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An indication of knowing someone really well is knowing which foods they love, like, and hate. My father loves this recipe, and I was told by Kyria Loula, who knew him as a boy, that it had to go into the book just for him. If you follow his taste buds, the more garlic the better. If you follow mine, start slow, taste as you go, and add more garlic as needed.
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Recipes
A recent Facebook study tweaked your news feed to gauge your emotional reactions, and now we're conducting our own test: How do these recipes make you feel?
Recipes
At a dinner at an Italian vinoteca, on the dessert menu was something I'd never seen before: ricotta-stuffed eggplant with candied orange and chocolate sauce. My curiosity piqued, I placed an order with the waiter, only to have him come back with "You won't like it. Order something else." Not one to be easily swayed from ordering an intriguing dessert, I ordered it in spite of his admonition, and you know what? I liked it—quite a bit, in fact.
With that experience in mind, when I saw a fresh fennel cake on a dessert menu at a fancy three-star Michelin restaurant, I didn't hesitate to order it. I had high hopes and was ready for anything. But so was the waiter, who informed me as he set it down that if I didn't like it, he'd replace it with something else. He saw my expression after I took my first bite, and he briskly returned to the table to make good on his offer.
Still, I do believe in giving a chance to things that are out of the ordinary, otherwise, how would we discover new flavors and tastes? I haven't gotten around to trying to come up with my own version of an eggplant dessert (and I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to come up with a fresh fennel one, either), but I've made these tomato jam-filled cookies many times and not once have I had to rush over to offer guests anything in their place.
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Culture
Recipes
My mom, Betty Keller, was a creature of habit. She worked very hard at her job managing restaurants while raising five boys and a daughter as a single mother. She loved to have cookies on hand at the end of the day, and she especially loved the Keebler pecan sandie. It was part of my childhood, and it's a flavor combination, vanilla and pecan, that I associate with her. It was an adult cookie to me. There was always a bag of them in the cupboard.
Or almost always. We were six kids, and we were voracious. That was a problem when it came to my mother's cookies. We had our own cookies, Oreos and Nutter Butters, but when we'd dispatched those, there would be that bag of Mom's pecan sandies, daring us. It was really hard. Those cookies were sacrosanct, but sometimes, guiltily, we ate her cookies, one by one, until they were gone.
Mom had very few things she could call her own. She had no real luxuries. We didn't have winter family vacations; we didn't go to a cabin by a lake in the summer. She worked, and she gave us everything we wanted and needed. But we didn't appreciate it then. How could we know? How could I, youngest of the boys, know?
But I do now. Day after day, year after year, Mom set an extraordinary example for me. An example of hard work, attention to detail, and an all-consuming love for our family that I still have today.
Food is a powerful connecter of who we are to who we were, to our past, to our memories, and, for me, to a different and simpler time. Even the smallest thing—a cookie—can help us understand what we feel now while reminding us of what we once felt and who we've become versus who we were then. So much of who I am today is tied to who my mom was, the choices she made, the way she worked, and how she lived her life. What success I have today, I owe to her.
All of which is why the pecan sandie is so important to me.
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Recipes
On the curve of Palermo’s Via Papireto, just before the entrance to il mercato delle pulci—the flea market—there sits a watermelon stand and a hand-wrought sign: ICED, SWEET WATERMELON, DAY AND NIGHT. We passed the little place several times each day on our excursions through the great honkings and snarlings of the city traffic. Drawn by its promise, we meant always to stop but never found quite the right convergence of appetite, time, and space in which to park the car. But one Saturday evening, after a long, winy dinner and a dry search for a still-open gelateria, we thought to soothe ourselves with a visit to the watermelon man. Though it was well after midnight, he was there, waiting midst the walls of precisely laid, smooth-skinned fruit, his old Arab eyes illuminated by festoons of pink and green lights. He bid us sit at his one and only tiny, oilcloth-covered table, tucked in the corner farthest from the street. Speaking only in smiles—it was hardly necessary to tell him what we desired—we watched as he chose a melon from those he kept in a basin of iced water and then cleaved it open with a single heft of some ancient tool. Each half he stuck with fork and spoon and, resting the juice-dripping melons on wooden boards, he presented them. He brought a little tin plate in which we might deposit the seeds and two beautifully ironed kitchen-towel napkins. The red flesh was crisp under our spoons and each new excavation brought up a yet sweeter, colder mouthful of it. We ate slowly under the pink and green lights, finally resting our spoons against the great, hollowed shells, triumphant, certain we’d spent well that hour of our lives, certain, too, how perfect, how divine was that food. Lacking a faithful watermelon man, here follows a way to work with a well-ripened, even if not exquisitely fleshed, melon. Perfumed with cinnamon and studded with bitter chocolate and pistachios, it is the traditional ice of ferragosto—the official high summer Italian festival. The gelo is best eaten long after midnight.
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Culture
For the person who has two of everything.
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Recipes
Agatha Christie said of her grandmother, “Although a completely cheerful person, she always expected the worst of anyone and everything. And with almost frightening accuracy [she was] usually proved right.” Her grandmother would say “I shouldn’t be surprised if so-and-so was going on,” Christie recalled. “And although with no grounds for these assertions, that was exactly what was going on.” Sounds just like my grandmother Elsie. Elsie fancied herself an adept armchair detective. She was thrilled when our neighbor was murdered. Wait—that might lend the wrong impression. She was saddened by the loss of life, certainly, but elated at the chance to do some sleuthing and speculating. She quickly deemed it a love triangle gone wrong, a day before the police figured it out. I can see her now, seated in her floral chintz wingback chair with feet propped on the hearth, reading a good mystery. I must say that on early dark winter evenings I find myself right there in her favorite wingback, set about my guilty pleasure of working my way through The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, all 1,878 pages of it, with a plate of Elsie’s rarebit to sustain me.
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Culture
From fledgling founders to start-up veterans, these women turned their love of food into a career—and you can too.
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Culture
Articles
(29)
techniques
Ian Knauer hunts for the elusive morel and gives his recipe for cooking the spring mushrooms.
Ian Knauer
Restaurants
When people ask me where I like to eat and what they should order, I can send them this intel.
Kate Kassin
Lifestyle
I found abundance when I freely let go of what I no longer needed.
Iona Brannon
Culture
Recreating her signature recipe without her meant solving an intergenerational puzzle.
Kwame Alexander
Lifestyle
Stuck inside all day? Change up the vibe with scent.
Aliza Abarbanel
Videos
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In this episode of "Kids Try Food" series, the kids try 100 years of pastries. For this installment, the kids taste test and react to whoopie pies, butterhorns, banana dumplings, cream horns, magic marshmallow crescent puffs, croquignoles (similar to beignets), death by chocolate, croquembouche, bacon sticky buns, and cronuts.
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We challenged resident Bon Appétit supertaster and test kitchen director Chris Morocco to recreate Guy Fieri's brick burger. The catch? He'll have to use each of his senses - other than sight. Does Chris have what it takes to recognize and reproduce a perfect route to Flavortown while his eyes are behind a blindfold?
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We challenged resident Bon Appétit supertaster Chris Morocco to recreate Emeril Lagasse's Chicken Cordon Bleu in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. The catch? He'll have to identify what he's making with a blindfold over his eyes, letting each of his other senses guide the way.
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Do you gush with curiosity over little, chewable sugar blobs filled with goo? Claire Saffitz deconstructs and improves one of our favorite childhood candies!
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We show you how to make a Fattoush.
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How many of you experience sense memory when you think about eating Warheads when you were kids? You know, that sour feeling on the back of your tastebuds? Well, pastry chef Claire Saffitz is setting out to recreate that sensation as she attempts to make gourmet Warheads.
Check out Claire's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/csaffitz/