Good morning. Pete Wells has a fine reverie in The Times today about restaurants and our memories of them, of particular dishes at particular times at particular tables or seats at the bar.
It’s an essay to accompany a collection of recipes and stories we’ve gathered from restaurants across the United States, recipes, he writes, that are like postcards from another time: “The time before this, when you could just take a subway, a taxi, a ferry or a plane without thinking twice, and when you could arrive wherever you were going and walk down a street where the lights were on and the doors were open.”
Read that today, and then go traveling in your mind as you cook this evening: to Canlis, say, in Seattle, for the house salad; or to Eventide, in Portland, Maine, for chowder; to Brennan’s in New Orleans, for bananas Foster; to Phoenicia, in Birmingham, Mich., for toum.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. A lot more of them than usual are free for you to browse even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. I’ll ask you, though, to consider subscribing, all the same. Subscriptions are what allow us to continue doing this work.
Now, it’s nothing to do with prawns or XO sauce, but I’ve been deep down the “Poldark” rabbit hole on Amazon Prime and maybe you ought to join me.
Ordinarily I’d wait for publication day to hail an important book, but, with the shipping delays we’re experiencing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, it seems like you should get on the pre-order bandwagon: Skip Finley’s “Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy” is out on June 15 from the Naval Institute Press.
Finally, here’s Blue Mountain to play us off, “Mountain Girl,” from 1995. I’ll be back on Friday.
