Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

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David Malosh for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

Friday, June 18, 2021

What to Cook This Weekend

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I took to The New York Times Magazine this week to write about a remarkable 20th century restaurateur named Henri Charpentier, who was raised in the kitchens and dining rooms of the French Riviera, labored under Auguste Escoffier and César Ritz in Paris, and moved to New York in the early 20th century, where he opened his restaurant Henri’s, in Lynbrook. One of the dishes Charpentier served there showed up in a cookbook my friend Julie found in a used bookstore in the Midwest a few years ago: fluke au gratin (above).

It’s a remarkable, elegant dish, and a simple preparation appropriate to any firm, mild white-fleshed fish. Make a buttery sauce with chopped shallots, garlic, chives, parsley and mushrooms, and brighten it with lemon juice and white wine. Spoon some of it into a shallow roasting pan, place your fillets on top, then add the rest of the sauce, some bread crumbs and dots of butter. Roast it for a few minutes until the fish has just cooked through. Serve with rice and asparagus, maybe? It’d be a lovely meal on Saturday night.

Charpentier was a raconteur (his memoir “Life à la Henri” reads a bit like a first draft of “A Gentleman of Moscow”), and he long insisted that he invented the dessert crêpes Suzette at 16, while serving a dinner for the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. In his telling, a beautiful French girl named Suzette was there. While making tableside crepes for dessert, he accidentally flamed them with brandy, but passed it off as intentional. The prince thought the dish tasted superb. Charpentier offered to name it in his honor. But the prince told him, “We must always remember that the ladies come first. We will call this glorious thing crêpes Suzette.”

Historians quibble with this story. But maybe you could make the crepes for dessert all the same.

Other things to cook this weekend: recipes to celebrate Juneteenth on Saturday; recipes to celebrate Father’s Day on Sunday.

I’d also like to try this meal inspired by the scattered sushi dish known as chirashi: one-pot sesame salmon bowls where the rice is cooked in vinegar-seasoned water and the salmon steamed on top of it toward the end, served with raw vegetables for freshness. Likewise, this gingery, cilantro-flecked chicken with napa cabbage, cucumbers, and lots of mint and chives.

Maybe Alice Waters’s seasonal minestrone? Or slow cooker honey- soy braised pork with lime and ginger? Or Indian-ish nachos with Cheddar, black beans and chutney? Absolutely these soft sugar cookies with raspberry frosting. Unless you’d prefer the crunchiest summer fruit crumble.

Many thousands more recipes to make this weekend await you on New York Times Cooking. Go take a look at them and see what appeals. Save the recipes you want to make. Then rate the ones you’ve made. And you can and ought to leave notes on them if you’ve come up with a recipe hack or ingredient substitution that you’d like to remember or share with your fellow subscribers.

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We are standing by like the queen’s guards if you have a question about anything. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you. Or write to me directly: foodeditor@nytimes.com. Even if I can’t get back to everyone, I read every letter sent.

Now, it’s nothing to do with fancy salts or cast iron pans, but I think you will enjoy this excerpt from the photographer Kristin Bedford’s new book “Cruise Night,” about modern lowrider culture in Los Angeles, in Los Angeles Magazine.

And you ought to check out “Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories,” on Netflix.

If you’re in New York or planning a visit soon, do leave time for the Alice Neel show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Finally, new music to play us off: Clairo, “Blouse,” featured in the latest Playlist of new songs, in The Times. I will, as always, see you on Sunday.