Leah Koenig

Lost Foods of New York City: Vichyssoise:

Lost Foods of New York City is a column celebrating the food and drink that once fed the city, but have disappeared. Plus, the recipes. This time: Vichyssoise

Bio: Leah Koenig is a freelance food writer and cookbook author. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Saveur, Gastronomica, Food Arts, Everyday with Rachael Ray, CHOW, Tablet magazine and The Forward among other publications. She's the author of The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook: Daily Meals for the Contemporary Jewish Kitchen (Rizzoli, 2011). Leah lives in Brooklyn with her husband, musician Yoshie Fruchter. Visit leahkoenig.com for more information.

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Lost Foods of New York City: Vichyssoise

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Vichyssoise has, as its name suggests, distinctly French roots, but its soul belongs to Manhattan. The dish was created by a chef named Louis Diat, who modeled it after a beloved leek and potato soup his doting mother made him as a boy growing up in Montmarault, France. In 1910, the 25-year-old Diat moved to New York to be chef de cuisine at the just-opened Ritz-Carlton hotel. Seven years later, he offered his first bowl of crème vichyssoise glacée to hotel diners. More

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By Leah Koenig

on January 3rd, 2013 2:14pm

 
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Lost Foods of New York City: Chicken à la King

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At its core, chicken à la king is straight up saucy comfort—mushrooms, peppers and diced chicken served in a creamy sauce over toast. Throw some biscuits on top and you practically have chicken and dumplings; add a flaky crust and you get pot pie. But for the high society, francophile (or rather franco-obsessive) New Yorkers of that era, a vaguely French-sounding name was all the dish needed to secure its vaulted reputation. More

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By Leah Koenig

on October 22nd, 2012 9:45am

 
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Dirt Candy chef Amanda Cohen offers a new approach to veggies, and a new kind of cookbook to match

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Cohen treats produce with the same obsessive attention other chefs give meat, teasing out each one's unique characteristics by "cooking it every way we can—frying, baking, smoking, roasting, grilling, caramelizing, dehydrating—to figure out it's every taste." The resulting dishes, like her stone-ground corn grits with corn cream, huitlacoche (corn's equivalent to a truffle) and a tempura poached egg, are complex, sophisticated and have earned Dirt Candy a devoted clientele. The cookbook, which came out in late August and features the art of cartoonist Ryan Dunlavey, simply expands her reach. More

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By Leah Koenig

on September 10th, 2012 10:51am

 
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Lost Foods of New York City: Brooklyn Blackout Cake

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Today, the cake that once defined the borough’s sweet tooth is hardly a blip on New York’s dessert radar—unless you ask someone over the age of 55. Then the floodgates open and you begin to hear apocryphal tales like the one food historian Arthur Schwartz shares in his book New York City Food (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2004). “[When my sister and I] were teenagers and didn’t have dates on a Saturday night," he writes, "we would consume an entire cake.” More

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By Leah Koenig

on August 21st, 2012 10:47am

 
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Lost Foods of New York City: Date-nut bread sandwiches at Chock Full o' Nuts

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The sandwich, made of two dense slices of date nut bread slathered with cream cheese, was once a daily fixture of New York City life, particularly for those on a budget. In their respective memoirs, By Myself and Then Some, and Memoirs of a Beatnik, model-turned actress Lauren Bacall and poet Diane di Prima recount how they relied on Chock Full o’ Nuts’ date-nut sandwiches as a primary source of young-artist sustenance. Bacall remembers the sandwiches (10 cents when she ate them in the 1940s) and a cup of coffee (5 cents) being “not substantial, but filling—[they] got me through the day.” More

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By Leah Koenig

on July 16th, 2012 2:10pm

 
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Lost Foods of New York City: Biscuit Tortoni

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“Biscuit tortoni started out in posh restaurants, then eventually migrated down to the red-checked tablecloth places,” explained Jeri Quinzio, author of Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making. A search through the New York Public Library’s menu archives confirms that biscuit tortoni appeared on menus at numerous ritzy dining establishments, including the restaurants in the Waldorf Astoria in 1900, the Park Avenue Hotel in 1901, and The Hotel Knickerbocker in 1907 (In each case, the treat set diners back 30 cents.) More

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By Leah Koenig

on June 13th, 2012 9:09am

 
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When New York was king of beer

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Up until the turn of the twentieth century, the story of American beer production was largely set in New York City. This is the story told at Beer Here: Brewing New York’s Beer History, a newly opened exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, on view through September 2. Consider two local American beer giants of the recent past: Schaefer and Rheingold. Both companies were founded by German immigrants in the nineteenth century and enjoyed nearly a century of national brand recognition thanks to Mad Men-era jingles touting them respectively as, “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer!” and, “The one beer to have when you’re having more than one.” More

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By Leah Koenig

on June 1st, 2012 11:49am

 
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Lost Foods of New York City: Gesztenyepüré, Hungarian Chestnut Puree

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The dessert made its way to America with the Hungarian immigrants who settled in New York City from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries. They brought with them a zest for culture and the arts, and the hearty, rib-sticking fare—chicken paprikash, beef goulash, apple and cabbage strudel and, of course, gesztenyepüré, that had graced their dinner tables in the Old Country. More

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By Leah Koenig

on April 26th, 2012 9:59am

 
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Fatty Crab's Zak Pelaccio pairs great food with music and drink at a party for his new book (and gives us a recipe)

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For a cookbook launch party, last night’s event at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena in honor of Zak Pelaccio's new book Eat with Your Hands (Ecco) was pretty killer. The music, which included a live performance by the Brooklyn-based folk-rock band Woods, was too loud for real conversation, but the perfect volume for dancing. Friends wielding cans of Tiger Beer yelled enthusiastically to each other from across the room. And instead of the usual passed canapés, there was whole smoked pig—a four-foot expanse of leathery, brick red skin and juicy pulled pork holding court on a folding table. The mix of hearty, well-wrought food, plenty of drinks, and good music was an appropriate setting for a book that celebrates all three. More

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By Leah Koenig

on April 18th, 2012 12:20pm

 
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Three 'pizza tours' merge history, food geekery and a love of 'New York Style' pizza (whatever that is now)

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With 150 years of pizza history and evolution under the city’s belt, there actually is no one definition of New York–style pizza. Depending on where you eat, you might encounter a chewy, thin-crusted Neapolitan-style pie, which comes minimally splotched with fresh mozzarella; or a Sicilian pie, which is bready, sauce-heavy and square; or a beautifully blistered artisanal pizza baked inside a coal- or wood-fired brick oven. With so much variety crowding the field, you might need a little expert advice just to wade through. More

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By Leah Koenig

on March 22nd, 2012 8:54am