Tea Towels: The Softer Side of the Industrial Revolution
Once upon a time, back when horses and wagons roamed the Earth and the telephone was a twinkle in Alexander Graham Bell’s eye, tea towels were found in every Victorian English lady’s kitchen. Typically made from absorbent, finely woven soft linen, tea towels were ideal for drying china, glassware and delicate serving pieces without fear...
Black Beauty: Cooking with Cast Iron
There’s a reason certain things have, in Darwinian fashion, managed to survive in the face of so-called “advances” in technology. Even though you can get amazing musical replication from a synthesizer, for example, true aficionados would claim it can’t replace a Steinway or a Stradivarius. In the kitchen, nothing cooks quite like cast iron. Stainless...
A Shell-Shocking Discovery: Eggs
Years ago, when print magazines ruled the Earth, an article in Gourmet lit the first embers of the fire that eventually led me to culinary school. It was about the humble omelet. The essay by Francis Lam (now a judge on Top Chef Masters) extolled the French omelet as the pursuit of perfection. The French...
Flying the Coop: The Return of the Backyard Chicken
While eggs have been called Nature’s miracle food, they simply wouldn’t exist without chickens. Or, wait… would chickens not exist without eggs? Hmm. The age-old riddle. Like the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa, we’ll probably never know, but in the spirit of fowl play I did some digging into the homegrown chicken industry and made some...
A “Taste of” the Hudson Valley
If you’re looking for a true taste of the Hudson Valley, mark your calendar for the fifth annual Hudson Valley Bounty ‘Taste of’ Dinner on August 5 from 5 p.m. – 8 p.m. The Coumbia County Fairgrounds in Chatham, N.Y. sets the stage for this popular fundraising event, which this year commemorates its original founders....
A Culinary Legacy: Cast Iron’s Revival
There are some foods—scallops, a steak, pork chops—that cry out for a solid, gorgeous, homogeneous sear on the outside. Sure, you can get browning from a regular sauté pan. But let me speak plainly: Nothing cooks like cast iron. Cast iron, you say? That heavy, slightly dirty-looking skillet your grandmother used? The skillets the pioneers...
Preserving Memories
When I was growing up in North Carolina, we had a huge garden. My mother hated to garden or pretty much anything to do with the Great Outdoors, but with three young children at home, she was thrifty. While Dad and we kids toiled in the soil, she came up with ways to use the...
Salt of the Earth
I love Coney Island. Living in New York City, I’ve always escaped to the ocean, the only place in the city that feels truly wild and untamed. But Coney Island holds a special place in my heart: still rugged beneath its gentrifying shell, it’s best in the off-season, when it’s just me and the old...
Purity of Purpose
When I ditched the corporate life and enrolled in culinary school, and one based on French technique no less, I was prepared to be overwhelmed. All the terminology, the sauces, the variations, the pace, the chef-instructors whose accents and creative use of English made everyday a linguistic adventure. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was...
Cast Iron: Follow-up
As a follow-up to our last post on cast iron, today we are highlighting the true legends of the cast iron industry, and providing some tips on how to identify them. The two main gold standards of antique cast iron cookware are Wagner and Griswold. The Griswold company, originally Selden & Griswold, was the first...
