Goodbye, over a cocktail

Today marks the exit of The Minimalist, as a weekly column at least. There may be return appearances, but the unbroken string of more than 13 years and nearly 700 columns in The New York Times ends here.

Sooner or later, a weekly column starts to turn into a body of work. This one charts the history not only of my personal development in the kitchen, but of recent cooking trends. So indulge me while I toast The Minimalist with a Champagne cocktail — developed with help from the bartender Jim Meehan, it is appropriately celebratory and bittersweet — and a few reflections.

The Minimalist first appeared on Sept. 17, 1997. It was the brainchild of Rick Flaste, who created The New York Times' Dining In/Dining Out section (now the Dining section); Trish Hall, my on-and-off editor; and me. It was conceived as a successor to Pierre Franey's classic 60-Minute Gourmet column, but with a less-French, more modern, less chef-y sensibility. In addition, Rick wanted the recipes to be "smart," and although I couldn't quite figure out what that meant, I tried to please him.

As every columnist will tell you, it takes time for a column to find its true identity, and The Minimalist was no different. A year later, the column was at least adolescent, and I described its typical recipes as I do today: Nearly all of them use minimal technique, minimal time or minimal ingredients; many recipes meet two of those standards, and quite a few all three.

I could say it more succinctly: The column's goal, my job, has been to help make home cooking more accessible.

The first topic was Rick's idea, and such a good one that I was intimidated: red pepper puree. You roast red peppers (I'll take credit for devising an easy technique for that, one I still recommend), peel them, and puree them with salt and olive oil, or with other flavors. You use this as a condiment.

Two elements of that column became ongoing. The puree is essentially a paste — a pesto — and when it came to taking an ingredient and puréeing it, I became a fanatic. I did this with herbs, with vegetables (the leek was the most recent), with beans, with peas, with arugula and other greens, with almost everything I could lay my hands on. Last year, I finally recognized that the food processor was a major component of my cooking style, and celebrated that in a column. More important was that I'd established the variability of the recipe, something I'd done before that, and have done ever since. One goal has always been to demonstrate that few recipes are dogma; they can all be tweaked. And learning to tweak is part of becoming a cook. (One of the most gratifying comments I get from people who use my recipes is that they're easy to change.)

Within a couple of weeks, I had tackled chicken under a brick, a then-little-known dish I'd learned in Tuscany, and one that seemed to solve the problem of producing, without too much fuss, a nearly whole chicken that's both crisp and juicy. Thus began what became a powerful thread in both the column and my personal cooking. (I do have a cooking life outside of The Minimalist, but the two have been melded — or even welded — for all these years.) This involved exploring traditional recipes, and gently — I hoped — Americanizing them, without — I hoped — robbing them of their souls. Thus there were a fast cassoulet, a simple bouillabaisse, quick paella and, eventually, the 45-minute turkey.

One could argue that I robbed all of them of their souls, but cooking is compromise, after all. We almost never have the time, the ideal ingredients or equipment, or all of the skills we'd like.

In 1998, I began a decade of intense travel. I cooked with chefs, with grandmothers (a privilege, almost always), with granddaughters, with whole families, with celebrities, with friends and with colleagues. And I discovered that you never cook with someone else without learning something. In every case, there's a two-way transfer of knowledge. If they know less than you do, you grow from teaching. If more, of course, you grow from learning.

Some of my favorite dishes came out of travel: pasta alla Gricia, among the most basic and simplest building blocks of pasta cooking; braised squid with artichokes (a visit to Liguria began that craze for me, along with a passion for farinata, also called socca); black cod with miso; jook; and eggplant curry, just to name a few.

There were also dishes I learned in New York, of course: spaghetti with fried eggs (thank you, Arthur Schwartz); Sichuan chicken with chilies; stir-fried chicken with ketchup (thank you, Suvir Saran). There were another 500 or so I learned from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, with whom I wrote a couple of cookbooks, but that's a different tale.

Usually, I was either taught to make something or I modeled it myself, as best I could. I refused to buy into the notion that there was a "correct" way to prepare a given dish; rather, I tried to understand its spirit and duplicate that, no matter where I was cooking. For months I lived with a hot plate and a combination convection-microwave oven. When I needed to roast something I borrowed a friend's kitchen. For years after that I cooked in others' kitchens more than my own; the column never missed a beat. Thus I have no patience for "I'd love to cook but I have a lousy kitchen."

To me the question was not, "Would I cook this as a native would?" but rather, "How would a native cook this if he had my ingredients, my kitchen, my background?" It's obviously a different dish. But as Jacques Pepin once said to me, you never cook a recipe the same way twice, even if you try. I never maintained that my way of cooking was the "best" way to cook, only that it's a practical way to cook. (I'm lazy, I'm rushed, and I'm not all that skillful, and many people share those qualities.)

There has been some invention as well. Before Rick dreamed up The Minimalist, I pitched a column called The Spontaneous Cook, to reflect the way I and many others actually operate in the kitchen: shop avidly, keep a full refrigerator and pantry, pull things out and get to work. Thus I "created," usually by accident, some of my favorite dishes: crisp-braised duck legs with aromatic vegetables, braised turkey (the demands of the annual Thanksgiving column engendered much creativity, and this was an especially successful one), and the more-vegetable-than-egg frittata.

The biggest change, as anyone who's followed The Minimalist closely knows, was a gradual shift of focus from meat, poultry and fish at the center of the plate to, well, something other than that. (Beefsteak, for example, appeared an average of one-and-a-half times a year for the first 9-10 years; since 2008, it's been featured only once.)

My growing conviction that the meat-heavy American diet and our increasing dependence on prepared and processed foods is detrimental not only to our personal health but to that of the planet has had an impact on my life and on that of the column. You can see this in dishes like stir-fried lettuce with shrimp, chickpea tagine with chicken, a number of bean dishes and the dozens of other meatless or less-meat recipes that have become dominant in the last five years.

In part, what I see as the ongoing attack on good, sound eating and traditional farming in the United States is a political issue. I'll be writing regularly about this in the opinion pages, and in a blog that begins next week.

That's one place to look for me from now on. The other is in The New Yorks Times Magazine, where I'll be writing a column most Sundays beginning in March.

Part of my reasoning in going to the opinion section is to advocate, essentially, for eaters' rights. But the response of good cooks, and those of us who write about cooking, must be to continue to look for ways to bring real food to all of our tables.

Which, in a way, is pretty funny, because it's where The Minimalist began.

CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL

Yield: 1 drink

¾ teaspoon bitters

½ ounce lemon juice

¼ ounce maple syrup

6 ounces Champagne

Twist of lemon.

Stir the bitters, juice and syrup in a flute. When combined, add the Champagne. Squeeze the lemon twist over the top, wipe the rim with it and discard.