The counter to the side of your stove. It’s where you keep the foods you need most often. The ones you grab every day. Your kitchen’s speed dial. Your food friends list. Here’s a written snapshot of the space next to my stove, circa late spring 2019.
Continue Reading →
More than half of the Australian state of Tasmania is preserved in national and state parks. That doesn’t mean there’s no enterprise. But instead of loggers or miners, the workers are much smaller.
Continue Reading →
The first English written reference to toast appears in 14th century cookbooks. Back then, after grilling your bread over the fire, you didn’t slather on butter or jam. Instead, toast was served soaked in ale or hot wine and spices. (They called this dish sops, which turned into our words soup and supper—a light evening […]
Continue Reading →
If you order “a coffee,” what will you get? It depends where you are in the world.
Continue Reading →
In college, my roommate and I had a VCR with one tape: Braveheart. We watched it daily. Sometimes twice. I memorized the scenery as much as the dialogue. Regardless of the film’s historical accuracy, Scotland looked beautiful and I dreamed of going. Twenty years later, last spring, I finally had a reason. I had just […]
Continue Reading →
“Territorial” is a term of art for traditional regional British cheeses. As a definition it’s a bit loosey goosey. It can mean an area as big as a county where a cheese was made, like when it’s used for Lancashire or Cheshire. Or it can be as specific as the town where the cheese was […]
Continue Reading →
Good winemakers often make wine from the grapes grown in their own vineyards. Excellent olive oils are most often pressed from the olives of a single estate’s groves. Farmstead cheeses, made only with the milk of the cheesemaker’s own herd, are revered at most good cheese counters. Being involved in every step of the process […]
Continue Reading →
Some foods are so much a part of a place that you never think of one without the other. Belgium’s got their waffles. Champagne has their bubbly. Buffalo has its chicken wings; Nashville has its hot fried chicken. In the Spanish village of Almoharín, they’re all about their figs.
Continue Reading →
I used to joke that The Netherlands only had one cheese: Gouda. Gouda in endless varieties, gouda with endless wardrobe changes. Gouda aged one year. Two years. Four years. Gouda with red wax. Gouda with black wax. To me, Dutch gouda was an enjoyable cheese, but monotonous, dull. It never got me excited. It never […]
Continue Reading →
Cory Carman grew up in the Wallowa valley in eastern Oregon, the fourth generation on her family’s cattle ranch. On the wall in her office, she has a map of the surrounding land. She can point out which plots were purchased by her great-grandfather a century ago, and chart how the land was later split […]
Continue Reading →