Beat This! Cookbook: Absolutely Unbeatable Knock-'em-Dead Recipes for the Very Best Dishes

By Ann Hodgman and Elizabeth Berg

Do you think you have the absolute best recipe for apple pie? Maybe your neighbor claims to make the best meatloaf around. Did your Italian grandmother serve the best spaghetti sauce this side of the Atlantic? Well, unless you or that neighbor or your grandmother is Ann Hodgman, you’re wrong!

The book that the editor in chief of Vanity Fair called “the funniest, most engaging book about food I’ve ever come across” has now been revised and updated: more than half the recipes are completely new, and many of the originals have been “oomphed up” to make them even more shamelessly delicious.

Beat This! Cookbook contains more than a hundred all-time favorites, from Burnt Sugar Ice Cream and White Chocolate Raspberry Pie to Chili-Cheese Casserole and Onion Rings. Each one is guaranteed to make people take a bite, stagger with joy, and beg you for the recipe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9780547691701

Ann Hodgman

ANN HODGMAN is the author of Beat This! and Beat That! Cookbooks and One Bite Won’t Kill You. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Food & Wine. She lives in Connecticut.

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Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Dedication

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction to the Introduction

Introduction

The Dishes by Category

Priceless Almond Triangles

The Best Regular (or I Guess I Should Say Classic) Apple Pie

Not-Controversial-at-All Apple Crisp, It Turns Out (formerly Very Controversial Apple Crisp)

Apricot Conserve

Artichoke and Mushroom Salad

Nothing to Be Ashamed of Artichoke Dip

Caramelized Bacon

Best Banana Bread

Not Not Yo’ Mama’s Banana Pudding

Base

Beef Stew

Baking Powder Biscuits

Jim Paisley’s Current Black Bean Soup

Blue Cheese Dressing

Sugar Hill Blueberry Muffins

Blueberry Pie

World’s Best Bread

Savory Bread Pudding

Brownies

Layered Brownies

The Brussels Sprouts

The Other Brussels Sprouts

Burnt Sugar Ice Cream

Buttercrunch

Porter’s Butterscotch Sauce

Pure, Rich, Great Caramels

Slow-Cooker Caramelized Onions

Roasted Carrot and Ginger Soup

Carrots with Ginger and Cumin

Carrot Cake

Party Cheese Crackers (aka Sneaky Cheddar Cheese Wafers)

Cheese Straws

Mom-Style Cheesecake

New New York-Style Cheesecake

Chicken Salad for Company

Carol’s Perfect Poached Chicken-Salad Chicken

Perfect Roast Chicken

Chile-Cheese Casserole

The Chiliest Chili

Flourless Chocolate Cake (Lora Brody’s Bête Noire)

Mom-Style Chocolate Cake

Mom’s Chocolate Frosting

Chocolate Cookies

The Only Chocolate Chip Cookies

Grandma Weld’s Cookies

Chocolate Ice Cream

Helen Kenyon’s Chocolate Sauce

Cinnamon Rolls

A Few Thoughts About Clam Chowder

Manhattan Clam Chowder

New England Clam Chowder

Coffee Ice Cream

Kuchen (Coffee Cake)

Connecticut Gooey Butter Coffee Cake

Lime and Peanut Coleslaw

Pan-Fried Corn

Jalapeño Corn Bread

Crab Cakes

Cranberry Jelly

Creamed Onions for Our Time

Croissants

Deep-Fried Dill Pickles

Bacony Deviled Eggs

Philly Cheesesteak Egg Rolls

Coquito (Coconut Eggnog)

Ferrel’s Dip

English French Toast

Chicken Elizabeth’s Fried Chicken

A Completely Different Fried Chicken

Perfect Fudge (If You’re Lucky)

Hot Fudge Sauce

Laura’s Better Gingerbread

Grape Pie

Grape Ice Cream

Thanksgiving Green Beans

Many-Splendored Guacamole

Don’s Gyoza

Red Zhello for Grown-Ups

Easy Kid-Please-y Lasagna

Corrected Lemon Squares

Papa Bear’s Own Lentil Soup

Lime Sorbet Supreme

The Most Humane Way to Kill a Lobster

Lobster Salad

My Macaroni and Cheese

Mashed Potatoes

Mom-Style Meat Loaf

Company Meat Loaf

Mexican Wedding Cakes, Pecan Puffs, Russian Teacakes

Even Better Molasses Cookies

Onion Rings

Not-at-All-Classic Onion Soup

Pasta with Mushrooms

Peach Pie

Neen’s Peanut Sauce

Pecan Pie

Pesto Torta (Best Cocktail Party Cheese Thing)

Pimento Cheese

Majestic Imperial Regal Yuletide Plum Pudding

Mozart’s Rum Sauce (for Plum Pudding)

Pork Loin with Prunes and Madeira

Powerfully Better than Any Other Pot Roast

Modern Potato Salad

Anita Bryant’s Pound Cake

Easy Preserved Lemons

Pulled Pork

Rice Pudding

Great Tates

David’s Salad Dressing

Parmesan-Peppercorn Dressing Just Like in Restaurants

Peppered Mapled Salmon

Slow-Cooked Salmon with Pistachio Butter

Browned-Flour Shortbread

Shrimp Salad

Soft-Shelled Crabs

Basic Spaghetti Sauce

Spinach Casserole

Martha’s Squash Casserole

Strawberry Gelato

Strawberry Pie

Strawberry Shortcake (With a Little Help from Some Raspberries)

A Really Great Stuffing with Sausage in It

Wild Rice Stuffing

Sugar Cookies

Vaguely Thai-Like Beef Salad

Thai-Like Vegetable Stew

Perfected Jam Thumbprints

Real Cream of Tomato Soup

Great ’Mates

Magnificent Ultra-Turkey

Vanilla Ice Cream

White Chocolate–Raspberry Tart: The Best (Nay, Only) Use for White Chocolate

Leftovers

Afterword: Gotcha!

Permissions

Index

TO DAVID

Copyright © 2011 by Ann Hodgman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-547-43700-2

eISBN 978-0-547-69170-1

v3.0618

Acknowledgments

THE NEW EDITION

THIS NEW EDITION HAS TWO MOMMIES: Rux Martin and Elizabeth Berg.

One day, six people called me to say they’d heard someone talking about Beat This! on NPR. The someone turned out to be Elizabeth

Berg, or, as I like to think of her, The acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Berg. She’d been asked what her favorite book was and had been kind enough to say it was Beat This! Even before that, she had mentioned the book in one of her novels, The Year of Pleasures.

The day after the broadcast aired, Rux Martin, my Houghton editor, called to say that Houghton wanted to publish a new edition of Beat This! Could I come up with, say, fifty new recipes?

I thought I could manage it.

Anyway, back to Rux Martin. Editing the new edition of a book is hard, especially when everything about book production has changed 10 million percent since 1993. You can’t just go into the file on your computer and make Ann’s changes when everything was done on paper the first time around. Yet Rux has cheerfully allowed me to change way more details than she needed to. This introduction, for instance: she didn’t have to let me write one. She could always have said, No, the budget won’t allow for extra front-of-the-book material. But she let me make all the changes I wanted if it was in the book’s best interest.

Although she has so many reasons to yell at me, she never does! For this and many other reasons, always including her mother’s pet woodchuck and baby possums, she’s my new best friend.

Elizabeth Berg is my other new best friend. We’ve gotten to know each other since that NPR broadcast, and if I die suddenly, I authorize Elizabeth to continue writing my cookbooks in my place.

I would also like to thank Joni Evans and Randi Zucker, who helped me to realize, in another context, that all was not lost.

And, of course, Davis, Odie, and Jaybs.

Foreword

IN 1975, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MOTHER OF MY FIRST CHILD, my husband and I did not have a lot of money for extras. Extras included cookbooks. So I woud check out armloads of cookbooks from the library, and while my daughter napped in her daybed, I would copy the recipes I liked—one from here, one from there—onto index cards. This was a laborious process, and I used to long for one cookbook that would be full of recipes I couldn’t wait to make and that did not disappoint. This last point is critical. Far too many of us have had this experience: we get all excited about a recipe, we go out and get the (sometimes very expensive!) ingredients, we create a big mess in the kitchen preparing the (sometimes very time-consuming!) dish, eagerly taste it and say . . . Eh.

Such things do not happen with Ann Hodgman’s recipes. Rather, things like this do. I have a friend who is a gourmet cook. She’s highly skilled not only at food preparation but also at ferreting out the most exquisite recipes from her vast collection of cookbooks and magazines. One night, when she needed to make dinner in a hurry, I suggested Ann’s perfect roast chicken recipe, the one with garlic and lemon (page 78). It’s simple, it’s fast, you get crispy outsides and juicy insides and it makes your house smell great while it’s cooking. A few weeks later, I asked my friend if she had tried Ann’s recipe. She said, Are you kidding? I’ve made it about six times already. I love that recipe!

And then there’s this story: My next door neighbors did something nice for me and so I did something nice for them, which is to say I made them Ann’s Very Controversial Apple Crisp (page 23). The next day, the wife told me, "You know my husband never eats desserts, doesn’t like them. He could not stop eating that apple crisp." Another friend told me that when she first made it, she and her husband stood at the stove after it came out of the oven and ate the whole dang thing. (She’d halved the recipe, but still.)

There’s a quote on the front of this book, which I’d like to amplify. This really is a humor book: Ann’s commentary is laugh-out-loud funny. It really is a self-help book, because your confidence level will rise after you make these recipes and garner rave reviews from your family and friends and from that most important critic of all: yourself. It really is a security blanket, because when you need to make something that must be good, you can count on Ann’s recipes delivering in spades. It really is a kind of bible, too, because so far as I am concerned, Ann Hodgman is the first and last word in giving you the best recipes and cooking advice. My daughters and I often discuss recipes, and whenever we wonder about something, we ask, What would Ann do? I know what this phrase evokes, but you know, it should evoke that.

I’m a writer. I love books, especially literary fiction. But when I was asked by NPR to recommend just one book, it was a cookbook. It was Beat This! because it really is the book I recommend far more than any other. You can’t beat it. I would say that I envy all of you who are reading this cookbook for the first time, but the truth is that after all these years, I’m still as thrilled by it as you’re about to be.

—ELIZABETH BERG

Introduction to the Introduction

ONE GOOD THING ABOUT NOW: I CAN BE PRETTY SURE THAT when I grow up, we won’t have to substitute a single daily pill for all our meals. Back in third grade, that’s what I was told would happen in the future. Nutrition was going to become so advanced that we wouldn’t need food anymore! At last we’d be able to make productive use of those three daily chunks of time we’d been wasting since the caveman days.

Other things I learned in third grade also turned out to be wrong. Snowflakes are not radioactive, for example, and you don’t have to kiss the flag if it touches the ground. Food is still here, though it’s changed a lot since the first Beat This! came out in 1993. Remember when it was so great to be able to buy fresh pasta that you ignored the fact that dried pasta works better in most recipes? Remember the day you decided, Might as well start liking goat cheese—it’s not going to go away? When bread flour suddenly showed up in your grocery store, and premium-brand chocolate chips, and guajillo chiles and miso and Devonshire cream and fish sauce and Lyle’s Golden Syrup? When you started to see fresh herbs year-round, even though what’s the point of spending five dollars on twenty oregano leaves in the winter? And when finally—finally!—you could buy butter that’s 84 percent fat instead of just 82 percent?

Plus, the Internet. Any ingredient you can’t find in a physical store can be found online, which is why I have so many exotic ingredients waiting around. I’ll see a recipe, think, Sounds good, but I don’t have any tamarind paste and order a two-kilo block of it. By the time it arrives, I’ve already forgotten what I wanted it for, so I just stick it in the cupboard along with the mahlab seeds and fennel pollen. But the point is, I was able to get tamarind paste.

Don’t worry, by the way. Nothing in this book calls for tamarind paste. Lyle’s Golden Syrup, though—you’d better track that down.

I myself haven’t changed much since 1993, except for having accepted the fact, and it is a fact, that it’s better to weigh ingredients than measure them. (Again, don’t worry. Only one of these recipes, for croissants [page 117], requires that you own a kitchen scale, even though you should really get one.) But my opinion on what kind of recipes should be in Beat This! has evolved somewhat.

You’re finally going to make it healthier! people are thinking.

NO.

Anyone who’s bothered by butter and cream can put this book down and leave the store right now. I certainly don’t cook this way all the time, and you shouldn’t either. It would make you too full and logy. But there are times when you want the best recipe for an old favorite, not the healthiest or the easiest. (There are plenty of quick-cooking, low-fat cookbooks over on the bargain table. See them? Next to the books about trains?) Once in a while—when you have to bring a main course to a potluck, say—you want people to love it.

Some readers have criticized me for saying my recipes are the best. Your pot roast—what a joke, one lady wrote me a few years ago. But doesn’t every cookbook author think her recipes are the best? Would you actually try a recipe for Only Okay Soup? Obviously these matters are subjective.

Another woman was angry that my caramel recipe involves two hours of stirring. I don’t have two hours to spend on caramels! she said. (My husband, David: Tell her to cook them for two minutes.) But who’s forcing her? She’s welcome to buy some bad caramels if she wants to save time. That’s not what this book is about.

So: that evolution that I mentioned? It’s mostly that I decided Beat This! needed more variety and less flour. I’ve trimmed some of the breads, cakes and homemade play dough recipes to make room for more vegetables, main dishes and sides. (Please don’t count the recipes to see if that’s actually true!) In this edition, the recipes appear in alphabetical order rather than in categories, just as they did before. I know that some people (mostly male-type people) had trouble with that organization the first time around. But if I’m looking for the best burnt sugar ice cream recipe (page 52), I want to look it up by name, not category. When people read cookbooks, they rarely plow through them page by page. They dip in and out, looking for things that sound good and quickly flipping past things that call for water chestnuts. That’s how I do it, anyway. And since I use my own cookbooks over and over—they’re such convenient collections of my favorites!—I can at least be sure that I’ll be able to find recipes easily.

The thing that surprises me is how many of the recipes in this book start with C. What’s up with that? Of course there’s a pile of chocolate recipes—isn’t that true of most cookbooks?—but even if you took those out, there would still be tons of Cs. C is a perfectly good letter, and at least it comes early in the alphabet, before people get tired. So it’s not a problem, exactly; it’s just a mystery. There are also a lot of recipes that start with P, and yet not one of them is for actual peas. Man, my biographers are going to have a field day with that. All I can say in my own defense is that I use a lot of Parmesan and a lot of potatoes. And that no one would be happier if I had included letters like N arbitrarily. (Nut loaf? Necco Wafers?)

Anyway, it would have been a ton of work to rearrange everything, and I’ve got so much going on with the new puppy. His name is Henry, and is he ever cute! If you could only see him now, lying on the floor in such an adorable way! His paws are all stretched out—can’t you just picture it? Even though he’s a poodle, and therefore by definition unable to be cute, he’s just so cute! But don’t worry, Beanie. Although this book is dedicated to David, it’s also dedicated to dear, dear Beans, who (along with dear, brainless Moxie) was the anxious, loving heart of the kitchen for so many years.

Introduction

WHY ARE PEOPLE ALWAYS SO PROUD OF THEIR BROWNIE recipes? Katharine Hepburn, for example. If there’s anything I’m sick of—besides the way she always says she’s a regular person and not an actress—it’s reading about how sinful her brownies are. Actually, Hepburn’s is the dullest brownie formula there is, and one of the most common. There’s a copy of it in my daughter’s nursery-school cookbook (prefaced by the remark, These are sinful); there’s a copy of it in two different Junior League cookbooks I own; there’s a copy of it in Fannie Farmer. All these recipes for an utterly undistinguished product! I guess sin is duller than I thought.

Brownies aren’t the only food for which people always think their recipe is the best. Another one is meat loaf. Ann Landers gets hundreds of requests for her meat loaf recipe, which is strange considering that it, too, is ordinary in the extreme. (Ground meat, ketchup, onion soup mix—you get the picture.) There’s a whole feedlot of recipes out there with self-awarded blue ribbons. But it’s rare to find a best recipe that’s even worth reading—much less eating.

Except for the ones in this book. These really are the best. There’s just no point in trying any other recipes but these. I mean, there’s just no point in trying any other recipes for these foods but these. What I mean is, these are the best recipes of their type. Well, you know what I mean. I guess I mean, if you’re looking for a blini recipe, my chili recipe won’t do you much good. But if you’re looking for a chili recipe, it will. Know what I mean?

I’m not very good at coming up with original recipes, although my daughter Laura is. One of my favorites is one she composed when she was five:

PLAIN DOUGH

SUGAR

RAISINS

ANY FRUIT

COOKIT

Unlike Laura, I can’t just walk into the kitchen and improvise a brilliant new dish. But I can figure out how to improve a recipe. I just double the chocolate and add some bacon.

Of course it’s a little more complicated than that. Still, some of the recipes in this book wouldn’t necessarily be considered healthy. Lots of them, I guess. But the best recipes are rarely the healthiest. When you’re looking for the best potato salad to take to a potluck (page 188), or the best blueberry pie to bring to a bake sale (page 40), or—uh—the best French toast to serve to your boss at that breakfast meeting (page 130), you’re not usually concerned with the dish’s fat content. You just want people to take a bite, stagger with joy and beg you for the recipe.

With these recipes, they will. I know, because it always happens to me. A word about this book’s organization. Unlike most cookbooks, it lists the recipes in alphabetical order rather than by category. That’s because I expect people to use the book when they’re hunting for a specific best, not idly thumbing through the pages trying to decide what to make for dinner.

For the most part, I’ve alphabetized the recipes by each dish’s main quality. On the other hand, fried chicken and roast chicken do share the same section. Why is this? Because it makes more sense. Chicken is the main thing about both recipes, not friedness or roastedness, just as salad is the main thing about green salad, while potatoes are the main thing about potato salad.

If you can’t bear to hunt down recipes in this way, you can always turn to the index. Things are conventionally organized there. But I think it’s more fun to read a cookbook with all different kinds of recipes jostled together, just as I prefer bookshelves where books like Betsy-Tacy and Tib are snuggled between The Interpretation of Dreams and A Field Guide to Mammals of North America.

The Dishes by Category

DRINKS

Coquito (Coconut Eggnog) 128

HORS D’OEUVRES

Nothing to Be Ashamed of Artichoke Dip 26

Caramelized Bacon 28

Party Cheese Crackers 67

Cheese Straws 69

Deep-Fried Dill Pickles 122

Bacony Deviled Eggs 124

Ferrel’s Dip 129

Many-Splendored Guacamole 145

Pesto Torta 177

Pimento Cheese 179

SOUPS

Jim Paisley’s Current Black Bean Soup 36

Roasted Carrot and Ginger Soup 61

Manhattan Clam Chowder 98

New England Clam Chowder 99

Papa Bear’s Own Lentil Soup 153

Not-at-All-Classic Onion Soup 168

Real Cream of Tomato Soup 228

SALADS AND DRESSINGS

Artichoke and Mushroom Salad 25

Blue Cheese Dressing 37

Chicken Salad for Company 76

Lobster Salad 156

Modern Potato Salad 188

David’s Salad Dressing 198

Parmesan-Peppercorn Dressing Just Like in Restaurants 199

Shrimp Salad 205

Vaguely Thai-Like Beef Salad 222

MAIN DISHES

Beef Stew 34

Carol’s Perfect Poached Chicken-Salad Chicken 77

Perfect Roast Chicken 78

Chile-Cheese Casserole 79

The Chiliest Chili 81

Crab

Reviews for Beat This! Cookbook

[shelleyraec · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

With a family of six I am always looking for new recipes to try and the Beat This! Cookbook, which is about to be rereleased, sounded promising. While the style is certainly readable with Ann Hodgman's warmth and humor, I didn't find any recipes that particularly suited me. Many of the recipes require a lot of prep and ingredients (including some not available in Australia like Corn Syrup). Neither were any of the recipes particuarly original, I felt that they could have come from my mothers pre cholesteral 197O's cookbooks - particuarly with so many recipes calling for 2 entire sticks of butter.There are a few good hints and tips however, and I most likely I will try her Caramelised Bacon recipe because I love bacon and can't resist.Beat This! is unlikely to appeal to the health concious or busy mother, but may provide a solid collection of recipes for those who enjoy cooking or are looking to improve their culinary skills.

[eamcnair · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you cook often, you know that you have lots of cookbooks that you really only use occasionally for one or two recipes. On your shelf, this one has the best pie recipe, and this one has the best casserole so you have quite a lot of cookbooks. What if you had one cookbook with the best of every type of recipe all in one book?Well, the claim that Ann Hodgman makes is that every single recipe in Beat This! is the best recipe that you will find for that dish. This new cookbook which was released March 2011 is the new and updated version of the cookbook by the same name published in 1999, so one would hope that these recipes are even more amazing than the last ones.The best part of this book is the author’s style of writing. While some might find her assertions that her recipes are the best slightly annoying, quite frankly I wouldn't want to try a recipe if someone told me that it was just an “ok” recipe. The way that she describes her recipes is so enticing. Ann Hodgman gives plenty of helpful advice before she gives you the recipe such as “Triangles, by the way, always make a bar cookie look more impressive.” As you may see, the style of Beat This! is different from most other cookbooks. In addition to the above, Hodgman chose to arrange the alphabetically by the main ingredient. This leads to some interesting combination next to each other, but it works well for this book.So if you are looking for another cookbook for your collection, I would certainly suggest Beat This! Cookbook.