American Merroir WHETHER IN BIG FLAKES, coarse crystals, or a fine grind, salt is often an afterthought. Yet just as geography begets different tastes and textures in wine and oysters, it also creates a multitude of flavors and sensations in salt. But don’t take our word for it: Test drive these small-batch U.S. sea salts yourself. Whether you’re salting the rim of a margarita or putting the final flourish on a dry-aged rib eye, a cellar (see “Worth Their Salt,” p. 38) filled with crystals from one of these locales will transport you from sea to shining sea.—Jessica Carbone York, Maine The limited-production offerings from Slack Tide Sea Salt are hand-harvested at high tide, when the waters are cleanest, just before the tidal stream goes slack (still from movement). Operating…
IN HONG KONG CANTONESE, you don’t say you’re hungry; you say my stomach is beating drums. And after sunset, to follow the metaphor, that drumroll ushers in a late-night food scene unlike any other: curry fish ball skewers on the streets of Kowloon, beef brisket noodles in eclectic Sheung Wan, and hot milk tea from any stall that beckons. Feasting after dark is in the city’s DNA. I learned quickly that my adoptive home of eight years wasn’t kind to morning people, as anyone who’s tried to buy a coffee before 9:00 a.m. can attest. Night is when the island lights up, literally and figuratively, with gaggles of trendsters, fanny pack-sporting grandmas, and party-hearty expats all pushing their way into noodle bars and cha chaan tengs (our local diner equivalent).…
My father gave me his letters from paris. Written with a fountain pen on onionskin stationery and folded in envelopes marked Par Avion, these formative accounts were addressed to my grandmother, and mailed during the year he studied art in Montparnasse. He was 25 then, and freshly disembarked from a World War II merchant marine ship. Dad asked Nana to ship pipe tobacco and instant coffee from the States, because the French stuff was “too expensive” and “undrinkable.” He spent Sundays at museums. Bought a radio instead of paying his rent. Got engaged to someone else before meeting my mother. Ate a lot of soup when dead broke. The school my father attended, Académie de la Grand Chaumière, was anything but grand. A modest townhouse with open studios, the academy…
IN HER DEBUT BOOK, My (Half) Latinx Kitchen, the Ecuadorian Korean American author Kiera Wright-Ruiz makes a powerful dedication “to anyone who has ever had to check off the ‘other’ box.” Wright-Ruiz treats her cookbook as a “culinary genealogy project,” she says, with recipes that reflect both the family she was born into and the Latinx foster families who shaped her life. The embrace of intersectional identities flows through a handful of 2025 cookbook titles. In Salt Sugar MSG, Calvin Eng recounts his childhood yearning to be “more American,” only fully claiming his Cantonese American culture through cooking. In Family Style, Peter Som serves up large-format Chinese cooking with a global spin that nods to his Bay Area upbringing, with dishes like cacio e pepe sticky rice and sole meunière with fish…
IN PARIS, restaurants have long provided more than mere sustenance. Since the aftermath of the French Revolution, when cooks formerly employed by the aristocracy began to open their own establishments, dining outside of the home has served as a mirror of Parisian society. Through the centuries, these spaces came to reflect political upheavals, social shifts, and the ever-changing rhythms of urban life. Distinct dining formats emerged over time to serve a multitude of functions: the lively brasserie, the intimate bistro, the grand café, and the refined restaurant—each with its own cultural significance and clientele. These businesses were the backdrop for artistic and philosophical movements, manifestos, and new ways of seeing the world. Beyond nourishment, Parisian restaurants provided a democratic space where everyone from legendary thinkers to resistance fighters could gather…
Standing in an alley outside a low-slung courtyard home, I dial the number taped to the door and place my order. It’s a chilly Beijing morning, and several minutes pass before a woman emerges cupping a bowl of mian cha, thick millet porridge topped with toasted sesame paste and seeds. Literally “flour tea,” mian cha makes for a satisfying breakfast: nutty, mild, and especially welcome at this early hour. When I lived in Beijing in the late 2010s, the hutongs—narrow passages that snake through the city—were my favorite places to wander. More than just an architectural byproduct, they were the kind of shared spaces where life unfolded in all its richness and mundanity: folks hanging laundry, neighbors gossiping over mahjong, wok smoke drifting through open doors. Yet the hutongs I…
I spent my first nine years in my mother’s kitchen in Battambang, Cambodia. Sometimes I wish I could have stayed there forever, helping her chop onions and garlic, running to fetch wood and water, and falling asleep in a hammock as she rocked me to sleep. ¶ My mother—“Mae,” as I called her in Khmer—left me nothing but her songs and recipes, and aromatic memories to last the rest of my life. I was always happiest in that open, airy kitchen. I remember it as being made up of pure light. A large window high in the pale blue walls framed the bright, tropical sky—so much blue that the walls and sky seemed to merge. Sunlight streamed into the doorway, which opened onto a narrow staircase leading down to my…
6th arrondissement I recently told our son that we were thinking of moving across the Seine. His response: What about your favorite café? What about Twiggy, the cheesemonger? Juan, the caviste? Your neighbors? Your nearby friends, who’ll come for dinner at a moment’s notice? And would you really move away from Yves Camdeborde? Sure, I live in Paris, but in reality I live in the 6th arrondissement, in the small town of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the micro-village known as Odéon, on the stretch I think of as Camdebordeville. Yves Camdeborde is the first person I see when I head out for croissants, and he’s the last person (not counting my husband) I kiss good-night when I’m coming home from dinner. If my husband were the jealous sort, he’d have his sights…
RESTAURANTE CALDO DE PIEDRA OAXACA, MEXICO “Stone soup is a prehistoric dish made by plunging heated river stones into a gourd with water and seafood in it. On a road outside of Oaxaca’s center, there’s this restaurant— really more like a hut with no walls—that specializes in it. In goes the stone, and a few minutes later, after a lot of sizzling, you’re left with the most delicious, light seafood soup. Beyond the drama and the theater, you could kind of imagine someone trying to make it in a three-Michelin-starred restaurant.” —Alex Stupak, chef-owner, Empellón, New York City PARKER’S BBQ WILSON, NC “This is the best chicken I’ve ever had in my life. It was so good that, the first time I had it, I got up and asked the…
LIKE A LOT OF KIDS GROWING UP IN OKLAHOMA IN THE 1970S AND ’80S, THE FIRST TIME JOE DAVIDSON ATE HUMMUS WAS AT A STEAKHOUSE. IN THE LATTER HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY, A SERIES OF LEBANESE-OWNED AND -INFLUENCED STEAKHOUSES—EDDY’S, FREDDIE’ S, JOSEPH’S, JAMIL’S, THE SILVER FLAME—RAN THE SCENE IN TULSA. “They didn’t tout it as Lebanese,” remembers Davidson, who is now the owner of Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ. “We didn’t even know where Lebanon was. But if you wanted to have a great rib-eye, that’s where you went.” Just one of these restaurants remains within city limits, serving gut-stuffing steak dinners where the Middle East meets Middle America. At Jamil’s, third-generation owner Jennifer Alcott’s feathery blonde hair floats around her face as she checks on diners with a gravelly, worn…
Caldo de Pescado (Fish Stock) MAKES 2 QT.; Photo pg. 20 Active: 10 min. • Total: 45 min. Homemade stock infuses the deepest flavor into paella. In Spain, a classic fish stock—the kind used in shellfish paella—is typically made from a combination of small bony, non-oily soup fish (such as little red mullets), the heads and bones of larger species (such as monkfish or cod), and often a handful of Mediterranean galeras (mantis shrimp) or small crabs, and simple aromatics. This recipe doubles easily if you prefer to make a big batch and store it. 1.–2 lb. small, white-fleshed, non-oily fish such as red mullet, or the heads and bones of larger whitefleshed, non-oily fish, such as cod 1 leek, trimmed, coarsely chopped, and rinsed 1 large tomato, halved 10…
How to Choose the Correct Casing When making Russell Moore’s sausages, we used hog and sheep casings. Hog casings, a sturdy option for larger sausages, like Moore’s boudin blanc (see page 38 for recipe), come in a variety of diameters: 1 1⁄8–1 1⁄4” for frankfurters, 1 3⁄8–1 1⁄2” for bratwurst, and 2 1⁄4” if you want to make traditional black pudding. Sheep casings, which are more delicate, are best for smaller sausages like breakfast varieties, or Moore’s garlic and herb sausage (see page 38 for recipe). These natural casings, if packed in salt, should be rinsed and soaked in lukewarm water for 24 hours before using. If submerged in brine, 15–30 minutes of soaking will do. Synthetic varieties are less expensive and ready for immediate use, no cleaning necessary, but…
It’s not quite 4:30 in the morning on Friday, February 2, but the Rio Vermelho neighborhood of Salvador, the capital city of Brazil’s Bahia state, is already buzzing. Revelers, dressed mostly in white, stream along the street parallel to the beach, some still drunk from the night before, others struggling to wake up. In the dark, streetlights reveal popup booze stands hung with lemon-yellow Skol beer ads, and stalls selling roses and carnations and lilies—f lowers enough for a thousand weddings. Down by the beach, a crowd has gathered around a makeshift pagoda, where two men in shorts are pounding on 3-foot-tall drums, and another is striking the cowbell-like agogô with a stick. A dozen old women in satin blouses and ankle-length hoop skirts, heads swathed in kerchiefs, sing and…
Roasted and Fresh Tomato Pie (recipe on page 74) This is how the blueberry helped me find my voice. When we opened Chef & the Farmer in Kinston, North Carolina, Kinstonians made a lot out of my pedigree. A small group of people were thrilled that a local girl, trained in New York, came home to open a restaurant, but most people were a little suspicious. Both groups believed I brought back with me a different notion of how to cook, a revised palate, and a penchant for the sophisticated. What I brought back, unfortunately, were just other people’s recipes. I had no sense of the type of food I wanted to cook. And I certainly had no idea how to use food, particularly the food of my childhood, to…
We happened to cruise into the town of Fulks Run, in northwestern Virginia, on what devotees know as Fried Ham Friday. What luck! One day each week, the big table at the back of Fulks Run Grocery, a small provisions store, is cleared so that people can sit down and eat sandwiches at what normally serves as the ham shipping department for Turner Ham House. The legendary hams, made by Ron Turner using his great-grandfather's formula, are dry-cured with sugar, salt, and saltpeter. They come enveloped in a fragrant cloud of titillating porcine perfume, and they deliver the exquisite salty-sweet punch for which Virginia hams are famous. On Fridays, nickel-thick slices are first soaked in water to mellow their intensity; then they are lightly breaded and fried crisp in an…
Lemon-Caper Tuna Sandwich MAKES 2 SANDWICHES COOK TIME: 30 MINUTES This briny, tangy sandwich, from Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery + Café in Boston, benefits from sitting awhile after assembly. The oils from the tapenade will seep into the bread, making it moist but not soggy, and the sharp flavors of pickled fennel, capers, and olives will mellow pleasantly. For the pickled fennel: ¼ cup rice wine vinegar 3 tbsp. sugar 1 tsp. kosher salt 1 fennel bulb, trimmed and cut into ¼” pieces For the olive tapenade: 1 cup pitted kalamata olives 2 tbsp. olive oil 1 ½ tbsp. minced basil 1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice 1 tsp. capers 1 clove garlic, minced Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste For the sandwich: ¼ cup capers, drained…
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, WHEN LORETTA Harrison opened Loretta’s Authentic Pralines in New Orleans’ old Jax Brewery building, she became the first African-American woman to own and operate a praline company in the Crescent City—a distinction she characterizes as relative. “While mine may have been the first brick-and-mortar store here,” Harrison says, “many other entrepreneurial black women preceded me.” Indeed, free women of color have been selling pralines in the French Quarter since before the Civil War. The history is, of course, complicated. Though street-vending granted these early “pralinières” a means to support themselves, it also required a certain degree of subservient posturing. In Gumbo Ya-Ya, a book of Louisiana folklore published in 1945, the authors noted that “the delicious Creole confections…have been vended by Negresses of the ‘Mammy’ type.” This…
My Manhattan apartment does not have a dishwasher. We’ve debated installing one; there’s room, just barely. I always pull back at the last minute. I like doing the dishes by hand, the more the merrier, the crustier the better. Sometimes music will be playing. I’ll find myself moved by it, the way the English novelist Barbara Pym was, as she wrote in a 1943 journal entry, when she caught herself weeping to Yehudi Menuhin on the radio one evening while her hands were “immersed in the washing-up water.” More often, there will be silence. I get my best thinking done here, far from a blinking cursor, my raw hands plunged into the soapy warmth. I’m not, in general, the tidiest human being. My favorite haiku, which I keep meaning to…
THE BROTH WAS MURKY, swirling with elliptic leaves as I dredged up a shred of tomato and a half-moon of squash from the bottom of the bowl. The hot soup, known here in Chiapas as sopa de chipilín, is a balm for the biting mountain air in the highlands of Mexico’s southernmost state. I must have eaten half a dozen versions of this soup on this trip so far: some studded with kernels of field corn, others enriched with crema, and one with the region’s signature simojovel chiles fried and floating on the surface. Regardless of where I was or who was making it, the moss-green chipilín was present, with its beguiling, grassy flavor as ballast. I was at “the end of the road,” what locals have dubbed these borderlands…
We’d come to see the wood carver in Chiavari, one of those perfect smallscale coastal Ligurian dream towns scrunched up between the Mediterranean Sea and the Apennine mountains. Arriving at his address on Via Bighetti, we found ourselves in front of a spare, if elegantly dilapidated, storefront. An old wooden rocking horse stood sentinel at the open door. Inside there were statues everywhere. Sculptures of minotaurs, headless torsos, and flying angels hung next to oil paintings of Garibaldi and Stalin. Countless chisels and wooden mallets and old iron tools were lined up on a workbench. “Buon giorno?” No answer came. On the verge of leaving, we heard a holler and shuffled back out into the sunlight. To our right, in the adjacent courtyard, shaded by a sensationally beautiful marble church,…
They say that when God finished creating the world, he chucked a handful of leftover rocks into the Adriatic. My ancestors hail from one of those rocks: the tiny island of Murter in Dalmatia, a 233-mile stretch of coastline in the middle of Europe staring at the back of Italy's boot. The former summer playground of Roman emperors, Hapsburg aristocrats, and comrades on workers' holiday, this part of Central Europe was passed back and forth between the Italians, the Austro-Hungarians, and sometimes the Turks for centuries. All of them enjoyed the coast's most prominent charm: its exquisite seafood. For millennia, people here have drawn their livelihoods from the waters of Croatia's Dalmatian coast, which hugs the Adriatic Sea. The local cuisine is centered on the hundreds of fish and shellfish…
Use a Kitchen Scale Professional bakers always weigh their ingredients to ensure that baked goods turn out precisely as intended each time. To help nudge home bakers into this practice, we at SAVEUR have begun including weight measurements for dry ingredients like flour and sugar in our recipes. Use the OXO Good Grips 11-lb. scale ($50; williamssonoma.com) to ensure success. Get Uniform Dough with Rolling Pin Bands When it comes to rolling the dough for sugar cookie cutouts and shortbreads, an even thickness is paramount so that all the cookies will bake at the same rate and reach that golden color on the bottom at the same time. We like to use Evendough rolling pin bands ($8; amazon.com), rubber bands in varying thicknesses that slide onto the ends of your…
1. Picpoul de Pinet is the “perfect white T-shirt” of any wine collection. As in, this crisp, clear, high-acid white from the French Mediterranean goes with everything. Sommelier Vanessa Price is determined to bring wine talk down to earth, even if that means occasionally hitting the drive-thru. In Big Macs & Burgundy, Wine Pairings for the Real World, she expands on her popular column for New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog. Among Price’s other supremely helpful fashion analogies: A Mendoza malbec, like an old pair of Levi’s, is equal to any occasion and consistently good, even at the value tier; Italian Barolos are akin to tailored blazers—pricey yet foundational for adults; and vintage port is equivalent to a piece of prized leather, which becomes more nuanced with age. 2. For…
BEFORE WE CAN SEE THE cardamom plants, Amilcar Pereira and his men have to castrate the bulls. That morning, in a pickup truck on the bumpy mountain climb to the cloud forests of Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz, I was privy to Pereira the theologian. Our discussion about his new export company, 786 Gexsa, prompted a half-hour sermon on the roles of god and personal responsibility in family and commerce. He named his first business FedeAgro, a portmanteau of the Spanish words for faith and agriculture. “They’re both tiny things that get bigger.” But now it’s time for Pereira the cowboy—lasso, hat, pistol. He directs his crew to corner a bull and tosses a rope over its horns. A few more lassos and the bull is down, legs outstretched, suddenly silent and…
Creamy Gochujang Chicken Noodles Serves: 4–6 Firefighter Gary Yeung fused fettuccine alfredo and Korean buldak to create this crowd-pleaser (see “Around the Table with Boston’s Bravest,” p. 30). —Megan Zhang ¼ cup gochujang3 Tbsp. vegetable oil, divided2 Tbsp. gochugaru chile flakes1½ tsp. honey1 tsp. paprika½ tsp. freshly ground black pepper½ tsp. kosher salt4 garlic cloves, finely chopped4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-in. pieces1 lb. fettuccine1½ cups heavy cream3 Tbsp. soy sauce3 scallions, whites and greens separated, thinly sliced8 white mushrooms, thinly sliced1 cup grated parmesan (optional) 1 In a large bowl, stir together the gochujang, 1 tablespoon of the oil, the gochugaru, honey, paprika, black pepper, salt, and garlic. Add the chicken, toss to coat, cover, and refrigerate for 30 minutes. 2 Bring a pot of salted water to…
WALKING AROUND LIMA, where there are cevicherías in every neighborhood and each one is bursting with locals, you would never know that ceviche—a citrus-marinated seafood starter—wasn’t invented in Peru. Crude forms of the dish—at its most basic, raw fish marinated in a lime, fish stock, and ají chile mixture—are found all along Latin America’s Pacific Coast and have been for centuries. Yet, it is in Peru that the most elaborate versions have taken shape, influenced by waves of immigrants and international chefs. When the Spanish arrived in Peru in the 1500s, they found coastal communities eating raw fish mixed with the juice of tumbo, a pulpy passion fruit relative. They added lime and onions, upping the acidity and bite of leche de tigre (tiger’s milk)—ceviche’s famous bright and briny base.…
Every so often, a car cautiously serpentines down the winding hillside road away from the ancient hamlet of Ofena, in Italy’s Abruzzo region. It’s not the sort of drive you rush: Every downward curve opens onto yet another vista of superabundant grandeur. The views here in the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park are of such unrelenting picturesqueness it seems only right that the roadside benches are turned away from the landscape, toward Ofena’s unprepossessing buildings. The locals sitting there appear relieved to be resting their eyes from the ceaselessly breathtaking Apennine postcard unfurling behind them. For at least a thousand years, the local tradition of transumanza —the seasonal movement of flocks of sheep and goats from mountains to grazing pastures and back again—has been practiced up and…
L ee Bailey was the original food-and-lifestyle guru. Writing and photographing in a pre–Martha Stewart world, he was a pioneer in suggesting that a meal’s setting was just as important as the food, that the way you layered sliced tomatoes on a plate mattered, and that a bandana might be used to cradle bread, fruit, and cheese on the way to a picnic, then do double duty as a place mat. He was, as The New York Times summed it up in his 2003 obituary, “an expert in the stylish life.” I write cookbooks for a living, and no one has influenced or inspired me more than Lee—even though, it pains me to say, it’s likely you’ve never heard of him. While his legacy isn’t quite as imprinted on the…
Nisreen Ghanem's kitchen in the village of Burqin in Palestine's northern West Bank is as up-to-date as most any home kitchen I've seen in a small town. The floor is vinyl tile, the counters are Formica, the five-burner stove runs on gas. Nonetheless, when it's time to prepare m'sakhan, Ghanem, a youthfully agile, middle-aged mother of four, spreads a plastic sheet over her floor so that she and her sister-in-law, Mai, can get right down to business, as countless Palestinian women over the centuries have always done, kneeling almost prayerfully over the task. M'sakhan—juicy, bonein chicken glistening with olive oil, tinted maroon by tart sumac and piled high on just-baked flatbread smothered in caramelized onions—is quintessential Palestinian feast food, present at all manner of celebrations. Ghanem and a small army…
Perched on a creaking bentwood chair, I watch a lungi-clad waiter stream a waterfall of piping hot coffee from saucer to tumbler and back, the meditative movement transforming the liquid into an airy froth. The kaapi, as it’s called here, is robust, milky, and sweet. I drink it scalding, before the lather settles and the surface creases into a milky skin. Soon, the table fills with food: crisp and golden masala dosa; kela bajji, battered and fried plantain; and fat medu vadai, lentil fritters furling with steam and soaked in a broth-like tamarind rasam. An abbreviated menu, inked in red, is stamped onto the wall behind me. Sunlight filters through the windows onto the checkered floor. My friend Priya Balasubramanian and I are at the iconic 86-year-old eatery Sharda Bhavan…
1 Panettone Peddlers Mail-order options from these six producers restore panettone’s good name PANETTONE IS A PECULIAR HOLIDAY TRADITION. Beloved by some, it’s written off by others for the grocery-store versions that are so often cloying and dense, and filled with artificially dyed fruits. And yet a properly made panettone can transcend its middling reputation. (See “Panettone Town,” p. 72.) While some of the best breads rarely leave their remote Italian villages, these six stellar producers have made their loaves available to an international audience. —Alex Testere 1 RUSTICHELLA D’ABRUZZO Made by one of Italy’s best-regarded gourmet food brands, these hand-wrapped panettoni come in several different flavors, including the classic citrus and raisin, dried fig and chocolate, saffron and Sicilian orange, and black cherry. From $22; casa rustichellain.com 2 MANRESA…
HAS FARM-TO-TABLE GONE LUNAR? Thanks to NASA’s Artemis program, which launched when an unmanned spaceship orbited the moon in 2022, the answer is yes. The U.S. government agency has ushered in space travel’s next frontier—one that will involve extended space stays and planetary exploration. Next fall, Artemis II will send a crew of four into lunar orbit for the first time since 1972. Though we’re accustomed to humans on (or near) the moon, the upcoming mission will bring us closer to Artemis’ bigger objective: establishing a space station and lasting presence on the Earth’s only natural satellite. The base will enable research and, ostensibly, serve as a launch pad for deep-space travel. We’re talking Mars, Earthlings, and getting there by blasting off of the moon’s surface. MIT Technology Review says reaching…
1 Hair of the Tiger Making the most from leftover leche de tigre LITERALLY TRANSLATING TO “tiger’s milk,” leche de tigre is a critical part of Peruvian ceviche: The mix of citrus, chiles, aromatics, and fish stock flavors and gently “cooks” the raw fish. But in parts of Central and South America, it’s also often sipped as a hangover cure. After testing several versions for “Lessons from Lima” (p. 38), we turned our leftovers into a zesty, revitalizing cocktail. The gentle spice and citrus notes of reposado tequila were just right with the heat and umami of the tiger’s milk. —Alex Testere Hair of the Tiger Cocktail In an ice-filled shaker, combine 5 oz. Leche de Tigre (recipe on p. 41), 1½ oz. reposado tequila, and ½ tsp. fruity hot…
An old traveler’s adage: The more ramshackle the restaurant, the more soulful and satisfying the food find. So here I am at a spot in Wenchang, China, perched along the canal and facing Three Corners Street, with rickety tables, pink plastic lawn chairs, and tarps strung overhead that shade from the fierce sun. Several older men in flip-flops just sit here, for no reason other than it’s midafternoon on Hainan Island, and the air is so sweltering and sticky the smart thing is to remain motionless until sundown. This restaurant specializes in Wenchang chicken, the hometown specialty, and it is called, fittingly, Wenchang Chicken Restaurant. The 63-year-old owner, Sung Shen Mei, tells me it has operated continuously here since 1927. His grandparents, he says, were the first to make a…
IT’S 7 P.M. ON CHRISTMAS EVE, AND THE table is set. When I was a kid in the suburbs of Montreal, every holiday season was celebrated with a dozen aunts and uncles, cousins, and our beloved Grandmaman. The annual réveillon meal was served at midnight back then, but I can’t imagine keeping my 6-year-old up that late now. Still, my kids stay up past their bedtimes and pick one of their gifts to open, just like we did. It’s my way of honoring réveillons past. Montreal may be known for its nightlife, but after dark on December 24, the streets are quiet. Restaurants and bars are empty, and the city’s inhabitants are celebrating at home—though not necessarily quietly. Growing up, my family threw all-night, shoes-off parties in my uncle’s basement, the…
MY GRANDMOTHER, Tita Susana, used to tell me that one day I would write a book about her family from Pátzcuaro, a city in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. I never took her seriously, but always hoped that one day we could travel there together. Sadly, she passed away in 2019, but her prophecy came true: Last year, I visited Pátzcuaro for the first time to research our family history for my book, Mexico’s Day of the Dead, out this September. While customs vary across Mexico, there are certain Día de Muertos traditions that everyone is familiar with. One is the use of marigolds, or cempasúchiles, the ceremonial flowers that are said to guide the souls of loved ones home with their strong aroma and bright color. Another is…
AT THE BACK OF A butchery in the town of Martina Franca, Riccardo Ponte claps his massive, baseball-mitt hands, calloused from years of charcoal burns and judo holds, and presents the next plate. Tender chunks of veal lung wrapped in sinister layers of pork fat form a glistening pyramid on the table. “Pugliese chewing gum,” he says with a grin, before retreating back to his grill, a central fixture of his shop, called Mang e Citt, or “Sit Down and Eat” in Pugliese slang. Most of the macellerias—butchers that double as informal restaurants—have, out of convenience, moved to standard-issue flat-top grills in recent years. Ponte’s setup, however, is somewhere between a pizza oven and a hearth, a kind of infernal cubby hole carved directly into the wall of his small…
STEAM RISES FROM metal baskets, each holding an artful array of deftly pleated, juicy pork dumplings. An Alaskan king crab, bigger than a hubcap and still thrashing its legs, is unloaded from a delivery truck. Among the din of lunchtime chatter, the wheels of dim sum carts pad softly across a carpeted floor. Here, in the many restaurants of California’s San Gabriel Valley (SGV), the largest majority Asian American region in the United States, a wealth of culture and history is served alongside every bite. After World War II, the region became a hub for groups of Mexican, Chinese, Filipino, and South Asian Americans moving from other enclaves of Los Angeles where racially restrictive covenants prevented them from settling. Japanese Americans began to arrive as they were released from concentration…
JUST DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS at a butter yellow home in Uptown, New Orleans, chef Dominick Lee dips a spoon into a simmering pot of gumbo. As he tastes the stew—his Cajun version a luxurious combination of chicken thighs and freshly shucked oysters—holiday music and sounds from the movie Elf trickle in from the living room. I’ve been to several of the chef’s preview dinners for Augustine’s, his restaurant opening this year at the Hotel King David in Houston’s historic Third Ward. I chat with his family about the progressive Creole menu, a technique-driven, contemporary approach to regional dishes like jambalaya, boudin, and—of course—gumbo. As the cool winter wind whispers outdoors, we sit on the couch, eagerly awaiting a feast that features Lee’s family recipes for some of these local specialties, and…
AMERICANS LOVE CHOCOLATE. U.S. citizens eat some 10 pounds of the stuff per person each year, and an increasing demand has contributed to shortages and skyrocketing prices. But in Puerto Rico, quality-focused farmers are shaking up the global industry by reintroducing cacao plants and making some of the world’s best bars. Here, chocolate is a new frontier. But how “new” is it, really? Puerto Rico served as an entry point to the Americas for Spanish colonizers, who, as early as the 16th century, profited off sugarcane and tobacco grown there. To protect those crops, Puerto Rican plantation workers also planted cacao, a Central American tree with broad leaves that shield seedlings from the harsh tropical sun. “Cacao was never an economic crop [in Puerto Rico],” says Elaine Shehab, founder of…
WHERE THERE’S A KITCHEN, there’s a good chance of blood—that’s the hook for countless mystery and crime writers as they sprinkle culinary intrigue throughout their novels. But the allure of good food might be even deadlier than the sharpest knife. Such is the threat in the 2024 translation of Butter by Japanese author Asako Yuzuki: Journalist Rika Machida finds herself face to face with a famed serial killer and food blogger, and the characters’ conversation quickly turns to home cooking. The murderer’s recipe for freshly cooked rice, studded with cold slivers of French butter and drizzled with soy sauce, intrigues Machida. Upon replicating the dish at home, the protagonist finds herself lost in its pleasures, falling into an affinity with the notorious killer, a trap tinged with gastronomic awe. Food…
Havana— beautiful, decaying, perfumed by diesel fumes and sweet sea air—is a challenging place for an outsider to come to grips with, even after repeated visits: Why has someone left the carefully arranged head and feet of a dismembered goat outside a Catholic church? Why are the taxis nicknamed almendrones (literally, “big almonds”)? And, perhaps most puzzlingly, why do Cuban adults eat so much ice cream? Starting around 10 a.m. and going well into the evening, Havana, especially its Old and Central quarters, is filled with people—an old lady with smooth, nut brown skin; a young man with an Elvismeets-Reggaeton hairstyle; a teenaged girl in microshorts—consuming great quantities of helado with remarkable dedication. Some eat out on the street, but most spoon up their pint-size sundaes in one of the…
IT CALLS TO MIND UNREAL PLACES: Tolkien’s Middle Earth, innumerable iterations of fairyland. It is unlike anywhere I’ve ever seen—and, more to the point, unlike any place I’ve ever felt. I know nowhere quite so lushly green, so exquisitely gentle here, and craggily forbidding there. It had been more than a decade since I’d visited England’s Lake District, just south of the Scottish border, and even to imagine being back there without my husband, Frank, who died in 2010 of a rare form of cancer, was for a long time not possible. But last year, I felt ready. If England were a play, the climate would be a main character. Not as predictable as its reputation, it is capricious, and its machinations frequently drive the plot. The Monday afternoon I…
Every meal at Milli begins with a complimentary chalupa. One of the cooks griddles a small, handmade corn tortilla atop a hot comal until it’s bronzed on both sides, then layers it with smoky red salsa and homemade queso fresco. It’s a humble gift—and a warming first taste of the restaurant’s pueblo cooking. One of Milli’s owners, Leo Telléz, says that other local chefs who come to his restaurant often end their meal with hopes of emulating the dishes they tasted. A common line of questioning is about the restaurant’s fresh masa. Leo answers amicably, knowing that the skill takes time to hone. “If you just want the final dish, that’s not how it works,” he says. “You have to feel the maiz, touch it, even plant it.” His year-old…
1. There’s more than one way to make a roux It may seem that fat, flour, and some patient stirring are all that go into this building block of Louisiana cooking. But Justin Devillier, chef-owner of Magazine Street’s La Petit Grocery, gives no fewer than three methods in The New Orleans Kitchen. Devillier cooks clarified butter and flour for 10 to 12 minutes to create a blond roux for soups and chowders. His brown roux—the ideal étouffée base—relies on peanut oil instead of butter, and a cooking time of 15 to 20 minutes. He leaves that mixture on the heat about 10 minutes longer to yield the dark roux gumbo requires. “No one else in the world uses dark roux,” Devillier says. “Mastering its technique is the mark of a…
ALL THINGS GAME ARE NOT ALWAYS WILD, and all things wild aren’t always fair game. Last fall, walking in my backwoods, I found a poacher had erected a portable blind and set out leftover Halloween pumpkins as deer bait. Not only did this trespassing flout Department of Environmental Conservation regulations—it also pissed me off, coming from a long line of Southern hunters who always stick to the rules. While I don’t hunt myself, I’ll gladly accept a brace of ducks or a backstrap of venison from friends who ask permission to legally stalk on my land. Where I live now, in northern New York, plenty of my neighbors still fill freezers with game to sustain their families all winter long. The extra meat stretches tight budgets and, sometimes, nourishes deep-rooted cultural…
Spring stirs early in California. On this March day, I wake up, as I always do, before sunrise to make my morning rounds. Peach blossoms blanket our farm in the San Joaquin Valley. Sunlight shines through the translucent petals, creating a pink hue against the brilliant blue sky. The rough, gnarled bark of our trees contrasts with the delicate flowers, the old and new side by side. My ritual begins with coffee in the 100-year-old farmhouse I call home. I look over my farm journal, reviewing the rhythms of seasons past and the work that needs to be done. We always farm in the shadow of those who worked this land before us. From the porch I can see the orchard my dad and I planted 45 years ago. I…
I’m obsessed with sausage balls,” says Annie Pettry, chef-owner of Decca restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky. “No matter where I am on Christmas morning, I’m making them.” Hers are juicy pork sausage mixed with cheddar cheese that oozes out and forms a lacy, cracker-like disk at the bottom—just like her mother always made them. “Christmas would be incomplete without them,” she says. And that’s the thing about holiday breakfasts: As much as we love the dressy to-do of a festive dinner—the centerpiece roast, the good china—our simpler holiday morning traditions can often be the more lasting and beloved ones. Free from the stiff ness of a formal sit-down, celebratory morning meals allow for those sometimes messy dishes that even exacting chefs love. For Noah Bernamoff , co-owner of Mile End Deli…
This Sicilian specialty combines two of our best-loved foods “Lasagna bread!” our staff shouted when the first scaccia (see page 70 for recipe) came out of the test kitchen. “No, it’s tomato and cheese babka! No, it’s lasagna babka!” We were amazed at this Sicilian street food, a multilayered pie made by folding a thin pasta-like dough smeared with tomato sauce and shingled with shavings of caciocavallo cheese. Similar in style to a calzone (made with pizza dough folded in half over toppings to form a crescent) and stromboli (pizza dough covered in toppings and rolled into a cylinder), scaccia is a specialty of Ragusa, in southeastern Sicily, and is typically made into a freeform rectangular pie. Our recipe, however, calls for baking the pie in a loaf tin, giving…
There was never any question of what we would eat for dinner. The Yildirim family has been raising sheep for as long as anyone can remember, and lamb—roasted whole in a wood-burning oven, then served chopped to bits on communal plates—is how they greet every guest. But first, the animal would have to be killed. After a late breakfast of fire-baked flatbread and fresh cheese, the shepherd, Dursun Yildirim, led the animal into the dusty courtyard outside his home. He cradled it in his arms and stroked its neck so gently that, for a moment, it seemed as if he might pet it to death. But it was a knife that actually did the job, and it wasn’t long before Yildirim had sheared the animal, removed its organs, and cleaned…
THE KIND CITIZENS OF ATHENS, New York, (population 1,603) thought I was crazy when, two months into quarantining here, I dug up my entire backyard to plant a vegetable garden. “The groundhogs will get it,” said one neighbor, matter-of-factly. “You have invasive knotweed,” warned another, as my teenage son tilled. (Google confirmed that guy was right.) But what did I have to lose? Everyone already believed my husband and I were bonkers Brooklynites for buying the big pink-and-yellow Victorian pile that sat vacant for years in the center of the village. The house may not have had heat or a water-resistant roof, but it did offer views of the Hudson River, along with that yard, as sun-flooded as it was neglected. If vegetables grew as profusely as the weeds had,…
My first connection with Senegal was a fragrance. The scent was not a culinary one; rather, it was an astonishing mix of musk, amber, myrrh, and smoke—perhaps even a hint of Shalimar or Chanel No. 5.1 would later learn it was the incense known as thiouraye ("CHEW-rye"), a resinous mixture made from assorted local plants. It emanated from the elegant woman seated next to me on the plane and signaled that I was heading into a world unlike any I had visited before, one that would challenge all of my five senses. It was 1972, and this was my first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. Both familiar and foreign, and occasionally frustrating, Senegal would, over the next half-century, become one of my heart’s homes—a place where I now have friends as…
MEAT PIES FROM CANADA’S Quebec province, called tourtières, are thought of much like homemade pot roast is Stateside: a simple and satisfying dish for Sunday dinner, but one that can also anchor a celebration. While the humble tourtière reigns in Montreal, its country cousin, cipaille, is more dramatic. Cipaille’s deep-dish pastry is filled with game meats and the flavors of medieval France: cinnamon, clove, allspice, and nutmeg. The origins of this imposing pie are murky: Some argue its Anglo nautical heritage, comparing it to early published recipes for “sea pie,” which was developed to feed a literal boatload of British sailors. Others claim that the name refers to the traditional six layers of pastry and meats, with roots in the court of Catherine de’ Medici. Whatever its true origin, today…
Wrappers should be thin and tender, never doughy, and just large enough to contain a single bite of filling. Choose fresh wonton wrappers from a reputable Asian market if possible, and buy extras to make up for any cracked ones in the package. (You can wrap leftover wrappers tightly in plastic and store them in the freezer for up to a month before they become dry and brittle.) Keep the unused wrappers under a damp towel to prevent them from drying out as you wrap the parcels. There are many traditional techniques for folding wontons, and—much like Italian pastas—different shapes are better suited to specific preparations. When selecting a shape, consider the surrounding ingredients, says chef Man-Sing Lee of Hong Kong’s Mott 32. “The Szechuan wonton fold, which has the…
U.S. 101—a two-lane road that snakes through California, Oregon, and Washington, nearly all of it along the Pacific—might be the most sublime drive in America, especially the 363-mile segment that runs along the Oregon coast, where we traveled last spring. As we traversed cliffside expanses, we spied pods of gray whales passing by in ocean waters. When the road dipped down to sea level, we stopped to ride horses between towering dunes and rocky shoreline on a broad beach studded by colossal basalt rock formations. We had always wanted to visit this part of the country. We knew it as the place our dear friend the late James Beard loved so much. Long ago, the famed American culinarian regaled us with reminiscences of summer trips from his family's Portland home…
Calvey’s Achill Mountain Lamb The sheep of Achill Island, which is connected by bridge to the mainland, roam over 20,000 acres of “commanage,” pasture shared by the island’s residents. They graze on samphire, seaweed, and calcium-rich grasses along the shore, and heather and wild herbs in the mountains. The result: meat that is “ocean-salty and heather-sweet,” says Martina Calvey, one of the ten children of Martin Calvey, who founded the business 50 years ago. The operation has grown to include Top Drawer and Pantry, a shop where you can take away dishes like honey-glazed, oven-roasted rack of lamb, or stock up on local products like sea-salted oil and homemade lamb sausage rolls. Keel, Achill Island, Co. Mayo; calveysachillmountainlamb.ie Ireland has always been known more for its natural beauty and spirited…
VIRTUALLY EVERY PLACE HAS AN iconic street food—that inexpensive, highly portable bite capable of telegraphing its geographical culinary identity to the rest of the world. The United States is known for hot dogs; Vietnam, banh mi. In Guadeloupe, the bokit (pronounced “BOkeet,” not “bo-KIT”) sandwich speaks volumes about the French-Caribbean archipelago’s complicated history with slavery and colonialism. To call this wonder a sandwich would be to seriously undersell its bread. Yes, there are fillings: typically cod and conch, but also chicken and pork. Toppings too, including lettuce, tomato, and hot-pepper sauce. The main attraction, however, remains that perfectly crisp, pillowy envelope, reminiscent of the American South’s yeast roll, had said roll’s dough been deep-fried instead of baked. Versions of this bread—some yeasted, some incorporating cornmeal—are prevalent throughout the Caribbean, called…
RICH, COMFORTING STEWS laced with tomato and pepper. African music. Adinkra symbols illustrating Ghanaian proverbs and adages. Growing up in Yonkers, north of New York City, Eric Adjepong hadn’t yet realized the impact of these key memories. Today, it’s clear to him that the tastes, smells, sights, and sounds of his childhood kitchen—the beating heart of his family home—pointed to Ghana. Eric was born and raised in the United States, but both of his parents grew up in the West African nation. His mother, Abena, passed down the wisdom of her culture to her children. When Eric started cooking, that understanding became the foundation of his culinary path. I first met the now 36-year-old chef in 2019 at a pop-up at Craft in Manhattan. He had recently finished strong as…
There are waves of mise-en-place at the ready. Flat pieces of cinnamon bark, soaked and drained rice, curry leaves, and tiny halved onions. There is freshly grated coconut, a rainbow of ground spices, whole cardamom pods, a glistening slab of skin-on tuna, stalks of lemongrass, and slices of ginger and garlic waiting in a mortar. Sri Lankan dishes come together quickly, once the pan is hot. But the final assembly is preceded by a great deal of soaking, roasting, grating, and pounding. It’s 8 A.M. Though I’ve yet to taste the blistering fish curry that will be my first Sri Lankan cooking lesson (and breakfast), I’m in a full running sweat—more or less my constant state for the next several days, from heat both ambient and on the plate. I’m…
Around three in the morning Ronald David turned on the lights and fired up the boiler at Glade Hill Cannery in rural Franklin County, where tobacco fields and apple orchards checkerboard the red clay foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. A sturdy 74-yearold former mechanic with a bottlebrush mustache and a crescent wrench stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, he is the master canner at one of the remaining community canneries in operation. It was still dark when parishioners from Greater Mount Parrish Baptist Church arrived to cook the 40 bushels of fruit they had cored and sectioned here a day before. Soon, steam from the pressure cookers gathered on the ceiling and fogged the studio windows of this cinder block building, a former schoolroom and occasional garage for…
For four years now I’ve been the chef at Henne Kirkeby Kro, a little thatched inn on Denmark’s wild west coast. I’m well and truly besotted with the place. The inn has been quietly lying along the roadside for more than 200 years, nestled within a sleepy hamlet. Years ago there was a school, a merchant, a cobbler, and a church—today I reside in the old cobbler’s cottage. Life is full-on every year from Palm Sunday, when we throw open the doors, until things get rather bleak and we close in December. But I do fire up the stove for one last meal, a traditional Christmas dinner in honor of my glorious Hennefolk—my loyal, hardworking, beautiful staff who tread these boards all season. I love them dearly. Donning their Yuletide…
I've never been crazy about New Year's Eve in the United States, with all its boozing and forced jollity. So when I got an invitation last year to celebrate the holiday in a tiny French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, I jumped at the chance. My hosts were winemakers I'd met on an earlier visit to France's rural southwest, a region for which I have an abiding affection. They'd urged me to come when the village, Viella, holds an annual festival called Les Vendanges du Pacherenc de la St-Sylvestre at the end of December. The name confused me at first. I knew that pacherenc—officially known as pacherenc du vic-bilh, “vine rows of the old village” in a local dialect—was a delicious sweet wine made in very small quantities…
It was two years ago that Christopher Hirsheimer first noticed a for sale sign on the vacant old train station in Milford, New Jersey. She immediately asked Melissa Hamilton, her business partner, to come see the place. “This building—this building—told us it wanted to be a restaurant,” Hirsheimer recalls. “We said, ‘No, no…,’ and the building said, ‘Yes. I want to be a restaurant.’” Hamilton nods in agreement. “We have a thing,” she explains. “We go on saying ‘no’ until something makes us say ‘yes.’” Both women live nearby, in the Delaware River Valley, where they met shortly before Hirsheimer co-founded Saveur in 1994. Twenty-five years into their friendship, the two communicate intuitively, conserving words and finishing each other’s sentences as they talk about how food should be cooked, seen,…
A BIT PAST NOON on a balmy, rain-thick day in October, I knock on the door of a tumbledown building in the Brazilian port of Belém and ascend a narrow flight of wooden stairs. It took barely 20 minutes to walk here through the city’s historic center, but by the time I arrive at Iacitata Amazônia Viva, I have already broken into an inevitable equatorial sweat. Inside the restaurant and cultural center, floor fans whir by a pair of French doors flung open over a canopy of mango trees. A leaden sky mirrors the hammeredpewter surface of Guajará Bay, barely visible beyond the terracotta roof of a fortress built by the Portuguese more than 400 years ago to guard the southern flank of the Amazon Delta. Books and banners line…
MARSEILLE: IT’S EAST AND IT’S WEST, a city with awe-inspiring force shrouded in mystery. It’s hard to pin down. It must be teased out, won over through discovery. And then suddenly, it’s yours! When you arrive in Marseille from the airport highway, the tracking shot is spectacular. The sea. The islands in the distance. The buildings straight ahead. And the long footbridge crossing that’s like an artery into the city. Marseille feels cinematic. The air is sweet even when the cold mistral wind is blowing. You slow down. There’s no rush. La Bonne Mère—the emblematic cathedral towering above the city—watches over you. The fishmonger is calling out the catch of the day. Suddenly you’re hungry, but there’s so much to choose from. Honey beignets on rue d’Aubagne. A “moitié-moitié” pizza. A…
IT’S DOUBTFUL WE’LL EVER HAVE A WHITE Christmas in Athens, Georgia. When I was growing up in Canada, there was always snow in December, but in the 18 years I’ve lived in the South, snow has been more of an apocalyptic rarity than a seasonal event. We don’t deal with it well; our towns aren’t equipped with a fleet of plows, and our old water oaks can’t bear its downy weight. The tree limbs snap, knocking out power, the streets become littered with abandoned cars, and the grocery stores empty out like in a scene from The Walking Dead. This year brought no such end-of-days anomaly. It was a suitably beige holiday, festive in its own way. On Christmas morning, I woke up happy but in need of coffee. Nursing…
AS THE SUN SETS in a blaze of orange over the golden domes of Karbala, drums beat and black-clad pilgrims pack the streets of one of Iraq’s holiest Shia cities, a two-hour drive south of Baghdad. Some 22 million believers have descended upon Karbala (population: 600,000), as they do every August for Arbaeen, the largest annual gathering of people in the world. And those people have to eat. From a rooftop, I watch endless processions of pilgrims inch toward the shrine of Husayn ibn Ali—a grandson of the prophet Mohammed, who was martyred at the Battle of Karbala in 680 c.e. Everywhere you look, there’s food: women seasoning chicken in big copper vats, men grilling skewers of meat over hot coals, bakers slapping samoon (Iraq’s signature flatbread) into makeshift tandoor…
FROM THE MOMENT I MET CRISTINA SALAS-PORRAS HUDSON, I was drawn into her beautiful and generous orbit. It was 2017, and we sat next to each other on a bus in rural Rajasthan during a month-long group trip to India. She immediately took my hand and asked thoughtful questions. Before long, we were chatting as if we’d known each other for years, instantly bonding over a love of food and travel. Since then, I’ve visited Cristina’s breathtaking home on Hudson Ranch, in the Carneros region of Napa Valley, many times. The property spans 2,000 acres, and her husband, Lee, has been cultivating it for more than 40 years, transforming it into a working ranch and award-winning winery. Cristina has spent more than three decades working in food, hospitality, and the…
LIKE MANY in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic in western Uzbekistan, Klishbay Jumanyazov learned to cook while fishing. He spent his days on the Amu Darya delta, where Central Asia’s most important river meets the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake. Born under Soviet rule in 1948 near the fishing town of Moynaq, Jumanyazov spent weekends on the water catching sturgeon and bream, which he’d boil into soups, stew with flour into a porridge called qarma, or simmer with rice, carrots, and onions for fish plov, a local variant of the emblematic dish. Like most outsiders, I came to Moynaq to understand the tragedy of the Aral Sea, which has lost 90 percent of its surface area since the 1960s. For generations, the Sea had been the lifeblood of the…
1994 • Saveur is born! The magazine launches with an editorial staff of 11, a cover story on Oaxaca, and an editorial advisory board that includes Marion Cunningham, Sheila Lukins, and Alice Waters. • The Food Network celebrates its one-year anniversary. After lackluster reviews of How to Boil Water and Emeril & Friends, Chef Emeril Lagasse kicks it up a notch with the successful The Essence of Emeril. • Jeff Bezos founds online bookseller Amazon. Quickly expanding into new markets, the site will eventually offer everything and, in 2017, will acquire Whole Foods Market. By 2019, Amazon will report more revenue than any other internet retailer in the world. • The Flavr Savr tomato, the first genetically modified food product on the market, is approved by the FDA. Due to…
Elvira Fernández García strides out to the vegetable patch, a basket under her arm, while a train rattles along the valley in the distance. She cuts a handful of collard leaves for pote de berzas, a mixed-meat, bean-and-vegetable stew that hinges on the Spanish variety of this leafy green. Back in her kitchen, several large stew pots bubble gently on the stove. Born and raised in Asturias, the lush region on Spain’s northern coast, Elvira, or “Viri,” runs a small restaurant in San Román, where acres of farmland sit beside the river Nalón. El Llar de Viri, or Viri’s Hearth, occupies the ground floor of the house where Elvira’s parents once had their farmstead, grain mill, and butchery. Over the course of a quarter-century, together with her daughter-in-law María José…
CULINARY DISPATCHES FROM EARTH … AND BEYOND AS THE SUN BEGINS to set over the Himalayan peaks in the distance, Avinash Yadav sits cross-legged in a makeshift outdoor kitchen, crushing stark green leaves in his palm. He tosses them into chickpea flour, mashing the mixture with finely chopped onions, potatoes, and water to make a rich, almost golden batter. Nearby, villagers of Kyark start to slink to their homes. Some herd their livestock into pens to avoid prowling leopards, a common sight in Devbhoomi, the mountainous region in Northern India known as the Land of Gods. When Yadav finishes preparing his batter, he’ll form it into small portions and gently drop them in hot oil shimmering over a mud stove. He’s making a fritter known as “bhang ke pakora.” Its…
Down six winding flights of stairs, across the street, and onto rue Faidherbe, the quartier’s main thoroughfare—with its poppy-themed florist, organic and biodynamic market, local post office, and neighborhood record shop—I take a quick left on the narrow, cobblestoned rue du Dahomey and another onto rue Saint-Bernard. I could do the four-minute walk in this far east section of the 11th arrondissement—my home for the past two years—with my eyes closed and still land precisely on the chocolate-meets-caramelizing-onions-scented doorstop of 5 rue Saint-Bernard. It’s 8:30 a.m., and the gate in front of the seafoam green facade of Mokonuts is only halfway lifted, but that doesn’t stop passersby from ducking under it to see about some coffee or a cookie. This 24-seat local favorite calls itself a “café and bakery” on…
The best tomatoes I’ve ever tried—even better than the ones you get in Italy—are grown in the summertime in Ukraine, where I was born. We use them for our borscht, which has a rosier hue than the dark red beetroot borschts of Russia. It was an important part of the big lunch we ate every day. My mother and grandmother raised me on soups—my mum says she couldn’t live without having some kind of rich broth daily—and now, as a chef in London, I’m fascinated by how creative those two were with their recipes back then. Fresh produce wasn’t available in the winter, so we’d preserve what we could, fermenting fresh tomatoes into a fizzy pulp, or packing jars full of fresh herbs and salt to be used as seasoning…
After the scandal we’d caused, Janez, the tall waiter with a taut black vest fitted over his keg-shaped belly, decided to take me into his confidence. Pensively stroking his red shoe brush of a moustache, he came to clear my dessert plate, and then leaned in and spoke behind the fence of his thick fingers. “You must go east if you want our best food, Mr. Alexander. Go to the countryside east of Maribor, my hometown. Go to the Štajerska and Prekmurje regions. That’s where the food in Slovenia is still good and honest and true.” The scandal was minor but telling: The night I’d arrived at the faded grand hotel on the shores of Lake Bled where my grandmother had once stayed as a young woman with a married…
AT THE END OF THE LAND IN SOUTHERN LOUISIANA, water sloshes at the sides of the road, creeping into parking lots and backyards and beneath houses on stilts. Wetlands and fishing docks splay out into the Gulf of Mexico, narrowing the divide between solid ground and the open sea. “Rural” here increasingly means surrounded not by open land, but by water. On one dock, Sandy Nguyen, an activist and a fisherman’s wife, stands among a small crowd, part of the community of Vietnamese shrimpers who reside in Plaquemines Parish, a county of about 23,000. It makes up the southernmost part of New Orleans, and appears on a map as a sprinkling of tiny islands reaching out into the Gulf. Sandy paces the dock, alternating between jovial greetings and pointing out…
NORMAN JEAN ROY FEARS NOTHING, NOT EVEN DEATH. But he is a little worried that his rye berries may overcook. It’s July 29, 2020—day 140 of the pandemic—and Roy tells me as much while stirring the berries into submission for a few loaves of Danish rugbrød. He’s spent the time in lockdown furiously preparing to open Breadfolks, a new bakery in Hudson, New York. “Smell these,” he says, brandishing a wooden spoon. The rye berries smell earthy and the tiniest bit sour. Roy is either a world-famous photographer moonlighting as a small-town baker, or a small-town baker moonlighting as a world-famous photographer, depending on whether you consider “energy expelled” or “income generated” the more compelling indicator. With the exception of an odd job here or there (say, a recent Allure…
Blue-Ribbon Dungeness Crab Cakes Makes: 14 crab cakes THESE SQUAT PATTIES (see “Crab Cake Cook-Off,” p. 19) have lots of surface area for crisping in the skillet. Dungeness crabs are about 25 percent meat by weight, so source two 2-pounders for this recipe, or substitute picked crabmeat. If your local fishmonger doesn’t have any in stock, order online from Pike Place Fish Market or Giovanni’s Fish Market. Chefs Lynn Derrick and Janelle Weaver make their own blue cheese dressing (below) using Point Reyes Blue Cheese. In a pinch, a good bottled dressing will do. 2 celery stalks, finely chopped+ Koshersalt and freshly ground black pepper⅓ cup finely chopped shallots1 serrano chile, finely chopped1 Tbsp. finely grated lemon zest3 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice, divided1 Tbsp. vegetable oil, divided, plus more for…
Papas Alinas (Potato Salad with Tuna) SERVES 6; Photo at left Active: 20 min. • Total: 50 min. You can find Andalusian potatotuna salads like this offered at any café or bar in Jerez, served at most hours of the day and night. Eduardo Ojeda ofequipo Navazos likes to make the dish as the starter course for family meals at home. He uses tuna belly preserved in olive oil, tins of which are sold in Spain as ventresca de atún claro. He also adds a serious quantity of olive oil, never measuring exactly. Just when you think you’ve added too much oil, he recommends adding a healthy flourish more. Serve with fino, ideally from Macharnudo vineyard. 1 medium onion (8 oz.), finely diced (1⅔ cups)15 medium red or Yukon Gold…
There are a few indigenous words worth adding to your vocabulary before you go to the Dolomites—and really, unless you are anti-awe or Tyrolean-chalet-averse or just constitutionally unresponsive to the self-evident charms of stunning pink-hued sunsets and green pastures fragrant with edelweiss and speck, the ubiquitous local ham, you should positively, definitely, without hesitation go to the Dolomites. None of these words relate directly to the act of skiing, though skiing is what brings a lot of folks up here where the powdery peaks of Trentino-Alto Adige overlook the Austrian border. The posh enclave of Cortina d’Ampezzo has been a skier’s destination since it hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956. Twenty or so miles of twisty roads and a world away are the quieter villages that compose the Alta Badia:…
We were called les belles étrangers: the beautiful foreigners. Twelve American writers brought to France as part of a cultural exchange delivering foreign literature to rural communities. After we arrived in Paris, we were paired off and given our assignments: One set was sent to Corsica, another to Nice, another to Marseille. I was informed, however, that my partner had hurt his back. I would be traveling alone to…the director looked at his clipboard. “Mulhouse,” he said. Pronounced “mool-OOZE.” Somewhere in Alsace. I was introduced to my chaperone—a pretty English-free Algerian girl named Sylvie—and off we went to the German border, to Mulhouse, a wind-harried industrial town once known as the “Manchester of France.” T ere I was introduced to the Provincial Librarian, a weary, bald, monkish man. I say…
CANNOLI HAVE ALWAYS BEEN a fixture in Angie Rito’s family, thanks to her Sicilian grandfather Santo. At age 8, he worked at a tiny pastry shop in Riposto, on the island’s eastern coast. His first task was mixing cannoli dough. “Back then, the shop was using a 300-pound marble mortar to keep the dough cold,” says Angie, who coowns Don Angie restaurant with her husband, Scott Tacinelli. According to her grandfather, adding cold dough to hot frying oil helps create the bubbling that makes cannoli shells light and delicate. “I’m not entirely sure the science adds up, but who am I to change the way he’s always made it?” He also spent hours kneading and rolling out the dough by hand. Cannoli are still Santo’s specialty: He bakes them professionally…
01 The Artist Who understands Your Pandemic Pain Rafael Gonzales Jr. not only gets it, he makes a game of it. With a series of Lotería cards that call upon our shared COVID-19 neuroses, this San Antonio visionary (@pinche_raf_art) has turned Mexico’s version of bingo into a highly collectible coping mechanism, one that may or may not rival the curative powers of a salt-rimmed frozen margarita. —Shane Mitchell 02 GRILL? WHO NEEDS A GRILL WHEN YOU HAVE THIS? You could spend a few grand to have a brick pizza oven built in your backyard. Then again, you could also just buy this little number for $500. Ooni’s Koda 16 portable pizza oven (ooni.com) hooks up to a standard propane tank and reaches temperatures of up to 932°F—hot enough to deliver…
ON A RECENT TRIP TO MOROCCO with her family, New York-based photographer Doaa Elkady was captivated by the vibrant markets and food vendors that span the country. Beginning in the capital city of Rabat, the group went on a multi-city driving tour before ultimately arriving in Marrakech. Each town and road-side stall had something new to offer. “[With] my husband and three kids, we rented a van, mapped out our stops, and got on the road,” Elkady recounts. Having just wrapped up a trip to Egypt, where Elkady was born, she says, “This was my first time in Morocco, and I was excited—for my children as well—to see the similarities and differences between these two Muslim-majority, Arabic-speaking countries on opposite ends of North Africa. And, of course, to explore all the…
Garry Kennebrew had fire in his eyes and smoke in his veins since he was very young. He grew up in Gadsden, Alabama, crammed alongside six siblings in a home with no electricity or running water. When he was 6 years old, his mother taught him how to bank the fire that warmed the house in the winter—to take charcoal ash and lay it atop the flames. It kept the embers underneath hot through the night, and the next morning, a quick shake and some kindling brought the fire back up. But it was his grandmother’s skill in the kitchen that stayed with him. Frying chicken is tricky enough with a controlled gas flame, and she had it mastered on the intense and inconsistent heat of a woodburning stove. A…
W hen Lulu Peyraud invited me to lunch with her family one fine sunny Provençal afternoon, the welcome was genuine. From the first moment, I felt cared for and at ease, as though I had never really experienced true hospitality before. Lulu immediately struck me as a generous soul. Then in her late 60s, she was vivacious and charmingly down to earth (as she still is). I had already been impressed with many tales of the extraordinary Peyraud family and their vineyards and fabled winery, Domaine Tempier, located near the town of Bandol, a half-hour drive from Marseille. I’d seen photographs of the domaine and sampled a goodly amount of their wines, but in California. Alice Waters had given them pride of place on the wine list at Chez Panisse,…
The craggy branches on the almond trees are just starting to squeeze out their soon-to-be springtime storm of blossoms as my husband, Joe Hargrave, and I drive along a small dusty road in central California. Joe grew up in these parts during the 1970s, before tract housing and big-box stores replaced a sea of orchards, and he still proudly dominates the namethat-tree game. He ticks them off —almonds, walnuts, apricots—as we make our way to Highway 99. Although there are now more efficient routes for traversing central California, State Route 99, also called the Golden State Highway, used to be the chosen one. It was the main thoroughfare from Mexico to Canada, and a straight shot through the Central Valley, California’s 22,500-square-mile fertile crescent, which cranks out more than half…
PARATHAS ARE THE STUFF of my carb-filled dreams. The soft, layered Indian breads were a staple of my childhood in Dallas—most commonly stuffed with spiced, mashed potatoes and made by my Aunt Rachna. I remember sitting at her kitchen table, mesmerized as she carefully rolled the whole wheat dough into rounds, expertly sealing an impossible amount of potato filling within each thin disk. Ours were basted in oil or ghee and griddled in a hot cast-iron pan until shimmery and crisp, and we’d either pile them high in the center of the table or, more often, eat them as soon as they came out of the skillet. Depending on where you are in India or its surrounding countries, “paratha” might mean something entirely different. In some places, they are folded…
THERE’S THE SIGHT of the colorful spread. The sounds of laughing friends and the crunch of crispy lechón skin. The smell of garlic wafting above the sinangag. And the complex, contrasting tastes and textures dancing on your tongue. Welcome to kamayan, the Filipino feast that stimulates the senses—especially the carnal, intuitive one many Western meals overlook: touch. Kamayan (from kamay, “hand,” in Filipino) refers to the pre-colonial tradition of eating without cutlery. Sixteenth-century Italian scholar and explorer Antonio Pigafetta, who documented Philippine history during the Magellan expedition, noted that natives used wooden spoons for serving and cooking—but not for eating. Nowadays, kamayan is synonymous with a communal feast of rice, grilled or roasted meats, seafood, and fruit, all laid atop a banana leaf-lined table, floor, or ground. The bounty is…
Standing at the window on her farm in Waldoboro, Maine, Allison Lakin watches her three Jersey bull calves—Frick, Frack, and Artie—play among a flock of starlings and butterflies on a grassy pasture nearby. It’s a Wednesday afternoon in September, and Lakin, owner of Lakin’s Gorges Cheese, is waiting for her pasteurization machine to reach the right temperature so she can get to work on her award-winning Rockweed and Cascadilla Bleu cheeses. Right now, though, the calves are keeping her entertained. “They’re being so funny today,” she laughs, noting how they keep sticking their snouts in the dirt, playing peek-a-boo with the starlings. The scene sounds straight out of a Walt Disney movie, but there’s not much of a happy ending to this story. A few months from now, the trio…
WHEN PEOPLE OUTSIDE California imagine summertime on the Central Coast, they’re probably thinking of blue skies and ocean breezes grooming perfect surfing waves. In fact, it’s usually about 60 degrees here and the ocean is gnarly, the clouds like dark stubble on an unkempt sky. Ever the optimist, though, I keep a surfboard in my truck. Not that I have much time for surfing: Thursday through Sunday at Dad’s Luncheonette, my restaurant in Half Moon Bay, my team and I are cranking out hen of the woods sandwiches—topping the griddled mushrooms with pickled onions and a gooey fried egg—or we’re snipping herbs into seasonal salads. We’re frying potato chips by the gazillion and slamming them with so much umami-packed nutritional yeast that they taste almost meaty. We’re doing it all in…
C hina’s far west region of Xinjiang is a place of expansive natural beauty, full of snowpeaked mountains and stony deserts. Located at the threshold of central Asia where the ’stans converge—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan— it is home to the Turkic-speaking Islamic Uyghur people. For centuries, oasis towns on the ancient Silk Roads provided safe harbor and much-needed sustenance on the passage from the Middle East to the Chinese Empire. Flavors associated with the Middle East predominate—cumin, chile, garlic, and saffron, cooked with peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. Mutton features heavily, either slow-braised, cooked with rice in polo (a mutton pilaf), or smoke-grilled, and camel is eaten occasionally. Flatbreads called nang, similar to Indian naan, are essential at every meal, along with fragrant black tea scented with saffron and…
I don’t order dry martinis anywhere except in Estoril. Usually, I like my gin wet. But sitting in a low antique chair at the wood-paneled Spy’s Bar in the Hotel Palácio, nothing but a dry gin martini will do. The echoing clatter of heels on marble drifts in from the hotel’s double-height lobby, and there’s never quite enough chatter to drown out the soft music. In daylight, the gleaming green and blue of the garden and pool blink through long windows into the dim bar, lined with elegantly worn satin upholstery, and smoky mirrors catch the light at night. When it rains, as it does in winter, you can stare out at the dappled pool with underwater lights changing colors for no one. Waiters in white jackets carry platters of…
It's the beginning of a brutally cold crab-fishing season in January off the coast of Alaska, and the sea is steaming from the clash of 18-degree air and 33-degree seawater. Freezing spray coats every inch of our boat with a translucent layer of ice. On days like this, crabs must be landed quickly and sorted into the onboard holding tanks before their limbs freeze and snap off like deadwood. Our ship, the Rollo, is 107 feet long, with a royal blue hull that towers above the water, guarding against the notoriously huge waves of the Bering Sea. The six-man crew, of which I am a deckhand, includes a cook, an engineer, and a deck boss, but all double as fishermen during the harvest. Our first crab pot of the day—a…
FROM THE MOMENT Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg met at a Christmas party in 1997, they had a hunch they’d be entertaining together far into the future. Since that fateful day, the duo has designed more than 25 kitchens and houses, coauthored a book, and lived in a number of cities around the globe, including London, Guatemala, and—their current home base—Mexico City. I met them in Italy two summers ago, when we found ourselves crammed into the back seat of a car on the way to Lake Como—though it feels like we’ve known each other much longer. Secretly, I knew who they were before they introduced themselves: I’d long been a fan of the couple’s colorful and eclectic design style, which I’d clocked in all the big magazines and through…
Salt-Baked Shrimp with Caper Sofrito SERVES 4 Total: 1 hr. 20 min. Small green alcaparras—the edible flower buds of the caper bush—grow in abundance on the island of Menorca. Salt-cured and then stored in vinegar, they find their way into many local dishes. FOR THE SOFRITO: 6–8 medium ripe plum tomatoes (1½ lb.), or substitute drained canned plum tomatoes3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil1 medium onion (6 oz.), finely choppedKosher salt1 medium garlic clove, minced (1 tsp.)¼ cup drained and rinsed capers in brine (1⅓ oz.) FOR THE SHRIMP: 16 shell- and head-on extra-large shrimp (2½ lb.)5 lb. (13½ cups) coarse sea salt or coarse kosher salt1 Tbsp. coarsely ground black pepper3 large egg whites 1 Prepare the tomatoes: If using fresh tomatoes, cut them in half crosswise. Scoop the seeds…
I can smell the narazuke fermentation room before I see it. The malty scent of vegetables mingling with bacteria is a signpost pointing toward the facility where Soshin Nishida and his family age pickled white melon. I inhale deeply, taking in the aromas, and Nishida beams. “It smells good, doesn’t it?” Tourists flock to Nara to pose for selfies with the Japanese city’s famous free-roaming deer, but the historic prefecture is otherwise largely overlooked as a destination, eclipsed by Kyoto’s famed temples and Osaka’s glitz. Yet in the 8th century, Nara was Japan’s first permanent capital, among the easternmost stops on the ancient Silk Road, and a key entry point for edible imports. From tea drinking to persimmon cultivation, the city became a fountainhead of Japanese food culture. Today, many…
It began with the borscht, rendered in vibrant fuchsia paint with a mint-green scalloped bowl. Wendy MacNaughton spotted the illustrated pages in a glass case, tucked among the shelves of brittle, yellowing manuscripts at San Francisco’s Antiquarian Book Fair. An illustrator herself, she examined the whimsical spread in front of her—the bowl of borscht, the hand-lettered recipe, two pink beets with roots crossed in a beckoning X. It was a sketchbook, each page filled with recipes and illustrations, the paint laid down with a practiced hand and the text lettered with masterful brushstrokes. When her friend, writer and food editor Sarah Rich, arrived, they devoured the manuscript, turning up recipes for stuffed cabbage, potted liver, potato soup—the unheralded dishes of an Eastern European Jewish upbringing. “It’s the food of my…
BORN AND RAISED IN NORTHWESTERN ALGERIA, NEAR THE border of Morocco, Warda Bouguettaya moved to the U.S. when she was 21 years old. “I followed my love to Detroit,” she says. After a few years, it happened again: He received an offer to work in China for three years, so they moved there before ultimately settling back in Michigan. “The idea of opening a pâtisserie was to have a space that celebrates all the places I have once called home: Algeria, France, and Asia,” Bouguettaya says. Using locally sourced ingredients such as flour from Michigan’s Ferris Organic Farm, and even some savory herbs and vegetables from nearby urban farms, she tries to achieve the most traditional versions of pastries from each place. “The ingredients might be a little different here…
EVERY TIME STEVE SANDO, THE founder of California-based heirloom bean company Rancho Gordo, heads down to Mexico, he encounters a new kind of pozole. “I remember one I tasted in Oaxaca where the cooks used some puréed hominy to thicken the broth and cooked it with goat meat,” Sando says in a rapturous daze. “I still think about it to this day.” After more than 40 trips across the country over 35 years, the bowls have added up: In Michoacán, a broth was stained green with fresh chiles, tomatillos, and ground pumpkin seeds. In Guerrero, a pale white variation was garnished with pork cracklings. In Acapulco, an unusual rojo sassed with tomatoes was fortified with shellfish instead of the typical pork. “Whichever one I ate last is my favorite,” he…
