I call New York City home, but I’m not from here. I grew up south of the Mason-Dixon, which is why I treasure the fact that local lettuces are available at the Greenmarket for most of the summer. Long after what I consider an early crop has disappeared, a variety like French Crisp, from grower Keith Stewart in the Hudson Valley, is still coming up in these parts, looking as fresh as the day is long. It even hung on through last week’s hot spell, which I think intensified its sweet, minerally flavor.

Great lettuce in a salad can’t be beat, but I want something more. Something richer and more substantial, yet still uncomplicated and fresh tasting. I want smothered lettuce—that is, lettuce slicked with a hot bacony dressing. It is sublime.

My parents introduced me to the dish as a child at the Nu-Wray Inn, a comfortable old country hotel high in the mountains of western North Carolina. It followed a typically mild lecture on the virtues of trying new foods, and one bite was enough to reel me in hook, line, and sinker. I suppose this was a life-defining event: I still presume the unfamiliar to be delicious until proven otherwise.

The concept of smothered (a.k.a. wilted or killed) lettuce is ancient; in the first century A.D., the Romans doused both raw and cooked lettuce with hot oil and vinegar. In its Appalachian form, it consists of nothing more than bacon drippings, the leaves of a thin-leafed lettuce variety like Black-Seeded Simpson, and chopped green onions, with their lanky-as-an-adolescent leaves. Generally speaking, one cook’s green onion is another cook’s scallion, but what I think of as green onions are a little more robust-looking than scallions. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check out the cover art on Booker T. & the M.G.’s first album. I learned how to snap my fingers to the title cut.

As you might imagine, the hot dressing lends itself to embellishment. The Nu-Wray’s recipe booklet advises adding a teaspoon of sugar and salt to taste to the lettuce and onion. “Pour over 2 tablespoons vinegar,” it then directs. “Fry five slices of cured country bacon crisply, and place strips upon lettuce. Pour hot bacon grease over all. Serve immediately.”

When my mother made smothered lettuce at home, she always used a bit more sugar, and disdained the cream that more mainstream cookbooks called for. Instead of green onions, she often used the green tops of the shallots that grew out back; I don’t recall that she ever paid any attention to the small, white-skinned bulbs.

Today, I find myself taking another tack entirely, reaching for pancetta instead of bacon, and searching Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking for a half-remembered recipe. Ah, here we go: “Smothered Boston Lettuce with Pancetta.” Hazan cooks the onion, along with the pancetta, in oil until it is deep golden, then adds the lettuce, letting the thick leaves simmer in their own juices. The treatment is really more akin to that of smothered steak, where braising tenderizes a tough cut of meat.

The thinner leaves of my lettuce won’t stand up to slow simmering, but I love the idea of wilting the greens on the stovetop to coax out even more succulence. Smothered lettuce is delicious with pork chops, sausages, or seared scallops. But don’t be afraid to serve with nothing more than a large spoonful of soup (pinto) beans and cornbread. Or focaccia.

Smothered Lettuce with Pancetta

Serves 4

You could use almost any lettuce here except iceberg; just adjust your cooking time depending on how thick the leaves are. Escarole or dandelion greens, with their more assertive flavor, would be delicious, too.

Mild extra-virgin olive oil

About ½ cup coarsely chopped pancetta, or enough to make you happy

A handful of thinly sliced spring onions or scallions (including the green parts)

About 1½ pounds lettuce (see above note), washed well, dried, and torn into manageable pieces

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cider or red-wine vinegar

1. Put a generous glug of oil in a large skillet and heat it over moderately high heat until shimmery. Add the pancetta and cook, stirring occasionally, until it crisps up and turns golden. Drain the pancetta on paper towels, and, in the fat that’s left in the skillet, cook the onions or scallions until they soften but still have some spunk.

2. Add the lettuce to the skillet, and don’t worry if it won’t all fit; once it begins to wilt, you’ll have room for what’s left. Add a sprinkling of salt and cook the lettuce, tossing it with tongs so that the leaves are all lightly coated with the hot fat and they begin to wilt yet still retain some crunch.

3. Transfer the smothered lettuce to a serving bowl and drizzle with the tiniest amount of vinegar to brighten. Scatter with pancetta and taste before seasoning with salt and pepper. Eat at once.

Beach chairs. Check. Umbrella. Check. Lots of good stuff to read. Check. Cooler. Check. Pepper mill, black peppercorns, sea salt, coffee, extra-virgin olive oil, a freshly sharpened utility knife.

Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.

Packing the car for a week at the beach, down in North Carolina, can be tricky. I like the freewheeling aspect of making do in a rented cottage, but I never regret bringing along a few gotta-haves. The last item on my list is the most important: Two large, low cardboard boxes of New Jersey heirloom tomatoes, in varying shapes, sizes, and degrees of ripeness. There are pounds of them, plenty for salads and squelchy sandwiches best eaten over the kitchen sink. The tomatoes are nestled in beach towels, stem side up so their pleasingly plump shoulders won’t get bruised. Check.

Our extended family that gathers each year expands or contracts depending on circumstances. A couple of the many things we all share are a love of the surf and a great reluctance to leave the beach in order to go indoors and make dinner.

That is why we all take turns shopping and cooking, and that is why peel-your-own boiled shrimp is the default meal. Add corn on the cob and a platter of those tomatoes, sliced and drizzled with a lavish amount of good oil (and fresh basil if you’ve remembered to toss some in the cooler), and you have easily attainable perfection in no time flat.

The brown shrimp (Farfantepenaeus aztecus) that are running now are sweet, fat, plentiful*, and, at around $5 (heads-on) or $6.25 (heads-off) a pound, almost heartbreakingly inexpensive. I’m surprised there aren’t skid marks on the highway in front of every roadside stand. These shrimp are also sustainable and what is termed “wild-caught“; just hours before we ate the ones shown above, they were dumped from the hold of a boat working Pamlico Sound. This shallow lagoon separating much of the Outer Banks from the mainland is so broad and long that explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano thought he had reached the Pacific Ocean.

I’m a big believer in protecting the physical integrity—thus the flavor and tender texture—of seafood. Unless I’m stuck with very large shrimp, I never fool with deveining. Why open up that thin, resilient armor and run the risk of coarsening such delicate meat? And although there’s no beating the succulence of heads-on shrimp, lots of people prefer the convenience that comes with buying them heads-off.

I also cook shrimp in the smallest amount of water I can get away with, covering them by two inches or so. As far as the seasoning is concerned, I add a quartered lemon and enough sea salt to make cold tap water taste like the ocean. If you are a fan of Old Bay, Zatarain’s, or a homemade seafood boil blend, toss some in as well, but use a light hand so as not to obliterate the clean, briny-sweet flavor of the shellfish.

Even though everyone refers to these as “boiled” shrimp, the object is to not actually boil them. Just bring the seasoned water to an enthusiastic boil and add the unpeeled shrimp. Start timing from here on in; depending on the size of the shrimp and how many pounds of them** are in the pot, I begin checking for doneness at about two minutes. Once the shrimp are a beautiful rosy-pink on the outside, opaque inside, and firm yet tender in texture, immediately drain them in a colander.

Eat them hot out of the shell, with melted butter (add garlic or a spritz of lemon if the spirit moves), or cooled, with a horseradishy cocktail sauce. A New Orleans–style rémoulade would be wonderful too, but I don’t know—too much mincing and measuring for me this week. I would much rather walk the beach and watch a full moon rising.

*Unlike this spring’s white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus), which suffered a high mortality rate from the harsh winter, the area’s coldest on record (since 1874).

**The adults in my crowd can easily put away at least ¾ pound of (heads-off) shrimp per person. If there are any leftovers, the next day make shrimp rolls for lunch: Peel the shrimp and cut them into chunks. Add mayo, a little Dijon mustard, shredded carrot, some chopped red bell pepper or celery for crunch, and some chopped scallion. Serve in lightly toasted hotdog buns.

Back the week of July 18.

There were all sorts of things I meant to do this past weekend, but life took a turn. Plump, glossy sour cherries just appeared at the Greenmarket, and I had to seize the moment: They are perhaps the season’s most fleeting treasure, and I’d heard that our region’s cool, cloudy spring had resulted in a small harvest. Time to pounce.

I stood in a line as long, patient, and enthusiastic as what you would find at this week’s National Cherry Festival, in Traverse City, Michigan, eventually staggering home with quarts and quarts of what modern-day marketers euphemistically label tart cherries, and what home bakers of an earlier era sensibly called pie cherries. Unlike meatier sweet varieties, which are meant to be eaten out of hand, they have a complex, puckery intensity and are best for cooking. I bought as many as I could carry because they will last, pitted and frozen, through the rest of the summer and beyond.

Montmorency (above, at top and at right), an old French variety first cultivated in the United States in 1760, tastes as bright as its clear-red hue; the English Morello (above, left) is a bit deeper in color and flavor. Both varieties are wonderful in pies and preserves, but what I also find fabulous is their ability to cut through richness. That’s why they work so well in an eggy clafoutis, and why, when simmered down into a spicy chutney, they strike such a balance with pork, duck, or game.

Pitting sour cherries isn’t a big deal; since they’re softer than sweet cherries, you don’t even need a cherry pitter. Working over a bowl to catch the juices (and wearing an apron to guard against the inevitable, indelible juice spatters), simply use your hands to gently squeeze out the pits through the stem ends. If you intend to use the cherries for preserves or sauces, just spoon them with their juices into heavy-duty ziptop bags and chuck them into the freezer. If you’d rather keep them as whole as possible, spread them on a paper towel–lined rimmed baking sheet and freeze them; when they are frozen solid, bag them and refreeze.

Fresh or thawed frozen sour cherries make a wonderful base for fizzy lemonade, a libation that you will want to enjoy, either with or without vodka, all summer long. The recipe, from Gourmet, was developed by food editor Shelley Wiseman, and it couldn’t be easier; in fact, you don’t have to worry about pitting the cherries if using fresh ones. They get pulverized in the blender, pits and all, then strained. If using fresh cherries, reserve a handful with stems to garnish the glasses.

Sour Cherry Lemonade Cocktail

Adapted from Gourmet, July 2002

Makes 8 tall drinks

1 quart sour cherries, stemmed if fresh or thawed if frozen

1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (from 4 or 5 lemons)

1 cup sugar, or to taste

1½ cups (12 oz) vodka

2 to 3 cups chilled sparkling water or club soda

In a blender, whizz up the cherries at low speed until the skins have turned the liquid red and some of the pits are coarsely chopped. Pour through a sieve into a 2-quart pitcher, pressing firmly on the solids; then discard the solids. Add the lemon juice and sugar and stir with a long-handled wooden spoon until the sugar is dissolved. (You can make this mixture up to this point a day ahead of time and refrigerate it.) Fill 8 tall glasses with ice cubes and add 1½ oz vodka to each. Pour ½ cup cherry lemonade into each glass and top off with sparkling water.

There is something irrepressibly cheerful about this cocktail, and about cherries in general. My father was fond of whistling the Depression-era tune “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” whenever he needed a lift, and it’s no surprise that vintage cherry-covered tablecloths and tea towels remain popular. I get my own personal fix from a friend’s watercolor that hangs in our kitchen. It fills me with happiness every time I look at it.

Illustration by Robert Clepper

For all its unpretentious, knobbly familiarity, the potato is pretty fabulous. A rich source of vitamins (including a hefty amount of vitamin C), minerals (calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium), protein (essential amino acids), and complex carbohydrates, it has nourished humans ever since it was first domesticated in Peru, about 8,000 years ago.* Granted, it took a while for Europeans to get the hang of what to do with the New World curiosity: In the 1580s, Sir Walter Raleigh’s kitchen gardener waited until the potato flowers set seeds, and then sent those to the cook, figuring they were what was eaten.

This summer, along with the first just-dug new potatoes came a Harvard long-term study on changes in diet and lifestyle, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Among the findings was a correlation between the consumption of potatoes and gradual weight gain. Not only do extra servings of potato chips and french fries tend to expand waistlines over time, but so do nonfried potatoes (presumably embellished with butter or sour cream).

I’m not the first person, of course, who wonders if people who routinely indulge in a second helping of fries or chips might consume more calories in general than those who make different choices; plenty of others have weighed on the matter, including the ever-practical Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University and author of What to Eat and Food Politics. And, obviously, the study’s methodology and ramifications will be discussed endlessly and in great detail.

But not here.

I would much rather spend my time cooking—and eating—the new potatoes I scored the other day from Sue Dare’s Cherry Lane Farms, at the Union Square Greenmarket. It’s tempting to roast them in parchment, David Tanis–style: They taste irrevocably of the moment. But given the temperature outside, I’m not inclined to crank up the oven and roast anything for 45 minutes.

What I’m in the mood for is potato salad, and these just-dug spuds will be the key to its goodness; moist and dense-fleshed, they hold their shape beautifully after cooking. And although I adore an old-fashioned creamy salad, with chopped hard-boiled egg and celery, I have something simpler in mind to showcase the sweet, earthy, almost nutty flavor of the star ingredient. It’s a happy amalgam of recipes from two masters—Darina Allen, of Ballymaloe Cookery School, in County Cork, Ireland, and Marcella Hazan.

No matter what sort of potato salad you make, however, you’ll want to keep a few points in mind. Always start potatoes in cold water; if you add them to boiling water, their outsides will be done before the insides are fully cooked. Once the water comes to a boil, lower the heat to a steady simmer. A rolling boil is too chaotic—the potatoes will constantly bump into each other and begin breaking apart. And don’t forget the vinegar, which gives potato salad brightness and freshness; sprinkle it on the potatoes while they’re still hot so they absorb the tart acidity more easily.

My final tip is really more of a true confession. Cookbooks will solemnly instruct you to boil the potatoes whole for the best flavor and texture; that way, they don’t get waterlogged. I’ve never quite gotten the logic of this, given that a potato is almost 80 percent water to begin with, but maybe depending on the starch content … oh, never mind. All I mean to say is that if I need to fast-track dinner, and I’m dealing with any so-called boiling potatoes, I slice them before cooking and guess what? They turn out just fine. Only faster.

New-Potato Salad with Fresh Herbs

Serves 4 to 6

1½ pounds or so new potatoes, washed but left whole (see final tip, above) and unpeeled

Salt and freshly ground pepper

2 to 3 tablespoons vinegar (cider, red-wine, or rice)

Roughly chopped fresh thyme, parsley, and/or marjoram leaves, to taste

Your best extra-virgin olive oil**

Put the potatoes in a pot and cover them with about 2 inches of cold water; season with salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes. Drain the potatoes well and when they are just barely cool enough to handle, cut them into ¼-inch-thick slices. (Taste first, and if the skin is at all bitter, peel the potatoes before slicing.)

Spread the warm sliced potatoes on a platter and immediately sprinkle with vinegar. Add lashings of olive oil, scatter with herbs, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at room temperature.

This potato salad is a hit at dinner parties as well as on weeknights at home. Add it to an antipasto plate; bolster it with good canned tuna, blanched green beans, and little black olives for a niçoise effect; or substitute garlicky mayonnaise or pesto for the olive oil. Any leftovers can be a raft for a fried egg, or cobbled together with the remnants of broiled wild salmon or smoked trout.

“So, what do you think of that Harvard study?” asked a dinner guest. Looking almost furtive, he slipped another, very small, spoonful of potatoes onto his plate. “Mr. Potato Head is really Snidely Whiplash!”

“Curses! Boiled again!” interjected Sam, and poured more wine.

Oh goody, my turn. Everyone cringed in anticipation. I raised my glass. “Here’s to Spudly Do-Right …”

*For a wide-angle take on the subject, see John Reader’s Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (Yale University Press, 2008).

**Lately I’ve been fixated on Spanish olive oils, but use whatever speaks to you.

It’s easy enough to get into an olive oil rut. We all find brands we’re comfortable with—an inexpensive one for cooking, a fancier option for vinaigrettes or drizzling—and then stick with them for years. Decades, even. But given the extraordinary array of olive oils available in fancy-food shops and many supermarkets today, it’s a shame not to experiment with something new.

Take Spanish olive oils, for instance, which have long been undervalued and underrated. Pons, from northern Spain, is delicate yet distinctively olivey. Unió, a common supermarket brand, is fruity and mild, with a finish that’s peppery but not throat-catchingly pungent. A mature Nuñez de Prado, from Andalusia, is marvelously rounded and ripe tasting.

But what I really can’t get enough of is Merula (500 ml/$16.95), picked up on a visit to Formaggio Kitchen, one of my favorite stores on the planet. Produced by Marqués de Valdueza in Extremadura, the estate blend of fruity arbequinas, meaty hojiblancas, tart picuals, and buttery moriscas is lush, balanced, and extremely versatile. (You’ll find those same characteristics, by the way, in smoked paprika—another culinary gift from this remote region.) In fact, this is the olive oil I’m traveling with this summer, because it’s perfect for a weekend house or beach cottage: inexpensive enough to cook with, yet possessing enough character to act as condiment or seasoning. And even though I usually prefer a mild French olive oil for vinaigrettes, Merula won’t overpower a salad of tender young lettuces.

I am also crazy about the packaging: The oil comes in a sturdy tin, which is both easily transportable and impervious to the deteriorating effects of light. And there’s been something about the handsome merula (“blackbird” in Spanish) on the tin that, for weeks now, has reminded me of García Lorca … and Mort Rosenblum, a reporter’s reporter and author of the comprehensive, compulsively readable Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit. I finally sat down and flicked through the pages until I found what I was looking for*, from Poema del Cante Jondo. “The field / of olive trees/ opens and shuts / like a fan,” the poem begins. But the image that had stubbornly lodged in my memory comes at the end: “The olive trees / are loaded / with shouting. / A band / of captured birds / moving their broadest / tails in shadow.” Love that.

My obsession with Merula will probably last until winter, when I will crave something different, a leaf-green oil from the new harvest, with the sharp pepperiness of fresh-from-the-press polyphenols. But right now—even though I know heat is a great equalizer of cooking oils—I am reveling in the fact that everything I make with Merula tastes outrageously good. Fried eggs. Sautéed summer squash. Stewed tomatoes. Quick-braised greens.

And with Spain on the brain and a pound or so of beautiful wild American shrimp at my disposal, I even tried my hand at gambas al ajillo—cooking the shrimp quickly in plenty of hot oil along with a lavish amount of sliced spring garlic and a dusting of smoked paprika. This is a classic tapas offering, of course, but Sam and I called it dinner: I put the pan, still sizzling, on a trivet in the center of the table, and plunked down a baguette, a plate of thin-sliced ham, and a green salad spiked with flat-leafed parsley. We ate with utter concentration. “Can we do this again next week?” Sam asked. He had olive oil all over his chin.

* The only thing this book is missing is an index. Mort?? I’m just sayin’.

It’s easy to be extravagant in the spring. Last week, we traveled miles to see carefully tended beds full of tumbling, fragrant old-garden roses. And this week, we traveled miles to eat soft-shelled crab.

I know sweet, succulent soft-shells are available here in New York, but every June I feel compelled to pick up and go to the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States and synonymous with the blue crab, Callinectes sapidus (literally, “savory swimmer”). This year, the Bay experienced a harrowing winter, and crab mortality was high. Still, according to the latest dredge survey conducted by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, blue crab stocks, above their target for the third year in a row, are climbing back from a precipitous decline. We got in the car and headed south to visit friends on the Eastern Shore—and polish off a whole mess of crabs.

The key to deciphering roadside signs in that part of the world is basic biology. A peeler is a crab that is just about ready to commence shedding (molting) its hard outer shell—anatomically speaking, its exoskeleton. A buster has begun to back out of its carapace but hasn’t kicked it completely free. Every time a blue crab sheds its shell, it increases its overall size by about a third, and it might cycle through the process 20 times during its three- to four-year life span.

Commercial watermen will protect peelers and busters in shedding tanks until they leave their shells behind. Once a crab has busted loose, so to speak, it’s termed a soft-shell. Because this stage only lasts for a few hours, a soft-shell is immediately removed from the water to prevent its shell from hardening.

Soft-shells are highly perishable, so cooking them involves buying them live and dressing—i.e., cleaning—them. This procedure is gruesome to the uninitiated (and it’s something you can ask the fishmonger to do), but, perhaps because it’s something I’ve been around all my life, I can’t get too worked up about it. Crabs, after all, are scavengers. They will eat anything, even me, given the chance. Luck of the draw.

Our friends’ summer cabin is on the primitive side, with sturdy cots for sleeping and cans of OFF! within easy reach. The airy kitchen is equipped with a few ancient pots and pans as well as an equally ancient range. We used kitchen shears to snip off the crabs’ eyestalks and mouth, taking out their central nervous system in one fell swoop. We removed the sand sac (stomach), which can contain grit, and the “mustard,” actually a digestive gland called the hepatopancreas. Lots of people savor its assertive taste, but since that’s where any contaminants will be concentrated, it’s usually best to discard it. The spongy-looking gills and the apron (abdomen), on the underside of the crab, were the last things to go. Once rinsed under cold water and patted dry, the crabs were ready for cooking, and we were ready to dig into the cooler of iced beer.

The rest of dinner wasn’t complicated—green beans tossed with a shallot vinaigrette and Parker House rolls, baked the day before by Sam and freshened in the oven. Soon, with two skillets working on the stovetop, we started sautéing batches of soft-shells to order. I didn’t write anything down, but the following recipe will give you a general idea of how to cook not just soft-shells, but almost any kind of seafood à la meunière, or “miller’s wife style”—that is, with floury hands. The finishing touch is a quick pan sauce of brown butter, parsley, and lemon. It is infinitely versatile: Try substituting chervil for the parsley.

Sautéed Soft-Shelled Crabs

Serves 4

We used all-purpose flour for dredging, but finely milled Wondra, the secret to silky-smooth gravies and sauces, gives the crabs’ delicate crust more finesse. If you prefer a little crunch, use quick-cooking Cream of Wheat instead of flour; it’s a technique I learned from chef—and Top Chef Master—Floyd Cardoz while working on his book, One Spice, Two Spice. If you’re worried that the crab shells might be a little tough, soak the soft-shells briefly in milk before dredging.

All-purpose flour

Salt and freshly ground pepper

8 medium live soft-shells, dressed (see above), rinsed, and patted dry

Canola oil

Unsalted butter

Fresh lemon juice

Finely chopped fresh parsley

Spoon about a cup of flour in a pie plate and season generously with salt and pepper. Gently dredge the soft-shells, one at a time, in the seasoned flour, shaking off the excess. In a large heavy skillet, heat about 2 tablespoons oil and about 1 tablespoon butter over moderately high heat until shimmery. Add half the crabs, upside down, and cook until they’re golden brown, about 2 minutes. Turn them over and cook them until crisp and golden brown on the other side, a few minutes more. Drain the crabs on brown paper and cook the remaining soft-shells in the same way.

Wipe out the skillet with a paper towel and add a nice chunk of butter. Let it cook, still over moderately high heat, until it is a rich golden brown and has a nutlike aroma. You will know it’s done when people run into the kitchen exclaiming, “What smells so good?” Spritz in some lemon juice and add the parsley. Pull the pan off the heat, taste the sauce, and tinker with the seasonings if necessary.

Serve the soft-shells immediately, drizzled with the sauce. Clink glasses and make a toast: “Same time next year!”

Photo courtesy William Woys Weaver

When William Woys Weaver learned that his Culinary Ephemera: An Illustrated History had taken top honors for culinary history at the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) cookbook awards, presented last week in Austin, Texas, he responded in characteristic, generous fashion. He fired off an e-mail thank-you to everyone in his orbit.

“Dear Friends,” he wrote. “I have learned this evening that my book Culinary Ephemera took first place in the IACP cookbook awards for the category ‘Culinary History.’ IACP has done much to elevate this branch of food studies and I am deeply honored to take the gold since this will give other struggling food scholars the kind of recognition they deserve in a field that has only just recently come into its own. I had a little prosecco to celebrate the award and to remind myself how lucky I am to have all of you as my friends. Yes, YOU!!! Where would I be without my family of friends?”

And where would we be without Will Weaver?

Back in the late 1990s, when I first stumbled across Will’s Heirloom Vegetable Gardening—an instant classic—I knew his voice belonged in the pages of Gourmet. Years of happy collaboration followed. A food historian and master gardener who maintains around 4,500 varieties of vegetables, flowers, and herbs in his Roughwood Seed Collection, in Devon, Pennsylvania, he was game for writing about anything. Tomatoes. Potatoes. Squash. Melons. You name it: We asked, he responded with alacrity and panache.

Will nurtures people like his beloved dahlias. When the staff at the magazine was pole-axed, one after another, by a particularly vicious cold (“You’ve been sick for weeks,” he said to me, anxious and aghast. “How long have you had that cough?”), he immediately posted a care package of herbs, with carefully detailed notes for a tisane. At the time, he was deep in the weeds, translating Sauer’s Herbal Cures: America’s First Book of Botanic Healing, written in German by a Colonial American apothecary, and we took him at his word. Mugs of the steaming hot liquid were carefully passed around, and “… what in God’s name was in that?” we all said a day or so later. He had coaxed us back into bloom.

For the past few years, Will poured much of his prodigious energy into Culinary Ephemera, which is based on his collection of almost 50,000 almanacs, calendars, handbills, menus, match covers, trade cards, product pamphlets, packaging, valentines, and much more. I came across a quote from him I’d scribbled down in a kitchen notebook ages ago. “Old cookbooks are important for interpreting culture,” he had told me, “but they’re not enough. Just like archaeology needs many different kinds of artifacts, so does food history.”

Will and I share a fascination for menus both haute and humble. I really like the one up above, partly because of the amazing graphic quality of the die-cut, and partly because of its Austin provenance—fitting, in light of where the IACP conference was held this year. The menu, published in 1939 by the Triple XXX Pig Stand, documents a regional restaurant that first opened in Dallas in 1921 and claimed to be the first drive-in restaurant in the United States. “At drive-ins, Americans could sit in their cars and eat and enjoy the scenery at the same time, albeit in a less glamorous way than was possible on the railroads,” Will wrote. “…. This ordinary experience became the new standard, the new chic.”

I am also extremely fond of postcards, and I shamelessly wallowed in Will’s chapter on collecting them—a pastime called deltiology. By 1900, when the “real photo postcard” began to take hold, food, food processing, people harvesting, and restaurants had become topics of interest. “Food postcards create their own reality, apart from that which is depicted,” said Will yesterday. “They create expectation.”

Most of these early American postcards were, in fact, printed in Germany, where color lithography was invented. The arresting image above, depicting a long-vanished renowned Atlantic City hotel bordered by lobsters is a great example. The lobster, of course, is an icon for a typical New England “shore dinner,” which rapidly captured the imagination and appetites of resort-goers all along the Eastern Seaboard and as far inland as Philadelphia and Washington.

You’ll also find the exact same lobster border wrapped around a view of Rumeli Hisari fortress, on the Bosporus. In his charming, evocative Constantinople Old and New (1915), Harrison Griswold Dwight, who grew up there, noted that the local boatmen who ferried tourists from village to village eked out their incomes by fishing. “We are famous for our lobsters at Roumeli Hissar,” he added.

All of these fabulous lobsters lead me to include the most recent addition to my virtual ephemera collection, from an advertising poster that reads, “There’s nothing like a Guinness with Lobster.” I had to crop the hell out of the image to get it to fit in this space, so it’s worth clicking here to get the full effect (note the beautiful typeface).

I also found myself trying to wrap my taste buds, so to speak, around the concept. It had never occurred to me to drink a dry Irish stout with lobster. I had to research this, obviously, and am happy to report that it is delicious.

The fact that e-phemera isn’t nearly as satisfying as actual paper is offset somewhat by the fact that it doesn’t take up any room. Like postcards. I’ve collected them for years. They are roughly organized into categories, but my archiving technique can best be described as iffy.

As soon as I opened this box devoted to culinary subjects, I saw some favorites. At top left, there is a very nice Winslow Homer 1901 watercolor called Bermuda Settlers. You may think it belongs in the postcard box labeled “Art,” but relax—there is a dupe there, and the subject matter, wild boar, is perfectly valid here as well. Below it is a souvenir from a trip to southern India; every time I look at it, I’m reminded of the extraordinary meals I had there.

Now, at top right, there is what Will would call a vignette of life as it actually was: Flip’s Drive-In Restaurant, Wilmington, North Carolina, circa 1957. Looking at the photo, I conjure my own reality: My parents walking through the door. My mother would have worn a shirtwaist dress, my father, crumpled khakis and a seersucker jacket. Even though there was curb service, they would have eaten their barbecue sandwiches and fried shrimp inside, where there was a booster seat waiting for me. I still go to Flip’s on occasion. There are far better places for barbecue in that part of the world, but I don’t care. I was too young to remember, but it’s where I ate my first french fry, my first bite of pulled pork.

The postcard at bottom right is of a photograph taken in Tennessee circa 1983–86 by the great William Eggleston. He acquired his first camera, a Canon rangefinder, in 1957, so I like that juxtaposition with Flip’s. The fact that color photography is considered a museum-worthy art form today is one of Mr. Eggleston’s many contributions to the field.

That zebra peeking out from behind the gingham tablecloth has nothing whatsoever to do with food, and I’m not quite sure why that postcard is there. It’s of a George Stubbs painting of 1762–63 that hangs at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Paul Mellon bought the painting, shown amid a jumble of furniture and household goods, at auction at Harrods.

Harrods! The Food Hall. Imagine one of those fancy seagrass hampers, stocked with delectables and a nice bottle of fizz, plunked down in the Eggleston still life. The zebra stays.

With the exception of my work, I am not what you might call a process person. I don’t make jam, pasta or bread, the last layer cake I assembled looked demented, and I will never, ever get around to organizing the wedding photos.

Which is why the sudden desire to grind meat for burgers at home took me by surprise. Perhaps it was the blade steaks we had last week—they were so good, they left us with an unfashionable craving for more beefy flavor. Perhaps it was the imminent arrival of summer funfunfun. Or, perhaps, perversely, it was the various food safety issues that have been in the news lately.

At any rate, I really wanted a juicy burger, and liked the thought of knowing exactly what cut I was getting. I passed up lean sirloin—overzealously trimmed of excess fat, it would result in dry burgers—for a firm, well-marbled beef chuck roast that had a shaggy, dazzling-white strip of fat running through its middle. For good measure, the butcher threw in some extra beef fat on the side.

Later that day, I took a look at The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, by the great San Francisco chef Judy Rodgers. She’s a big believer in salting meat to enhance the texture and help it retain moisture. While cutting the roast into 1-inch cubes, I removed the gnarly bits of connective tissue and some of the oddly shaped pieces of fat in the middle of the roast. Then I sprinkled the meat with salt, stuck it in a zip-top bag, and put it in the refrigerator until the next day. Rodgers doesn’t say to wash off the salt before grinding, but, feeling a little guilty, I gave it a rinse, then blotted the cubed meat dry with paper towels.

I wish I could tell you I broke out my grandmother’s meat grinder, the one she used for to make the best ham salad I’ve ever tasted, but since I’ve always had countertop-challenged kitchens, I sold the dratted thing at a stoop sale years ago. Instead, I used the KitchenAid stand mixer and the food grinder attachment, fished out of the tackle box Sam has dedicated to every KitchenAid accoutrement in existence.

After scrupulously cleaning the grinder and the bowl, I chilled them while I scrubbed down the kitchen counter and thoroughly washed my hands. We all know about the risk of pathogens in ground meat (the USDA recommends using an instant-read thermometer to correctly gauge doneness in burgers), but believe me, there’s a bumper crop of them in the home kitchen as well. How long has that sponge been sitting by the sink? I thought so. Throw it out.

The reason I chilled the grinder and bowl is that old adage about making pastry—”keep it cold and keep it moving”—applies to grinding meat as well. In both cases, you want the fat to stay solidified while you’re working. Flakiness in a pie crust, for instance, comes from tiny patches of cold fat between the layers of dough; by the time the fat starts to melt in the heat of the oven, the dough has already begun to set. The liquid in the dough turns to steam, which pushes the layers apart. Rarely does a science experiment smell so delicious, unless you happen to have burgers cooking away on the grill. The small pieces of cold fat in ground meat melt during cooking, too, resulting in a burger so succulent, the juices run down your chin.

The KitchenAid food grinder is a piece of cake to assemble, and in no time, I had ground the meat, along with a few indulgent pieces of the extra beef fat, through the coarse die. It extruded very cleanly in the beginning, but about halfway through, its texture abruptly changed from crumbly to mushy. Thanks to Rodgers, I knew to turn off the machine and disassemble it; sure enough, there was a stringy, sinewy tangle wrapped around the blade. Some minutes later, with the gismo cleaned and reinstalled, I was back in business. Soon I switched the coarse die for the finer one and fed the meat through the grinder once more. I gently mixed the meat with my hands to more evenly distribute the fat. Again, I was reminded of pastry dough: The meat felt malleable, not greasy. Back into the fridge it went, until it was time for supper.

Choosing the right meat is one secret to fabulous burgers; another is to avoid overhandling the meat. If you knead and compact it into dense patties, it will stay dense. Use a light hand to form patties ¾ to 1 inch thick, and they will puff during cooking and become juicy. Resist the urge to press the burgers with a spatula while on the grill; you’ll smash those lovely juices right out of the meat. And treat burgers with the respect you’d give a steak: Let them rest after cooking, to give the juices a chance to redistribute themselves evenly.

As to the perfect degree of doneness, you are on your own. Personally, I like a burger that comes down solidly on the medium side of medium-rare. Sam, who grew up eating steak tartare and who, as a child, used to lick the bowl after his mother put together a meatloaf (which just makes me go all wobbly inside) is more daring. If you stick with chuck, though, and handle it lightly, you will discover that even burgers cooked well-done stay beautifully moist.

Now, of course, I’m wondering what other uses I can find for the meat grinder. I wish I had my grandmother’s recipe for ham salad.

I’ve always worked better on deadline—thrived under the pressure, in fact—which is why I found myself racing around on May 21 as though I actually took stock in all of the end-of-the-world predictions. If only I’d planned better, I told myself, we could have had a fabulous cocktail party. Deviled eggs. Melt-in-your-mouth cheese straws. Benne wafers, the savory kind. Dilly beans and carrots. Ham biscuits. James Beard’s onion sandwiches. Nina Simonds’s Hundred-Corner Shrimp Balls, one of the greatest hors d’oeuvre recipes ever published in the pages of Gourmet. Ever published, period. Crabmeat, lots and lots of it, maybe crab Mornay, served with toast points. Now, that’s my idea of rapture.

And it was so not going to happen.

After briefly flirting with the notion of spending $30 a pound for wild Copper River salmon—it was gorgeous—sanity prevailed. I moved on to the meat cases, stared at their contents, and half-listened to my Saturday-morning shopping comrade Kempy Minifie as she gabbed to the butcher. “Well, would you go see if there are any in the back?” she asked. “I really need them.” She stood on her toes so she could look him in the eye.

“What’s for dinner at your house?” I said. “I have to get something good. The clock is ticking.” Kempy cocked an eyebrow. “You know, the world. What if it is our last meal?” I rationalized. Kempy looked around to see if anyone else was within earshot. “Blade steaks,” she breathed. “They have some, but you have to ask.” The guy behind the counter handed her a well-wrapped solid little parcel and grinned at me. “There are three left,” he confided.

The boneless chuck top blade steak has numerous aliases—book, butler, or petite steak, for instance—but you’ll know it when you see it. The tidy oval, slightly larger than the palm of your hand, is bisected by a thin strip of inedible gristle, or cartilage. That may not be an appealing characteristic, but don’t let it deter you from enjoying a superb cut of meat, one in which deep, beefy flavor is coupled with extraordinary tenderness.

The texture is a revelation to anyone who presumes that all beef chuck requires long, slow cooking to bring out its unctuousness. Although most cuts from the chuck, or forequarter, of a steer (see #6 in the diagram below, from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s masterful River Cottage Meat Book) are tough—that part of the animal does most of the work—top blade steaks are beautifully tender. They come from the long, wide muscle that butchers call the flatiron steak, which happens to be the second-most tender cut of beef after the (vastly) more expensive tenderloin. Slice a flatiron steak crosswise, and you’ve got top blade steaks. At about seven bucks a pound, they might more accurately be labeled top-value steaks.

Dinner that night was pretty darned good. The steaks, which took just minutes under the broiler, needed no other embellishment than salt and pepper. I had cut the cartilaginous bit out of my steak before plating it; Sam preferred to leave his steak whole and simply ate around the gristle. In both cases, the meat juices wilted the jade-green tangle of wild watercress (a farmers market splurge) that sat underneath them. I’d originally had baked potatoes in mind, but found myself in a Gruyère frame of mind. Potato gratin it was.

Life is short, so it’s worth eating well. The dishes will be there in the morning.