Memories of Mousse

February 9th, 2026

Left to right: Dagny’s secretary Agnes, Dagny, Tinky, and Eric in Paris

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, I am thinking of chocolate .. and specifically  of my mother’s recipe for Chocolate Mousse.

“Mousse” means “frothy” or “foamy,” apt words for this airy dessert. Many sources credit the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with inventing it. Alas, according to “Food Republic,” recipes for Chocolate Mousse were published long before he whipped it up for his Bohemian friends in Paris. Still, he did make it.

My own association with Chocolate Mousse relates to another artist who lived in France, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890).

I have consumed (and even prepared) many amazing meals over the years. Among the most memorable of these was a luncheon in Auvers-sur-Oise in France when I was 19.

Auvers is about an hour outside of Paris, the city in which I was helping my godmother Dagny, her nephew Eric, and a host of colorful characters mount a summer film festival. Dagny, who was a paraplegic, lived in Florida but spent several months each year in Paris. She wanted to make sure she could get wherever she needed to go; the metro was far from accessible to someone on crutches. She consequently shipped her red Ford to France each time she visited.

One day she decided to drive Eric and me to Auvers. Our destination was the Auberge Ravoux, the inn in which Van Gogh spent the last two months of his life. When we visited it was known as la Maison de van Gogh (the House of van Gogh).

© Institut Van Gogh and Erik Hesmerg

The dining room was small but inviting. We sat at a corner table and ordered. My main course was Steak au Poivre (Pepper Steak). This is a classic French dish: a small steak, crusted in freshly cracked peppercorns and pan fried.

The same pan is used to make the sauce. This consists of stock, brandy or cognac (which the French warm and then light dramatically), and cream. Heaven on a plate.

The restaurant served it with Pomme Frites (French Fries), which I can usually do without. These crispy pieces of potato I adored. I then had a salad glistening with a simple vinaigrette of oil, red wine vinegar, and mustard. I can almost taste this perfect combination of foods in my mouth today.

When the waiter asked about dessert, I intended to say “non” … until I saw it. He returned to the table with a large bowl—the word “vat” comes to mind—of fluffy, chocolaty Mousse. It melted on the tongue.

After lunch, Eric and I climbed the shabby, curved wooden stairs at the Maison to see the room in which van Gogh spent the weeks before he killed himself. The room was unfurnished, illuminated by a skylight.

The publicists at the Auberge write on its website that the room has “rien à voir… mais tout à ressentir” (“nothing to see … but everything to feel”). Legend has it that the owners of the Auberge never rented it out again after the artist’s death, reluctant to have others stay in “la chambre de suicide” (the suicide room).

© Institut Van Gogh by Erik and Petra Hesmerg

In fact, Van Gogh didn’t shoot himself in the room. He pulled the trigger outdoors and made his way back to the auberge. Still, he died in his bedroom a day and a half later so I guess one could call it “la chambre de suicide.”

The room was tiny, a little more than 75 square feet in area. Apparently, van Gogh used another room at the inn to paint.

Paint he did. He averaged more than a painting a day during his time in Auvers.

Despite his productivity there, he continued to be plagued by the physical and mental ill health that had followed him for much of his life.

I often wonder why many people who are intensely artistic—painters, musicians, actors, even some writers—are mentally ill and/or engage in self-destructive behavior.

Does their artistic talent stem from their off-kilter way of seeing and feeling the world? Or does their genius render them incapable of moderation and common sense?

I will never know. Although I have some creative gifts, I am no genius. I can be sadly pedestrian.

Vincent van Gogh painted full time for only about a decade. As a young man he dabbled in a variety of professions until his younger brother Theo convinced him that he should devote his life to art … and provided the funds to keep Vincent housed and fed while he painted.

Despite the relative brevity of his artistic career, van Gogh produced an astounding body of work, one with which even most non-art students are familiar.

According to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, his last painting was a vivid, gnarly study called “Tree Roots.” In “Smithsonian,” Meilan Sooley writes, “In some ways, the painting appears to function as a goodbye.”

Tree Roots, 1890

Sooley quotes art historian Louis van Tilborgh as suggesting that “it’s van Gogh’s way of saying: ‘I have lived, just like those tree roots. I’ve done my best, I’ve struggled with life, I’ve grown, had setbacks and now is the time it ends. I am falling.’”

Van Gogh’s brother Theo arrived before the artist died and recorded Vincent’s last words: “La tristesse durera toujours.” (“The sadness will last forever.”)

For me, the flavor of Chocolate Mousse will last forever. (I told you I was pedestrian!)

Mousse at the Auberge © Institut Van Gogh/Erik Hesmerg

Mousse au Chocolat

Ingredients:

6 ounces good-quality semisweet chocolate
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) sweet butter
2 teaspoons vanilla
5 tablespoons coffee, divided (you may use water instead or use a bit of each)
4 eggs at room temperature, separated
1/2 cup superfine sugar, divided
1 pinch salt

Instructions:

In the top of a double boiler (or in a heatproof bowl over warm water) combine the chocolate, the butter, the vanilla, and 2 tablespoons of coffee. Cook the mixture over hot water, stirring, until the chocolate melts. Remove the pan from the top of the hot water, and set it aside to cool.

In another heatproof bowl combine the egg yolks, 3 tablespoons of coffee, and 1/4 cup of the sugar. Place them over the hot water and cook, whisking vigorously, until the mixture becomes uniformly frothy and lighter in color.

Remove the yolk mixture from the top of the hot water, and whisk it for another minute or so. Whisk in the chocolate mixture. Allow the resulting concoction to cool for a few minutes so that it is lukewarm to the touch. (You may begin beating the egg whites while the chocolate/yolk mixture is cooling.)

Combine the egg whites and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer. Beat them until the egg whites are foamy. Sprinkle on the remaining sugar and beat the egg whites and sugar until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the whites into the chocolate mixture. (It helps to add a little bit of the whites at first, followed by the rest.)

Spoon the mousse into a serving bowl or bowls. Cover and refrigerate for several hours or overnight; then serve with a little whipped cream. Serves 8.

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Posted in Holiday Foods, Pudding | 1 Comment »

Soup Month: French Onion Soup

January 26th, 2026

January is National Soup Month. This January has been a doozy weatherwise, and I have indulged in a lot of warm soup.

One of my favorite soups at this time of year (or any time of year, really, but it is hardy so January is ideal for it) is my mother’s French Onion Soup. She of course preferred to call it “Soupe a l’Oignon,” Francophile that she was.

I’m not precisely sure when Taffy, as I called her, learned to make this soup. She had two French cooking teachers. The first was Madame Continénie, her landlady in Paris during her Junior Year Abroad in Paris in the late 1930s.

Madame taught my mother how to make many basic dishes. She also tried to make her teenage guest more sophisticated. The first endeavor was more successful than the second. My mother had many wonderful qualities, but sophistication was not one of them. Luckily, she didn’t need to be sophisticated or soignée. She was direct, fun, and smart. Those qualities stood her in good stead throughout her life.

Taffy went on to study French cooking at a Cordon Bleu school in New York in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Her teacher there, Madame Béran, taught her a lot about cooking and also about French.

In Taffy’s little handwritten cookbook, she sometimes inscribed recipes in French even when she had clearly learned them from Americans. She adored the French language.

Whoever taught her to make it, this soup was a staple of my youth. It uses one of my favorite techniques, caramelizing onions. Gently frying onions for a long time always makes the house smell homey and delicious.

Taffy’s recipe gets additional robust flavor by using beef broth and red wine instead of the chicken broth and white wine that are more usual in this country.

Please do not misunderstand me. I will happily slurp down onion soup however it is made. I do think that the darker, more flavorful broth and wine make it even tastier, however.

Whenever my mother went to Paris, she made a point of visiting Les Halles, the popular open-air market that was founded in the 12th century. The market was known for its Soupe a l’Oignon. One could find this soup there at any hour of the day or night, and it was always freshly made and fabulous.

Les Halles around the Turn of the Last Century’ (Library of Congress)

My parents took me to Les Halles first when I was seven and had never tasted onion soup. Like my mother, I fell instantly in love with the soup and with the bustling market in which it was served … although I was small enough to need help getting up onto a chair there to eat.

Taffy was saddened when the market was torn down in 1973 to make room for an underground shopping center that had none of the original’s character and charm. The area is now a mall. Luckily, Taffy, who emphatically did not believe that her beloved Paris needed a mall, never learned of that final transformation.

The old Les Halles market lived on in her kitchen and continues to do so in mine … in January or in any other month. As Marcel Proust noted when he wrote of madeleines, flavor is an ideal vehicle for transporting us into the past.

This particular flavor made me VERY happy earlier this month when the weather was disgusting.

If you’re in a hurry or don’t have oven-proof bowls or crocks, don’t worry about putting the cheese on toasted bread and broiling it. Just serve the soup with grated cheese on top and toasted bread on the side.

Serving the soup with the broiled bread and cheese (“gratinée”) is more authentically Parisian, however. And quite delicious.

I probably have no need to tell you that my mother had oven-proof crocks, which she bequeathed to me. In fact, she had, and I have, TWO sets of crocks. The one I prefer has little baskets to hold the hot soup when it comes out of the oven.

Taffy’s French Onion Soup

Ingredients:

for the soup:
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) sweet butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
6 medium onions, finely sliced
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste (Start with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 8 turns of your pepper grinder.)
1 generous teaspoon flour
4-1/2 cups beef broth
1/2 cup red wine (a little more is fine!)

for the topping:
sliced baguette (enough to cover the soup in the 4 crocks; it doesn’t hurt to have extra, however; the toasted slices make great crackers for dip or cheese)
a drizzle or two of extra-virgin olive oil
grated or sliced Gruyère or other Swiss-type cheese as needed (Last week I ended up using “Swiss” slices from the grocery store, which were inelegant but sufficient; I used 2 slices per crock.)

Instructions:

Melt the butter in a Dutch oven. (I used my 5-1/2-quart pot. The freshly sliced onions take up a fair amount of room, although they do shrink as they cook.)

Add the oil and the onions. Cook fiercely over medium-high heat for a few minutes; then turn down the heat and continue cooking, stirring every 5 to 10 minutes, until the onions begin to turn golden. This will take from 1/2 hour to 1 hour. While the onions are caramelizing toast the bread. (See below.)

Stir in the mustard, the salt, the pepper, and the flour. Stir for 1 minute or until the mixture is smooth. Slowly add the broth and the wine.

Bring the soup to a boil, turn it down, cover it, and simmer it for 15 to 20 minutes. After the 15 minutes, taste it and see whether it needs a little more salt. (You shouldn’t need a lot; the cheese is salty!)

You will know that the soup is ready when it tastes warm and flavorful. The taste of the wine should be perceivable but not strong.

To toast the bread slices, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly rub the pieces of baguette on both sides with a little olive oil, or spray them with an olive-oil spray. This is a balancing act. The oil helps the bread toast and adds flavor. You don’t want the pieces of bread to taste oily, however.

Place the bread pieces on a rimmed cookie sheet and bake them for 20 minutes, turning once. Set them aside to wait for the soup.

When the soup is almost ready, preheat the broiler. Ladle the soup into 4 ovenproof crocks, place toasted bread on top of each crock (you will need 1 to 3 slices, depending on the size of your baguette), and cover with cheese.

Broil the soup on high until the cheese melts and turns golden brown. Serve within a few minutes, but warn your fellow sippers to be careful. Onion soup can get very hot and burn the tongue. Serves 4.

Taffy with a Friend

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Posted in Soups and Stews | 2 Comments »

Comfort Food at Its Best

December 30th, 2025

I love New Year’s celebrations—lunar, Jewish, Christian, whatever. In a sense, of course, the divisions cultures establish between years are arbitrary. Still, they give us a chance to look back on where we have been and make wishes for the future. A wish is always a pleasure to make, even if it doesn’t come true … or doesn’t come true in quite the way we envisioned it would.

On New Year’s Eve, I like to entertain friends with warm, comforting dishes that offer a contrast to the chilly weather. One of my favorite New Year’s Eve dishes is my friend Cherie’s “Mom’s Meat Lasagna,” which I made for this holiday about 10 years ago. It was delicious. But it involved A LOT of steps. Sometimes I’m in the mood for something much simpler.

Luckily, I have in my repertoire something that replicates the flavors of lasagna but takes a lot less work … particularly if one cheats (as I usually do) by using jarred marinara sauce instead of the homemade version: Baked Ziti.

When I say “Baked Ziti,” I really mean “Baked Tubular Pasta.” I often make it with rigatoni or penne. Even when I stray from actual ziti, I like to call the dish Baked Ziti. That name reflects the celebratory nature of the origins of this dish in Sicily. In that island’s language, “zita” means bride, and “zitu” means groom. Put together, they become “ziti,” the wedding couple. In fact, the ancestor of this dish was served at Sicilian and Southern Italian weddings for centuries.

Sicilian-American food expert Peter Giuliano writes:

I remember reading about ‘lasagna’ in Garfield comics as a kid and not knowing what it was. That’s because we didn’t really eat it [in] my Sicilian-American family—we much preferred the dish we called ‘baked pasta’ or pasta al forno, a dish of tubular pasta like ziti or rigatoni baked with meaty tomato sauce, ricotta, and other cheeses.

We made it at home, of course, but it was really a dish for weddings: basically 100% of the wedding receptions I attended as a kid featured huge pans of baked pasta and trays of charcuterie, which we called “cold cuts.”

I gather that the Pasta al Forno served at Sicilian weddings for centuries was a bit different from what we Americans make. Our dish is a lot more goopy and cheesy … probably because many Americans are a lot more goopy and cheesy than traditional Italians and Sicilians. Nevertheless, it is at heart a classic Southern-Italian-American dish and would have reminded Giuliano’s forebears of their homeland.

I love tubular pasta because it has so much surface to catch the sauce and other yummy ingredients in this dish. And I love Baked Ziti because it’s a snap to mix the pasta with the other ingredients to construct it, in contrast to the careful layering for which lasagna calls. (Okay, technically, there ARE layers in Baked Ziti—but they are easy-peasy layers as you will see in the recipe below.)

I learned from Giuliano another reason to love tubular pasta. The first time I tried making pasta, I didn’t roll the dough out thinly enough. The substance that resulted was a gummy mess. The outside cooked just fine, but the inside was decidedly underdone. When Italian grandmothers (and other relatives) learned to create tubular pasta, Giuliano explains, they avoided my mistake and produced a hollow shape that could cook uniformly.

I encourage you to try this recipe for New Year’s Eve or any other occasion. I wish I could tell you where I got it. I have been making it for years and can’t really remember when and how I started. I may just have tasted a friend’s version and reconstructed it as well as I could. In any case, it’s simple and celebratory.

You may assemble it a little before baking it for guests. This frees you up to chat with your company … and to ponder those all-important New Year’s wishes.

If you do not plan to serve vegetarians, I highly recommend including the optional sausage, which adds a lot of culinary personality to the dish. This version of the dish is a bit wet—but I like wet! Nothing is worse than dried out pasta.

And if you feel that you absolutely have to add a little extra mozzarella, you have my blessing.

Happy (almost) New Year from my kitchen to yours.

Baked Ziti

Ingredients:

1/2 pound ziti or another tubular pasta
1/2 pound sweet or hot Italian sausage—or a mixture of the two, preferably not in casing (if it’s in casing, do your best to get it out), optional
1 cup ricotta cheese (the best brand you can find)
1 cup shredded or cut up mozzarella cheese (again, the best you can manage), divided
1/2 cup Parmesan or Romano cheese, divided
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley (use 1 teaspoon dried if you absolutely must)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 24-ounce jar prepared Marinara sauce or 3 cups homemade tomato sauce

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cook the pasta al dente according to the manufacturer’s directions. Drain it and pour cold water over it to keep it from cooking any longer. Place it in a bowl.

If you are using the sausage, pan fry it in small pieces while the pasta boils and drain it on paper towels.

In a bowl combine the ricotta, half of the mozzarella, half of the Parmesan, the parsley, the salt, and the egg. Set aside.

Spread a small amount of the tomato sauce on the bottom of a 1-1/2-quart casserole dish. Ladle a bit more of the sauce into the pasta, and blend.

Layer half of the pasta mixture into the casserole dish, followed by half of the ricotta. Note that the ricotta will be applied in dabs; you can’t really spread it.

Place the sausage in the next layer; then make another layer each with the remaining pasta and ricotta. Pour the remaining sauce over the top, followed by the reserved cheeses.

Bake until the dish is heated through and the cheese on top has melted, about 20 to 30 minutes. Serves 4 generously.

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Posted in Casseroles, Holiday Foods, Pasta and Pizza | 3 Comments »

Butternut Squash Risotto

November 26th, 2025

This sign was donated by Dorothy Leggett to the local historical society. Courtesy of Wicked Local.

Readers, you probably have your Thanksgiving menu all figured out. This isn’t a Thanksgiving dish anyway. It takes too much time at the stove! But as the temperatures get colder it’s lovely to have a reason to linger there. So make it next week … or the week after.

Butternut squash is everywhere at this time of year. Although many of us think of pumpkin orange as the quintessential color of fall, to me the perfect autumn shade is the more subtle hue of butternut squash. From time to time, I see a house painted in this color. I envy its residents.

A butternut squash can last a single person like me a long time. I tend to vary what I do with it. Sometimes I fry tiny pieces with onions in a sort of hash. Sometimes I roast half of a squash in the oven, scoop out the flesh, and mash.

And then there’s this risotto, best served to guests since it’s hard to make just a little.

I only recently learned that butternut squash, a staple of fall here in New England, was first eaten less than a century ago.

Although Indigenous peoples have eaten various forms of squash on this continent for more than 6000 years, butternut squash originated here in Massachusetts only in the 1940s. It was the brainchild of Charles Leggett of Stow, in Middlesex County. Leggett was an avid farmer and amateur plant breeder.

He loved squash but wanted to produce a variety that was not too big and not too small. He wanted a gourd that had, his wife Dorothy later remembered, “a compact, regular form and flesh that was easier to prepare.”

If you have ever tried taking the stringy goop and seeds out of a pumpkin only to find very little pumpkin left, you’ll know why he wanted something easier to prepare than that. In contrast, the innards of Leggett’s butternut squash come out easily, leaving lots of lovely edible flesh to work with.

To create his hybrid, Leggett crossbred a gooseneck squash with other varieties until he had a squash he liked. He brought it to the Waltham Field Station of the Massachusetts College of Agriculture (known far and wide as Mass Aggie), which is now part of the University of Massachusetts.

He presented his creation to the scientists there under the name Butternut because it was, in his words, “smooth as butter, sweet as a nut.” In Waltham, Robert F. Young, a professor at the college, tinkered with it and named it Waltham Butternut Squash.

I don’t imagine Leggett was pleased that the station put its name on the squash instead of his, but at least he had the satisfaction of seeing his squash become popular both domestically and abroad. It’s grown as far away as New Zealand.

In this country it is raised in almost every state, including Florida. The top producer is Michigan. I’m certainly glad it’s still grown here in Massachusetts. It tastes delicious and stores well. And it makes excellent risotto.

So … here is my recipe. I started with a formula given to me years ago by Laurel Ritmiller Lucrezia of Boston. I then added and subtracted ingredients until I was happy.

This recipe calls for tiny pieces of butternut squash so one needs to peel the squash. (When I roast it halved, I just scoop out the flesh after cooking; there’s no need to peel before cooking.) This can be a little tricky, but it’s not undoable.

First, cut the stem and the bottom off the squash. Cut it in half lengthwise, and scoop out the middle gunk. (There’s not a lot of that, thanks to Leggett.)

If you have a sharp vegetable peeler, use that to scrape off the skin of the squash. My peeler is quite old and a bit dull so I started with it and then switched to a sharp knife. It didn’t take long to get rid of the outer skin of the squash.

A note about herbs: I tend to think that sage is the ideal herb to accompany this type of squash. However, one of the people I was serving when I made this dish was not a fan of sage. Consequently, I used parsley for flavor and color in the risotto and then had sage available to sprinkle on top. Both were tasty.

Choose the herb that appeals to you most. I should think thyme might be handy, or even rosemary, but I haven’t tried them in the risotto. If you want to experiment, try my method of having them available for sprinkling at the table.

Whatever herb you use, you’ll end up with a colorful risotto. Roasting the squash pieces and adding them at the last minute lends texture and flavor to your meal.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Butternut Squash Risotto

Ingredients:

1-1/2 cups squash, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (more or less)
extra-virgin olive oil, salt, and pepper as needed
4 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) sweet butter plus another 2 tablespoons later
2/3 cup chopped onion
1 small red or yellow bell pepper, seeded and diced
1-1/4 cups Arborio or long-grain rice
1 cup white wine
2 tablespoons chopped herbs
grated parmesan cheese to taste (start with 1/2 cup)

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the squash pieces in a bowl. Splash a generous drizzle of the oil on top, along with salt and pepper to taste. (I used about 3/4 teaspoon salt and 7 twists of my pepper grinder.) Toss.

Place the oiled and flavored squash on a rimmed cookie sheet. (I lined my sheet with aluminum foil for easy clean up, although some might consider this wasteful.)

Pop the sheet into the oven and roast the squash pieces, stirring every 5 to 10 minutes, until they begin to brown around the edges. This will probably take around a half hour, but timing may vary.

While the squash roasts, start the risotto. Place the stock in a saucepan over low heat.

In a heavy saucepan over moderate heat melt 1/4 cup butter and add the onion and bell pepper. Cook, stirring, for 5 minutes. Add the rice. Cook for 1 minute. Toss in a little salt (maybe 1/2 teaspoon).

Add 3/4 cup of the wine and stir. Add 1 cup of stock and keep stirring.

As the mixture cooks and the rice dries up, add the remaining stock a bit at a time. Cooking will take quite a while—somewhere between half an hour and 45 minutes.

In my experience, the only sure-fire way to know whether risotto is done is to taste it from time to time. It’s ready when it is no longer crunchy and sort of creams in your mouth. If you think you need more salt, add it toward the end of cooking after tasting.

If you run out of stock as you stir, add a small amount of water. If you don’t use all the stock, that’s fine, too! Every batch of risotto is slightly different.

Just before serving, stir in the roasted squash, the herbs, the remaining wine, the last bit of butter, and the parmesan.

Serves 6.

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Cooking with Eric Carle

October 30th, 2025

Eric Carle

My small hometown, Hawley, Massachusetts, houses just over 300 people. Nevertheless, it has been home to luminaries in different fields. We have housed writers, theologians, and architects.

Two of Hawley’s residents stand apart from the rest. Alice Parker, a world-renowned composer, lived here until her death two years ago. And Eric Carle, the beloved children’s book author who died in 2021, had a home in Hawley for many years with his wife Bobbie.

Eric enjoyed food and cooking. He was kind enough to let me publish his bread-pudding recipe in my first book, The Pudding Hollow Cookbook. Although I knew Bobbie better than I knew him, I always enjoyed Eric’s whimsy and of course his colorful books.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst is currently displaying an exhibit that is dear to my heart and will appeal to lovers of Carle and cuisine.

“Cooking with Eric Carle,” which opened in September and will run for almost a year, focuses on this author/artist’s love of food and food illustration.

Readers of his work (just about every American child and parent) will have seen his food-related work in children’s books like Pancakes, Pancakes! and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

The exhibit has less familiar art from Eric Carle as well, however, including linocuts from a cookbook he illustrated in 1965 titled Red Flannel Hash and Shoo-Fly Pie. Linocuts are block prints made with linoleum.

There are also doodles the author drew on checks from one of his favorite restaurants and much more.

One of my favorite features of the Carle is its studio. I’m not particularly artistic, but the act of drawing, coloring, and pasting there gives me insight into the artistic process. It’s also just plain fun.

The cooking exhibit has its own little craft area. The museum encourages visitors to write down their favorite recipes on cards … and draw pictures of the recipes.

On the exhibit’s opening night, associate curator Isabel Ruiz Cano interviewed Lisa and Sally Ekus. The pair are cookbook-and-lifestyle literary agents at the Ekus Group in nearby Hatfield. Lisa founded the group, and her daughter Sally now manages it. The Ekus women are lively … and they know their cookbooks.

In fact, Lisa holds the Guinness World Record for the largest personal cookbook collection in the world. In 2019, when she was added to the record book, she officially housed 4,239 cookbooks in her vast, multi-story library. I’m sure she has more now.

Lisa and Sally discussed trends in cookbook illustration over the last century or so. Earlier cookbooks tended to have simple sketches or no illustrations at all. Over the years, photography was slowly introduced.

In the last 20 years or so, as color printing has become more affordable, vivid yet naturalistic photos have come to dominate the pages of cookbooks.

The two also charmingly linked cookbook illustration and picture-book illustration as they talked about teaching Sally’s young daughter to read and to cook.

Lisa (left) and Sally Ekus, Courtesy of the Carle Museum

Isabel told me that the Ekus appearance was the brainchild of the museum’s former director of education. “Cooking with Eric Carle” was Isabel’s own idea.

One of her first projects when she joined the staff of the Carle in 2022 was to sort and, as she put it, “rehouse” many of Eric Carle’s illustrations, including the linocuts for Red Flannel Hash.

“I was fascinated by all these different art works,” she said. “I kept finding food imagery.”

She relished putting together the exhibit. She found the work particularly meaningful because she had never met Eric Carle, arriving as she did after his death.

“I learned a lot about his favorite foods and favorite food preferences. He was a very simple man who loved bread and honey … and sushi,” she recalled.

She quickly added that the sushi was consumed separately from the bread and the honey. I’m sure Eric could have come up with a story in which they overlapped, however.

“I enjoyed getting to know the kind of warm person he was, especially since I came after he passed,” she said.

I asked Isabel Ruiz Cano if she had a favorite piece in the exhibit. “Everything becomes my favorite!” she laughed.

She sees the exhibit as a way “to honor who [Eric] was but also present things that people didn’t know about him that will surprise them.”

Of course, I wanted to prepare a recipe to honor Eric Carle and the exhibit. I decided to make pretzels to pay tribute to the 1972 picture book Walter the Baker, illustrated with Eric’s trademark collages.

Here is what Eric wrote about the book on his website:

“The story is based on the tale of how the pretzel was invented, which was told to me by my Grandmother when I was a boy. But I truly had an uncle named Walter who was a baker and who baked, along with all kinds of bread, cookies, cakes and rolls; pretzels!”

In the book, a hardworking baker named Walter is stymied early one morning when his cat knocks over the pail of milk that gives his sweet rolls their signature texture.

He tries substituting water, with disastrous results. His best patron, the Duke, is affronted and threatens to exile Walter from the Duchy… unless the baker can come up with a special roll “through which the rising sun can shine three times.”

Walter tries and tries to create such a roll with no success. Frustrated, he throws his last bit of dough into the air. It lands in a pail of water, somehow twisting itself along the way. When this creation is baked and served, the Duke beams. Walter is saved, and the pretzel is born.

I’m a less talented baker than Walter so my pretzels weren’t actually pretzels, just blobs. (“Knots” might be a nicer-sounding descriptor.)

I think I needed to roll them into longer ropes before folding them into their final shape. You’ll note that the recipe calls for ropes of more than 2 feet; mine were about a foot and a half.

Even as blobs, my pretzels were tasty enough for my friends to eat, with a soft, chewy interior. Fortunately, unlike Walter, I didn’t need to worry about seeing the rising sun shine through them. (This was just as well since I NEVER leave my bed to bake at sunrise.) The recipe is based on one from King Arthur Baking.

“Cooking with Eric Carle” will run through Sept. 6, 2026. Visit the museum’s events page to see a list of upcoming activities at the Carle.

The Pretzels

Ingredients:
for the dough:
1 generous teaspoon yeast (1/2 packet)
1/2 cup lukewarm water, divided
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1-1/4 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
for the water bath:
1/4 cup warm water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
for finishing:
1-1/2 tablespoons salted butter, melted
coarse, kosher, or pretzel salt as needed (I only had regular sea salt; it added lovely flavor but wasn’t visible in the final product.)

Instructions:

Make the dough. Proof the yeast for about 5 minutes in 1/4 cup of the lukewarm water along with the sugar. When the mixture bubbles, add it to the flour and the remainder of the dough water. Mix briefly; then stir in the salt.

Knead the resulting dough for about 4 minutes, until it is soft, smooth, and slack.

Dust it with flour to prevent sticking and place it in a plastic zip-top bag. Close the bag, leaving room for expansion, and let the dough rest for 30 minutes

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat.

Transfer the dough to a greased work service. Divide it into 4 pieces. Let them rest, uncovered, for 5 minutes. While they rest combine the water and sugar for the bath in a bowl.

Roll each piece of dough into a long thin rope (around 28 inches long). Twist each rope into a pretzel shape (or a blob!). Dip the pieces in the water bath; then place them on the prepared baking sheet. Bake them until they turn golden brown, about 8 to 10 minutes, turning the pan halfway through.

Remove the pretzels from the oven, and brush them with the butter. Sprinkle with salt. Makes 4 pretzels. This recipe may be doubled.


Eric Carle Illustration for Walter the Baker. Collection of the Eric and Barbara Carle Foundation. ©-1995 Penguin Random House LLC

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