Ovenly

OVENLY

Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin

www.harlequinbooks.com.au

CONTENTS

MY HISTORY, MY RECIPES

A REFUGE IN THE KITCHEN

INTRODUCTION

Essential Tools & Ingredients

Scones & Biscuits

Quick Breads & Coffee Cakes

Muffins

Cookies & Shortbreads

Pies & Tarts

Brownies & Bars

Cakes & Cupcakes

Baking for the Holidays

Fillings, Frostings & Sauces

Bar Snacks

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

MY HISTORY, MY RECIPES

A Preface by Erin

During my childhood in suburban Chicago, I spent countless hours in the kitchen with my grandmother and mother—Granny cooking from memory and Mom cooking mostly (and always exactly) from her massive collection of recipe clippings.

Mom wasn’t one to purchase expensive hardcovers, but she did fill our home with a steady supply of cooking magazines. We had subscriptions to Country Living, Cooking Light and her favorite, Betty Crocker. Together, we were always trying out something new. There were a lot of successes (like the quintessentially Midwestern seven-layer cookie bar, which I remember making for the first time and still make today) and others…not so much. (I can still recall the rubbery texture and cardboard taste of a fat-free cheese and frozen-spinach casserole Mom and I whipped up during one of my parents’ dieting phases.)

To my mother’s credit, she also kept a trove of handwritten recipes in the drawer of a bright royal-blue kitchen wall cabinet. Each time she or my granny found success with a new dish, they would inscribe it (or, in my grandma’s case, type it) twice on two separate ruled index cards—one for themselves and one for the other. The formulas came from everywhere—cooking shows, chef appearances on the local news, friends, the old country, library books and even those Betty Crocker magazines. Mom and Granny communicated with each other through these recipes, and as a little kid, I tried to insert myself into that special conversation. As my brothers, Seth and Dan, intensely sorted through their respective collections of coins and baseball cards, I pawed through those recipes—picking out all the dishes I thought sounded interesting, narrowing them down into a small stack, and running to my mom when I found something particularly good. That small stuffed cabinet drawer was the treasure chest of my childhood, full of unexplored possibilities.

My mom continues this handwritten tradition: almost weekly I receive a magazine clipping or a neatly printed three-by-five card, reliably accompanied by brief messages in her perfect schoolteacher script. There’s dark chocolate in this recipe. You love that! or I made this last weekend. Delicious! Dad says you have to make it at Ovenly! or "I ripped this out of a Bon Appétit sitting in the doctor’s office. Don’t tell anyone!" I add those recipes to my own kitchen cabinet drawer of culinary wonders.

When Granny passed away and I inherited her painstakingly organized recipes, I discovered that she was trading not only with her daughter, but also with her close circle of chatty and boisterous lady friends. There were article clippings from magazines and newspapers, including ones featuring Nancy Reagan’s Famous Brownies; banquet-size (and outdated dishes) like chicken à la king for one hundred people; and instructions on how to make walnut kiffel, with additional notes written in some blend of English, Hungarian and German. Granny’s cards were not just about the food of a certain time, but also about relationships, culture and tradition. They are a homemade slice of my grandma’s rich history, and a way for me to keep her with me always.

One of Granny’s recipe boxes sits next to me as I type this preface, the words Menu Maker pressed into the green plastic lid. As I rummage through her cards for the millionth time, I vividly recall the tang and crunchiness of the broiled pimento-olive toast that she (and Mom) made for every social gathering, the feeling of her pineapple cheesecake melting on my tongue—fluffy and sweet—and the buttery flakiness of her apricot kolacky, dusted with confectioners’ sugar. These cards—along with my own collection of handwritten notes, cookbook scribbles and magazine clippings, and my Recipes to Try digital folder that I share with Agatha—are more than a collection of weights and measurements and oven temperatures. They are a chronicle of the flavors of my youth. I can tie each of those delicious recollections to those sweet and savory moments of my own slices of history…my middle school graduation, a road trip to a Phish concert (yes, I was that teenager), the first time I made a boy dinner and the family gathering following my granny’s funeral.

Unlike my inheritance of handwritten gems, the first cookbook I ever owned was, in appearance, unremarkable. It was a thin publication with four-color photos titled something like Oriental Cuisine, sold alongside woks and rice steamers in a now closed department store whose name I can’t recall. When we were only seven or eight years old, my brother Dan (just a year and a half my senior) and I were totally obsessed with Martin Yan’s long-running PBS series, Yan Can Cook. During each beloved episode, I would imagine that I was Chef Yan’s sous-chef—expertly smashing make-believe garlic cloves into a gooey paste with my pretend Ginsu knife, and deftly chopping the tails off of phantom shrimp with a swiftness and dexterity that I have never actually possessed. (I’m a total klutz. Ask Agatha about the time I spilled ten pounds of tiny flaxseeds all over her kitchen floor or when I burned my entire right hand with boiling sticky caramel.) My mother rewarded my enthusiasm for Mr. Yan’s Chinese dishes with both the Chinese cookbook and a shiny new wok. (Dan probably got a new Transformers or Walter Payton T-shirt.) I was pumped.

Properly equipped, I began my first independent culinary experiment: beef stir-fry. Though my mom supervised—cutting things when they needed to be cut, watching closely as I coated meat in corn starch for frying, and reminding me to be careful as I steamed the rice on the stove while standing on a stool—she let me make the meal almost entirely on my own. When dinner was ready, I served it to my family and eagerly watched them clean their plates and then ask for seconds. Dan and Seth likely emitted some sort of gastric approval. They liked it! My confidence grew as I tinkered more and more, and as I did, I became more and more food obsessed. A wacky quality for a kid in the 1980s.

Those were the days when being a foodie wasn’t a pop culture thing. While my brothers were playing T-ball down the street or practicing WWF-inspired wrestling moves on one another, and my girlfriends were making up dances to the newest New Kids on the Block videos (I thought Joey McIntyre was just the dreamiest, but second only to my inexplicable childhood crush on Rod Stewart), my idea of a good time was hovering around my friends’ kitchens. Across the tracks at Sarah Gorajski’s house, I pestered her father for tips as he prepared deep-fried soft-shell crabs. A few more blocks away, at Dana Lord’s house, I taste tested her mom’s scharole—a spicy, brothy and herby escarole soup—and came home begging my mom to call Dana’s mother so we could make it on our own. And my favorite was going to Granny’s to help bake yellow cake with chocolate icing, date cookies or Chocolate Cheesecake with Sour Cream Topping (see recipe).

As I matured, so did my palate and my sweet tooth. When I was a preteen, I experimented with creating the perfect brownie (my strategy was to use as much chocolate and butter as possible). When I became a vegetarian in high school, I paged through Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook so often that the cover fell off. (That book was the inspiration for Ovenly’s Whole Wheat Banana Bread [see recipe]). At the University of Wisconsin, you could find me on Library Mall, reading about perfect pie crusts à la Rose Levy Beranbaum (whose recipe served as muse for our Pâte Brisée pastry dough [see recipe]). Even as I was busy pursuing my master’s in arts management, I was challenging myself to concoct the best possible vegan chocolate chip cookie (see recipe), which, oddly enough, ended up being the world’s perfect chocolate chip cookie. Period.

But at the age of twenty-six, I had not yet ventured into food as a real profession. At some point, I had deliberated about going to pastry school and had dabbled in blog writing, but I felt pressured to pursue a more traditional career, so I entered a graduate program instead. Once I finished, I continued to eschew any culinary aspirations and found a safe and secure position as the executive director of a small nonprofit arts center near Chicago—the perfect job for someone my age with my degree. But my heart wasn’t in it, and it wasn’t long before I was bored out of my mind and relegated to only dreaming of being a chef.

Finally, one night after a gridlocked commute home from work on the Eisenhower Expressway, I pulled out that Menu Maker box one more time. I reached for it to look for dessert inspiration, but looking back, I think I was searching for answers to the questions, What should I do with my life, and what will make me happy? A lightbulb went off.

We’ve heard it said a million times that you are what you eat. But right then I had the epiphany that I am what I cook. My one true, indefatigable passion was cooking and baking. More than from anything else, I found joy in my creative experiences in the kitchen, from the pleasure on friends’ faces when I fed them a yummy meal, from the miraculous metamorphosis of a few simple ingredients into something beautiful, shareable and delicious. I was suffering behind my desk. I had to change the status quo.

The transition wasn’t swift by any means. For months, I hemmed and hawed as I gathered the courage to bid farewell to my go-getting job, to my boyfriend and dear friends, to my family and the Midwestern culture and geography that had swaddled and shaped me. Saying goodbye was scary, but I had to let go of all that was familiar in order to say hello to the gritty, chaotic, thrilling and inspiring test kitchen that is New York City. Here, I finally took the risk to embrace my dreams.

Though I would not meet Agatha for another two years, and though Ovenly would not come to be for another three, the move motivated me, and I seriously began to hash out business ideas (and I had about a million of them). Culinary tinkerers—bloggers like Deb Perelman, professionally trained chefs like Claudia Fleming, TV personalities like Martin Yan and especially home cooks like Mom and Granny—were my inspiration. They were funny, thorough, smart, demanding and always encouraging. They fueled my passion, gave me opportunities to experiment, and ultimately provided me with the courage to take a risk and pursue my true love. They were my teachers. Ovenly and this book have come to be largely because of them.

I hope, if anything, that in writing this book, Agatha and I provide some of the same inspiration for you. And, please, feel free to write our recipes down on index cards and send them on to your loved ones. We would be honored.

A REFUGE IN THE KITCHEN

A Preface by Agatha

As the daughter of two Polish immigrants who met in a small industrial city in Connecticut, I was raised bilingual, speaking Polish at home and English everywhere else. My family ate traditional Eastern European dishes, including liverwurst, headcheese and tripe, at every meal. Believe it or not, I loved it all.

My parents were quite cunning; they never told me what these foods actually were until I was already hooked, thus inadvertently (or deliberately) raising me to be an adventurous eater from the time I was tiny. Thanks to their dinner table sleight of hand, I proudly enjoy those foods to this day. Not many people in the world can claim to be a headcheese aficionado.

Aside from consuming the neglected parts of farm animals, some of my fondest memories of food go back to weekend visits to my babcia’s house in New Haven, Connecticut. It was a quiet forty-five-minute drive there from our house, but it always felt like an eternity. She maintained a giant, messy garden that mesmerized me. Each visit, immediately upon arrival, I would dive right into the tangled green mess, in search of edible treasures. A short time later, I would emerge bare bellied with a stretched-out T-shirt full of juicy strawberries, perfectly ripe gooseberries and tart red currants, which I loved to pinch until they popped. Whatever fruit I could resist eating went into the sweets we baked that day. Currants have held a special place in my heart since then and eventually became the inspiration for Ovenly’s Currant Rosemary Scones (see recipe).

I never ceased to be amazed by the sheer volume of desserts that my grandmother was capable of whipping up in a day’s time. She baked for any occasion or no occasion at all. Her table was permanently set with my favorites: airy cake layered with dense, wet poppy seeds; lightly fried pączki filled with homemade prune jam; and a simple buttery apple cake (all of which have inspired our coffee cake variations [see recipe]). At first glance, it always seemed to be an insurmountable feast. Yet my family and I always found a way to devour every last morsel, often when a dish was still steaming from the oven. I suspect that this was around the time I developed the bad habit of tasting baked goods straight out of the oven and still blazing hot; my stomach is grateful, but my tongue has repeatedly suffered the consequences.

Though my grandmother’s kitchen barely fit the two of us at one time, she always invited me to squeeze in next to her. Her stoic nature left no room for small talk, only concentrated yet seemingly effortless work. Her hands moved quickly and rhythmically. I studied her, carefully counting the number of times she stirred a batter, analyzing the pressure and method she used to pat down a mound of sticky, wet dough, or her technique for cracking an egg. I don’t remember seeing any recipes or proper measuring tools; everything was measured by eye and recalled from memory. This was how I learned my first recipes—by memorizing them, never writing them down.

During my childhood, my mother’s mental health deteriorated. After years of struggle, my parents eventually separated and my father bravely took on the role of sole caretaker of my younger brother and me. I don’t think my father had much choice at the time, but he did so without any hesitation, for which I will always be grateful. So at fourteen, I became the woman of the house. I gave up, at least partially, my short-lived career as a boy-crazy teenager and assumed adult responsibilities, like bossing my brother around, organizing our spice cabinets and attempting to re-create meals that I had watched my parents make when I was younger. Rushing home from school to prepare gourmet family dinners before my dad