how little data seems to be available about what Americans actually spend on what they eat. Yet this is one area where the variance is enormous.

Instead of actual numbers, I found a prescriptive chart from the U.S.D.A. chart which offers guidelines for food costs ranging from “thrifty” and “low cost” to “moderate” and “liberal.” (Turns out my family is moderate, uh, mostly.)

Of course, the food evangelists’ big complaint about Americans is that they should spend more for better food, investing in fresh fruit and vegetables.  I don’t think they’d be happy with the menu items for the U.S.D.A.’s fictional $575-a-month “thrifty” family, which is the government’s baseline for minimally adequate nutrition.  For the same size family, a “liberal” food budget is $1140.  But consider why people chose (or must) save on food.  Food is the one area where people have some control.  Mortgage, car payments, etc. are fixed.  But food has a huge range in cost depending on where you shop, what you buy, and how much or how little you decide to invest in it. The thrifty family spends $565 less per month than the liberal one, and that adds up to a $33,000 difference over five years.  Wow. 

If you want to see where your food budget falls in the scheme of things.  Take a look here at the USDA food plans for November 2009.  Meanwhile, I’d like to find out what was in that $575 menu.

It wasn’t too hard, to be truthful as most shepherd’s pies are made basically the same way: meat, either lamb or beef, is seared, then vegetables and herbs are added followed by a spoonful of flour and deglazing with wine, broth, or worcestershire sauce (and sometimes all three) while potatoes are mashed with butter and milk which are then used to top the stew. The whole pot gets baked until the bottom is bubbly and the top is browned. All I had to do was cull the recipes until I grokked the basic pattern, then used the flavors I love in stews to concoct the one that I remembered from childhood. You can read the old recipes we dug up along the way. 

I did make one unorthodox addition. Want to know what it is? Here’s the recipe:

One Badass Shepherd’s Pie
Note: The optional addition of celery root, though not traditional, adds a bright flavor to the mashed potatoes and the stew. Try it!

1 T. olive oil
2 pounds of boneless lamb stew meat, cut into one-inch pieces
1 large onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 stalks celery, chopped
5 carrots, peeled and sliced on the diagonal
1 pint mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
1 large shallot
salt and pepper to taste
1//2 t. dried thyme or 1 t. fresh thyme, chopped
1 T. all-purpose flour
1/2 cup red wine
1 cup beef broth, and more if necessary
1 T. tomato paste
1 T. worcestershire sauce
1 large celery root, peeled and cut into matchsticks (cut the root into slices, then stack them and slice into sticks) optional but recommended
6 medium yukon gold, or yellow baking potatoes (or your favorite potato for mashing)
4 T. sweet unsalted butter
1/2 cup or more milk (lowfat is fine, even skim, depending on how much fat you like in your mashed potatoes)
1/2 cup or more chicken stock
1 T. or more olive oil, enough to flavor potatoes
frozen or fresh peas, optional

1. Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot (preferably an ovenproof one) over medium-high heat. Add the meat and let it brown on all sides, stirring, about 5 - 6 minutes. Add the onion, garlic, celery, carrots, mushrooms, shallot and salt and pepper to taste, and thyme. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to soften, about 10 minutes.
2. Add the flour and stir to combine. Let the mixture cook until it thickens and reduces, and the flour and meat juices begin to brown on the bottom of the pot. Don’t let it burn, but do let the flour and juices brown, stirring and scraping the bottom as needed. This is where the dark color and flavor of the gravy will begin to develop. When the juices reduce until the bottom of the pot has brown bits of flour and reduced sauce clinging to it, deglaze the pot with the wine, broth, tomato paste and worcestershire sauce. Scrape the bottom of the pot once the liquids are in there to incorporate all the brown bits on the bottom of the pot. Cover the pot, turn the heat to low, and let the stew cook about 15 minutes more, adding more broth as necessary to keep the mixture moistened. It should be the consistency of stew - liquid but not thin and soupy. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.
3. Meanwhile, steam the potatoes and the celery root in a covered double boiler or covered in the microwave oven until they are tender when pierced with a fork. Set aside about 1 cup of the celery root to add to the stew. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk or in a bowl with a masher, mash the potatoes and remaining celery root together, adding the butter, milk, chicken stock and olive oil until the potatoes are the consistency of buttercream frosting - able to hold their shape but not too thick and dry. The proportion of broth, oil, milk and butter in the potatoes is really up to you. For more healthful mash, add more broth and olive oil and use skim milk. Season with salt and pepper if desired. Press through a food mill if you have one and desire smooth mashed potatoes. Otherwise they will be chunky.
4. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Transfer the stew to an ovenproof container, add the reserved celery root, and the peas if using, and top it with the mashed potatoes, spreading the potatoes evenly with a spatula. Bake for 20 minutes until the stew is bubbly and the potatoes are browned. Serve immediately.

I had the pleasure of standing before this painting recently when it was included in a show at a local museum. Here is the glowing light emanating like sunlit honey from the dabbed and layered surfaces of the fruit.

There are the planes of color, sometimes as many as four or five hues in every square inch, that speak of Cezanne’s revolutionary approach to defining form with color and his powerfully contemplative working method of taking over a hundred sittings to complete a painting. There is the poetic line, now ivory black, now deepest ultramarine, on its quest for unchartered territory, embedded in memory, mined from the subconscious. One line in particular held me captive: it is the one that strives to delineate the form of a peach but hovers slightly above it. In its empty arc I can feel Cezanne’s rebellion, his inclusion of the truth in all its contradictions — its ennobling beauty and leveling ugliness. Most of all I admire Cezanne’s refusal to color in this wayward line and take away even a fraction of the wide open space it fronts like a gateway constructed of the intimate body of small peachy flesh opening to its vast soul. A space that is most convincing of course, in its ability to allow for the truth of domestic space — it’s mess and drudgery as well as its beauty.

see also: Thing of the Day — Chardin

Nancy loved Shepherd’s Pie in her childhood and wants to retrieve it.  This weekend she’s going to test the first one, and soon she’ll share the results.

The origins of this rib-sticking dish go back to the great pie baking traditions of medieval England where meat was cooked with dried fruit spices
and fruit inside a “coffin” of pastry dough.  Pie was originally a form of food preservation before refrigeration. 

Enter the potato, brought back from the New World.  The possibilities were enormous for thickening stews and soups and adding heft.  In the following recipe, the great 18th century writer Hannah Glasse inches us toward Shepherd’s Pie by giving a recipe for a traditional spiced meat pie with pastry--plus potatoes. See it here:

“To Make a very fine Sweet lamb or Veal Pye.
Season your Lamb with Salt, Pepper, Cloves, Mace and Nutmeg, all beat fine, to your Palate. Cut your Lamb, or Veal, into little Pieces, make a good Puff-paste Crust, lay it into your Dish, then lay in your Meat, strew on it some stoned Raisins and Currans clean washed, and some Sugar; then lay on it some Forced-meat Balls made sweet, and in the Summer some Artichoke-bottoms boiled, and scalded Grapes in the Winter. Boil Spanish Potatoes cut in Pieces, candied Citron, candied Orange, and Lemon-peel, and three or four large Blades of Mace; put Butter on the Top, close up your Pye, and bake it. Have ready against it comes out of the Oven a Caudle [thick drink] made thus: Take a Pint of White Wine, and mix in the Yolks of three Eggs, stir it well together over the Fire, one way, all the time till it is thick; then take it off, stir in Sugar enough to sweeten it, and squeeze in the Juice of a Lemon; pour it hot into your Pye, and close it up again.Send it hot to table.” 
---The Art of Cookery Made Plain & Easy, Hannah Glasse [London:1747]Chapter VIII, “Of Pies.”

Not long after we begin to see recipes that do away with the pastry crust entirely in favor of potatoes.  What a smart idea. Less work and a much simpler (and lighter . . . maybe) repast. 

Click here for Nancy’s final version of modern Shepherd’s Pie you can make with success. 

see also: Calling All Recipe Detectives — Shepherd’s Pie

Some of the shepherd’s pie recipes I’ve seen have potatoes on the bottom as well as the top, like a sweet pie with a filling, but the one I loved only had the potatoes on top. Cutting through the mashed potatoes was like slicing through perfect meringue. That was the trick of it; the mashed were light and rich but held their shape. The meat mixture beneath was somewhere between the reddish brown of burnt sienna and the cool darkness of burnt umber with dabs of orange carrots and green peas and celery mixed throughout. If you’ve got a lead, please use the comments link above to send it to me. In the meantime, you can find me trying to warm up by painting pictures lit with what I can capture of the elusive sun or wrapped up in a quilt looking up the history of this wonderful dish.

Want to see my favorite final recipe for Shepherd’s Pie right now? Click here.

but when it cooled into a rich bar with an intense, head-filling flavor and a substantial crunch but no toughness, I knew for sure. I ate three of them immediately, and then packed the rest up to share with friends not because I’m so generous, but because if they remained in the house, I would have had to eat them all right then and there. Absolutely irresistible. Siren-song irresistible. That’s a warning. In any case, taste testers the next morning confirmed what I already knew — this is The One.

I would be delinquent in my duty as a baker however if I did not tell you that the historic recipe above is full of holes, the kind that only a baker with a combined memory of generations of bakers can fill in. To reach into that legacy, bequeathed to me by a legion of cookie mavens, and get the secrets that make it work along with an updated version (or should I say translation of old-recipe-ese), read on.

What you have basically is a recipe that requires the baker to fill in the details, particularly about types of ingredients, their temperatures, and their handling. An unspoken rule for the freshest, high quality ingredients always applies, as does working by hand when possible since most old baking recipes were made that way. I have a kitchen-aid mixer but I would not use it for this because I saw my Scottish nanny make it by hand and I know that the signature crunch of shortbread is partly a result of a judicious amount of hand-kneading to touch, just enough to give it the right structure, but not so much as to make the dough tough. And more importantly, if you mix by machine you will miss the singular pleasure of having this dough in your hands. The aroma is beautiful and the feel of it is quite lovely — a fragrant, floury, buttery mix that awakens an internal sense of earth and sky and sun and all that’s good that comes from it. Once you make it a few times you will know the texture the dough must have: pliable and firm but with no glue-y feel. If the dough becomes glue-like you have worked it too much. If it is mostly falling apart and dry, you have not worked it enough. Have a go at it and enjoy.

One Badass Scottish Shortbread
adapted from The Neighborhood Cookbook, 1914.
Note: The original recipe instructions and ingredients appear at left in italics, and the update is in parenthesis at right. Also this recipe is weighed, not measured, for accuracy. Invest in a good kitchen scale if you don’t already have one. They are kitchen workhorses that more than pay for themselves over time.)

Old recipe:
1 pound flour (update: 1 pound all-purpose unbleached flour)
one-half pound butter: (update: 2 sticks (1/2 pound) unsalted sweet butter, softened slightly to room temperature but not warm and greasy. This is very important. If the butter is too cold or too hot the recipe will not work. Be diligent about checking the butter until it is malleable but still cool and not shiny.)
six ounces sugar (update: 6 ounces of granulated white sugar.)

Method:
1. Work all together on a board. (update: This means combining all the ingredients at once in a large bowl or on a wooden pastry board. I find a bowl easier because it prevents spillage. Squeeze the dough through your fingers, taking fistfuls at a time. Press the dough into the bottom of the bowl trying to get all of it to stick together. Keep doing this until the dough holds together and picks up the remainder of any dry crumbs in the bottom of the bowl. It will not all come completely together but it will mostly adhere.)
2. When thoroughly mixed, press with the hand into cakes one half-inch thick; cut into shapes. (update: This means pressing the dough into disks, the kind you would roll out flat for cutting with cookie cutters. Alternatively, you can press the mixture into a 9” x 13” pan, flatten it by placing a piece of plastic wrap on top and smoothing over it until it is flat and even, then score it with a sharp knife into bars. This is what I did.)
3. Bake in a slow oven. (update: Bake at 300 degrees F. until the dough is light golden and cooked through, about 30 - 45 minutes. Turn the dough half-way through the baking time to prevent uneven browning. While the cookies are still hot from the oven, use a sharp paring knife to cut through the scored lines. Remove the cookies from the pan with a spatula and cool on a wire rack. Store in an airtight container.)

I said yes because well, there are a lot harder ways to earn a buck, but also this was one assignment where I could take the kids along. 

Among my first stops:  The writing of Ed Levine:  (Pizza:  A Slice of Heaven) and his “Slice/Serious Eats” website (Serious Eats).

In addition to learning (with fascination) all about the depth of pizza--ingredients, history, techniques, and endless discussions about ovens and heat--I was amazed to hear again and again how emotional--almost whacky--people get about the subject, particularly about the pizza places of their youth.  I concluded that pizza in NJ is very much about memory.  There are so many joints here where the pizza is really just okay, but people tell you it’s awesome.  Why?  Well the reason is that it brings back memories. And the pizzamakers--particularly at old beloved taverns--take great pride in never changing a thing to cater to this nostalgia and sense of the past.  I listened with respect and duly noted all this, as an anthropologist might because, well, I wasn’t like that myself.  And I continued to drive around doing my research discovering wonderful out-of-the-way places like Santillo’s (take-out only) in Elizabeth and Grimaldi’s in the back-end of Hoboken.

A big source for my story was one of my Dad’s best friends, Mike D’Amico, who is a lifelong New Jersey Italian American and ardent pizzalogist.  He sent me in the right direction.  And he reminded me of Pizzatown USA in Elmwood Park--still decorated in its original 1958 decor, covered from top to bottom with American flags and red white and blue.  It has become a rather grim stretch of highway since 1958, but Uncle Sam is still up on the roof offering you a pie, ever reassuring the 1950s postwar population that Mussolini is really dead, and Italians can be trusted.  How to describe the inside?  Bizarre.  Totally cool. A bit of a dump....  All of the above.  I hadn’t been there in years.

When I took my family one November night, the pizza was ready in six minutes.  It came out of the oven, bubbling and oozing on the platter—a beautiful thing.  Thin crust, crunchy, light on the cheese and full of tomato sauce. 

The only place to sit was at a communal bench with another family. We settled down, and I stole a sip of my son’s birch beer.  Then a strange thing happened.  Some archeological layers shifted in my brain....  Suddenly, I could see my Dad in the 1970s, slamming the door of his pick up truck, walking up the cement path to our house, past green lawn and maple tree.  Pizzatown box in hand, a white bag of zepoles balanced on top.  The sight of pizza in that childhood life, back then in the era when mothers cooked every night, offered a small burst of joy.  Proust knew what he was talking about with those madeleine’s.  And if you were here with me I’d say that for you with a serious NJ accent. 

Here’s the story in full: NJ Monthly.  http://njmonthly.com/articles/restaurants/searching-for-the-soul-of-jersey-pizza.html