Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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Photograph by Heami Lee. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.

Friday, December 11, 2020

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton is in The Times this week with a marvelous new recipe for white borscht (above) that pays homage to the $2.50 bowls of soup she used to eat in her early days in the East Village, when Polish and Ukrainian diners were thick on the ground.

“During my scared-about-money years,” she wrote for The Times, “these diners and their steam drawers of pierogies and sauerkraut and hunter’s stews kept me not only fed but secure, and even after I had reliable income, I always returned for the white borscht. It remains one of my favorite soups of all time.”

The borscht is a sour soup, traditionally made with a spoonful or two of fermented sourdough starter stirred into the kielbasa broth, but Gabrielle makes do with a large chunk of stale sourdough bread instead, soaking it in the broth until it goes soft and pillowy, then blending it into the liquid to give the soup body and bite. Try that borscht this weekend, and I bet it’ll become one of your favorite soups, as well.

Meanwhile, Hanukkah continues, with Kwanzaa and Christmas hot on its heels: sticky toffee pudding season; holiday sugar cookie season; babka for days. See what delights you in those collections of recipes, and make them like gifts.

Me, I’d like to make these roasted sausages with caramelized shallots and apples this weekend, and this Taiwanese popcorn chicken with fried basil. It might be a good time to butter-roast salmon or to simmer a big pot of beans. You could make caramelized onion, apple and goat cheese melts. Or a Japanese cheesecake. Or an onion quiche. Speaking for myself, I find it is never not a good thing to make cheese buldak and consume it with beer.

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Now, it’s a very long way from stir-fries and roulades, but you should spend some time with The Washington Post Magazine’s 2020 photography issue, “American Crossroads.”

Likewise, the Canadian restaurateur Jen Agg’s pandemic memoir for The Globe and Mail.

My colleague John Eligon put me on to this excellent video explanation of and recipe for doubles, one of Trinidad and Tobago’s greatest foods. That’s on the weekend docket as well!

Finally, here’s new fiction from Enyeribe Ibegwam, “Memento Mori,” in The Georgia Review. Read that, and I’ll see you on Sunday.