Food & Nutrition

Even if you didn’t watch the 2020 Democratic National Convention last August, it was impossible to miss: the “calamari comeback” moment. During the televised event’s “roll call” of delegates from each state, viewers were presented with a Miss America–like montage, only instead of beauty queens, lawmakers were joined by or replaced with farmers, factory workers, students, activists—or, in the case of Rhode Island, a cook, clad in a black bistro shirt, a chef’s beanie, and a mask, silently brandishing a platter of battered and fried calamari adorned with pickled cherry peppers and grilled lemon wedges.   It was perhaps the most attention this country has ever paid to squid.  Six months later, it’s clear that calamari—as the cephalopods are known in ...

“Peddler is a chance to breathe and have a moment of quiet, which I don’t think there’s a lot of in food media,” says Hetty McKinnon. Since McKinnon launched Peddler in 2017, the twice-yearly food journal seeks to highlight the small, “in-between” moments of food with its limited runs of 1,000 copies per issue. That is, the clanging of mahjong tiles followed by a feast of shrimp and pork-stuffed wontons, or the lingering aroma of preserved limes embedded in our memories. It’s a sharp contrast to the splashy hands-and-pans shots and prop-styled spreads we’re used to.  Though McKinnon is no stranger to America’s traditional food media landscape, and she doesn’t shy away from a bold recipe full of loud flavors. She develops recipes like creamy five ...

I try to visit Mexico at least once a year. It does not always work that way. Each time I do go, I try to visit a city I never have before. On one of these trips a few years ago, I traveled to Santiago de Querétaro, the capital of the central state of Querétaro. This is not a story about the pulchritude of Santiago de Querétaro’s town center, or the humbling power of international travel. That would be cruel to both you—and me—during these pandemic days. This is, instead, a story about a cookbook series I discovered in a bookstore in Santiago de Querétaro.   The series is called Cocina Indígena y Popular (“Indigenous and Popular Cooking”) and it comprises a staggering 78 titles produced by a federal cultural agency in Mexico. I have never seen al...

Fondue’s melty and stretchy origin story places it squarely in the Swiss peasant dish realm, and there it may have stagnated were it not for Schweizerische Käseunion (the Swiss Cheese Union). Using funds from the Swiss government, and member dues from the cheesemakers, the union began advertising in the United States as early as the 1930s; by the mid 1960s, they had offices on Madison Avenue and were aggressively pushing the dipping of bread and fruit into melted Swiss cheese as a paragon of class and sophistication to mid-century magazine readers. It all worked, and interest in fondue exploded in Mad Men-era America.  And then, as quickly as the pots bubbled across our nation, the food went out of style—tastes changed, the low-fat craze dominate...

There’s a subtext built into the steady glamorization of canned fish over the course of the past five years: Europe does it better. Don’t like anchovies? Try Agostino Recca anchovies from Sicily. Don’t like the watery tuna that constituted all of those soggy childhood sandwiches? Upgrade to Ortiz from the Basque region of Spain. A bit apprehensive about digging into a can of sardines? You just haven’t encountered the French sophistication of Rödel. But when tinned seafood company Fishwife launched their online store in December, they chose two American-produced cans as their inaugural products—a smoked Albacore tuna and a smoked wild Alaskan salmon. “The salmon flew,” says cofounder Becca Millstein. “We sold out in two and a half days.” Since tho...

Back in December, I caught up with chef, activist, and entrepreneur Lucas Sin on Zoom. At the time, he was at the Midtown Manhattan location of Junzi Kitchen, his quickly expanding fast-casual Chinese restaurant chain, as he and his team were furiously making a batch of chile oil to fulfill online orders. “It’s all hands on deck,” he said through his N95 mask. “We have hundreds and hundreds of bottles to ship in the next few days.” A booming chile oil business is just one of the many facets of Sin’s game, which is shaped by a Hong Kong upbringing, US education, and a deep love for culinary history, both past (cooking dinners in tribute to historical Chinatown restaurants, like Mon Lay Won the “Chinese Delomico” operating in early 1900s NYC) and mod...

How to Make Mushroom Sauce for Pasta Recently I purchased a container of crimini mushrooms just to have in the house for salads, sauces or soup. I didn’t use them up so I decide to make a mushroom sauce for pasta. My wife and girls have been in Utah for the past few weeks so I’m home alone. My wife Meg typically plans our meals and then the both of us prepare them. With Meg gone, I’m making things up as I go along. This dish was easy because I had all the ingredients in my refrigerator or in the pantry so I didn’t even have to go out shopping. I like to call these meals “what’s on hand” recipes. Ingredients Let’s look at some of the ingredients and I’ll offer you some substitutions. Rigatoni pasta – a tubed shaped pasta like penne but larger and slightly curved and ...

There’s never been a better time to have an emotional breakdown and decide that you can’t drink alcohol because it’s messing too much with your brain chemistry. That’s what happened to me last June—but no pity, please, because discovering the rich and varied new world of carbonated nonalcoholic drinks, many with enough nuance and intriguing flavor combinations to fill the void left behind by wine and spirits, was well worth the existential crisis.   I credit one drink with my soda awakening: Kimino’s sparkling ume juice, whose squat glass bottles I discovered one day, warm and rather lonely, on an out-of-the-way shelf at my local specialty grocer. My only other experience with ume, a fruit sometimes called “Japanese plum” that is genetically most...

Ugly Vegetables Need Love Too   By Meg Jones - wife, mother,professional, contributor Here’s my first post from Salt Lake City, Utah on how to prepare pork chops with maple, apple, acorn squash. A few months ago, our younger daughter introduced us to Misfits Market.  If you’re not familiar, as I wasn’t, the company describes itself as “… a subscription box of sometimes funny-looking, always delicious produce, designed to break the cycle of food waste. Think of us like an online grocery store, except one that specializes in rescuing food that is unnecessarily thrown away. We source high-quality organic produce that has a few quirks—onions that are too small, potatoes that are shaped like your favorite celebrity, and carrots that fell in love and got twisted together. I...

As much as we’ve been led to believe that chicken soup will “heal the soul” for most people, comfort food is its own irrational, illogical, and totally subjective category. In Don’t Call It Comfort Food, a new TASTE essay series, writers share the recipes (and not-recipes) that define comfort for them.  I’ve been an immigrant most of my life, but everywhere I’ve lived, I have sought solace by cooking the creole food of my birthplace, Lima, Peru. One of the most comforting constants has been tallarines rojos with papa a la huancaína—a unique combination of spaghetti with tomato sauce and potatoes bathed in a spicy cheese sauce that my grandmother and mother prepared for family beach picnics and community potlucks in Lima when I was a child. Large ...