Search Results for: food

On Food, Family, and Love: A Recipe For Memory

Longreads Pick

Atlanta chef and culinary teacher Tim Patridge says there is a difference between reunion and funeral chicken. Reunion chicken, he explains, is fried fast and hot, in a hurry to get to the park and the party. It has a crust that is consequently crisper than the more tender crust of funeral chicken. Funeral chicken is fried slowly. Reluctant for the day to progress, the cook takes her time, turning the burner lower, braising as well as frying. As she stands at the stove, turning the pieces, raising and lowering the heat, she is lost in the act of remembering the person who has gone before. That memory, Tim suggests, may also flavor funeral chicken.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Sep 22, 2016
Length: 7 minutes (1,993 words)

On Food, Family, and Love: A Recipe For Memory

68. Fried Chicken by jon oropeza. CCBY SA 2.0

Atlanta chef and culinary teacher Tim Patridge says there is a difference between reunion and funeral chicken. Reunion chicken, he explains, is fried fast and hot, in a hurry to get to the park and the party. It has a crust that is consequently crisper than the more tender crust of funeral chicken. Funeral chicken is fried slowly. Reluctant for the day to progress, the cook takes her time, turning the burner lower, braising as well as frying. As she stands at the stove, turning the pieces, raising and lowering the heat, she is lost in the act of remembering the person who has gone before. That memory, Tim suggests, may also flavor funeral chicken.

At Oxford American, Ronni Lundy reflects on the simple shared pleasures of food and on how recipes become maps through memory.

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Clean Eating and Pure Loving: My Life as a Whole Foods Cashier

Longreads Pick

Certain jobs feel like dead ends, but the community and memories you build in them can sustain you the rest of your life.

Source: Catapult
Published: Sep 2, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,703 words)

Our Fancy Foods, Ourselves

Longreads Pick

Inside the enormous, bi-coastal Fancy Food Show, small companies try out for prime time, next year’s trends begin, and the people who have invested their life savings into their business now search for distribution and vie for your attention as you walk around snacking. All. Day. Long.

Source: Eater
Published: Jul 13, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,676 words)

The Food Industrial Complex

Longreads Pick

How the economics of processed foods explain their dominance over fruits and vegetables, and what the U.S. government has to do with it.

Source: Priceonomics
Published: Mar 24, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,874 words)

The Guatemalan Chef Who Became a Hiroshima Comfort Food Star

Even at their most decadent, food cultures contain traces of the scarcity that helped shape them — and in few places more so than in Hiroshima. At Roads and Kingdoms, Matt Goulding follows the origin story of okonomiyaki, the harmoniously messy pancake that has become a staple of post-war Hiroshima cuisine, through the unlikely career of Fernando Lopez, the Guatemalan chef who’s mastered it.

Lopez and his wife were determined to bring the flavors of Phoenix and Santa Fe and El Paso to the people of Hiroshima. The only problem was that no one in Japan had ever heard of Southwestern food.

After presenting his plan to a local builder, the contractor told Lopez bluntly, “I don’t build restaurants that fail.”

Lopez and his wife shuffled through ideas — pizzeria, bistro, sandwich shop — but nothing felt right. Eventually the conversation turned where conversations in Hiroshima normally turn when the subject of food comes up: okonomiyaki. “Why don’t you open an okonomiyaki restaurant?” friends and family started to ask.

Why not open an okonomiyaki shop? Let’s consider the reasons: Because Lopez was born seven thousand miles away, in one of the roughest cities on the planet. Because he didn’t look Japanese, speak Japanese, or cook Japanese. Because okonomiyaki isn’t just a pile of cabbage and noodles and pork belly, but a hallowed food in Hiroshima, stacked with layers and layers of history and culture that he couldn’t pretend to be a part of. Because even though they might accept an Italian cooking pasta and a Frenchman baking baguettes, they would never accept a Guatemalan making okonomiyaki.

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The Guatemalan Chef Who Became a Hiroshima Comfort Food Star

Longreads Pick

The origin story of Okonomiyaki – the harmoniously messy pancake that has become a staple of post-war Hiroshima cuisine – and of its unlikely master.

Published: Oct 27, 2015
Length: 30 minutes (7,574 words)

In Praise of Polarizing Food

Canned sardines turn many Americans off to fresh sardines, which is a shame. In Tin House‘s 2009 Appetites Issue, Jeff Koehler shares the little fish’s pleasures, describing how eating canned sardines in his vagabond youth led him to savoring fresh sardines as an adult, which culminated in years of culinary experimentation in his adopted home of Barcelona. Koehler’s essay was reprinted in the Best Food Writing 2010 anthology and is for anyone who’s ever loved something other people find gross.

Sardinas en escabeche became part of my repertoire, and I still enjoy it in autumn when the hues and scents of the dish feel right for the cool, clear days. Eventually, I learned to prepare sardines in many different ways. At home we like them pan-grilled and eaten with plump grapes. Or grilled and crowning a slice of toasted country bread piled with strips of roasted red peppers, eggplant, and onions. Or batter-dipped and fried with slices of acidic apple. These days, my two girls love it when I bury a mess of sardines whole under a mound of coarse sea salt, and then bake the lot in a hot oven for 15 minutes. They enthusiastically take turns breaking open the salt crust with a wooden mallet while my wife and I scramble to dig out the succulent fish—moist and completely cooked in their own juices—before the girls crush them.

But, without a doubt, the most pleasurable way to eat fresh sardines is a la brasa, grilled outside in the open air over hot embers. The flavors are at their robust finest, the flesh sparkling and briny, shaded with smoky oils. Inside, that distinct smell of searing sardines is overpowering, even pungent (and immediately alerts every neighbor as to what’s on the stove), but outside, among green leaves and dusty loam, or on a sandy beach with sea breezes, it’s evocatively, stirringly aromatic.

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On Ugly Food

Gravy, curry, casserole, beef stew ─ some of humanity’s most comforting, aromatic foods are the least photogenic. At Serious Eats, Kat Kinsman analyzes America’s obsession with culinary appearances and makes the case for learning to measure food by other, non-visual standards.

I’ve been thinking about ugly food, and ugly things in general, for an awfully long time now. I still remember using my post as a high school yearbook editor to make sure the wallflower kids were just as well represented as the tall poppies in our class. Sure, they weren’t the prettiest of the bunch, but I felt a certain solidarity with them. I knew we had a special value all our own. As a girl who figured I’d never measure up as lovely enough (mostly because so many people flat-out told me so), I had always identified with the ugly and the overlooked—the teddy bear with the wonky eye, the holey thrift store dress. I understood these things. I celebrated them.

The foods that pleased me the most were the objectively ugly ones: the stews, gravies, gumbos, curries, goulashes, mashes, braises, and sauces that were cooked long and low until they slumped and thickened. Maybe I knew that these foods, like all the ugly ducklings in this world, had to work harder to get their proper due. It takes time and effort to transubstantiate flour and fat into cocoa-dark roux, a rough hunk of muscle into sumptuous brisket, and raw, tough leaves and tops into sweet, savory greens. Time, it seems, can make some foods taste like heaven, and look like hell.

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Mid-Century Visions of Modern Food

One of the most dizzying of these effects is the dominance of circles. Ringed or round connoted nature tamed. The vegetables that survived the cleansing were united by two qualities. They were round and cute: button mushrooms, olives, cherry tomatoes, pearl onions, peas, invincible iceberg. (Celery, long and tubular, made it through, too, I think because it is so neat. And so crisp and orderly.) As food production was mechanized, there followed a march of finished foods made round: cocktail franks, meatballs, cheese wheels, cheese balls, onion rings, sherbet rolls and pale, melted fondue, bubbling in small round pots.

Rachel Laudan, a food historian and author of the 2013 book ‘‘Cuisine and Empire,’’ thinks that behind the Betty Crocker recipe box lurks the Cold War — that these glossy cards were another theater for the standoff between socialism and capitalism, a version of the message that ‘‘abundance was something to be celebrated.’’ Surely the lush profusions on each card stand in diametric opposition to the Soviet aesthetic of the day, with its homemade loaves of dark bread, its communes and caps and kvass.

Tamar Adler, writing in a photo-essay in The New York Times Magazine about the strange, colorful, gelatinous recipes Betty Crocker concocted during what’s known as the atomic era, and how artificial these foods look to us now.

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