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Amy Thielen may have years of fancy-restaurant cooking experience, but the cooking and entertaining style that comes through in her latest book, Company, is one that she describes as “radically casual.” You’d never hear her utter the word tablescape. These are parties where kids get full-on grilled garlic bread scraped with a dripping tomato and run off before the meal. Someone’s frying chicken outside so they can hang out where everyone else is, and the sauce from the meat mingles deliciously with a few different piles of sweet garden vegetables gilded with bacon fat or glazed with brown butter and caramelized ketchup. Neighbors (which in Thielen’s neck of the northern Minnesota woods means anyone within a 20-minute drive) and friends show up with sixpacks and go home with jars of pickles.
She knows that cooking is a balancing act—“the key to a regular, sustainable open-door dinner party habit,” she says, “lies in balancing money with time, and extravagance with thrift.” Some parties involve everyone working together to roll out pasta. Some make a lot out of a little. And always, she writes, it involves remembering, cook to cook, that “no one else will ever care about the food as much as you and I do.” We want things to be delicious, and they will be. But the act of gathering matters the most, filling a “spiritual need” that Thielen feels keenly in her life in the woods, and perhaps all of us are feeling more keenly than we did pre-pandemic.
Thielen shares her menus for holidays and barbecues, birthdays and summer lunches, fish frys and the annual deer camp feast. The occasions you mark might not be the same as hers, but reading each of Thielen’s warm descriptions feels like opening the door of her cabin and going inside, finding the buffet table and piling your plate high.
Who this book is for
If you love to take on a project, especially in service of a great hang, you’ll find lots of inspiration here: rustic, boozy pâté grandmère, cotton-soft hot water rolls, roasted deboned chicken thighs stuffed with gingery pork, a frozen 9-by-13-inch lemon custard pie with a Ritz cracker crust and brûléed meringue topping.
But the operative mood of most of Thielen’s food is cozy: if you love to have friends over and you’re the type to read a cookbook in bed, or you’re looking to get into the holiday-cooking mood, this book is exactly the knitted blanket and mug of chocolate-and-Chartreuse-spiked coffee that you need.
What we can’t wait to cook
In spring: Green Salad With Invisible Vinaigrette. Thielen has been making this dressing for years, and calls it “the little black dress of salad dressings” thanks to its “talent for slipping quietly into the background, for tasting more like lettuce than some lettuces do themselves.”
In summer: Corn on the cob, cooked in milk, and paper-thin slices of white vinegar-marinated cucumbers. A luscious confit of garden eggplant, frying peppers, and cherry tomatoes.
In fall: Sticky Date Olive Oil Cake, scented with lemon zest and Madeira, white sweet potatoes glazed with ketchup, cayenne, maple syrup, and coconut milk, and lardo-crisped roasted turkey served with a creamy gratin of turnips, onions, and Medjool dates.
In winter: A sizzling skillet of garlicky shrimp with chorizo and green olives, then olive oil thumbprint cookies with lemon curd instead of jam.
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