The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Dorie Greenspan

I got married at 19, and every Friday night, my in-laws cooked a big dinner for 10 or 15 people. We’d all pull up a chair and talk about food, which was foreign and fabulous for me, because neither of my parents cooked and seeing people come together over a great meal made me want to always have good food in my life. My in-laws put out this blackout cake from a bakery in Brooklyn called Ebinger’s, which was chocolate layers with a pudding filling, chocolate frosting, and cake crumbs all over. I have been trying all my life to make this cake, and while I come close (in fact, the cake that’s on the cover of “Baking From My Home to Yours” was a version of one such attempt, which ended up being more of a black-and-white cake), I’ve learned that you can’t capture the flavor of a memory. 

I took my first trip to Paris with my husband when I was a junior in college, and on our first day we stopped at a pâtisserie recommended in Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day book and got this two-bite strawberry tartlet. It had vanilla pastry cream and these teeny-tiny little wild strawberries. I had never tasted anything like it—I didn’t know that crust could feel crackly and tender and have a real butter flavor, that real vanilla actually tasted like vanilla, or that berries could be so perfect. It was a real stop-me-in-my-tracks moment, because it was so simple and so delicious, and it made me want to get really good at baking at home. 

I taught myself to cook using books, and one of the most formative was Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts. It’s about American baking, and this recipe in particular is for a fairly plain pound cake cooked in a tube pan, with no frosting or filling or anything extra. Heatter gave me an appreciation for simplicity, and taught me the goodness of pound cakes, sponge cakes, and shortbreads—all the things that totally rely on good ingredients and being well-made. I made this cake for Sarabeth’s bakery when she first started in the early ‘80s, and she still makes a version of it today. 

I went to grad school for gerontology, the study of aging, but after getting into baking at home, I decided I’d rather become a baker than a gerontologist. I got an apprenticeship at Soho Charcuterie where my job was to stand in the basement and bake their signature cake, which had whiskey-soaked raisins and walnuts. I had never worked in a kitchen before and I had no idea what was going on upstairs, and I got bored of making the same thing over and over again. One day I decided not to soak the raisins in whiskey but instead to soak prunes in Armagnac, and to use pecans instead of walnuts. I never told anyone about the change, I just did it. At the end of the day, I got called into the owner’s office, and she said, “What did you do?” I told her I made a new cake, and asked her if she liked it. She said, “Good cake, but you’re fired.” I got fired for creative insubordination! Going off the rails really taught me a lot about myself—I’m not good at repetition, and I have ideas about how things should be done at home that wouldn’t work in a bakery. I put that cake in my book Baking From My Home To Yours and called it “The Cake That Got Me Fired.” 

In 1986, I went for a joint birthday dinner at Lafayette, Jean-George’s [now-defunct] first restaurant in New York. Everything about the meal was incredible, but the thing that really stands out for me is that the maître D’ overheard our table talking about it being our birthdays, and he brought out every single dessert from the kitchen. They came out on a cart, which was very popular at the time, and covered the entire table. It was the epitome of generosity, and I was so blown away that I ended up coming back and working with Jean-George’s pastry chef for six months. When I talk about desserts, I say there’s no reason for them. We don’t need them. But at this meal, we just giggled like school kids, and I came to understand the power of dessert—more than any other food—to make people happy. Desserts are made for sharing.

In the early 1990s, I had the pleasure of writing about a lot of great French chefs, including Alain Ducasse. So when I found myself in Monte Carlo, my husband and I went in for one of the most luxurious meals of our entire lives. It had a million fantastical courses, and we were clearly enjoying ourselves a great deal, being the only mortals in the whole place—which was literally filled with royalty and their bodyguards. At some point a busboy came up to me and whispered, “Ma’am, you have yet to taste the butter. You must try it with the salt.” Back then, “farm to table” was not a phrase anyone knew, but Ducasse was using local cultured butter for the breads and fleur de sel from Brittany, which sounds boring now but at the time was a revelation and truly rare because the salt fields had been closed. That dinner really helped me understand the importance of every single ingredient, and I’m glad the busboy said something, because he recognized that we were enjoying our food so much but missing two simple-yet-hugely important elements. 

I was in Paris writing a story about sugared chestnuts for the New York Times, and I went to Fauchon, the fanciest specialty shop in the city, to find out how they were made. Suffice it to say that no one should make the chestnuts at home, but it was in reporting that story that I met Fauchon’s pastry chef, Pierre Hermé, who has become a lifelong friend and my pastry mentor. We started talking, and my husband claims he took one look at us and knew we were in love. I mentioned to Pierre something about a recipe for canelé from a nearby restaurant that I couldn’t make sense of, and Pierre gave me one of his to try and said, “this is how it should taste,” and the rest is just history. We went on to write two books together, and he’s provided me with the inspiration for some of my best recipes, including the “World Peace Cookie,” a chocolate sable that’s on the cover of my new book, Dorie’s Cookies. 

In 1991, my first book, Sweet Times, was published, and I was invited to Boston to do a book signing and a cooking demo at an event with Jacques Pepin and Julia Child. I mean, I have no training, and I never even raised my hand in school because I was too shy, but there I am. Fortunately the recipe I demoed is called “15 Minute Magic,” and it takes basically no technique—it’s almonds, chocolate, Amaretti cookies, butter, sugar and eggs whirred in the food processor, and the whole thing takes 15 minutes. When I finished, Julia came up to me and puts her arm around me and says, “Let’s have dinner tonight.” She seated me at her table, and we hit it off, and it was just so fabulous. We kept in touch and I ended up working with her on Baking with Julia. We talked every morning at 8:30, and I just loved her so much. I always say that 15 Minute Magic is the recipe that brought Julia into my life.

About eight years ago, I was traveling with my son, Joshua, through Southeast Asia, and we spent a few nights in Luang Prabang, Laos, where we developed a little ritual of wandering the night market, snacking, then buying a chicken sandwich to take back and eat in our guesthouse. The sandwich was on a soft, squishy baguette, wrapped in newspaper and secured with rubber bands that compressed it and made everything inside sort of meld together and get a little drippy—which I know does not sound appealing, but trust me when I say we tore into them every night, eating straight off of plastic bags on our laps. We ate these chicken sandwiches every night, and it was during this ritual that we first started talking about doing a cookie business together [the now-closed Buerre and Sel]. 

This cookie came to me in a dream, truly—I was in Paris and I dreamed this cookie, woke up, made it, loved it, and immediately brought it to Pierre [Hermé] to taste to make sure I wasn’t making this whole thing up. He declared them perfect. The cookie is essentially a vanilla shortbread with jam in the center and streusel with salt around the edges, baked into a ring like a mini tart. What I love about it is that it’s an easy recipe to change or tweak with all sorts of flavors and fillings. So many people tell me they’re afraid of baking, but the jammer is ripe for experimentation—even the failures usually taste good. I have a whole chapter in my new book dedicated to all the different types of jammers, and I hope to show people that there’s nothing to be afraid of—even in baking, there’s always room for personality.