The six days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve are the Sunday afternoon of the year—a grace note on the calendar, a dreamlike week where everything feels half celebratory and half asleep. The relentless holiday hysteria has peaked and fizzled, but the mood of the world remains festive—decorations are still up, gifts of all sorts have been given and received and are ready to be read or listened to or bundled up within (or discreetly thrown away). The obligations of the New Year still feel ten million miles away.
I have two traditions for this interstitial week: the first is to take long, wintry walks, tramping with my dog through the empty parks and sidewalks of post-holiday New York until the sun starts slanting through the trees at an ungodly hour in the early afternoon. The second is to cook—and eat—without cessation: this week is perfect for finally making all the cookies and slow braises and odd little dishes that I’d intended to put together in the first part of the month and, thanks to December’s manic demands, just never did.
Before 2019 kicks off, I’m going to make lemon curd, which I often do around this time, when I’m compelled—by some wintry deficiency of vitamins and bright colors, probably—to buy half a dozen lemons every time I leave the house, whether or not I actually need them, and need to find an outlet before they all collapse into a dusty (and oddly beautiful) pile of jade-green mold. Lemon curd is the sort of thing that you can decant into little jars and tie up with a ribbon for a fussy little gift, or bake over a shortbread base to make lemon bars, or just spoon over buttered toast with a sprinkle of salt. I’m also going to make rainbow cookies, those almond-scented confections that I buy whenever I go into an Italian bakery, and which somehow always taste not quite as good as I remember. Or, at least, I’m going to try to make them: it’s a serious project, more of a triple-layer cake than a proper cookie, perfect for keeping my hands busy for a few hours while I get lost in the latest “Murderbot Diaries” audiobook. If they fail, I’ll just throw it all away and pretend it never happened.
In a week of grazing, you can’t go wrong with dip. There’s no better excuse to eat a cracker (you also can’t go wrong with crackers), and the joylessly cracker-averse can go at their dip with baby carrots and cucumber spears. Two recipes topped my own personal Year in Dips; both are beyond simple. The first is the chef Alex Stupak’s miraculous two-ingredient cashew salsa, in which a combo of smoked cashews and canned chipotle peppers somehow come out of the blender tasting of mezcal and heavy cream. (If you’re a normal person who lacks a stovetop smoker, just throw in a big pinch of smoked pimentón instead.) The second is my friend Martha’s smoked-trout dip—it’s a tin of smoked trout flaked with a tablespoon of mayonnaise, a tablespoon of spicy mustard, and a fistful of finely minced pickled red onion, and it reliably becomes the gravitational center of every cocktail party and baby shower. There’ve been days when I’ve made it multiple times.
At the center of my holiday week—going into the oven as soon as I get home after Christmas away, and at the front of the fridge for slicing and picking at the whole rest of the week through—will be a big, gorgeous ham. Almost nothing else I cook makes me as giddily happy—maybe it’s the hokey Americana classicism, or the fact that I used to keep kosher and a hulking cut of pork still feels a bit thrillingly illicit. I love the June Cleaver cosplay of it all: hair tied back and a ruffled apron tied around my waist, I rise up from the oven with a bright smile and a goddam glorious ham, bronze and pink, glazed in mustard and brown sugar and tessellated with pineapples and cherries. (I make a version from Diner Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the folks behind the Williamsburg restaurant of the same name; it isn’t online, but the glaze in this recipe will get you similar results—add your own tropical fruit.)
At the end of the week, if you’ve cooked a bone-in ham, and timed your eating right, you can throw the picked-over remains into a pot for Hoppin’ John, a stew of black-eyed peas and rice that, in the South, is served for luck on New Year’s Day. Like so many traditional dishes, this one is closely policed by purists—diehards will allow pork, beans, rice, and not a whit more. But according to Edna Lewis, the empress of Southern cooking, Hoppin’ John is even better if you add tomatoes, and who am I to say she’s wrong?
Sourse: newyorker.com
