Do you have a favorite cookbook author? Someone whose works seems marvelously clever in addition to being totally delicious?
Suzen has one: Sarah Leah Chase. Sarah has written several cookbooks, including this one, Cold‑Weather Cooking from 1990. After 25 years, this book is every bit as pertinent and current as anything you’ll find in the “new” section of your bookstore. After all, in 1990 how many cookbooks had a recipe for Pork and Apricot Empanadas?
In 1980, Sarah moved to Nantucket and opened a food/catering business. Nantucket is a tad remote and to keep her customers inspired, she need to boost the dishes she offered. She had to make them special to the eye and to the palate. Sarah succeeded with magnificence, as you will see in the recipes below. It was that added experience, in having to directly please customers, that must have contributed to ideas like those empanadas and more:
- Asparagus with Mustard Bread Crumbs
- Baby Buckwheat Popovers with Pressed Caviar
- Baked Beans with an Apple Rum Crust
- Crabmeat Casserole
- Cranberry Curd Tartlets
- Pumpkin, Prosciutto, and Parmesan Lasagna
- Smoky Ham Hash
- Onion Soup with Cider and Cheddar Gratin
- Potato Casesar Salad with Sun Dried Tomatoes
- Roasted Pepper and Artichoke Puffs
- Warm Tomato Pie
- Cinammon Onion Marmalade
- Buche de Thanksgiving
There are recipes here inspired from across America and across the oceans: a Southwestern corn chowder and a Polish mushroom and potato soup. But the core of this book is recipes based on New England native ingredients: cranberries, seafood, cider, cheese, tomatoes, and, yes, rum.
There are chapters in the book devoted to late fall recipes, before the cold weather does arrive, and for the spring, when you cannot wait for the cold weather to depart.
In between, you’ll find recipes for appetizers — she was catering, after all — and feasts — two chapters for Thanksgiving, savory and sweet, plus Christmas and eventually Easter. There is a chapter for cold weather breakfasts, one for warm soups, one for seafood, and one — Stormy Weather and Magic Mountains — for slow cooked stews and other treats that take hours to slowly, gently emerge as carbohydrate feasts filling your kitchen with artistic aromas.
Suzen and I think Sarah is a bit of an artist: in these titles for her recipes and in the way each recipes comes forth with a serious extra helping of flavor. Take those baked beans for example. Baked beans by themselves can be deep as the ocean in texture and flavor. But who would think of adding an apple crust, let alone an apple rum crust.
Cold-Weather Cooking has over 300 recipes. Personally I think the book is mistitled. It really is cold-weather comfort. Open its pages, try its suggestions, and comfort is surely what you will discover.