Ruhlman's Newsletter

I posted a photo of the above pâté on Instagram as soon as it was put before us at Pastis, a local favorite I’ve written about. I haven’t tasted a better country pâté in NYC. The occasion was a recent Friday afternoon lunch with my Young Adult editor at Penguin Workshop, Nick Magliato, and its executive director/publisher, Francesco Sedita. It was a celebratory lunch on the occasion of my second title with them, A Taste of Somewhere Else for the 12- to 16-year-old reader (or even older, I hope).

Mary's Fish Camp, a restaurant I noted last time, and another classic that's (gasp) six blocks above 14th St. but is too consistently good not to mention, and a return to a fave for a new great dish.

In 2007, I convinced Tony to do a show in Cleveland. Here we’re in my old Cleveland Heights kitchen with fixins for what was probably the best cassoulet I’ve had: Sausage, duck confit, chunks of pork in a big pot lined with a huge sheet of pig skin. (Also some pig ears for a crispy pig ear salad.) Tony always denigrated his cooking skills; in fact, he was great cook. Eight years since Anthony Bourdain killed himself in Strasbourg, France, and his legend continues to grow.

The beloved Cherry Lane Theater a few evenings ago. Now that we’re back home … well, that’s kind of misleading, as during the next month Ann is managing to travel to Scotland, Greece, Spain, and France … but we’re mainly home, and when we are, our plan is typically to devour New York culture. And one of our most important endeavors is not to see plays, but rather to choose the best ones, as we can’t see them all and don’t have a budget for unlimited play-going.

The bounty of summer! No meal says summertime beach house vacation with more gusto than a simple crab boil. It’s a celebration spilled out onto newspaper, a communal meal to be eaten with gusto, and when it’s over, the carnage can be all wrapped up and thrown away. Just the two of us, we opted for simple: crabs, corn, potatoes, smoked sausage (portugese chorizo as we’re right outside Fall River). But you can include other shellfish, like steamers or mussels or shrimp.

The Jefferson Library on Sixth Avenue, which will be featured in Ann’s next novel and where she often works. Ann and I are taking a break to enjoy summer before the inexorably busy fall, to beach, read, cook, and scribble. And heavenly though our stretch of river and beach is, I find myself looking forward to the familiar pleasures we’ve been without pretty much since we departed for Ireland in May.

It’s that time of summer … when my mind turns to the hammock on the banks of the Westport River, and fat tomatoes and perfumey basil hot from the sun, and platters of sweet corn dripping butter, and ribs and brisket smoked on a kettle grill, and Vienna Beef hotdogs blistering over the coals, and our classic beach house dish, the tomato pie. But: shortly before we departed NYC, we had dinner with a friend. We hadn’t seen her in weeks and I knew at first glance she was not in a good way.

Our extended road trip—which began mid-May in Ireland, continued on eto the Baltics, then back to Newport and Ann’s MFA program, found brief respite in NYC for the 4th, then continued on to Maine where Ann and I taught at Maine Media, followed by another week of Ann’s teaching in Truro, MA—OY!!!—it truly ends today as we at last return to NYC and some solid ground, hurkle-durkling on familiar pillows and cotton sheets, morning Peets, writing, movies and plays, the evening cocktail and...

I’ve written about this before but I wanted to give this recipe its standalone place on my Substack because it’s so good. I’m been making and devouring it for some 30 years, since my father created it, with the addition of the minced shallot by me. Also, Father’s Day came and went without a mention of my dear dad, Rip Ruhlman (1938-2008), about whom I fe…

The first Europeans to arrive in America, who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, learned this practie and this dish after arriving on these shores. They looked to the native Americans who had been living here for a while—like 20,000 years—and knew what they were doing.