A Roundabout Route to a Recipe for Keeps

A labyrinth of little ideas and etceteras + my ideal "decent dinner" dish

Is it not the best when you make a foray into the kitchen, having no clue what you’re going to make, and emerge with a new dish that you know you’ll want to repeat forever? I just had the good luck of that happening, which I’ll tell you about, but first I must ramble on a bit, because the train of thought that follows is what led me to the recipe in the first place.

It all began with contemplating the weather, which has been turning my fingers into rock-candy pops on a daily basis. Cold snaps and snowfalls have been the meteorological theme of the month (the coldest January in several years), and with snow, of course, comes salt to gravel our paths. Salt and snow always sift themselves together in my brain when I step outside into a powdery world, and I’m reminded of P.K. Page’s poem, Photos of a Salt Mine, of which a mere snippet here:

And wonderful underfoot the snow of salt

the fine

particles a broom could sweep,

one thinks

muckers might make angels in its drifts

as children do in snow,

lovers in sheets,

lie down and leave imprinted where they lay

a feathered creature holier than they.

What a magical and nostalgic wintery world she creates. Alas, Page is describing a salt mine, the dark side of which comes out further down in the poem.

“Peter!”, I yelled, as he was coming down the lane in his pyjamas, dragging the recycling bin behind him. “Can you please take a picture of this snow angel?” He was sick as a dog, ready to get straight back into bed, but he stopped and snapped it. “The things you do for journalism,” he said, shaking his head.

The tug of war between what many say is innocence and guilt in that poem lingered in my mind and then tied itself to a conversation that came up at a dinner later in the week. The table was surrounded by artists, one of whom is a friend of the great photographer Edward Burtynsky whose show, In the Wake of Progress, I was dazzled by a couple of years ago.

“That guy is amazing”, I said. “He can point his camera at something completely ugly, industrial, borderline cruel even, and capture such beauty.”

“Ah well,” said the photographer’s friend. “He does get criticized for daring to do that.”

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Is it immoral to see a glint of beauty in the face of something horrible? Or could it, instead, be our only hope of survival?

Bit heavy, all this, especially leading up to a recipe test, but then so is the state of the world, which I don’t talk about on here, because A Place at My Table exists to give us some respite from all that. Instead, then, let’s now talk about “firsts,” because also at the aforementioned dinner I had my first-ever matzo ball soup, which I’ve been dying to sample for years. Is that not the most comforting dish on Earth?! I’m going to try my own hand at it soon, starting with this version on Serious Eats, unless one of you has a better recommendation. (By the way, this is not the recipe that’s coming up, I’m just mentioning it because I was so thrilled finally to have tried it.)