for help. Without hesitation, she put her hands on my shoulders and lead me straight to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, her eyes wide and serious as she handed it to me. “You’re welcome.” she said, and walked away. The next 48 hours of my life completely disappeared.

Gone Girl is an “easy read” only in that it is absolutely impossible to put down. Besides that, there is nothing easy about this book. Gillian Flynn creates a cast of characters as hard to like as they are to trust. They lie to each other and they lie to us, they pull us onto to their side only to fill us with disgust a few sentences later—it is a truly exhausting reading experience.

The novel begins on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne’s five-year wedding anniversary. The couple, who met in New York City, moved to Nick’s hometown of Carthage, Missouri the year before to lick the wounds of having both been laid off, and to care for his dying mother and alzheimer’s-ridden father.

The novel opens with Nick laying in bed, listening to the sounds of his wife cooking “something impressive” in the kitchen below him—“probably a crepe, because crepes are special, and today Amy would want to cook something special.” He walks downstairs and finds Amy at the stove, humming the M*A*S*H theme-song (you know, the “suicide is painless” song—Flynn is a master at the seemingly pointless detail) and making him breakfast.
“Amy peered at the crepe sizzling in the pan and licked something off her wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms, she would smell like berries and powdered sugar.”

Later that evening, Nick receives a call that his front door is wide open, and goes home to find Amy missing and the house in complete disarray. As the days tick on and Amy is still missing, the investigation turns on Nick. What follows is one of the darkest accounts of a marriage gone sour that I have ever read.

What? You’re not just starving for some crepes now?

Gone Girl Brown Butter Crepes with Ricotta, Blood Orange and Balsamic
Makes 6 8-inch crepes (crepes pictured are much bigger)

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, browned
2 large eggs, beaten lightly
½ cup whole milk
2 tablespoons honey
½ cup all purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 pint ricotta
3 blood oranges, supremed
balsamic vinegar and / or honey to taste
sea salt for sprinkling

Directions:
Brown your butter and set it aside to cool. Add eggs, milk and honey to a bowl fitted with a whisk attachment. With the mixer running add the flour, salt and butter. Refrigerate for an hour or up to 48 hours. Once the batter has rested, get a nonstick skillet or crepe pan heating up over medium heat. Add butter (even if it’s a nonstick pan) and add ¼ cup of batter to the center, swirling the pan around to coat the whole surface evenly. Cook for about a minute and a half-two minutes, or until surface is set and the edges are golden-brown. Flip crepe over gently and cook about 30 more seconds.

To assemble, simply spoon about ¼ cup of ricotta into the crepe, top with supremed blood oranges and drizzle with balsamic vinegar and/ or honey. If you don’t know how to supreme an orange, watch this video of a man using a ridiculously enormous usuba knife to do it, and then do it yourself with a much more practical knife.