It was lunchtime on a hot summer day at a tiny seaside restaurant on the Ligurian coastline of Italy. I took a bite of a simple trofie pasta coated in bright green pesto that is super typical in the region and was immediately struck by the familiarity of it — this was my mom’s pesto! The one she has made since my childhood with basil from her garden. Who would have thought that I’d travel more than 4,000 miles from home to find such a familiar dish?
The truth of it is that the coveted family pesto recipe came from an equally revered cookbook in my family: The Silver Palate Cookbook. This one is an oldie but a goodie — it was originally published in 1982, back when there was a shop by the same name on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The flavors and ingredients that the shop’s founders, Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, used were simple but different than what most Americans were used to eating at the time.
But the awesome thing about this book is that nothing in it is overly complicated or has 35 ingredients. It’s just beautiful food that’s unpretentious and interesting and delicious! It seems that a lot of 70’s and 80’s babies have fond memories of recipes from the Silver Palate books — when I did a quick Google search to pull up a link to the book, I found this article from Bon Appétit with memories from their editorial staff about their parents cooking from Silver Palate when they were kids. Maybe you even remember a classic Silver Palate recipe from your childhood.
These days, I still find myself going back to The Silver Palate Cookbook for everything from my favorite Italian pesto recipe and French gougères to good ol’ American apple pie. The spine of my copy is so broken in that I can almost always just flip the book open to my tried-and-true dishes. Which recipes are your favorites from this classic?
Comments