An American Tale

The author of “Heirloom Kitchen” is an Italian-American who attended culinary school and wanted to record her immigrant mother’s recipes. The project led her to explore the cooking of other immigrant women. In this attractive volume, she has recorded the cooking and the experiences, both daunting and gratifying, of 37 of them from 30 different…

This Gin Speaks Portuguese

McQueen and the Violet Fog may not have been developed for the Aviation, a gin cocktail that is made with violet liqueur, but its name, and the whisper of lavender, in this new gin from Brazil makes it a fine choice. The small batch spirit is made in copper pot stills with a raft of…

A Focaccia That Behaves Like a Pizza

I have traveled to certain destinations just for one dish. Recco, on the Italian coast about 10 miles south of Genoa, is the place for a type of double-crust cheese pizza called focaccia di Recco. Within unyeasted pastry as thin as Sardinian pane carasau is molten stracchino cheese. The focaccia is baked in a special…

Where Rabies Is Entrenched

Rabies has been known since antiquity, and has been completely preventable since Pasteur developed a vaccine more than a century ago. But the World Health Organization still considers it “a neglected disease of poor and vulnerable populations.” Why? Rabies, one expert has written, “became a neglected disease when it was eliminated from Europe and North…

Dinos for Dinner

Image CreditVictoria Roberts Q. What would dinosaur meat have tasted like? A. Obviously, there is no way to be certain — there were not any hominids around to do a taste test. Our ancestors evolved tens of millions of years after the mass extinction of most dinosaurs. In any event, the many kinds of dinosaurs,…