322: Ruth Reichl & Nancy Silverton

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0:31You know, a lot of it has to do with when I was in art history, they call connoisseurship. It's when you're a restaurant critic and you go out to eat, you are mentally comparing that dish to every other version you've ever had.

0:50This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbar.

1:17wide variety of topics. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:29One of our guests tonight is Nancy Silverton. She's a celebrated restaurateur. She's the only chef ever to be awarded both the Outstanding Chef and Outstanding Pastry Chef Awards from the James Beard Foundation. And she's also the author of the fabulous new book, The Cookie That Changed My Life. So good. And we also have a very, a second very special guest tonight. We're joined by Ruth Reichel, the legendary editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine and New York Times best-selling author of numerous books, including Save Me the Plums and the forthcoming novel, The Paris Novel. And our host is Matt Rodbard, founding editor of the award-winning Taste.

2:04So this is our last event of the year. We couldn't be luckier to wrap up the year like this with these guests. So they're going to be in conversation together for about 30, 40 minutes with time afterward for audience questions. And now let's give a very warm welcome to Nancy and Ruth and Matt. Thank you. I just want to say thank you, guests. And first, we're going to have Jamie Oliver here on the 24th of January. So mark your calendars. Hello. Hello. Thank you for coming by. You were just in Italy. You just flew in from Pittsburgh. It means a lot that you made the time. Appreciate it. Pleasure.

2:36What a great book you've written. Oh, thank you. We're going to talk about it. Let's jump into it. So holiday cookie season. How do you judge a holiday cookie? Do you mean is it a Christmas tree shape or what does that mean? No, like for like a cookie box, a swap. We're like in swap mode right now. We're planning. And each Nancy, you first. Okay, so are you saying what in my new book would I say is appropriate? Sure, I love that. Let's go there. Besides all of them? I guess one would think chocolate. Okay. Is that a good start? I think so. Okay, so there's a, I think, a delicious chocolate cookie that is in the book.

3:16I was trying, well, let me just say really quickly that the book was trying to either recreate or create the best of everything in every single category. And some things didn't have a name. So, for instance, Claudia Fleming's Ginger Cake is in that book because who could make a better ginger cake than Claudia Fleming's Ginger Cake? But other ones are original for myself. Those that are ones that everyone knows from a carrot cake to a pineapple upside down cake. But then there is a chocolate cookie that would be called like maybe my favorite ultimate chocolate cookie. So it doesn't have a memorable name, but it has a memorable flavor.

3:58So it's sort of, it's an open face cookie as opposed to a sandwich cookie. but it's a cookie I would describe the bottom kind of in an Oreo kind of flavor palette. And the top is one of those kinds of chewy cookies that kind of are a little bit too sweet and crack. And so because I find them a little too sweet, but I love the texture, I kind of bake them on top of this Oreo cookie base that's kind of bitter. But it is indulgent and it could be a great Christmas cookie. That's the one. Ruth, how would you judge a holiday cookie? I think I need to start by saying I have never been a cookie person.

4:39Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You're just sitting there waiting to say that. Well, no, I mean, this was a real problem when I got to Gourmet because they had for years done a cookie Christmas cover and the first year I didn't want to do it. And everybody had to say to me, you know, this will be a disaster you must do. And over the 10 years that I was there, I really came to understand the joy of cookies. And I would say that looks are really important for Christmas cookies and, you know, and color. I mean, there's a lot about using sprinkles and color. And it's the cookie collections that we did. And one year we did do, because Richard Ferretti, our brilliant design director, one year wanted them to do understated cookies.

5:39And they were actually, they were gorgeous, but I don't think the biggest hit. I mean, we all loved them. You want some sprinkles. Or indulgence. I'll still argue that chocolate still has a place. You know, chocolate is always a winner. Definitely. So, Nancy, this book, remarkable. Remarkable because you blend. But you haven't baked from it yet. I haven't baked from it yet, that's true. I'm more of the words guy when I write and read. I think about head notes and your head notes are fantastic. But as you mentioned, the concept is it's taking this lifetime, 50 years in the industry of baking and figuring out the best version.

6:24Of desserts that most of them I had never made before. Like I never made a lemon bar before. How are you up for this? How are you up for this? This is like a crazy task. Well, you know, I had time. 2021 was a slow year. So I had time. You know, everybody was, you know, baking their way through sourdough bread. And I didn't really feel the need to do that. And so I guess subconsciously I had the need to do something. And this sort of kind of happened. You had a rhythm during this 21-like time. Yeah, but having that time to really focus in, you know, look at lots of times, I think even when we cook, but I know that I'm guilty of it too.

7:03When you're pressured to have come up with, say, 110 plus recipes, sometimes you get to a recipe and you think, you know, that's good enough. And you kind of stop there. But I didn't stop at good enough. I didn't stop until I thought it was the best version that I could possibly make. And sometimes that was, you know, two dozen or more tries. We'll get into the lemon bars. We'll get into the scones. We'll get there. But Ruth, how do you call something the best as an editorial person? Well, you know, a lot of it has to do with when I was in art history, they call connoisseurship. You know, I mean, it's when you're a restaurant critic and you go out to eat, you are mentally comparing that dish to every other version you've ever had.

7:51And I think it's, you know, as a young cook or a young critic, I think it's probably hard to say this is the best that that can be. But when you've been doing it for 50 years, you know, it's pretty easy to go through that memory bank and go, this chocolate cake is maybe half as good. Yeah. What about restaurants? And, you know, restaurants, it's the same thing. You're just, I mean, restaurants are more complicated because you're not just talking about flavor, texture, et cetera. Yeah, you're talking about a night, a performance. You're talking about the whole performance of it. But you do, you have a lot in there to, you know, to judge against.

8:39Right, we'll get to some of your favorites and your not favorites. But Nancy, we all came for that. You can answer that question. But Nancy, let's talk about lemon bars. Let's go there. in the head note you write purist beware which you know shots fired a bit what were you doing with the lemon bar idea and tell us about the lemon bar you landed on is the best well the reason why i said purist beware is that i tried to stick as closely as i could to the original version of something i didn't want to stray too far because that wasn't the intention of the book So I tried to respect the originality of each recipe.

9:20And a lemon bar, as we all know, is a baked lemon custard on usually a cookie dough or a cake. But a dessert that I could never understand the appeal. I thought it was always too sweet. Yes. Um, it, uh, I, I, the look of it when that powdered sugar inevitably melted into the custard as it sat and sweated, you know, that was just really unappealing to me. And then because of the way, because of the, the egginess and the, and the bakedness of it, it always had kind of a sulfury aftertaste. I just, I really, that was, you know, kind of a little bit camouflaged by the overly sweetness of it. Anyway, I hated it.

10:06Not a fan, right? So, questions, you think I liked them? Never, ever, ever. And I didn't grow up with them and they had no sentimentality, nothing to me. But I felt like because of what this book was supposed to be about, it had to have a lemon bar in it. And finally, after so many tries and closing the book to having one, but then realizing a couple weeks later I had to have one, I settled on a compromise between one of my favorite tarts, which is a lemon curd tart, a simple French custard tart that is where the lemon curd is baked in a bowl over a van marie and filled and set. And that was really my compromise, but it's not true lemon.

10:55Yeah, but powder sugar to order. Oh. So instead of powder sugar, yeah, a la minute. I love that. So, and then you get that nice contrast and that white dusting on top, but it doesn't have the chance to melt and sweat into the culture. It's such a good tip, and I feel like most lemon bars are not good. Now that you've like... Agreed. What do you think of lemon bars? Well, you know, at anybody who has listened to the first one of our podcasts, Three Ingredients on Substack, which launched last week. Yeah, shout out. We have a fight about lemons. Oh, we did? I don't even remember. Yeah, about... And Laurier Cho, right?

11:34And yes, the three of us are doing it. And I really love lemons. I mean, my first cookbook, I have an entire chapter on lemons. and I like lemons to be really tart and Nancy is extolling the joy of Meyer lemons which I think are just a ridiculous idea To bake with Meyer? Well, it's a lemon that's crossed with a tart tangerine Why would you want to do that to a poor unsuspective lemon? But I don't have Meyer lemons in the lemon I know, and this tart is it has, it's tart, which I like a lot. It's cool. I would probably add a little more lemon zest myself. Oh, we got notes happening. All right. Let me ask both of you.

12:23This book is about memory. It's about your life, you know, baking 50 years back. You've been working in the kitchen. I'd like to ask you, I've been wondering about this for a while. Is there something that you baked maybe in the 70s or 80s that you just can't achieve anymore? That like it is trapped in time. abstract question. Yeah. So when you say the seventies, you know, I wasn't a child then. I was already a grown person in the seventies, but. Is there like something like in terms of like ingredients back then, maybe they changed over time that you were searching for that's something that maybe you attempted to make, but you just couldn't nail it from that memory back in the day.

13:02You know, there is, there's one, uh, dessert that I used to do at Michael's restaurant. Now this is in 1979. So does that fit into the seventies? You know what? I just threw a decade I made it by a year. And it was something that was so delicious and I can never make it as good as we made it there. And that was the creme brulee tart. And it was not the creme brulee that we know it, that custard baked in a bain marie in the oven, you know, and just set. This was, I guess it was Jimmy Brinkley who was the pastry chef at Michael's. His own version, I think he got it from L 'Hermitage, where it was a deep crust of puff pastry was blind baked in a cake pan, fully baked.

13:51And then it was filled with a creme brulee, the style of it baked on top of the stove until it was the right thickness that when poured into the shell, it set up in the refrigerator. and then he just crumbled brown sugar on top and burnt that. And it was just something that was so craveable. And I remember, not for this book because it wouldn't have fit into the premise, but a few years ago thinking, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to revisit that tart. And I couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. Ruth, is there something trapped in time? But it's trapped in time more about memory than about the ingredients.

14:33um when I first was you know cooking professionally kind of um at the swallow restaurant in Berkeley I would go in um this is like the early 70s and I would bake 12 quiches every morning and people would come in and go what's a cliche oh funny nobody had ever in you know in Berkeley California, nobody had ever heard of a quiche. And they were kind of magical. And we did them, you know, we really, we made really great pie crust and blind baked it. And so you had that really crisp crust and then the joy, another custard. This is the custard conversation. but um the taste of those because they were so unfamiliar and rich and textured and now you know you get a quiche and it's like it's they're frozen a lot of them are well that's because you're calling them a quiche now i think you have to go back to cliche i'd like to have the cliche and maybe it'll be a lot better all right nancy i'm gonna quote you quote from the book i've never really understood the appeal of the traditional British style scones, finding them to be dry, heavy and lacking in flavor.

15:55I figure traditional scones were an acquired taste that I had not acquired. So Nancy, how did you actually figure out to make a scone worthwhile in this book? You know, I, you know, another, and I don't know if in that recipe, I also elaborated, I think the quote may have been longer that what, you know, um, when we think of scones, I think that we think of the American version of a scone, which is really much more like a flaky biscuit. And I couldn't get, I can't get that flavor or that texture kind of out of my mind because that's how I think a scone to be. When I eat a traditional British or Scottish or Irish scone, they just always did seem so dry and hard and you understood why people ate them with jam and with clotted cream, right?

16:49But I wanted to come up with a version that I would even like. Now, I can't say it's my favorite recipe in the book because it's not my favorite recipe. What is your favorite recipe? I'll tell you in a minute. So that I made a version that I liked. I mean, I still, I didn't try to Americanize it. I still, you know, in the end result, it still was kind of dry. But I tried every version that I could find, including lard and all different, you know, butter and no butter and eggs. And I came up with the version that gave me the right color because I don't like, I can't get away from that whiteness of any kind of dessert unless it's a boiled frosting, you know.

17:29But I got, I came up with that one that had color. But I also, I noticed that in cutting in the earlier stages of doing this, when I would cut out the scone and I would bake it and it would have that smooth kind of shape that didn't, that seemed so hard and dry and red that way. And then I would take the scraps and just kind of lump them together and bake them. I noticed that the ones that were lumped together at least visually looked a lot more appealing. And so instead of patting this dough out and cutting it into a circle or a triangle, what I did is I just chopped it into pieces and gently put them together.

18:06And then the way they baked was just very irregular and it did give it a much visually a much better shape. And I did choose to add currants that were soaked in scotch or brandy or rum, whatever alcohol I chose that time, which helped with the flavor. So all in all, I did come up with one that I thought was pleasant. And that's about as far as I can get. That's about as good as best gets for you is pleasant. Okay. I'm going to quote you again. There are a few things in the world that all New Yorkers agree on, but one of those things is that crumb cake should be equal parts cake and crumb okay audience new yorkers hands up equal parts yeah equal parts i mean so that like okay ruth's there okay we got about 30 percent really what's what is the other person so what do we like are we more crumb to cake or why are we more crumb here who likes crumb we have new yorkers in the audience okay all right this wasn't i wasn't meant to, I wasn't trying to pick on you.

19:07Oh, no, no, I understand. Definitely not. But I think that that's, you know, what I was trying to point out is there's a real difference between a New York style crumb cake, that one, and a coffee cake that has streusel on top, is that not only is there the ratio of the crumb to the cake, but also that the crumb on top is really like clods, right? Big hunks of crumb. It's almost like a meal. It's like an extra meal. It's like a bonus, you know? Now, how could you not like that when you say you don't like desserts? Do you like New York cream cake? I own. Now, you're just reminding me. You want to know a flavor I have never had again.

19:49The cookery on 8th Street, when I was a kid, had a cherry on, yeah, no, East. It was University in 8th Street. They had a cherry crumb cake that I would it's like a flavor that's locked in my head that I would give anything to taste again. I'm thinking about this a lot. Like we've got these taste memories that we can't achieve for a lot of reasons. And once we go back to have them and we realize that well the tastes have changed. I think that was really good. So what was it? It had just cherry. It was like sour cherries. It was like a cake with Sour cherries and crumbs on top. And it was wonderful.

20:33And my friend's uncle owned that restaurant. And we used to wait tables there when we were little kids and get paid in cherry crumb cakes. Oh, that's so good. I got to ask you both about brownies. Brownies, to me, are often not great. What makes a brownie memorable? I'll ask you, Nancy, and Ruth will follow. Well, I think you have to define what you like in a brownie, right? Good qualified answer. I like that. Fudgy or cakey? What do you like? Personally, fudgy all the way. Fudgy. I'm not about texture. I'm about the actual density. I found out that I like that texture, that fudgy texture, but it was very difficult to eat too much of until I realized I prefer my fudgy brownie cold out of the refrigerator.

21:20And then I think it's really delicious. You have another thing in the book, which I think is brilliant. I mean, you made me want to make brownies again reading this book, which I never think about making brownies. But, and part of it is texture. So you've got the fudgy bottom, but it really doesn't work unless you've got like a crinkly cakey top. Yeah. And that to me is like what defines a great brownie is when you get both textures. Break through that top layer. Break through that crackle. Yeah, that roof of it. Yeah. Huh. What's your favorite recipe? Let's go there. I think everyone's on the edge of their seats.

21:55for Ruth's original question. It's not necessarily a favorite because, you know, you can't have favorites. However, one that, like, I'm so proud of, like, oh, that's why I'm so smart, is, I think, is the cornbread. And I think I've talked to you about this, right? Have I? No. Oh, okay. So now I didn't grow up eating cornbread and my mother didn't make it and she didn't make food that you would eat along with cornbread. So I'm not a cornbread aficionado. I know a lot of people are. When I've had it in my adult life, I never quite understood it because it wasn't a bread. And all I used to taste in it was the sweetness of, say, honey.

22:37But it never tasted like corn, but maybe it's not supposed to. I know it has cornmeal and maybe it doesn't have the right name. Maybe it should be renamed. But I always felt like it needed to taste like corn. In the last couple books that included a cornbread of mine, I tried to do different things that I thought made it a little better, but I never, I was new in the back of my mind, this isn't perfect yet. So I, you know, I converted to making a cast iron pan, which I loved. I added sage, I added brown butter. Wow. I tried to, plot twist. Yeah. And, but then I thought I tried to add corn, but I thought when you had those whole kernels of corn.

23:16It had that texture of every time you took a bite, you wanted to spit out, you know, whatever that piece was. So instead I used a Japanese corn creamer and I creamed, you know, I creamed the corn, I drained it, knowing as a baker, you can't add all that extra liquid without making your cornbread or a cake too heavy. And so this time I was determined to make a cornbread that tasted like corn. I certainly bought Anson Mill, which is a great cornmeal, fresh cornmeal, you know, the one, the whole grain. So it was, you know, has all the flex of the outside. I did everything like that. And then I almost stooped solo as I bought a can of cream corn from Erwan.

24:00So it had no presorbiters. Oh my gosh, we haven't even gotten there. We're going to get there. I thought that's going to be the answer. You know, that's going to give me the corniness that I think it lacks. So I opened up that can. I looked at it. I couldn't do it. And And so it was like, now what am I going to do? So I thought, you know, I'm going to do what I did before, which is use that Japanese corn creamer and cream my corn, which slashes the kernels, right? And it releases all the milk in them. But this time I'm going to reduce that milk instead of throwing it away. And maybe I'll reduce it by a couple of tablespoons or in half or something like that.

24:33So creamed, strained, poured that liquid in a pan. And as soon as it came up to temperature, it made a pudding because of all the cornstarch in it, right? All the starch in it, it became a pudding. And I'm like, oh, wow. And I tasted it and it was like it's corn. So I chilled it and stirred that back into the cornbread and then baked it. And it was like, wow, this tastes like corn. The texture was not affected by this element. No, because it was thickened. You know, it wasn't. And so that really was like, okay, this is a great recipe. because I don't think everybody here is making that point. Oh, I know, right.

25:13Now can I tell you one other one that I did something a little bit similar, and that was with the carrot cake. A real polarizing dish. Well, I love carrot. You don't like carrot cake? I love it, of course. Do you like carrot cake? You know, it has to have cream cheese frosting and everything like that. I know you're out there who don't like it. Mine did have cream cheese frosting, but I did a brown butter cream cheese frosting, and I think that really added another layer of flavor. but the same thing with carrot cake. Loved it because I love the texture. I love the spice in it. I love the cream cheese but carrot cake never tastes like carrots.

25:46You know, you need that grated carrot. So I kind of said to the few people that were left in the pastry department, actually the one person that was left in the pastry department during 2021 and said, do you have any suggestion on making my carrot cake better? Have you heard of anyone doing anything different? and she was really shy and she barely, you know, probably couldn't really hear her. She had said, well, there was somebody I knew that used to roast their carrots. And I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to try that. And sure enough, I roasted the carrots for this carrot cake. I still grated them because you want to see, you know, the pieces of carrot.

26:25But again, a carrot cake that finally tasted like carrots. So those are the kinds of recipes that I really had fun with in the book. Yeah. Because, you know, you know, so often we just sort of develop our own recipes by just building off of somebody else's and we just don't stop to think of how can we make it better. And the pandemic allowed you to just stop and think. Yeah. Yeah, it really is truly a remarkable book. But those are the, I mean, that's good. Yeah, no, because you went to many sources and you got the time to do that. I highly recommend you all checking it out. A few more questions, we'll take some from the audience.

27:05We haven't really gotten to Italy. I mean, Ruth, you're here because you guys are buddies. You guys are road buddies. You guys go and travel all over the place. And we even share the same room. And sometimes even the same bed. And if you want to know, we're two people who don't move at all at night. The best. It's the partner you want. So let's talk about Italy because you're there quite a bit. You just returned. What's good in Italy right now, Nancy? Life. Yeah, right? Where are you guys going next? What's your next trip together, the two of you? Together? Well, we just came back from Marseille, which was incredible.