A recipe from Michelle Maisto's memoir

Her new book is called "Gastronomy of Marriage - A Memoir of Food and Love". One of the things I like about it is that she treats food as culture. She uses food memories to tell stories. Like her grandma's famous walnut tarts. Not only does she tell us about her mother making these and 11 other kinds of cookies at Christmastime, she gives us the recipe for these delights.

WALNUT TARTS
crust:
8 oz cream cheese
1 stick butter
1 cup flour

filling:
1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts or a combination of the two
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. For this recipe you'll need a mini muffin tin (two ideally). Put these in the refrigerator. Then blend the crust ingredients until smooth. If, like me, you tend to have warm hands, wash them under cold water. Drop teaspoonfuls of dough into each muffin cup and press the dough with your fingertips until each one is like a mini piecrust. Don't press them so thin that you can see the gray of the muffin tin; the thickness of a navel orange peel is about right.

Put the muffin tines back into the refrigerator while you make the filling, simply mixing the ingredients together. Spoon the filling into each little pie shell, leaving a little space before the top of the crust. Bake for 20-30 minutes, until the crust is light brown.

Tune in this week for my conversation with Michelle Maisto about her relationship and her relationship to food. If you miss it, check the archive!