Nora Ephron and Butter: A Love Story

A rare excerpt from the late legend's self-published cookbook.

Source.

If you subscribe to this newsletter (thank you!), then you’re likely an ardent admirer of Nora Ephron, the writer and director behind three of the most beloved and enduring romantic comedies of all time: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. My first book, I’ll Have What She’s Having, chronicles how she made those films and stamped the love genre with her wry, observational wit and unabashed nostalgia. Today would have been her 82nd birthday.

Ironically, Nora was not outwardly sentimental. Not in person. She communicated affection through hospitality — giving advice and recommendations for the best chocolate chip cookie in Manhattan, the best place on the East side to repair your zipper, the best anything and everything. “Nora knows what to do” was a common refrain among her friends and associates. She was a passionate home cook and gourmand, and two of her most personal works feature avatars of Nora the Culinary Goddess (the funny food writer Rachel Samstat in Heartburn; the Streep-ified Julia Child and zealous food blogger Julie Powell in Julie & Julia). Her dinner parties were famously cozy affairs. When I interviewed him for I’ll Have What She’s Having, the actor Greg Kinnear (Frank Navasky in You’ve Got Mail) gushed over the delicious ham that she served at her baronial uptown apartment; Frank’s inspiration, the irreverent journalist Ron Rosenbaum, another guest at another dinner party, was won over by the baked lima beans and pears casserole, a recipe from her friend Lee Bailey that she immortalized on the pages of Heartburn, her 1983 roman à clef. The dish was a “thing which I otherwise wouldn’t have imagined liking,” Frank — I mean, Ron — told me.

Nora felt especially religious about butter. Julie & Julia’s close-up of three decadent hunks melting in a pan was the closest she ever got to a steamy sex scene in any of her films. “The day there’s a meteorite heading toward the earth and we have thirty days to live, I am going to spend it eating butter,” Amy Adams’ Julie blogs to her followers. “Here’s my final word on the subject: You can never have too much butter.”

Off the Hollywood soundstage, Nora, who died in 2012, assembled a self-published, 174-page cookbook and distributed it to her loved ones. It archived favorite recipes with personalized titles such as THE FAMOUS CORNBREAD PUDDING MADE OF HORRIBLE INGREDIENTS and WORD OF MOUTH RICE PUDDING, which I made for my husband on his birthday. (Our verdict: Delicious!) Nora also included amusing and practical essays on washing lettuce leaves (“Is that boring or what?”), serving fried chicken (“Don’t ever make it. Ever. Buy it from a place that makes good fried chicken…”) and, naturally, butter.

Without further ado, here is Nora’s final word on the subject — and special thanks to Alex Leo (THE BEST) for the permission to publish her great friend and mentor’s short but sweet butter tutorial in this newsletter. As far as I can tell, it’s the first time it has been posted in full, or ever. (References from 2000s New York City may be dated.)

ABOUT BUTTER

I love butter. There is not enough of it in the world. Every so often you don’t have to use it. For example, margarine in cookies makes a softer, chewier cookie. And Crisco or lard in piecrust makes a flakier piecrust. But most of the time, butter is, as they say in the ads, better.

Many recipes in cookbooks call for sweet butter. I don’t know why. Sweet butter is boring and there’s really no point in ever buying it. If you put it on bread, especially the lovely tasty breads you can now buy nearly everywhere, it doesn’t stand up to it. Restaurants go on serving it for murky reasons probably having to do with pretentiousness. Peter Luger’s steakhouse in Brooklyn, which has the best steaks in the world, also has the best butter in the world, an amazingly delicious salt butter you could practically eat as a dessert. It comes, as I recall, from some farm in Pennsylvania and can be purchased on West 14th Street between Hudson and Greenwich at one of those meat places. For a while, I got all my butter there, but there’s something to be said for not having the greatest butter in the world in your refrigerator even though it’s hard for me to say it.

The best way to melt butter is in the microwave.

It’s also the easiest way to clarify butter because you melt it in a Pyrex measuring cup and you can see the butter clearly. Clarified butter is butter that’s been melted and had the milky part of the butter removed so that it’s sort of the oily part of the butter. This is what you get served at lobster restaurants with your lobster and a thing that must be said about clarified butter is: never serve it with lobster. Or artichokes. Butter is much tastier if it’s not clarified. The only reason to clarify butter is to cook with it: when you remove the milky part, you’re essentially turning the butter to oil, which means that it doesn’t burn at as low a temperature, which in turn means you can fry things in it without burning the butter while still getting a lovely buttery taste. The legendary scrambled eggs from the Beverly Hills Hotel coffee shop were cooked very quickly over a very high flame in clarified butter; that was their secret, and it took me years of stealthily watching the chef there to figure it out. They were great scrambled eggs. On the other hand, we make our scrambled eggs in the low flame-unclarified butter way and they’re also great.

I know a food person who makes pancakes in clarified butter, but that, to me, is overreaching.