Electric Mixer

We made this dessert because of our love for Thai tea sweetened just the way the Thai do, with sweetened condensed milk. We got so many compliments on it that we left it on the Ssäm Bar dessert menu for over a year, which we almost never do. To this day, we still get requests for it. While the ingredients here are off the beaten path of your average pantry, they can easily be found in Chinatown or a Latin market or at amazon.com.

One summer we had the idea of putting a frozen ice cream pie on the menu at Ssäm Bar. It would be sliced and stored in the freezer, so all the cooks had to do was get it on a plate, put some fruit on top of it, and—booya!—send it out to the table. Not a lot of work for the already-slammed savory cook. But that was during the time when we were operating out of a portion of the tiny, tiny basement at Ko, and there wasn’t any extra real estate for a professional ice cream machine. So we took a little time to think about how we could cheat the process a little—basically, we needed to get rid of the churning while freezing. We ended up finding that our sweet corn cereal milk was the milk that took to the task the best—the freeze-dried corn and Cap’n Crunch combo has this intense corn pudding flavor. It’s so tasty it can be diluted with a lot of fatty, bland cream and still pack a punch of corn flavor. The high proportion of cream, fortified with the starch from the cereal and corn, creates an “ice cream” that freezes soft but hard, a texture kind of like Häagen-Dazs. Because it gets loose and pourable as it defrosts, the “ice cream” is best for molded frozen uses, like this ice cream pie, or poured into, say, Popsicle molds to make ice cream pops. Once we had this crazy intense corn ice cream, we set to making a crust corny enough to match it. That process led us down the road to developing our corn cookie, which is the sleeper of all the Milk Bar cookies. It looks so harmless, so plain, so yellow, so un-cookie-like. It’s also my grandma’s favorite. Her house is surrounded by cornfields, so she’s my authority.

This recipe was found in a handwritten Swedish cookbook, dated about 1864, belonging to Countess Frida Af Trampe. This was said to be her favorite cookie. Ingrid Albertzon Parker, who is Swedish, took the time to translate this recipe into American measurements. I had the pleasure of having Ingrid come into my kitchen one afternoon to teach me the art of making these buttery little morsels. They are really very simple to make. The optional Cognac and shaved chocolate were added by Ingrid.

A luxurious spread for bagels that is so much better than ordinary cream cheese, this will keep for about a week in the refrigerator. For best results, remove the cream cheese from the refrigerator about an hour or so before you plan to use it, so it will soften.

A beautiful pink, intensely flavored butter, this can be made with either fresh or frozen, thawed berries. The butter should be a little cooler than room temperature when you whip it. Take the butter out of the refrigerator a half hour to an hour before you plan to use it, so it can soften.

Two keys to a great roast beef sandwich are rare roast beef and good, crunchy, warm sourdough bread. We added some spicy horseradish cream to give it a kick.

If you didn’t think waffles could taste good and be good for you at the same time, these will change your mind. Besides the taste of fresh applesauce, the addition of flaxseed meal, wheat germ, and whole wheat pastry flour imparts a wholesome flavor. If you choose to buy applesauce rather than making it from scratch, the waffles will still be very good, but nothing compares with homemade applesauce made with crisp autumn apples.

Thin, buttery, and delicate, these fall somewhere between crêpes and American pancakes. It’s traditional to eat Swedish pancakes topped with lingonberries (or lingonberry jam) or another tart berry, a slice of lemon to squeeze on the pancake, and confectioners’ sugar. These pancakes cook quickly because they’re so thin. In fact, they’re so thin that most guests will want three or four. Serve with your choice of herrings (page 196) or Smoked Salmon (page 191).