Louis visited us on Martha’s Vineyard last month and we celebrated our reunion with lots of great home cooked meals, including a Gabrielle Hamilton-themed dinner. The food was delicious, but the best part was being together and having fun collaborating in the kitchen.
The meal was inspired by Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year (Indiebound), which I had just finished reading. Reichl tells the story of meeting a group of Gourmet “refugees” for lunch at Prune, Hamilton’s restaurant in New York. According to Reichl, when she ordered the weirdest dish on the menu, another member of her party asked her, “Do you think other people actually order this?” Everyone at the table tried the bacon and marmalade sandwich and they all liked it so much, they ordered two more to share. Reichl reproduced the sandwich when she got home and her husband asked her, “How’d you ever think of this?”
I had no trouble imagining bacon and marmalade working together in a salty and sweet addictive combination. Adding the bitter of orange peel would add a new dimension. I decided to serve the bacon and marmalade sandwich when Louis arrived. Then I thought, why not make it a Gabrielle Hamilton-themed dinner? Italian cocktails and radishes with butter came to mind. If you’ve read Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones & Butter (Indiebound), you’ll remember that she wrote of her mother serving radishes and butter. Hamilton also wrote about sipping Negronis on her summer visits to Italy.
I pulled out my copy of Prune, the restaurant cookbook, and found the bacon and marmalade sandwich. I found a salad dressing for a salad made with lettuce growing in pots on our deck. Dessert was a little harder to decide on. I ended up borrowing from two dessert recipes in the cookbook to make our dessert.
As we got closer to the evening, I searched for good pumpernickel bread for the sandwiches, but didn’t find it on the island. I settled for a good loaf of rye bread.
On the morning Louis was to arrive, I made cardamom panna cotta and put the ramekins in the refrigerator to set. I was a little concerned about their consistency and worried that they wouldn’t set.
Louis’s flight was delayed by four and a half hours. After picking him up in the late afternoon, we had just enough time to get to a local farm and pick up some of their delicious cheeses. As we were driving, I was about to tell Louis and Tom about dinner, when Tom asked, “What’s on the menu tonight?” We foodies are so predictable.
Arriving at home, I checked the panna cotta and it hadn’t set. Back into the pan it went. I quickly heated it, bloomed some gelatin in water, added it to the scalding sweet cream, poured it into the ramekins and popped them back into the fridge. “If that doesn’t jell, we’re pouring it over the berry sauce,” I announced. If life gives you runny panna cotta, pour it out and devour every delicious drop.
We decided against Negronis, because it was so hot that night. Tom made Campari spritzes for our Italian cocktails. They seemed like the most refreshing option. We settled in the yard for cocktails. The last of the radishes from my garden were delicious with sweet butter and a little salt. The fireflies showed up and we told stories and enjoyed each other’s company.
Back inside, Louis put the bacon in the oven while I washed lettuce for a salad. We were challenged by the task of reducing the restaurant-size Prune vinaigrette recipe down to something for three people. There was a lot of talk about measurements. Cup and tablespoon amounts of ingredients had to get down to tablespoons and teaspoons (or portions thereof) in order to produce a manageable amount of dressing. How many teaspoons in a tablespoon? How many tablespoons in a cup?
The bacon and marmalade sandwiches were delicious! Hamilton and Reichl sure know their way around food.
The salad with lettuce, heirloom tomatoes and Prune house vinaigrette was fantastic.
The panna cotta had set! I made Hamilton’s summer berry sauce (which she pairs with lemon panna cotta), in which I used wild blueberries that I had picked. I added a touch of homemade beach plum liqueur to the blueberry, strawberry and raspberry mixture.
This isn’t a menu that I would suggest making often, given the amount of fat we consumed. But, it was a special evening and the food was wonderful. Enjoying cooking as we do, these are the moments that make memories that we can hold onto until we are together again.
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