Paul Bass Photo
Home, sweet (and savory) home: Claire Criscuolo at WNHH FM.
If you stop by Claire’s Corner Copia Saturday for a slice of Claire Criscuolo’s signature Lithuanian coffee cake, you can also pick up Criscuolo’s signature — in her latest cookbook.
Criscuolo is hosting a signing at her iconic College-and-Chapel Street vegetarian restaurant from noon to 3 p.m. for 50 Vegetarian Recipes from 50 Years of Claire’s Corner Copia.
Globe Pequot will officially release the book on June 17 as part of a months-long celebration of the restaurant’s semicentenary.
The book is Criscuolo’s fifth. Reflecting evolving tastes, it has more smoothies than in the past, plenty of vegan offerings, and a popular ginger-and-turmeric-infused addition to the menu inspired by a request from some Yale undergraduates called Sick Girl’s Tea.
In addition to the ingredient lists and prep steps, 50 Vegetarian Recipes features crisp close-up photos by Lisa Nichols of dishes and of Claire’s staffers as well as the back stories behind items like the tea — as well as that trademark Lithuanian coffee cake.
Claire’s started selling it the first year it opened, in a then narrower slice of the corner spot it continues to occupy a half-century latter.
An employee named Sally Tessler shared the original recipe, which came from her mom. It didn’t include coffee. “I’m Italian-American, and in our family,” Criscuolo recalls in the book, “we eat biscotti with our coffee or espresso, so basically to me coffee cake meant coffee in a cake.” The coffee stayed, and the rest is history.
Criscuolo draws on her own late mother’s cooking for many of her dishes. During a conversation Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” she was asked to name other influences on her cooking. She didn’t name fellow vegetarian cookbook gurus like Mollie Katzen or Isa Chandra Moskowitz. Instead she named Julia Child and Jacques Pepin.
“Vegetarian cuisine is a style of cooking every cuisine. It’s not a cuisine of its own.,” she explained. “I used to call it Italian Catholic Friday food because we didn’t have meat. And my mother would make beautiful soups and salads and entrees and wonderful sauce dishes. If you’re not going to eat meat, you still have to follow the same nutritional rules: You still need good, solid protein, you still need complex carbohydrates, and you still need healthy fats. So you still need the vitamins and minerals that you would if you were eating meat.”
As she navigated changing tastes and times, “including several recessions and a pandemic,” Criscuolo resisted the call to franchise her restaurant.
She doesn’t know if she would have succeeded business-wise, she said. (Of course she would have.) But she does know she’s more fulfilled focusing on her hometown and rooting her business in her community, including partnering with agencies on projects and helping them raise money.
“If I was in some office somewhere, how would I see when New Haven Reads comes in? How would I necessarily know that 98 percent of their kids are reading at grade level within a year? I want to support something like that. How would I know that if I was in some office in another state? I have plenty … I don’t need another car.”
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with Claire Criscuolo on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” including details of her restaurant’s 50th anniversary $100,000 fundraising drive in partnership with the Yale Child Study Center to provide positive after-school programs for young people. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”