Go for the gold: Cook to Comfort

March 2, 2022

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

Cook to Comfort

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. We are a week into the war in Ukraine, and my inbox is filled with requests for recipes for borscht. The letters are a reminder that cooking is a cultural act: a way to feel connected, to support, to acknowledge the world and perhaps to understand it better.

That it's a solace, too, is a bonus. Cooking can be a way to feel better, even in fearful, difficult times. So for readers reaching out, there's white borscht (above), perhaps, or vegetarian borscht or winter borscht loaded with the plump mushroom- and onion-filled dumplings known as vushka, or "little ears."

Far from the news, but no less comforting to those who consume it, I'm intrigued by this recipe for a slow-cooker mushroom and wild rice soup (and for this pressure-cooker version of the same recipe), filled with neat little tricks for achieving creaminess without overcooking the rice.

Also by this terrific recipe for crispy frico chicken breasts with mushrooms and thyme. Red wine vinegar goes into the pan at the end to balance the richness of the mushrooms and cheese, but one subscriber reported using Dijon mustard instead: "That served as just enough of an emulsifier that the pan drippings coalesced into a very luxurious sauce." Smart.

You could make a speedy fish chowder this week, and have enough time after dinner to bake breakfast bars with oats and coconut for the morning. You could make rigatoni al forno with cauliflower and broccoli rabe. You could make cauliflower Parmesan and load it into hero bread for dinnertime sandwiches.

Or you could avoid using a recipe entirely and make steak au poivre. You don't need strict instructions for that. Cook it on the fly!

Here's how: Get a few thick strip steaks, some whole black peppercorns, garlic, fresh thyme, a shallot, some unsalted butter, a splash of cognac or brandy and a glass of heavy cream. Cook the steaks in a pan as Julia Moskin advises, and set them aside to rest while you make your no-recipe sauce. Simply return to your pan and add to it some sliced garlic, chopped shallots, the crushed peppercorns and a few knobs of butter. Cook over medium-low heat for a few minutes until the garlic and shallots are soft, then carefully flame the whole affair with a generous splash of cognac or brandy. When the alcohol's evaporated, add the cream and simmer over low heat until the sauce cloaks the back of a spoon.

Slice the steaks against the grain, place them on a warm platter and tip any steak juices from your cutting board into the sauce. Spoon it generously over the meat, and serve with watercress and oven fries.

There are thousands and thousands of actual recipes to cook right now waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. As I mention occasionally, you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions support our work. I hope, if you haven't done so already, that you will subscribe today. Thank you.

And do write for assistance, should anything go awry while you're cooking or using the site and app. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or if you'd like to send me a gripe or a mash note, I'm at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.

Now, it's nothing to do with mincemeat or Muscadet grapes, but I don't think you'll be disappointed by Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller and really the whole cast of "Somebody Somewhere," on HBO Max.

I enjoyed the New York and the language of Walter Mosley's 2010 mystery novel, "Known to Evil," the second of his Leonid McGill series. (If you want to start at the top, the first was "The Long Fall," from 2009.)

You oughta read Helen Rosner's interview with J. Kenji López-Alt, in The New Yorker.

Finally, here's "Kingdom," a poem from Joyelle McSweeney, selected by Victoria Chang for The New York Times Magazine. Consider that, and I'll return on Friday.