Category Archives: Food Writing

Mise-en-place and Mindset

Thomas Keller Ad Hoc at Home On mise-en-place … Be organized in your mind too. Think ahead, and think one step at a time. Take sixty seconds to write down a list of the tasks you need to accomplish so … Continue reading

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Working the Angles

My Amazon review of Chèvre by Tia Keenan. An exercise in limits. It won’t melt I like the intro advice on goat’s cheese: “Chèvre does not melt — Think of chèvre as most similar to ricotta in the way it … Continue reading

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The Call to Risk

We beg to differ with Cecil Beaton Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. Likely from his … Continue reading

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Garnishes, Guests and the Failure of Conversation

Discuss. Arabella Boxer’s Book of English Food The introduction to the First Courses section contains a bit of commentary on soups and garnishes This practice of handing round a number of elaborate garnishes separately, amused the English. Part of its … Continue reading

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Collapsed Cake

Marguerite Patten’s 1,000 Favourite Recipes She devotes a section to “Turn disaster into Success!” in which she suggests some ways of coping with collapsed cake… The cake has sunk in the centre? Cut out the centre carefully and turn the … Continue reading

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Incitation to Larcency

Massimo Bottura from the concluding paragraph to the introduction to Bread is Gold Food waste is one of the biggest problems of our century and our generation’s cross to bear. Numbers are numbers. Almost one billion people are undernourished. One-third … Continue reading

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Cuisine Choreography

James Barber The Urban Peasant Cooking for Two Cooking for two is very intimate and very immediate. I very seldom start to cook of a guest until the doorbell rings, and then we do it together. Of course you can’t … Continue reading

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Obviously Valuing Vintage

Culimnation of an extended analogy between cars and people … But there are exceptions. Every now and then one comes across people who have grown old gracefully, or have become more handsome, sprucer, and more active and vital than they … Continue reading

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Recipe Cards from a Fish Company

These two pieces of cooking ephemera were found in a second-hand book. At first I thought they were decorated with simulated coffee mug stains. On closer examination and noticing the logo of the company in the right hand corner, I … Continue reading

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Kalman’s Stein and Toklas & Lemon Pound Cake

I like the calligraphy on the left. It occupies the space like the brushstrokes of a line or two of verse on a Japanese scroll. Every Sunday they ate a lemon pound cake and made plans for the week. The … Continue reading

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