"Silver Palate," you seasoned my youth

"The Silver Palate Cookbook," now celebrating 25 years, changed the way my family ate -- and fueled my teenage dreams about an adulthood full of bounty.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Cooking, Recipes, Rebecca Traister, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

May 8, 2007 | Some of us have great stories. Pretty stories, that take place at lakes, with boats and friends, and noodle salad ... a lot of people, that's their story. Good times, noodle salad. -- Jack Nicholson, "As Good as It Gets"

I remember that the first time I heard Jack Nicholson speak that line in "As Good as It Gets," I instantly knew what kind of people he was describing. He was talking about people who cooked from "The Silver Palate Cookbook."

My family was among their number. And we did have good times -- though lighter on the lakes and boats than the revelers in Jack's imagination. We also literally had "Good Times": second in the trilogy of cookbooks, along with "The Silver Palate" and "The New Basics" by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins.

Rosso and Lukins opened a gourmet take-away shop, the Silver Palate, on New York's Upper West Side in 1977 and published their cookbook by the same name in 1982. They are now celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication with a spiffy new edition, newly studded with shiny still-life photographs of their multicolored, veggie-heavy terrines, purees, pastas and roasts.

Just as Alice Waters' bringing sun-warmed greens in from her garden and plating them for Chez Panisse diners sent reverberations through the professional culinary world that we still feel every time we eat a baby lettuce, so Rosso and Lukins' cozily illustrated recipes for pasta sauce Raphael and chocolate hazelnut cake ("the best chocolate cake in the universe") changed the life of the American home cook.

In my house, it helped change the way we ate, and it just may have played a part in saving my family from early cardiac catastrophe. My mother was always a great cook, and on the weekends would make meals from Julia Child and Marcella Hazan; she made curries and stroganoffs, and dove into her own mother's potato farm repertoire for roasts and casseroles. But on work nights, it was breaded chicken or lamb chops. Having grown up on a farm, she understood a fresh vegetable, but working them into a quick meal was not always possible. Carrot sticks, a baked potato, mandarin oranges from a can: These sometimes had to suffice.

"The Silver Palate" was not about canned food. It was also not Mollie Katzen's vegetarian "Moosewood Cookbook," which had been published five years before "The Silver Palate," to great acclaim, but to my young palate was notable for the myriad ways in which it could successfully make everything taste like herbed cardboard. "The Silver Palate" was not vegetarian, or particularly healthy, but it did insist on "fresh, seasonal ingredients, no shortcuts, ever."

"It encouraged me to make different kinds of food," my mom says now. "Before that, my idea of how to get home at 5 and put a meal on the table was to broil a steak or a burger and boil a vegetable. On a weekend I could spend three hours making something, and that was the only time we'd ever eat anything interesting until we got 'The Silver Palate.' It allowed me to do creative things with vegetables and use less meat in a realistic amount of time."

She went on, "And it's where you really learned to cook. Because it was simple enough for a beginning cook. You certainly didn't learn out of Julia Child or any of the books I was using for really good food before 'The Silver Palate' came along."

I did learn to cook from "The Silver Palate." I became obsessed with cooking as a preteen, and thumbing through the cookbook now brings back the first ways in which I ever considered ingredients and spices and textures and flavors. It also reminds me of how my ideas about cooking -- an adult pursuit -- corresponded to my ideas about what adult life might be like.

"The Silver Palate" wasn't just about the ingredients. It was about a kind of life, a life that was comfortable and full of bounty. Rosso and Lukins didn't just print recipes, they composed menus of their food, suggesting dishes for a "country weekend lunch," or a "Mediterranean supper menu." Sometimes they pointed out that a given recipe could be served warm or cold, perfect for picnics. A note about Julee's original sour cream coffee cake read, "This elegant cake is just so scrumptious served to a large brunch party, and it's perfect, too, with late-afternoon coffee and a good book." Country weekends! Picnics! Brunches! Late-afternoon coffees and good books! With "The Silver Palate" in hand, I felt confident that I was embarking on an adulthood that would contain, as Rosso and Lukins might (and did) put it, "pesto possibilities!"

I surely didn't realize that I was, of course, fantasizing about class. I understand now that this was a book of recipes that allowed harried middle-class families to wean themselves from the Shake 'N Bake pouch and eat more like wealthy people. This kind of food -- the noodle salads and cold soups and skewered shrimp -- was more urbane and elegant than what we'd been eating in suburban Philadelphia. It's not that it was simply "rich people's food"; though there was a whole chapter on caviar, there were also soda breads and potato salads. It's just that Rosso and Lukins had begun to take labor-intensive methods and high-quality ingredients consumed by fancier people than we and translate them from the original "unattainable" into the modern "practical." Not to mention tasty.

Next page: It will always speak to me of the past, of my mother and my childhood home