Go for the gold: It's Time for French Fries

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Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

It's Time for French Fries

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Is sourdough still trending, people all over the place nurturing starters, putting them to use in boules and baguettes, in pancakes and waffles? It sure seems that way, from the mail that I get. I think it’s because so many of us are still at home a lot, still working from the desk in the corner or not working from the couch in the living room, working the phone in search of unemployment insurance. With more time at home than usual, there’s more time to ferment.

But sourdough’s not the only kitchen project you can get going under or near quarantine. You might make gravlax or guanciale or pâté. You could make yogurt. And sometime this week, you could make French fries (above). Real French fries, the sort we used to eat at hamburger stands and in bistros, heavily salted, heavenly crisp. Gabrielle Hamilton has a recipe for them that’ll bring that kind of experience back into your life and make it available to you any time you like, because you can parcook the fries and freeze them, just like the ones in the bags from Ore-Ida, but 10 times better. It’s laborious work, she allows, but straightforward. Sounds like sourdough to me, though if I can return to my mail bag, sourdough is often the opposite of straightforward. So let’s make that a thing.

And to go with? A fantastic steak. Some griddled cheeseburgers. A big bowl of mussels.

You’ll want a good dessert as well. Jerrelle Guy has a spectacular new recipe in our pages this week, for strawberry spoon cake. And as good as that would be after a plate of fries, in truth it’ll be even better the next morning, for breakfast.

Another ace new recipe: Melissa Clark’s sugar snap pea salad.

And I don’t know if it’s near as good as those, but I ginned up a no-recipe recipe the other day, for refrigerator mixed grill. I had some Italian sausages lying around, a big bunch of asparagus, a few peppers and onions, some garlic, jalapeños, a hunk of provolone and a big bag of baby spinach. I dressed everything but the greens in olive oil, salt and lemon pepper, then grilled it on a plancha set on top of my grill. (You could use cast-iron pans, or just grill everything straight on the grates or do it under the broiler in your stove.) I arranged everything on top of the greens, hit the platter with a little more olive oil, then squeezed a lemon over the top. That was powerfully good.

Many thousands more recipes to cook this week await you on NYT Cooking. A lot more of them than usual are free to use even if you aren’t a subscriber to our site and apps. I think it would be great if you subscribed anyway, though. Subscriptions support our work.

We are standing by to offer assistance if anything goes sideways during your adventures in the kitchen. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with strawberries or cornstarch, but Gaby Wood’s “Diary” in the London Review of Books, “How to Draw an Albatross,” is really fascinating reading.

A must-to-attend: On Thursday at 6 p.m. Eastern, Veronica Chambers, a senior editor at The Times who co-wrote “Between Harlem and Heaven: Afro-Asian-American Cooking for Big Nights, Weeknights and Every Day,” will be in virtual conversation with Toni Tipton-Martin, the author of “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking.” They’ll raise a glass to Juneteenth and talk about their writing, history, race and food. I hope you can join them for this Live At Home event. Register here.

Here’s Graham Bowley in The Times, on the mess that is the Robert Indiana estate, two years after the artist’s death in 2018, at 89.

Finally, and also in The Times, here are the poems and poets 16 poets tell us they’re turning to in this moment of upheaval. I’ll be back on Friday.