New York, October, 1978. The restaurant? Les Pleiades. Tucked in the Surrey Hotel, at 20 East 76th Street, it was one of the city’s classic French “red room” restaurants and a legendary gathering place for art dealers, collectors, auction-house experts, and museum directors. The first course on everyone’s plate? Céleri rémoulade, impeccably cut matchsticks of raw […]

A recent dinner party at a friend’s house began with a gorgeous platter of grilled fresh sardines, golden and crisp-skinned. They were delicious, and made me feel on holiday in a Mediterranean port town. They also left me wanting more grilled fish. As luck would have it, another pal scored some line-caught black sea bass from down around […]

You may not think that green tomatoes have a season—they’re available all summer long if you have access to backyard beefsteaks—but they do, and it’s now. Farm stands are piled high with them, as growers know many of them will never completely ripen on the vine. The tomato is a tropical berry, after all, and […]

Snap beans are such a part of my summer cooking routine, it never occurred to me to write about them until now. Luckily, thanks to second plantings in July, you’ll still find bushels of them at many farmers markets for a few weeks to come. I don’t want you to miss out. I like having […]

Nothing pitches me headfirst into gloom faster than Labor Day. I will chirk up once it’s October—always such a golden month—but for now, I am holding on tight to summer. The peaches are wonderful. The tomatoes are delicious. The corn—even that bought on the fly in a suburban supermarket—is juicy and full of farm-stand flavor. […]

Stewed tomatoes are delicious hot, cold, or at room temperature. This makes them convenient to have on hand during a hurricane—or whenever you’ve been too greedy at a farm stand and consequently find yourself on the home front with lots (and lots) of tomatoes turning soft-ripe at precisely the same moment. Botanically speaking, tomatoes are […]

Butter beans are suave—there is no other word that sums up their flavor, their texture, and their effortless ability to swing from down-home to haute. At roadside stands in the South, you’ll find coolers full of them—hand-picked, shucked, bagged, and ready for the pot. No such luck here in New York City. Still, a recent […]

The neat, workmanlike, and—let’s face it—really cute bunches of onions stopped me in my tracks. Vince D’Attolico, delighted at my reaction, unloaded the last of the crates from his Hudson Valley farm and stood back from his stand at Union Square to gauge the overall effect. “It’s a Dutch variety I haven’t tasted for twenty […]

Summer weekends are for rusticating. Sometimes, we head down to visit friends in southwestern Virginia, where a typical Saturday might be spent mowing a field, hiking up to the Blue Ridge Parkway … or lolling in a porch swing with an absorbing read and a long, tall glass of something cold. Dinner is straightforward, often […]

  Up until the late ’80s or so, the only parsley you would see in its raw form in this country was a jaunty boutonnière (or prom-worthy corsage) of curly parsley on dinner plates across the land. My mother even garnished our meals with the stuff, turning my little brother’s intense love of a record album […]