What Ruth Reichl Can’t Cook Without

Apple-cider syrup is a very old American product that disappeared during Prohibition. At that time, they pulled out a lot of apple trees because they were mostly used for making hard cider. But they were also used for makingthis, which is just molasses-like boiled-down apple cider. For a long time, it was one of the major sweeteners in this country. I love it, because unlike maple syrup, which is cloying, it has some acidity and real character to it. I use it in many things. I’ll throw a little into a bowl of chili or anything where you want to balance sweetness, like stews. It’s also great on pancakes. You can make a shrub out of it or use it for anything where you would use liquid sugar. A lot of people are making it now, but when I first found it, about 12 years ago, Carr’s was the only one. It was producing it as a by-product of its cidering.

I don’t really garden, since our property is on shale, except for growing herbs. In the summer, it’s a go-to thing to make basil pesto. Most of the pine nuts that people buy are not from Italy. If you look at them closely, real Italian pine nuts are twice as long as the tiny ones that you normally find in the supermarket. These Italian ones are hideously expensive, but for a big batch of pesto, you only need three tablespoons of pine nuts, so a little goes a long way. The flavor is amazing — you’re getting this really soft, lovely, buttery, nutty flavor — and they also have more oil in them, which means the texture is better too. If you take supermarket ones and these, and taste them together, which I did once for my Substack, the difference is kind of amazing. I always have them in my freezer.

I am a freak for anchovies. For years, I was buying Italian anchovies, and then I discovered these Cantabrian ones from Spain. They are so delicious that I buy them in giant tins. You put them in the refrigerator and they last forever. The little tins that have nine anchovies — I can eat those in one sitting. For me, anchovies are one of those really great umami ingredients. If I’m cooking spinach, I will take an anchovy and swish it around in the pan until it disintegrates. Nobody knows what it is, and it doesn’t taste fishy. If you use that instead of salt, you have something that has real depth. Also, if people stop over, there is nothing better as an appetizer than a grilled piece of bread with butter and an anchovy on top.

There are many brands of pasta, but this pasta doesn’t cost the earth. These are supermarket pastas, but they maintain their integrity. If it says the spaghetti takes 11 minutes to cook, at 11 minutes it still has a bite to it. I haven’t found another pasta that doesn’t cost a million dollars that does that. And if you overcook it a little, it still has integrity. I’m a carbohydrate freak, so I would probably eat pasta every night of the week very happily. When I’m alone, the dinner I will often make myself is a pasta with anchovies, garlic, a lot of herbs, lemon zest, olive oil, really crunchy bread crumbs, and Parmesan cheese. It comes together in the time it takes the water to boil, and nothing tastes better.

Really good balsamic is not like anything else. The market has been flooded with fake balsamic that has no resemblance to the real thing. This is hard for younger people to understand, but the first time I tasted balsamic vinegar was in 1978. Colman Andrews, who was then my boss, and I went to eat at Darrell Corti’s house. Darrell is the man who knows more about food and wine than anybody else in America, and always has. He is a walking encyclopedia. Colman and I had both been writing about food for eight or nine years at that point, but he gave us asparagus with this amazing stuff to dip it into. It was real balsamic vinegar, which neither of us had ever heard of or tasted before. You use this extremely sparingly. You don’t put it on salad at all, but you do put it on asparagus. Strawberries are fantastic dipped into great balsamic. On almost any vegetable dish, just add a couple of drops. I make a very simple butternut squash soup in the fall, which is basically just butternut squash, carrots, onions, water, all puréed — no stock or anything. A few drops of really good balsamic on top of that is heaven.

[Editor’s note: Pedroni lists its prices in euros, so what’s shown here is an approximation in U.S. dollars. You can also find more affordable variations of traditional balsamic vinegar from the companyhere.]

Up here in the country, I do a lot of Chinese cooking because there aren’t many Chinese restaurants, and I love Chinese food. I have a whole pantry full of items from Mala Market, but I chose the oyster sauce because you really can’t get good oyster sauce at the supermarket. The stuff that you buy there is basically just caramelized sugar. This is actually made with oysters, which means it tastes like it’s supposed to. I use it to make shrimp or clams with black beans; kung pao chicken; and steamed baby bok choy glazed with a mixture of oyster sauce, soy sauce, black vinegar, a little sugar, grated ginger, and garlic. I sometimes toss it into mapo tofu. And I’ve been known to stir a splash into a pot of black beans or a pot of chili to deepen the flavor.

These people make a lot of really interesting vinegars. At one time or another, I’ve probably tasted them all. But the one I keep reaching for is this celery-leaf vinegar. I use it as one of the vinegars in a salad dressing: I’ll put some red-wine vinegar, olive oil, and then a little splash of this celery-leaf vinegar, which has such a bright flavor. It tastes like celery leaf — like you’re nibbling on a celery leaf — not like celery seed, which I find kind of a bully. Celery is one of those completely underrated ingredients. What you associate with celery is crispness, and when you put a little bit of this into a salad, it’s like the salad tastes crisper just because you have that taste memory of eating celery. It’s wonderful.

If you’re going to bake with chocolate, you should use great chocolate. I end up baking a lot of chocolate desserts because they’re the cheapest trick. Everybody loves them. You can do something simple like a one-bowl chocolate cake, and it’ll be fine if you use ordinary chocolate, but it’ll be great if you use Dandelion. This kit has ground chocolate, large chips, and cacao nibs. Stock your pantry and you’ll be set. It’s so hard to describe what makes good chocolate versus bad chocolate, but these are just so rich.

[Editor’s note: This kit is currently sold out, but you can sign up to be notified when it comes back in stock.]

I just discovered this atRubiner’s, which is a shop up here in the Berkshires. I go in there all the time because Matt is always discovering new things. I know Valerie Confections as chocolate-makers, but I saw this and was curious about it because I love apricots. I bought a jar and brought it home, and my kids and I ended up eating the entire thing in one day. I went back and bought three more jars because I was afraid he would run out. I don’t like super-sweet things, and this actually tastes like apricot, which is to say sweet and sour. They use Blenheim apricots, which are the greatest apricots in the world, but very few people in America grow them anymore because they don’t have a long shelf life and don’t ship well. My father was German, so I grew up eating Sacher torte. With Sacher torte, you need a good layer of apricot jam right beneath the frosting. When I got this, I thought,Oh my God, I have to make a Sacher torte.