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Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal has it right: American cookbook publishers should start listing weights next to ingredients, not just volume measurements. Publishers argue that American cooks typically don’t own kitchen scales, so why include these measures? To which I say “Balderdash!” Most serious home cooks do own electronic digital scales, and if they don’t, so what? Cooks who don’t want to ditch their measuring cups can rely on the more imprecise volume measurement, while those of us who revere our scales can follow the weight measurements.

One important point Gomes alludes to in his essay but doesn’t spell out is why ingredient weights deserve, well, more weight in the kitchen. It’s this: a cup (or a tablespoon or a “pinch”) isn’t always a cup, a tablespoon, or a “pinch.” It’s why your cereal box includes the message, “Sold by weight, not volume” or warns “Settling may occur.” A recipe tester’s measuring cup might be slightly bigger than the measuring cup you inherited from your Aunt Matilda. Or the cookbook author may have baked in his dry New Mexico kitchen and you’re baking his bread in your humid Houston home. Humidity can definitely affect volume measurements of ingredient like flour and sugar (as well it does weight, but still, weighing gives you a better chance at accuracy).

So, long story short — you’ll get the best result from a recipe when you know the precise weights the recipe developer/cookbook used. (And always be wary of recipes that specify a “pinch,” especially when it comes to cayenne pepper — one cook’s pinch is another cook’s pain in the ass!!)

I was scanning a sale announcement from Jessica’s Biscuit, one of my favorite virtual cookbook haunts, and I zoomed in on this book, Consider the Eel, by Richard Schweid. A cookbook about eels? Indeed. The author discusses the fascinating life of eels (did you know every eel starts out in the Sargasso Sea and spends up to three years of its early life drifting to either European or North American rivers? I didn’t!) and includes historic and contemporary recipes for this odd-looking fish. I’m tempted to order the book, although eels squeesh me out, visually and texture-wise. They remind me of snakes, and the few times I’ve eaten eel, the sliminess of it turned me off.

I’ve never seen eel on a U.S. menu, except in sushi restaurants. Eels seems to be more popular in Europe, where I occasionally see it on menus. Next time I’m in Europe, I want to try two new-to-me eel dishes: jellied eel when I visit London (which won’t do much to quell the slime factor) and deep-fried elvers, or baby eels, a Basque specialty.

Until then, you’ll have to look for your eel recipes somewhere else on the web — or order this book from Jessica!

I alluded that we get a lot of greens in our CSA pickup each week, especially at the beginning of the season. And yes, being that I’m in New England, mid-July is still considered early season. Over the next few weeks, the composition of our basket will become less green, and more red and yellow.

And although I love greens, even the bitter ones, it does become tiresome eating them the same old way, which around here is sauteed in either olive oil and garlic, or bacon and onions. So Sunday night I flipped through one of my favorite recent cookbook acquisitions, Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food, and settled on a kale and potato soup. It was perfect because it also happened to use up some pantry items. My walk-in pantry and chest freezer are heaving with food and I really must empty both out this summer to make room for the winter.

Have I mentioned how much I love Alice Waters? I know it’s fashionable in some quarters to make fun of her. Like, “Oh, who do you think you are, Miss Fresh, Local & In Season … Alice Waters?” Screw those folks. Alice rocks. Her recipes are simple, and as long as you use fabulous ingredients — not hard to do in the summer — you’ll be rewarded with a dish that’s flavorful, good, nourishing, and totally non-pretentious, so I don’t know where these anti-Alice people get their ideas.

Alice’s kale and potato soup is one of those recipes. It’s so hearty, a meat lover would enjoy it, and although it contains few ingredients, its taste is complex — definitely more than a sum of its parts. I happened to have two quarts of fantastic homemade chicken stock in my freezer, which elevated the soup flavorwise. It would be just as tasty with a homemade vegetable stock — barring homemade, a good quality packaged chicken or vegetable stock would make a decent base. The other winning flavor component is the real Parmesan Reggiano cheese garnishing the soup. It has a nutty, salty flavor that lacks in domestically produced Parmesans. Were I not to have the $15/lb. cheese on hand, I’d probably skip it and garnish with bread chunks fried in garlic oil.

This soup makes the perfect Sunday night supper, even in July.

Kale and Potato Soup
Adapted from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 onions, sliced thin
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 bunch of kale, tough center stem removed and leaves sliced into thin shreds
1 lb. Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/4″ rounds
2 quarts homemade chicken broth
Kosher salt, to taste
Fresh nutmeg, to taste (optional)
Shaved Parmesan Reggiano cheese, for garnish

1. In a heavy soup pot or enamel cast iron Dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onions, stir to coat with oil, and cook for 10 to 12 minutes, until soft and just starting to caramelize. Stir in garlic and cook for another minute. Add kale and potatoes, and stir to coat with oil. Cook for a couple minutes, then add broth. Bring broth to a simmer, reduce heat and cook for 30 minutes, or until potatoes are cooked through.

2. Taste the broth. Does it need salt? I don’t salt my homemade broths, so here I add a teaspoon or two of salt, tasting as I go. Store-bought broths tend to contain lots of salt, so taste first! Serve soup in large bowls, scrape some fresh nutmeg over each dish, and top with shavings of Parmesan cheese.

This was my first try cooking from Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift’s How to Eat Supper. It includes so many recipes I’m dying to try for our family meals. My goal this summer is to empty out our freezer and pantry, so I want to use recipes where I don’t have to go out and buy a lot of stuff, save meat and produce. Of the two recipes I tested last night, one was a winner, the other a dud. But let’s start with the good:

Cabbage Slaw with Orange-Pumpkin Seed Dressing

From the pantry: EVOO, garlic, white wine vinegar, spices/salt/pepper, an orange, and a carrot

Had to buy: napa cabbage, pumpkin seeds

This was a straightforward slaw with napa cabbage and carrots as the starring vegetables, seasoned with a dressing made from roasted pumpkin seeds, orange juice, cumin and coriander. I made this slaw as a side to go with the Tamarind-glazed Pork Chops, and unlike the chops recipe, this turned out well. Surprisingly well, considering I generally detest coleslaw. I liked the quiet flavor of the cabbage with little bursts of sweetness from the carrot. I had screwed up by buying raw unsalted pumpkin seeds — the recipe called for roasted & salted — but all was remedied by pan roasting the seeds and salting by hand. I made the dressing ahead in the food processor, then a few minutes before dinner, I used the slicing attachment to shred the cabbage and carrot directly into the dressing. Kasper and Swift recommend adding smoked tofu or tempeh to the salad, something I’ll do next time — smokiness would have been an excellent addition to this delicious salad.

Next time: Use a finer grained salt in the dressing and shred the cabbage with a knife for a more uniform appearance. Also, the two servings of raw cabbage I devoured gave me terrible heartburn around 2:30 a.m. Ouch!

Tamarind-glazed Pork Chops

From the pantry: Aleppo pepper (yeah, can you believe it?), garlic, fish sauce, sugar, white wine

Had to buy: pork chops, tamarind concentrate

I had high hopes for this recipe since I love the sour flavor of tamarind, but things got off on a bad footing when I discovered my small jar of tamarind concentrate in the ‘fridge had disappeared. I hoofed it over to the local Indian market, got my Tamcon, and came back home to make the glaze ahead of time. I could tell The Oyster wasn’t going to like the 2 tablespoons of ground Aleppo pepper the recipe called for, so I cut it down to a mere 2 teaspoons. The rest of the glaze consisted of the tamarind concentrate, garlic, fish sauce, sugar, dry white wine, and water to thin. When I taste-tested the glaze it was way too sour, so I added an additional 2 teaspoons of sugar on top of the 1 tsp. the recipe called for. It still wasn’t very sweet on the tongue, but I thought maybe the sweetness would come through once grilled.

I used a Caphalon grill pan to cook the chops, then brushed the glaze over them to finish. Unfortunately, the grilling did nothing to heighten the sweetness. Instead, the sour of the tamarind overpowered the chops — not even the salty flavor of the fish sauce or the six garlic cloves could cut through it. However, the heat from the two teaspoons of Aleppo pepper came though — I can’t imagine how strong it would have been with the recommended two tablespoons.

Next time: There won’t be a next time. This one was dudsville.

Before Ina and Nigella, before Martha or even Julia, there was Elsie.

A former medical secretary, Elsie Masterton and her attorney husband John left New York in the 1940s to cleave a ski area from Vermont’s Green Mountains. While John and his workers felled trees and packed snow (if there was any — this was before the advent of snow guns and grooming machines), Elsie taught herself to cook, a practical necessity since it became her job to feed an army of hungry men every day.

The ski area didn’t pan out, but Elsie’s newfound cooking talents saved the enterprise. With the last of their savings, the Mastertons transformed their 19th century farmhouse into the Blueberry Hill Inn, with Elsie presiding in the kitchen. A small ad in the Saturday Review promised visitors “Lucullan food,” and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, guests from around the world sojourned in Brandon, Vermont, to feast on Elsie Masterton’s shrimp tempura, her famous chicken baked in wine, and her homey, bite-sized biscuits. Her fame grew with the publication of the Blueberry Hill Cookbook in 1959, the Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook in 1963, then the Blueberry Hill Kitchen Notebook in 1964, in addition to two nonfiction books about the Mastertons’ lives as country innkeepers.

Masterton balked when her publisher asked for a cookbook that merely catalogued the inn’s recipes. She convinced them that women wanted and needed a cookbook with spice and personality. In the Blueberry Hill Cookbook she wrote, “I think that I am talking with someone; let’s let it be you. You are a gal in my kitchen, at my elbow. I want you to know what I’m doing, every single thing I’m doing, and as often as this is practical, why I’m doing it.” The headnotes in her recipes share amusing stories about her children, guests, and the local school board, impart practical kitchen wisdom, or guilelessly gush over how delicious the dish is. Masterton’s engaging writing style won over not only American housewives, but earned her accolades from First Lady Bess Truman and poet Ogden Nash. An unattributed endorsement on her last cookbook reads, “I read and devoured [the Blueberry Hill Cookbook] like a novel from cover to cover.”

In a day when convenience food became the norm, Masterton fought the good fight: “I disclaim all knowledge of a way of fixing any canned vegetables other than onions and beets,” she wrote. She preached respect for ingredients, instructed readers to make friends with their butchers, and showed them there was life beyond the canned vegetable aisle when they grew their own vegetables or shopped at roadside stands. And although she quaintly refers to women as gals and chooses margarine (the fat of the day) over butter in her recipes, Masterton’s cookbooks are relevant nearly a half-century later. Today she’d be an enthusiastic supporter of CSAs and farmers’ markets, if not a card-carrying member of Slow Food USA.

When Elsie Masterton died of cancer in 1966, mere months after her husband passed away, so did one of our earliest good food advocates. Masterton’s cookbooks are out of print, but can occasionally be found in used bookshops. Signed copies can fetch $25 or $30, and the boxed set of her cookbooks has gone for as much as $90 on eBay. And she still has her fans: on eGullet, an online community for foodies, Masterton’s books were cited when someone posed the question about what cookbooks members most liked to curl up with and read.

Tony Clark, who bought the Blueberry Hill Inn from the Masterton estate in 1968, says he gets the occasional letter asking if Elsie is still around. In a way, she is. The youngest of her three daughters, Laurey Masterton, has run Laurey’s Catering and Gourmet-to-go in Asheville, North Carolina, for 20 years.

“People are always coming in here, telling me how much they loved my mother’s books,” says Laurey, who was 12 when her parents died. “Then they look at me and tell me how much I look like her. I’m very proud to be her daughter.” Several years ago, she reprinted the Blueberry Hill Cookbook, and in February 2007, she published a memoir, Elsie’s Biscuits: Simple Stories of Me, My Mother, and Food ($19.95). “It’s really about me honoring my mother,” says Laurey. “I wish she could see what she showed me and what I have now.”

Laurey feels closest to her mother when she’s making her biscuits; it was her job as a child to line them up on the baking sheets after her mother cut them out with a makeshift biscuit cutter. Today Laurey uses her mother’s recipe in her shop. When one customer learned there was sour cream in the recipe, he declared, “Them’s Yankee biscuits.” He went on to devour them.

Yankee biscuits they may be, but with Elsie’s touch they transcend time and cultural boundaries.

Elsie’s Biscuits can be purchased from Laurey’s Catering and Gourmet-to-go or Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café in Asheville, NC, phone 828-254-6734.

Elsie’s Biscuits

Adapted from The Blueberry Hill Cookbook by Elise Masterton
Yield: 30 1-inch biscuits or 10 3-inch biscuits

To preserve the soft, flaky architecture that’s the hallmark of a well-executed biscuit, use a light touch when patting out the dough and don’t twist your biscuit cutter – simply push it into the dough and pull it straight up to release the circle. Elsie cut her biscuits into bite-sized 1-inch circles. If you don’t have a 1-inch cutter, cut the dough into 1-inch squares or use a standard 3-inch biscuit cutter. According to Elsie’s daughter Laurey, a handful of chopped ham and Vermont cheddar makes a fine addition.

3 cups flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon sugar
4-oz (1 stick) butter, cut into 8 pieces
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/3 cup sour cream
1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract
Flour, for sprinkling

1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

2. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a large bowl.

3. Using a pastry blender or two knives, cut the butter into the flour until the mixture looks like cornmeal. In a small bowl, stir together the milk, buttermilk, sour cream, and vanilla extract. Pour the liquid into the flour mixture and stir until just combined.

4. Place the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Gently pat the dough out until it’s 1/2-inch thick. Press a biscuit cutter firmly into dough without twisting, and place biscuits on baking sheet.

5. Bake 1-inch biscuits for 7 to 8 minutes. If using a standard size biscuit cutter, bake for 11 to 12 minutes. Serve warm.