This is how I framed Genius Recipes when I launched it
as a weekly column on Food52 in June 2011. In the years since, the definition
really hasn’t changed: These recipes are about reworking what we’ve been taught
and skipping past all the canonical versions to a smarter way.
For example, if you were to look to a classical text or
cooking class, you’d probably think you’d need to truss and flip and baste a
chicken as you’re roasting it. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of
that—you will probably get a good dinner out of the exercise. But Barbara Kafka,
in writing the cookbook Roasting: A Simple Art in
1995, perfected roasting everything, from mackerel to
turkeys to cucumbers. She puts chicken in the oven, legs akimbo, at a raging
500°F (260°C), then hardly touches it. Hers is the juiciest roast chicken I’ve
tasted, and has the crispiest skin, without fussing—so why would you?
This book is full of happy discoveries like this roast
chicken, drawn from the experience of the best cookbook authors, chefs, and
bloggers around. No one cook could have taught us so much. From historic voices
in food like Marcella Hazan, Julia Child, and James Beard to modern giants like
Ignacio Mattos and Kim Boyce, we’ve learned that making something better doesn’t
mean doing more work—and oftentimes, it means doing less. If you look to the
people who’ve spent their careers tinkering with these dishes, they’ll often
show you a better way to make them.
Here in this collection are more than one hundred of the
most surprising and essential genius recipes. Some are greatest hits from the
column that keep inspiring new conversations and winning new fans. I also dug up
a bunch more recipes, like Marion Cunningham’s famous
yeasted overnight waffles and Dorie Greenspan’s apple cake
with more apples than cake, to stock our kitchens and keep us
cooking and talking. You’ll also find new tips and variations and a good number
of mini-recipes alongside the full-length ones. These genius ideas were simple
enough to distill into a paragraph or two and made the collection whole. My hope
is that this book, held all together, can act as an alternative kitchen
education of sorts.
Some of the recipes are already legends: If you’ve been
reading about food for a while, you’ve probably already heard of the tomato sauce with
butter and onion, the no-knead bread, the one-ingredient
ice cream. I love sharing these on Food52, because it seems everyone has an
opinion and a good story to tell.
A handful of others are tricks I stumbled across myself:
The oddball
ingredient I saw when I trailed in the kitchen at Le Bernardin. The simple
carnitas I found in an old Diana Kennedy cookbook when I was missing the
burritos at home in California. The winning ratatouille after
I tested four in a day. The dessert served at the
James Beard Awards that Melissa Clark posted on Instagram—watch out, world: I’m
paying attention!
But if we had to rely on me, Genius Recipes would have
been a nice little series that would have petered out long ago—and it surely
wouldn’t have evolved into a book. I’d hoped I would have help finding the gems,
since the spirit of better cooking through community has always driven Food52.
But I couldn’t have known that the tips would just keep coming—that the majority
of the recipes I would gather, and the most unexpectedly brilliant ones, would
come from emails and tweets and conversations with the Food52 community, fellow
staffers, and other writers, editors, and friends.
I wouldn’t have looked twice at a soup made of
cauliflower, an onion, and a whole lot of water. And broccoli cooked forever
is almost daring you not to. But cooks from Food52 said these were worthy of
genius status, and they were right. Genius Recipes is proof of the power of
crowd-sourcing and curation, but also of listening and trusting other cooks.
Even though many of these recipes have been around for years, some for decades,
only now can we gather and share them so quickly.
I hope you will use the recipes in a number of ways. Some
may become formulas (I don’t make roast chicken or guacamole or oatmeal any
other way anymore). But others, I hope, will be jumping-off points. Maybe you’ll
make the kale
panini just as written, then next time you’ll use collards or whatever
greens you have, or start making just the quick pickled peppers to keep around.
As soon as you make the olive oil and maple
granola once, if you’re like the legions of commenters on Food52, you’ll
start tweaking it and making it your own.
Please do, and the next time you discover something
genius, let me know.
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