The Minimalist Cooks Dinner (2 page)

The Minimalist’s place of birth and permanent home is
The New York Times
, and it is my editors there, Michalene Busico and Regina Schrambling, to whom I am most grateful. I’ll always be indebted to Trish Hall and Rick Flaste, the
Times
editors who were not only responsible for the column’s inception but were and remain supportive and encouraging.

The Minimalist Cooks Dinner
is the work of the great folks at Broadway Books, most notably Jennifer Josephy, Steve Rubin, and Tammy Blake.

Many home cooks, fellow food-writers, and chefs all over the country and the world have given me great ideas for “the Mini,” and I’ve thanked them in the appropriate places. My friend Ed Schneider, whose daily correspondence challenges me and keeps me on my toes, and my coauthor Jean-Georges Vongerichten—a minimalist’s maximalist—deserve special mention.

Thanks as usual to Angela Miller, who is always there for me, not only as an agent but as a friend; to the ever-tolerant John Willoughby; and to the loving Alisa Smith. And, especially this year, I was blessed to count among my friends David Paskin, Pamela Hort, John Ringwald, Semeon Tsalbins, Joe and Kim McGrath, Bill Shinker and Susan Moldow, Mitchell Orfuss, Naomi Glauberman, John Bancroft, Madeline Meacham, Fred Zolna, and Sherry Slade. Karen Baar was the source of a large chunk of the inspiration and creativity that go into the Minimalist; for this and many other things I’ll always be grateful.

—Mark Bittman

These hundred-odd recipes represent about two years of my
New York Times
column, an average of a recipe a week. They have a couple of things in common. First of all, that they were developed at the rate of one a week is no coincidence, since almost all appeared in my weekly column, “The Minimalist.” Second, they are intended to be easy, often simple, and usually quick (those that are not quick spread out a little bit of work over a few hours).

If they are successful, if they provide you with satisfying dishes with a minimum of effort, it’s thanks in large part to the fact that I am lucky enough to work on just one recipe a week. There were times in my career as a food writer when I was obligated to come up with twelve recipes a week; this simply cannot be done on a regular basis without begging and borrowing recipes from friends, chefs, and fellow food writers, and submitting them without testing or changing.

I still beg and borrow ideas, and from the same sources. But these days I take those ideas home, to my average suburban
kitchen with its average equipment, and work them to death, until I’m satisfied that they can’t be made any simpler or easier without sacrificing too much of their essence.

If this sounds like a compromise, it is. Cooking, like most everything else in life, is exactly that. We never have as much time as we like, we rarely have the perfect ingredients, and few of us—myself included, lest you doubt it—have the skills to measure up to truly demanding recipes. My job, as I see it, is to show you the little path I blaze, the route that makes things faster, more flexible, and easier.

Sometimes I am accused of going too far, and failing to retain a recipe’s soul, losing too much of its vitality in the process of simplifying it. I try to take this objection into account and remedy it by offering a wide range of substitutions and variations, ways to make recipes more complex, slightly fancier, more sophisticated, or just different.

Simple, as a friend of mine said to me, need not mean simple-minded. As much thought and work may go into
figuring out a great three-ingredient, 30-minute recipe as one that includes thirty ingredients and takes 3 hours. The fact that the preparation and execution is faster and easier does not make the recipe less sophisticated, complex, or desirable—indeed, it may make it more so.

The Minimalist Cooks Dinner
differs from its predecessor,
The Minimalist Cooks at Home
, in a few ways. The texts are shorter, the pointer sections more substantial. Furthermore, I have included serving and wine suggestions as well as a chapter of quick, easy side dishes, so that you can easily complete a meal based on one of the recipes here. But I want to stress that these serving suggestions are exactly that—a list of dishes that I think might well serve to complement the main course. You might want more, less, different, or none, and by all means I encourage you to go your own way.

That’s what home cooking is about.