Foodies Clan

Nusret’s arrival in London is a story of delays, delays, and more delays — but looks set to open on 17 May in Knightsbridge

Goop Kitchen is now open in Los Angeles

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop is getting into the ghost kitchen game with the launch of a new delivery-only restaurant in Santa Monica, California.

The Goop Kitchen, which opened on March 8, is led by chef Kim Floresca, who worked at restaurants including Per Se, El Bulli, and The Restaurant at Meadowood. The menu includes bowls, salads, lettuce wraps, soups, and desserts. The dishes are all gluten-free and tout vegan options, sustainable growing practices, and an in-house “Goop Certified Clean” label (a.k.a. no processed sugars, processed foods, gluten, soy, dairy, peanuts, or preservatives). Prices are on par with other fast-casual bowl restaurants like Sweetgreen; GP’s — and again, that’s Gwyneth Paltrow‘s — Cobb is $11.95, while a spring salmon bowl will set you back about $16. Not exactly cheap, but we were expecting far steeper prices from the brand that, in a recent gift guide, suggested a $38,000 mattress and a $2,000K Ouija board that’s probably not even haunted.

“Driven by a core belief that clean, nutrient-dense, delicious food leads to greater well-being, Goop has covered countless detoxes and interviewed legions of experts on the food-to-happiness connection,” the company said in a statement, per Food & Wine. “Goop Kitchen’s mission is to accelerate the clean food movement by proving, just as Paltrow did years ago, that whole, unprocessed meals can be both satisfying and convenient, this time brought right to your door with just a few clicks.”

All in all, sounds very Goop-y.

Paltrow is the latest celebrity to join the ghost kitchen trend, following in the footsteps of fellow famous people such as Guy Fieri, YouTuber MrBeast, and rapper Tyga. Ghost kitchens, also known as virtual kitchens or delivery-only “concepts,” have become an increasingly popular restaurant model, particularly during the pandemic. It’s often easier and more cost-effective to spin up a virtual brand and service the delivery boom from industrial kitchens or existing restaurant kitchens than to open a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant with a dining room. That makes ghost kitchens attractive to celebrities with a brand image to hawk, independent chefs experimenting with pop-ups, and entrepreneurs looking for a scalable project with high earning potential.

It remains to be seen whether or not ghost kitchens will be the “future” of the restaurant industry, but there are sure to be more Goop Kitchens down the road. While the newly opened Santa Monica kitchen is currently the only location, the company promises “several Goop food concepts with new locations rolling out throughout the Los Angeles area in the next few months,” according to an Instagram post announcing the launch. This, of course, is in addition to Goop’s other business branches, which most recently extended into peddling snake oil to profit off the COVID-19 pandemic. Bon appétit, Los Angeles! Scrambled yoni eggs for all!

• Goop Opened a Ghost Kitchen to Deliver You a ‘Clean’ Lunch [F&W]

Nadiya Hussain calls baking her “happy place.” With her new Netflix show, it can be yours, too.

At the end of every episode of Nadiya Bakes, Nadiya Hussain, the Great British Bake Off winner and beloved food personality, sits down with one of her almost-too-decadent creations — a mango sponge cake, a tutti-frutti pavlova topped with candied cherries, a cookie tower filled with candy — as if she’s about to eat the whole thing herself. Then, she offers a piece to someone off-screen. The camera angle shifts, and the show’s crew is revealed: Hussain insists they maintain six feet of distance as everyone digs in. In the first episode, the boom operator takes a bite of his cake without using a fork, the boom still hovering. In the third episode, Hussain jokingly urges the crew to come get a piece of her tomato galette, as if otherwise they were going to leave her to eat it all alone, mukbang-style.

The moment of sharing is almost one of relief; as a viewer, you realize the crew has been creating the loving, glossy shots of these dishes all day, and now they finally get to eat. It’s also a reminder that during COVID, there are no big shared meals with friends or family, as there were in Hussain’s previous series, Nadiya’s Time to Eat. There’s only your fellow essential workers. But instead of feeling bleak, Hussain manages to infuse these final shots with warmth and happiness. There’s a lot of laughter and ribbing, emphasizing the teamy nature of a production, rather than placing Hussain on a star’s pedestal.

Hussain’s 2015 run on The Great British Bake Off was star-making, and since her famous acceptance speech — “I’m never gonna put boundaries on myself ever again. I’m never gonna say I can’t do it. I’m never gonna say ‘maybe.’ I’m never gonna say, ‘I don’t think I can.’ I can and I will” — she’s set about proving it, publishing cookbooks and a memoir, hosting her own cooking shows, and baking a birthday cake for the queen. As a British Bangladeshi who wears hijab, she is the most prominent avatar of the “curious means of change” function, as described by fellow GBBO veteran Ruby Tandoh, that Bake Off has served in the country’s white-dominated food world. Hussain is also clear about her intentions to remake that system from within. In a conversation with fellow Netflix star Tan France during the 2019 Cheltenham Literature festival, she says her motto is “elbows out,” to make room for people who look like her who will follow her into the industry.

Nadiya Bakes is Hussain’s first full-fledged baking show since she won Bake Off, and it’s a pleasure to see her back in her element. The show is not a COVID baking show, but it’s not not a COVID baking show, either. At the very least, it’s a show about finding joy in baking, and maximizing the pleasure of it, in the face of isolation and restriction. Her previous show featured her delightful visits to both cooks in need of advice and huge food factories, and the ends of episodes often included her family; Nadiya Bakes is Hussain baking for her production bubble, with separately shot segments featuring bakers she admires around the U.K.

Hussain describes baking as her “happy place,” and as a means of self-care: “If I’m anxious, I bake. If I feel a little bit sad, I bake. If I’m concentrating on a recipe, I feel like I don’t have to think about anything else.” It’s a bit of a shame that American audiences, or at least those scrolling through Netflix looking for a cooking show, are unlikely to be familiar with Hussain’s work as a mental health advocate, and her openness about overcoming panic disorder. If there’s any food personality I want to hear from about baking as self-care, it’s the woman who participated in a documentary about her own exposure therapy.

There’s also something extra delightful, after a year of crushing lockdown sameness, about Hussain’s particular brand of maximalism, where every element of a recipe is tweaked and amped in the service of flavor. Her opening dessert is a strawberry cupcake with a cookie on the bottom, a whole strawberry in the middle, icing made with melted strawberry ice cream, and freeze-dried strawberries on top. Hussain explains that she loves classic desserts like cupcakes but didn’t grow up eating them (in another episode, she says her mother used the oven for storage), so she sees them as a zone of creativity. “I think, how can I twist this?” Considering how many dessert recipes lean heavily on childhood nostalgia, this is especially refreshing.

The maximalism works wonderfully for television (she’s adding a whole wheel of brie?? She’s frying up chicken doughnuts???), and it also does lead to truly transcendent results. The chocolate episode features a chocolate-chip-packed fudgy caramel cheesecake brownie that Hussain says always raises spirits in her household. On a not-so-spirited day in my household, I made a batch. The recipe was a process, especially because first I made my own dulce de leche; then I made the brownie, then the nut topping, and then a final bake for the cheesecake. The next morning, I was so anxious to try it that I skipped the final step of dusting on cocoa powder. That first brownie tasted too rich, too sweet, and I wondered if I was not up for this level of flavor extremity. Then, I dusted on the thin layer of bitter cocoa and tried it again. This time, the flavors were perfectly balanced. I relished the crunch of both the nuts and the chocolate chips; the orange zest in the cheesecake shone. And much like Hussain’s show, the brownies cheered us up all week.

Meghan McCarron is Eater’s special correspondent.

Deliveroo announced plans to go public on the London Stock Exchange a week after a Supreme Court ruling that could irreversibly change its business model

Federal waivers provide free school meals to students during the pandemic. Advocates want that to be permanent.

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Some children have just returned part-time to the school where Michael Gasper works, and he is busy. Gasper is the district’s supervisor of nutrition services in Holmen, Wisconsin, a small community just north of La Crosse, with six schools and 3,800 students. His team is coordinating both in-school meals and meal delivery for students in remote learning, while also running a vibrant farm to school program. And on this mid-February day, Gasper is preparing his newly remodeled kitchen for the delivery of 40 boxes of locally produced hamburger and Italian sausage.

Like most other districts around the country, Gasper has been providing free school meals to students during the pandemic, paid for by federal waivers granted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and he wants to keep it that way. Today, he is joining with 750 members of the School Nutrition Association (SNA) to call on Congress to expand the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs and provide universal, free school meals all around the U.S.

“Lunch really needs to be part of the school day. It really is part of their education,” says Gasper, noting that most industrialized countries in the world provide lunch free to all students.

SNA, which represents more than 50,000 school nutrition administrators nationwide, cited the policy as the top priority in its 2021 Position Paper, arguing that free meals would support learning and improve attendance and classroom behavior while eliminating the burden of unpaid meal debt on families and school district budgets, and the costly, time-consuming meal application and verification process.

SNA’s support is a shot in the arm for a movement that has been building for decades. And the group isn’t the only major player to step forward. The American Academy of Pediatrics and American Heart Association joined with 62 other organizations in a December 2020 letter, organized by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), urging the Biden Administration to work with Congress to establish universal school meals. Alice Waters’s nonprofit, the Edible Schoolyard Project, has been pushing for the idea in California and beyond. Meanwhile, California State Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a bill in February mandating free meals for all public students in the state.

“Frankly, it’s an idea whose time has come,” Diane Pratt-Heavner, SNA’s director of media relations, told Civil Eats.

In 2019, as part of a roundtable on School Food Policy hosted by Civil Eats, Bettina Elias Siegel, a school food policy advocate and author of Kid Food, lamented the fact that the notion of universal or free school meals was “pie in the sky” because of the political climate at the time. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has changed everything. Siegel says she’s really pleased to see SNA making universal school meals a priority, noting the group carries a lot of weight on Capitol Hill.

The pandemic has exposed and even widened the fault lines in the school lunch program, as districts have scrambled to find creative ways to equitably feed ever more hungry children while keeping their budgets in the black. The USDA waivers, which reimburse school districts for every meal through the 2020–2021 school year, have provided a lifeline to school districts and families, and primed the pump for a longer-term solution. Advocates also see opportunity with the change in administration in Washington.

Universal school meals are now seemingly within reach as a solution to child hunger and many long-standing problems with the lunch program, including its meager reimbursement rates, its narrow window of eligibility, and its failure to prevent lunch shaming. But are universal free meals the panacea that advocates are searching for? And what will it take to make them a reality?

“We want to build on what’s going on right now, and we think it’s important for the incoming administration to focus on making sure that school breakfast and lunch are reaching the kids in need,” said Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school time programs at FRAC.

Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images

Community Eligibility Provision: First Inroads into Universal Meals

Free school meals have long been seen as a way to ensure nutrition security in children, rectify racial inequities, and improve learning outcomes.

The movement made major inroads in 2010, when former First Lady Michelle Obama took on the issue of child hunger and nutrition. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 — which she championed — authorized funding for innovative approaches, like the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), in the school lunch and breakfast programs.

CEP allows schools to offer free meals to all students without collection of the meal applications normally required for free and reduced-priced meals. To qualify, at least 40 percent of students had to be eligible for free meals, based on their participation in other means-tested programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Nearly 31,000 schools across the country participated in CEP during the 2019-2020 academic year, serving 15 million children, or 28 percent of the 52 million children enrolled in schools participating in the national school breakfast and lunch programs, according to a USDA spokesperson. Most of those children are enrolled in public schools, though a small percentage of the 97,000 schools that operate both the breakfast and lunch programs are charter or nonprofit private schools.

The program provides a window into the potential benefits that could accrue from a universal meal policy. Take for example, the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District in Orange County, California, a moderate-sized district with 33 schools and 25,000 students. Nine of its schools participate in CEP.

Suzanne Morales, director of nutrition services for the Placentia-Yorba Linda district, told Civil Eats, “The best thing about CEP is it really removes the stigma of being in the cafeteria. You don’t have to worry about your peers and looking different.” She also notes that the guaranteed reimbursements from USDA have helped the district financially by eliminating unpaid meal balances in the nine schools.

Unlike other school district budget items, school meal programs are run as separate businesses, and they depend on federal reimbursements for every meal they serve. What’s more, the amount they receive is fixed, at about $3.50 per lunch, and must cover staff and overhead expenses as well as the food. When families cannot pay, school districts are left with unpaid balances, which can lead to lunch shaming, lunch debt, and children going hungry.

Morales noted that, before the pandemic, absenteeism has gone down in CEP schools in her district. Studies have also shown improved nutritional outcomes, including reduced obesity in low-income children in CEP schools, as well as improved academic performance.

Finally, CEP helps reach children in families who are on the cusp, but not quite eligible for free meals. To qualify, federal guidelines say a family of four can earn no more than $34,060 (or 130 percent of the national poverty level). Families living in communities with higher living costs — like Orange County — may earn too much to qualify, but still struggle to provide nutritious meals to their children.

USDA Waivers: The Pilot for Universal Meals

When the pandemic hit, and school meal programs scrambled to provide meals remotely, their incomes plummeted. The USDA issued several nationwide waivers, funded by the two 2020 coronavirus relief packages passed by Congress, to give schools maximum flexibility.

For Pratt-Heavner, these waivers were the “pilot,” for universal free school meals, and extending them into the future is critical for the nation’s recovery. “Everyone is concerned about loss of learning during the pandemic,” she says. “School meals are going to be more important than ever to make sure students are fueled for learning, and more families than ever will depend on them.”

Today, up to 50 million Americans, including 17 million children, are food insecure, with Black, Latinx, and Native American communities disproportionately impacted, according to Feeding America.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for the USDA suggested it is open to considering universal free meals, noting the agency stands ready to work with Congress on any legislation put forward. “USDA will be reviewing the impact of school meal flexibilities, including widespread access to free school meals provided during the pandemic,” the statement read. “What we learn from that review may help inform future policy decisions for providing equitable access to school meals, including the possibility of universal free school meals.”

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Making Universal Meals a Reality

No one can say how large the true price tag of universal free meals would be. In 2019, close to 29 million children received school lunch at a cost of $18.7 billion, according to the USDA. And no one knows how many of the nation’s 52 million students in schools participating in the school lunch program would opt for free school meals.

Morales told Civil Eats she was surprised that not everybody participated in the lunch program when schools adopted CEP. “There are many barriers to participating in a meal program,” she said, even one that is free.

USDA analyses of the past year will be important for getting a sense of the potential price tag.

When it comes to political support for the measure, Pratt-Heavner and FitzSimons say it’s too early to identify legislative champions for universal meals. But they have been speaking with Biden Administration officials, however, and both Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) introduced the Universal School Meals Program Act in 2019 when lunch shaming became a national issue.

While they build political support for universal school meals, SNA is also calling for an extension of the USDA waiver into the next academic year. Pratt-Heavner says that school nutrition programs need that certainty. “Families have adjusted to receiving meals at no charge. The impact of going back to the application and verification process is going to be a big hurdle,” she said.

She also noted that some districts are already seeing a decline in applications for free and reduced meals for the coming year, because families have grown accustomed to not having to fill out the paperwork. Children in need may therefore miss out, if the waiver isn’t extended, and school districts may suffer further financial losses.

Rebuilding Democracy with Lunch for All

Alice Waters, founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project and Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, and a chef, author, and activist, argues that schools can offer nutritious, organic, locally sourced meals to all students at no extra cost to traditional meal programs, if they focus on serving more plant-based meals.

“We have to think of meats as a condiment, or maybe a special occasion at home sometimes, and we have to think of cheese [in the same way], as we balance the budget. But there are foods that we could cook from around the world,” she says, mentioning hummus and the Mediterranean diet.

Children enjoy hummus, spicy beans, and grains, says Waters, “foods that people have been nourishing themselves with since the beginning of civilization.”

Gasper, in Wisconsin, agrees. His menu incorporates locally sourced meat — the boxes of hamburger and sausage he received? They came from pigs and cows raised by one of his district’s high-school seniors — through the farm to school program, which works closely with Future Farmers of America (FFA) to purchase local foods produced by students with school district funds. But he also serves a lot of vegetables, like the Brussels sprouts that he roasts with kosher salt and garlic, and the radishes, sunflower sprouts, and lettuce that he grows in the school district’s greenhouse.

Kids love the Brussels sprouts he says, calling it “a huge victory” when parents ask for the recipe because their children want to eat them at home. “We’re teaching a whole generation how to eat well and healthy, which is really going to have a lasting impact on the health of our nation,” he says.

Waters takes an even wider view. She says the idea behind the Edible Schoolyard Project was to build a cafeteria where all students would eat the same food, and that food would be grown by the children or connected to what they were learning in their classrooms.

“Public education is probably our last truly democratic institution,” Waters said. “Every child has to go to school, and so how do you engage them to learn the values that we need to live together on the planet . . . and to really rebuild our democracy?”

Implementation wouldn’t be easy, says Orange County’s Morales, who adds that schools would have to ensure they have the refrigeration space, staff, cafeteria capacity to accommodate a large increase in meals served.

But, she said, “I don’t think you’ll find a nutrition services director who’s not willing to take those challenges on to feed more students.”

• The People Behind School Meals Are Pushing for Free Access for All [Civil Eats]

Fette biscottate are like dry, hard, crusty cardboard, yet I adore them

The first time I had fette biscottate, I threw one in my mouth plain. I coughed. I choked. It did not taste like food. It tasted like one of those cheap, brown paper napkins from a fast-food restaurant.

If you’ve never encountered this Italian pantry staple, imagine a beautiful, fluffy piece of white bread, flattened a bit, and then toasted, toasted, and toasted again on the lowest toaster setting — I’m talking like a two — until it’s basically obliterated. The end result is hard as a rock but somehow not burnt, not even well done. It’s just, dry. Despite the fact that they are fundamentally just dry slices of actual wheat bread, fette biscottate have a lot more in common with cardboard. They’re so flavorless even my carb-obsessed 5-year-old will take one bite and spit it on the ground.

And yet I adore them.

This type of twice-baked bread is widely consumed across Europe and Asia, but I first experienced it when, in the early 2000s, I shared an apartment in Milan with two young Italian girls. I watched my roommates for cues on how to assimilate, eventually realizing the easiest way to turn into an Italian was to eat like one. I investigated their cupboards, mirrored their selections when I went shopping, and coughed my way through my inaugural fette biscottate.

The internet doesn’t translate “fette biscottate” as “crackers” or “biscuits.” It goes with “rusks.” The word rusk means nothing to me. I can’t even conjure an image in my head. As someone who speaks Italian, the translation in my brain is more like “sliced cookie breads,” which is also misleading because there is nothing remotely cookie-like about them. Nor do they bear any resemblance to the nut-studded things packaged in cellophane and found near cash registers at coffee shops known in America as biscotti. If you’re looking for a cookie, eat a cookie. If you’re looking for a carbohydrate surfboard, look no further than fette biscottate.

While their lackluster English name accurately describes their dull, tasteless nature, it fails to communicate their wonderful potential when combined with toppings. It wasn’t until I observed my Italian roommates as they brought out marmalade and ricotta with their fette biscottate, and when I watched them steam milk on the stove for their espresso to enjoy alongside, that I truly understood. I gathered my own slew of toppings, steamed my milk, and soon fette biscottate made up the majority of my Italian mornings. The allure of fette biscottate isn’t in what they inherently are, it’s in what they can be. You can load them up with marmalade and ricotta, or go with Nutella. Honey, jam, butter, and nut butter all work. There is not a spread around they can’t handle. With the flick of a butter knife, they become a blank canvas — almost literally — for morning creativity. Their versatility keeps them exciting, day after day.

Though so brittle they practically crumble under the weight of your breath, fette biscottate can take on more weight than seemingly possible. They’re like the ants of the breakfast table. Yet they somehow manage to stay dry at the same time. Fette biscottate are absolutely devoid of moisture. If you were stuck in a desert with nothing to eat or drink, consuming one might actually kill you. But that desiccation provides just the right contrast to a juicy jam or fatty nut butter. It’s the parched yin to a rich, moisturizing yang; the height and glory of balance.

Spreads and fette biscottate are a powerful combo, but the little rusks reach an even higher plane when they meet a latte, combining the crunch on the edges, the soft middle, the warm coffee, and the cool spread. However, dunking a jam-covered rusk is a textural tightrope. If you dare to bite into one without dipping it, you receive a mountain of crumbs at your feet. On the other hand, fette biscottate crumble in hot milk like a sand castle to water. There are but a few seconds after dunking a piece into a latte before it becomes part of your drink. Only by risking such destruction can you achieve ultimate flavor.

Unfortunately for us all, fette biscottate just don’t fly in the States. Here we prefer our packaged breakfast treats with some built-in hydration, preloaded with sugar and fat, moisture and flavor. I love granola bars, Pop-Tarts, and Toaster Strudels as much as the next American, but they’re prefabricated objects designed for lazy mornings. They require nothing of us.

The closest thing to fette biscottate I can find in a giant, American grocery store today are French “egalite” rusks, ironically located in the “luxury” cheese section. They rub shoulders with highbrow boxes of crackers, not daring to associate with the Ritz a few aisles over. The flavor isn’t wildly different from fette biscottate, but they don’t fulfill my needs. They’re too hard and too small, roughly a quarter of the proper size. One would need to eat 20 to feel the same heft as four or five fette biscottate. I could top them with jam, but it seems wrong given their association with cheese. Still, if I’m being honest, their true offense is that they are not Italian.

When I do find myself craving uncraveable toasts, I order fette biscottate from Eataly, Amazon, or one of myriad internet sellers with rather generic names like Italian Food Store Online. The package itself is usually affordable (around $4 or $5), but after shipping, it’s a scary price for a pocket-sized, dried-out piece of bread.

But I gladly pay it from time to time, usually when fall comes around and the air feels like it did when I first landed in Milan. I can practically smell the memory of my Italian breakfasts. I’ll eat fette biscottate at my table in Wisconsin and imagine myself back in Italy, where people can take something as boring and dry as a rusk and make it into something that sounds — and is — as beautiful as fette biscottate.

Kelly Green likes dogs more than you do. She is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin, where most of her running routes end in front of a bakery.

The findings don’t prove cause and effect, but the statistically significant patterns are in line with previous studies and expert advice

For the better part of a year, now, public health experts have been clear: wearing masks helps mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus, and indoor and outdoor dining both carry risks of transmission.

But here’s one more study, published by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on March 5, to add to the growing pile of evidence out there. Examining county-level data from March 1 to December 31, researchers found mask mandates were linked to decreases in daily infections and death growth rates within 20 days. The data also showed that reopening restaurants for on-premises dining was followed by a rise in infections and deaths six to 11 weeks later, especially when mask mandates weren’t in place.

The findings don’t prove cause and effect, but the statistically significant patterns are in line with previous studies and expert advice. Masks can reduce the amount of infectious droplets and aerosols emanating from people’s noses and mouths. Indoor dining, even with limited capacity, can still allow the buildup of these infectious aerosols inside restaurants — especially without proper ventilation — as customers spend long periods of time eating, drinking, and talking without their masks on. (Restaurant workers face the most risk in these scenarios.) Outdoor dining is generally judged to be safer, but the lack of social distancing, outdoor dining setups that basically recreate indoor structures, and more infectious new COVID variants mean that there are still risks involved with eating out.

The National Restaurant Association, an industry lobbying group that has pushed for the reopening of restaurants even while fighting against raising the minimum wage, took issue with the CDC’s new study, calling the analysis “an ill-informed attack on the industry hardest-hit by the pandemic.” The group’s public statement highlights the caveats that the CDC attached to its analysis, including a lack of controls related to other business closures and the enforcement of local policies, as well as a lack of differentiation between indoor and outdoor dining and whether or not restaurants had adequate ventilation and physical distancing.

While there are some limitations to the study, these general guidelines of “masks = good” and “restaurant dining = some risk” remain critical to keep in mind as states like Mississippi and Texas recently announced that end of mask mandates and the reopening of businesses at full capacity, despite daily new COVID cases still averaging close to 59,000 across the U.S.

“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” CDC director Rochelle P. Walensky said in a briefing on Friday, per the New York Times. “And so we would advocate for policies, certainly while we’re at this plateau of a high number of cases, that would listen to that public health science.”

As new infections decrease and as more people get vaccinated, guidance will begin to change. According to the CDC’s first set of public health recommendations for vaccinated people, issued today, those who have received the full vaccination dosage can gather indoors with other fully vaccinated people or with unvaccinated, low-risk people from a single household, without masks or physical distancing. But medium- and large-sized gatherings are still not recommended, and fully vaccinated people should still wear masks and maintain distancing in public, when visiting unvaccinated people from multiple households, and when visiting unvaccinated people who are at high risk for severe COVID-19 sickness. Until enough people receive full vaccination, it’s still as important as ever to exercise caution.

• Association of State-Issued Mask Mandates and Allowing On-Premises Restaurant Dining with County-Level COVID-19 Case and Death Growth Rates — United States, March 1–December 31, 2020 [CDC]
• The Virus Spread Where Restaurants Reopened or Mask Mandates Were Absent [NYT]

Former employees accused the fine dining restaurant of failing to pay minimum wage for all work performed, among other complaints; chef Blaine Wetzel denies the allegations

Nevada’s COVID-19 Task Force estimates that hospitality workers will be eligible in two weeks for one of three COVID-19 vaccines

The bucolic documentary, out today, follows truffle hunters and their canine companions in Piedmont, Italy

A steep hillside mottled green and orange; the same woods, now barren, kissed by fresh snow; a bounty of fresh tomatoes splayed across a rustic table. These are just a few of the picturesque scenes from The Truffle Hunters, a quietly stunning documentary about elderly foragers looking for that prized white fungus. The film, out March 5, isn’t just a pretty sight — Italian travel porn sparking Old World–wanderlust — though it is certainly that, too. An ode to slow living, the movie captures a humble tradition, its observational style subtly exposing greater socio-political issues that surround a luxury business.

Do you know who picked your truffles? The heady white ones perfumed with an unmistakable scent? It’s not who you may have thought. Carrying on cultural tradition, an eccentric group of spry septua- and octogenarians unearth Tuber magnatum, the Alba truffle, outside the small Piedmontese village of Moncalvo. Absolutely necessary for finding truffles are their canine companions. “A bad dog is like a useless degree,” says one man, who serves his dog dinner on fine china right next to him at the table. Another hunter sings to his dogs as if they were dear children. With scenes devoted to the everyday occurrences of their lives, the film is as much a food documentary as a nature one — an uninhibited and unprecedented glimpse into a vanishing world.

Shelving the expository track taken by many popular food movies and TV shows, which aim to inform viewers as much as possible, The Truffle Hunters unfolds as a series of oft-wordless vignettes. Without an authoritative presence like voiceover, explanations, or direct interviews, much is left unsaid and unexplained on the art and practice of truffle hunting. For example: What breed of dogs has the best nose? How do you train them? Who will inherit this practice in the future? These questions go unanswered, which is as much the filmmaker’s decision as it is the scrappy fruit of their limitations. Dweck and Kershaw worked on the film for three years, gaining trust and access into this little-seen subculture.

Sprinkled throughout the film are some tangential insights in the commercial life of a truffle after it’s been plucked out of the ground. Foragers negotiate with middlemen; middlemen phone clients and chefs; truffles are collected and auctioned at a fair — all gentle reminders of the capitalist supply chain. There is no market for misshapen truffles, so hunters are squeezed to find perfect specimens — which becomes difficult when the harvest relies on uncontrollable conditions. One hunter, a Saruman-looking tippler, has bowed out of the game entirely. Tapping out an explanation-cum-appeal on his Olivetti typewriter, he explains that the integrity of truffle hunting has been marred by fierce competition and foul play, including trespassing and even dog poisoning. Elsewhere, the high demand for Alba truffles has spurred a profitable and vast conspiracy of fakes.

Every frame looks like a painting. There are few tracking shots, save from some terse action footage from the dog’s POV. The filmmakers plant the stationary camera in front of their subjects, which gives them a status akin to noble portraiture. This is cultural preservation through filmic documentation, a record of unsung heroes — the lowest totem on a luxury food chain. Divorced from technology, the foragers may not be interested in watching the final product, but it’s likely they wouldn’t be phased by such adulation. Bereft of leading questions or heavy-handed suggestions, The Truffle Hunters allows introspection and asks the viewer to come up with their own conclusions. It’s a movie that fosters your curiosity — piques your appetite, if you will — and pushes you to dig a little deeper.

Elissa Suh is a writer and editor in New York whose work has appeared in IndieWire, Paste, and MUBI. She publishes the newsletter moviepudding.

The makeup line, which includes eyeshadow and an avocado-shaped makeup sponge, will be released March 9

You ever walk into a Chipotle, see the offerings, and think, “Gee, I really wish I could turn this into a look?” Well, now finally you can accent your eyes with sofritas, thanks to Chipotle’s collaboration with E.L.F. cosmetics.

The new makeup line includes a plumping “Make It Hot” lip gloss, a makeup sponge resemblant of an avocado, a makeup bag that looks like a bag of chips, and a 12-color eyeshadow palette with shades to match everything from the corn salsa to the black beans at a Chipotle burrito bar. Every purchase of the eyeshadow palette comes with a coupon for free chips and guacamole from the chain.

Chipotle is also not the first food brand to enter the makeup world. Recently, Tapito hot sauce collaborated with Hipdot on a line of products. In 2017, Taco Bell solicited makeup looks inspired by its menu items. And who could forget about the Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers?

Besides, Chipotle can use light and silly PR boon right now. The company has spent the better part of the last few years dodging claims of lax food safety and poor worker treatment; last March, a Chipotle worker in New York says he was fired for calling in sick. And Chipotle has also been engaging in speculative buying during the pandemic, calling struggling independent restaurants and offering to buy out their leases so it can keep expanding.

The least they could do now is release a lipstick that tastes like fajitas.

With dead, frozen crops, farmers are struggling to rebuild

With dead, frozen crops, farmers are struggling to rebuild

I am one of the millions of viewers who have been riveted by @CheeseDaily’s TikTok videos since they started to appear on the platform in 2019. 

Writer Tienlon Ho talks about collaborating with chef Brandon Jew on their new cookbook, “Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown,” and the challenges of documenting this moment in time in Chinese-American food

In the two pages set aside for acknowledgments in Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown, the cookbook’s chef-author thanks Tienlon Ho “for writing this book with me, for qualifying our ideas and for pouring your heart into enriching these pages with Chinatown’s fascinating history.” His name — Brandon Jew — appears on the cover, as you’d expect. But Ho’s does too, which you might not. Jew is the headliner; it’s his restaurant, his story, his cookbook. But at least we know Ho had something to do with writing it. The ghostwriter, or the named writer whose contribution is never really spelled out or fully credited, might be the most exploited of all the talent in the publishing process. But you rarely read about that: A finished book doesn’t tell you the story of its making, and how hard-won the triumph was (or if it even felt like a triumph at all).

I was thinking about this when I received the pre-publication copy for Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown. It’s a sumptuous, archival book that provides a panoramic portrait of one of America’s most vital, storied communities — but it does so through the eyes of a Chinese-American chef who is part of that community and has synthesized its influences and history into both his cooking and his restaurant. Of course, he couldn’t have done it without Ho, who I became friends with when she contributed an essay to the anthology I edited. She is a deeply and precisely thoughtful person, something you can see in her breathtaking prose and hear in any conversation you have with her.

So as soon as the galley arrived, I emailed her. She had lots to say, and I asked if we could pick up our phones for a conversation about how cookbooks get made and, more specifically, what that experience is like from a co-writer’s point of view.

Eater: We can start with the obvious: How did you come to work on this project?

Tienlon Ho: Connecting with Brandon was all thanks to his agent. There were a couple other people who she thought of ... I’m pretty sure I was the only Chinese-American person. And then it turned out our whole team (chef, photographer, recipe developer, and me) ended up being Asian American, which is really rare in cookbooks these days.

What really resonated for me was [Brandon] was one of the first young chefs I’ve talked to who takes this idea of grounding his work in tradition really seriously ... I’m always worried about this idea of trying to present yourself as this pioneer, and that chef-hero thing that’s like, “I’m the first one to ever do this.” In one of those early conversations, he said something like, “I’m part of this really long lineage. I see myself in this long line of history and I want to somehow get people to understand that.”

At the same time, one of the things that struck me, that was important to both of us, was this idea that you can be grounded in tradition, but also be really innovative. People who cook haute cuisine, [there’s an idea that] they’re inventing things out of nowhere, leading the way with all these new ideas. In the same way that, as a writer of color, I have to ground everything in a personal story, chefs of color are asked to do that all the time, like, “Oh, this had to come from your grandmother. This is exactly how your mom made it.”

I wanted to make sure to protect that aspect of him, which was that he is a creative person, and just because you respect tradition doesn’t mean you’re not thinking of new things and coming up with things that are inspiring and expressive of yourself.

Why do you think he chose you?

We connected in terms of this idea of telling the truth about Chinese-American cooking. We struggled with this and debated, “Is it Chinese food still?” which is what Cecilia Chiang said it was. Or is it just American food? Because we’re all Americans. Brandon’s a third-generation American. There was a way to make this very Chinese — Chinese Chinese. But what he does isn’t Chinese Chinese. It’s Chinese American, and we wanted to make sure that was clear.

But we wanted to show, in a way that maybe only people who are connected to old countries and very old cultures can understand, that you can be American but know so much more about another culture and have that be so much a part of your identity, as well.

What happened with Chinese-American food is that the first people that were able to come here and cook for everyone were from a very teeny, tiny place, Toisan. So what they cooked didn’t represent all of China. In fact, it didn’t even represent all of the province [Guangdong] they were in.

When they got here, and when they were cooking their style of food with the equipment that they had and the ingredients that were available, which were very limited, that whole menu became representative of Chinese-American cuisine. It still is today. It was defined by outsiders and they drew these borders where they didn’t need to. It became called “Cantonese” because it was [from] Canton, they said. So Cantonese food came to represent everybody. There was no other way to try other food because so few people were allowed to emigrate from other parts of China for so long because of Chinese exclusionary laws. … Brandon is Toisanese. His background is a mix, but he remembers a lot of his Toisan roots through his family’s cooking. (I’m a mix of Hakka, which is southern, and northern in the same way Cecilia Chiang was.)

We wanted to make sure we described the diversity [in Chinese food] in the way people look at even the same dishes, how they would approach them very, very differently depending on where they were born in China or in the diaspora. There’s no way to represent 200 dialects and so many regions, and the diaspora and all the creativity that’s happened even within [San Francisco] Chinatown itself. But we want to at least show that reality that there’s so much more than you (and we) ever imagined.

What was the initial vision for the book?

We wanted to document this moment in time in Chinese-American food. This is the first book out of Chinatown that focuses on San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest Chinatown in North America. It’s the first book in [almost] 60 years, as far as I can tell.

What was the cookbook that came before it?

Eight Immortal Flavors. [It was by] Johnny Kan, this wonderful chef-entrepreneur who basically revolutionized Chinese-American food as we know it. He died in 1972. He grew up with James Beard, in Portland, but he was a poor Chinese kid, and his mom actually cooked for James Beard, and that’s how he got to know James, [who] wrote his intro to this book.

[Kan] came up with the idea of delivery. Before, around Chinatown, the way you would get food delivered is the waiters would carry these heated trays. Kan was like, “You know what, we should take credit cards and have a fleet of cars that are refrigerated. We’d keep everything warm.” He set up delivery all around San Francisco really early on, so he was the takeout revolutionary. And then, he was the one who said, “We should have kitchens open for people to see with windows,” because, at the time, Chinese food was considered really mysterious and people still made jokes (they still do) about rats’ tails and mystery meats and things that they just didn’t understand. [Kan] said, “Why don’t we just show them how we do a technique, show them how clean we work, show them how much goes into this,” and so his restaurants were the first that had open kitchens.

Wow, that’s so cool!

I know, he did so many things ... he also was a huge influence on Cecilia Chiang. His whole thing was about service … people who never would have gone to Chinese restaurants flocked to his restaurant. It was a place to be seen.

That was something that we wanted to capture: to talk about the heyday of Chinatown, and all the triumphs, because so much of it is about suffering, because there was so much suffering. But there was so much celebration, too, and innovation, and things that aren’t really remembered because of how history gets written down.

Can you talk a little bit about how you originally planned to structure the book?

Brandon really wanted to have this feeling of understanding where Mr. Jiu’s fit into the community of Chinatown. In the proposal, we said we wanted to have all these stories of these people we know, who in some cases did make it into the book.

How much would you say the manuscript resembles what was laid out in the proposal? Is it completely different or is there a through line?

The proposal actually was very much unlike how this book turned out. But the through line is there: It is definitely, like, this is a restaurant in Chinatown and it couldn’t have existed anywhere else because it’s inspired by and rooted in the Chinese-American experience, and that’s what Chinatown is all about.

You basically have three different narrative strains or themes: Chinatown, the restaurant, and Brandon as a chef. How do you make them all fit into a unified whole?

I was thinking about what I had in front of me and how I could see each dish. It was like, “What is the Chinese-American story behind each dish?” And then, “How did Brandon build on that?” Then I started realizing what it really was, was that he’s a representative of his Chinese-American experience and his Chinese-American food is his own Chinese-American food. That is the individual lens through which to look at this larger story of how Chinese food became American food and how we call him a Chinese-American chef, because people before would have just called him a Chinese chef. But we’re in an age now where people recognize a little bit more, I think, I hope, this difference.

Did you receive any pushback from Ten Speed along the way?

The cover. We really didn’t want it to be a dish. We wanted it to be a setting, something that represented the aesthetic of Mr. Jiu’s within the context of Chinatown. And we had lots of ideas for that. I mean, what’s more iconic of Chinatown than the window with the barbecue hanging in front of it? … They really wanted a dish. And even then, it was funny. They wanted the fried chicken wings, which is a snack. And it’s a delicious dish, but Brandon was like, “That does not represent in any way.” To him it seemed so cliche and obvious when there were so many other dishes that are slightly more complex. … And chicken wings just wouldn’t cut it. The publishers totally understood that.

And we had some pushback on recipes, on how you cover the “greatest hits” of Chinese-American cuisine. The publisher really wanted to make sure we had potstickers and maybe egg rolls and things like that … these dishes that exist in America but are not cooked by Chinese people, or just wouldn’t be cooked at home. [Brandon] didn’t want to do that either. He wanted to just really represent the food of his restaurant. It might not be stuff that you would normally make at home, but now you can.

If you look at what is most ordered around this country, its General Tso’s. It’s kung pao chicken. It’s sweet-and-sour chicken and sesame chicken. … [Brandon] doesn’t make General Tso’s chicken. But he makes another orange chicken where he boils the gastrique down for two or three hours and it’s that way in this book. You start with, like, a gallon of it —

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. At one point I challenged him on it. I said, “This is not for home cooks. This is really intense.” And he’s like, “Well, that’s why it tastes so good.” I couldn’t really argue with that. To cheapen that would be .... like nearly every other book [written in America] about Chinese food and Chinese-American food.

But isn’t this the paradox of every restaurant cookbook that’s ever been written, which is that one of the reasons you go to a restaurant is to eat food that you wouldn’t make at home, or that’s better than it would be at home? And then here’s this restaurant being like, “Hey, here’s the recipe if you want to make it at home.” I get frustrated when a cookbook isn’t cookable, because I think it’s no longer a cookbook, it’s a book about cooking.

I think we talked about this early on, and I remember you being like, “I’m pushing back because so many of these things you wouldn’t cook at home.”

We decided on a certain percentage. There’s a group, and they’re not labeled this way, but they’re master recipes. He does them at the restaurant exactly [the same way]. ... Some of them take at least 10 days.

Oh my god.

Yeah. Well, that’s how long the [roast] duck takes. … I was like, “How should we explain why we’re doing this? Why do you have these master recipes in here?” And he said, “It’s my mission in some ways just to show you the technique that went into this so that there’s an audience for this food in the future.” Because if we all think we can make whatever … you become accustomed to [riffing and taking short cuts], or you find that acceptable, then we lose what little support we have for artisanship in this country. He’s very much a believer of that.

[Brandon’s] role in this restaurant is to keep minds and palates open. [These techniques] don’t have to be lost because no one finds them useful or palatable or there’s no market for them at all. What he fears for Chinatown in general is that people only expect the greatest hits. And it’s impossible, on these small margins, anyway, for these little restaurants to keep going so that they all just make all the same things. People complain about that. They’re like, “Chinatown is just for tourists.” But it’s the tourists who made it that way.

What’s great about this book is that it shows you there’s more to it than the just-for-tourists part. It’s there, if you want to find it. But there’s stuff in here that doesn’t take days to make, right? It’s not all major-undertaking recipes…

The vast majority [are not] … [there] are things that you can do in 10 minutes. I felt like that was really important. He did start to understand too. Sizzling fish is a really good example of an easy recipe that is totally legit ... it represents Southern Chinese cooking so well, and yet it’s not that complicated, even though some people might find it intimidating, because it’s a whole fish, but that’s what Chinese cooking is. There’s such a beautiful picture of it; [Brandon] wanted to put that on the cover. [But the publishers] were like, “No, one will buy it, because it has a fish.” Is that true? Did you hear that too?

Yep! It’s a thing. I know you guys worked so hard to make sure you were telling a different story from what we usually see in cookbooks and food media, in correcting the narrative of the colonial hero figure who comes swooping in to “save” or “ennoble” a cuisine and reveal its hidden greatness. But then, the emailed PR text that accompanied the PDF of the galley kind of reduced it to exactly that. It literally included the phrase “realizing its untapped potential.” This happens so often, the disconnect between how the publishers market the book and what’s going on in the book itself. Were you able to have any input there?

We were asked to review it and I did. And I marked it up, and not all the changes were made so I don’t really know.

That seems in keeping with the opacity of the publishing process. There’s a lot authors aren’t privy to, or that isn’t really explained. Related to the marketing stuff, who was your target audience? And how do you imagine people will interact with and use the book? You guys were clearly going for something that isn’t necessarily just like, we want people to take this book home and make all the food in it.

Right. No. And I’ve been thinking about your distinction between cookbooks and a book about cooking. And I think some of these recipes fall squarely in the cookbook idea, but you’re right. It is a book about cooking and I’m not really sure that’s a bad thing.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all.

Part of the problem is that there’s so little context for Chinese-American food. People don’t know a lot of this history and why and what the Chinese American experience has been, and by having cookbooks that just have the recipes over and over and over, it becomes so much easier to have those problems that we are all trying to be so careful about, like cultural appropriation and this whole idea of disconnecting a food from the people who care about it most and disrespecting that connection. I think we have that connection.

We wanted to offer a foundation for understanding the food as well as making it. That’s why it was important for [Brandon] to have the complexity, and the things that might not work out the first time but that require attention and experience and detail.

At some point, Brandon mentioned some of his chef friends who are extremely skilled but don’t understand Chinese food. And he said, “If they could read this and get something out of it too, I’d be so pleased.” Because he’s tired of having to explain it. And also was just tired of defending it. … He wanted it to be very plain to people who care about what goes into food. To really delight and enlighten at the same time.

Ultimately, we struggled, because … [the publisher wanted] to really try to make this for home cooks. I mean, we did make it for home cooks, but for enthusiastic home cooks who would be the same people who would come to eat at his restaurant.

Something else that you touched on before — there’s the idea that [Brandon] wanted to reach Chinese Americans with the book as much as he wanted to reach people who are not of Chinese heritage, because for a lot of Chinese Americans, a lot of this stuff has been lost. And most of the time, the expectation is that you’re doing a cookbook so that people who aren’t like you can understand your food. So I love this idea that it’s very much for exactly people like him.

Yeah, for posterity, for his children, for people who were disconnected for whatever reason from their past or their roots. There’s a weird thing that happened in Chinatown after the earthquake and the fires: All the records were lost. We usually talk about the records in terms of citizenship papers, but all the newspapers were lost and all the books and all the things that were published in Chinatown.

It’s really hard to find records of the early restaurants that aren’t written by outsiders, by English writers, or non-Chinese Americans or Chinese people, because those are the only ones that survived. That was one of the challenges of doing this too: How do you have these histories that are clearly written by outsiders rather than the people who lived in it, and how would it have been different?

For me, it was important to capture this moment in time. And I wanted to write that down from our perspective of being in Chinatown, rather than wait for someone to write about it.

Yes, and it has an added significance now that Chinatown is once again in danger of disappearing.

Yeah. Already, last January, Brandon and all the restaurants and businesses there felt a change when people stopped coming to Chinatown. By Chinese New Year, it was very clear that there were no crowds and people were not coming — unless they were Chinese American or lived in the community. And then by March, it was shelter in place. The Chinatowns all over the United States have been hit much harder than any other community in terms of impact on their businesses. Some 233,000 Asian-American-owned small businesses closed between February and April, when everything had only just started, at a much higher rate than similar white-owned businesses.

But Brandon was really trying to be optimistic. So for a while, he didn’t want to add anything [about the pandemic] to this book. And then as it became clear that there’s a disparate impact on Chinese Americans in Chinatown, and as more anti-Chinese rhetoric came out, we really felt it was even more important to acknowledge the total change that the neighborhood and restaurant were experiencing, in a short note at the end of the book. But it didn’t make sense to write everything.

But that’s okay too, because then it becomes a record of pre-COVID.

Exactly. We were all so glad that we had this snapshot in time ... I mean, his restaurant, the vibe is so energetic. Under normal circumstances, it’s packed. And that’s the whole point of the Chinese banquet meal: to have a big room full of people with lazy Susans, everyone shares these dishes. So, it was a bit of a mourning thing, because [we could] imagine that it could be lost for a long, long time.

That’s the problem with all this white supremacist rhetoric: You forget in all the ways that we are connected and how in being connected, the world’s new ideas come out. Chinatown isn’t just Chinese. But it was because there were so many outside influences, people coming in and wanting a certain dish and Chinese chefs adapting and saying, “Oh, I thought you would like this.”

Can you imagine a world where we didn’t have this connection? And we thought that everything that we did in our own individual silos was good enough? Finishing the book when we did, I thought, this is a record of how great people are when they are together. Not when they’re apart.

Chefs and home cooks looking for a financial boost and creative outlet during the pandemic turn to the online platform

Faced with financial uncertainty and risks to their own health, many restaurant employees don’t feel safe working in these environments

Around the world, people are paying more for household essentials

Food prices are soaring around the world, due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. This sadly comes at a time when millions of people are out of work and already struggling to afford essentials.

As predicted by climate change experts, extreme weather conditions are wreaking havoc on the global food chain — the recent storms in Texas, which destroyed crops and livestock, being a recent example. The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service estimates farmers and ranchers have lost $600 million, the cost of which will ultimately be felt in food shortages and higher prices around the U.S. The storms also disrupted shipping, which led to food waste. “Truck drivers were stuck for days waiting to load or unload produce,” reports the New York Times. “Processing plants had no power. Dairies were forced to dump 14 million gallons of milk, said Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture.”

The pandemic has made food workers uniquely vulnerable, as working conditions at farms and slaughterhouses are prime for rampant spread of the COVID-19 virus. Because of these unsafe conditions, many workers fell ill, which led to less production and companies hiking prices. According to NBC, “Consumer Price Index data for the month of January found that the cost of food eaten at home rose 3.7 percent from a year ago — more than double the 1.4 percent year-over-year increase in the prices of all goods included in the C.P.I.”

According to Bloomberg, staples across the world are rising, from a 30 percent jump in the cost of tofu since December in Indonesia, to a 64 percent increase on sugar in Russia over a one year span. “People will have to get used to paying more for food,” Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Canada, told Bloomberg. “It’s only going to get worse.”

In the U.S., the pandemic has led to millions being out of work, and food banks have seen unprecedented demand. Because food is treated as a commodity, not a necessity, people continue to go hungry even though there is enough food to go around. For example, due to February storms and power outages, Portland grocer Fred Meyer threw out thousands of pounds of food, and called the cops on residents who attempted to salvage it from the dumpster.

As with many man-made disasters, it doesn’t have to be this way. But this is what happens when you live in a system that values profit over people and the planet.

In “Rice,” historian Michael Twitty goes deep on the most versatile Southern grain, with recipes

Like The Cooking Gene before it, the newest book from historian Michael Twitty provides lessons on African-American culinary history in the South, and excitingly, its insights into the region’s food culture come through a laser focus on one ingredient: rice.

Rice: a Savor the South cookbook is the latest in UNC Press’s series of deep dives on single subjects essential to Southern cooking. “For many of us southerners, no other ingredient tastes this much like home,” Twitty writes in the book’s introduction. But rice is also global, and “bonds the Lower South with much of the rest of the planet, for whom a meal without rice is, frankly, not a meal at all.”

After tracing rice’s journey to the South through Asia and Africa, Twitty lays out 51 recipes for rice dishes from the South and around the world. In the “Deep Origins” section of the book, you’ll find recipes for African rice dishes like jollof, Liberian rice bread, and thiebou niebe, while the “Diverse Approaches” chapter features the Cuban rice and beans dish Moros y Cristianos, Sephardic pink rice, and a recipe for “unforgettable rice” from Mexican chef Pati Jinich, among others. Throughout the book, Twitty calls on chef friends like Jinich, as well as culinary experts; legends, including Edna Lewis and Princess Pamela; and family members for a collection that demonstrates that of all the Southern grains, rice, as Twitty puts it, is “without question the most versatile.”

From the “Southern Classics” section of the book, here is a recipe for country captain, a Southern curried chicken and rice dish. This version comes from Twitty’s “Alabama grandmother,” Hazel.

Country Captain à la Hazel

This is my Alabama grandmother’s recipe for country captain, a Southern curry-flavored rice dish popular in the Carolina Low Country and other parts of the Lower South. You can also taste the influence of West Africa, India, and Great Britain in the rural South all at once.

Makes 6–8 servings

Ingredients:

8 pieces skin-on, bone-in chicken (thighs, legs, drumsticks, breasts cut in half)

For the chicken rub:
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon Kitchen Pepper (see recipe below)
1 teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

For the country captain:
3 cups basmati rice, washed and drained
1/4 cup canola oil or bacon fat
1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped 1 large red onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon peeled and finely chopped fresh ginger
1 tablespoon Madras curry powder
2 teaspoons Kitchen Pepper (see subrecipe below)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes, with juice
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
4 cups no-salt-added vegetable stock, homemade or store-bought
1 cup vegetable or canola oil, or 1/2 cup vegetable or canola oil mixed with 1/2 cup bacon fat
1 cup all-purpose flour

For garnish (optional):
Carrot shavings
Chopped fresh parsley
Chopped tomatoes
Raisins
Sliced green onion
Slivered almonds
Unsweetened coconut flakes

Instructions:

Step 1: Pat the chicken dry with a paper towel and place it in a large mixing bowl. Add the salt and seasonings and rub them all over the chicken, coating it well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 3-4 hours, or preferably overnight.

Step 2: When you’re ready to begin cooking, place the rice in a large pot with a tight-fitting lid and add enough water to cover the rice by 1 inch. Cover and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then turn the heat down to low and simmer, covered, until the rice is fluffy and the liquid has evaporated, about 20-25 minutes. Fluff the rice with a fork and then replace the lid to keep it warm. Set aside.

Step 3: While the rice is cooking, in a large, heavy-bottomed pot with a tight-fitting lid, heat the canola oil over medium-high heat. Add the bell pepper, onion, garlic, and ginger. Sauté until the onion has softened and become translucent, about 5-8 minutes. Stir in the curry powder, kitchen pepper, and salt, then add the crushed tomatoes with juice and the tomato paste. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, for 3-4 minutes. Add the stock and bring it to a boil over high heat, then turn the heat down to low and simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Taste and adjust the seasonings as needed.

Step 4: While the sauce cooks, prepare the seasoned chicken for frying. In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, heat the vegetable oil over medium-high heat. The oil is hot enough when it can brown a cube of bread. Place the flour in a shallow bowl, dredge each piece of chicken in the flour, shake off the excess, and place the piece of chicken on a plate. Working in batches to avoid over- crowding the pan, shallow-fry the chicken for about 4–5 minutes per side, until the chicken is golden brown on both sides. As you finish each piece of chicken, place it on a plate lined with a paper towel.

Step 5: Add the fried chicken to the pot of simmering sauce and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat, then turn the heat down to low. Cover and simmer for about 35 minutes to allow the chicken to finish cooking and the liquid to thicken into a stew. Turn off the heat and let the chicken rest for about 10-15 minutes. Serve with the rice and any or all of the suggested garnishes.

Kitchen Pepper

Kitchen pepper is an old-school spice mixture that was very popular in early American cooking, especially in the coastal South. While it takes its main cues from quatre épices, a spice mix of pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and ground ginger common in French cooking, it also helped to preserve both medieval and Silk Road flavors in southern foodways, as well as the flavors of West Africa, where indigenous and Middle Eastern spices had long influenced the cuisine. This is my take on this classic. It has the complexity of garam masala without quite the punch and heat.

Makes about 1⁄2 cup

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper
1 tablespoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 tablespoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 tablespoon ground mace
1 tablespoon ground white pepper
1 tablespoon red pepper flakes

Combine the ingredients in a small bowl. Store in an airtight container in a cool, dry place for up to six months.

From RICE: a SAVOR THE SOUTH^® cookbook by Michael W. Twitty. Copyright © 2021 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.org