Along with the Silver Palate, this cookbook was a pretty major part of how I learned to cook.
I used in college a few times, most particularly to cook the Thai curries listed in the book. I’d never eaten Thai food in a restaurant until college and even then only once or twice. But I had a chance passing through New York City to buy the distinctive spice pastes (they came in tubs then) and I brought them with me to college so I could try the recipes.
What I didn’t know then was that the Frog/Commissary recipes were what marketing experts would be calling “fusion”. In this case, the cookbook took out what normally would have been coconut milk and instead had instructions for making a bechamel sauce with cream and then blending it into the curry. (This was also where I learned how to make a bechamel sauce.) The green curry with chicken was the one I made the most—the final product was chunks of chicken cooked with garlic and Thai green curry paste, then with sugar that caramelizes in the saute (also where I learned what caramelizing was), then with some soy sauce added. The bechamel went in after that and then peanuts and blanched broccoli (also where I learned to blanch green vegetables for color). Serve over rice. Whenever I served this for friends or family back in the 1980s, it would generally amaze everyone. Now I know how it altered a typical Thai curry but also about that characteristic Thai mix of sweet, salty, and spicy that made the dish stand out to folks who also hadn’t really had Thai food before. I even made a version of it a few times at the restaurant I worked at, though I nervously felt as if that was probably bad form. But nobody ever recognized the dish.
I haven’t used the book in years, though. Most of the recipes that I liked in it have become second nature to me, or I’ve found versions I like better. Reading through the book now, I’m struck on one hand by how much I still like the visual design by Anne Clark and basic accessibility and range of the recipes. It was also the first cookbook that I ever saw that would rattle off a long list of simple ideas of foods to put together without a fully developed recipe, which I found inspiring. (I tried some of those ideas at the restaurant, also.) On the other hand, it’s definitely of its moment—it’s a kind of standardization on one hand of the ideas that Alice Waters and her immediate peer group brought into American restaurants and at the same time has the characteristic sort of under-acknowledged grabbing of ‘exotic’ preparations and ingredients from Asian cuisines without much discussion of the cultures, cuisines or specific sources of inspiration involved. (Plus the names are equally of the moment: the Thai curry is called “Siamese”, and other dishes are “Oriental”.) This often tagged a restaurant of that era as “international”. In some ways, it was the forerunner of later food courts, a kind of culinary mish-mash where you could expect to find an eclectic mix of adapted popular dishes influenced by the American Southwest and Mexico, the U.S. South, China (either Szechuan or Cantonese), Japan, Italy, Thailand, Korea.
I’m not a big fan of the more extreme sorts of complaints about cultural appropriation (this kind of interaction between foodways is a much older story) but there was a kind of characteristic attitude in this moment that’s a bit off-putting when you look back at it. It’s mostly feels restaurant owners were keenly aware of how much these recipes helped give their own restaurants a feeling of “safe originality” for white American diners who would have been uneasy going into Thai, Vietnamese, or Korean restaurants (well, actually, I think a fair number of suburban folks liked Korean grill restaurants, the kind where you cook meat at the table). Steven Poses does lay out some of the details of how Thai food came into the Frog’s mixture of dishes, so there’s that.
Speaking of Poses, I was always a bit sad that the Commissary had closed just before I moved to Philadelphia. I remember walking by its shuttered storefront on Sansom and thinking “wow, there’s the actual restaurant!” I think he did keep his catering business going until very recently and had a few other culinary ventures over the years. It’s always been felt to me that the spiritual successor of Frog and the Commissary was the Judy Wicks’ original White Dog Cafe, though it opened not too long after Poses’ restaurants. That’s the other context that’s worth remembering—Poses and Wicks were operating in Philadelphia in a restaurant scene that was otherwise defined by Le Bec Fin. (I did have a chance to eat there a few times: it was very much not my kind of thing. I’m pretty glad that places like that have disappeared.) And in a Philadelphia that in culinary terms as well as many other respects was defined by a sense of being second-rate next to New York. I think as far as restaurants go, that hasn’t been true for a long time (though New York City is clearly still pretty much the premiere dining city in North America).
(This also reminds me that I really miss the White Dog as it was when Wicks was the owner. The suburban branches and the original one are nothing like they once were.)
Today I’ve made the pecan waffles with strawberry butter for breakfast. Those were pretty good, if not quite great. (I admittedly did not use the buckwheat specified in the recipe—I went with spelt instead.)
Tonight I’m going to make the pork chops stuffed with bacon, corn and cheese, a recipe that I always noticed and never made, and then a mocha ice cream. (The Frog/Commissary ice creams were also the first time I ever made ice cream myself.)
We were too late for these restaurants, too, although we enjoyed White Dog a couple of times. I actively disliked Le Bec Fin the two times John and I tried it. Coming from Chicago, it just felt stuffy trying for grand. John and I held Charlie Trotter’s as our ideal, though we were more likely to be found at Topolobambo, if we had the $$$.
I continue to be he humble yet grateful beneficiary of the Cookbook Survivor Substacks.