Month: September 2022

The Apolitical Messiness of Language in ‘Brahmastra Part One: Shiva’
23Sep By No Comments
Lifestyle & Arts

The Apolitical Messiness of Language in ‘Brahmastra Part One: Shiva’

Text by Prathyush Parasuraman. One of the first glimpses of Brahmastra Part One: Shiva we had, the announcement of its motion poster launch, was in Hindi, so archaic and untouched by the contemporary, that it could only be understood in context. The voice was that of Amitabh Bachchan; pay attention to how it traverses the clash of consonant sounds without any vowel’s reprieve — the “gn” of “agni”, the “str” of “brahmastra” — how it digs into the epiglottal “kh” of “khud” and releases the last “ah” in ”Shiva” as though freeing something fettered. Director Ayan Mukerji wrote on Instagram, “Mr. B’s voice — had to start with his energy and his blessing!” There was nothing playfu...
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Vintage Cookbook Collecting Is Often Kind, Sometimes Cutthroat, and Now Extremely Online
20Sep By No Comments
Food & Nutrition

Vintage Cookbook Collecting Is Often Kind, Sometimes Cutthroat, and Now Extremely Online

The adrenaline rush begins with an Instagram notification: Press SF just posted a photo. Instantly, I unlock my phone, racing to assess what jewel just hit the feed. Maybe it’s an image of a crouching crab, lovingly carved from a cucumber and immortalized in the 1996 edition of How to Garnish. Or a recipe for “Imprisoned Eggs for Timothy Leary,” which pairs bacon, sugared strawberries, and fried eggs “like a Utopian community” as instructed by the California Artists Cookbook in 1982.  I didn’t know I wanted any of these cookbooks, much less that I’d feel a desire so strong it would cause me to interrupt whatever I’m doing (slicing onions, writing this very article) to be the first to click the “buy” link. This is what it takes to secure the bag—...
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Bonne Maman Is Every Jam, Everywhere, All at Once
13Sep By No Comments
Food & Nutrition

Bonne Maman Is Every Jam, Everywhere, All at Once

When I was a child, my aunt made jam. Sometimes, we had her jam, and sometimes, we had a jam from a jar with “Bonne Maman” scribbled on the label. This confused me: Bonne Maman was not my aunt, who was American and named Judie, but the jars looked so similar—it had to be homemade by someone? And at the same time, I was vaguely aware that this could not possibly be right. I’d seen it in the grocery store, which seemed like an implausibly high volume for one aunt. I couldn’t parse it, which I found unsettling. Who was this Bonne Maman?  By early adolescence, I had a better grasp of brands. Even then, I understood that Bonne Maman occupies a singular place in the landscape of preserves. (It is a preserve and not technically a jam, because jams use ...
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Cooking Advice for the Ambitious and Confused
12Sep By No Comments
Food & Nutrition

Cooking Advice for the Ambitious and Confused

Kristen Miglore knows what your scrambled eggs are missing. It’s not butter or cream. It’s not some specialty cast iron pan forged by Swedish monks. The secret is cornstarch. “I promise you, in 15 seconds, you’ll have a decadent, magic, silky soft scramble. No need to make time for the low-and-slow method,” she says on a recent Zoom call.  This is precisely the sort of practical cooking advice for which Miglore is famous. As a founding editor at Food52 and creative director at the brand’s spin-off project Genius—a concept born of Miglore’s editorial column of the same name—she’s been tracking down and sharing recipes that contain legitimately memorable bites of kitchen wisdom since 2010. Recipes that are, well, genius. Think tahini granola that ...
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The Chocolatier’s Journey: Chef Sanjana Patel Takes Us From Bean To Bar
9Sep By No Comments
Lifestyle & Arts

The Chocolatier’s Journey: Chef Sanjana Patel Takes Us From Bean To Bar

Travel Text and Photography by Mallika Chandra. Chef Sanjana Patel, Creative Director and Executive Chef at the Mumbai-based La Folie, on an exploratory sourcing trip in Karnataka. Earlier this April, Chef Sanjana Patel added me to a WhatsApp group named “Mysore trip”. “Hey everyone. Super excited to take you guys to Mysore for the harvest — nothing better than having friends over.” Friends. I smiled to myself. It had been a week since I finished working with her Mumbai-based patisserie and craft chocolate brand, La Folie, and it was during that conversation that she had invited me to accompany her on an exploratory sourcing trip to Karnataka. “No work!” she had said; she just wanted me...
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Stone Fruits Shake Up the Smoothie Blahs
7Sep By No Comments
Food & Nutrition

Stone Fruits Shake Up the Smoothie Blahs

When the sultry heat of late summer crashes together with peak stone fruit season, there’s only one breakfast on my mind: this refreshing peach chia breakfast shake. The combination of nut milk and chia seeds with creamy-fleshed peaches is luscious, tangy, and a little bit sweet. You can use nectarines, apricots, or plums in place of peaches—it’s the perfect way to take advantage of stone fruits at the height of their season. In fact, I wait all year to make this shake, because nothing works as well as these late-summer jewels. The post-blending addition of nutritious chia seeds not only provides a dose of omega-3 fatty acids and digestible protein, it also thickens the mixture to a luxurious texture without the added sugar of typical smoothie m...
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Inside Sticky Toffee Pudding’s Gooey American Takeover
6Sep By No Comments
Food & Nutrition

Inside Sticky Toffee Pudding’s Gooey American Takeover

Sticky toffee pudding is a clear communicator. The warm dessert is, yes, sticky from both dates and the accompanying butterscotch sauce. That same sauce, with its dark, caramelized sugars, is toffee in liquid form. Some may say it bamboozles with that final descriptor: “pudding.” The moist, muffin-like construction is no cousin of chocolate pudding as it is known in the United States. Instead, this is a pudding in the manner of the beloved style of British steamed dessert, those moist dense confections like plum pudding and suet pudding. A new dessert, as far as desserts go, sticky toffee pudding has none of the centuries-old nostalgia of, say, hasty pudding. Sticky toffee pudding was popularized only 50 years ago, during the 1970s, when it firs...
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