To be brutally honest, a tattered recipe for sauerbraten in some anonymous person’s handwriting is interesting, but it’s not a love letter. Old love letters, or hate letters, or even a parent’s letters to a child away at college, are really much more interesting than even the most beautiful cursive script explaining how to make stuffed dates. I love recipes, but a real letter says more about a person, no matter how culinary anthropologists want to tell me I’m wrong.
Still, my mother’s file of clipped recipes is different, but only for me, because I can feel the emotion rising off of each stained newspaper clipping. I can look at the recipe for rosemary knots with gorgonzola and honey, and remember the dinner my mother and I planned for my brothers coming home from boarding school.
I can see Christmases gone wrong and the ones we got right in her recipe for Brandade du Morue. I can see the light in her February kitchen, a pot of small daffodils in the center of the table, when I visited her from graduate school, and she served Greek Cod with Feta and Green Beans.
I can see the more recent recipes she’s clipped - a magazine page featuring a sleek 20-something’s apartment, Chipotle Baked Oysters on a bed of ice at a sideboard - and I can feel my mother planning a dinner party.
This recipe just made me crack up; it’s so my mother, who, if she ever made sauerbraten, made it only once. No, I had the mother who, even while she was probably feeling herself fade, was planning on a lunch of canned tuna dressed with mayonnaise, sesame oil and sriracha sauce, a recipe clipped from the Boston Globe in the not so distant past, according to the fade on the newsprint.
I don’t know if my mother ever tried it, but it’s genius.
Spicy Tuna Salad
Ingredients:
1/4 cup mayonnaise
2 teaspoons dark sesame oil
1 teaspoon sriracha sauce, or more to taste
1 bunch arugula
2 cans sold white albacore tuna in water
olive oil
lemon
avocado
Instructions:
In a small mixing bowl stir together the mayonnaise, sesame oil, and sriracha. Taste for seasoning, and play with it if you like.
Stir tuna into dressing. Again, play with this. Make more dressing if you really like it, which you probably will.
Dress the arugula in olive oil and lemon juice. Splay the avocado around it, and top with the tuna. Grind pepper.
I served mine with the delicious homemade bread Sarah from The Roving Home thoughtfully baked for us.
