ATOKA, Okla. — Year after year, eight million vehicles drove through this sleepy town just off U.S. Highway 75, which stretches from Texas to Canada. Almost none of them stopped. Atoka had fallen on hard times: Residents had moved away, and downtown buildings were decaying. Carol Ervin, its economic development director, began to plot how…
Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra, a food historian who as Puerto Rico’s leading gastronomy expert sought to define the island’s cuisine and educate the world about it, died on March 8 in San Juan, P.R. He was 67. His brother Carlos Ortíz Cuadra confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said that Mr. Ortíz Cuadra had…
Some family members may call it obsessive behavior. I call it a gripping intellectual and culinary pursuit. For the past five months, I’ve been on a mission to dial-in a home cook-friendly recipe for a thin-crust pizza popular in the Midwest, Chicago in particular. It’s taken me through scores of iterations, furtive late-night pizza texts…
This week at New York Times Cooking, we published an amazing list of recipes that kids — a notoriously choosy (and highly ungrateful) demographic — actually love to eat, sourced from readers of this very newsletter. But let’s not neglect the adults! We’ve got Eric Kim’s fiercely boozy ricotta pasta alla vodka below, alongside recipes for…
When I set out to make bolo de cenoura, a carrot cake found in Portuguese and Brazilian cuisines, I wanted to recreate what I’d had at bakeries or seen on Instagram: perfectly plated slices in vivid contrasting colors, an orange-amber crumb under a dark chocolate glaze. Often made at home in a blender or food…
Now that the first season of a certain hit HBO show has concluded, I think this is, finally, a safe space for the return of a beloved topic: the mushroom! Driven by little other than impulse, I recently splurged on some nice mushrooms without a plan in mind. I finally decided to riff on this…
A decade ago, the chef Jimmy Tu opened Bunker, a restaurant in an industrial stretch of Ridgewood, Queens, far from public transportation. And eager diners were always willing to make the trek. Among his remarkable dishes, inspired by street food vendors in Vietnam, where his family is from, his phở gà stood out for its…
If I look at other food writers and cooks, I am definitely not the only one with a complex attitude toward cabbage. There aren’t many who would pour their hearts out in an unmitigated love serenade to the forebear of all brassicas. The only one I can think of is Nora Ephron, with her piece…
This is not a recipe for shrimp scampi. I know, everyone loves scampi. That garlicky, buttery, winy sauce, so easy to pour over plump, pink shrimp, whether eaten with pasta or mopped up with a piece of crusty bread. Then there’s the heavenly aroma. Is there anything more seductive than garlic sizzling in a pan…
My mother always said that a good sandwich should be like a scintillating conversation: packed with tasty morsels that constantly surprise you. In the same way that a skilled raconteur keeps you on your toes, the next bite of a great sandwich should always be somewhat unexpected. Is that a touch of scallion, crème fraîche and…