Arrive Magazine - November/December, 2009

Boston
Cream Pie

While you’re reveling in airy chocolate sponge cake, creamy rich custard and chocolate glaze topped with sliced almonds, it’s easy to forget that this dessert did get its name from a gritty city. It was created at the Parker House hotel, the same kitchen that invented the famed Parker House rolls. (Must have been a busy chef!) Like most classic dishes, however, it’s hard to pinpoint its exact origins. Some sort of chocolate-pudding cake had been around since early in American history, according to John Mariani’s Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, but it was at the Parker House that the almonds were added and the name was given, in 1855. Today, the hotel is called the Omni Parker House ( omnihotels.com), and you can still enjoy the dessert at its restaurant, surrounded by opulence: chandeliers, mirrors, gold leaf, cushioned armchairs. Another fine version can be found at the Oak Room at Copley Plaza ( theoakroom.com), which has a similarly luxurious feel with its mahogany wood panels, red and white drapery, white tablecloths and banquettes so comfortable you’ll want to curl up for a nap. After your pie, of course.

Best of 2009 and New Jersey. But I also recommend Claymont Steak Shop (claymontsteak shop.com) in Wilmington, Del. Those metal spatulas scraping the griddle. The bread that’s got just a little crust but is squishy inside. The steak—it’s chopped, not sliced—is just the right texture and the onions are just the right sweetness. I get mine with mushrooms and ( horrors!) a side of ranch dressing.

Best of 2009

Beef Wellington

Beef Wellington—tenderloin layered with mushroom duxelles and foie gras and baked in puff pastry—is said to be of Irish or British descent, and that makes sense: It’s basically a fancy meat pie. But its popularity in the 1960s is purely American. According to David Leite’s article “Dining through the Decades,” found on his Leite’s Culinaria website, dinner parties at the time were becoming competitive, and the cook who could one-up his friends by presenting such a complicated feast won. Not only did you have to make puff pastry by hand but also you had to procure foie gras and truffles and prepare the dish using the most expensive cut of beef, filet mignon. How’s that for capitalism in the kitchen?

The dish has since fallen out of favor, but I’ve had a great version at Restaurant X and Bully Boy Bar ( xaviars.com) in Congers, N. Y., just north of Manhattan. It’s so popular that customers revolt whenever chef Peter X. Kelly tries to take it off the menu. Hey, come to think of it, that’s awfully American of them, too.

Pasta Primavera

There is no closely guarded recipe brought from a grandmother’s kitchen in the old country, though pasta with spring vegetables probably has been around Italy as long as noodles and spring. This particular version started out as a fad. Sirio Maccioni, owner of Le Cirque

( lecirque.com) restaurant in Manhattan, threw together some pasta with peas, vegetables and cream one night in the mid-1970s, and Craig Claiborne, the very influential food editor of The New York Times, raved about it. The dish wasn’t even on the menu, because the chef hadn’t created it, but everyone was clamoring for it. Though Le Cirque has moved several times since then, you can still ask to order pasta primavera off-menu.