Here’s a truth about Thanksgiving: No matter how much gravy-bathed turkey, marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole and mounds of stuffing one may devour, when dessert time rolls around, there’s always room for pie. Pie had been a constant on Thanksgiving tables even before Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the day a national holiday in 1863. Pumpkin was the…
In the decade I spent working in restaurant kitchens, I rarely felt an emotional connection with the food I was cooking. This feeling of distance from the food I encountered here in the United States began almost as soon as I arrived from Nigeria as a young college student. Very few dishes I ate growing…
Can we talk about my colleague Yewande Komolafe for a minute? Her recipes are superb, precisely choreographed dances of flavor and texture. The honey-glazed chicken below is a great example, a five-star recipe that people are loving. I’m thinking of Yewande right now not only because of that chicken, but for her buttery new cornbread…
In his poem “Digging,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney describes the sensation of holding potatoes as “loving their cool hardness in our hands.” That “cool hardness” is the start to a proper mash, which should end with potatoes that taste deeply of themselves but avoid becoming pasty. To preserve those tastes, I decided to try…
Rasha AlMahroos thinks of her Thanksgiving table and chuckles: A big turkey sits in the center, and right next to it, as if hiding under its wing, a very small chicken. “My mother-in-law cannot get used to turkey, so she always stuffs a tiny chicken with hashweh,” said Ms. AlMahroos, a lawyer who was born…
But he did enjoy cooking, and for years he had been making diary entries about meals he had prepared or eaten and menus he had perused. He filled his columns not just with recipes and cooking tips but with anecdotes and humor. For instance, in March 2000 he offered a solution of sorts to the…
I’m usually in charge of the cooking on Thanksgiving, and while I look forward to it all year, I consider the turkey an obligation, nothing more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ All I really want to cook, and all I really want to eat, are the sides — the actual, low-key superstars of the table. I usually make two…
Speaking of green, there is a green stone of otherworldly beauty known simply as cantera that is everywhere in Oaxaca. It appears as exposed quoins on the corners of painted facades. It forms the border of giant grill windows, which, Spanish-style, run the full length of the building. It is there as rustication and entablature…
My daughter, Grace, will turn 13 this year. She doesn’t remember the taste of her jiddo’s mansaf. His cooking and storytelling were central to his identity, and I want her to know who he was. I begin to wonder if there wasn’t some restaurant version that she and my husband, Scott, could share with me…
We were on our way to the Sahel Center, an outpost of AfricaRice, the Pan-African research organization that began operations in 1971 to help meet the rising consumption of rice in West Africa, with an emphasis on increasing self-sufficiency. It now has 28 member countries across the continent, including Madagascar, who participate in research exchanges…