Molasses cookies in Little House on the Prairie, the taste of barbecued ribs beside a busy road… These things sparked Debora Robertson’s obsession with US food, shown off here in glam style with a frozen, boozy version of key lime pie
An ode to
It probably started with Little House on the Prairie. Lying on the floor of my parents’ sitting room, homework ignored in front of me, I watched as Ma Ingalls pulled something out of that Walnut Creek stove: a fruit pie, a plate of molasses cookies, a ham, some cornbread or a batch of fluffy biscuits.
Later, it might have been repeats of the Mary Tyler Moore Show – an early lesson in what an independent woman looked like and the show that made me want to be a journalist, witnessing her disastrous veal Prince Orloff: a ‘light’ supper of veal, mushrooms, bechamel sauce, cheese… Or perhaps it was LA Law, with those glitzy restaurants and sushi dinners? The nearest I’d been to sushi in County Durham was a tin of tuna.
One way or another, and years before I’d been there, I fell in love with American food, its wholesomeness and glamour, its promise, its exoticness. So perhaps it’s hardly surprising that the minute I arrived at the University of St Andrews in 1983, I met The Texan and fell instantly in love, in that way you do when you’re barely 18. He wore denim dungarees (‘overalls’ he called them), plaid shirts and cowboy boots entirely unironically. Compared to the well scrubbed, tweed-jacketed specimens at Stanhope Young Farmers, The Texan was dazzling. And I allowed myself to be dazzled.
He loved cooking. The first thing he made for me in his tiny student flat was chicken fried steak (the steak breaded and deep-fried like chicken) with mashed potatoes and white gravy. It seemed an odd thing to do to a steak, especially on a student budget, but in the land of the deep-fried Mars Bar, it seemed churlish to mention it. And I was blinded by love.
Over the next few years, I spent my summers in Houston, Texas. We lived in a little house near Rice University and had lots of parties. I cooked my way through The Silver Palate cookbook, which I’d stolen from his stepmother’s bookcase. It was quite new then, and written by Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso, who ran a tiny gourmet food shop of the same name on the Upper West Side of New York. Of course, the recipes included apple pies and oatmeal cookies, but also strange poetry – arugula, pesto, pasta puttanesca and their famous chicken marbella, which I still make today.
Our tall larder fridge, twice the size of the one that had sustained me through my chil
