Cooking with Judy: Celebrate July 4 with casual food and chocolate cake - OCRegister

What a difference a year makes. Last Independence Day was more of a fizzle than a firecracker, but this year finds us especially ready to celebrate our freedom.

Celebrating at home? I can’t think of a better menu inspiration than award-winning cookbook author David Rosengarten’s “It’s All American Food” (Little, Brown and Company, $29.95), with more than 400 ethnic, regional and classic dishes that make up our national cuisine. And what better way to celebrate July 4, this most American holiday, than with the simple, down-home foods we all love?

“Casual” is the word of the day for this holiday. “The stuff that we do on the grill, hamburgers and hot dogs, I love that stuff,” declared Rosengarten. “It’s great food, simple food, satisfying food.”

But Americans need to get over their inferiority complex about American food, he said.

“The things people eat in other places seem exotic to us. We go to the south of Italy and see somebody drizzling olive oil on a local tomato with a sprig of basil and say, ‘That’s beautiful,’” he said. “Europeans look at our BLT and say, ‘What an incredible sandwich.’ We use supermarket white bread, Hellmann’s mayo and think, ‘This can’t be great.’ But when you bring all those things together in that sandwich, they’re a fabulous lineup of ingredients. We don’t know what a treasure we have in America.” (By the way, here on this coast, Hellmann’s is better known as Best Foods, and is the secret to his devastatingly rich chocolate cake.)

“It’s All American Food,” which gleaned a James Beard award, is the culmination of Rosengarten’s years of travel as a food, wine and travel writer.

“I never let an opportunity get by,” he said. “Wherever I go, I search out the local specialties.”

Boston baked beans, Maryland crab cakes, pushcart onions for hot dogs sold on the streets of New York – these are the foods Americans are really eating, and Rosengarten is passionate about preserving the recipes before they get lost.

“If we don’t get people making these dishes at home, they will ultimately disintegrate into nothingness,” he said. “The most vital way to keep a dish alive is if a lot of people are cooking it, thinking about it and making it better.”

Fullerton’s Judy Bart Kancigor is the author of “Cooking Jewish” and “The Perfect Passover Cookbook.” Her website is cookingjewish.com.

CHOCOLATE CAKE FOR ALL PURPOSES

From “It’s All American Food” by David Rosengarten.

Yields: 8 servings

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup good-quality mayonnaise, such as Best Foods
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups cake flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3 large eggs
1 cup whole milk

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 8-by-8-inch or two 8-inch round baking dishes with butter. Sprinkle evenly with all-purpose flour.

2. In a medium mixing bowl, beat sugar, mayonnaise, and vanilla with a whisk until blended.

3. In another bowl, sift together cake flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt.

4. In another bowl, beat eggs lightly, then add milk, whisking to blend.

5. Whisking slowly, add 1/3 of flour mixture to mayonnaise mixture. Add half the egg-milk mixture, whisking, then another third of the flour mixture. Keep whisking, then finish with the remaining half of egg mixture and last third of flour mixture.

6. Pour into prepared baking dish and bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until skewer inserted in center comes out clean. Let cool on rack and frost.

Adblock test (Why?)