Cook's Treat

When I was a kid, my mom always roasted chicken legs in the oven before handing them over to my dad to finish on the barbecue. Once the chicken was brushed with sauce and sizzling on the grill, Dad would dive into the roasting pan with a piece of soft white bread, mopping up chicken fat and bits of caramelized skin. “Cook’s treat,” he called it, and my siblings and I would gather at the strategic moment, our own pieces of bread at the ready.

In my brother’s kitchen, where together we cook the elaborate meals our family loves, cook’s treat might be the crispy, fatty end slice of a sirloin steak, or a spoonful of caramelized onion, or the piece of roasted potato that got a little too browned.

The cook’s treat is never on the menu, and the people in the living room don’t know what’s going down in the kitchen as each succulent tidbit is offered from one cook to another on the tip of a knife or off the side of the cutting board. The back-of-house sharing is part of the savor.

In professional kitchens, the cook’s treat is the misshapen cookie, the cheesy bits that fall off the pizza and melt on the tray, or the whipped cream left behind in the pastry bag. At the Chocolate Claim in Whitehorse, closed now (though chef Glenys Baltimore still stocks local stores with cakes under the name “The Claim”), there used to be a slim orange box on a shelf in the chocolate room. You just had to open the door partway, reach in, curl your fingers around a rejected truffle, and pop it into your mouth. It was all with the blessing of the owner, José Janssen, who knew how to keep her kitchen happy.

At this time of year, the cook’s treat I like most after a long day of holiday kitchen prep is a single shortbread with a whiskey cocktail, often enjoyed in solitude when the counters are clean, the dishwasher’s running, and the rest of the household is fast asleep.

This December I am thinking a lot about my friend and collaborator, Jennifer Tyldesley, she of Free Pour Jenny’s bitters fame. In December of 2017, Jenn and I published our book Cold Spell, a slim volume of cocktails and savories suitable for a northern winter. While we were testing recipes for that book, many cook’s treats were traded back and forth, and often they were liquid. While we were testing recipes for that book, Jenn taught me a great deal about cocktail and food pairings, and much about artisanal liquors, amaros, and spirits in all the years since.

Jenn moved to Vancouver Island last spring, and I miss her greatly. (I’m happy to report her online shop is still open, and yes, you can order her Solstice Bitters for delivery.) I think of Jenn every time I sip a Holiday Almond, which I only drink in December, and savor a quiet cook’s treat of Cold Spell spiced nuts while the snow falls gently in the gathering dark.