Cooking for Christmas

Much of my food planning, purchasing, and preparing over the past weeks was in connection with Christmas. The menu I’d chosen for Christmas Day dinner turned out to be more ambitious than I’d realized. Since much of its work couldn’t be done in advance, Tom and I both had an exceedingly busy day in the kitchen!
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Here are the cocktail snacks we served with champagne: savory salame-and-cheese puffs, tiny toasts topped with beef tartare seasoned with truffled salt, prosciutto-wrapped truffled grissini, and cashews that had been coated with salted truffle juice.
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All that truffle presence was due to a sumptuous gift box of truffled products we received this year – an unprecedented pleasure we were happy to share with dinner guests. (Astonishingly, the box also included a whole, two-inch, fresh white truffle. But that’s a story for another day.)
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Our first course at the dinner table was a pair of cotechino sausages in pastry crust. The sausages had to be cooked, cooled, placed on rolled-out mustard-smeared dough, wrapped, decorated, and baked. I hasten to say they tasted a lot better than they look here.
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The pastry pretty much shattered when sliced for serving. But the cotechino – imported and authentically gelatinous – was luscious, especially accompanied by the sweet-sharp mustard fruits of mostarda di Cremona.
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Our main course was an eight-pound capon, roasted with an elaborate stuffing of apples, pears, prunes, chestnuts, walnuts, ground veal, pancetta, and cognac. It had to be basted numerous times during its lengthy cooking, which eventually contributed to a good, rich gravy. My hasty photograph doesn’t do it justice: the accursed bird kept refusing to come out of its deep roasting pan. It took three of us to finally muscle it out, during which one whole leg bone pulled off.
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Happily, the capon wasn’t overcooked: I had feared for it, but both the dark and the light meat were tender and juicy, the browned skin satisfyingly crisp. Butter-browned boiled potatoes and sauteed green beans made nice foils for the fowl.
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Next came the cheese course. As the photo shows, the diners had already started in on the selection. Clockwise from top, Chabichoux (French, goat), Fromage d’Affinois (French, cow), Ewephoria (American, sheep), and Chiriboga Blue (German, cow).

 

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Dessert was a beautiful lemon tart made and brought by one of our guests. Delicious! And totally refreshing after all the rich, buttery food that had preceded it.

 

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To my chagrin, I forgot to put a plate of my own Christmas cookies on the table with dessert. I did send the guests home with some, though. Here’s what the cookie plate would have looked like.

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As I said at first, this was an unusually labor-intensive dinner to make, even for as special an occasion as Christmas. But, while exhausting, it was a labor of love, and a fine way to finish out this year’s culinary adventures. Here’s to more love and less labor in 2023!

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A Fabulous Large Gougère

If you mention gougère these days, culinarily inclined people are likely to think of bite-sized cheese puffs. These small, savory cousins of eclairs and profiteroles are charming to serve with aperitifs (and I do), but the real glory of gougère shines forth in a big, golden, shaggy, crunchy, fragrant, deliciously cheesy pastry.

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Gorgeous, isn’t it? And that one is not even quite full-sized. The recipe I use is practically an heirloom. It was given to me decades ago by a friend at work, who would occasionally bring one of his homemade gougères to casual meetings of the junior staff. Andrew was a brilliant, witty guy, and when we finally persuaded him to give us his recipe, it turned out to be a two-page masterpiece of jaunty prose.

Preparing the choux paste base for gougère is often considered complex and tricky, but Andrew’s recipe makes it seem easy – and it has always worked fine for me. Here’s a short version of the procedure.

In a saucepan, melt butter with water, salt and pepper.
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When it comes to a boil, turn off the heat, dump in all the flour at once, and stir rapidly until the mixture turns into a ball of dough and cleans the side of the pan.
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Add eggs, one at a time, stirring vigorously until the egg is thoroughly combined into the mixture.
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Stir in diced cheese; by rough spoonfuls transfer the mixture to a buttered pie dish that has been previously heated in the oven; sprinkle more diced cheese over the surface.
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Bake at 450° for 35 to 45 minutes until, to quote Andrew, “Your eyes and nose will tell you when it’s done.”

And once it’s done, the only problem is holding off long enough to prevent scalding your mouth when you take the first forkful. Ambrosia! Here’s another view of it.

 

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And now, as a special gift to my readers, here’s an image of the ancient, battered, original document from which I’ve been making fabulous gougères for all these many years. Thank you, Andrew, wherever you are!
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Cheese and Onion Pudding

Officially we’re well into Spring, but it doesn’t always feel like it. On one raw, wet morning lately, I had an urge to make a warm, comforting dish for our lunch. I had a recipe in mind called Cheese and Onion Pudding, which I’d seen in The Greens Cook Book. Normally I don’t find “pudding” an attractive name for dishes other than desserts, but this one seemed interesting.

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For a half recipe, to serve two, I was to peel and slice ¾ pound of yellow onions. Clearly, you’ve got to like onions for this dish! We do. The ones I had on hand were mostly red, but I didn’t think they would hurt the dish.

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I tossed them in two tablespoons of butter in a skillet, sprinkled on salt and dried thyme, and let them cook very slowly, stirring frequently, for 30 minutes, until they were very soft.
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Meanwhile I was to beat an egg with half a cup of milk or light cream. What I had in the refrigerator was heavy cream. Undaunted, I measured out a scant cup of it and made up the difference with water, to lighten it a bit. My egg turned out to be a double-yolker, which I thought would probably be all to the good. I finished the batter by beating in two tablespoons of flour and seasoning the mixture with salt, pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg.
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When the onions were ready, I stirred them into the batter along with three generous tablespoons of grated gruyère.
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To bake the pudding, I had the choice of a single pie plate or individual gratin dishes. I chose the latter, topping each dish with a little more grated cheese. They bubbled away merrily in a 400° oven. The recipe said they’d take only 30 minutes, but at that point my puddings were still very wet in the centers. They needed 45 minutes to firm up. (Could that have been due to my red onions, the extra egg yolk, or the heavy cream? I wouldn’t have thought so.)
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Though nothing extraordinary, the little puddings made a pleasant enough – and welcomely warm – lunch. You could think of them as crustless onion quiches.
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One day I may try the recipe again with the exact ingredients called for, and see if the result is any different. Or else, since both Tom and I felt the puddings would have liked more cheese presence, maybe I’ll try it with a more assertive cheese than gruyère, or simply more of it.

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Roman Farm-style Eggs

Uova alla contadina is the oddest little recipe I may ever have come across – but a good one. While it translates as farm-style eggs, a more descriptive name would be eggs poached in molten mozzarella.

The recipe is from Le Ricette della mia Cucina Romana, one of a series of small cookbooks on the regions of Italy that I’ve acquired on trips there. I’ve found all the books useful and reliable, but this dish just didn’t seem Roman to me. However, checking in my other Roman cookbooks, I found one had essentially the same recipe made with provatura, which is a traditional cheese of Lazio, Rome’s province, and is similar to mozzarella but a bit stronger. Then, looking under the name uova alla provatura, I found many recipes for it on the Web. I’m sure this is real home and country cooking: I’ve never seen it on a restaurant menu anywhere.

It’s a simple enough preparation. For a small lunch for two it took only 2 eggs, 3½ ounces of mozzarella, 3 tablespoons of butter, and 1 ounce of freshly grated parmigiano.

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And simple cooking, too. The first step was to melt the butter in a skillet.
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Next, add the mozzarella, diced, and stir constantly to melt it too.
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As soon as the combination is fully liquid, scrape two shallow depressions in the cheese puddle and slip in the eggs.
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Sprinkle the grated parmigiano on and around the egg whites, along with salt and pepper.
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All this bubbled gently along over low heat while I kept nudging the edges of the mixture to be sure the cheese wasn’t sticking. In fact, enough of the melted butter coated the bottom of the pan to keep everything moving freely. When the whites had firmed up and become opaque, I slid half of the pan contents onto each of two plates and served them.
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While that lunch was small in quantity, it was rich and filling. All those butterfats! The texture of the egg white and cheese blend seemed a little strange – and you had to eat quickly before the mozzarella began to resolidify – but the yolks made a perfect sauce.

We could see that, especially if you had a farm with chickens and cows (or better, water buffalo!), this would be a very handy dish for a quick bite to eat. It would also be fine served with or on a thick slice of country bread. I’d love to try the recipe with provatura, but I can’t remember ever seeing that cheese in this country. The inventiveness of Italian cooks with few and simple ingredients is just amazing.

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American Holiday, American Dinner

We celebrated Independence Day this year by having good friends over for an American dinner. This was a bit of a menu challenge, since my palate, my pantry, and my parties mostly tend toward Italian and French. But I dug into my recipe collection and came up with an all-American lineup, while Tom dug into his wine storage for American wines.

We started modestly in the living room with aperitifs of Gruet brut, a champagne-method sparkling wine from New Mexico, with cocktail peanuts, cheese straws, and pickled herring to nibble on. I made the cheese straws with New York State cheddar, and the little tidbits of herring in mustard sauce were from Russ & Daughters on Houston Street, one of Manhattan’s many noted immigrant success stories.
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At table, our first course was a New Orleans favorite, Crabmeat Maison as served in Galatoire’s restaurant. I’ve written here before about making this luscious preparation for Atlantic blue-claw crabmeat. This day it paired beautifully with a 2016 Chenin Blanc from Paumanok Vineyards on Long Island.
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From there we moved to a rolled rib roast of beautifully rare beef, sourced from Ottomanelli’s of Bleecker Street, one more noted Manhattan immigrant success. This delicious centerpiece was accompanied by picnic-style vegetables: first-of-the-summer corn on the cob, new potato salad (I’ve written here about this too), a colorful heirloom tomato salad; and an ever-reliable three-bean salad, with black beans, kidneys, and chickpeas. The corn, potatoes, and tomatoes were from local farmers at my greenmarket. Our wine was a fine 2010 Petite sirah from California’s Ridge Vineyards.
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Even our cheese board held only US cheeses: Leonora, a goat; Harbison, a soft-ripening cow; Grayson, another cow; and one called Simply Sheep. All but the Grayson were new to us, and all were very good. With them we drank another excellent Ridge wine: 2010 Geyserville. (Tom has written about all these wines in his blog.)
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We concluded with small strawberry shortcakes, that quintessentially American summer dessert. Again, I’ve written about this classic recipe from the American Cooking volume of the Time-Life Foods of the World series. They were local strawberries, of course. This particular batch came out quite messy looking, but they tasted perfectly good.
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All that definitely made a Glorious Fourth dinner. For the final aspect of the patriotic theme, our evening’s music program was also all-American. The guests arrived to the tune of John Philip Sousa marches, and when they were all played, we listened to quiet jazz by Teddy Wilson, who, in Tom’s opinion, probably has the lightest touch of any jazz pianist ever.

Expressing patriotism is a tricky business these days, but culinary patriotism can win all available hearts, minds, and stomachs.

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A Delicious Dinner of Near Misses

There’s a rough, chunky Italian cookie that’s known as brutti ma buoni – ugly but good. At a dinner party of ours last week, the principal dishes all turned out that way: brutti ma buoni. It was one of those days when everything you touch tries to go wrong, and only luck kept the meal from being a disaster. This was the menu:

Mozzarella in Carozza
Spaghetti all’Amatriciana
Stuffed and Rolled Flank Steak
Sauteed Swiss Chard
Assorted Cheeses
Fig and Almond Crostata

I can’t blame unfamiliarity with these dishes, because I’d made them all before; most were even from Tom’s and my own recipes. Mercifully, Vicky and John, our guests for that evening, are good sports as well as adventurous eaters, so they were unperturbed by the appearance of their plates.

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The first setback was the antipasto, my mozzarella in carozza.

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This should have been a good-looking dish, as well as a delicious one. It’s made with slices of bread and slices of mozzarella, floured, egged, pressed together, and fried in olive oil. I’ve made this successfully for years (even wrote about it here once), but this time the egged bread tried to fall apart, and the mozzarella broke through its supposed-to-be-golden crust. Though it didn’t look at all appetizing, it still tasted much as it ought, and we all ate it happily enough, along with a little sauce of anchovy, butter, and cream.
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The spaghetti all’amatriciana also was from one of my recipes, this one in La Tavola Italiana.

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The only thing wrong with the pasta this evening was that the classic recipe uses bucatini, not spaghetti, and I only discovered that I didn’t have enough bucatini for four when it was too late to run out and buy more. Though very plain-looking, the dish tasted especially good because the tomato sauce was enriched by a particularly flavorful artisan variety of guanciale (air-cured pork jowl) that we’d smuggled in (shh!) from our last trip to Rome.
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But then came the stuffed flank steak: braciolone alla napoletana, yet another recipe from La Tavola Italiana. To get the full effect of this near-disaster requires several illustrations.

The flank steak, butterflied by our butcher

 

The stuffing ingredients: prosciutto ground together with parsley and garlic, plus golden raisins, pine nuts, breadcrumbs, an egg, and grated pecorino romano

 

The flank steak trimmed and spread with the stuffing

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Now, here was the first problem: Which way should I roll that meat? Starting at the short side would have made a great blimp of a cylinder, with many opportunities for the filling to leak out during the cooking. So I rolled from the long side, making a long skinny tube.
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The size of it presented the second problem: Do I have a pot that will hold a 14-inch long roll? It had to be my ancient, rarely used 13-quart Creuset Dutch oven. (I could hardly lift the 21-pound monster out of its place in the bottom of a kitchen cabinet.)

Starting to brown the roll, along with chopped onion, carrot, and celery

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I’d placed the roll in the pot seam-side down, hoping it would seal. Nope! What it did was spread open as far as it could around the strings, as the meat shrank during the cooking. With the stuffing exposed that way, I didn’t dare turn the roll at all for the hour of slow, gentle cooking it would need. So I poured in white wine and diluted tomato paste, covered the pot, and looked in every 15 minutes to baste the meat with the juices and be sure it wasn’t sticking to the pot.

When fully cooked, the roll was definitely brutti.
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Maneuvering the meat out of that deep pot onto a cutting board without its breaking apart was a little tricky but we did it. And despite my fears, when I cut off the strings it stayed intact. In fact, it divided into not-bad-looking thick chunks for serving.

And if I do say so myself, the beef and its stuffing were both delicious: genuinely buoni.
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In retrospect, I can see it was a mistake to spread the stuffing all over the butterflied steak. In previous (forgotten, evidently) cases, I must have mounded the stuffing in the center and closed the meat over it, with enough overlap to ensure the stuffing stayed covered. I’d better annotate my recipe to that effect, to avoid imperiling future dinners.

The cheese tray, requiring no cooking or manipulation, was safely beyond my ability to harm it, but my dessert, the fig and almond tart, was one more barely averted disaster. I’ll save the rest of that story for my next post.

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Gratineed Ham Crêpes

I’m an inveterate list-maker. Besides shopping lists and to-do lists, I keep lists of foods in the freezer and bottles in the wine closet. For dinner parties I list the timing of every step in the final cooking and serving. And tucked into many of my cookbooks are lists of recipes I want to try some day. The day just came for one of those.

Today’s dish is from my list for Raymond Oliver’s La Cuisine: gratineed ham crêpes. The filling sounded tasty, the creamy sauce was made with an unusual technique, and the final gratin was also unusual. His separate recipe for making the crêpes themselves didn’t attract me, but I could work with the Julia Child crêpe recipe I’ve always relied on. So on to the attempt.

One day in advance, I put together the crêpe batter – mixing flour, salt, milk, water, eggs, and melted butter in my old blender. Crêpes are about the only things I still use a blender for: I’ve found that the food processor can leave lumps. The batter needs at least two hours of chilling, but it’s perfectly happy to sit in the refrigerator overnight.

Next day, feeling quite professional, I assembled my batterie de cuisine on top of the stove: two crêpe pans, a little dish of oil and a brush to grease them with, a plate to receive the cooked crêpes, the blender jar of batter, a quarter-cup measure to dip it out with, and a little bowl to hold the wet cup. All was set up for fast, efficient cooking of two crêpes at a time.
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Pride goeth before a fall! It had been too long since I’d last used those crêpe pans. They’d lost their seasoning, so when I poured in the first batter it instantly cemented itself to the pans, even though I’d greased them. It had to be scraped off in bits – which didn’t do the pans any good.
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Chastened, I selected the less-bad-looking pan, scrubbed it with salt, oil, and paper towels, re-seasoned it as well as I could at the moment, and resumed cooking my crêpes – slowly and carefully, with just the one pan. They gave no further trouble, thank goodness.
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That taken care of, I could go on to make the sauce, while Tom minced half a cup of good smoked ham, shredded half a cup of gruyère, and beat an egg yolk with two tablespoons of heavy cream.
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The sauce started as essentially a bechamel, but made differently from the way I’m familiar with. First, I had to brown the mixture of butter and flour, rather than letting it foam along without browning. Then the milk to be added had to be lukewarm, not boiling. Third, after additions of nutmeg and cayenne it had to cook for 10 minutes, which is a longer time than I’m used to, before being enriched with the egg yolk-cream mixture.
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I set part of the sauce aside for topping the filled crêpes and mixed all the ham and most of the gruyère into the rest of the sauce. I remembered to lay out the crêpes ugly side up, so when rolled they’d show their better sides. It seemed like very little filling.
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I laid the rolled crêpes in a buttered baking dish and topped them with the remaining sauce, thinned out a little with cream, the rest of the grated gruyère, dots of butter, and – what for me was another unusual feature – fine dry bread crumbs.
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The dish baked for 15 minutes at 400°. It came out looking quite nice, except that the butter had made little puddles rather than spreading out. I guess my dots were too big. No harm, though.
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The crêpes were excellent. Richly flavorful, despite the modest amount of filling; though Tom would have liked a stronger ham presence. The texture of the dish was one of its best features: soft in the center but pleasantly crunchy on top from the breadcrumb gratin. I may adopt that gratin for when I make other kinds of crêpes – which I must do soon. Gotta keep those pans seasoned!
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Eating East of the Cascades

Tom and I are just back from a week’s birding trip to Eastern Washington. That’s the dry side of the state, protected by the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains. We’d hoped to encounter good Pacific Northwest regional foods there, as well as many bird species that aren’t found in our part of the country.

Overall, we had fine weather, beautiful scenery at several altitudes, a congenial group of fellow birders, and reasonably successful birding. (We missed a few target species, e.g., Golden Eagle, Varied Thrush, Ferruginous Owl.) The food, however, mostly disappointed. Too much of it was anonymous American, inferior Italian, or ubiquitous salmon. Even so, there were some interesting and memorable dishes.

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At one dinner, my appetizer was called Wood Oven Clams. I hadn’t known you could oven-roast clams, so this was a new pleasure for me. They were sweet, tender Manila clams, as moist as if they’d been steamed open but with a bit more depth of flavor from the roasting, and with a refreshing burst of seasoning with butter, herbs, and fresh lime juice.
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Tom’s main course that evening was Cioppino, made with shrimp, clams, mussels, calamari, and some sort of white fish. Obviously not a specialty of this high-altitude area so far from the sea – but it was very good: hearty and delicate at the same time, as fresh and enjoyable a fish stew as one could hope for.
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At another dinner we shared an appetizer of grilled venison bratwurst with hot bacon-cabbage slaw, roasted fingerling potatoes, grainy mustard, and fresh applesauce. The venison may well have come from local mule deer, which were commonly seen in our forest walks. This was a dish for hearty mountain appetites: It could easily have been a main course for one of us.
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From the bratwurst we went on to share an excellent cheese fondue made from a blend of Gruyere, Asiago, and Swiss, with white wine. The dipping ingredients were a heaping plate of grilled sausage, roasted potatoes and carrots, steamed broccolini, bread cubes, grapes, and apple slices. Again, this was meant as an appetizer for two, but it was plenty as a main course for us.
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Finally and quite unexpectedly, for lunch at a cheerful roadside Mexican joint, we enjoyed fish tacos and tacos al carbon, both as lively and good as any we’ve had in the Southwest or elsewhere. A pleasant, spicy change from the milder flavors we’d mostly been experiencing.

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Birders’ Dinners in Cape May

Last week Tom and I made our annual spring birding pilgrimage to Cape May, New Jersey, a hotspot for migratory birds. We stay in an oceanfront motel apartment with a kitchen, so we can alternate dining out and dining in. Not to waste birding time with extensive food preparation, we bring along pre-cooked main dishes in a cooler chest. This year our friend Jennifer was with us, so we were cooking for three.
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The appetizers for our first dinner in the apartment were a specialty of Tom’s, elegantly known as “cheese thingies.” For these he lightly pan-cooks 7” frozen parathas, tops them with cheeses and other items as inspiration suggests, and runs them under the broiler until the cheese melts. We brought all the ingredients for these in the cooler chest.

On the left, a thingy with Isle of Mull, a Scottish cheddar, and Greek-style pickled peppers. In the center, one with Puigpedrós, a Catalonian cow cheese, and Italian corallina salame. On the right, Puigpedrós again with chopped onion and pickled jalapeño peppers. Very eclectic and international, eh?

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Our main course was a stew of chunks of skinless, boneless chicken thighs with potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, green beans, onions, garlic, a few dashes of Cholula hot sauce, white wine, and chicken stock, thickened with flour. I’d made and frozen it several days in advance. It was plain, homey, and tasty.

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The next night we went out for dinner to the Lobster House, a popular dockside restaurant. There we always start with Cape May Salts, an especially succulent local oyster. The three of us happily went through two dozen oysters and then went on to excellent fried soft-shell crabs and fried sea scallops. The menu always offers elaborate creamed seafood concoctions, but we prefer to keep things simple and enjoy the freshness of the prime fish and shellfish.

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At home again the following day, we sat to a mixed antipasto, the components of which also came along with us in the cooler chest: fresh ricotta, mortadella, sweet sopressata, grape tomatoes, a smoked shrimp and crab spread, Venetian-style calf’s liver pâté, and toast triangles.

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The main event was a pan of lasagna that I’d made in advance, baked, and frozen for transport. It was partly a Marcella Hazan-style northern Italian version, with Bolognese meat sauce and béchamel, but with Neapolitan additions of mozzarella and coins of sweet sausage – all between many layers of our thinnest homemade lasagna noodles. Reheating the lasagna in a very hot oven provided nice crunchy end pieces to contrast with the meltingly lush central section.

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.The final dinner of our trip was again at the Lobster House, and again we started with two dozen of our favorite Cape May Salts. We went on to the restaurant’s signature snapper soup (not pictured below), fried flounder and fried calamari. Everything was sparklingly fresh and perfectly cooked.

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Lest you think all we did in Cape May was eat, be assured the birding was fine, even though the weather was a bit dodgy. We got up very early each day and did quite a bit of walking, which was how we worked up appetites for all that food. We logged a total of 93 species of birds over 3½ days.

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A Quirky Cheesecake

The culinary world must contain an infinite number of cheesecake recipes. The cheese component of any one version may consist of only cream cheese, only cottage cheese, only ricotta, or some combination of those, in widely differing proportions. Similarly variable are the indicated quantities of eggs, sugar, sour cream (if any), and flour vs. cornstarch.

While I’ve never had a cheesecake I didn’t like, I’m not a frequent baker of the things. For many years, if I felt like making a cheesecake, or Beloved Spouse asked for one, I’d go straight to the recipe on the back of the Argo cornstarch box. (Yes, Virginia, Argo once came in a modest cardboard box with a cheesecake recipe on the back. Now it’s in a bulky plastic bin, and the recipes on it are for generic gravy and play clay for kids. O tempora, o mores!)
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Fortunately, I copied out the Argo cheesecake recipe for myself long ago. It calls for a pound each of cottage cheese, cream cheese, and sour cream; plus sugar, cornstarch, eggs, melted butter, lemon juice, and vanilla. I generally make a half recipe’s worth and skip its graham cracker crust entirely.

My refrigerator never normally contains sour cream, cream cheese, and cottage cheese or ricotta at the same time, though at times it has at least some of one or two of them – usually left over from other uses. So I got into the habit of varying the half recipe’s proportions of those three according to what I had on hand, and buying the remaining item or two. For example, some of the variations I’ve made notes on are:

• 1 pound ricotta, 1 cup sour cream, 2 ounces cream cheese
• ½ pound ricotta, ½ cup sour cream, 5 ounces cream cheese

I’d adjust the other dry and wet ingredients to achieve a reasonable looking batter and proceed to bake the combination according to the recipe. Every one of my mongrel combinations turned into an actual cheesecake, with a decent texture and a pleasant flavor.

Thus encouraged, this latest baking day, I went way out on a limb. Clockwise from the sour cream in the picture below (the only thing I had to buy) are 6 ounces of cream cheese, 4½ ounces of sheep’s milk ricotta salata, and 2½ ounces of regular ricotta from buffalo milk.
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Now, ricotta salata is a fine addition to many good dishes, but it’s not used in desserts. This salted and pressed variety of ricotta is dense, crumbly, and lightly salty. I chose to use it in part from an urge to clear my refrigerator of small leftovers and in part out of curiosity, to see what I’d get by blending this firm, dry, sharpish cheese with my remnant of soft, sweet, creamy buffalo ricotta, which was just about swimming in its own whey.

I whomped the ricottas together in my heavy-duty mixer, then worked in the cream cheese, 2 beaten eggs, and ⅔ cup of sugar. When that was well mixed I added 2½ tablespoons of cornstarch, ½ teaspoon of vanilla, and 1½ teaspoons of lemon juice. That gave me just a quart of not-very-thick batter. I’d have liked to bake it in a deep dish, but the only suitable sizes I had were shallow pie dishes. One of those would have to do.
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The dish went into a 325° oven for one hour, then sat in the turned-off oven for two more hours. The cheesecake firmed and puffed up nicely.
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It was a really quirky tasting cheesecake – not unpleasant, but only slightly dessert-sweet. It seemed to be approaching a savory baked custard, like a crustless quiche. I must admit the texture was a bit grainy. I really should have pushed the ricotta salata through a fine sieve before beating it into the fresh ricotta. Not sieving is a shortcut I often take with my cheesecakes. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter; this time it did.
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The cheesecake was as usual quite rich. Its savoriness made it go well with a glass of white wine. There was enough of it to last us for several days, and its texture seemed to smooth out somewhat with time. Still, it’s not an experiment I’m likely to repeat.

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