Much Obliged, Ma’am

Cowboy culture is distinctive, no matter whether one encounters it on North America’s grasslands, or on South America’s.  In Argentina’s pampas, that culture takes on the character of Italian and French immigrants to the country and produces a great cuisine at play in this week’s entry, Gaucho Pizza.  Paired perfectly, by the way, with a…

The Right Wood

Anyone involved in barbecue will tell you a good combination of woods produces a subtly-smoked roast that not only falls off the bone, but is tender enough to shred easily.  Involuntarily in fact.   All the more so when the meat is laced with a mustard-based sauce, making the quintessential Carolina Pulled Pork. By the…

What about Milk?

As the notes accompanying the recipe in the July-August 2019 Milk Street explain, Catalans like to dunk carquinyolis, local almond cookies, in coffee or in a sweet dessert wine.  Good advice in principle, though difficult in practice.  Coffee is an unfortunate choice, while a Catalan dessert wine could be a pricy acquisition for so limited…

Not Even in Restaurants

For the longest time, Thailand kept its secret.  For centuries, in fact.  There is a plant, called the pandan locally, that, when cooked, infuses food with a subtle and uniquely herbal sweetness quite reminiscent of vanilla.  Pandan adds a soothing taste to candy and sweets; predictably, it is used for this purpose.  However, it also…

Unexpected

Over the years, many sources have inspired what you’ve seen on these pages.  There have been half a dozen or so different cooking magazines, as well as countless culinary websites.  Cookbooks make contributions from time to time, and every once in a while  comes something one of you suggested.  There even was an idea from…

Plums, Grapes and Pomegranates

The table set before you makes use of all three, taking advantage of the agricultural bounty one finds in Georgia – the country, not the US state.  Though home to some of the Caucasus’s towering peaks, the fertile valleys in between and the Black Sea coastline grant Georgia an abundance reflected in the country’s cuisine.…

Or So Vienna Says

From what the Austrian Tourism Board reports on its website, Apple Strudel is a Viennese specialty, and the recipe it offers there recreates a pastry that has become symbolic of the country.  Maybe, maybe not, but the country’s German cousins might have a competing claim or two of their own. No matter the dessert’s true…

More Than Chicken

The islands, and Jamaica in particular, bring their vibrant kaleidoscope of life to the table and have made their cuisine a celebration.  One of their creations, jerk sauce, is of such flavorful exuberance to have gained acclaim far beyond the Caribbean.  Most commonly, jerk sauce enhances chicken, but it works magic for all manner of…

Easier Done than Said

Today’s recipe is labeled Southeast Asian Beef and Rice-Noodle Soup, at least that’s what Gourmet called it when it showcased the dish in February 2009, but in reality, it’s phở. The ingredients list is unmistakable; this is the deeply flavored and intensely aromatic Vietnamese soup that is perhaps its country’s most famous culinary treasure.  Thanks…

All Dressed Up

What if you took chips and salsa, a combination so pedestrian and somewhat inauthentic Taco Bell has a version, and gave it major enhancements, taking care to make everything from scratch, down to pulling your own tortilla chips from the oven?  Then you’d have chilaquiles, a flavorful and satisfying dish much more likely to be…