Pastry Food Quotes

Danish. I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.

You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!

The chef turned back to the housekeeper. “Why is there doubt about the relations between Monsieur and Madame Rutledge?” The sheets,” she said succinctly. Jake nearly choked on his pastry. “You have the housemaids spying on them?” he asked around a mouthful of custard and cream. Not at all,” the housekeeper said defensively. “It’s only that we have vigilant maids who tell me everything. And even if they didn’t, one hardly needs great powers of observation to see that they do not behave like a married couple.” The chef looked deeply concerned. “You think there’s a problem with his carrot?” Watercress, carrot—is everything food to you?” Jake demanded. The chef shrugged. “Oui.” Well,” Jake said testily, “there is a string of Rutledge’s past mistresses who would undoubtedly testify there is nothing wrong with his carrot.” Alors, he is a virile man . . . she is a beautiful woman . . . why are they not making salad together?

It wasn't a perfect body but it was the body she deserved. Not just from every bar of chocolate or bag of crisps or laden plate of food that she'd eaten. This body was also testament to all the hours in the gym and cycling up hills on her bike and glugging down two litres of water a day and learning to love vegetables and fruits that didn't come as optional extra with a pastry crust. She'd earned this body. This was her body and she had to stop giving it such a hard time.

You will eat no fried meats,” he began abruptly. “You will eat no pastries, but you will eat plenty of vegetables. You will eat good, substantial, wholesome food—the kind of food your mother makes. You will go to bed at ten o’clock and arise punctually at seven o’clock. You will not smoke or drink or chew. And you will follow this regimen all year round, for as long as you row for me. A man cannot abuse his body for six months and then expect to row the other six months. He must be a total abstainer all year.

My yogurt was nestled into a bag, waiting to turn into aushak, and all around us were sausages and pastry, lollipops and spices, chicken and cheese. Any world that contained all this, I thought surveying our loot, was a very fine place. I felt reinvigorated, alive, optimistic. The though of getting back to work suddenly seemed like fun.

She thought of him sprawled in the armchair in the downstairs study, calmly demolishing pastry after pastry while Aubrey looked at him in shock. Or what about that god-awful dinner? A variety of people looked daggers at him and tried several times to deliver a direct verbal cut, while he plowed through alarming amounts of beautifully prepared food with evident enjoyment for the cuisine and a monumental indifference for anybody else’s opinion.

I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.

Foods Uniquely Designed to Screw Up Your Brain Bagels Biscuits Cake Cereal Milk chocolate/white chocolate Cookies Energy bars Crackers Doughnuts Muffins Pastas Pastries Pies Granola bars Pizza Pretzels Waffles Pancakes White bread Milkshakes Frozen yogurt Ice cream Batter Gravy Jams Jellies Fries Chips Granola

You accept food and music from every part of the world without reservation, don’t you? You don’t have to be Danish to eat Danish pastries or Italian to eat pasta and pizzas. You don’t have to be a German to enjoy Beethoven or an Indian to listen to sitar music. Why then, when it comes to wisdom, do we become so narrow-minded?

He knew that if he did not inform to the police a warm welcome would be his when he left prison. There would be a party waiting in his home, the best of food, homemade ravioli, wine, pastries, with all his friends and relatives gathered to rejoice in his freedom. And sometime during the night the Consigliori, Genco Abbandando, or perhaps even the Don himself, would drop by to pay his respects to such a stalwart, take a glass of wine in his honor, and leave a handsome present of money so that he could enjoy a week or two of leisure with his family before returning to his daily toil. Such was the infinite sympathy and understanding of Don Corleone.

We passed the scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon in silence. Fresh fruit and pastries were piled up on silver trays. It felt wrong to have this abundance of food traveling across the same surface that twelve hours earlier had displayed images of my brother slowly starving to death.

As a leftover sixties liberal, I believe that the long arm and beady eyes of the government have no place in our bedrooms, our kitchens, or the backseats of our parked cars. But I also feel that the immediate appointment of a Special Pastry Prosecutor would do much more good than harm. We know the free market has totally failed when 89 percent of all the tart pastry, chocolate-chip cookies, and tuiles in America are far less delicious than they would be if bakers simply followed a few readily available recipes. What we need is a system of graduated fines and perhaps short jail sentences to discourage the production of totally depressing baked goods. Maybe a period of unpleasant and tedious community service could be substituted for jail time.

They got cream puffs at the bakery but I bet yours will be better,” he noted. “As Americans often put sweetened whipped cream or vanilla pudding between the choux pastry, and we’ll be making crème patisserie, this is indeed a fact.” “What’s crème patisserie?” Ethan asked. “Proof there is a God,” I answered.

Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness - blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar - I'd loved since childhood, perhaps I'd find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized "the savour of the little madeleine": the apprehensiveness of death. "A mere taste," Proust writes, and "the word 'death' ... [has] ... no meaning for him." So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat, but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel's luck.

Her sense of artistry reached even as far as her plating and presentation... arranging her tarts in a woven basket like a bouquet of flowers. The sight of her bringing them to us was like a scene straight out of a fairy tale! Yes... she too... is like a character straight from fantasy. A fairy godmother who casts her spells on ordinary ingredients... ... turning them into beautiful and delicious princesses of food! All who take a bite of her apples... ... fall under her spell... ... and are transported into a land of dreams!

I'm a fiend when it comes to good pastry, and the French make the best as far as I'm concerned.

Fruit pies started to come into their own during the sixteenth century as sugar became cheaper and more delicate forms of pastry were available.

A cook who has gone to extra trouble, who loves you enough not to just toss the stew onto a plate with a lump of bread, but to craft for it its own little pastry gift-box. Is this the crux of it?

A pie is only as good as its pastry, and one of the delights of a good pie is the contrast in texture between the crisp pastry and the filling - whatever it might be. In a perfect pie, each component is independently perfect - the mouthfeel of the pastry (buttery, flaky, crumbly) and the mouthfeel of the filling (rich, unctuous, tender, sticky, crunchy, etc.); and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

An artist must regulate his life. Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, natation, etc.) Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.9 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am. My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself. I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me. My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologise very politely. I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.

Chouquettes. The perfect pastry. Puffed up. Light. They came in two versions, dusted with sugar granules or chocolate chips. April elected the sucre perlé. If you were in Paris your food might as well glitter. After

Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.

Onion tartlets, pastry puffs stuffed with cheese, a terrine of mushroom and hazelnuts. There's an pharaoh-sized pyramid of exotic fruits. The pineapples alone must have cost a small fortune. And, of course, there's the sham.

The food in his life was the one thing that remained consistently exciting- from the most expensive black truffle to the freshest apple pie at the bakery around the corner, the scent of cinnamon wafting through the pastry lattice.

This may have looked like a cookbook, but what it really is is an annotated list of things worth living for: a manifesto of moments worth living for. Dinner parties, and Saturday afternoons in the kitchen, and lazy breakfasts, and picnics on the heath; evenings alone with a bowl of soup, a or a heavy pot of clams for one. The bright clean song of lime and salt, and the smoky hum of caramel-edged onions. Soft goat's cheese and crisp pastry. A six-hour ragù simmering on the stove, a glass of wine in your hand. Moments, hours, mornings, afternoons, days. And days worth living for add up to weeks, and weeks worth living for add up to months, and so on and so on, until you've unexpectedly built yourself a life worth having: a life worth living.

Practical, versatile, universally esteemed and provided with its own edible, easily decorated gift-box of pastry - small wonder that pie still plays a feature role at many of our favourite celebrations, so much so that it is often symbolic of the very event itself.

My father doesn't ask why I'm in the back after the first morning rush, making green and purple sugar paste for pan dulce. He's working on a batch of unicorn conchas, his latest stroke of genius, pan dulce covered with shells of pink, purple, and blue sugar that sell out every weekend.

Fast Action Plan: Stop eating fast food. On all packaged foods from the supermarket, check the ingredients list for “partially hydrogenated” or “hydrogenated” oils. If either of those is listed, don’t eat it. Look in particular at margarines, cookies, cakes, pastries, doughnuts, and, as mentioned, fast food.

The traditional ingredients of the 'oggie', as it is called in the old Cornish language, are naturally disputed, but on some things most experts agree: the meat must be chopped, not minced, the vegetables (perhaps potato, onion and turnip) must be sliced and the ingredients are not pre-cooked before they are put in the pastry.

It's 10:00 a.m., time for the second round of baking of the day. After feeding the fire with chunks of maple, he loads the bread and pastries according to cooking time: first the fat country rounds, then long, skinny loaves dense with nuts and dried fruit, and finally a dozen purple crescent moons: raspberry croissants pocked with chunks of white chocolate.

Notice that a strict vegetarian diet is not necessarily the same thing as a WFPB diet. Some people become vegetarian only to replace meat with dairy foods, added oils, and refined carbohydrates, including pasta made with refined grains, sweets, and pastries. I refer to these people as “junk-food vegetarians” because they are not consuming a nutritious diet.

Momo Akanegakubo's field of expertise is sweets. Cakes. Candies. Desserts of all varieties. She excels at them all! In fact, her delicate technique and vibrant sense of artistry is what earned her a Seat on the Council of Ten! Council of Ten Fourth Seat, Momo Akanegakubo... ... is far and away the Top Patissier of the Totsuki Institute's current generation!

I made tourtes of veal, of capons, and of artichokes and cardoon hearts. I slaved over pork belly tortellini and eggs stuffed with their own yolks and raisins, pepper, cinnamon, orange juice, and butter. I made sure the pastry chef was working hard on the pastry twists made with rosewater and currants. Soups of cauliflower, mushrooms, and leeks simmered for the better part of the day.

It's not like you ate Filipino food all the time. You loved Emperor's Way takeout, and the friendly Chinese girl there who you were too shy to ask but whose name tag said to call her Ming always gave you extra sauce for your orange chicken. The sweet potato pie from Butter was absolutely to die for, and it made you feel soft and warm the same way Lola's leche flan did. The youngest Manzano once handed you a delicious pastry without prompting or demanding payment before drifting away, seemingly lost in a world of her own. If this was a marketing strategy for their pastelería, it worked. But you could tell that there were differences in the way they cooked and baked, that they took old and treasured recipes and put in their own unique, modern spin to them. Why couldn't you do the same?

There were miniature fruit trees growing chocolate-dipped plumbs and brown-sugar-glazed peaches. Wedges of cheese peeking out of miniature treasure chests made of pastry. Upside-down turtle shells filled with soup. Finger sandwiches shaped like actual fingers. Colourful plates of salted pink and red radishes. Water with lavendar bubbles, and peach-coloured wine with berries at the bottom of the glass.

I decided to serve him even more luxurious versions of the foods he had loved when we were young. The centerpiece of the meal would be braised beef shank, flavored with fennel pollen, cinnamon, ginger, and a hint of rose vinegar. I stewed it with plums and cherries and doused it with a little malmsey for good measure. Then I made a casserole of eggplant and cheese, ray fish in pastry wraps, capon meatballs, and a blackberry tourte.

We will be making pancakes. Oh, not for now, of course. But for later, we have crêpes aux mille trous, and harira soup, with lemons and dates. At Ramadan, everyone fasts, but we think about food all the time; we buy food, we prepare food, we offer food to our neighbors, we even dream of food- that is, if this wind allows us to sleep. I will bring some Moroccan sweets; some macaroons, and gazelle's horns, and almond meringues, and chebakia.

Anna opened the box. Wow. Inside were four beautiful, freshly baked pastries. Anna didn't know what kind they were, but they looked and smelled utterly delicious. Two were in shades of green, the other two in shades of purple, and the warmth of them bled through the box and into her hands and chased some of the cold away. "They're pan dulce," said the girl. "I knew someone needed them, so I baked them. I knew as soon as I saw you that it was you.

The sauce. Memories flooded into her brain. It was zabaione. She had a sudden vision of herself, that first night in Tomasso's apartment, licking sauce from her fingers. Coffee. The next taste was coffee. Memories of Gennaro's espresso, and mornings in bed with a cup of cappuccino... but what was this? Bread soaked in sweet wine. And nuts--- a thin layer of hazelnut paste---and then fresh white peaches, sweet as sex itself, and then a layer of black chocolate so strong and bitter she almost stopped dead. There was more sweetness beyond it, though, a layer of pastry flavored with blackberries, and, right at the center, a single tiny fig. She put down the spoon, amazed. It was all gone. She had eaten it without being aware of eating, her mind in a reverie. "Did you like it?" She looked up. Somehow she wasn't surprised. "What was it?" she asked. "It doesn't have a name," Bruno said. "It's just... it's just the food of love.

It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one—a modest, private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive—as follows: Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie liens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry. Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

You will eat no fried meats,” he began abruptly. “You will eat no pastries, but you will eat plenty of vegetables. You will eat good, substantial, wholesome food—the kind of food your mother makes. You will go to bed at ten o’clock and arise punctually at seven o’clock. You will not smoke or drink or chew. And you will follow this regimen all year round, for as long as you row for me. A man cannot abuse his body for six months and then expect to row the other six months.

Aunt Charlotte was everyone's Auntie, and provided the food: the ladies' sugared ratafias, plates of toasted cheese at four in the morning, and beef and eggs for the gentlemen's hearty breakfasts. But her pastry-cook's heart was in the buffets that glittered under the colored lamps: the sugarwork Pleasure Gardens, and Rocky Islands decorated with jellies, rock candies, and pyramids of sweetmeats. And best of all were the chocolate Little Devils, morsels of magic that all the gentlemen loved.

Salt can take a while to dissolve in foods that are low in water, so add it to bread dough early. Leave it out of Italian pasta dough altogether, allowing the salted water to do the work of seasoning as it cooks. Add it early to ramen and udon doughs to strengthen its gluten, as this will result in the desired chewiness. Add salt later to batters and doughs for cakes, pancakes, and delicate pastries to keep them tender, but make sure to whisk these mixes thoroughly so that the salt is evenly distributed before cooking.

Pastry-making, as every amateur baker fears, is as much about technique as ingredients. The rationale behind the well-known advice to keep the hands, implements and kitchen cool while making pastry, to use minimal water and to handle it lightly is obvious, now that we understand the process. Cool handling lengthens the time that the fat in the dough stays solid; using minimum amount of water reduces the gluten content and also allows the dough to be crisper; minimal handling also reduces the gluten, so we do not knead pastry dough as we do bread.

Her smile was somehow a little too bright, but I watched as she showed me how she had scored the puff pastry and brushed it with oil. She got me to smell the thyme pressed between her fingers and thumb, and told me how good garlic was for keeping away colds. She preached about food and sang and laughed and baked until the light started to come in the windows. Then we sat and ate hot tart without knives and forks. She kissed my cheeks and smelled like garlic. I remember the hot cheese dropping onto Mama's sweater and drying to a rubbery streak against the wool.

I meant to run down every road and up to every house if necessary. Movement conjured appetite, specific and sharp. For carne asada fries sweating in Styrofoam. For Australian fairy bread doused in sprinkles so plastic they'd outlast the coral reefs. For jian bing and soy milk and man tou strung each morning down Beijing's hutongs, where vendors were rumored to whiten their dough with lead paint, not fatal in such quantities, but sweet, addictive, you could cultivate a dangerous passion. Every artist needs a muse, the pastry chef had said, and it occurred to me that the muse might be myself.

For the weekend before, we had had a blowout of tarts, a tart bender, tart madness- even, I dare say, a Tart-a-pa-looza, if you will forgive one final usage of the construction before we at last bury that cruelly beaten dead pop-culture horse. Tarte aux Pêches, Tarte aux Limettes, Tarte aux Poires, Tarte aux Cerises. Tarte aux Fromage Frais, both with and without Pruneaux. Tarte aux Citron et aux Amandes, Tarte aux Poires à la Bourdalue, and Tarte aux Fraises, which is not "Tart with Freshes," as the name of the Tarte aux Fromage Frais ("Tart with Fresh Cheese," of course) might suggest, but rather Tart with Strawberries, which was a fine little French lesson. (Why are strawberries, in particular, named for freshness? Why not blackberries? Or say, river trout? I love playing amateur- not to say totally ignorant- etymologist....) I made two kinds of pastry in a kitchen so hot that, even with the aid of a food processor, the butter started melting before I could get it incorporated into the dough. Which work resulted in eight tart crusts, perhaps not paragons of the form, but good enough. I made eight fillings for my eight tart crusts. I creamed butter and broke eggs and beat batter until it formed "the ribbon." I poached pears and cherries and plums in red wine.

These pastries are gorgeous colors," she said. "I didn't even know I liked green, but I do. It reminds me of her. I keep thinking of her grandparents' house in India. My mother and aunt grew up in the city, but their grandparents grew coffee on a plantation a few hours away. Have you ever heard of Coorg? It's this region in the south of India where people grow tea and coffee, and they have the most beautiful forests, and we used to go there every year when I was little. My mother would take me out to show me the coffee blossoms and the tigers in the forests. It was always so green there, and the air always felt like rain. And now it's raining here and it's all just wet and cold and I'm scared that-" She broke off. "I don't know. Sorry. I'm probably not making much sense." Lila was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "What are you scared of?" Anna shook her head. She couldn't shape the words, and she wasn't sure she could say them to someone she had only just met anyway. To distract herself, she took a bite of one of the pan dulce Lila had given her. It almost melted in her mouth, moist and sweet and perfectly crumbly. "This is amazing," she said. Lila beamed. "I'm glad you like it." Another bite, another taste. Lila continued to swing gently, back and forth, in an oddly soothing rhythm. The taste of the pan dulce on Anna's tongue felt soft, comforting, like a friend holding her hand.

The Molinas' entourage of bakers stream through Sugar's doors with trays brimming with lavender-colored surpresas de uva, brigadeiros, and bem-casados under protective plastic films, which they load into the back of the van. And then they bring out a full tray of empadinhas! Even from my spot across the street, I see the dough flaky and golden like Grandma's recipe. The thing is, everyone knows that only Salt makes empadinhas on our street. That's the deal our families made generations ago, when our great-grandmothers drew the battle lines: Ramires only prepare savory foods. Molinas only prepare sweets. Sugar crossed the line baking empadinhas, and they know it. Those shameless, dishonest, garbage snakes!

Lila smiles, reaches into the cloth covering whatever goodies are in the basket, and pulls out a concha. The top of the pastry is a swirl of colors- deep purple, inky blue, pink, green, gold. It reminds me of the galaxy, and I stare for a moment, mesmerized, before I take it from her. My mouth begins to water. "This smells incredible," I say. "What do I owe you?" "It's on the house," she says, already turning away. "Enjoy." I want to argue, but the urge to bite into the pastry is nearly irresistible now. I've never had Mexican pastries before. But first... I pick up my phone from the bench and take a picture of the gorgeous creation. Then, putting it back down, I take a big bite and close my eyes. My mouth explodes with flavors and sensations- sweet, yeasty, warm. In another three bites, I've eaten the entire four-inch ball of dough and am licking my fingers.

The great chestnut-wood tables groaned under the weight of platters, trays, plates, dishes and bowls. The whole Feast was here, John saw. Every word in the book, every fruit in the gardens, every green thing that grew, every creature that ran or swim or flew. John felt his demon creep forward as a great wave of flavors and tastes washed through him, those his mother had shown him on the slopes joined with others he had never sensed before. He could smell the rich tang of the meats. His head swirled from the steaming fumes of the wine. His jaw ached from the sweets which rose in heaps on silver platters while honeyed syllabubs shivered in their cups. He felt the pastry crunch, shiny with beaten butter. He heard the sugar-pane crackle. The sweetmeats flooded his senses, banishing his hunger and cold. A great procession of dishes floated up out of the pages, all theirs.

Pigeons wrapped in the leaves of vines. Oysters in crisp pastry cases. Whole Gloucester salmon in aspic. Yarmouth lobsters cooked in wine and herbs. Glazed tarts of pippin apples. Paper-thin layers of buttery pastry spread with greengages, apricots, peaches, cherries, served with great gouts of golden cream. "Well," I say, "it's gruel for us tonight, with a smidgeon of salt and pepper." Whereupon he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a twist of greased paper, and opens it. Immediately I smell the tang of heather honey. "For you, Ann." In his grimed palm sits an oozing chunk of honeycomb as big as a plover's egg. I clap my hands in delight, my tongue waggling with greed. As we eat our gruel I make the clots of chewy wax last as long as possible, pushing them around and around my mouth, pressing them against my molars, sucking on them 'til they slip sweetly down my throat.

The variety of wares was staggering: stacks of brown haddock fried in batter, pea soup crowded with chunks of salt pork, smoking-hot potatoes split and doused with butter, oysters roasted in the shell, pickled whelks, and egg-sized suet dumplings heaped in wide shallow bowls. Meat pasties had been made in half-circle shapes convenient for hand carrying. Dried red saveloy and polony sausages, cured tongue, and cuts of ham seared with white fat were made into sandwiches called trotters. Farther along the rows, there was an abundance of sweets: puddings, pastries, buns crossed with fat white lines of sugar, citron cakes, chewy gingerbread nuts dabbed with crackled icing, and tarts made with currants, gooseberries, rhubarbs, or cherries. Ransom guided Garrett from one stand to the next, buying whatever caught her interest: a paper cone filled with hot green peas and bacon, and a nugget of plum dough. He coaxed her to taste a spicy Italian veal stew called stuffata, which was so delicious that she ate an entire cup of it.

I make the very best halwa chebakia. With mint tea, or qamar-el-deen- you can take some home to your family." Such an offer cannot be refused. I know this from experience. Years of traveling with my mother have taught me that food is a universal passport. Whatever the constraints of language, culture or geography, food crosses over all boundaries. To offer food is to extend the hand of friendship; to accept is to be accepted into the most closed of communities. I wondered if Francis Reynaud had ever thought of this approach. Knowing him, he hasn't. Reynaud means well, but he isn't the type to buy halwa chebakia or to drink a glass of mint tea in the little café on the corner of the Boulevard P'tit Baghdad. I followed Fatima into the house, making sure to leave my shoes at the door. It was pleasantly cool inside and smelt of frangipani; the shutters closed since midday to guard against the heat of the sun. A door led into the kitchen, from which I caught the mingled scents of anise and almond and rosewater and chickpeas cooked in turmeric, and chopped mint, and toasted cardamom, and those wonderful halwa chebakia, sweet little sesame pastries deep-fried in oil, just small enough to pop into the mouth, flower-shaped and brittle and perfect with a glass of mint tea...

David Chang, who had become the darling of the New York restaurant world, thanks to his Momofuku noodle and ssäm bars in the East Village, opened his third outpost, Momofuku Milk Bar, just around the corner from my apartment. While everyone in the city was clamoring for the restaurants' bowls of brisket ramen and platters of pig butt, his pastry chef, Christina Tosi, was cooking up "crack pie," an insane and outrageous addictive concoction made largely of white sugar, brown sugar, and powdered sugar, with egg yolks, heavy cream, and lots of butter, all baked in an oat cookie crust. People were going nuts for the stuff, and it was time for me to give this crack pie a shot. But as soon as I walked into the industrial-style bakery, I knew crack could have nothing on the cookies. Blueberry and cream. Double chocolate. Peanut butter. Corn. (Yes, a corn cookie, and it was delicious). There was a giant compost cookie, chock-full of pretzels, chips, coffee grounds, butterscotch, oats, and chocolate chips. But the real knockout was the cornflake, marshmallow, and chocolate chip cookie. It was sticky, chewy, and crunchy at once, sweet and chocolaty, the ever-important bottom side rimmed in caramelized beauty. I love rice crisps in my chocolate, but who would have thought that cornflakes in my cookies could also cause such rapture?

Signor Renzo's lodge stood on a grassy knoll near the crest of the hill. It was a modest place, just a low stone hut, before which stretched a woven ceiling of vines. My dinner was cooked on an open fire by the table. This was no banquet, but what the cook called a pique-nique, a meal for hunters to take outdoors. After Renzo had chosen two fat ducklings from his larder, he spitted them over the fire. Then he made a dish of buttery rice crowned with speckled discs of truffle that tasted powerfully of God's own earth. 'Come sit with me,' I begged, for I did not like him to wait on me. So together we sat beneath the vines as I savored each morsel and guessed at the subtle flavorings. 'Wild garlic?' I asked, and he lifted his brows in surprise as he ate. 'And a herb,' I added, 'sage?' 'For a woman, you have excellent taste.' For a woman, indeed! I made a play of stabbing him with my knife. It was most pleasant to eat our pique-nique and drink the red wine, which they make so strong in that region that they call it black or nero. I asked him to speak of himself, and between a trial of little dishes of wild leaves, chestnut fritters, and raisin cake, Signor Renzo told me he was born in the city and had worked at a pastry's cook shop as a boy, where he soon discovered that good foods mixed with ingenious hands made people happy and free with their purses.

Extract from 'Quixotic Ambitions': The crowd stared at Katy expectantly. She looked at them - old women in black, exhausted young women with pasty-faced children, youths in jeans and leather blousons chewing gum. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. Then, with a sudden burst of energy, she blurted out her short speech, thanking the people of Shkrapova for their welcome and promising that if she won the referendum she would work for the good of Maloslavia. There was some half-hearted applause and an old lady hobbled up to her, knelt down with difficulty, and kissed the hem of her skirt. She looked at Katy with tears rolling down her face and gabbled something excitedly. Dimitar translated: ‘She says that she remembers the reign of your grandfather and that God has sent you to Maloslavia.’ Katy was embarrassed but she smiled at the woman and helped her to her feet. At this moment the People’s Struggle Pioneers appeared on the scene, waving their banners and shouting ‘Doloy Manaheeyoo! Popnikov President!’ Police had been stationed at strategic points and quickly dispersed the demonstrators without any display of violence, but the angry cries of ‘Down with the monarchy!’ had a depressing effect on the entertainment that had been planned; only a few people remained to watch it. A group of children aged between ten and twelve ran into the square and performed a series of dances accompanied by an accordian. They stamped their feet and clapped their hands frequently and occasionally collided with one another when they forgot their next move. The girls wore embroidered blouses, stiffly pleated skirts and scarlet boots and the boys were in baggy linen shirts and trousers, the legs of which were bound with leather thongs. Their enthusiasm compensated for their mistakes and they were loudly applauded. The male voice choir which followed consisted of twelve young men who sang complicated polyphonic melodies with a high, curiously nasal tenor line accompanied by an unusually deep droning bass. Some of their songs were the cries of despair of a people who had suffered under Turkish occupation; others were lively dance tunes for feast days and festivals. They were definitely an acquired taste and Katy, who was beginning to feel hungry, longed for them to come to an end. At last, at two o’clock, the performance finished and trestle tables were set up in the square. Dishes of various salads, hors-d’oeuvres and oriental pastries appeared, along with casks of beer and bottles of the local red wine. The people who had disappeared during the brief demonstration came back and started piling food on to paper plates. A few of the People’s Struggle Pioneers also showed up again and mingled with the crowd, greedily eating anything that took their fancy.

Over the next two hours, we sampled from cheese plates, charcuterie platters, salads, roasted vegetables, tarts, and two risottos. I knew we were nowhere near done, but I was glad I'd worn a stretchy, forgiving dress. Next came the pastas, spring vegetables tossed with prawns and cavatappi, a beautiful macaroni and cheese, and a lasagna with duck ragù. It didn't end there---Chloé began to bring out the meats---a beautiful pork loin in a hazelnut cream sauce, a charming piece of bone-in chicken breast coated in cornflakes, a peppery filet mignon, and a generous slice of meat loaf with a tangy glaze. My favorite was the duck in marionberry sauce---the skin had been rubbed with an intoxicating blend of spices, the meat finished with a sweet, tangy sauce. It tasted like summer and Oregon all at once. We planned to open in mid-August, so the duck with fresh berries would be a perfect item for the opening menu. While I took measured bites from most of the plates, I kept the duck near and continued to enjoy the complex flavors offered by the spices and berry. Next came the desserts, which Clementine brought out herself. She presented miniatures of her pastry offerings---a two-bite strawberry shortcake with rose liqueur-spiked whipped cream, a peach-and-brown-sugar bread pudding served on the end of a spoon, a dark chocolate torte with a hint of cinnamon, and a trio of melon ball-sized scoops of gelato.

Wasanbon sugar, honey and tofu. Together, they make a silky-smooth pastry crust that gently caresses the lips... while the fluffy, sticky white bean paste melts on the tongue. Its mellow and robust flavor wafting up to tickle the nose! And with every bite, the crisp tartness of apples pop like fireworks, glittering brightly and fading, only to sparkle once again. Its sweet deliciousness ripples from the mouth straight up to the brain... a super-heavyweight punch of moist, rich goodness!" "Yeeah!" "Ladies and gentlemen, all the judges have looks on their faces! What on earth could have created a flavor that rapturous?!" "The biggest secret to that flavor is right here, brushed on the underside of the pastry crust... apple butter!" "Apple butter?!" "Hmm..." It's as simple as its name- grated apple, lemon juice and sugar added into melted butter. The distinctive tang of fruit is melded together harmoniously with mellow butter, creating a spread that can add acidity, saltiness and rich body to a dish! "Yet making something like this is no mean feat! Two completely disparate ingredients must be not just mixed but perfectly emulsified together! It's a task akin to perfectly melding oil with water! Even pro chefs have difficulty bringing out the butter's smooth shine without accidentally letting it separate! Managing it all requires mastery of a very specific cooking technique!" "Yes, sir! I did use Monter au Beurre. It's a technique for finishing sauces... ... common in French cooking!

Japan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they've taken it another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don't forget the famous Mister Donut, which I just made up. Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer. "Wallace is a one-woman man," said Laurie. Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I've always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake.

A depachika is like nothing else. It is the endless bounty of a hawker's bazaar, but with Japanese civility. It is Japanese food and foreign food, sweet and savory. The best depachika have more than a hundred specialized stands and cannot be understood on a single visit. I felt as though I had a handle on Life Supermarket the first time I shopped there, but I never felt entirely comfortable in a depachika. They are the food equivalent of Borges's "The Library of Babel": if it's edible, someone is probably selling it, but how do you find it? How do you resist the cakes and spices and Chinese delis and bento boxes you'll pass on the way? At the Isetan depachika, in Shinjuku, French pastry god Pierre Hermé sells his signature cakes and macarons. Not to be outdone, Franco-Japanese pastry god Sadaharu Aoki sells his own nearby. Tokyo is the best place in the world to eat French pastry. The quality and selection are as good as or better than in Paris, and the snootiness factor is zero. I wandered by a collection of things on sticks: yakitori at one stand, kushiage at another. Kushiage are panko-breaded and fried foods on sticks. At any depachika, you can buy kushiage either golden and cooked, or pale and raw to fry at home. Neither option is terribly appetizing: the fried stuff is losing crispness by the second, and who wants to deep-fry in a poorly ventilated Tokyo apartment in the summer? But the overall effect of the display is mesmerizing: look at all the different foods they've put on sticks! Pork, peppers, mushrooms, squash, taro, and two dozen other little cubes.

But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

Saturday is birthday cake day. During the week, the panadería is all strong coffee and pan dulce. But on weekends, it's sprinkle cookies and pink cake. By ten or eleven this morning, we'll get the first rush of mothers picking up yellow boxes in between buying balloons and paper streamers. In the back kitchen, my father hums along with the radio as he shapes the pastry rounds of ojos de buey, the centers giving off the smell of orange and coconut. It may be so early the birds haven't even started up yet, but with enough of my mother's coffee and Mariachi Los Camperos, my father is as awake as if it were afternoon. While he fills the bakery cases, my mother does the delicate work of hollowing out the piñata cakes, and when her back is turned, I rake my fingers through the sprinkle canisters. During open hours, most of my work is filling bakery boxes and ringing up customers (when it's busy) or washing dishes and windexing the glass cases (when it's not). But on birthday cake days, we're busy enough that I get to slide sheet cakes from the oven and cover them in pink frosting and tiny round nonpareils, like they're giant circus-animal cookies. I get to press hundreds-and-thousands into the galletas de grajea, the round, rainbow-sprinkle-covered cookies that were my favorite when I was five. My mother finishes hollowing two cake halves, fills them with candy- green, yellow, and pink this time- and puts them back together. Her piñatas are half our Saturday cake orders, both birthday girls and grandfathers delighting at the moment of seeing M&M's or gummy worms spill out. She covers them with sugar-paste ruffles or coconut to look like the tiny paper flags on a piñata, or frosting and a million rainbow sprinkles.

STRAWBERRY SHORTBREAD BAR COOKIES Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position.   Hannah’s 1st Note: These are really easy and fast to make. Almost everyone loves them, including Baby Bethie, and they’re not even chocolate! 3 cups all purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) ¾ cup powdered (confectioner’s) sugar (don’t sift un- less it’s got big lumps) 1 and ½ cups salted butter, softened (3 sticks, 12 ounces, ¾ pound) 1 can (21 ounces) strawberry pie filling (I used Comstock)*** *** - If you can’t find strawberry pie filling, you can use another berry filling, like raspberry, or blueberry. You can also use pie fillings of larger fruits like peach, apple, or whatever. If you do that, cut the fruit pieces into smaller pieces so that each bar cookie will have some. I just put my apple or peach pie filling in the food processor with the steel blade and zoop it up just short of being pureed. I’m not sure about using lemon pie filling. I haven’t tried that yet. FIRST STEP: Mix the flour and the powdered sugar together in a medium-sized bowl. Cut in the softened butter with a two knives or a pastry cutter until the resulting mixture resembles bread crumbs or coarse corn meal. (You can also do this in a food processor using cold butter cut into chunks that you layer between the powdered sugar and flour mixture and process with the steel blade, using an on-and-off pulsing motion.) Spread HALF of this mixture (approximately 3 cups will be fine) into a greased (or sprayed with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray) 9-inch by 13-inch pan. (That’s a standard size rectangular cake pan.) Bake at 350 degrees F. for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the edges are just beginning to turn golden brown. Remove the pan to a wire rack or a cold burner on the stove, but DON’T TURN OFF THE OVEN! Let the crust cool for 5 minutes. SECOND STEP: Spread the pie filling over the top of the crust you just baked. Sprinkle the crust with the other half of the crust mixture you saved. Try to do this as evenly as possible. Don’t worry about little gaps in the topping. It will spread out and fill in a bit as it bakes. Gently press the top crust down with the flat blade of a metal spatula. Bake the cookie bars at 350 degrees F. for another 30 to 35 minutes, or until the top is lightly golden. Turn off the oven and remove the pan to a wire rack or a cold burner to cool completely. When the bars are completely cool, cover the pan with foil and refrigerate them until you’re ready to cut them. (Chilling them makes them easier to cut.) When you’re ready to serve them, cut the Strawberry Shortbread Bar Cookies into brownie-sized pieces, arrange them on a pretty platter, and if you like, sprinkle the top with extra powdered sugar.

In truth, he had always considered the sight of men eating croissants slightly ridiculous, especially at the beginning, when for the first bite they had to maneuver the point of the crescent into their mouths. No matter what a person did, he ended up with an asymmetrical mouthful of pastry, which he then had to relocate with his tongue to a more central location. This made him look less purposive than he might. Also, croissants were more apt than other breakfast foods to spray little flakes all over one’s clean dark suit. Art himself had accordingly never ordered a croissant in any working situation, and he believed that attention to this sort of detail was how it was that he had not lost his job like so many of his colleagues.

No one was the least bit hungry any more, but that is precisly what is so good abut the moment devoted to pastries: they can be only appreciated to their full extent of their subtley when they are not eaten to assauge our hunger, when the orgy of their sugary sweetness is not destined to fll some primary need but to coat our palate with all the benevolence of the world.

He could mentally picture, in great detail, some of the grand, intricately detailed pastries and cakes Lani had constructed at Gateau. Her inspired creations had drawn raves. She hadn't been a Beard nominee during her first year of eligibility for nothing. She'd worked tirelessly to perfect even the tiniest detail, not because the client- or an awards committee- would have noticed, but because it mattered to her that each effort be her best. In fact, it was her work ethic and dedication that had first caught his attention. She wasn't a grandstander, like most with her natural ability, behaving in whatever manner it took to stick out and be noticed. She let her work speak for her. And speak it did. It fairly shouted, in fact. Once he'd noticed, he couldn't help being further captivated by how different her demeanor was from most budding chefs. Bravado, with a healthy dose of self-confidence bordering on arrogance, was a trademark of the profession. Some would say it was a requirement. Leilani's quiet charm, and what he'd come to describe as her relentless calm and ruthless optimism had made an indelible mark on him. She wasn't like any baker he'd ever met, much less any top-notch chef. She cared, she labored- hard- and she lived, breathed, ate, and slept food, as any great chef did. But she was never frantic, never obsessed, never... overwrought, as most great chefs were. That teetering-off-the-cliff verve was the atmosphere he'd lived in, thrived on, almost his entire life. Leilani had that same core passion in spades, but it resided in a special place inside her. She simply allowed it to flow outward, like a quietly rippling stream, steady and true. As even the gentlest flowing stream could wear away the sturdiest stone, so had Leilani worn down any resistance he'd tried to build up against her steady charm... and she'd done it without even trying.

Walmart uses data from sales in all their stores to know what products to shelve. Before Hurricane Frances, a destructive storm that hit the Southeast in 2004, Walmart suspected—correctly—that people’s shopping habits may change when a city is about to be pummeled by a storm. They pored through sales data from previous hurricanes to see what people might want to buy. A major answer? Strawberry Pop-Tarts. This product sells seven times faster than normal in the days leading up to a hurricane. Based on their analysis, Walmart had trucks loaded with strawberry Pop-Tarts heading down Interstate 95 toward stores in the path of the hurricane. And indeed, these Pop-Tarts sold well. Why Pop-Tarts? Probably because they don’t require refrigeration or cooking. Why strawberry? No clue. But when hurricanes hit, people turn to strawberry Pop-Tarts apparently. So in the days before a hurricane, Walmart now regularly stocks its shelves with boxes upon boxes of strawberry Pop-Tarts. The reason for the relationship doesn’t matter. But the relationship itself does. Maybe one day food scientists will figure out the association between hurricanes and toaster pastries filled with strawberry jam. But, while waiting for some such explanation, Walmart still needs to stock its shelves with strawberry Pop-Tarts when hurricanes are approaching and save the Rice Krispies treats for sunnier days.

With a quick thank-you, I focused my attention on the pastry he brought. The flavors melted in my mouth- warm chocolate and melted butter and the flaky sweet crust. This was what I loved about France. A keen appreciation for the simplicity and sweetness of life. The French seemed to savor their minutes along with their food.

Sara had never eaten such a delicious meal in her life: succulent lobster and quail meat baked in pastry, and chicken breasts rolled in crumbly batter, fried in butter, and covered with a rich Madeira sauce. Derek kept urging her to try different morsels: a bite of potato soufflé dabbed with sour cream, a spoonful of liqueur-flavored jelly that dissolved on her tongue, a taste of salmon smothered in herbs.

In addition to a stack of small white plates, a basket of rolled cloth napkins, and a pile of polished silver forks, there is baked Brie in puff pastry, caviar with blinis (caviar!), a shallow bowl of beautiful purple grapes with a sterling silver pair of scissors placed beside it, poached shrimp with cocktail sauce, and a pale pink mold in the shape of a fish with crackers surrounding it, thin lemon slices and capers on top. "That's not the salmon mousse from the Silver Palate, is it?" I ask. The salmon mousse from the Silver Palate is perhaps my favorite thing to eat in the world. "Oh shoot," she says, and I can all but imagine her stomping her little foot. "You found me out. Is it just so tacky I brought in food from the city? I did press the mousse into the fish mold myself, and I also fixed the Brie. That is, I put some apricot jam on it and wrapped it in Pepperidge Farm puff pastry dough.

Among items in the glass cold case were cheesecake, marzipan candies, The Owl & Moon's famous Chocolate Cherry Thunder fudge, and a round of sharp cheddar for the apple tarts. The nonrefrigerated case held all manner of pastries, sweet rolls, and berry pies. When the buckwheat rolls came out of the oven they went directly into pink boxes tied with kite string.

I wanted to show him how to make a timballo. This baroque dish exemplifies the style of cooking from the island's aristocratic past, known as cucina baronale. Its main ingredient is macaroni, which, until the eighteenth century, was a celebratory food that only the very wealthy could afford to eat. The macaroni is mixed with mushrooms, onions, tomato paste, chicken livers, wine, cheese, and ham and then formed into a pie with a melting pastry crust. It is a complicated dish, so we tend to make it only on special occasions.

I make myself an espresso and bring it over to the pastry station where I begin the pasta. I can hear Tony whistling in the large walk-in refrigerator as he unloads the day's shipment of meat and eggs. I measure out the semolina and deposit it into several piles of approximately equal size on the marble station. Tony has set out a large bowl of fresh eggs and several containers of pasta flavorings, two kinds of pepper (red and coarsely ground black), lemon zest and anchovy paste.

The second course would feature six butter statues, one of which was an elephant, and another Hercules fighting the legendary monster Cerebus. A monstrous pastry stag was the centerpiece of that course, with red wine gelatin bleeding from where an arrow had pierced its side. The final course included six monstrous statues made of pastry: Helen of Troy; a nude Venus; a camel with a king upon its back; a unicorn with its horn in the mouth of a serpent; Hercules holding open the mouth of a lion; and Poseidon and his mighty trident. There were 361 bowls and plates of candied fruits: coconuts, apricots, grapes, pears, and melons, as well as plates of almonds, pistachios, pine nuts, and a variety of cheeses.

We had ordered the shaved ice and candied tropical fruits, the curry ice cream with mini brioche puffs, and the lemon basil profiteroles with blueberry-oatmeal brittle.But a small army of servers brought out even more: chocolate fondant sandwiched in coconut crisps, cinnamon apple churros with maple syrup tapioca, chocolates, macarons, marshmallows. Felix delivered the petit fours himself, and whispered to me, "I'm sorry for the delay with the truffles. Try the lavender-peach macarons. They're my favorite.

All those songs I used to pretend to understand, all the angsty, heartbroken songs I had heard all my life, they suddenly made so much more sense. "Well, then she probably needs a giant coffee, a huge box of your creations, and some time to nurse her feelings in private, don't you think?" Brantley Dane, local hero, saves girl from sure death brought on by sheer mortification. That'd be his headline. "Come on, sweetheart," he said, moving behind me, casually touching my hip in the process, and going behind counter. "What's your poison? Judging by the situation, I am thinking something cold, mocha or caramel filled and absolutely towering with full fat whipped cream." That was exactly what I wanted. But, broken heart aside, I knew I couldn't let myself drown in sweets. Gaining twenty pounds wasn't going to help anything. There was absolutely no enthusiasm in my voice when I said, "Ah, actually, can I have a large black coffee with one sugar please?" "Not that I'm not turned on as all fuck by a woman who appreciates black coffee," he started, making me jerk back suddenly at the bluntness of that comment and the dose of profanity I wasn't accustomed to hearing in my sleepy hometown. "But if you're only one day into a break-up, you're allowed to have some full fat chocolate concoction to indulge a bit. I promise from here on out I won't make you anything even half as food-gasm-ing as this." He leaned across the counter, getting close enough that I could see golden flecks in his warm brown eyes. "Honey, not even if you beg," he added and, if I wasn't mistaken, there was absolutely some kind of sexually-charged edge to his words. "Say yes," he added, lips tipping up at one corner. "Alright, yes," I agreed, knowing I would love every last drop of whatever he made me and likely punish myself with an extra long run for it too. "Good girl," he said as he turned away. And there was not, was absolutely not some weird fluttering feeling in my belly at that. Nope. That would be completely insane. "Okay, I got you one of everything!" my mother said, coming up beside me and pressing the box into my hands. She even tied it with her signature (and expensive, something I had tried to talk her out of many times over the years when she was struggling financially) satin bow. I smiled at her, knowing that sometimes, there was nothing liked baked goods from your mother after a hard day. I was just lucky enough to have a mother who was a pastry chef. "Thanks, Mom," I said, the words heavy. I wasn't just thanking her for the sweets, but for letting me come home, for not asking questions, for not making it seem like even the slightest inconvenience. She gave me a smile that said she knew exactly what I meant. "You have nothing to thank me for." She meant that too. Coming from a family that, when they found out she was knocked up as a teen, had kicked her out and disowned her, she made it clear all my life that she was always there, no matter what I did with my life, no matter how high I soared, or how low I crashed. Her arms, her heart, and her door were always open for me. "Alright. A large mocha frappe with full fat milk, full fat whipped cream, and both a mocha and caramel drizzle. It's practically dessert masked as coffee," Brantley said, making my attention snap to where he was pushing what was an obnoxiously large frappe with whipped cream that was towering out of the dome that the pink and sage straw stuck out of. "Don't even think about it, sweetheart," he said, shaking his head as I reached for my wallet. "Thank you," I smiled, and found that it was a genuine one as I reached for it and, in a move that was maybe not brilliant on my part, took a sip. And proceeded to let out an almost porn-star worthy groan of pure, delicious pleasure. Judging by the way Brant's smile went a little wicked, his thoughts ran along the same lines as well.

The Italians are generally sociable people. For many, a shopping expedition is traditionally a family occasion and a time to meet friends, browse through the latest fashion designs, and perhaps enjoy a meal at a restaurant. Despite the growing number of out-of-town supermarkets, many Italians still prefer to buy fresh food each day from the local market and stores. Food stores tend to open early, often at seven o’clock in the morning, and close late, perhaps at eight in the evening. However, they close for a long meal break, between about one o’clock and half past three in the afternoon. The food markets are noisy and colorful, and customers like to pick over the goods for the best quality. Fresh bread, fruit and vegetables, meat, cheese, and salami are usually on the shopping list. In most towns there are specialist food stores selling fish, smoked meats, dairy produce, or sweets and pastries.

Making dinner for Wayne is either the easiest thing or the hardest thing on the planet, depending on how you look at it. After all, Wayne's famous Eleven are neither difficult to procure nor annoying to prepare. They are just. So. Boring. Roasted chicken Plain hamburgers Steak cooked medium Pork chops Eggs scrambled dry Potatoes, preferably fries, chips, baked, or mashed, and not with anything fancy mixed in Chili, preferably Hormel canned Green beans Carrots Corn Iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing That's it. The sum total of what Wayne will put into his maw. He doesn't even eat fricking PIZZA for chrissakes. Not including condiments, limited to ketchup and yellow mustard and Miracle Whip, and any and all forms of baked goods... when it comes to breads and pastries and desserts he has the palate of a gourmand, no loaf goes untouched, no sweet unexplored. It saves him, only slightly, from being a complete food wasteland. And he has no idea that it is strange to everyone that he will eat apple pie and apple cake and apple charlotte and apple brown Betty and apple dumplings and fritters and muffins and doughnuts and crisp and crumble and buckle, but will not eat AN APPLE.

It's barely 8:00 a.m., but my train mates waste little time in breaking out the picnic material. But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy three more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

I began the day I was to dine at casa di Palone in the Vaticano kitchen, helping Antonio prepare the pope's meals. For noonday, we made barley soup, apples, and a little cheese and bread. For the evening meal, we prepared the same soup with bits of roasted capons, and I made a zabaglione egg dish with a little malmsey wine. I suspected the pope would not touch the custardy dessert, but I felt compelled to take a chance. The worst that might happen was that he would order me to go back to his regular menu. And at best, perhaps he would recognize the joy of food God gifted to us. Once we had finished the general preparations, Antonio helped me bake a crostata to take to the Palone house that evening. He set to work making the pastry as I cleaned the visciola cherries- fresh from the market- and coated them with sugar, cinnamon, and Neapolitan mostaccioli crumbs. I nestled the biscotti among several layers of dough that Antonio had pressed into thin sheets to line the pan. Atop the cherries, I laid another sheet of pastry cut into a rose petal pattern. Antonio brushed it with egg whites and rosewater, sugared it, and set the pie into the oven to bake. Francesco joined us just as I placed the finished crostata on the counter to cool. The cherries bubbled red through the cracks of the rose petals and the scalco gave a low whistle. "Madonna!" Antonio and I stared at him, shocked at the use of the word as a curse. Francesco laughed. "That pie is so beautiful I think even our Lord might swear." He clapped me on the shoulder. "It is good to see you cooking something besides barley soup, Gio. It's been too long since this kitchen has seen such a beautiful dessert." The fragrance was magnificent. I hoped the famiglia Palone would find the pie tasted as good as it looked.

Your Majesty, the next course will be cold dishes. An insalata of fennel and one of thistles with salt and pepper; fresh split almonds; muscatel pears; stuffed dates; pear and pistachio pastries; a prune and visciola cherry tourte; wine-soaked cherries in sugar; and finally, ricotta and almond fritters.

WES’S SIMPLE SOURDOUGH STARTER & BREAD STARTER Making a sourdough starter is the first step in opening the door to all kinds of delicious, nutritious, and traditionally baked breads and pastries. PREP: 5 minutes PROCESS: 3–5 days COOL: none 1-quart Mason jar with lid 1 five-pound bag of your favorite flour (non-white is recommended and an organic sprouted whole wheat flour gives a rustic sourdough loaf flavor) lukewarm water CREATING THE STARTER 1.​Mix ¼ cup flour and ¼ cup warm water in a Mason jar until it looks like a pancake mix. Based on your climate and altitude, you may need to add in a splash more water or flour. 2.​Cover the container loosely and allow mixture to stand overnight at room temperature. 3.​Repeat these steps and continue adding to the starter for the next four days. Between days two and three, your starter will begin to bubble. You should be able to see air pockets on the side of your Mason jar and “rivulets” or fine air bubbles on the top of your mixture by day five. If not, remove ½ cup of starter and continue the same steps for two more days. The starter should have a tangy aroma that’s not overpowering. The bubbling mixture is now ready to use for baking. MAINTAINING THE STARTER 1.​Store the starter in the refrigerator with lid. Once or twice a week remove ½ cup of starter and add ¼

Multiple plates full of colorful elements stared back at him. Beet-cured salmon sliced thinly, sitting atop Andean purple potatoes made into a crispy cake, crowned with a tiny salad of arugula, edible flowers, and passion-fruit-pickled shallot rings, which could all be picked up and eaten in one bite, was his nod to both the South American flavors Penelope had been teaching him and his own Jewish traditions. Next he'd created a Lapsang souchong tea-smoked pigeon breast with a tamarind sauce in a flaky, herbed pastry cup (a refined version of one of his pasties), and for dessert, a chili and cinnamon-infused chocolate bon bon filled with a horchata liquid caramel.

smiled at the food on my bed. The Baby Men used to bring over handmade pasta, homemade appetizers and gourmet pastries from the finest bakeries, but this gesture meant the most to me. “This looks amazing.

It smelled of baking cakes, which sent her back to the kitchen of her childhood, coming home from school to find her mother in the kitchen, making cookies... but it also smelled medicinal, and that made her think of being ill and being looked after when she was tucked in bed. Then there were spices, and a faint hint of Christmas---nutmeg, perhaps, and cloves---but underneath all of those was something else, something insidiously smooth and emollient, like vanilla or eucalyptus. She had a sudden memory of kissing her father's cheek as he bent to say good night, the rasp of his five-o'clock shadow and that smell... She had it now: it was the smell of his cologne, the smell of his business suits, the smell of her parents' bedroom and the big double bed and the terrifying, dark thought of what went on there. But after another moment she relaxed. There were comforting smells in there too: apples and brandy and crisp butter pastry and cinnamon.

For sheer showmanship, it is hard to beat the creation of a really flashy dessert. Without asking Benedetta's permission, Bruno assembled his ingredients. Eggs. Sugar. Cream. Pastry. A large dish of black currants and other fruits from the garden. First he spun sugar into delicate lattice bowls of crisp brown caramel. Then he made meringues, inside which he placed individual baked peaches. Where the peach stone had been, he inserted a berry gelato, made with pieces of solid fruit.

There were myrtle berries to pick and then to serve gratinéed with a topping of mascarpone. There were blackberries to gather, to make into pastries and sorbets. Chestnuts and walnuts added their sweet richness to pasta sauces and stews. The walnut trees were surrounded with bibs of white netting, to catch any prematurely falling fruit, and whole families climbed the trees to pick or walked down the rows of grapes in the vineyards with baskets on their backs, picking the fruit that would become the local wine.

Is dessert okay? Maybe some kind of bread pudding with homemade ice cream---simple, but hearty and good?" We all nodded. "I'd like to do a raw fish appetizer," said Bald Joe. "Maybe a crudo with hamachi?" "And I'd like to do an entrée," Vanilla Joe said. "A beef dish. Which means our other entrée should probably be seafood." I nodded. "I can do a slow-cooked black bass." We'd done one at the Green Onion that I loved. It had a preserved tomato broth and cauliflower and a pile of nutty grains. I could do farro. That left Bald Joe and me to divide another appetizer and a dessert between us. "I can do a dessert," I offered, thinking about a deconstructed baklava, but Vanilla Joe shook his head. "No. Joe here is already doing one appetizer; we can't make him do two. He'll get overwhelmed." "I really don't mind," said Bald Joe. "As long as Sadie helps me put everything together. I'd rather do an appetizer. I'm not great at pastry." Vanilla Joe shook his head before I could speak up and say of course I would help. "Joe, I want you doing a dessert, so Sadie, you pick an appetizer." Fine. Whatever. I hashed it out with the rest of the team, decided I would make a sunchoke soup with bacon and thyme. Vanilla Joe squinted at me. "I didn't think bacon was kosher." "I don't cook kosher food," I explained patiently. I actually didn't mind; I was used to it. Kosher cooking had a long list of rules: no pork, no shellfish, no combining meat and dairy, among many others. Grandma Ruth had kept kosher, and I had total respect for everyone who did, but it wasn't me.

Saturday, I slipped out to the farmers' market. Waiting for me were crates of pears in shades of green, gold, and rose. I fell in love. I brought home a flat of Comice pears and placed them on my dining room table. I pulled out a chair so that I could look at them at eye level. Pears. Pear cake, pear sauce, caramelized pears, baked pears. Pear tart. Everybody liked tarts. I could flavor it with vanilla for depth, lemon zest for brightness, and cardamom as a surprise. I could make it as a galette, a free-form tart, and use a buttery puff-pastry crust. If I wanted to get my hands into food, puff pastry was a good place to do it. The process of making the laminated dough, folding butter into already buttery dough over and over---depending on your mood, it could be hypnotically soothing or mind-numbingly tedious. It sounded perfect.

I stopped worrying about the precise amounts of tiny caviar pearls that went atop each pillow of cheese, and started looking around me to see what the other chefs were doing. As I knew, Vanilla Joe on my left was handing out his homemade pigs in a blanket, his hand-ground sausages wrapped in what looked like hand-rolled pastry, all served with a variety of dipping sauces he must also have made himself (including vanilla aioli, obviously). The judges were at his station now. From the big, cheesy grin on Vanilla Joe's mustached mouth and the rhapsodizing tones of Charles Weston's and Maz's voices that floated my way, they loved it. I scowled. On my other side, Kaitlyn looked to be handing out arancini balls atop a bed of crisp greens and pickled vegetables. Probably tasty, but hard to eat in one bite---the judges always took that into account. She was laughing and talking with each guest, assembling her dishes in a way that looked totally effortless; was she even sweating at all? Guests wandered by with charred meat on a skewer, alternating with ripe chunks of watermelon and tomato. In the distance I could see Kel cooking up spoon bread with what looked like mushrooms. Megan was frying dumplings, which made my mouth water thinking about the inner mixture of pork and cabbage and water chestnuts. When I saw somebody eating takoyaki balls, I assumed that was Bald Joe's work----after all, the tender balls of fried dough and octopus were a traditional Japanese street food. Somebody else had soup shooters.

I look at the selection behind the glass. There are a few pasties and pastries, things like Scotch eggs and potato salad, as well as sliced meat and wrapped cuts. "Can I have a Scotch egg and..." The man's hand reaches for the Scotch egg at the top of the pile and wraps it in thin plastic, then places it on the counter. "...a cheese and... bacon pastry thing..." I point, and he gets a small paper bag from behind him and uses tongs to pick the pastry up. "And one of those sausages, maybe a couple of those smaller sausages too, some potato salad---and yeah... um... do you have, like, some pig blood?

As soon as we emerge from the tube and walk through the limestone archway on Borough High Street, we are bombarded by purveyors of everything from fresh vegetables and buttery pastries to goat's milk ice cream and soft, eggy strands of pasta. Hugh lets me wander up and down the aisles, and I stop to watch one vendor stir a three-foot-wide paella pan, offering up piping hot bowls of tender prawns and rice to a throng of hungry customers.

she had once whispered to Cordelia, sprinkling a pinch of pepper over a dish. “Food can heal all manner of maladies.” Cook would stir up herby stews to soothe hurt feelings, bake honey cakes to mend broken hearts, make crinkle-crusted pies for courage and melting-cheese pastries to bolster tired souls. Her cucumber soup could cool a hot temper and her bread-and-butter pudding inspired kindness in even the grumpiest person. Her roast potatoes seemed to help with everything.

The menu was full of foods that felt like home to me, but that also had a flair of originality. Brisket and matzo balls in a hearty bowl of ramen. Lox bowls with nori and crispy rice. Savory potato kugel and boureka pastries with hummus and fried artichokes with kibbeh. Knishes with kimchi and potato filling and a gochujang aioli. "This menu is so... Jewish." "So Jewish," Seth agreed. "And make sure you're saving room for dessert. The rugelach is unreal, and the rainbow cookies are---" he looked around, then lowered his voice--- "better than my mom's." One of the things I actually missed about living in New York was seeing all the fun twists people put on Jewish and Israeli food at restaurants and in delis. Nobody was doing that in Vermont. Maybe you could do that in Vermont, something whispered in my head. I was used to just pushing that voice away, but, for once, I let myself pause and consider it. Would it be that crazy to sell babka at my café? I bet people would love a thick, tender slice of the sweet bread braided with chocolate or cinnamon sugar or even something savory with their coffee. I could experiment with fun fillings, have a daily special. Or I could rotate shakshuka or sabich sandwiches on the brunch specials menu, since they both involved eggs. My regulars might see eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce and pitas stuffed with fried eggplant, eggs, and all the salad fixings as breaths of fresh air.

Pulling out a stick of lilac chalk, Dina added "besotted briouats" to the list, followed by "rosy-cheeked ghriba." The briouats--- melt-in-your-mouth filo pastry filled with honey and almonds--- were heavenly, even without the spell that made you feel like you'd been kissed on the forehead by a loved one. The ghriba, decadently soft sugar cookies with rosewater essence and lemon zest, were laced with a spell to warm up the fingers and toes.

Neil freshened our coffee and passed her the platter of picked-over pastries, offering, “Have some.” She noticed, as I knew she would, that the bagels were untouched. She asked everyone, “What’s the matter? You don’t like Jew food?” I would normally bristle at such a comment, but as Barb herself was Jewish, she could say such things with impunity—and often did.

I nod, trying not to look too hard at the food on his dish. The flakiness of the sugared crust, which reminds me of crystals on an edge of snow. The red-stained berries smeared across the plate, ripe and surely ful of taste. The words I’ve said cling to my mind like the pastry does to the heavy silver fork.

A nation of inspired cooks and enthusiastic eaters has, of course, coined a specific word for a lust for a food—goloso (from gola for “throat”), which goes beyond mere appetite, craving, or hunger. Friends readily, even proudly confess to being golosi for cioccolata, sfogliatelle (stuffed pastries), or supplì (melt-in-your-mouth rice and cheese balls).