A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

A few years ago, on a trip to Edinburgh, I had an elderflower drink that I keep thinking about. I don't remember what it was specifically called on the menu—cordial, elderflower water, or some variant—just that it was so cool and refreshing that it seemed weirdly magical on that day. It was a late afternoon in November. My husband and I had been to this little graveyard in the old part of the city (martyrs, moss) and then stopped into a restaurant nearby. It was too early to be having dinner but that's the nice part [...]

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

Like most good Puerto Ricans, my mother was born in the Bronx. But growing up, I spent a decent amount of time in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, where my grandparents lived until I was in my 20s. There, as kids, my brother and I chased lizards in the backyard, enjoyed coconut right off the tree, listened to coqui frogs at night and roosters in the wee hours of the morning through open louvered windows. Everything on TV was in Spanish (which we didn't speak), so we explored a lot. We were also exposed to some dishes that, while [...]

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

While we all know Jamaica owes many of its food and cultural influences to British weirdoes (see: love of porridges; how my mother writes "Many happy returns!" in my birthday card every year), what is less known is the Spanish influence on the island.

The Spanish "discovered" Jamaica a long time ago. I, admittedly, am somewhat fuzzy on all the details of Jamaican history, but here's what you need to know: The Spanish came first in 1494—some say it was Columbus, some say it was another dude. No matter. Today, we call the place where the Spanish [...]

A series about recipes that may seem odd or outmoded and yet we're curious to try!

As 17th-century delights go, curd cakes sounded good. Kinda like comfort food. When the two of us first came across the recipe, we placed bets on where curd cakes might fall on the Elegance-Meter. Were they dukes or peasants? Might (Dame) Maggie Smith have said, "What is a curd cake?" on "Downton Abbey" (back when it was good), or would she have readily ordered them up for tea? On the whole, curd cakes seem less festive than our previous concoction, whipp'd syllabub, what with the latter’s spume and special [...]

A series on things to make, eat and imbibe this summer.

The almanac says we've got a few weeks left of summer. But if you're like me, Labor Day is the bookend that marks summer’s close and the beginning of all things fall—that pivot point when the the state fair shuts down and college football starts up. While I can't get my head around summer ending just yet, I love the transition to fall, when grilling moves from the backyard to the tailgate. If you’re planning one final blowout of the summer in observance of our favorite socialist holiday, don't bore your guests with [...]

It’s morning in the American supermarket. As the Sriracha rooster crows, Jemima, a working mother, drops the kids off at Miss Butterworth’s daycare. Liquid-Plumr (call him Joe) dreams of a better life and lower taxes, and it’s all lion dances and bar mitzvahs in the ethnic aisle with Messieurs La Choy and Manischewitz. Corporations are people, too, but it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that even the most storied and iconic brand sauces and flavor bases started out as somebody’s homemade recipe. So let’s come home to Sofrito, the condiment you can make yourself.

The word “sofrito” derives from the Catalan verb “sofrefir”—to fry lightly. A sofrito is generally understood [...]

A series about recipes that may seem odd or outmoded and yet we're curious to try!

Hospitality mavens of the 1690s knew that, if you were expecting company, you’d do well to serve up a nice cold syllabub. (As the nursery rhyme goes, the queen of clubs made syllabubs.) Syllabub, a foamy, marvelous vehicle for wine and cream and froth, inspired strong feelings. “I shall hate Sillabubs as long as I live,” announces Lady Addleplot, the “a highflown Stickler against Government” in Thomas d’Urfey’s play Love for Money. John Donne has a satire about two country bumpkins who choose a too-hot custard instead of “Choice Sillabubs with Sugar hill’d [...]

As we round the corner into the final week of Drynuary, here are three nonalcoholic drink recipes from Sean McClure, who runs a consulting company called Cocktail Chemistry. While behind the bar at Craft, where McClure worked until last summer, he spruced up the beverage menu to include some terrific nonalcoholic options. As he put it to The New York Times, "All the time, people come in who are pregnant or who don’t drink, and if their dining partner is doing something like a full tasting menu with wine pairings, I don’t want them to have to suck down Coke all night." The Times singled out [...]

My household is primarily ovo-lacto vegetarian, and I say "primarily" because I have small children who like those gross chicken lumps and fish sticks you find in your grocer's freezer, and also because it's nice to have a grilled, cedar-planked slab of wild-caught salmon on Thanksgiving. On the West Coast, you can do this outside on your grill, just like the Pacific Northwest tribes did for thousands of years before "Portlandia" and the Microsoft Surface tablet. In colder climates, you can broil the salmon in the oven if you don't have a coat? But this method does create the "burning flesh" smell so loathsome to delicate souls such [...]

I already made this apple pie! Using, essentially, this pie crust, and then "throwing apples inside it" and "baking it." GAZE UPON MY CRUST AND DESPAIR. What have YOU done with your life today? Please don't go hungry. Bad things happen to people locked in houses who get hungry. Here are some tips, depending on the staples you purchased drunk and at the last moment yesterday.

• Got apples? Tarte Tatin.

• Got arborio rice? Risotto.

• Got pot? It's pot brownies.

• Got lemons? These lemon squares are A+.

• Got lettuce? Stir-fry for you.

• Cherries? Meet clafoutis.

• Plums? [...]

The mornings have turned chilly quite suddenly and so it is apple season! And so it is also tarte tatin season. Let's talk about this.

It is the easiest of all desserts, and yet the instructions for tarte tatin are always intimidating. Witness the struggles of our pal Deb over at the wonderful Smitten Kitchen. Back in 2008, she endorsed a friend's recipe, which is very good, because she'd ruined too many herself. Finally, last spring, Deb engineered a recipe of her own, based off Julia Child's. I disagree with both of them, somewhat! Maybe even with Julia Child! (Waits for lightning bolt to strike me down.) Where [...]

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

When I was little my father used to take me and my brothers into L.A.'s Koreatown after Korean Church. We would often stop by the Joonggook jip (Korean-Chinese restaurant) for a steaming bowl of my favorite lunch, jjajangmyeon, a roasted black soybean sauce served over hand-pulled thick wheat noodles. My father would always tuck a paper napkin under my chin, since the inky sauce was liable to leave flecky dark-brown stains on my white Sunday shirt.

Now I'm grown, and I no longer feel comfortable wearing a makeshift bib in public. To avoid visible stains I [...]

A series on things to make, eat and imbibe this summer.

You know what? Forget about groups and gatherings. Enough with the ever-faithful host to the hordes, the slaving over the hot grill for others just to watch them bogart all of your ribs. Deep into the dog days of summer, it's time to slow down and relax with a somewhat indulgent meal. Save it for one of those summer Saturday nights when you have nothing planned and nowhere particular to go. Sometimes a delightful summer evening requires nothing more than you and your sweetheart. And a huge hunk of beef.

Main: T-Bone Fiorentina Sides: Grilled ramps and [...]

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

I have no idea why the chicken wing was the food to make it out of Buffalo. I mean, I understand the appeal, but its ultimate success is baffling when you consider my beloved hometown’s other signature dish—the beef on weck, which, were this a right world, would be the Buffalo food on every bar menu. It’s a very simple sandwich: roast beef and horseradish, but it’s the roll that’s key. It requires kummelweck, which is hard to find outside of western New York, and that might be what's held the beef on weck back from world domination.

A series about recipes that may seem odd or outmoded and yet we're curious to try!

I don’t recall the moment that blancmange first appeared in my world as a concept, but it was certainly in a book (although, spoiler, not Little Women, which I’ve never read). Perhaps Jessica Kirwin’s website Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, which devotes a full entry to the medieval dessert, essentially a milk pudding, gave me my first encounter. Or, it could have been when I had a petite crush on Maxime de la Falaise, reading anything I could come across about her online, right up to the fact that she once did an [...]

When the weather turns cold/apocalyptic, your cocktails need to step it up a notch, and your bitter aperitifs are no exception. Lucky for you, there's Sorel. Full disclosure: Sorel is an artisanal, handcrafted twee little liqueur made in—of COURSE—Brooklyn. So that makes this recipe something of a trend piece! And trend pieces should go with summer drinks (see Aperol!), not fall ones, right? But resisting Sorel is futile because it's good. Really good. Billed as a hibiscus liqueur, Sorel wraps up classic fall flavors like cinnamon, clove, ginger and rhubarb and is versatile enough to both complement or supplement things like sweet vermouth, Campari or other aperitifs.

Another [...]

The summer after my junior year of college, I worked the prepared-foods counter at a restaurant on Newbury Street in Boston. It was called Stephanie’s, after its owner, who was an amazing chef. Stephanie made chicken breasts so tender you could almost drink them. Her julienned carrot salad sold out before noon every day. The chefs made gourmet mac and cheese in fifteen-pound batches, and there were always a couple pounds left over for the undergrad waitstaff to gratefully take home. But by far the most popular item on the menu was Stephanie's risotto.

At some point early on that summer it occurred to me that I was surrounded by [...]

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

In elementary school, back in the 70s in Tempe, Arizona, one of my favorite meals was something called Farmers Fritters. On Friday nights, our mother whipped up a batch of the thin, crisp, tangy-sweet cottage-cheese pancakes, which were actually more like little crepes. She used to put her huge rectangular electric skillet in the middle of the table, and my sisters and I sat around it while she made fritters in batches, sliding them around onto everyone's plates.

While we ate these fritters with homemade applesauce and huge puddles of Aunt Jemima syrup, we sometimes told stories, [...]

A new translation of Nostradamus has just been published—though if you’re a real fan you already knew that! Actually, this is the first time we’ve had access to the real thing: the prophecies that launched a thousand crackpots, in all their trippy medieval weirdness, taken seriously as poetry, translated by a great Guggenheim-winning translator, and decked out with essays and notes to give us half a chance of understanding what the hell is going on. But let’s just flip through randomly, shall we?

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

While there are many things that Michigan is known for (Motown; the dying American auto industry; Robocop), its cuisine is probably not what springs first to mind. When Michigan foods are mentioned, the references tend to be agricultural—corn, morels, muskmelons, blueberries, cherries—rather than culinary. But there is one dish that allows us to, rightfully, wax rhapsodic: the humble pasty.

The pasty is the definitive dish of Michigan, particularly the Upper Peninsula, although the downstate natives (I am one) can be equally passionate about it and partisan in their wars over the right ingredients. It was brought [...]