Essay

How This 130-Year-Old Kitchen Tool Holds My Family’s History

I’ve never seen my grandmother drink a single sip of coffee. No pourover, fancy French press, or flavored brew will tempt her away from her cabinet of caffeine-free teas and herbal tisanes. Known for pulling tea bags out of her pocketbook at restaurants, she once even brought bags of her favorite tea across the Atlantic when I took her on a research trip to the tea-steeped English countryside. Meanwhile, my grandfather drinks his coffee black, all day long, and by the bucket. His coffee set-up—a small drip machine—is relegated to one slim corner counter with a canister or two of Folgers tucked in a small cabinet below. Between his minimal coffee gear and the prominent kettle, cozies, and tea strainers, my grandmother’s kitchen is clearly meant for making tea, which is why I’ve always found it strange that she kept an old wood-and-cast-iron, hand-cranked coffee bean grinder on display in the pass-through window. The grinder has…

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My Mom Says ‘I Love You’ with Aloo Paratha

The first question my mom asks when she hears I’m coming home for a visit is “What do you want to eat?” It has been this way since I left for college, and to her undying frustration, I always say something like “Whatever’s easiest!” She throws out suggestions. “Chicken curry? Matar paneer? Biryani?” and I just annoyingly reply “Yeah, that all sounds good.” I’m indifferent about what she cooks for dinner because everything she makes is always so reliably good that it’s hard to choose one thing over another. Since the pandemic emerged in 2020, traveling to see my parents has become harder. This past summer, I stayed with them at their home in Michigan for the first time in two years for my childhood friend’s wedding. I had exactly one week, which at first seemed like more than enough time. Then I started to think realistically about what the week ahead entailed and the guilt…

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Failing at Croquembouche Helped Me Overcome Bullying

When I was a freshman in high school, I was nearly pushed down the stairs, startled by pop-up jocks from behind doors and called homophobic slurs. The day before Christmas break was one of the best school days of the year for most kids, second only to the last day of school. Every teacher would show movies while hungry teenagers ate every holiday treat in sight. I, however, couldn’t get out of bed. Just the thought of those checkered halls made me sick. So, I told my mom I wasn’t feeling well, faked a cough for good measure, crept back into bed, my duvet wrapped around me like a boa constrictor, and cried. I had never felt like I entirely fit in, but I had never been bullied like this. So, I tried to think of things that made me happy, like baking cookies with my mom and trying new recipes from my first cookbook, Flour…

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How Baking Angel Food Cake Made Me Realize I’d Fallen in Love

I wasn’t used to the kind of date where you’d bake something together. I was used to being taken out to bars that smelled like hops and bleach and you had to yell to be heard over the music. I’d come of age at a college obsessed with fraternities and then moved to New York City just as Tinder exploded, both of which gave me the sense that dating happened exclusively at bars and parties. So when I moved to Virginia in my late twenties and a guy named Ben invited me out on a series of dates that felt too good to be true—a sunset walk, dinner at his house, and then, after those improbable first two dates, suggested we make a pumpkin angel food cake together—I assumed he must be joking. Forget the fact that I thought dates should involve late nights and at least one kind of alcohol. I couldn’t understand why anyone…

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Rediscovering My Family’s History Through Cornmeal Dumplings

My family moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Boston, Massachusetts when I was a child, a dislocation that was the source of much tragedy, small and large. To be southern was to be special, but we seemed to lose our identities and our drawl overnight. At the same time, my mother discovered the price of heating oil for a drafty New England colonial home, died of shock, and then rose again to buy down booties and electric blankets. Not only were we no longer special, we had elf feet and slept in fear of being electrocuted by the blanket. Lost in the shuffle, I barely noticed that we could no longer buy Stivers’ Best, our family brand, in the grocery store. From Our Shop Sale! Five Two Ultimate Apron with Built-In Pot Holders $25–$45 $15–$45 More Options

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My Hometown’s Salty-Sweet Sundae Still Holds Up 90 Years After Its Invention

I’m from Canton, Ohio–the meat-and-potatoes middle of the country. A town most famous for being home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame and lots of cream soup–based casseroles. It’s the kind of Midwestern place where the food is abundant and uncomplicated, often forgettable and occasionally sublime. The Canton-born Bittner, a 90-year-old ice cream sundae, falls into the latter category and remains one of the best desserts I’ve ever eaten, beating out my new favorites like Milk Bar’s cereal milk ice cream and my old standbys like Nestle Drumsticks. From Our Shop Ice Cream Canteen Insulated Container $45–$46 More Colors

exclusive Food52 Ice Cream & Friends Cookbook $24–$46 More Options

KitchenAid Ice…

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The Extremely ’90s History of the Flavored Latte

If, like me, you occasionally revisit Nora Ephron’s 1998 rom-com classic You’ve Got Mail, you may recall one iconic scene at a Starbucks in New York City’s West Village. Bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), in a masterfully layered pinafore and turtleneck, smiles as she awaits her soon-to-be ‘90s-viral order of a tall, skim, caramel macchiato. She’s recalling an email from Joe Fox, her AOL crush and unwitting rival played by Tom Hanks. “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee,” Fox’s voiceover proclaims. “…So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!” Read More >> …

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Washing Meat Is Cultural, Yet Mandatory

I felt sick the first time I ate unwashed chicken. I watched my friend de-package the chicken breast. He rinsed one side for all of one second; placed the chicken, with its package juice-water still dripping, in a baking pan; sprinkled a few seasonings then popped the pan in the oven for the breast to bake. I knew people didn’t wash their chicken, or any meat for that matter, but witnessing it was an entirely grotesque experience. Read More >> …

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The Healing Powers of My Grandma’s Macaroni Salad

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones. It’s just a bowl of noodles. A stockpot, in my case, because I don’t have the basketball-sized Tupperware bowl my grandma uses, but it’s still just a bowl of noodles, coated with the most stereotypically American of ingredients—Miracle Whip, mayo, a little pickle relish. It’s a bowl of noodles, but now it’s something more. It’s my deliverance, my emancipation from heartbreak. Read More >> …

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Finding Comfort in Food, A Lesson From Nora Ephron’s ‘Heartburn’

This story was written by Noëlle de Leeuw. “Food, I think, is my favorite thing,” Nora Ephron once said to Vogue’s food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, during an interview in her Upper East Side kitchen, “When I go somewhere, I have no desire whatsoever to see a famous Renaissance painting. I only want to go to the market and I only want to go to the restaurants. It’s all I care about.” Read More >> …

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My Ex Introduced Me to Arepas. They’re Now My Favorite Comfort Food.

The word “arepa” did not exist to me until three years ago. My knowledge of Latin American cuisine was limited to the Mexican food of my California hometown. We’re known for the La Victoria Taquerias and their special orange sauce, but to me, the best Mexican place is a cash-only stand with picnic table seating serving classics like massive burritos, tacos, and quesadillas stuffed so full that they might as well be burritos. Growing up, I’d be hard-pressed to list foods from anywhere further south of the border. Now, my partner and I pan-fry white cornmeal dough into little crispy disks and stuff them with salty, crumbly queso fresco and sautéed bell peppers at least twice a month for a Colombian/Venezuelan-inspired dinner. Read More >> …

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The Frittata That Bought Us a House

No matter how many times I brought it up, Epiphania always gave the same sad answer in her cadenced, Italian accent: “No, you can’t buy it! The house is not on the market!” I knew the instant we walked into the Connecticut farmhouse that this was the place for us. Initially, we were there looking for a place to rent because my husband, Bob, had been offered the directorship of a museum nearby. Our plan was to get to know the area and eventually buy a place. This would mean a long commute for me back to the Hudson Valley, but this was a terrific new opportunity for him. Even though we were only there to consider renting the place, in those first few moments in the grandma kitchen, with its tiny-apple wallpaper and vintage wood stove, I had an uncanny feeling that this was where we belonged. Read More >> …

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How a Single Mom Conquered Dinner, One Pound of Hamburger at a Time

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones. Some people grow up with moms whose love language is flaky pastry or fragrant spice. Moms who say “I love you” by serving up heaping bowls of delicious food. My mom’s love language was the actual phrase “I love you.” She uttered these words frequently and generously. She spoke them, sang them, and wrote them. When it came to cooking, though, she kind of phoned it in. If recipe boxes had titles, my mom’s might be something like: “What Can’t You Do With Hamburger Meat?” Read More >> …

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In My 40th Year, I Finally Made Pita Bread

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones. I reach for my favorite apron, the light blue one with the thin red and white stripes, worn soft from decades of cooking. I tie the strings around my waist, first to the back and then the front, securing them with a bow. It molds to my body like a second skin, the way a favorite threadbare T-shirt might. Read More >> …

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The Best Way to Make Kimchi, According to My Korean Mom

“Did you try popping your ears?” my mom asks me over the phone, as I’m standing in the home goods aisle of H Mart. That’s her answer for everything, including my bad week. Not to say that she takes my dips lightly. But unlike my friends or my cousins or even my brother, Jean often tries to link my lows with something physiological. Oh, you’re depressed? There must be something wrong with your chemisms. (Her sister is a nurse, so she knows.) Read More >> …

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On Navigating the Holiday Season After Loss

I started feeling anxious about Thanksgiving and Christmas in August. By October, I decided the best way to get through the holidays was to escape them. My husband, Erik, had died suddenly in a mountain-climbing accident in late May. Since then, I had spent my days in a sad stupor of grief: crying, struggling to eat, and grasping for motivation even to get dressed. Read More >> …

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Working in Food Made Me Worse at Entertaining

Two years ago, I had recently moved into my first apartment and wanted to host a couple of friends for an intimate Friendsgiving. We hadn’t seen each other often since graduating college and in that time, I had a stint as a line cook in a French restaurant and was now working for Martha Stewart. All of my family and friends saw me as the professional chef in their lives, and therefore believed I knew everything there was to know about cooking. (“Are these chicken thighs still good?” to “How do I clean my cutting board?” to “What should I order for dinner tonight?). For the record, I knew some things but certainly not everything. But I took a lot of pride in the knowledge that I learned first-hand in the kitchen and took even greater pride in delivering a restaurant-quality meal to my parents and partner night after night. Since I started working in a…

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How I Became the Keeper of My Mother-in-Law’s Spinach Rice Recipe

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones. I started a pandemic kitchen notebook in April 2020, three weeks into California’s first lockdown. “What We Ate in Covid Quarantine,” I wrote on the inaugural page, adding a jaunty swoosh under the title. Each day, I’d record our meals: cobbled-together leftover lunches, mother-son baking adventures, ambitious holiday projects, and obligatory sourdough experiments. Read More >> …

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Stanley Tucci’s Instagram Is a Delicious Corner of the Internet

It seems like only yesterday that Stanley Tucci was walking me through the trendy streets of Milan feeding me spoonfuls of risotto and pizzoccheri, guiding me on a gondola through Tuscany, feasting on cacio e pepe and rigatoni all’amatriciana in Rome, and sharing tales of growing up in Italy as a young teenage boy. Wait, that happened to you too? Tucci took not just one or two lucky people, but millions of CNN viewers through the Italian countryside to the seaside on his show Searching for Italy. In a year (plus many, many more months) of living in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, a virtual vacation to the land of Parmigiano and pizza was a welcome escape. Searching for Italy premiered on February 14th, 2021 and ever since that fateful Valentine’s Day, viewers (myself included) have been craving more of Tucci drinking limoncello, Tucci ordering wine through a secret window, Tucci eating a giant cream…

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The Comforting Continuity of Comida Corrida

Ask anyone who visits Mexico City, and they’ll tell you that they’re there for the food. The dishes that circulate the bucket lists for tourists visiting the federal district—the bi-colored pescado a la talla at Contramar, Pujol’s toddler-aged mole, and late-night tacos at Los Cocuyos—are destination dishes in their own right. But I tend to direct inquirers, friends visiting the city, and customers at my restaurant, Cicatriz, in a decidedly different direction: towards an unremarkable, un-Instagrammable plate of rice. Rice is second in the three-course parade that is comida corrida, a pedestrian set meal offered at thousands of inexpensive restaurants throughout the city. Comida corrida or comida economica, literally “fast food” or “affordable food,” preserves the ceremony of the modern midday break from work while reflecting the popular flavors that reverberate through Mexico City and the country at large. Read More >> …

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My Mom Has Always Foraged—A Year Into the Pandemic, I Understand Why

“Did you eat your ginkgo nuts today?” My mom’s anxious, familiar refrain turned in my head even after we spoke. The next morning, I investigated my crowded freezer, where she stashes said ginkgo nuts. The bag was still full. The first thing my omma does upon arriving at my home (we don’t live together, but are in a “pod”) is open my fridge and freezer. Like a discerning chef, she wants to know which of the ingredients and home-cooked dishes she brought over last time I actually ate, and which I didn’t. Today, she’s disappointed. She puts the bag back in the freezer and peers up at me accusingly. “You didn’t eat any ginkgos,” she says, her voice heavy with the kind of disappointment that non-Korean parents likely reserve for kids who’ve hosted a kegger while they were out of town. “Ginkgo nuts make your blood circulate and memory sharp,” she reminds me. Read More >>…

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The Legendary Story of Thangam Philip: Food Scientist, Nutritionist, Chef & Mentor

Thangam Philip has crosshatched my life in the most curious ways. My uncle studied catering under her (very) stern supervision. My mother once took a class at the Dadar Catering College, where Philip reigned as principal—in fact, we still have a stack of her recipes, typed on sheaves of yellowed, raspy pages, all carefully filed away in a blue plastic folder. As for me: I own newer, glossier, books on baking, but it is The Thangam Philip Book of Baking, with its infallible madeleine and sponge recipes, that I unfailingly turn to. Whichever way you spin it, Philip was a food legend. Read More >> …

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A Beloved Syrian Dessert & the Inheritance of Loss

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones. Back in early February, before the world as we knew it changed, I hosted 20 people at my home in Chicago. Crowding around a dining table packed to the edges with my favorite Syrian Jewish dishes, we ate and talked about the Syrian war. It was a benefit luncheon I was hosting to raise money for displaced people of the nearly 10-year old conflict that has, for most of its duration, been a blip on the map of global crises. Read More >> …

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How We Ate Through a Most-Unusual Year

In the 19th century, a French philosopher named Henri Bergson proposed a new way to think about time: la durée, or the subjective perception of time, as opposed to the objective definition measured by clocks (or today, smartphones). La durée explains why 10 minutes spent chatting with a friend fly by, but while waiting for water to boil, those same 10 minutes pass painfully slow—particularly when hungry. In a year marked by historical events—civil rights protests, nail biters of elections, and a global pandemic—there were periods that seemed to stretch like well-kneaded dough. (That is, for the homebound and so-called non-essential workers.) The purpose of this story is to try to pin down how “we” (an admittedly slippery term) cooked and how we ate, based on observations of the food media-sphere and some year-end numbers, in the hopes of finding commonalities in our experience; and to document what we brought to the table during these extraordinary…

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A Chocolate Cake That Celebrates Mothers—Lost & Found

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones. In the first months after my husband, Erik, died while mountain climbing in 2014, I spent much of my time shuffling about my sister’s house in a teary, sleepless haze. I wore rumpled variations of pajamas or sweats every day, and I had no appetite—everything I tried to eat tasted like the color grey. Prior to the accident that took his life, before I knew the term “young widow,” I had loved food. Read More >> …

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