recipe

Wisconsin triumphed in American Cheese Society awards

Wisconsin triumphed in American Cheese Society awards

As one of America's big dairy states, Wisconsin takes special pride in its cheeses. Even the fans of the Green Bay Packers NFL football team call themselves ‶cheeseheads.″ They wear ridiculous hats that look a bit like a Swiss cheese, complete with plenty of holes in their heads. The cheese industry's promotional arm brags that the state makes ‶more flavors, varieties, and styles of cheese than anywhere else in the world.″ We do wish that Wisconsin cheese companies wouldn't appropriate cheese names that obviously belong to other places in the world. Wisconsin parmesan, for example, is a fine grating and flaking cheese in its own right. If it were called something else, it wouldn't invite comparison to Parmigiano-Reggiano, to which it displays only a distant...Read More
‘Serafina’ capitalizes on tender summer harvests

‘Serafina’ capitalizes on tender summer harvests

How this cookbook would have made the late Tony May smile! The champion of Italian food in America always insisted that Italian cuisine had been emphasizing fresh ingredients centuries before the farm-to-table fad. The Italian penchant for combining a few terrific fresh ingredients to make a dish underlies Serafina: Modern Italian Cuisine for Everyday Home Cooking by Vittorio Assaf and Fabio Granato, text by Lavinia Branca Snyder (Rizzoli, New York, 2022, $39.95). Of course, a good origin story never hurts. Assaf and Granato were lost at sea in a small sailboat. They comforted each other by vowing that if they survived, they'd open a restaurant serving the best pizza and pasta in the world. And so they did, launching Serafina in New York in 1995....Read More
Cake celebrates a signature taste of Valencia

Cake celebrates a signature taste of Valencia

The whole idea of a Valencian orange is confusing. The area around Valencia boasts a staggering number of orange orchards. Most of the trees bear sweet oranges, but not what is called a Valencia orange in the U.S. That would be a creation of William Wolfskill, an agronomist who hybridized the juice orange in the mid-19th century. He called it Valencia because the oranges of that part of Spain were famously sweet. Of course, they were sweet. They were what we now call mandarin oranges. And most of the citrus varieties grown in Valencia today are mandarins or one of the many mandarin-pomelo crosses. Orange remains one of the signature flavors of Valencian cuisine. Fresh oranges appear throughout the meal from an orange-onion salad to...Read More
Noodling around with fideuà in Gandía

Noodling around with fideuà in Gandía

While we were living in Valencia, we took advantage of the cercanías (essentially the regional commuter rail) to explore beyond the metropolis. One Costa Blanca city on our bucket list (and on the train line) was Gandía. The big attraction is the ducal palace of the Borja family, who rose to fame (or infamy) when they changed the spelling to Borgia and took over the papacy. The Palau Ducal (Carrer del Duc Alfons el Vell, 1, Gandía; +34 962 871 465; palauducal.com) is a sprawling Gothic fortified palace complex where Sant Francesc de Borja was born in 1510. He later became one of the most important figures in the history of the Society of Jesus. Thanks to the stewardship of the Jesuits, the building is...Read More
Summer’s ‘la vie en rose’ begins by Public Garden

Summer’s ‘la vie en rose’ begins by Public Garden

The summer solstice may be a few weeks away, but balmy temperatures, bright sun, and unusually vigorous rose blooms have us thinking summer already. Our penchant for white wines fits the summer well, but we also tend to keep a bottle or two of rosé in the vegetable drawer. Pink wine is the perfect foil for summer food. Sommelier Andrew Thompson of Bistro du Midi (272 Boylston Street, Boston; 617-279-8000; bistrodumidi.com) agrees. In fact, the French bistro overlooking the Public Garden is going all out with rosés this summer in a reprise of the popular Tour de Rosé promotion. Two wines are featured each month along with some signature menu items from executive chef/partner Robert Sisca. For June, it's the Grenache/Cinsault Château Sainte-Marguerite from the...Read More
Learning about all the Valencian rice dishes

Learning about all the Valencian rice dishes

Just walking around the Tastarròs festival provides an education in the astonishing variety of Valencian rice dishes. By far, the bulk of them are cooked in the wide, flat pans that we tend to associate with paella. In fact, the pan is called una paellera. The photo sequence above shows the first steps in making a paella. The paellas range in color from a ruddy yellow to deep red. Here is celebrity chef Santi Garrido of La Pepa Bluespace (lapepabluespace.com/) serving his arroz rojo de carabineros, which had eager diners lined up in a queue that stretched halfway around the plaza. Part of the appeal was his fame (he's a Valencian culinary rock star) and partly that he was using the huge red prawns (carabineros)...Read More
Tortilla soup: Mexico’s world class comfort bowl

Tortilla soup: Mexico’s world class comfort bowl

Because our trips to Mexico have mostly focused on the central highlands, we've been acquainted with tortilla soup as long as we've been going to Mexico. You might find it in some coastal resorts, but it's primarily a staple of the inland Mexican cities. We can't count how many different versions we've eaten over the years. Sometimes the soup is gussied up with fresh chopped herbs, cubes of avocado, or diced hard-boiled egg. Often it is simply thin chicken broth thickened with fried tortilla strips. But we've never eaten a bad version of tortilla soup. Sitting in a small back room or under the arcade (as in Morelia, above), tortilla soup makes a dependably tasty and economical lunch. Over the years, we've perfected a version...Read More
Clever recipes born of pantry cooking in pandemic

Clever recipes born of pantry cooking in pandemic

We sympathize with lifestyle journalist Ronda Carman. Known best for her work writing about entertaining, decorating, and traveling, she found herself suddenly grounded by the pandemic. The avid cook suddenly felt the need to minimize trips to the supermarket. We know. We know. Many of us experienced the same restlessness compounded by agoraphobia. We converted a large portion of a supply closet into the overflow for extra food. Why should one giant cardboard canister of old-fashioned oats suffice when we could stockpile three? Carman took a more practical approach and began to catalog her pantry and adapt her aspirational cooking to suit. (We suspect she enlarged her pantry, too.) The upshot was this lovely cookbook out next week, The Art Of Pantry Cooking: Meals for...Read More
Pepper and mint conjure memories of Turkiye

Pepper and mint conjure memories of Turkiye

We first tasted Turkish red lentil soup around 2010. We were researching Food Lovers' Guide to Boston when we encountered it at a now-vanished Financial District lunch buffet restaurant. The chef was Turkish and, after some nudging, he gave us a recipe for the soup to publish in the book. When we visited Istanbul the year after that book appeared, we realized that the recipe we had printed was good, but was only the most basic version of the soup. Well-suited to a buffet line, it was too one-dimensional to enter our home soup rotation on a regular basis. Thus began our quest to perfect red lentil soup. Eating in Istanbul was probably the most important part of the research. We had our tastiest bowl...Read More
At Mardi Gras, gumbo is as much a lifestyle as a soup

At Mardi Gras, gumbo is as much a lifestyle as a soup

Some 80 communities in Louisiana celebrate Mardi Gras but New Orleans has claimed the holiday of unbridled excess as its own. The locals have made the French Catholic cycle of temptation and atonement into something of an art form. If you're not sorry the next morning, cher, then you didn't have fun the night before. Not for nothing does St. Louis Cathedral (below) dominate the skyline of the French Quarter. Mardi Gras in New Orleans is founded on the idea that you need to pack enough warm memories into the week before Ash Wednesday to last the entire 40 days of Lent. If, like us, you can't be in town for the parades and general shenanigans, be sure to visit Mardi Gras World (1380 Port...Read More