Go for the gold: Melissa Clark’s Fourth of July

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Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Carrie Purcell.

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Melissa Clark's Fourth of July

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Happy Canada Day, to those celebrating. In the United States, we’re barreling into the Fourth of July, which will be a strange one this year, no doubt. We’re sick of fireworks, most of us; many can’t gather closely because of the coronavirus; and we’re all in the midst of a difficult, painful reckoning over the history and present of our nation I’d get it if you spent the Friday holiday tucked up in bed under a fan, reading mysteries and fighting off panic attacks.

But give Melissa Clark a chance to persuade you to do otherwise. She has a terrific column leading the newspaper Food section we delivered to readers this morning, all about how to gather outside and cook and eat with friends right now, and how joyous it can be to do so — so long as you’re super, super careful.

“Our goals were to be as careful as we could, given our knowledge of the virus,” Melissa wrote, “and to use the comfort threshold of the most anxious person in the group as our guide. Because while pandemic etiquette was new to all of us, making guests feel at ease and welcome in our home is not.”

That’s so smart. As are her new recipes for the day: for gingery chicken thighs with charred peaches (above), served directly from the grill; grilled corn with jalapeño feta butter, likewise; and individual ramekins of no-bake butterscotch custard for dessert. I think those could make for a very nice holiday meal, even if it’s just for your family and eaten in the living room while you watch “Uncut Gems” together as an exercise in anxiety management.

Other things to cook on Friday, if you’re following the Clark mantra and making it so you can serve directly from the grill or stove or fridge: fried chicken (and in particular Tejal Rao’s recipe for fried chicken biscuits with hot honey butter, assembled ahead of time and wrapped into individual packets); grilled sausages with peppers and onions; feta-stuffed grilled flatbreads; grilled oysters with hot sauce butter; gazpacho.

And then for dessert, take a look at J. Kenji López-Alt’s new recipe for a chile crisp sundae (really!), along with a fine recipe for chile crisp itself.

Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook right now, this weekend and beyond are waiting for you on NYT Cooking, along with a host of helpful guides to cooking better. (Samin Nosrat on how to cook pasta is particularly sublime.) I hope you will consider subscribing so that you can see all that we have. Your subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue.

We will meanwhile be standing by to help if anything goes wrong along the way. Just write us: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with mille-feuille, but I loved these Devin Doyle photographs of reopened drive-in movie theaters in upstate New York.

Let’s read Lucille Clifton’s “Poem to My Yellow Coat,” in The Paris Review.

Finally, to return to the beginning, let’s jump into the wayback machine and fish up a wonderfully diverting novel. Here’s John Ball’s “In the Heat of the Night,” the original Virgil Tibbs mystery, from 1965. I’ll be back on Friday.