Good morning. Passover begins on Monday and, for those observing, Joan Nathan has given us her family recipe for brisket (above), which you could prepare on the day itself, but please don’t. It’s much better cooked this weekend and chilled in the refrigerator for a day or two so the flavors have time to set up — and so you can skim the excess fat from the top of the braise more easily.
As the ads for Levy’s rye bread used to say, you don’t have to be Jewish to love it. (My family’s recipe for the dish, which isn’t kosher, happens to have come from Joan as well.) Brisket on a cool April evening is a lovely thing to eat with buttered noodles — or a crisp potato kugel. And what a treat not to have to cook on a Monday night, having used the weekend to get ahead!
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Brisket
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(Other recipes for Passover: chicken with artichokes and lemon; braised lamb with dried fruit; whole roasted cauliflower with pistachio pesto; matzo-ball soup; apple and walnut haroseth.)
Not that all my cooking this weekend will be prep work for the week to come. Saturday morning would be a fine time to make some French toast amandine. Ramen for lunch, with miso, seaweed and egg? Definitely sausage and peppers for dinner.
And I’d like to make Joan’s recipe for whitefish salad for Sunday breakfast, to eat with bagels. But if I can’t find a good smoked whitefish at the market, I’ll downshift into a bacon, egg and cheese on a bulkie roll, with extra butter and, as they say at the deli, salt-pepper-ketchup.
Either way, breakfast will hold me through lunch and leave me with plenty of appetite for Sunday dinner: Suzanne Goin’s amazing recipe for lamb meatballs with spiced tomato sauce, pita’s finest foil. Make that once and you’ll find yourself doing so again and again, riffing off the theme. (Sometimes, instead of broiling the meatballs before braising them in the sauce, I cook them over a ripping hot charcoal fire on the grill, which adds a fantastic smokiness to the dish.)
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Now, it’s nothing to do with apples or honey, but you should read Sarah Lyall’s profile of the author Salman Rushdie in The New York Times, along with Dwight Garner’s rave review of Rushdie’s new memoir: “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”
“The Killing,” on Amazon Prime, is a 2007 police procedural that originally ran in Denmark as “Forbrydelsen,” or “The Crime.” One man’s opinion: It seems to have taken some editing notes from montage-rich K-dramas, but is no less gripping for that.
Speaking of drama, here’s Louis Menand in The New Yorker, on the 1874 Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial as covered by Robert Shaplen in the same publication in 1952. Wheels within wheels!
Finally, it’s early yet to declare the song of the summer, but my colleague Lindsay Zoladz is putting down a marker for Sabrina Carpenter’s new jam, “Espresso.” “Make it a double,” Lindsay wrote, “and get ready to hear this one everywhere.” I’ll see you on Sunday.
