Fourth of July weekend is usually one of my favorite cooking times. We usually have a friend or two over. Sometimes—not this year—we go see suburban fireworks. (I’ve been to a couple of big-city fireworks celebrations, along with New Year’s Eve in London once, and never again. The only way I’d do that is if I lived right where it was all happening.) The whole weekend for me is always a time to cook some of the things I love best but also to try something new from the cultures and cuisines that have come to this country as part of its long and tumultuous process of becoming. Which now appears in danger of unbecoming, in multiple senses of that word.
Talking about cultures coming here and being remade here can be a story of appropriation and mistreatment. When it is, we shouldn’t look away from those facts. There are many versions of Black and Atlantic cuisines that are part of American life, and to cook them respectfully, you need to understand how they got here. There are so many different Asian cuisines threading through the last 150 years of American life, from small Midwestern towns into New York and Los Angeles, and the same is true: it’s not all a happy story. That’s as true of the foods (and crops and livestock) Europeans brought to North America as anything else.
Today, we are facing people determined to make it unhappier still, whose vision of American history is that white Americans are the real Americans and everyone else who preceded Europeans, came with Europeans, and has come ever since is a “replacement”. As you wave flags and watch fireworks and grill, remind yourself of how wrong that story is. Factually as well as morally. And then cook and eat with love and zest and appreciation, in good company and with as much cheer as you can muster.
I opened up the weekend with two household favorites. On Friday, I made small filet mignons with a quick reduction of chopped anchovies, shallots, balsamic vinegar and chopped basil, a recipe I learned from Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe cookbook. (A big favorite of mine, but it historically has had shitty quality binding: I’m on my second copy of it and both have fallen apart.)
Saturday I made an even simpler favorite: lobster, with a salad of fennel, olives, mozzarella and cherry tomatoes on the side. Yes, lobster was served at the first feast between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, but it’s hard to take comfort in that fact considering that only a handful of decades later, the settlers put the next ruler of the Wampanoag’s head on a pike outside their town. So much for gratitude. Lobster isn’t as exclusively American as turkey is, either, though the lobster found in the northeast of North America is pretty distinctive all the same. It’s an expensive meal, though I if I have time to run up to H-Mart, that cuts the price a lot—they’ve often got live lobsters that are much cheaper than anywhere else in this region. It was great, but I feel a little bad—I generally always make lobster broth with the shells afterwards but I just didn’t feel like it this time. It’s a holiday! That’s it.
Today, I’m making a Japanese-style curry from the New York Times’ cooking app. It honestly was the cooking app that drew me back into subscribing to the Times, though I also have to confess that the paper’s thorough adaptation to digital distribution is really striking, even if I still sometimes feel irritable with some of its reportage and its baffling attachment to some of its opinion writers. I like Japanese curries; I felt the desire to cook one when I saw that recipe partly because my spouse and I have been doing a playthrough of Persona 5 lately, where your character frequently gets asked to help make his landlord’s apparently remarkable curry. Hopefully this one will meet the standard and restore some spell points. Considering how much reading the news feels like an endless crawl through some horrible person’s Palace, we could use it.
Tomorrow, on the 4th, I’m going to make three favorites for grilling. (Weather’s looking good!) I picked up some kalbi-cut beef short ribs for Korean grilled beef, which I’ll make from Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking.
As she notes in the recipe, it’s a dish that first appeared in Los Angeles—like quite a few other classic dishes associated with particular national cuisines, it was invented in that nation’s diaspora.
I’m making lamb kebabs, but I haven’t settled yet on the specific recipe I’m going to use. That’s something I’ll decide on a bit later today. Almost certainly a recipe from somewhere in the Mediterranean world, but we’ll see. If I’ve got the energy, I might make some flatbreads or homemade pita to go with them.
I’m also going to wrap a few shrimp in prosciutto and fresh basil and toss that on the grill. I honestly don’t remember where I learned that, but I’ve been making it for almost forty years as a basic go-to grill.
I’ll likely make a cornmeal and blueberry cake that I got from Sheila Lukins’ USA Cookbook, another venerable denizen of my shelves, once very frequently used until I pretty much absorbed some of its recipes into my improvisational repertoire. I still consult it a fair amount.
I’ve got a lot of different vegetables for sides or salads, but I’ll likely stick to something simple, a bit like what I made on Saturday to go with the lobster. Possibly some kind of roast carrots with cumin and lemon.
Image credit: "Persona 5 / 女神異聞錄5 /ペルソナ5" by Doge Aki is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
I can’t wish people happy 4th this year. I just can’t. But I can wish you all good grilling, so I do. John liked that first cookbook a lot, too. I think its spine was broken when I had to do the cookbook triage before my move.