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 […]

Funny what we take for granted. I never really thought about our cooling rack until I decided to put a number of cookie sheets through their paces. The (gotta love it) Nifty brand “EZ Expanding Cooling Rack” more or less lived on the dining table for several days, and, even when cookie-less, it became an […]

Admittedly, the bases are loaded. The refrigerator contains small amounts of all sorts of things. Leftover kale that had been cooked with red-pepper flakes and lots of garlic. Cooked chickpeas, ditto garlic. Tomato sauce. Parsley. A hunk of sheep’s-milk cheese. A crumbly wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano, picked up on the fly while dodging the San Gennaro […]

I am waiting for a UPS shipment of a friend’s homemade fig preserves, and maybe today’s the day. The preserves are delicious on toast at breakfast, but I tend to use them more like a chutney. They embellish roast chicken, served with a judiciously thin slice of Benton’s country ham and biscuits or crumbly corn bread. […]

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 […]

Scratch—adj. Informal usage. done by or dependent on chance: a scratch shot. These days, my life doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for planning and cooking meals. I do make the effort, almost every Saturday morning, to get to the Greenmarket at Union Square—I enjoy the actual shopping for provisions as much as I […]

This hot dry summer has produced staggeringly great tomatoes, and I’ve even taken a shot at growing a few varieties in a sunny corner on Long Island that belongs to my in-laws. As much as I’ve enjoyed cultivating the little crop, I think what has delighted me the most is the chance to eat them […]

I’ve been a huge fan of Ed Mitchell’s whole-hog barbecue ever since John T. Edge first championed the pitmaster’s crazy, pure vision—to source and serve the juicy, full-flavored, pastured pork of his childhood—in the pages of Gourmet almost exactly five years ago. The only things that surpass Ed’s pork are his beaming countenance and enveloping […]