Our heritage turkey from Bill Niman’s BN Ranch was really expensive. And it was not nearly as chesty as your typical supermarket bird, the aptly named Broad-Breasted White. Sleeker and more streamlined (nice gams!), it reminded me of that great Spencer Tracy line from the picture Pat and Mike: “Not much meat on her, but […]

Cradling a bourbon in one hand, my father would always remark during our Thanksgiving celebration—in which the turkey played second fiddle to an oyster roast—that southern colonists were throwing cocktail parties by the time the Pilgrims anchored off Cape Cod. That must be why milk punch feels so right. My Thanksgivings here in New York […]

My grandmother was relaxed about canning; it was something she did all her life. Her daughter, my mother—not so much. To her, standing over a hot stove stirring boiling jam was the last thing she wanted to do, ever. My father, who adored homemade relishes, pickles, jellies—I believe I got my condiment gene from him—saw […]

I’ve been on the road lately, to a few unfamiliar cities. And I’ve been struck by  the fact that whenever I ask the people who live in these places about the most interesting food story going, nine out of ten of them will tell about a restaurant or chef. But 18 rich, full years at […]

I learned to cook without black pepper in the place where it is king: Tellicherry, a small town in a remote part of southwestern India. Its shadowy warehouses overflow with sacks of the spice, bound for markets all over the world after being harvested from the vines and sun-dried. I’d traveled to Tellicherry—called Thalassery in […]

“True grits, more grits, fish, grits and collards. Life is good where grits are swallered.”  —Roy Blount, Jr. One of the many great things about attending the annual Southern Foodways Alliance symposium is that I get to go down to Oxford, Mississippi, and see some of my favorite people on the planet. I often stay with friends […]

The last of summer’s peaches are larger than baseballs. They make me think of Dori Sanders, South Carolina novelist and peach farmer extraordinaire. The last time I stopped at her farm stand, there was a peach calendar, of sorts (“Expect Albertas about the first week of August”), so you could plan a trip accordingly, and […]

“I got blackberries, I got blackberries, blackberries.”—street cry, New Orleans blackberry seller Yesterday at the Greenmarket, I ignored the signs of early autumn—the first apples and acorn squash, collards and kale—and instead stubbornly lugged home corn, tomatoes, melon, and the other usual summer suspects. Fat, shiny blackberries were going for a song, and I bought […]