By Leah Koenig 

This dish hails from Rome's ancient Jewish community, which dates back 2,000 years. The recipe makes delicious use of summer’s zucchini abundance and highlights a hallmark technique of Roman Jewish cooking: frying vegetables in oil. Although the zucchini is fried before it is marinated in a mix of chopped basil, parsley, garlic, and a glug of red wine vinegar, the final dish is complex and bright, rather than stodgy or heavy. I first tried concia at a restaurant in Rome's historic Jewish ghetto neighborhood over a decade ago, and haven’t ever forgotten the experience. 

When 2020 began, Mélanie and Xavier Delcourt had good reason to believe that they had finally achieved their dream of running a successful Park Slope restaurant.  

By Liz Alpern

Soup is my ultimate comfort food. As a kid, I was eager to bring a thermos of hot soup to school for my lunch—a little reminder of home. As an adult, I cook gallons of soup frequently, to feed the crowds at my fundraising party, Queer Soup Night; and we regularly serve soup at events hosted by my company, The Gefilteria. 

Contributed by Lucy Rumack who joined the Park Slope Coop in 1983 

By Jennifer Perkin

Home cooking is having a moment. Although many Gazette readers and PSFC members are of course already prolific home chefs, going by posts on the internet, a lot people are taking this time to really spread their culinary wings. We are all baking those sourdough loaves, fermenting that kimchi, and making pasta from scratch. (Well, maybe not all.) People are also being creative with items that have been sitting in their pantry unused. 

By John Tucker

Obviously, as sad as it was for me to close RW after 19+ years in business, the timing has turned out to be fortuitous, to put it mildly. I miss my staff, and the warm buzz of our little kitchen, and especially the produce. RW was ever and always fixated on seasonality, and with spring coming I’m feeling very wistful about not seeing the ramp guy we worked with for many years, who would show up in early spring for about a month or a little more with ramps and fiddlehead ferns he’d hand harvested near the Delaware river where NY meets PA. The corn meal in the polenta dish was grown by a Hudson Valley farmer I worked with for 25 years, first at Savoy in SoHo, then at RW, and I miss that relationship, too. Now I’ll have to celebrate the seasons with shopping trips to the coop and the greenmarket, which is fine, but it feels a little lonesome not to celebrate the seasons with my customers. I look forward to getting together with friends again, and celebrating what the earth gives us on the plate and in the wine glass. That day can’t come too soon.