The Secret Life of a Recipe Tester

Liz Baer in the kitchen.

Liz Baer earns her paycheck teaching Latin, but she’s been moonlighting for a little more than a year testing recipes for the forthcoming Berkshires Farm Table Cookbook by Elisa Spungen Bildner and Robert Bildner. Perhaps it hasn’t crossed your mind that cookbooks need recipe testers, but they do, in the same way that all books need copy editors – or perhaps more urgently, because readers aren’t generally required to eat typos. (For an exception to that rule, keep reading to the end.) For The Berkshires Farm Table Cookbook, Baer didn’t test every single recipe herself, but each one was tested more than once. Two authors and two independent testers meant a total of four people who checked and double-checked (and sometimes triple-checked and quadruple-checked) every single recipe.

Elaborate Simplicity: Yotam Ottolenghi's Simple

Chef Yotam Ottolenghi is the author of Simple. (Photo: Chris Floyd)

If you're familiar with Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbooks and you make a few of the recipes in Simple, you might find yourself tempted to suggest modifications to his title. Simple for Ottolenghi might be more apt, or perhaps Simpler than NOPI. (Ottolenghi and Ramael Scully's 2015 NOPI: The Cookbook offered such notoriously elaborate recipes that even some admiring reviewers admitted that they would probably only use it for special occasions.) Coming only two years after Diana Henry's collection of the same name, it's particularly difficult to deny that Ottolenghi's notion of simplicity is . . . involved.

Honey at the Spencer Fair

A stand showing some of the honey entries at this year's Spencer Fair. (Photo: Ellen Perry)

Every year at the Spencer Fair, the Worcester County (Massachusetts) Beekeepers Association puts on an educational display that includes candle-rolling and an observation hive – the latter basically a couple of hive frames covered with honeybees and encased in glass so that people can see the insects at work. The observation hive is extremely popular with children, who focus intently on locating the queen bee and almost always shout with delight when they find her. (This year, she was marked with a red dot on her back, which made her a lot easier to find and also indicated that she was born in 2018.) The children were mesmerized by the hive right up until somebody delivered a couple of two-week-old baby goats to a nearby display, at which point they drifted – or, in some cases, raced – away.

Lessons for the Home Baker

A loaf of sourdough bread. (Photo: Liliana Fuchs)

In New England, everybody knows King Arthur Flour. It’s on the shelves in most grocery stores and it’s generally on the more expensive side. Their all-purpose flour is higher in protein than most brands – within the range of traditional bread flours – and that makes for a good, elastic dough and a delicious loaf. The King Arthur Flour Baking Center is situated among the green hills of Vermont, immediately across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College. While the company that eventually became King Arthur has been in operation for over 200 years, the Baking Center only opened in 2012. It includes a bakery, a café, a baking supply store and a small school that offers classes for both professionals and amateurs. The question is, with so many recipes and Youtube videos available on the internet for free, why would you sign up for a class to learn how to make something like sourdough bread or croissants? Because yeast is a living creature; and because many home bakers find croissant recipes daunting just to read. Baking, in other words, can be tricky business, and some skills are most easily learned with the help of experts.

What to Listen to if You Like to Cook (and Eat) – Part II

Rosalind Bentley's Great Aunt Lucy and one of her cookbooks, featured in Gravy's "Hostesses of the Movement". (Photo: Gravy Archives)

Amer: So would you fast on Yom Kippur?

Lehmann: Yes.

Amer: And you’d break your fast with . . . 

Lehmann: Pork roast.

 – Gravy, Episode 14: “The Last Jews of Natchez”

Gravy is the name of a print publication and an affiliated podcast, both produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance. Gravy, the podcast, is actually not where you want to turn for recipes or cooking advice – though you might come away from the episode “Hostesses of the Movement” with an overpowering desire to make, or hunt down, lemon icebox cookies. (Here, let me help you with that.) Instead, Gravy is a collection of radio documentaries on the food culture of the American South. Episodes range from nineteen minutes to just over an hour long – with the vast majority coming in at under half an hour. Each is dedicated to a single topic, so it’s a cinch to select what interests you and to skip what doesn’t.

What to Listen to if You Like to Cook (and Eat) – Part I

Cherries! (Photo: Dean Morley)

I like to listen to food podcasts while I’m cooking and also – maybe this is ironic – while I’m exercising. And there are a lot of podcasts out there to choose from. The two described here are actually radio shows, but they’re available as podcasts, so you can download them and listen to them anytime, anywhere.

Put a Cork in It

The cork forests of the western Mediterranean region are among the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. They are home to over 13,000 species of plants and animals, and several endangered species; and they are wintering grounds for the migratory birds of northern Europe, including virtually the entire European population of common cranes. They are key to defending the arid climates of southern Europe and North Africa against forest fires and erosion. And we should be exploiting them more.

When Housewives Were Chemists

Photo by Nicki Dugan Pogue.

Not many foods deserve a biography. Those that do generally either date back to prehistory (bread, wine, beer) or were among the essential building blocks of empire (tea, sugar, bananas). But chemical leaveners, including baking powder, had humble origins and, not terribly long ago, they altered the way we eat dramatically. Imagine no cookies, cupcakes, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, doughnuts, or quickbreads. Okay, now stop imagining that: I don’t want to traumatize anyone. But chemical leaveners made all of them possible.

With Baking Powder Wars, food historian Linda Civitello has recovered the forgotten story of how chemical leaveners changed the way we eat – the story of an “indispensable, invisible ingredient.” Its protagonists are, at the outset, American women. This is because, though baking was largely professionalized in Europe, in much of North America it was the domain of housewives. In fact, Protestant moralizing on this continent associated baking with feminine virtue. Before the advent of chemical leaveners, baking meant bread, and bread meant yeast. Even the rare cake was leavened with yeast.

The Art of the Roast

Checking the color of the coffee beans during the roasting process.

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Ellen Perry, to our group.

On June 18, 2007, David Fullerton taught his last high-school English class and went into the coffee business. He had purchased a café on Main Street in Worcester, Massachusetts – put it on his credit card, in fact – and launched a new roasting operation. He decided that he liked the name the previous owners had given to the café, Acoustic Java, so he kept that – though any connection to music is, at this point, largely metaphorical. But Fullerton likes literature and appreciates a good metaphor: Acoustic Java’s motto is now “As music tames the savage beast, coffee civilizes man unkind”; and its coupons look like concert tickets.

On a January morning, I’m sitting with Fullerton at his second Worcester location, a building that used to be part of the Whittall Mills, a 19th-century carpet company. It’s a typical New England mill, so the roasting area is enormous, and the ceilings are high and supported by sturdy beams. By contrast, the adjacent tasting room is cozy, its brick wall lined with bookshelves and original art; but it also has a capacious view through plate-glass windows into the roasting operations. Fullerton wants to offer his customers “a spectacle . . . an authentic one.” He wants them to see something of what happens to their coffee before Patrick, the barista, pours it into their cup.