Smitten Kitchen Keepers: Deb Perelman is back with 100 classic recipes

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Our cookbook of the week is Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files by Deb Perelman. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Carrot tarte Tatin, toasted ricotta gnocchi with pistachio pesto and ginger garlic chicken noodle soup.

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One measure of how much I’ve enjoyed reading a cookbook is the number of scraps of paper I’ve spontaneously stuck between the pages. Smitten Kitchen Keepers was chockablock with must-cook-as-soon-as-possible markers shortly after I cracked the cover.

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“That is literally all I care about, so that makes me very happy. I just want you to want to cook from it, or I don’t even know why I did it,” says author, photographer and food blogger Deb Perelman, creator of Smitten Kitchen.

I consider it a success if just one recipe from any given cookbook becomes part of my repertoire. A dish I make year after year, and look forward to each time. I’d never thought of these favourites as my “forever files” before, but after reading Smitten Kitchen Keepers, this term is lodged in my lexicon. A fitting descriptor for the recipes we turn to again and again because they’re such a joy to make, eat and share.

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“I am forever trying to populate my forever files when I cook, where I’m not just making a roast chicken. I want to know if this is the roast chicken recipe I’m going to be making. And when I find the roast chicken recipe that I found so perfect — it was seasoned well and it’s very juicy, and it’s impossible to mess up, and I didn’t have to do a handstand and count back from 10 to get it to work, or any kind of craziness — I feel like I immediately want to put it in my forever files.”

Since 2006, Smitten Kitchen has amassed millions of readers and social media followers, and given rise to three bestselling cookbooks: The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012), Smitten Kitchen Every Day (2017) and Perelman’s recently released third, Smitten Kitchen Keepers, which was five years in the making. And, as she writes in the introduction, though she’s proud of her first two, “this is the book I was always meant to write.”

Article content

When Perelman launched Smitten Kitchen 17 years ago, she never imagined the site would become a beacon for so many home cooks. It didn’t take long for people to start telling her she should write a cookbook. Overwhelmed by the success of her first, by the time the second came out, Perelman still felt like a deer in the headlights. At a loss as to what to do next, she reflected on why she had started Smitten Kitchen: To create a place where she could collect all of the recipes worth repeating.

“It was always why I started the site, because I was starting to cook and it was like, ‘Not this brownie recipe. Yes, this brownie recipe.’ ‘Not this cake. Yes, this one.’ ‘No, this is not a way to roast chicken that works for me reliably at home.’ I’ve always been doing this. I’ve just not been that conscious of it. And so, I wanted to do this in a more conscious way.”

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Perelman originally shied away from writing classic recipes, thinking they’d been “done to death.” (After all, there are 112 million search results for chicken parmesan alone.) But then, her now-13-year-old son started asking which of her recipes he should try. “I felt very squirmy when he would ask me what recipe to make. It was weird. I was like, ‘Ah, shoot. I mean, maybe the spatchcock chicken? Do I want him using kitchen shears?’” says Perelman, laughing.

She realized that what her son needed, and what a lot of people want, are more classics. “I wanted to be able to hand my kids a collection of recipes specifically written with making them forever in mind.” As a result, Smitten Kitchen Keepers features recipes Perelman had never conquered before. Roughly one-third of the book’s 100 recipes touch on classics, where Perelman tried to answer the question: “What would my perfect version of (blank) be?” Even though she thought the classics had been done, if she could add something she hadn’t seen, make them easier to shop for, easier or faster to cook, or easier to make sense of, then offering her own versions would be worthwhile.

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“I did not want to do a turkey meatloaf, because I thought that turkey meatloaves were really boring and bland, and I didn’t know why anybody would eat one by choice. I’m like, ‘What if I had to come up with one that I would eat by choice?’ And I’m like, ‘It would be this.’ And that’s how I got there. And it was really fun for me to do that. To really start from a place of feeling the pull from the outside rather than a push from the inside.”

When she started Smitten Kitchen in 2006, Perelman writes, “there were already too many recipes on the internet, and this made it hard to choose.” And as a new cook, she was discouraged by the sheer number that didn’t work. Now, with her own millions-strong audience, she feels a responsibility to have recipes “tested to the hilt”; every aspect vetted and considered.

Article content

“We have all been there. We have all made a recipe before that was a crushing disappointment. Where we took time we didn’t have and money we weren’t sure we wanted to spend, and energy we didn’t know we really had to give to make something because it promised greatness. And it came out either scraped into the trash or just so mediocre that you’re just mad. You want that $15 of roast chicken back. You want that time back. You could have had a slice of pizza and been watching Real Housewives on the sofa, and instead, you’re scrubbing out a pan. I think about that all the time. And I do not want to be the source of that for somebody.”

Perelman has read all of the 350,000 comments people have left on her recipes since she created Smitten Kitchen. She jokes in the acknowledgements of Smitten Kitchen Keepers that readers essentially named the book for her, since they use the word “keeper” so often in comments. October 2006’s pumpkin muffins, July 2008’s herbed summer squash and potato torte, and September 2020’s tangy braised chickpeas are just a few of her recipes that have elicited enthusiastic, “It’s a keeper!” comments.

“I think that we know when we make something that we want to make again and again. And I’m always chasing those moments.”

Article content

Our cookbook of the week is Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files by Deb Perelman. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Carrot tarte Tatin, toasted ricotta gnocchi with pistachio pesto and ginger garlic chicken noodle soup.

Article content

One measure of how much I’ve enjoyed reading a cookbook is the number of scraps of paper I’ve spontaneously stuck between the pages. Smitten Kitchen Keepers was chockablock with must-cook-as-soon-as-possible markers shortly after I cracked the cover.

Article content

“That is literally all I care about, so that makes me very happy. I just want you to want to cook from it, or I don’t even know why I did it,” says author, photographer and food blogger Deb Perelman, creator of Smitten Kitchen.

I consider it a success if just one recipe from any given cookbook becomes part of my repertoire. A dish I make year after year, and look forward to each time. I’d never thought of these favourites as my “forever files” before, but after reading Smitten Kitchen Keepers, this term is lodged in my lexicon. A fitting descriptor for the recipes we turn to again and again because they’re such a joy to make, eat and share.

Article content

“I am forever trying to populate my forever files when I cook, where I’m not just making a roast chicken. I want to know if this is the roast chicken recipe I’m going to be making. And when I find the roast chicken recipe that I found so perfect — it was seasoned well and it’s very juicy, and it’s impossible to mess up, and I didn’t have to do a handstand and count back from 10 to get it to work, or any kind of craziness — I feel like I immediately want to put it in my forever files.”

Since 2006, Smitten Kitchen has amassed millions of readers and social media followers, and given rise to three bestselling cookbooks: The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012), Smitten Kitchen Every Day (2017) and Perelman’s recently released third, Smitten Kitchen Keepers, which was five years in the making. And, as she writes in the introduction, though she’s proud of her first two, “this is the book I was always meant to write.”

Article content

When Perelman launched Smitten Kitchen 17 years ago, she never imagined the site would become a beacon for so many home cooks. It didn’t take long for people to start telling her she should write a cookbook. Overwhelmed by the success of her first, by the time the second came out, Perelman still felt like a deer in the headlights. At a loss as to what to do next, she reflected on why she had started Smitten Kitchen: To create a place where she could collect all of the recipes worth repeating.

“It was always why I started the site, because I was starting to cook and it was like, ‘Not this brownie recipe. Yes, this brownie recipe.’ ‘Not this cake. Yes, this one.’ ‘No, this is not a way to roast chicken that works for me reliably at home.’ I’ve always been doing this. I’ve just not been that conscious of it. And so, I wanted to do this in a more conscious way.”

Article content

Perelman originally shied away from writing classic recipes, thinking they’d been “done to death.” (After all, there are 112 million search results for chicken parmesan alone.) But then, her now-13-year-old son started asking which of her recipes he should try. “I felt very squirmy when he would ask me what recipe to make. It was weird. I was like, ‘Ah, shoot. I mean, maybe the spatchcock chicken? Do I want him using kitchen shears?’” says Perelman, laughing.

She realized that what her son needed, and what a lot of people want, are more classics. “I wanted to be able to hand my kids a collection of recipes specifically written with making them forever in mind.” As a result, Smitten Kitchen Keepers features recipes Perelman had never conquered before. Roughly one-third of the book’s 100 recipes touch on classics, where Perelman tried to answer the question: “What would my perfect version of (blank) be?” Even though she thought the classics had been done, if she could add something she hadn’t seen, make them easier to shop for, easier or faster to cook, or easier to make sense of, then offering her own versions would be worthwhile.

Article content

“I did not want to do a turkey meatloaf, because I thought that turkey meatloaves were really boring and bland, and I didn’t know why anybody would eat one by choice. I’m like, ‘What if I had to come up with one that I would eat by choice?’ And I’m like, ‘It would be this.’ And that’s how I got there. And it was really fun for me to do that. To really start from a place of feeling the pull from the outside rather than a push from the inside.”

When she started Smitten Kitchen in 2006, Perelman writes, “there were already too many recipes on the internet, and this made it hard to choose.” And as a new cook, she was discouraged by the sheer number that didn’t work. Now, with her own millions-strong audience, she feels a responsibility to have recipes “tested to the hilt”; every aspect vetted and considered.

Article content

“We have all been there. We have all made a recipe before that was a crushing disappointment. Where we took time we didn’t have and money we weren’t sure we wanted to spend, and energy we didn’t know we really had to give to make something because it promised greatness. And it came out either scraped into the trash or just so mediocre that you’re just mad. You want that $15 of roast chicken back. You want that time back. You could have had a slice of pizza and been watching Real Housewives on the sofa, and instead, you’re scrubbing out a pan. I think about that all the time. And I do not want to be the source of that for somebody.”

Perelman has read all of the 350,000 comments people have left on her recipes since she created Smitten Kitchen. She jokes in the acknowledgements of Smitten Kitchen Keepers that readers essentially named the book for her, since they use the word “keeper” so often in comments. October 2006’s pumpkin muffins, July 2008’s herbed summer squash and potato torte, and September 2020’s tangy braised chickpeas are just a few of her recipes that have elicited enthusiastic, “It’s a keeper!” comments.

“I think that we know when we make something that we want to make again and again. And I’m always chasing those moments.”