This recipe is from 1831 and the cookbook of a Mrs. Mary Randolph, reproduced in The Williamsburg art of Cookery. When I was young, my family would regularly visit Williamsburg, and the taste of these small, sweet biscuits is something I remember clearly from my childhood. When I stumbled upon this recipe while thumbing through The Williamsburg art of Cookery, it seemed to immediately ring a bell with the taste buds of my mind, so I decided to give it a try.

I’ve been back to Williamsburg several times as an adult, and have unfortunately been unable to find these biscuits in any of the historic taverns that dot the tricorn and breeches district. This leads me to believe that either they’ve stopped serving them, or that, like so much of my childhood, I only imagined it. Either one is just as possible.

For the wine in this recipe, I used dry sack. Sack is a sweet, fortified wine, similar to madeira or sherry. It’s somewhat fallen out of favor in the past couple of centuries, and is chiefly thought of now as being reported by Shakespeare as Falstaff’s favorite beverage. It’s not as cloyingly sweet as sherry, and it isn’t as painfully headache-inducing as madeira. I chose it because it gives the recipe a certain historical flair, but either sherry or brandy would work just as well. To keep the historical flair, I also recommend using demerara sugar.

Here’s the recipe adapted for modern kitchens:

Virginia Tavern Biscuits

• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon mace
• 1/2 cup dry sack, sherry, or brandy
• Approx. 1/2 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Combine the flour, sugar, mace, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Add the butter in pieces, and work with a pastry blender until the butter is broken down into small chunks and the dough resembles coarse cornmeal.

Add the wine and mix well, and then add enough milk to form a soft dough.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead lightly, until the dough is just beginning to feel dry. Roll out the dough 1/4 inch thick and cut into small circles.

Place the biscuits on a parchment-lined baking sheet and cook for 15-20 minutes, until the biscuits are golden brown. Pay close attention during the last few minutes of baking, as these biscuits will burn on the bottom very easily.

Louisiana gets unfairly denigrated by the nation at large. The inhabitants of Louisiana are unfairly characterized as swamp-dwelling hicks with the same refinement one expects from a bunch of alcoholic, banjo-strmmong, brothel-frequenting cartoon bears. We think of New Orleans as being the only source of good food in the whole state, but on every side road and off every highway throughout all of Louisiana you can find amazing little roadside restaurants serving amazing cajun food. If you can leave your prejudices said, you can enjoy some amazing cooking anywhere in Louisiana.

This recipe makes a massive amount of rich, spicy sweet jambalaya which is a perfect meal on a hot summer day. It takes a good, long while to cook, so while it’s simmering on the stove you have more than enough time to hop in the truck with some banjo-strumming cartoon bears and pop out for a quick taste of one of Louisiana’s many fine combination drive-through daiquiri emporium and brothels.

The Recipe

• 1 stick butter
• 12 plum tomatoes
• 8 cups chopped okra
• 1 cup chopped green onions
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 large yellow pepper
• 1 large red pepper
• 4 bay leaves
• 8 cups chicken stock
• 2 links andouille
• 2 links boudin
• 1 lb backfin crab meat
• 1 lb shrimp
• 1 lb catfish

Seasoning

• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp white pepper
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tbsp dried parsley
• 1 tbsp dried basil

Grill the boudin and andouille, and then cut into small pieces.

Chop the onions, garlic, yellow and red peppers, okra, and tomatoes.

In a large, heavy-bottomed dutch oven, melt the butter over medium-high heat and add the green onions and garlic. Sautee until the onions are soft.

Add the yellow and red peppers and the seasoning mix. Continue to sautee for 5 – 10 minutes.

Add the tomatoes and okra and cook, stirring, until the tomatoes begin to soften, about 20 minutes.

Add the chicken stock and bay leaves cook on a low simmer until the tomatoes are okra are broken down, about 1 1/2 hours.

Cut the catfish into small pieces. Add it to the jambalaya along with the shrimp and crabmeat. Cook until the shrimp are pink, about 10 – 15 minutes.

Serve with rice.

This is my take on the classic Caesar salad. Anchovy-intense, with soft-boiled eggs in place of the usual raw eggs. This is not done out of any particular paranoia about eating raw eggs, it’s just that I’ve made this recipe with eggs all the way from raw to hard-boiled and about 4 minutes seems to be where the best flavor is.

The Salad

• 1 head romaine lettuce
• 1/2 cup shaved parmesan cheese
• Crutons
• Caesar salad dressing
• Black pepper to taste

Break up the lettuce head and wash the leaves in cold water. Pat dry and refrigerate until serving.

When dinner comes along, combine all ingredients in a large salad bowl and serve.

Croutons

• About 3 cups of good, crusty bread, cut into large cubes
• 4 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 crushed garlic cloves

Preheat the oven to 350°.

Place the bread cubes on a large baking sheet and cook until lightly toasts, about 8 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil and garlic together in a large skillet.

Add the toasted bread crumbs to the skillet and cook, stirring constantly, until the croutons are browned and crispy.

Caesar Salad Dressing

• Juice of 1 small lemon
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 2 soft-boiled eggs
• 2 tablespoons mustard
• One 1.5 ounce jar of anchovies
• 3 garlic cloves
• Salt and pepper to taste

Remove the soft-boiled eggs from their shells with a spoon. Place the eggs, along with the other ingredients in a blender and puree until smooth. Chill before serving.

This is the central contradiction of Music for Gracious LIving: Barbecue, one of a series of five albums put out by Columbia in 1955, all featuring the mood music song stylings of Peter Barclay and his Orchestra. The albums smooth, easy listening arrangements are accompanied by expansive liner notes with tips on gracious living and helpfully included recipes. In short, your complete guide to gracious living pressed into convenient vinyl.

The mood music genre was at its height in the 1950s, with activity-specific albums helpfully identified as Music for something or other filling record store shelves. I will freely admit that I’m a huge fan of mood music. I’ve been rescuing these LPs out of thrift store bins for decades. The guys down at our local record store (and the greatest record store in Houston) Heights Vinyl know to pull aside for me anything which comes through the door with an absolutely absurd cover photograph wrapped around string-heavy arrangements of popular songs. Look, there’s a genuine tradition of music which you’re supposed to not entirely listen to. Most of Mozart’s work was meant to be not entirely listened to, but to serve as something for Vienna’s potentates and their mistresses to  parade around to. Mood music fills a space with an aesthetic cushion. It’s a genre that many of today’s restaurants should happily re-embrace. Sandwiches and death metal don’t mix.

Which brings me back to living as performance. Gracious living and barbecue don’t mix because they are essentially two different types of performance. Graciousness is the performance of social elegance. Slapping meat on a burning grill is a performance of hyper-masculinity. Both are legitimate forms of performance, but there’s only a very limited space where they intersect. And when they butt up against each other in an inappropriate way, the picture that comes together is often baffling in the incongruity of its mixes signals. Case in point — the album cover of Music for Gracious Living: Barbecue.

A family gathers at the edge of a dark forest. The master of the entire situation seems to be the elderly gentleman with the ambitiously escalated pants. He’s joined by his pearl-clad wife and a younger gentleman wearing what appears to be a casually smart three-quarter sleeve kimono tucked into his grey flannel pants. For some reason, there are seven coffee cups but only four people. No one seems to notice that the dog is fake. The elderly man’s stern grimace seems to command fear. These people all seem to share some horrid, dark secret. Perhaps they are cannibals.

That’s the strange thing about the ideas that the suburban ideal of gracious living that Music for Gracious Living: Barbecue and its ilk tend to promote. So much of the performance of gracious living is in having life appear effortless. So much of the performance of the hyper-masculine ideal of suburban living is in being self-sufficient.

One type of performance is based around creating the illusion of lack of effort, the other around creating the illusion of effort. When these two aesthetics intersect, for some reason we immediately jump into some very bizarre mental spaces, where the illusion of suburban ease is instinctively assumed to be covering the most obscene depravities imaginable. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the cover to another album in the series and let your mind wander.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Anyway, while you’re wallowing in that, here’s a recipe from the liner notes of Music for Gracious Living: Barbecue. Enjoy.

Easy-does-it Punch: A twist of the can-opener and it’s almost ready! One six-ounce can frozen lemon concentrate, one twelve-ounce can (one-and-a-half cups) apricot nectar, one twelve-ounce can unsweetened pineapple juice, one-and-a-half cups water. Combine all ingredients and chill. Pour over ice cubes or crushed ice to serve. Garnish with fresh mint, if desired. Makes six to eight servings.

The combination of oats gives this granola a nice, hearty crunch, and the mixture of sweeteners hits all the granola-central flavor spots. The recipe makes enough for two people for two weeks. I usually enjoy it in an artisan-made earthenware bowl with home-grown blackberries and yoghurt made exclusively from cows that have jumped over the moon.

The Recipe

• 6 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup steel-cut oats
• 1/4 cup shredded coconut
• 2 cups walnut pieces
• 1 cup pecan halves
• 1 cup sliced almonds
• 1/2 cup flax seeds
• 1/4 cup molasses sugar
• 1 tbsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp freshly-grated nutmeg
• 1 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup grapeseed oil
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/4 cup maple syrup

Preheat the oven to 250°.

Combine the oats, coconut, nuts, flax seeds, salt, sugar and nutmeg in a very large bowl and mix well.

Mix together the honey, maple syrup, and grapeseed oil and pour over the dry mixture, stirring well.

Pour into a large roasting pan and place in the oven. Bake for 1 hour, 15 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool and stir in the raisins. This will keep for a good long time when sealed in an airtight container.

With passover having come and gone, I found myself with a little leftover schmaltz and the urgent, emotional need for corn muffins. Working within those boundaries, I decided to see what would happen when those worlds collided. The result is something like Chicken in a Biskit crackers, if they were invented four hundred years ago in a shtetl on the Russian steppes.

Schmaltz, rendered chicken fat, is not only the key to light, fluffy, and structurally integral matzoh balls, it can also be used in baking in place of lard, but as shortenings go it does add a very distinct an noticeable flavor to whatever it’s used in. This can be fine if you’re planning on dousing whatever it is you’ve just cooked in chicken soup, as is usually done with matzoh balls, but if you’re planning on doing some stand-alone baking you need to plan around that chicken taste. And everybody knows that corn and chicken go great together. Fewer people know that blueberries go great with both of those.

These muffins are dense, firm, and moist with a sweet taste reminiscent of fried chicken. They’re fruity, schmaltzy, and corny, all the things that we secretly love. So put on some overalls and pop some Liberace on the record player and get to baking.

The Recipe

• 1 cup corn meal
• 1 cup white-wheat flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp dark brown sugar
• 1 cup melted schmaltz
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 pint blueberries

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Combine milk, egg, and melted schmaltz in a large bowl and mix well.

Add corn meal, brown sugar, flour, and baking powder and stir to combine.

Stir in blueberries.

Fill the cups in a 12-cup muffin tin about 1/2 way full with the batter.

Bake at 400° for 25 minutes.

This is a slow-roasted lamb shank, covered in olive oil and fruit vinegar and roasted surrounded by cloves of garlic. I like to use fig vinegar or four-berry fruit vinegar, but anything distilled from a dark fruit or berry will do. Don’t use a balsamic vinegar, though, the vinegar will glaze and the taste will be too strong for the delicate meat. Apart from the tender lamb shank, you also get a whole host of roasted garlic cloves to eat. And that’s always good.

Fair warning, I’m sure there’s some bylaw somewhere in the depths of kashrut that this recipe is violating. But, as you may have noticed by the frequent exhalations on the beauties of lard on the site, we’re not all that observant.

The Recipe

• 1 large lamb shank
• 2 bulbs of garlic
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 tbsp fruit vinegar, such as raspberry or fig. Not balsamic.
• 1 tbsp kosher salt
• 1 tbsp crushed peppercorns

Break the individual cloves of garlic away from the bulb, but do not peel.

Whisk together the olive oil and the vinegar.

Rub the oil and vinegar mixture over the lab shank, and sprinkle on both sides with the salt and pepper.

Place the lamb shank in a large casserole dish or dutch oven and scatter the garlic cloves around it.

Cover the dish and place it in the oven. Turn the oven on to 200° and cook for 4 or 5 hours, until the meat is tender and pulls easily away from the bone.

Let sit for about 20 minutes before carving. Serves two.

I’m thinking about this because last weekend I participated in the Houston Avocado Takedown. This was one of a series of cooking contests, held all across the nation, in which participants prepare a dish based around a single theme ingredient.

I learned of the competition when the organizer contacted me and asked if I’d like to participate. For me, entering a food competition is definitely an act that falls outside my usual range of choices. My wife often says I’m the least competitive person on the planet, but to me being least competitive seems like just trying too hard. But enticed by a crate of free avocados, I decided to give it a whirl.

The recipe I settled on was little pecan shells filled with honeyed avocado and topped with a squirt of grapefruit curd. It was a recipe that fell in to my usual high-end hippie flavor range for desserts — complex, not overly sweet, earthy and unexpected. That was probably my first mistake.

To say that I was underprepared for something that I spent three days cooking for seems like it shouldn’t be quite true. But as soon as we stepped in to the takedownatorium that Warehouse Live had been converted into, I had a sensation surprisingly similar to the one I experienced twenty years ago when I opened my SAT test booklet and thought “Maybe I should have been sober for this.”

I had heard of cooking competitions in the past. Events like chili cook offs and barbecue cook offs happen with some regularity in our neighborhood, and of course I knew of the work of Indiana State Baking Champion Thelma Stymer. But until I met the other participants in the Avocado Takedown, it had never occurred to me that there were a substantial number of people who join in these events not because they love cooking, but because they love competition.

Our little table of tiny cups of avocado in aluminum trays was quickly overshadowed by elaborate displays including pinatas, multi-level desert trays, and young girls in very low cut dresses. Looking down at my rayon shirt that I’d paid three dollars for because it has a typo, I knew that I was pretty roundly outclassed.

At some point in our lives, we all meet the avocado of death. That big, alligator-skinned pear that can have you drowning in green slime before you can decide if it’s a fruit or a vegetable.

I like cooking. I like cooking for my family, for my friends, and for anyone else who wants to come and sit around the table. I like long evenings that involve multiple courses, multiple candles, and multiple bottles of wine.

What I’ve discovered that I don’t like is cooking to win. I didn’t even realize this until I attempted it, although I probably should have seen it coming. With my rants about the culture and integrity of food, I was setting myself up to betray my principles in quiet ways exactly the way a character in a Whit Stilman movie would. Only more Jewish.

When I cook for friends and family, I do so because I’m afraid of dying. I’m terrified of the thought that one day, inevitably, these meals are going to stop. That there will come a point where the food that people think of most when they think of me will be the cold buffet they had beside my cold corpse.

Cooking competitions are too close to that reality for me. Being in a situation where only one person is going to walk out the door with the prize blender is just too close to being in a box and in no position to notice just how uncomfortable your suit actually is.

Eating is one of the best ways we have of staving off death. Keeping ourselves and those we love alive and living is the best way I can think of to spend that time. Making cooking about who walks away with the prize blender, or about anything where the reward is something other than the pleasure of food and company, is just too close to racing to the end for me.

Anyway, for those of you who are interested, here’s the losing recipe.

Honeyed Avocado in Pecan Shells

Honeyed Avocado

• 4 medium avocados
• 1/2 cup honey

Peel and pit the avocados. Combine with honey in a large bowl.

Beat with an electric mixer for 5 or 6 minutes, until the mixture is light and fluffy.

Pecan Shells

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 stick butter
• 1 1/2 cups finely chopped pecans
• 1/2 cup flour

Preheat the oven to 350°

Beat butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

Add the flour and chopped pecans and continue beating for an additional 4 or 5 minutes.

Spoon the mixture by tablespoons into mini-muffin tins. Place in a preheated 350° oven and bake for 10 minutes.

Remove the tins from the oven. While still very warm, press the center of each cup down with the handle of a wooden spoon to form hollow cups.

Let cool for a while in the tins, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

Grapefruit Curd

• 1 large grapefruit
• 1 lemon
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 stick butter
• Juice of 1 lemon

Zest and juice the grapefruit.

In the top of a double-boiler over medium heat, combine the grapefruit juice, lemon juice, 1 tbsp of grapefruit zest, butter and sugar and cook, stirring, until the butter is completely melted.

Stir in the eggs, reduce the heat to low and let simmer for 40 minutes, stirring often, until the mixture coats the back of a wooden spoon.

To Assemble

Spoon the honeyed avocado into a pastry bag and squirt enough into each shell to fill.

Spoon a small amount of grapefruit curd over the top of the avocado.

Makes about 24 cups. Repeat 20 times and leave without a prize blender.

This is a tropical fruit tart built on top of a crunchy, almond-filled crust. It’s really just got all kinds of amazing fruity goodness happening, and it has the benefit of looking really impressive and much more difficult to make than it actually is. So if you have a supply of cheap and plentiful mangoes, make this tart.

If you don’t have a supply of cheap and plentiful mangoes, move to Houston. We’ve got lots of other good stuff, too.

The Recipe

• 2 ripe nectarines
• 2 ripe mangoes
• 4 tbsp butter
• 4 tbsp lard
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup iced water
• 1/2 cup sliced almonds
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• Pinch cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 375°

Place the butter and lard in a large bowl and cut in the flour and salt with a pastry blender or fork until it resembles coarse cornmeal, with some large chunks still lurking in the dough.

Add the almonds to the dough and mix together.

Slowly pour in the 1/4 cup of iced water until the dough comes together.

Gather the dough into a ball and remove to a lightly floured work surface. Roll the dough out and fit in into a 10 inch tart pan.

Thinly slice the nectarines and arrange in a two circles around the edge of the pan. Place the sliced so they overlap one another.

Slice the mangoes into small cubes and pile in the center, surrounded by the circles of nectaries.

In a small saucepan, heat the water, sugar, and vanilla together until the sugar has melted. Pour this syrup over the tart, and then dust the mangoes lightly with cinnamon.

Bake for 45 minutes, then remove from the oven and let cool completely before serving.

These bottles are rarely opened. Usually the person who receives the bottle just passes it along to the next person who might be in a whimsically employing mood. We’ve passed them along ourselves. I’ve even thought about radio tagging the next bottle we pass along, just to see how far it gets. The higher up in the world of music you are, the better the bottles get. I’m sure James Levine gets unopened bottles of 1955 Veuve Clicqout handed to him all the time. Some of them with a little note still attached thanking Leopold Stokowski for a wonderful show and asking if he might be hiring.

Between concert seasons, I looked at our wine rack and saw the fairly ridiculous number of unopened champagne bottles sitting there. Deciding that it was a long time between now and next Chanukah, I decided to break the chain.

This recipe simmers a chicken and some pears in an entire bottle of champagne. It’s a wonderfully bright, refreshing meal. The flavors blend and compliment each other magnificently, with the chicken absorbing the distinct crispness of the champagne.

It goes well with some brown rice, and is well complimented at the table with a second bottle of champagne. If you don’t have two spare bottles of champagne sitting around, you should have learned the violin like your mother told you.

The Recipe

• 1 large chicken
• 1 bottle of champagne
• 2 D’Anjou Pears
• 1/4 cup fresh parsley
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/4 cup romano cheese
• 1/4 cup flour
• Pinch ground cloves
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Olive oil

Cut the chicken in to frying pieces.

Combine the flour, cloves, salt and pepper in a shallow bowl and dredge the chicken pieces to lightly cover.

In a large dutch over and a little olive oil, thoroughly brown all the chicken pieces on all sides over a medium-high heat. Once browned, remove from the pot.

Thinly slice the pears and place them in the pot. Cook, stirring, for about five minutes.

Deglaze the pot with a little of the champagne.

Return the chicken to the pot, add the remaining champagne and the lemon juice and reduce the heat to a very low simmer. Let the chicken cook for about 40 minutes, or until it is very tender.

Remove the chicken from the pot into a large, ovenproof dish.

Grate the cheese and lightly scatter it across the chicken.

Add the parsley to the sauce, return the heat to high, and cook until the stock is reduced to half.

Place the chicken in a 350° over until the cheese is just melted.

Remove the chicken from the oven, place on serving plates and spoon the champagne sauce over it before serving.