The book “Savage Feast,” by Boris Fishman, has descriptions of meals and food throughout, along with 25 recipes. But it’s not a cookbook. The book is a tightly written page-turner about the author’s childhood in Minsk, his extended family and their odyssey from Belarus to New York (via Vienna and Rome in the 1980s) as…
Licorice is a favorite flavor in Scandinavian countries; unless you belong to the cohort that cannot bear it, you should keep it in mind as you explore Nordic cuisines. In Denmark, Johan Bulow is a confectioner who has achieved some renown for his Lakrids. His products start with fresh licorice root that he sweetens and…
It is England in the 1700s, and bits of meat are being thrown into a pot, their sizzling drippings cooking a thick batter that’s poured on top, making it puff up and crisp spectacularly. The batter, plus a good serving of gravy, transforms the random off-cuts into a satiating, delicious meal. The dish was first…
I was talking about borscht the other day with a friend — you know, as one does. Perhaps we were discussing the long-gone resorts of the Catskills, in the so-called Jewish Alps. During their heyday, in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, these summer resorts hosted generations of Jewish Americans, at a time when virulent anti-Semitism…
Hello and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes, recipes for busy people who still want something good to eat. And don’t we need something good to eat? We’re in blah season, people. So go for brightness and tang, with kimchi, lemon, mint and feta. Or take this moment to embrace richness and depth, deploying lamb and…
We Americans don’t cook nearly enough sausage bakes. In Britain, those glorious one-pan meals of vegetables topped with browned sausages are standard weeknight fare — easy to throw together, endlessly variable and as cozy and warming as supper should be. Here, in the United States, we are more likely to roast a chicken over those…
The fashion designer and former model Jane Mayle has lived on the top floor of an 1860s rowhouse on 12th Street ever since she was a student at Columbia University during the mid ’90s. “I still can’t shake the sense that I’m going to wake the neighbors,” she said on a recent winter evening, wearing…
The topology of a Dinara Kasko cake is difficult to explain without discursions into higher math. A Ukrainian architect, Kasko, 30, is drawn to surfaces that are resolutely unflat. Some bulge outward, morphing into a cluster of perfect spheres, like oversize bubbles skimmed off the top of a bath; some sink in concave dips, suggesting…
Tattersall Distilling, near downtown Minneapolis, has earned a national reputation over the last few years for its award-winning gins, bitters and liqueurs. Soon, it may also be known for its plague water. An alcoholic concoction of angelica root, gentian and about a dozen other herbs, plague water was popular among medieval apothecaries as a tonic…
