In her book “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal,” Mary Roach explores how we taste and explains how we can perceive five main flavors, but infinite smells. “Eighty to 90 percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction,” she writes. That’s why grilled chicken legs taste especially good in summer, when their smokiness mingles…
In 2010, Busayo Olupona was working as a corporate finance lawyer in New York City when she began making dresses from traditional African textiles, both as a creative outlet and as a way to connect with her heritage. Olupona, who was born in Boston, lived in Ile-Ife, a city in the southwest of Nigeria, until…
I am not what you’d call a go-with-the-flow woman. I like structure, I like itineraries, I like contingency plans. That may be why, for a presumably straightforward question like, “What should I bring to the cookout this weekend?” I can think of no other way to respond than with a detailed, multi-answer flow chart. (“Finally,…
Nicholas Gray, the founder of Gray’s Papaya, a storefront hot-dog stand whose culinary eccentricity, competitive prices, clever sloganeering and apparent immutability earned the affection of New Yorkers young and old, rich and poor, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 86. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter Natasha Gray…
Last winter was a terrible time to be a strawberry in California — and maybe an even worse time to be a strawberry farmer. At Harry’s Berries in Oxnard, Calif., the rain came down so hard it flattened acres of strawberry beds “like pancakes,” said the operations manager, Kristopher Gean, whose grandfather Harry Iwamoto started…
In India, milk is simmered for hours until only the dense, nutty solids remain. They’re mixed with sugar and spices, like cardamom and saffron, to make burfi, a category of sweets whose adornments might include pistachios and twists of silver leaf. Unlike dulce de leche, in which milk is cooked down with sugar until it…
When I was growing up, a heated debate broke out over the chicken whenever my parents took our family out for Italian food. My father, a dark-meat and garlic guy to his core, espoused the charms of chicken scarpariello. But my lemon-loving mother preferred chicken francese — batter-fried chicken breasts with their tangy, winy, citrus-imbued…
In “Taste the Nation,” which debuted its second season this month on Hulu, Padma Lakshmi, the longtime host of the reality-television competition “Top Chef,” visits various immigrant communities throughout the United States, not only eating their food, but interviewing the people who make it. Much has been written about how the show is a radical…
If you’ve subscribed to this newsletter long enough, then you know my motto: Holiday weekends in New York City are the best. The city becomes a little bit hushed, a little bit slow-going, a little bit laid-back — descriptions that are very rarely applied to this string of islands and isthmuses. It’s also a perfect…
In December, the chef Yuji Tani opened a second edition of the highly seasonal French-Japanese restaurant he owns in Tokyo. The original, now 15 years old, is called House. The new one, in Greenpoint, is House Brooklyn. For what it’s worth, neither House is in a house. The first is in a black-glass cube in…