The sun is setting over ice-rimmed Turnagain Arm, the inlet I see out my Anchorage window. The snow sparkles in the setting sun’s reflection.
My body is here, but my mind is in Greece. I’m wading the shallows of a Northern Aegean island, a plastic basin of sea urchins floating beside ...
Beans: A History by Ken Albala (Berg 2007) may be the most interesting single-subject volume of food history I’ve seen; it reads as easily as a novel. Beans are Albala’s plucky hero, ever striving to overcome the cultural elite’s prejudice against what it deemed low-class trash food.
From ...
Diana Abu-Jaber grew up in the environs of Syracuse, New York during the 1960s and 1970s. She shares the dominant cultural references of all Americans her age. Her mother and influential maternal grandmother are Americans, their distant heritage “Irish, German, maybe Swiss?” Abu-Jaber’s father is from Jordan; his heritage Bedouin and ...
Fish and Vegetable Stew with Rouille
The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star. John Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Gout (Physiology of Taste) (1825)
Where do recipes come from? Family, community, tradition, and serendipitous accident are easy but incomplete answers.The ...
Andrea Camilleri, photograph by Pensiero
(From Greece)
English language books are hard to find on the island.
I carefully select those to bring with us, focusing on books we’ll both enjoy and want to reread. After several years, most books recede far enough into memory that rediscovering them is a pleasure. ...
I fell in love with food writer and teacher Patricia Wells during the pre-internet, pre-satellite-TV era.
We were living in Greece, and I barely spoke the language. Virtually no one on the island spoke English. We’d find BBC or Voice of America shortwave broadcasts when we were lucky; otherwise I didn’t ...
Featured Product
All-Clad Stainless 3-quart Saucier. Best pot ever. I got it for Christmas and it always seems to be my first choice when I'm grabbing a pot. Curved sides mean no burned corners and make whisking and stirring easy.
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