The Batali Inquisition: Sam Sifton
The founding editor of the New York Times’s new cooking section and former restaurant critic waxes on about wild game
When is your favorite time of day?
Just before dawn, when all is possibility.
Where do you sleep best?
In silent hotel rooms with blackout curtains.
What is the best way to recharge your batteries?
Find the fish. Cast the right fly to them. Catch and release. Repeat.
Where do you most successfully use your energy?
At the keyboard.
Where do you waste the most energy?
At the keyboard.
When are you most depleted?
At the very end of the day, near the end of whatever it is I’m writing or editing or cooking or building, not yet done but close.
What is the last thing you ate?
I made a smoothie for the kids–fresh strawberries and a few pieces of frozen peach, a splash of fresh squeezed orange juice, and a couple heaping tablespoons of Greek yogurt. Then I drank it.
When are you hungry?
Working as a restaurant critic schooled me well. I’m most hungry right before dinner. But that’s not set in stone. Does it look delicious? Does it smell sublime? I’m generally good to go.
What was the last thing you cooked?
I’ve been working on a series for The Times’s new cooking venture, NYT Cooking. It’s devoted to the rediscovery of old Times classics — recipes from Craig Claiborne, of course, and Pierre Franey, but also from Times journalists spooling down the years. Last night I made two: a marvelous beef stew with Dijon mustard and Cognac that the writer Regina Schrambling developed for the Dining section right after 9/11; and a 1950s-style summer-squash casserole that Julia Reed gave the paper in 2002. Both of them appeared in Amanda Hesser’s excellent Essential New York Times Cookbook, from 2010, but I wanted to make them myself in advance of a photo shoot that will yield pictures for our new website. Holy cats! It was some very good eating.
If you were a food, what would you be?
I’d like to think of myself as venison trying to elude harvest. I’m happy outside and alone, but I keep an eye peeled for trouble, and I think I’m pretty fast. For sure, I’m stringy. You’d want to eat me braised, with some cherries, or mix me with pork fat for breakfast sausages.
Describe the perfect meal—what and where?
I like eating in darkness, the table lighted by kerosene lamps, with my family and friends: food off and out of a wood stove, with cold wine, lots of seltzer, and a fresh-berry crumble for dessert. But I also like eating with my wife, just the two of us, at a white-tablecloth restaurant of the old school, with captains and waiters and runners and sommeliers, course after course until the duck press arrives and we begin the slow descent toward dessert and mignardises. Late-night Chinese with friends: ginger-scallion noodles and clams with black-bean sauce at an hour closer to dawn than midnight? That’s pretty grand. I once had a dinner with Nora Ephron on the Upper West Side with about a dozen people I hardly knew that was like a combination of all of those. That was a perfect meal.
What is your favorite Olympic event?
Freestyle skiing.
What was the last live performance you saw?
I’ve got kids and a job that has me out at night a lot. It’s been a while. But I was up in Toronto for the Luminato Festival not too long ago, and I saw Isabella Rossellini perform in Green Porno at the Winter Garden. It was pretty great, a grand and serious nineteenth-century lecture crossed with madcap performance art and brainy comedy. The sex lives of animals. Who knew?
With which artist of all time do you most identify?
I’m not an artist, so it’s hard. But I’d like to work as hard and well at the keyboard as Elmore Leonard. I’d like to write as well as him. I’d like to write as well as Richard Price or Joseph Mitchell too. I think of all three when I work. But I think about Todd Heisler’s photographs, too, and Gerard Richter’s drawings, and Meryl Streep always. What do you suppose is going through Neil Young’s head when he plays, or Ed Norton when he acts? We’re all looking for clarity in what we do. Artists help us see it and, at their best, inspire us to work harder. George Orwell said good prose is like a windowpane. I identify with the hard work that is needed to try to make that happen.
Who is your favorite literary character?
Smike, in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby? Strike, in Richard Price’s Clockers? E.J. Watson, in Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country? Dave Robicheaux, in the novels of James Lee Burke? Rosalind, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It? Or Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing? Travis McGee, in the novels of John D. MacDonald? All of Jane Austen’s characters? Most of Trollope’s? I have so many friends. I have an early edition of a novel by Jill Eisenstadt called From Rockaway, published in 1985. The protagonist is a kid from Rockaway named Timmy, out of high school and not going to college, working as a lifeguard, hoping to take the test for the fire department in the fall. His mother’s on him about it: He’s a dropout. His girlfriend broke up with him; she’s on a scholarship at a good college up in the woods. “Whatsa matter with you?” his mother asks. “I save people’s lives, Ma,” Timmy says. “What’s wrong with that?” I really like that guy.
What is your favorite method of travel?
If it’s less than five hours, I’m driving.
What is your favorite vacation spot?
A four-way tie between coastal Maine, southwest Florida, the Pacific Northwest, and Paris.
Where would you live if you could live anywhere?
The east end of Long Island.
What is your favorite luxury?
Generally speaking, I’d like to have the best available. But in terms of refinement of living? I pay the extra money for legroom on the plane.
What is the single best dish of wild game you have eaten in the last two years, and where did you eat it?
Click here to see Sam Sifton’s bonus answer.
To check out the new section of NYT Cooking, click here
