French cultured butter and Maggi seasoning powder may not be one of the most classic pairings, but it’s a combination dear to the cookbook author Andrea Nguyen’s heart. Before Ms. Nguyen and her family left Vietnam in 1975 to emigrate to United States, her mother would scrape small flakes of butter — imported from France…
My introduction to Lebanese street food was at an outdoor market in Paris, when I had just moved there in the early days of the 21st century. As I would learn, Lebanese savory treats are common at Parisian markets, a great boon to the hungry shopper. You get to the market by 10 a.m., when…
From the whimsical skylights that protrude like reptilian eyes from its new underground art museum to the undulating walls of a new library, Helsinki’s latest attractions are resolutely cutting-edge. So it came as something of a relief, on a recent trip to the Finnish capital, to spot a homely pastry in bakery windows throughout the…
Image What do these ads featuring Joe Camel, Kool-Aid Man and the maniacal mascot for Hawaiian Punch have in common? All three were created by Big Tobacco in the decades when cigarette makers, seeking to diversify their holdings, acquired some of America’s iconic beverage brands. They used their expertise in artificial flavor, coloring and marketing…
Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped clay into storage pots. Had they not done those things, would we speak the languages and make…
The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. ___ When you’re lucky enough to get a visit from Sam Sifton, The New York Times’s food editor, you eat. And when you eat with Sam, you learn and you gorge. This week, we did oodles of…
LOS PARGOS, Costa Rica — Impassable in spots during much of the rainy season, the dirt road to this village on the northern Pacific Coast of Costa Rica is a rutted, dust-spewing monster during the dry months. It is, as a friend once said, a “bone-jarring skunk of a road.” Until recently, visitors willing to…
HOBART, Tasmania — There’s a special kind of easygoing pleasure in eating your way through Tasmania’s capital city these days, a sense that this is the exact right place and the exact right time for maximum 2019 deliciousness. The ingredients that create that impression are numerous. Hobart’s compact size makes it manageable and walkable, while…
The great black moon of the grill pan is silent, for now. One sits at the center of every table at Doraon 1.5 Dak Galbi, a small Korean restaurant a few blocks from the Broadway Long Island Rail Road stop in Flushing, Queens. Each pan is deep enough that none of the coming bounty will…
Doraon 1.5 Dak Galbi in Flushing, Queens, specializes in dak galbi, a spicy chicken stir-fry cooked on a pan set at the center of your table. (In South Korea, dak galbi restaurants have been known to hand out aprons before a meal, to protect their customers’ clothing.)