Culinary Sayings Quotes

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men — friends, coworkers, strangers — giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.

Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance, as they say in the army - and I always, always want to be ready. Just like Bigfoot.

Bigfoot understood — as I came to understand — that character is far more important than skills or employment history. And he recognized character — good and bad — brilliantly. He understood, and taught me, that a guy who shows up every day on time, never calls in sick, and does what he said he was going to do, is less likely to fuck you in the end than a guy who has an incredible resume but is less than reliable about arrival time. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have. Bigfoot understood that there are two types of people in the world: those who do what they say they're going to do — and everyone else.

The privilege of living now is that I can seat myself at the master's table - the table of my white ancestor, a slaveholder - and interpret his world, and he has no say.

Character you either have or don't have. Bigfoot understood that there are two types of people in the world: those who do what they say they're going to do — and everyone else.

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.

Writer's Resolution Enough's Enough! No more shall I Pursue the Muse and scorch the pie Or dream of Authoring a book When I (unhappy soul) must cook; Or burn the steak while I wool-gather, And stir my spouse into a lather Invoking words like "Darn!" and such And others that are worse (Oh, much!) Concerning culinary knack Which I (HE says) completely lack. I'll keep my mind upon my work; I'll learn each boresome cooking quirk; This day shall mark a new leaf's turning... That smell! Oh Hell! The beans are burning!

Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing. The fruits of his attention can be seen in all the arts, crafts, and sciences. It can cost him time and effort, but it pays handsomely. If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil's Cathedral. Or how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the inside of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses and the juice of pine trees to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle. No doubt his wife urged him to get up and do something useful. I am sure that he was a stalwart enough lover of things to pay no attention at all to her nagging; but how wonderful it would have been if he had known what we know now about his dawdling. He could have silenced her with the greatest riposte of all time: Don't bother me; I am creating the possibility of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas. But if man's attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him - every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact - he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods - to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things. They made a calf in Horeb; thus they turned their Glory into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay. Bad enough, you say. Ah, but it was worse than that. Whatever good may have resided in the Golden Calf - whatever loveliness of gold or beauty of line - went begging the minute the Israelites got the idea that it was their savior out of the bondage of Egypt. In making the statue a matter of the greatest point, they missed the point of its matter altogether.

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

The food wasn’t as bad as the Scholomance cafeteria, which was as much as you could really say for it, although they presented it with the confident triumph of someone offering you marvels of the culinary art, complete with heavy white napkins and inconvenient cutlery that repeatedly threatened to fall down and disappear into the crevices of the seat or into spots unreachable except by someone with arms like a flamingo’s legs.

In my mother's book, a vegetarian is somebody who is not concern with his or her diet and health. "Someone who prefer bush and grass, as if they is sheeps and cows, is somebody who don't have enough food to put in his mouth," she always say. Only vegetarians eat dryfood regularly—and like to eat it, too. It is not considered normal for a person to cook food that doesn't have some amount o' meat or fish to go with it. Only someone who is starving, who don't have money to buy a fish head or a single flying fish or even the head of a dolphin—in other words, a person who is "catching his arse"—has to eat dryfood. A person at this stage is a person one remove from having to cook bakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

For somehow, beneath this gorgeous paradigm of unnecessary being, lies the Act by which it exists. You have just now reduced it to its parts, shivered it into echoes, and pressed it to a memory, but you have also caught the hint that a thing is more than the sum of all the insubstantialities that comprise it. Hopefully, you will never again argue that the solidities of the world are mere matters of accident, creatures of air and darkness, temporary and meaningless shapes out of nothing. Perhaps now you have seen at least dimly that the uniquenesses of creation are the result of continuous creative support, of effective regard by no mean lover. He likes onions, therefore they are. The fit, the colors, the smell, the tensions, the tastes, the textures, the likes, the shapes are a response, not to some forgotten decree that there may as well be onions as turnips, but to His present delight - His intimate and immediate joy in all you have seen, and in the thousand other wonders you do not even suspect. With Peter, the onion says, Lord, it is good for us to be here. Yes, says God. Tov, Very good.

Anthropologists like to say that to observe a culture is usually, in some small way, to change it. A similar dictum holds true for Bourdain's show. Whenever Bourdain discovered a hole-in-the-wall culinary gem, he places it on the tourist map, thereby leaching it of the authenticity that drew him to it in the first place. 'It's a gloriously doomed enterprise,' he acknowledged. 'I'm in the business of finding great places, and then we fuck them up.

I began to understand that what holds us back from culinary progress is often some cultural roadblock that we honor in the name of preservation - the kind of arbitrary roadblock that says, You're not supposed to do that with kimchi.

Torture Cuisine by Stewart Stafford Kitchen death growls, Whipping that cream, Beating those eggs, Burning all the toast. Knifing diced cheese, Drawn, quartered ham, Straining tomato sauce, Crushed-down walnuts. Peeling potatoes naked, Then smashing them up, You say purée, I say mash, Turkey and chicken skewers. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men—friends, coworkers, strangers—giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much—no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”) I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed—she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you. But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool

he had a stammer; he called his dog Astronomer; instead of however he used to say howsoever, and he introduced in his own house a French cuisine, the secret of which, according to his cook’s ideas, consisted in completely altering the natural taste of each dish: in the hands of this culinary master meat turned out to be fish, fish became mushrooms, and macaroni ended up dry as powder; moreover, no carrot would be permitted in a soup that had not first assumed a rhomboidal or trapezoidal shape.

back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?

With nothing else to do, I sipped my tea and watched the sushi masters. With quick precise strokes, they transformed glistening blocks of fatty tuna and gray mullet into smooth neat rectangles. The morsels shone like jewels, the color, cut, and shape perfectly showcasing the seafood's freshness. The two men snatched handfuls of rice from a wide wooden bowl and shaped them into ovals as if preparing for a snowball fight. They say the most talented sushi masters can form their rice so that every grain points in the same direction.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature- in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)- that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when wand where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dillute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking all desire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any "blueness." Above all, I want to stop missing you. 9. So please do not write to tell me about anymore beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn't X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty. 10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness. 11. That is to say: I don't care if it's colorless.

A long-time associate, Beth, who likes to refer to herself as the 'Grill Bitch', excelled at putting loudmouths and fools into their proper place. She refused to behave any differently than her male co-workers: she'd change in the same locker area, dropping her pants right alongside them. She was as sexually aggressive, and as vocal about it, as her fellow cooks, but unlikely to suffer behavior she found demeaning. One sorry Moroccan cook who pinched her ass found himself suddenly bent over a cutting board with Beth dry-humping him from behind, saying, 'How do you like it, bitch?' The guy almost died of shame — and never repeated that mistake again. Another female line cook I had the pleasure of working with arrived at work one morning to find that an Ecuadorian pasta cook had decorated her station with some particularly ugly hard-core pornography of pimply-assed women getting penetrated in every orifice by pot-bellied guys with prison tattoos and back hair. She didn't react at all, but a little later, while passing through the pasta man's station, casually remarked. 'Jose, I see you brought in some photos of the family. Mom looks good for her age.

have your fish guy remove gills, guts and scales and wash in cold water. Rub inside and out with kosher salt and crushed black pepper. Jam a clove of garlic, a slice of lemon and a few sprigs of fresh herb — say, rosemary and thyme — into the cavity where the guts used to be. Place on a lightly oiled pan or foil and throw the fish into a very hot oven. Roast till crispy and cooked through. Drizzle a little basil oil over the plate — you know, the stuff you made with your blender and then put in your new squeeze bottle? — sprinkle with chiffonaded parsley, garnish with basil top . . . See?

We have come to this strange cultural moment where food is both tool and weapon. I am grateful for it. My enter life I knew, and many others knew, that our daily bread was itself a kind of scripture of our origins, a taste track of our lives. It is a lie that food is just fuel. It has always had layers of meaning, and humans for the most part despise meaningless food. In America, and especially the American South, 'race' endures alongside the sociopolitics of food; it is not a stretch to say that that race is both on and at the Southern table. But if it is on the table alone we have learned nothing; we continue to reduce each other to stereotypical essences. It is not enough to be white at the table. It is not enough to be black at the table. It is not enough to be 'just human' at the table. Complexity must come with us - in fact it will invite itself to the feast whether we like it or not. We can choose to acknowledge the presence of history, economics, class, cultural forces, and the idea of race in shaping our experience, or we can languish in circuitous arguments over what it all means and get nowhere. I present my journey to you as a means out of the whirlwind, an attempt to tell as much truth as time will allow.

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

She found Diana’s room. Diana was sitting in her bed using a remote control to idly flip through the channels on the wall-mounted TV. “You,” Diana said by way of greeting. “Me,” Astrid said. “Can’t believe it,” Diana said. “All this time. And there’s still nothing on.” Astrid laughed and lowered herself slowly into a chair. “You know how they say hospital food is so awful? Somehow I’m not having that reaction.” “Tapioca beats rat,” Diana said. “I never minded rat as much as that dog jerky we were getting for a while. The stuff Albert had them flavor with celery salt? That was the culinary low point for me.” “Yeah, well, I had a lower low point,” Diana said, sounding angry. Or maybe not angry, maybe hurt. Astrid put a hand on Diana’s arm, and Diana did not shake it off.

I love analogies! Let’s have one. Imagine that you dearly love, absolutely crave, a particular kind of food. There are some places in town that do this particular cuisine just amazingly. Lots of people who are into this kind of food hold these restaurants in high regard. But let’s say, at every single one of these places, every now and then throughout the meal, at random moments, the waiter comes over and punches any women at the table right in the face. And people of color and/or LGBT folks as well! Now, most of the white straight cis guys who eat there, they have no problem–after all, the waiter isn’t punching them in the face, and the non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-guys who love this cuisine keep coming back so it can’t be that bad, can it? Hell, half the time the white straight cis guys don’t even see it, because it’s always been like that and it just seems like part of the dining experience. Granted, some white straight cis guys have noticed and will talk about how they don’t like it and they wish it would stop. Every now and then, you go through a meal without the waiter punching you in the face–they just give you a small slap, or come over and sort of make a feint and then tell you they could have messed you up bad. Which, you know, that’s better, right? Kind of? Now. Somebody gets the idea to open a restaurant where everything is exactly as delicious as the other places–but the waiters won’t punch you in the face. Not even once, not even a little bit. Women and POC and LGBT and various combinations thereof flock to this place, and praise it to the skies. And then some white, straight, cis dude–one of the ones who’s on record as publicly disapproving of punching diners in the face, who has expressed the wish that it would stop (maybe even been very indignant on this topic in a blog post or two) says, “Sure, but it’s not anything really important or significant. It’s getting all blown out of proportion. The food is exactly the same! In fact, some of it is awfully retro. You’re just all relieved cause you’re not getting punched in the face, but it’s not really a significant development in this city’s culinary scene. Why couldn’t they have actually advanced the state of food preparation? Huh? Now that would have been worth getting excited about.” Think about that. Seriously, think. Let me tell you, being able to enjoy my delicious supper without being punched in the face is a pretty serious advancement. And only the folks who don’t get routinely assaulted when they try to eat could think otherwise.

Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men—friends, coworkers, strangers—giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.

Yet each time, after consulting her watch, she sat down again at my request, so that in the end she had spent several hours with me without my having demanded anything of her; the things I said to her were related to those I had said during the preceding hours, were totally unconnected with what I was thinking about, what I desired, and remained doggedly parallel to all this. There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were trying to gain time by speaking about things that are utterly alien to the one thing that preoccupies us. We chatter away, whereas the words we should like to utter would have by now been accompanied by a gesture, if indeed we have not – to give ourselves the pleasure of immediate action and to slake the curiosity we feel about the ensuing reactions to it – without a word, without so much as a by-your-leave, already made this gesture. It is true that I was not in the least in love with Albertine: born from the mist outside, she could do no more than satisfy the fanciful desire awakened in me by the change in the weather, poised midway between the desires that are satisfied by culinary arts and by monumental sculpture respectively, because it made me dream both of mingling my flesh with a substance that was different and warm, and of attaching to some point of my recumbent body a divergent body, as Eve’s body is barely attached by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost perpendicular in the Romanesque bas-reliefs in the Balbec cathedral, representing in so noble and so placid a fashion, still almost like a classical frieze, the creation of woman; in them God is followed everywhere, as by two ministers, by two little angels recalling – like the winged, swirling creatures of the summer that winter has caught by surprise and spared – cupids from Herculaneum still surviving well into the thirteenth century, flagging now in their last flight, weary, but never relinquishing the grace we might expect of them, over the whole front of the porch.

the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women.’)

Mamá was mixing bread dough by the kitchen window, pressing and pulling in a culinary tug of war. It took all her strength to mix four loaves at once, flour up to her elbows, tendrils of hair escaping from her bun, but it hardly made sense to do less. Her good bread disappeared as fast as she made it. Why, her family could hammer away a whole loaf in one sitting. Mamá smiled, then crossed herself against the sin of pride. Modesta was always saying, “That’s too much work! Why not just buy a loaf at the store?” Those sickly soft things they call bread? Mamá snorted as she slapped her dough. It was a sin to call such cotton bread! Her bread could stand up to thick bacon sandwiches and homemade blackberry jam. Hers melted in your mouth like cake. Indeed, after supper Father often buttered a big slice for dessert. At the thought of her husband, Mamá crossed herself again, this time not for pride, but for love. Everything she did was done for him. She meant to work for God, to make her life a prayer, but since the first time she saw Manuel, long before they were married, his was the face she pictured as she wiped her brow, bent her back to the task at hand. She shrugged. Perhaps her daughters would do better...

In a village quaint and bright, Lived a chef with great delight. Every morn, with break of day, He’d cook his meals, then he’d say “Did you eat?” His voice so clear, Echoed far and echoed near. Neighbors smiled, children played, In his care, their hearts were laid. One fine day, a stranger came, Hungry, tired, seeking fame. “Teach me, chef, your art so fine, I long to make my dishes shine.” With a nod and knowing glance, The chef began the culinary dance. “First, you learn to truly care, For food is love, you must declare.” Days turned weeks, the lessons flew, The stranger learned and friendships grew. But fame and glory filled his mind, Leaving care and love behind. He opened a place, grand and vast, But love for food, a thing of the past. “Did you eat?” He’d never ask, Focused solely on his task. DID YOU EAT? Customers came, then soon they went, For something vital had been spent. Food was fine, but heart was cold, A lesson learned, a tale retold. Back he went, with heavy heart, To the chef who’d played his part. “Teach me now, what I have missed, For love and care, I have dismissed.” The chef then smiled, wise and kind, “To care for others, open your mind. The food you make, with love instill, And hearts you’ll nourish, a void you’ll fill.” “Did you eat?” He asked anew, And in that question, wisdom true. For food with love is more than treat, It’s a bond, a joy, a life complete. So here’s the tale, both light and deep, A lesson strong for all to keep. In every meal, in every greet, Ask with love, “Did you eat?

Did You Eat?" In a village quaint and bright, Lived a chef with great delight. Every morn, with break of day, He’d cook his meals, then he’d say “Did you eat?” His voice so clear, Echoed far and echoed near. Neighbors smiled, children played, In his care, their hearts were laid. One fine day, a stranger came, Hungry, tired, seeking fame. “Teach me, chef, your art so fine, I long to make my dishes shine.” With a nod and knowing glance, The chef began the culinary dance. “First, you learn to truly care, For food is love, you must declare.” Days turned weeks, the lessons flew, The stranger learned and friendships grew. But fame and glory filled his mind, Leaving care and love behind. He opened a place, grand and vast, But love for food, a thing of the past. “Did you eat?” He’d never ask, Focused solely on his task. Customers came, then soon they went, For something vital had been spent. Food was fine, but heart was cold, A lesson learned, a tale retold. Back he went, with heavy heart, To the chef who’d played his part. “Teach me now, what I have missed, For love and care, I have dismissed.” The chef then smiled, wise and kind, “To care for others, open your mind. The food you make, with love instill, And hearts you’ll nourish, a void you’ll fill.” “Did you eat?” He asked anew, And in that question, wisdom true. For food with love is more than treat, It’s a bond, a joy, a life complete. So here’s the tale, both light and deep, A lesson strong for all to keep. In every meal, in every greet, Ask with love, “Did you eat?

went to her workshop three times a week to paint with Kirsten. She rarely frequented the Lark House dining room, preferring to eat out at local restaurants where the owners knew her, or in her apartment, when her daughter-in-law sent the chauffeur around with one of her favorite dishes. Irina kept only basic necessities in her kitchen: fresh fruit, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, honey. Alma and Seth often invited Irina to their ritual Sunday lunch at Sea Cliff, where the family paid the matriarch homage. To Seth, who had previously used any pretext not to arrive before dessert—for even he was unable to consider not putting in an appearance at all—Irina’s presence made the occasion infinitely more appealing. He was still stubbornly pursuing her, but since he was meeting with little success he also went out with previous girlfriends willing to put up with his fickleness. He was bored with them and did not succeed in making Irina jealous. As his grandmother often said and the family often repeated, why waste ammunition on vultures? It was yet another enigmatic saying often used by the Belascos. To Alma, these family reunions began with a pleasant sense of anticipation at seeing her loved ones, particularly her granddaughter, Pauline (she saw Seth frequently enough), but often ended up being a bore, since every topic of conversation became a pretext for getting angry, not from any lack of affection, but out of the bad habit of arguing over trivialities. Seth always looked for ways to challenge or scandalize his parents; Pauline brought to the table yet another cause she had embraced, which she explained in great detail, from genital mutilation to animal slaughterhouses; Doris took great pains to offer her most exquisite culinary experiments, which were veritable banquets, yet regularly ended up weeping in her room because nobody appreciated them; good old Larry meanwhile performed a constant balancing act to avoid quarrels. The grandmother took advantage of Irina to dissipate tension, because the Belascos always behaved in a civilized fashion in front of strangers, even if it was only a humble employee from

We had a second date that night, then a third, and then a fourth. And after each date, my new romance novel protagonist called me, just to seal the date with a sweet word. For date five, he invited me to his house on the ranch. We were clearly on some kind of a roll, and now he wanted me to see where he lived. I was in no position to say no. Since I knew his ranch was somewhat remote and likely didn’t have many restaurants nearby, I offered to bring groceries and cook him dinner. I agonized for hours over what I could possibly cook for this strapping new man in my life; clearly, no mediocre cuisine would do. I reviewed all the dishes in my sophisticated, city-girl arsenal, many of which I’d picked up during my years in Los Angeles. I finally settled on a non-vegetarian winner: Linguine with Clam Sauce--a favorite from our family vacations in Hilton Head. I made the delicious, aromatic masterpiece of butter, garlic, clams, lemon, wine, and cream in Marlboro Man’s kitchen in the country, which was lined with old pine cabinetry. And as I stood there, sipping some of the leftover white wine and admiring the fruits of my culinary labor, I was utterly confident it would be a hit. I had no idea who I was dealing with. I had no idea that this fourth-generation cattle rancher doesn’t eat minced-up little clams, let alone minced-up little clams bathed in wine and cream and tossed with long, unwieldy noodles that are difficult to negotiate. Still, he ate it. And lucky for him, his phone rang when he was more than halfway through our meal together. He’d been expecting an important call, he said, and excused himself for a good ten minutes. I didn’t want him to go away hungry--big, strong rancher and all--so when I sensed he was close to getting off the phone, I took his plate to the stove and heaped another steaming pile of fishy noodles onto his plate. And when Marlboro Man returned to the table he smiled politely, sat down, and polished off over half of his second helping before finally pushing away from the table and announcing, “Boy, am I stuffed!” I didn’t realize at the time just how romantic a gesture that had been.

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.

She pointed to the paper lying on the breakfast nook table. "I don't think the person sending them is very smart." He pulled a latex glove on one hand and picked up the note by a corner. "Why do you say that?" "Bad grammar. Again. They keep using the wrong version of you're. I hate that." Shepler raised an eyebrow as he slipped the note into a plastic bag he had pulled out of his pocket. "I would think you'd hate getting death threats even more." "Well…yeah. That sucks, too.

Why then," he says, suddenly turning to me and folding his arms across his chest, "did your mother study in France? Why did you study in Italy? Which I presume you did because you know as well as I do that no culinary education is considered complete without an international apprenticeship." His voice is smug, his mouth curled in a half smile. "Wait a minute," I say, feeling suddenly compelled to defend American culinary tradition (not to mention my own expensive and, in my opinion, extremely comprehensive education at the Culinary Institute of America). "I studied in Italy because I cook Italian food. My mother studied in France because in the late 1960s there was no other option. But that certainly doesn't mean that there isn't a rich and varied culinary tradition in America today. Stop at a roadside barbeque in Texas, eat a lobster roll in Bangor, Maine, order a fried egg on your Primanti sandwich in Pittsburgh, for heaven's sake!

Renzo from Roddino leaves us on the doorstep of Osteria da Gemma, a Langhe culinary landmark in a village scarcely large enough to fill the restaurant. Before we can shake off the wet and the cold, before we can see a menu or catch our breath, the waiter comes by and drops a cutting board full of salumi between us. Prego. Then another plate comes out- carne cruda, a soft mound of hand-chopped veal dressed with nothing but olive oil and a bit of lemon, a classic warm-up to a Piedmont meal. The plates continue, and it soon becomes very clear that we have no say in the matter. Insalata russa, a tricolore of toothsome green peas, orange carrots, and ivory potatoes, bound in a cloak of mayonnaise and crumbled egg yolk. Vitello tonnato, Piedmont's famous take on surf and turf: thin slices of roast beef with a thick emulsion of mayo and tuna. Each bite brings us slowly out of the mist of emotion and into the din of the dining room.

Exactly. Well, not exactly. She didn’t say ‘have sex.’ She

[W]e may infer that it is also not possible to gather pink grapefruit from your juniper bushes, or pine nuts from your tomato plants, or lemons trom youur box hedge. Pursuing the analogy relentlessly, we may also surmise that you cannot send your child to a culinary school and expect to get back a mechanical engineer. You cannot send them to art school, and wonder why your son never became a doctor like you wanted. You can't pay for law school, and then be surprised when an attorney eventually shows up. We often act astonished when we have no right whatsoever to be surprised in any way. We say, wide-eyed with Aaron, that all we did was put in a bunch of gold, and "out came this calf" (Exod. 32:24). That has to rank as one of the lamest excuses in the Bible, and here we are, still using it. All we did was put in hundreds of billions of dollars, and out came this misbegotten culture. How could this have happened? We are frankly at a loss. And lest I be accused of being too oblique in the point I am seeking to make, you cannot send all the Christian kids off to be educated in a school system that is riddled with rank unbelief, shot through with relativism, and diseased with perverse sexual fantasies, and then wonder at the results you get.

made all over the city for the treats he found irresistible. “That place in the 5th arrondissement,” he murmured. “How aren’t there lines around the block?” Claire cleared her throat. “It sounds as if you two have had some adventures,” she said, “at least of the culinary sort.” Their gazes broke. Mia took the platter of eggs Trey passed. He applied himself to pouring syrup onto his waffle. They ate their meal with little further interruption. When Claire made a move to clear the table, her son put his hand on her arm. “I’ll do it. Stay right where you are, Mom.” She pulled in a breath. “I like hearing you say that word, Trey.” “I…” He closed his eyes, then sat back in his own chair. “Should we talk?” “I’m not running away

but I can say just as surely that this minute, in a northern-California valley, I can taste-smell-hear-see and feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace. They were uneven in both thickness and color, probably made by a new apprentice in the hotel kitchen, and almost surely they smelled faintly of either chicken or fish, for that was always the case there. They were a little too salty, to encourage me to drink. They were ineffable. I am still nourished by them. That is probably why I can be so firm about not eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them.

Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents.

Lucy paused, hands full of green beans, her memory flashing back to the giant pots of crawfish on the stove. Her Mama’s green eyes would squint into the steam, hair pulled back, a frown of concentration on her face. The salted water was flavored and ready to receive the “mudbugs” out of their burlap sacks. Other than an onion or maybe an ear of corn, if it wasn’t alive when you threw it in, then it shouldn’t be in the pot, she’d say. Did her Mama mind that Lucy didn’t cook those old family recipes? Was she turning her back on her culinary heritage as surely as Paulette was? She snapped the ends of the beans faster, glancing at the clock. This whole dinner was breaking her Mama’s cardinal rule: don’t hurry. She thought if a cook was in a hurry, you might as well just make a sandwich and go on your way.

Carla liked to act brave and say she would happily age into a single spinster, but deep down she didn't like to be lonely any more than anybody else. She needed to put her commitment phobias to bed, literally, with the fine detective.

You can accomplish anything, anything at all, if you set your mind to it. One must adopt a can-do-anything attitude. You were a professional. You didn't say no, not ever. You didn't complain. You didn't get tired. And you showed up, no matter what. You got there. Nothing but nothing kept you from reaching that kitchen. Also, you accepted the implicit obligation of excellence. Every effort would be your absolute best. Otherwise it was simply not worth doing. At the same time, you accepted that your best was never your best and never could be because you could always work faster, cleaner, more efficiently. Many of the changes a formal culinary education wrought were in one's attitude, a kind of tougher-than-thou stance. I'm tougher than you, faster than you, better than you. I'm a chef. I work in inhuman conditions, and I like it that way. I don't have to sleep every day if there's work to be done now, you get the work done. Only got a couple hours' sleep last night, and you've got eighteen more hours of work ahead of you. Good. You like that. You're a chef. You can sleep later.

We were just a bunch of scared and overly zealous kids grasping for a future we had all been promised, only to find out when we got there it had been reverse mortgaged so our spawners could go on cruises and never retire, just for fun. We did everything we were told to do. “Go to college so you don’t flip burgers!” our parents would say in liturgical unison. And all the politicians said, “Amen!” with raging boners over the interest we would be paying until the day we died of a preventable ailment. In the beginning, we never even questioned why we disparaged the culinary artists who prepared our meals, nor did we anticipate that we would all soon be fighting on the same battlefield together begging for table scraps. Comrades in arms of a war we didn’t even start. We were casualties of a massive game of Craps our parents were playing with the economy, betting their odds against our planet, our gains, our jobs, our education, our healthcare, our future. We were bitter millennials long before they even told us we had a title.

The little ones eat their meal, which at times requires us to coax, plead or threaten, spewing old chestnuts such as, ‘There will be no dessert for you, young man,’ and ‘Do you think dragons leave food on their plates?’ ‘Dragons don’t use plates.’ ‘I know they don’t use plates, I know that. I’m just saying … could you please just finish it.’ After their meal is eaten, sort of, the little ones are allowed to watch a bit of television. Dragons for him, Peppa Pig for her. (There is no question that my wife and I, along with many parents, wish the creators of that irritating animated swine a slow death, but they are so rich they have probably purchased immortality. And yet at the same time said pig allows us respite for half an hour or so every day. May God bless those creators.) While the little kids are immersed, I begin to make culinary preparations for the next ‘sitting’. TV time has ended, and we usher the little ones to bed. As usual the two-year old is screaming between gulps of her bottle because she has had to leave her beloved pink porcine pal. After settling her into her cot, we then take turns reading about dragons to the five-year-old, who proceeds to tell us he’s hungry, so we begrudgingly make him some toast and say something like, ‘I told you to eat your dinner. This is the last time.’ And it is. Until tomorrow.

I wouldn't want this to turn into a generic Asian hodgepodge, for example. Or a brand where the Korean part is no longer core to the business. Or the branding is offensive. Remember when Abercrombie and Fitch had all those offensive Asian T-shirts a few years back? I wouldn't want that to happen." Wyatt slurped his straw. "Jessie, sometimes you really overthink it all. For a company your size, the offer is more than fair. You'll have so much money, you can go invest it somewhere and retire on a secluded beach. These guys, Rich and Tommy, they have vision! They make magic happen with any business they acquire. Their Persian Eats cookbook based on their Netflix series has held the number one spot on the bestseller list for three months. The author is this fancy Culinary Institute of the Arts instructor. Dudley something; I forget his name, some English dude. Tommy, didn't you tell me he was chomping at the bit to do a splashy Seoul Sistas cookbook?" My whole body tensed. "We already have one coming out. And did you just say a White dude would be writing a Korean Seoul Sistas cookbook?" He backtracked in the most Wyatt-like way. "I never said that exactly. And I didn't say he was White." "With a name like Dudley, he's not exactly a sista." The silence in the room was palpable. Wyatt asked, "So no deal? Any smart business leader would jump at this opportunity." My God. Was he serious? "No deal." I looked at Daniel, pleading for any lifeline he could throw me to get me out of there. He stood from his chair. "Rich, Tommy, as always, it's been a pleasure working with you these last few weeks, but my contract ends now, at five P.M. And Wyatt, I'm respectfully declining your offer of full-time employment." Wyatt's mouth formed a perfect O. "But... why?" "I have a new client to counsel. Jessie Kim. And effective immediately, we'll be declining your offer and evaluating all of our options for selling or retaining her business." I stood and pushed the chair back with my leg. "Thank you so much for finding time to meet with me, and it was great meeting you, Rich and Tommy." Shooting a death stare at Wyatt, I continued, "As a smart business leader in a new and growing category, it's best for me now to consider my options and explore alternatives.

Within all of these species, of course, there still exist tremendous variations in taste, color and texture. Each season produces new tastes, much like a wine from, say, Burgundy does. For most of their natural history, salmon have been wild foods, so their taste, texture and color resist the homogeneity demanded by industrial food production. Every single wild salmon is different. This is part of the gastronomic beauty of the fish, even though it frustrates consumers with palates trained by corporate food to expect conformity. This fact, too, has been written by evolution and the currents of deep time, processes that privilege diversity over uniformity, chaos over control.

Even your oven isn’t as reliable as you think. How do we know this? We have more than two dozen ovens in our test kitchen and we keep an oven thermometer in each oven to tell us if they are properly calibrated. That is, are they reaching and holding the temperature set on the dial? With heavy use, we find that our ovens generally slip out of calibration in just a few months, so we get them serviced. The process will happen more slowly at home, but the odds are pretty good that your oven is not at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, even though that’s what the dial says.

She kneeled down, opened the wine fridge, and scanned the shelves, filled with a variety of white wines. Sam began to pull each bottle out and read the labels; all of the wines were products of the dozens of vineyards that dotted northern Michigan, including the two peninsulas that ran north from Traverse City into Grand Traverse Bay. There was a wealth of whites- chardonnays, sauvignon blancs, Rieslings, rosés, and dessert wines. All of these were produced within a few miles of here, Sam thought, a feeling of pride filling her soul. Sam pulled out a pinot gris and stood. A few bottles of red gleamed in the fading day's light: a cab franc, a pinot noir, a merlot. Robust reds were a bit harder to come by in northern Michigan because of the weather and growing season, but Sam was happy to see such a selection. Sam had had the pleasure of meeting famed Italian chef Mario Batali at culinary school, and the two had bonded over Michigan. Batali owned a summer home in Northport, not far from Suttons Bay, and he had been influential early on in touting Michigan's summer produce and fruit, fresh fish, and local farms and wineries. When someone in class had mocked Michigan wines, saying they believed it was too cold to grow grapes, Batali had pointedly reminded them that Michigan was on the forty-fifth parallel, just like Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Alsace. Sam had then added that Lake Michigan acted like a big blanket or air conditioner along the state's coastline, and the effect created perfect temperatures and growing conditions for grapes and, of course, apples, cherries, asparagus, and so much more. Batali had winked at her, and Sam had purchased a pair of orange Crocs not long after in his honor.

All this is necessary for the sake of that one special woman... ... to whom I will devote the whole of my cooking." "...?" "The First Seat on the Totsuki Institue's Council of Ten... the chef who holds that position is one of the most important people to the future of the culinary world... right?" Ah. For all his annoyance earlier, he looks like he can't feel insulated at that. "Now, who do you think the most important woman is in the culinary world?" "Hm?" "I'm sure you could make a case for many different ladies, but to me there's only one choice... The heir to the Nakiri Family- a family that has commanded the Totsuki Institute for generations... ... and bearer of the Divine Tongue itself... ... Dean Erina Nakiri! If I'm going to make the greatest woman of the culinary world mine... ... then I have to be the greatest man- otherwise I won't be worthy of her. Don't you agree?" "What?! Um! Then you're saying..." "Erina Nakiri... ... will be my bride." "WHAT?!" "I'm just gearing up to start my courtship now, though.

what holds us back from culinary progress is often some cultural roadblock that we honor in the name of preservation—the kind of arbitrary roadblock that says, You’re not supposed to do that with kimchi.* 3

Our culinary memory is short and we live in a very different food world now. Chances are you won’t remember the late nineties as a time when restaurants were basically inaccessible to most Americans, but it was. Our dining culture was, by and large, bifurcated. On one side, you had prohibitively expensive, mostly French-inspired restaurants with excellent service and comfortable dining rooms. On the other, there were far more affordable options serving the cuisines of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in humble settings—a genre that’s been lumped together as “ethnic food” since the 1960s. But as delicious as those places could be, they were usually locked into the traditions and time periods from which their immigrant proprietors first came. There really wasn’t a place where you could find something in between: innovative cuisine that was neither married to France nor fixed to the recipes of the motherland, made with high-quality ingredients, and available for, say, twenty bucks. I could tell that race played a major role in America’s slow uptake on this concept, which only made it more personal for me.* 9

Most Italians consume alcohol every day, but it’s not what we call drinking. For Americans and northern Europeans alcoholic beverages are mind-altering drugs, used as tranquilizers, sleeping potions, inhibition-looseners (“Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker”—Ogden Nash), or roads to inebriation. That is to say, to getting tipsy, high, drunk, plastered, smashed, sloshed, sozzled, soused, crocked, wrecked, juiced, stinko, tight, pie-eyed, crosseyed, shit-faced, blitzed, fried, wasted, gassed, polluted, pissed, tanked up, ripped, loaded, pickled, bombed, blasted, blooey, blotto, blind drunk, roaring drunk, dead drunk, falling down drunk, drunk as a lord, stewed to the gills, or feeling no pain—and that’s just my own personal vocabulary. Italians reach that state so infrequently that their language provides only a few tame options—ubriaco (drunk), brillo (tipsy), alticcio (high), sbronzo (drunk)—with at most perso (lost) or fradicio (rotten) tacked on for a touch of color. They don’t even have a proper word for a hangover, though if pressed they’ll come up with the stately postumi della sbornia, aftereffects of overindulgence. For Italians, wine and beer are foods. If they provide a little buzz that’s just a pleasant side benefit, improving the sparkle of the conversation. When I first traveled in Italy, parents regularly fed wine-laced water to their kids (“acquavino”), vaccinating them against later dipsomania. And at lunchtime in the cafeteria of my Nuovo Regina Margherita Hospital the docs would jostle to sit at the chaplain’s table, because he’d always bring a bottle of good country wine. Even the harder stuff fits into a culinary protocol: a seven p.m. Campari is meant to whet the appetite, and the cognac or amaro at the end of a large meal to aid digestion. Which is why, in proportion, Italy has one-tenth as many problem drinkers as America.

By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun. By all rights I should have been, at various times: shot to death, stabbed to death, imprisoned for a significant period of time, or at very least, victimized by a casaba-sized tumor.

I'd love to cook," she says, "but who has the time? I can't afford to spend two days baking a cake." The implication, of course, is that only unimportant people have that kind of time. Unimportant people like me. I wait for Adam to jump in and save me, but instead he shoves a forkful of lamb into his mouth and feigns deep interest in the contents of his dinner plate. For someone with Adam's political ambitions and penchant for friendly debate, I'm always amazed at the lengths he goes to avoid confrontation with his parents. "I have a full-time job," I say, offering Sandy a labored smile, "and somehow I manage." Sandy delicately places her fork on the table and interlaces her fingers. "I beg your pardon?" My cheeks flush, and all the champagne and wine rush to my head at once. "All I'm saying is... we make time for the things we actually want to do. That's all." Sandy purses her lips and sweeps her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. "Hannah, dear, I am very busy. I am on the board of three charities and am hosting two galas this year. It's not a matter of wanting to cook. I simply have more important things to do." For a woman so different from my own mother- the frosted, well-groomed socialite to my mother's mousy, rumpled academic- she and my mother share a remarkably similar view of the role of cooking in a modern woman's life. For them, cooking is an irrelevant hobby, an amusement for women who lack the brains for more high-powered pursuits or the money to pay someone to perform such a humdrum chore. Sandy Prescott and my mother would agree on very little, but as women who have been liberated from the perfunctory task of cooking a nightly dinner, they would see eye to eye on my intense interest in the culinary arts. Were I a stronger person, someone more in control of her faculties who has not drunk multiple glasses of champagne, I would probably let Sandy's remark go without commenting any further. But I cannot be that person. At least not tonight. Not when Sandy is suggesting, as it seems everyone does, that cooking isn't a priority worthy of a serious person's time. "You would make the time if you wanted to," I say. "But obviously you don't.

To say that Bittersweet Café was her happy place was perhaps an understatement. In the last two years, Rachel had left behind her high-pressure executive chef job and Melody her dead-end position in a chain bakery, then decided to open their dream restaurant together. The way all the details had come together was downright magical; nowhere in Denver's history had a functional café and bakery materialized in under four months. But Ana had no doubt there had been a healthy measure of divine intervention in the situation. She could feel it in the mood and the atmosphere of this place. Light, welcoming, refreshing. It was no wonder they'd quickly developed a devoted following. They were already in the middle of plans to take over the vacant space in the strip mall beside them and expand to meet their ever-growing demand. Ana couldn't be prouder. If she were truthful, she was also a little jealous. She might be good at her job, and she was certainly well paid, but there was an allure to the idea of working with her best friends, being surrounded by delicious food and baked goods. Too bad she had absolutely no culinary talent. Her mom had made sure she could cook rice properly and prepare Filipino dishes like adobong manok and kaldereta, but her skills stopped there. Considering the fat and calorie content of those foods, she'd left her childhood meals behind in favor of an endless stream of grilled chicken or fish over salad.

I often speak at churches,” explained Hyman when asked about his culinary philosophy. “I say, ‘It’s really easy. Just ask yourself, Did God make this or did man make this? Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did God make an avocado? Yes.’ It’s pretty simple.

I would call this method some kind of cross between Marie Kondo and Swedish Death Cleaning,” I say.

You’re saying you decluttered your ex-fiancé?

Example: here's a very popular dish I used to serve at a highly regarded two-star joint in New York. I got thirty-two bucks an order for it and could barely keep enough in stock, people liked it so much. Take one fish — a red snapper, striped bass, or dorade — have your fish guy remove gills, guts and scales and wash in cold water. Rub inside and out with kosher salt and crushed black pepper. Jam a clove of garlic, a slice of lemon and a few sprigs of fresh herb — say, rosemary and thyme — into the cavity where the guts used to be. Place on a lightly oiled pan or foil and throw the fish into a very hot oven.

Bigfoot understood — as I came to understand — that character is far more important than skills or employment history. And he recognized character — good and bad — brilliantly. He understood, and taught me, that a guy who shows up every day on time, never calls in sick, and does what he said he was going to do, is less likely to fuck you in the end than a guy who has an incredible resume but is less than reliable about arrival time. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have. Bigfoot understood that there are two types of people in the world: those who do what they say they're going to do — and everyone else. He'd lift ex-junkie sleazeballs out of the gutter and turn them into trusted managers, guys who'd kill themselves rather than misuse one thin dime of Bigfoot receipts. He'd get Mexicans right off the boat, turn them into solid citizens with immigration lawyers, nice incomes and steady employment. But if Bigfoot calls them at four in the morning, wanting them to put in a rooftop patio, they'd better be prepared to roll out of bed and get busy quarrying limestone.