food

Jacques Neukom doesn’t sleep well when there’s thunder and lightning over the mountains. Not in the summer, anyway, when the peach trees in his orchard are laden with sweet, juicy, luscious gems so ripe they would drop from the trees on their own if no one picked them. And he wasn’t exactly having the relaxed, […]

What foods do Americans miss when they are abroad? I never asked anybody, not even my husband. The only person whose food longings I can relate is Mark Twain. I recently read his autobiographical book, A Tramp Abroad , written in 1879 while on an extended stay in Europe. It includes a scathing assessment of […]

My first memory of food is the White Castle in Louisville, 20 miniature hamburgers for a dollar. I was 4, and the aroma — onions grilled in suet, then plopped with a tiny steamed beef patty inside a miniature square bun, in tiny white boxes, all bagged — was heavenly. At the age of 5, […]

If you visit Italy and decide to explore a grocery store (an expedition I highly recommend on both cultural and culinary grounds), you will notice the sign Biscotti at the top of an aisle. If you enter the aisle, you will probably be disappointed in not finding the array of biscotti you expect. I suffered […]

We are down to our last pint of Häagen-Dazs “Sticky Toffee Pudding” ice cream. I knew this would happen eventually, but I guess I was hoping for a reprieve. How, I thought, how could they possibly discontinue such a terrific product? Well, yes, it was one of their “contest” flavors, the ones they run for […]

Quick. What recipe is on the dirtiest, most dog-eared page of your favorite cookbook? And how old is that book? I’ve been thinking recently about cookbooks, old and new. A few weeks ago the San Francisco Chronicle published an article on the 25th anniversary of The Silver Palate Cookbook , a collection of recipes, menus […]

Risotto is an Italian dish that seems to have acquired, upon arrival in this country, an aura of mystique, as if its preparation entailed some kind of magical procedure. Is this true? Not that I am aware of. What risotto does require is the right kind of rice, a willingness to suspend multi-tasking for about […]

The town may be stretching things just a little bit by calling its big event Sunday "Trinidad’s 50th Annual Fish Festival," but we’ll forgive it. It was 1957, 50 years ago, when the little port town began celebrating its ties with the fishing and seafood business with an annual event, but it was not called […]

With the Farmers’ Market now in full glory, the North Coast community is blessed. How can we make the most of this bounty? When we opened our restaurant, Byrd House, over two decades ago, people warned us that there were "vegetarians" who would look askance at our omnivorous menu. I did not take them seriously. […]

The first time I heard the expression "plain vanilla" I had to ask for an explanation of its actual meaning. Taken literally, "plain vanilla" sounded like a combination of two contradictory terms. Vanilla is one of the most intense flavors in nature, and it is all but plain. I learned that the expression comes from […]

I’ve cooked a fair amount of salmon in my day. In the years when I worked as a chef at one place or another I became fairly proficient at filleting whole fish or cutting them into steaks. I learned various methods of preparation, but most of the time I’d chargrill the salmon and present it […]

This Sunday is Mother’s Day. If your mom is somewhere far away, you just might still have time to send her a card. If your mother is nearby and you’re planning on honoring or pampering her (or perhaps the mother of your children) by taking her out to dinner, I’d advise getting on the phone […]