A Chef’s Holiday: Recipes by Barbara Lynch
Photographs by Pat Piasecki
Styling by Taylor Greeley/Team
Flowers by Les Fleurs
Photographs by Pat Piasecki
Down a winding gravel road, inside a 1920s white stucco French Provincial farmhouse with deep-green shutters, all is quiet. Red sauce is simmering on the Five Star oven. The scents of cinnamon and crisp pine swirl through the air. It looks and smells like the holidays, but for one small detail. “I can’t do Christmas music,” says chef Barbara Lynch as she ties on a black apron in the kitchen. The culinary force behind some of Boston’s most beloved restaurants, including No. 9 Park and Menton, Lynch is about to make pasta dough for tonight’s dinner at her new home in Gloucester, set on nearly 5 rolling acres abutting conservation land. But instead of Bing Crosby, she and her company’s executive chef, Michele Carter, will chop vegetables and grate Parm to the likes of Landon Pigg and Madonna.
With roast duck and lots and lots of pasta on the menu, it’s a typical holiday spread for Lynch, who has spent the past two decades building a mini empire among a tight-knit community of Boston chefs. “I used to trade off with Lydia [Shire],” Lynch explains. “I would make gnocchi and she used to make her cranberry sauce.”
As the sun begins to fade, the action in the kitchen and the dining room picks up. Lynch dusts her intricately molded fruitcake with a flurry of powdered sugar—“It’s a blizzard,” she marvels—and her director of business analysis, Abby Gregory, mixes an aperitivo dreamed up while the team was truffle-hunting in Italy last year. Accented with shavings of the precious fungus, the luxe libation is best enjoyed in front of a crackling wood-burning fire. Which is exactly what Lynch and her colleagues and friends do as they clink their glasses and tuck into baccalà toasts. Ahead, the chef shares her secrets for making a holiday meal worth toasting over.
Tartufo Piemonte Cocktail
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Baccalà-and-Potato Brandade Baguette with White Truffle
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Duck Confit with Parsnip Purée and Spiced Prunes
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Rigatoni with Spicy Sausage and Cannellini Beans
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Classic Fruitcake with Cherries, Raisins, Pears, Apricots, and Cranberries
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WEB EXTRA
Pheasant-Meatball Lasagnette
Photograph by Pat Piasecki
Photograph by Pat Piasecki
