Bon Appetit - October 2017

12  OCTOBER 2017

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA MURRAY

editor’s letter

ADAM RAPOPORT

Editor in Chief

“It’s not entertaining—it’s having people over.”

When senior editor Meryl Rothstein proposed that as the

headline for Alison Roman’s feature story on page 78, I emailed

back immediately: “Yes! Exactly!”

We all have that friend whose house we go to for dinner, and

she just makes it all look so damn easy. Like she hadn’t actually

spent three days planning the menu or sourcing the ingredients

from five different specialty stores. Like she didn’t even decide

what to make until standing over her kitchen island, surveying

the produce in front of her, all while uncorking a bottle of

Sancerre and dialing up a playlist on Spotify.

Of course, the question is how the heck do the rest of us pull

this off? We all know that cooking for a crowd isn’t easy, and

entertaining is even harder.

Here’s what I think, and it’s something I am just now learning

at age 47: Don’t plan.

I know, I know. That doesn’t sound like shrewd advice. But it’s

not our guests who apply pressure on us—it’s ourselves. If we’re

given a week to map out a menu, we’ll use every minute, flipping

through magazines like this one and scouring our favorite sites

for recipes and ideas.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

A few Saturdays ago my wife and I had our friends Gabe and

Jules over for dinner. Not until that afternoon did I have time

to hit the market and, because of the usual workweek grind,

I hadn’t given much thought about what to cook.

I started at the butcher. As is often the case, some gorgeous

bone-in pork chops spoke to me. Good meat + salt + hot grill =

done. One dish checked off the list.

And then I remembered how when Gabe was a guest on the

Bon Appétit Foodcast, he went on (and on) about his admittedly

inauthentic take on nuoc cham, the great-on-everything, dead-

simple Vietnamese sauce. (To make: Combine a couple table-

spoons each of fresh lime juice and fish sauce, a tablespoon of

sugar, some grated garlic and ginger, minced red or green

chile, and minced cilantro stems.) Which got me thinking

about some bok choy at the nearby farmers’ market and how

that nuoc cham would be perfect spooned over it and the pork.

Done and done. Two dishes checked off the list.

While at the market, I spotted a mountain of in-season zuc-

chini. I figured that if I already had a hot grill going, I could throw

the zukes on there, sliced thin, and finish them with a mess of

fresh mint and minced garlic simmered in extra-virgin olive oil.

Back at the house, Gabe and I organized the ingredients while

Simone and Jules opened a bottle of Grüner Veltliner and fired

up the grill. I wouldn’t call our evening spontaneous, but it

wasn’t exactly planned out, either. It’s like when you call your

spouse and agree to meet up at a bar after work instead of

spending weeks planning an overwrought fancy-dinner night

out. We all know which one ends up being more fun.

So there we were, the four of us on our double date, hanging

around the table, eating and drinking and remarking, somewhat

surprisedly, on how well our spontaneous meal turned out.

Nothing crazy, just good food and good company. And when

you’re having people over, isn’t that exactly what you want?

MY RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

Nuoc cham, the versatile Vietnamese sauce, is so

easy to make even an editor in chief can do it.