Good morning. Time was, a goodly part of my correspondence was with readers annoyed with me or with The New York Times for publishing recipes calling for ingredients unavailable to them, either for reasons of geography or because they didn’t wish to stray beyond the aisles of their local supermarket.
Online shopping and better supermarkets changed all that. You can have oyster sauce shipped to your small town or your corner of a large city, and find mullein-leaf tea, tubs of Vegemite and egusi seeds, too. I had a hankering for a St. Louis-style pizza. I didn’t have to fly to Lambert Field. Two or three clicks on the laptop and the mail carrier soon brought me a few pounds of the Provel cheese necessary to make it.
Today’s shopping: cassareep, a Guyanese syrup of boiled cassava root, savory-sweet, like a cross between molasses and Worcestershire sauce. It’s a crucial ingredient in one of Guyana’s most beloved dishes, pepperpot (above), which Millie Peartree brought to New York Times Cooking this week. Of course you can buy cassareep online, but if there’s a Caribbean market where you are, it’s most likely stocked there as well. Browned into beef chuck, it makes for a lovely stew: spicy, fragrant, slightly sweet and sticky. Millie serves it with sliced white bread. I think that’s lovely.
Featured Recipe
Pepperpot
As for the rest of the week …
Monday
The other night I attempted a freestyle, no-recipe recipe for miso soup. It was an unmitigated disaster. Follow Eric Kim’s excellent, actual recipe for miso soup instead. It’s fantastic.
Tuesday
What I like about Ali Slagle’s recipe for chicken quesadillas is that she mixes shredded chicken with cheese in advance of assembling the tortillas, which yields a perfectly melted filling. And it comes together quickly, making it one of the great weeknight uses of a rotisserie (or leftover) chicken.
Wednesday
Lidey Heuck’s recipe for a Waldorf salad sees its roots in the fancy-dan cuisine served at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan in the 19th century, but in 2024 it’s a perfect example of how you can make a beautiful dinner out of plain-Jane supermarket ingredients: a couple of apples, some table grapes, celery, mayonnaise, lemon and a handful of toasted walnuts.
Thursday
There is no high-heat, fast-hands stir-frying in Genevieve Ko’s recipe for an easy kung pao chicken. It’s medium-heat, low-stress home cooking instead, a wonderful foil for greens steamed with garlic and a bowl of rice. I might add some peanuts to the mix, myself.
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with Kay Chun’s recipe for seafood burgers with Old Bay mayonnaise. They’re not complicated: shrimp, cod and scallions, with Delmarva-scented mayonnaise for fat and silkiness. Kay grills the patties, but they’ll cook just as nicely in a well-oiled cast-iron pan. Serve on toasted buns with plenty of iceberg lettuce and, if you like, sliced pickles. So great.
There are many thousands more recipes waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. You do need a subscription to read them. Subscriptions are what make this whole enterprise possible. So, please, if you haven’t taken one out yet, would you consider doing so today? Thanks.
Reach out for help if you find yourself in a jam with our technology. We’re manning the inbox at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write to me. I’m hopeless with technology, but I’m a good listener: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read every one I receive.
Now, it’s a far cry from galangal or smoked goose, but the South African soprano Golda Schultz is coming to the New York Philharmonic this week to sing Mozart. Here she is doing just that in London a few years ago. Let’s go!
See what you think of Paul Keegan, in the London Review of Books, on the Philip Guston show at the Tate Modern.
