Foodies Clan

Created by the same directors behind ‘RBG,’ ‘Julia’ will be another glimpse into the life of the beloved cooking personality

It’s hard to understate the influence Julia Child has had on American cooking, between helping home chefs learn about French cuisine to being a trailblazer of food television. Now, from Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary RBG, comes Julia, which aims to tell “the story of the legendary cookbook author and television superstar who changed the way Americans think about food, television, and even about women.” Finally, Julia without Julie!

The documentary, which has no release date yet, uses archival footage and interviews with chefs and friends to tell Julia Child’s story. At this point, it’s is a pretty well-worn tale. She joined the OSS during WWII, where she met her husband, Paul, and helped develop shark repellant. She and Paul moved to Paris, where she tasted the sole meunière that would cement her love for French food, and enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu. She joined with Simone Beck and Louise Bertholle to publish Mastering The Art of French Cooking in 1961, and then starred in PBS’ The French Chef in 1963. From there, she continued to write books, appear on television, and generally influence the tastes of home cooks across the country. The trailer hits all these beats, so hopefully, the documentary says more about Child’s life than can be gleaned from her Wikipedia page. But at least it’ll be another opportunity to watch her cook.

The service staffing crisis has some restaurants attempting extreme means to attract workers — you know, like the basic human rights that should have been there all along

The reopening phase of the pandemic is long underway in most parts of the country, but fast-food operators are still struggling to find enough workers to staff their restaurants. In the face of a labor shortage — which is actually just a shortage of jobs that pay well — fast-food restaurants like Jimmy John’s and Chipotle have offered potential employees a number of different incentives, like signing bonuses and free college tuition, to join their ranks. Most recently, McDonald’s announced that it could offer emergency childcare benefits to entice workers to apply.

Affordable childcare is difficult to find in the U.S., a reality that’s been exacerbated by the pandemic, with more than half of working parents saying they’ve struggled with childcare responsibilities during COVID. A recent survey of American workers conducted by McKinsey found that 16 percent of the workforce in the U.S. is dependent on childcare in order to work, and that it was among the most common barriers to finding work. According to the survey, fewer than 40 percent of workers with a household income below $50,000 said they were able to access affordable childcare.

The crisis is more acute for women, especially women of color: 40 percent of mothers — versus 27 percent of fathers — report adding 15 hours of caregiving to their weekly schedule, with the burden falling heaviest on the shoulders of Black, Hispanic, and Latina mothers, according to the McKinsey survey. This isn’t particularly shocking — there are many reasons we don’t have comprehensive childcare in this country, and most of them are rooted in patriarchy, racism, or some combination of the two — but it’s no less devastating. And it’s no less unconscionable.

As a direct result, women have dropped out of the U.S. labor force more rapidly than men throughout the pandemic. Nearly 900,000 women left the workforce in September 2020 alone, quadrupling the number of men who did so. Improving access and affordability in childcare isn’t just a capital L labor issue, it’s an intersectional inequity that includes gender and race. (Of course, improving pay for childcare workers — many of whom are Black women and other women of color whose labor allows wealthier white women to enter the professional workforce, where better paying jobs await — is critical as well.)

Business Insider also reports that McDonald’s could offer workers a number of other benefits, including eldercare, wage and benefits workshops, and tuition assistance, in an effort to stimulate hiring. Last year, McDonald’s franchisees polled thousands of workers to evaluate how they could improve compensation, and found that enhanced flexibility, job training, and better wages topped the list. It’s now up to individual franchisees to decide whether or not to offer the improved compensation packages, a decision they have till the end of the year to make.

Fast-food workers have been on the front lines of the pandemic since it first broke out more than a year ago, and they’ve also been working on the front lines of labor advocacy. A key moment in the Fight for $15 occurred in November 2012 when hundreds of fast-food workers in New York City went on strike to demand better wages and the recognition of a union called the Fast Food Workers Committee.

In less than a decade, a coalition of fast-food workers and low-wage workers from a number of other sectors have forced legislators in a number of cities and states to institute $15 minimum wage laws. Now they’re leveraging their collective bargaining power in the face of a labor shortage to force individual companies into offering better compensation packages.

Free tuition, higher wages, and emergency childcare benefits are a good starting point, and we owe fast-food workers a debt of gratitude for doing the leg work to get here. But if we want to help workers long term — especially women, and especially Black women and other women of color — then we have to make childcare benefits a right, not an emergency privilege.

How to make the traditional eggs-poached-in-tomatoes dish, with a sofrito and mozzarella tweak from chef Nettie Colón

Grammy-winning singer Miguel and chef Jeremy Fall created this recipe as part of their series “Beats for Breakfast”

The actress Nazanin Mandi was not overjoyed when her husband, the Grammy-winning singer Miguel, decided to turn their kitchen into a makeshift music studio. There was equipment everywhere, and not a lot of space left to, you know, cook. The de facto redesign, Miguel explains, came about after he decided to start intermittent fasting. “That means skipping breakfast, and breakfast happens to be my favorite meal of the day.” So to distract himself, “I said, ‘Instead of doing breakfast for breakfast, I’ll do beats for breakfast.’ It was sort of a way to stay creative every day, and also give myself something else to do while I was in the kitchen.”

So after making Mandi a cup of coffee (“to kind of ease the blow” of taking over the kitchen, he explains), the singer would get to work cooking up a beat. He’d use any sounds around the house — the garbage truck groaning to a stop outside, the cat jumping onto the counter — to build the base of a song. “It was sort of a way to stay creative every day,” he says.

Though Miguel’s intent was not to turn this morning routine into something bigger, his beat-making sessions were the seed of what would later grow into Beats for Breakfast, a Facebook Watch show the singer launched in mid-April with his friend, the chef Jeremy Fall. In each of the eight episodes, all around five minutes long and charmingly simple, Fall cooks a dish while Miguel stands behind his computer, building a beat inspired by — and designed to complement — the dish.

In one episode, Fall cooks shakshuka on one side of the kitchen. “How do you go about adding spice to your beat?” he asks Miguel, who responds by likening his creative process to that of building the flavors in a dish. But for the most part, the chef and singer stand quietly side by side, Fall focused on his pans as Miguel adds drums and guitar loops on his computer. “We both realized that our processes were kind of similar in terms of how we approach our crafts,” Fall says of how he and Miguel first came to this collaboration. “I really resonated with how [Miguel] kind of layers on top of a base layer. And that’s how I think of food as well.”

Creating a show that revolved around breakfast food was an easy decision: Both Miguel and Fall are breakfast-for-dinner people. For Miguel though, food hasn’t always been a source of inspiration or joy. “My relationship with food growing up was survival, to be honest with you,” he says. “It was just because, you know, we didn’t come up with a lot of money. And so I just made do. My favorite memories with food were around special occasions with family. Anytime I got to be with family, that meant food was going to be a little more of an enjoyable experience. And for me it has a sort of nostalgic value, and also a cultural value.” One of his grandmothers made sopes and enchiladas for special occasions, along with a mac and cheese fortified with salty crumbles of cotija. The other made fried chicken like no other: “She had a very special skillet that she would use specifically for fried chicken,” Miguel says.

The dishes that he and Fall create are mostly a tribute to Los Angeles. “Miguel and I grew up not far from each other in LA, so I think some of the dishes are love letters to the city,” says Fall. One of those dishes is a decadent pile of French toast, a recipe that the two shared with Eater. The bread is coated in cinnamon sugar to evoke the flavors of a warm, spiced churro. As for the cognac-spiked maple syrup, “Miguel and I both like drinking and any excuse to drink,” Fall explains.

This show, with its five-minute segments and rough measurements, will probably not, as Fall admits, turn a novice cook into a top chef. Nor will it give up-and-coming producers that much insight into how Miguel makes music. But really, that’s beside the point. Each snippet draws throughlines and similarities between the creative processes of a cook and a musician, something that can be as valuable and fascinating as a great recipe. “Every artist has a process,” Miguel says. “And the more you’re able to be around other creative people, you can exchange processes, and this will help you in your own creativity. That was the reason why this idea was so worth exploring.”

Churro French Toast with Horchata Ice Cream

Serves 4

Ingredients:

For the horchata ice cream (makes 3 cups):

1 cup horchata, or 1 cup sweetened rice milk plus ¹⁄₄ teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup heavy cream
¹⁄₂ vanilla bean
6 egg yolks
¹⁄₂ cup sugar

For the French toast:

¹⁄₂ cup granulated sugar, divided
¹⁄₄ cup packed light brown sugar, divided
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, divided
¹⁄₂ cup whole milk
2 large eggs
¹⁄₄ teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
1 orange
8 (¹⁄₂- to 1-inch thick) slices challah
¹⁄₂ cup maple syrup
2 tablespoons cognac or brandy
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
Fresh mint (optional)

Instructions:

Make the ice cream:

Step 1: Pour the horchata and cream into a medium saucepan. Split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and use a spoon to scrape out the sticky seeds. Add the seeds and the scraped vanilla pod to the saucepan. Bring to a bare simmer over medium heat.

Step 2: In a medium bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar. Slowly add the hot cream mixture, whisking constantly.

Step 3: Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and cook over medium-low heat, stirring and scraping the bottom and sides of the pan frequently with a rubber spatula, until the mixture has thickened (an instant-read thermometer will register 170 degrees). This will take 20 to 30 minutes; go slowly and be careful not to boil the mixture or the ice cream base will curdle.

Step 4: Strain the custard through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, discarding the solids. Refrigerate until completely cool.

Step 5: Churn the ice cream base in an ice cream maker following the manufacturer’s instructions. Transfer to an airtight container and store in the freezer for up to 3 months.

Make the French toast:

Step 1: Put ¹⁄₄ cup of the granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons of the brown sugar, and 1 teaspoon of the cinnamon in a shallow bowl or pie plate. Stir and set aside.

Step 2: Put the remaining sugar, brown sugar, and cinnamon into a large bowl. Add the milk, eggs, vanilla extract, and salt and whisk to combine. Zest the orange over the milk mixture, reserving the orange for another use.

Step 3: Combine the maple syrup and brandy in a small bowl. Set aside.

Step 4: Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a nonstick pan or griddle over medium heat. Dip 4 challah slices in the egg mixture and add them to the pan. Cook until golden brown on the bottom, about 2 minutes. Flip and cook on the second side until golden brown, 2 minutes more.

Step 5: While the French toast is still hot, turn the slices in the sugar mixture in the pie plate to coat on both sides. Transfer to dinner plates and cover to keep warm. Repeat with the remaining butter and challah.

Step 6: Drizzle the French toast with the maple syrup mixture and serve with a scoop of horchata ice cream on top. Garnish with mint leaves, if desired.

Dina Ávila is a photographer in Portland, Oregon.
Recipe tested by Ivy Manning

5 important takeaways about the only film that exists for me, a normal person

If you, like me, watched the trailer for Pig, the new Nicolas Cage movie and have so many questions — questions that go far beyond “Who has Nic Cage’s pig?” — Gabriella Paiella’s interview with the Hollywood legend in GQ is an absolute gift.

“I’ve been drawn to screenplays where I don’t feel I have to act so much — that I have the life experience or the memories or the pathos, if you will, where I can just sort of more resonate,” Cage says. “Acting is imagination and you have to believe, to some extent, that you can be these characters and that you can be in these situations.”

Along with opening up about his acting process, Cage talks about his formative food memories (he was once rocked to sleep by nuns who gave him anisette?!!?!), and how he drew from his experiences with his pet crow and pet octopus to inform his portrayal of the film’s lead character, a chef-turned-truffle-forager who searches for his stolen truffle pig.

Here are the five key takeaways and best quotes from the interview:

1. The pig is REAL and she has a NAME and it is BRANDY.

I have to admit that watching the trailer, I wasn’t totally sure if the pig was a real pig or just wonderfully effective CGI pig. The trailer is very dark, it left room for confusion. Cage tells Paiella, however that the pig was named Brandy and that he “enjoyed working with her.”

2. Carrots were an important part of getting Brandy to shine on camera.

Cage says that like many of us, Brandy was “payment-oriented.” “She wasn’t that interested in people and I get that,” he says. “But if they need a very soulful look in her eyes, off-camera, you could show her a bit of carrot.”

3. Even before this film, Nicolas Cage was very interested in chefs.

Speaking about his experiences of quarantine, Cage brought up missing going out to eat. “That’s what I like to spend my money on, going to restaurants and talking to the chef. That’s almost a spiritual part of my life,” he says, referring to his genuine regard for chefs and what they can accomplish.” His role in Pig felt like an extension of that. “I put chefs at a very high level in the realm of art.”

4. Nicolas Cage is kind of like Remy from Ratatouille.

When speaking of his fondest food memories, Cage recalls his father, the academic August Coppola, introducing him to the magic of pairing food and wine, whether in the form of a bucket of KFC and champagne — “I’ll be darned if that wasn’t the best taste combination I’ve ever had. It was like this American tempura,” he recalls — or goat cheese and red wine. “‘Take this goat cheese and have this glass of red wine and sip it, now isn’t that something,’” he recalls his father saying. It is! It’s the Ratatouille flavor fireworks!!

5. Thanks to Nicolas Cage, one of the movie’s best lines didn’t get cut.

There’s a line in the screenplay that is so central to the themes of the film that it’s part of the trailer: “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.” According to Cage, he had to fight to keep that line in the script. “At some point during the filmmaking process somebody wanted to cut the line and I said, ‘No, that’s the line! That’s why I wanted to play Rob. That’s what we can all relate to.’”

• Nicolas Cage on the Magic of Working With Animals [GQ]

Brandi Felt Castellano, co-owner of Apt Cape Cod, told the New York Times that while customers have always been rude to service workers, people’s post lockdown behavior ‘far exceeds anything I’ve seen in my 20 years’ in the business

Over the past year and a half, restaurant workers have reported an uptick in harassment, abuse, and general unpleasantness from customers. In December, a study found a customers docked tips if servers asked them to adhere to safety protocols, and women reported facing more sexual harassment. Unfortunately, that trend seems to have continued, to the point where one restaurant in Brewster, Massachusetts closed for a “Day of Kindness” after customers made its staff cry.

The New York Times reports that Apt Cape Cod shut down for a day after seeing an uptick in rudeness and abuse from customers, the final straw being a customer berating staff for not being able to take his breakfast order when the restaurant was closed. One customer even told staff “I hope you get hit by a car.”

“As many of our guests and patrons treat us with kindness and understanding, there have been an astronomical influx daily of those that do not, swearing at us, threatening to sue, arguing and yelling at my staff, making team members cry,” Apt wrote on Facebook on July 8, saying they would take a day to deep clean, train, and treat the staff to a day of kindness. “Please remember that many of my staff are young, this is their first job, or summer job to help pay for college. We have had to make adjustments due to the increase in business volume, size of kitchen, product availability and staffing availability, we are not trying to ruin anyone’s vacation or day off.”

You’d think after being on lockdown for over a year people would just be grateful that they can order eggs at a restaurant again, but apparently not. Co-owner Brandi Felt Castellano told the Times, “People are always rude to restaurant workers, but this far exceeds anything I’ve seen in my 20 years.” On Facebook, many lent their support, with some blaming the rise in rudeness on tourists coming to Cape Cod for the summer season, or a lingering influence from Donald Trump.

Other beach towns and tourist destinations have reported dealing with more entitled, abusive customers. Staff at Pop Pop’s Pit BBQ in Myrtle Beach say it’s gotten so bad they now read agreements to customers before they order, stating that patrons will be asked to leave if they’re rude more than once. But customers everywhere seem to be taking it upon themselves to be jerks to food service workers, whether it’s scamming restaurants for free delivery, or complaining about maintaining safety protocols.

Restaurants across the country are facing similar issues — staffing shortages (in some cases, due to servers still feeling unsafe working in restaurants and the low wages being not worth the risk), food shortages, and inflation. Most have been up front about these problems, asking customers to bear with them with longer wait times, a shortened menu, or limited hours. But, as Khushbu Shah wrote for Food & Wine, there needs to be a reckoning with the concept that the “customer is always right,” especially as the pandemic exacerbated cruel treatment toward service staff. As one server told Shah: “We are expected to provide [customers] with above-and-beyond service, even if they are abusive. It makes us feel like we are not allowed to have the expectation of being treated like a person.”

Restaurants like Apt and stressed workers are trying to set boundaries. But as a reminder: everyone is still struggling, and just because a state government said it’s okay for restaurants to be open doesn’t mean things are immediately going back to “normal.” Be patient, be kind. Otherwise you’ll ruin it for everyone.

The porcelain wonder uses a moat of saltwater to create a natural seal

In the 1970s, archaeologists in China stumbled across the 2,000-year-old tomb of a noblewoman from the Han dynasty. Known as Lady Dai, she was surrounded by lavish clothes, jewelry, and the remnants of her last banquet. Among the haul she was taking into the afterlife was a collection of pickle jars and a thick manuscript of corresponding pickle recipes.

Sometimes mistaken for an urn, the Chinese pickle crock is a curved vessel with a wide middle, a flared, narrow mouth, and a rounded lid that looks like an upside down bowl. The design allows the jar to double as an artwork, and some examples are decorated accordingly. But the shape also serves practical purposes. “It makes it easy for larger pieces of vegetables to fit inside, because it has a belly. And the way that it tapers on the top, it helps to make sure that the contents are submerged,” explains Jessica Wang of Picklé, a fermentation workshop based in Los Angeles. Many of the lids actually are just inverted bowls, which can be conveniently used for holding the pickles as you ladle them out.

In terms of material, pickling crocks are usually made out of glass, glazed clay, or porcelain. With glass you can see the progression of the pickles, but many people prefer clay because it has a unique microporosity that absorbs and releases flavor every time it’s used, similar to how a cast-iron pan works.

But the low-tech wonder’s greatest asset is around the rim. As opposed to straight-sided mason jars in the West closed with canning lids, the curvy glazed stoneware jar has a moat running around the rim that creates a natural seal when you pour in a handful of saltwater. It provides an easy way to keep pickles fresh and uncontaminated for years, with a fraction of the stress of canning.

WHY YOU NEED ONE

Since the seal is just a thin layer of water that can be broken or topped off when needed, it’s easy to add to the pickle jar and taste as you go. Unlike American pickle jars, often washed and sanitized between uses, the Chinese crock builds up layers of flavor over the years. With enough time and care, the brine can become just as valuable as the jar itself, a prize to be shared between generations. The Chinese pickling crock is part utilitarian and part sentimental, part everyday tool and part family heirloom.

While the jar is efficient for making any kind of pickle, it’s especially useful for lacto-fermented vegetables in salt brine, which gives the pickles a more complex tang and infuses them with beneficial probiotics. The fermentation process gives each batch a unique flavor, but it also produces carbon dioxide gas as a byproduct, which can build up in a sealed space and even cause jars to explode. Using a mason jar for lacto-fermentation, you have to regularly “burp” the ferment by opening the lid every now and then to release the gas. But in a Chinese crock, “the gases can come out, but nothing can enter through the water,” says Wang. The built-in water lock releases air bubbles while keeping harmful microorganisms from entering, creating a clever, passive system to ensure that the pressure doesn’t break the vessel but the contents remain protected.

Wang recommends dedicating each jar to just one type of pickle. She uses hers for rice wine-infused pickles, like her current project, a month-old batch of mustard greens which can be used to accent stir-frys or add acidity to earthy stews. She says pickles made in her clay crock have a subtle yet distinct crispness to them, and the process of nurturing a brine over the years creates a unique pickle that can’t be found anywhere else. Xiong Ying, a pickling enthusiast in Sichuan, has managed to keep a brine going for 20 years (her current one is a three-year-old brine in pristine condition). She explains that time gives her brine, and any pickles that go in it, a deep complexity that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

HOW IT’S USED

It’s not an understatement to say that pickles are a big deal in China. This type of crock is a common motif in the countryside, where many families maintain decently sized collections of crocks in rotation, passing them down the generations along with the brines inside. Pickle culture also extends into restaurants, where you’ll often find giant jars of house pickles fermenting in the back, given out as complimentary appetizers to help break up heavy meals.

Throughout the country, every region has its own basic pickle recipe. Southwest China is a hub for lacto-fermented vegetables, where fresh bamboo shoots, crisp cucumbers, radishes, and carrots are quickly blanched, cut into pieces, put into a salt brine with Sichuan peppercorns, then topped with a bit of baijiu. Southern pickles are sweeter and usually consist of turnips or cucumbers that sit in a solution of white vinegar, sugar, and a little bit of salt. Northern Chinese pickles veer saltier, with cucumbers immersed in a solution of sorghum or millet-based black vinegar, salt, and chiles.

It’s important to stress that this type of pickling crock is not unique to China, though it is an especially pervasive tool in the cuisine and likely originated from the region. The earliest pickle jar in China dates back to at least the third century, and they have been found in ancient tombs throughout the country. Today, the design is rather universal. In Germany, it’s used for sauerkraut, though the sides are straight instead of curved. Koreans use it for kimchi and the Japanese for tsukemono. There are also massive versions of the crock used to bulk-ferment alcohol, soy sauces, spicy bean pastes, and vinegars.

But while the Chinese pickle jar removes some of the up-front hassle of canning, it does require a bit more long-term care. Unlike a hot water bath-sealed mason jar, which is shelf stable and can be stored for many years, the Chinese pickle jar needs a bit of monitoring. You have to top off the water seal occasionally or it will eventually evaporate. Eventually a bit of grime might develop around the mouth of the jar, but you can simply wipe it off with a clean, wet towel. That may sound like more work, but it’s worth it.

HOW TO GET ONE

Serious pickle makers in China like procuring their crocks from the city of Jingdezhen, the national pottery capital. You can get them custom-made, but they’re also quite easy to get a hold of online in East Asia. Though harder to come by in the West, they can sometimes be found in antique shops and Asian grocery stores. Online, there are a couple of glass ones available on Amazon, porcelain jars on eBay, and vintage clay vessels on Etsy.

Clarissa Wei is an American freelance journalist based in Taiwan.

The earliest cookbooks were light on instruction and heavy on assumed knowledge — a style our recent, prescriptive recipe-obsessed food culture is now looping back to

You don’t need a recipe. Really, you don’t.

So chastises the back cover of Sam Sifton’s new book New York Times Cooking: No-Recipe Recipes, which, despite its own pretensions, is full of recipes. Here we have a delightful-looking Asparagus and Boursin Tart (send to mom, I wrote on a Post-it), some pleasantly ’90s-sounding Miso-Glazed Scallops, and a handful of ways to make weeknight chicken, the home cook’s holy grail. These are recipes you’d expect to find on the New York Times Cooking app, which Sifton helped to launch, and for which he has written a weekly newsletter for years. They’re dishes you can make in under an hour, without too much fuss or too many ingredients, after getting off work.

No-Recipe Recipes translates the utility of the cooking app into something analog while reworking its central format. Here, the ingredient lists do not include amounts, recipes offer no yields, and directions are kept to a single paragraph. Some include little footnotes for tips (make sure your pasta water is salty as the sea) and modifications (instead of asparagus, cook some frozen peas in butter). Sifton writes in the brusque but encouraging tone of a neighborhood dad coaching a soccer game. That asparagus tart recipe ends with a shout: Let’s go!

The aim of the book, as outlined in its three-paragraph introduction, is to get the reader riffing: “Cooking without recipes is a kitchen skill,” Sifton writes. “It’s a proficiency to develop, a way to improve your confidence in the kitchen and makes the act of cooking fun.” Formal recipes are like sheet music, he explains, a useful tool for learning by mimicking. He doesn’t go so far as to say that this book will impart unto its reader the living spirit of kitchen-jazz, but the implication hangs in the page’s white space like an echo. On the next page, Sifton encourages the reader to “join me in cooking this new, improvisational way, without recipes.”

But new to whom, exactly?

“I love Sam’s new book and when I got it, immediately thought of old Viet cookbooks that I’ve used for research, and to cook from,” Andrea Nguyen, James Beard award-winning cookbook author and occasional New York Times Cooking contributor, wrote when I emailed her for this story. Her favorite of those old books is Lam Bep Gioi (Cooking Well), which she describes as “the book of its time” and “akin to The Joy of Cooking” in its popularity among Vietnamese cooks, housewives in particular, upon its first publication in 1940.

In the book’s recipe for pho bo, author Van Dai omits and assumes just as much as she instructs. “She doesn’t tell anyone what the seasonings are in the broth,” Nguyen told me over the phone, translating the recipe and laughing at its brevity. “She just goes, ‘choose your noodles wisely. You need them on the thick side. And don’t overcook the meat, you need it to be kinda chewy.’” The last line echoes the suggestive tone of Sifton’s modifications: “If you want it to be really tasty, add a little MSG into each bowl.”

The recipe is what Nguyen calls a “talk-through,” exclusively prosaic instruction with the necessary ingredients mentioned as they are chopped, sprinkled, or added. Quantities are rare. “It actually is formal writing,” Nguyen clarifies, “but it’s not a recipe as we would identify it.” Not in 2021, at least, where nearly all cookbooks adhere to a standard format: title, headnote, ingredients, yield, instructions.

Dai’s omissions and assumptions reflect the implied cultural proximity between author and reader. Old cookbooks like Lam Bep Gioi “were written for an audience that had a common knowledge of a particular cuisine and culture,” Nguyen told me, “so you didn’t have to say much for people to understand.” Her readers know which bones to simmer for pho broth, and for how long. It’s a laconic sort of instruction familiar to anyone who has snooped through old community cookbooks or taken a mild interest in cookbook history.

The paragraph form has been around since the 1500s, or as long as cookbooks have been printed. American cookbooks really kicked off in the mid-1800s, and for their first hundred years or so, their recipe formats were scattershot, even within a single title. Some are quick talk-throughs; some include the sort of exacting ingredient lists modern cooks are used to. But most look more like the pho recipe in Lam Bep Gioi than anything recently published in Bon Appétit: They assume more than they explain, and they get to the point quickly. A recipe for macaroni in the 1904 book Cooking in Old Creole Days by Celestine Eustis reads like an older version of something Sifton would include in a newsletter, beginning with the basics and then spiraling out into variations to suit your mood. Like many of Sifton’s not-recipes, it is less a recipe than a suggestion with guide rails:

Macaroni must be thrown into plenty of boiling water to cook it well. Then drain it off and put it in a dish with salt and a little powdered mustard and put it in the oven until there is a nice crust on top. Grated cheese of any kind may be added, or a few tablespoonfuls of well cooked tomatoes, or a few tablespoonfuls of Italian mushrooms stirred up with chicken livers, or the remnants of pâte dé foie gras, or chopped ham or salt tongue, in fact almost anything that will give it a nice relish.

This style fell out of favor in the mid-20th century, when, according to Celia Sack of San Francisco’s Omnivore Books, “women suddenly found themselves without kitchen help — help who were raised to cook and not to need delineated recipes — and had no idea how to ‘make a batter’ or how long to ‘bake until done.’” These women needed more specific guidance, exacting quantities, and cooking times, and thus the modern recipe began to evolve. As the needs and circumstances of housewives shifted, so too did the recipe format. This changing shape, then, can trace the modern history of home cooking.

In a 2020 paper titled “Recipes for Reading Recipes? Culinary Writing and the Stakes of Multiethnic Pseudonarrative,” Delores B. Phillips attempts to untangle the question of whether recipes count as a narrative form. Narratologists often claim that they don’t — after all, nothing happens in a recipe — but, Phillips explains, “recipes adopt narrative’s sheen like borrowed light, accruing narrative’s features the closer they are to the stories that give them context.”

A 29-word recipe for cornbread published in 1881 and reprinted in Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, which traces and celebrates the history of African-American cuisine, doesn’t offer the traditional makings of narrative. As with many of the older, excerpted recipes in her book, it exemplifies the brevity of many old recipes, which assumed their readers already knew how to cook. But woven into what Tipton-Martin calls a “family tree” of cornbread, it begins to light up a story that starts with hot water cornbread and ends with souffle. Conversely, when a recipe is stripped of its narrative, it risks becoming a mere suggestion that deprives its reader of a deeper learned experience. A tree becomes a two-by-four.

What narrative does No-Recipe Recipes reflect? Maybe it’s the story of our highly digitized culinary world, as exemplified by the Times cooking app. (I should mention here that between 2019 and 2020, I was a regular contributor to the Times’ Hungry City column, a gig for which Sifton approached me; I am also a paying subscriber and enthusiastic user of the app.) In recent years, the Cooking section and the app have made important efforts toward recipe equity, both by adding bylines for cooks and authors who wrote an original recipe excerpted on the site, and by hiring and promoting the work of a wider range of contributors. But it still reflects an international palate that has historically been shaped by white tastes, and a style of cooking that treats putting food on the table as a primarily bourgeois hobby rather than a necessity. Sifton’s recipes rely heavily on a well-stocked pantry, which he outlines in the early pages of the book. His is the sort of global pantry newly embraced and encouraged by traditional food media outlets: stocked with gochujang, hoisin sauce, tahini, curry powder, furikake, Aleppo pepper, chile crisp, chutney, fish sauce.

When used like a mix-and-match set, this globalized pantry can quickly remove place from food. A Celery and Beef Stir-Fry with gochujang is, according to its three-line headnote, “a fast and loose stir-fry that recalls but does not replicate a classic Sichuan dish with a fantastic name — Send the Rice Down.” If you don’t have gochujang, Sifton explains in the modifications section, you can use chile-bean paste. (He knows his readers are already familiar with the spicy-sweet Korean chile paste, but doubanjiang isn’t there yet — hasn’t yet had its chile crisp moment — and needs an anglicized translation.) Once the beef is starting to get crispy and delicious-looking, he tells you to “hit it with a big, sloppy tablespoon or two” of your paste of choice.

That freewheeling instruction made Nguyen a little jealous. “When I was reading this I thought, man, at what point would I feel comfortable doing something like that?” she told me. “Because I’m always trying to push people to make things that they’re unfamiliar with.” Nguyen has written three Vietnamese cookbooks, and strategically began with banh mi and pho to hook as many readers as possible. “That’s why I love the book so much, because he just says, ‘you can make this. And here, make some Crisp Fish Filets with Delicious Sauce.’ I couldn’t possibly write a recipe title like that, because I would be like, ‘okay, that’s not really true to the original language that the recipe is in.’ But for his audience, they just want to make the food.” Those who take up the job of educating readers on a cuisine, particularly a non-Western one, often can’t get away with playing things so fast and loose. Their authority, too, is often chained to their heritage, and they are expected to honor externally imposed standards of authenticity. Nguyen had to prove herself by writing definitive, meticulously researched cookbooks on Vietnamese staple dishes. But for white writers and editors with institutional backing, authority is more variable, typically requiring little more than a passion for cooking and a wide-ranging pantry.

As Navneet Alang wrote on this website last year, incorporating ingredients from nonwhite cultures into fusion-y dishes for a majority-white audience deracinates those foods, each of which has its own history and culinary tradition. When mainstream recipes are developed for the widest possible (usually white-assumed) audience, their ridges of identity are often worn away in the service of ease of consumption, turning recipes — cultural documents that contain personal history, community history, cultural history, anecdote, contradiction, personality, and “fantastic” names — into highly digestible and endlessly mutable things.

There’s a long-running complaint online that recipe bloggers precede their recipes with too much personal narrative. We don’t care about your great-aunt’s knee surgery, the complainers wail, just give us our casserole. As if their computer’s scrolling functionality had gone on strike. A website launched a few months ago to try to appease these people: Called Recipeasly, it billed itself as “your favorite recipes without the ads or life stories [doughnut emoji].” A righteous uproar ensued, with complaints that the website diminished the labor of these bloggers, stole their ad revenue, and neutered their IP, all without consent. The website quickly shut down.

The project had a whiff of dog-whistle sexism, too, as Jaya Saxena wrote for Eater. It’s a modern version of the long-running institutional disrespect for recipe collections, particularly those unpublished, that Phillips outlines. Those who decry recipes and cookbooks as lacking narrative identity imply that household literature doesn’t deserve serious consideration. But they are often the richest source material we have for those domestic lives. “The annals acquire life,” Phillips writes, “not as repositories of information to await recovery and deciphering but as innovative textual feats that preserve the character of the communities from which they arise. The political mission here is obvious: Recipes tell stories because groups who write them need an archive, lest their stories disappear.”

At their most consequential, cookbooks document the ways in which history lingers and lives in kitchens. A great example of this is Bress ’n’ Nyam, the new cookbook from chef and farmer Matthew Raiford. In it, he tells the story of his family — six generations of farmers descended from the Tikar people of what is now Cameroon — and their land on the Georgia coast. It’s a document of Gullah Geechee culinary history, as well as the story of a self-described “prodigal son” returning to the land that raised him.

Raiford’s recipe for Smoked Ossabaw Island Hog (or How to Host a Pig Roast) looks about as far from a not-recipe as you can get, but retains some hints of the historical form. Over a spread of six pages, Raiford explains his preferred breed of hog; how to build a roasting pit (for which he uses the old box springs from a mattress); how an apple in the beast’s mouth will keep the heat circulating nicely. He briefly explains the tradition’s historic significance. And as with many recipes in his book, he points the reader toward success rather than holding their hand too tightly. An accompanying recipe for chicharrones instructs the reader to begin here: “Remove the skin and the fatback from the roasted hog. Render the fatback into a leaf lard that you can use for frying, pastries, and sausages.” It sounds a bit like a hundred-year-old recipe; technically, it’s older. The instructions for the skin that follow are more precise, but these first lines assume a certain knowledge in the reader, or at least a certain instinct.

“One of the things that I learned really early on, even before I became a young chef, was that a recipe is a guide, not the rule,” Raiford told me of his recipe-writing ethos. “A lot of times people consider it to be a rule and a guide. But that leaves no space for the person that’s cooking to realize that if I don’t taste it right about now, it might taste like this” — too salty, say, or not salty enough. “There’s a lot of ‘to taste’ in my book, because that’s the way my family cooked.” These aren’t improvisational recipes per se, but they teach the sort of intuition that future improvisation requires.

Roughly half of the recipes in Bress ’n’ Nyam (which means “bless and eat” in Gullah) are family recipes. Research for the book meant not just calling up his mother to ask about her pound cake, but reading through his grandmother’s old recipe cards (thorough, written-through recipes) and 10 or so “really old” cookbooks that Raiford found in the house, from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of them only offered a list of ingredients or “shorthand notes,” Raiford says, and vague directions, like “cook it until it’s soft.” As a trained chef and lifelong cook, he was able to make the assumptions that the original readers had been asked to make, a set of assumptions that were obvious back then: “Because who would take on cooking who didn’t know how to cook?”

Adapting his grandmother’s recipes was a little more straightforward, partially because so many were written the way he had learned them at her side. “All I did was take those recipes and go, okay, if I was telling someone this verbally, what would it come out like?” Raiford says. “I tried to recreate the things that were written as though you and I are having this conversation right now.” It channels an intimacy and trust between writer and reader that defies any lack of personal connection. That intimacy is strengthened by the personal and family histories that accompany Raiford’s recipes, lending to each dish that “narrative sheen” that Phillips described.

Most modern cookbooks aim to make their readers more confident cooks; improvisational cooking is an explicit result promised by some, and an implicit one for many. It’s also a style that professional cooks and housewives and other sorts of parents have practiced throughout modern history, and it’s a way many people have learned through watching and listening and doing, in home and professional settings. Cookbooks, in their way, are oral histories in formal dress. This improvisational style of cooking is not new, but trying to codify it is. Sifton’s book belies the difficulty of that effort: Outlining an improvisation is not the same as teaching someone to improvise on their own. Concision and empowerment don’t always go hand in hand.

The teaching of intuition, I wager, requires more space on the page. In considering Sifton’s book, I kept thinking back to Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, from 2017. The book takes up a similar goal as No-Recipe Recipes — to teach the reader to be a more confident, improvisational cook — but uses the opposite approach. The first recipe begins on page 217; before that are chapters on the elements of good cooking and flavor, a generous crash course in what makes good food good and how you might create it in your own home. (Nosrat has also contributed to the Times’ Cooking section, and was until recently a contributor to the Times Magazine’s Eat column.)

Nosrat takes a good three pages to explain the process of braising. She opens with a story: the memory of being 19 and new in the Chez Panisse kitchen, nervously watching chefs turn their backs on searing hunks of meat to chop onions in preparation for a braise. She explains a braise’s components, and what defines the category. She walks you through each step carefully, providing tips for things to watch out for, avoid, or expect. She explains the different routes you could take — wine or beer to deglaze; which vegetables hold up nicely to the process. With this extensive advice, Nosrat not only gives us all we need to know, she creates a trust, a faith, between herself and the reader. It’s a necessary inversion of the trust that authors like Van Dai had in their readers: from you know enough to cook this to I’ve written enough for you to learn from.

Later in the book we have a recipe (two full pages) for Pork Braised with Chillies, followed by variations, followed by “Everything You Need to Know to Improvise a Braise.” This takes the idea of learning to improvise and offers a hypothesis: You’ve got to follow the recipe, or at least understand the technique, before you can begin riffing. “The beauty of it all,” Nosrat writes, “is once you’ve got this braise in your pocket, you’ve got a hundred others in there, too.”

Marian Bull is a writer and ceramicist living in Brooklyn.
Allie Sullberg is an illustrator, designer, and artist who lives in Portland, Oregon.

What the critics are saying about ‘Pig,’ the only movie I plan on discussing this summer

Pig, this summer’s Nic Cage vehicle, opens nationwide on July 16, and the reviews are starting to trickle in. By and large, the critics are loving this movie — particularly praising Cage’s performance as a prominent Portland, OR chef who goes off the grid to live as a truffle forager and then returns to the city to search for his stolen truffle pig.

Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan gives the “strangely moving little film” a full four stars, writing that the movie is “a reminder of what the actor is capable of.” For O’Sullivan, the success of the film lies in a Cage-ian paradox: “Cage...has always been at the top of his game when he plays against the volcanic emotions inside his character, rather than indulging them.”

“Nicolas Cage isn’t just an actor,” writes Variety’s Michael Nordine in another rave, “he’s a state of mind.” Nordine is especially impressed by how the “strange, sad” film, directed by Michael Sarnoski, “manages to feel both out there and grounded, often at the same time.” The result is a film that is “unexpectedly touching” and a performance from Cage that is “a revelation.”

Over at AV Club, Mike D’Angelo gives the film an A, promising in the headline that the movie is “richer and stranger” than expected. Per D’Angelo, Cage’s performance as “balances manic intensity with uncharacteristic restraint in ideal proportion,” while the film itself “considerably smarter and more ardent than it appears at first glance.”

While the Mikes and Michaels raved, Sheri Linden at the Hollywood Reporter was a bit more tepid. While Cage “plays the enigmatic central character at the perfect simmering temperature, and without a shred of ham,” Linden takes issue with the way in which the screenplay — written by Sarnoski with Vannessa Block — includes some tired tropes and “well-chewed and reconstituted morsels,” resulting in “a gutsy narrative recipe, even if the final dish is less than the sum of its ingredients” and insights that are “less deep than meets the eye.”

In the Guardian, Benjamin Lee gives the film three stars out of five. Lee praises the way Sarnoski’s film tells a “beautifully shot, slowly unfolding” story, but finds the film “sometimes too quiet to be truly distinctive.” Still, Pig gives Cage “the time and space to be sincere once again, a rare experience for him and a rewarding one for us,” a performance that “shows that underneath the lazy mugging to the cheap seats, he’s still a soulful and careful actor.”

This piece will be updated as more reviews publish.

Watch the largest vendor of Dole bananas in the North East use high-tech processes and years of experience to sell bananas at peak ripeness

Anyone who’s ever watched a banana go from perfectly ripe to banana-bread-ready-brown in what seems like a matter of hours knows exactly how precarious the lifespan of the fruit can be. That’s why those at Top Banana — the largest vendors of Dole bananas in the North East — have developed a complex system for ripening bananas from all over the world to perfection.

“The produce industry is not the most technologically advanced, says Daniel Barabino, head of Top Banana’s strategy and operations. “We had a custom system for decades that worked great, but didn’t work as good as it could, so we made a huge investment in our internal software,” he says, explaining the temperature controlled rooms where bananas get moved throughout the ripening process, during which a fluctuation of even half a degree can make a difference.

A typical day at Top Banana starts at 5 a.m., when trucks unload hundreds of boxes of bananas from all over the world. A few bananas from each truck are punctured with a pulp thermometer to check their internal temperature, then hauled off into temperature and pressure-controlled rooms. These rooms are then pumped with ethylene gas — the same gas emitted from fruit as they begin to ripen — to begin a uniformed ripening process.

Once they’re ripe, they’re kept in a room with the ideal temperature of 58 degrees. The fruit is then examined, and sent out to grocery stores, for home delivery, and restaurants like NYC’s Magnolia Bakery, which uses about 30 cases of bananas every day to make the spot’s wildly famous banana pudding.

No offense to takeout panna cotta, but could we see the full dessert menu, please?

Pop-ups Ha’s Đặc Biệt and Kreung Cambodia pulled out of their wildly popular Outerspace residency right after the New York Times gave it a splashy review. What happened?

Masa, Momofuku, Peter Luger, and more were among the restaurants granted the most funds

Breaking down the food, labor, and fixed costs of Reem’s popular kishek and cheese man’oushe

We often presume to understand restaurant economics because we know what a chicken breast costs at the supermarket. “I could make this dish at home for $5,” goes the refrain. Could we? Here, Eater looks at all the costs in a popular restaurant dish to see what goes into it, and how much profit comes out.

There’s no good time for your restaurant’s oven to explode, but certainly half a year into a global pandemic that made operating a restaurant unprofitable, impersonal, and joyless has to be one of the worst times possible. For Reem’s in San Francisco, where the cuisine revolves around mana’eesh flatbread and three quarters of the menu comes out of the oven, it meant spending $45,000 on a new appliance (not to mention $100,000 in lost sales while the restaurant was closed for over five months) and waiting for the Marsal MB-60 double deck to be shipped from North Carolina. Not that owner Reem Assil sat on her hands. She had already undertaken the process of transitioning her restaurant to a co-operative, employee-owned model, and had enlisted the nonprofits Project Equity and Sustainable Economies Law Center to explore options.

“The world of worker-ownership is so new that there are a variety of ways you can structure it,” says Assil. “So we are being diligent and thoughtful about a model that works for us and our employees.”

The restaurant had already launched an apprenticeship program — 12 of the 26 employees are engaged in a yearlong course to learn skills in leadership, political education, participatory governance, and management, in order to prime them culturally for the shift to co-operative ownership. The end goal is to land on a new model and collectively write bylaws that will change the legal structure of the business.

“We are halfway through and it has been amazing to see people’s growth.”

So what does this kind of investment in workers have to do with the price of lunch? To see how this unique business structure impacts costs, let’s look at one of Assil’s signature items — kishek and cheese man’oushe (the singular of mana’eesh), the freshly baked flatbread topped with fermented bulgur yogurt and harissa (both made in house), grated akkawi cheese, and, for an extra dollar, arugula.

Menu price: $11
Additional 20 percent service charge: $2.20

The printed menu cost is $11; the restaurant has an included service charge, which brings the true cost to the consumer up to $13.20. Assil counts the service charge towards sales.

Total cost to the restaurant: $11.96
Profit (outdoor dining): $1.24
Profit (pickup, unsliced): $1.12
Profit (pickup, sliced): $0.73
Profit (delivery): -$0.06 (loss)

Food Costs: $2.06

Dough: $0.11
Spicy kishek: $0.38
Arugula: $0.34
Akkawi cheese: $0.75
Olive oil: $0.18
Chile spice mix: $0.30
Packaging: $0.12 for parchment paper and pastry bag or $0.51 for pizza box

Mana’eesh are the cornerstone of the Reem’s menu. Every day, the kitchen produces hundreds of these flatbreads, which are composed of relatively inexpensive flour, olive oil, and yeast. Even the kishek, yogurt fermented with bulgur wheat and house-made harissa (including red fresno chiles, roasted red peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes, salt, cumin, coriander, lemon, and olive oil), doesn’t break the bank. Neither does a generous glug of California olive oil. But as with pizza, it’s the cheese that runs up the majority of food cost. Still, even with the akkawi, a mild, brined cheese made by Karoun Dairies in San Fernando, California, grated over top of the man’oushe, the food cost of the dish is 15.6 percent, well below the 25 percent many restaurants aim for.

Labor Costs: $5.32

Modest ingredients require many hands to quickly transform them into exquisite meals. Someone has to deseed all those chiles and shape each ball of dough. Appropriate compensation runs up the labor tab. The lowest-paid staff at Reem’s start at $16.75/hour (with a cost of living increase every six months), which goes up to $20. They also split 85 percent of a 20 percent service charge that adds up, on average, to an additional $8.50 an hour. The remainder of this charge goes into a fund that covers benefits and the COL wage increases.

“We are trying to build jobs with dignity,” says Assil. “A livable wage is the base of everything else. It is a human right.” As such, Reem’s runs at 40 percent labor costs, while comparable restaurants typically run closer to 33 percent.

Fixed Costs: $4.65

In addition to the usual suspects of fixed costs — insurance, taxes, bank charges, POS, garbage, dishwasher, $9,000 monthly rent, hood cleaning, phone, loan repayments, and so on — Reem’s folds salaried management into this bracket. This may change in the future, as the business evolves into its employee-owned model. But for now, the investment in training adds a lot to fixed expenses. Fixed costs currently account for 35 percent of sales.

“Our salaried management is there through thick and thin, making the operations run whether we have sales or not,” says Assil. “That is why we see them as a necessary investment to run the business. I think there is a shift in people’s consciousness about the true cost of food and for that I’m thankful for this new chapter of Reem’s. When you create a culture centered around the people who work there, you invest in the things that make people happier and healthier. Ideally we want to see all our labor as a fixed cost.”

Third-Party Delivery Costs: $0.79

Assil was always wary of third-party delivery companies, a sector she describes as a race-to-the-bottom tool to maximize worker productivity while minimizing pay. Just before the start of the pandemic, after negotiating commissions down to 22.5 percent for delivery and 10 percent for pickup, she used Caviar for a while, incorporating the fees into higher prices for delivery.

“Even though Caviar doesn’t like that, and they say not to, we would upcharge on the pricing to account for that percentage of the cut. So our customers were paying for that.” Even so, Reem’s was just barely breaking even on these orders.

Once COVID-19 restrictions forced restaurants to focus on off-premises sales, Assil settled on the combination of Toast for online ordering (a flat $99 monthly fee) and Candlestick for delivery. The courier company is a bike operated co-op with a 6 percent commission. Though the dispatch zone is limited, at present only 4 percent of revenue comes from delivery. “Being worker-owned, they’re better aligned with our values. And the cut was reasonable.”

Profit or Loss

“I often call this the ‘heritage man’oushe,’” Assil says, “because it shows the beautiful sophistication of our approach to cooking — fermentation, working with chiles, creating bold flavor. All our Lebanese customers kept asking for it because it brought them nostalgia of street-corner bakeries. So we listened and now it has a cult following.”

The kishek is not the best-selling man’oushe. It ranks maybe fourth or fifth. And compared with higher-margin items like falafel, hummus, and the za’atar man’oushe, it’s not super profitable. But there’s a limit to how high Reem’s can price food without pricing out of its neighborhood. “The more we can scale, the more we can make the prices accessible. Although it’s a small profit, we’re happy about it and we think it’s still worth it to have on the menu. I’ve thought about nixing this one. But with a few of the higher-margin items, it evens out.”

Corey Mintz, a food reporter focusing on labor in restaurants, is the author of the upcoming book The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants As We Knew Them, And What Comes Next (Public Affairs 2021).
Michelle K. Min is a food photographer based in San Francisco.

“I made the film to get people to start to see him as a person again.”

What the rise of ghost kitchens and virtual brands means for restaurant owners, workers, and consumers

Over the past year, Guy Fieri, George Lopez, Mariah Carey, Pauly D, Mario Lopez, and Youtube star MrBeast opened hundreds of restaurant businesses simultaneously. Leaning into the popularity of delivery apps and the excess capacity of restaurant kitchens around the country, they all launched virtual brands — delivery-only chains that local restaurants sign up to distribute. They’re entirely designed for the app economy, and are one of a few, similar trends that are shaking up the future of the food delivery business.

Celeb-backed chains garner a lot of attention, but virtual chains are everywhere. National restaurant chains — Chili’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Applebee’s, for example — have their own. So do much smaller restaurant groups. Mom and pops around America are signing up as distribution points but also creating spinoff concepts of their own.

Meanwhile, restaurants continue to experiment with ghost kitchens — off-premise production spaces with no visible storefront designed to streamline a restaurant’s delivery business.

These new models could provide new revenue opportunities for struggling restaurateurs. But what does it mean for consumers who are increasingly disconnected from where their food is coming from? And what does it mean for workers making five menus out of the same kitchen?

Listen to episode four, the final installment in this Land of the Giants miniseries, to hear about the growth of virtual brands and ghost kitchens and how investors, restaurant owners, and the apps themselves are getting involved and what these new versions of “restaurants” mean for consumers.

Subscribe to Land of the Giants: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn

A brand new drop, with just three classic items

Eater merch is back, this time with a limited edition drop. Joining our collection of collegiate-themed items are three new products, all in iconic Eater red. Rep your restaurant obsession and your Eater city with any of these new shirts.

These items will be available for a limited time only — from now until August 11. So get your pre-orders in now! All orders will ship in August.

Head here to check out our merch storefront. Got questions about your order or about returns or refunds? You can find that info here.

It’s not just nostalgia or the enduring power of that neon-orange cheese powder. This gimmick is actually delicious.

Most of the time, gimmicky food mashups are the definition of disappointing. While the idea of candy-flavored cheese or ice cream infused with the flavors of an everything bagel might be compelling to some, most people are so put off by the concept of such a bizarre combination that the idea of eating something that weird is off the table. The products purpose is less for eating and more for Twitter gags and outrage, which is often how the brands intentionally designed them. This, however, is not the case with New York creamery Van Leeuwen’s new macaroni-and-cheese flavor, which is nothing short of magical.

In collaboration with Kraft, the makers of the famed blue box that fueled many of our childhoods, the upscale ice cream shop, known for decadent French ice creams like Royal Wedding (elderflower and lemon) and its most famous Earl Grey, will debut a new flavor made with the cheese powder that gives Kraft’s macaroni and cheese its signature neon-orange color on July 13. And however skeptical you may be about the pairing of macaroni and cheese and ice cream, I regret to inform you that this unhinged mashup is actually delicious.

Upon cracking open the first pint, which was shipped to my door shrouded in dry ice to protect from the blistering Texas heat, the flavor’s inspiration was immediately evident. The cheese powder — with a little help from turmeric, according to the ingredient list — makes a scoop of the ice cream look near-identical to the sauce that coats the noodles in a classic Kraft dinner, with a bright orange color that is sort of reminiscent of sherbert left by a nuclear testing site for too long. It doesn’t boast a particularly cheesy smell, and blessedly, there aren’t any little bits of noodles scattered throughout to really mimic a chilly version of this childhood classic.

Upon taking the first bite, I was hooked. Half of the pint had disappeared by the time I looked up, and I have no regrets. The cheese powder combines with Van Leeuwen’s rich base, made with milk, cream, and sugar, to produce a buttery flavor that’s only slightly cheesy. It doesn’t exactly evoke a bowl of macaroni and cheese in terms of texture, thankfully, but the flavor is strikingly similar. It’s lightly funky, and more complex than the classic blue-box dinner. It’s one of those foods that’s so uniquely compelling that you’re going to be confused while eating it, but definitely won’t want to stop.

The seemingly weird combination of cheese powder and ice cream works because its ingredients are really not all that different from what you’d typically pair Kraft’s cheese powder with. Macaroni and cheese is already made with milk and cream, and many recipes for the dish call for a little bit of sugar — a tablespoon or so — to balance out all that tangy dairy. Salty-sweet is an unbeatable flavor combination, and that’s exactly what’s going on here. The only thing that’s absent is the noodles, and they are absolutely not missed.

While this concept may seem totally bizarre, it’s not exactly uncommon in the United States and beyond. Ice creams made with queso fresco — or helado de queso — are common in Mexico and in Mexican snack shops across my home state of Texas, often garnished with fresh fruit. In the Philippines, cheddar cheese is such a popular ice cream flavor that it is mass-produced and sold in grocery stores and scoop shops. The internet, including the New York Times’s Cooking section, is replete with recipes for transforming tangy goat cheese into soft, decadent ice cream.

Perhaps it is largely nostalgia that makes this flavor so compelling to me. As a ‘90s kid, I regularly ate macaroni and cheese out of the blue box without complaint. I was a tween when Easy Mac, the microwavable version of Kraft macaroni and cheese, hit the market. It quickly became a regular part of the afternoon snack rotation, and in my stoner teen years, was the source of endless experimentation, including just pouring the cheese powder over various foods (popcorn, frozen pizza) to see if it would taste good. It usually did.

After the trauma of the last year, many brands are turning to nostalgia because they know we’re desperately looking for comfort, and often looking back to our childhoods. Breweries are dreaming up beers infused with candy and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Dunkaroos made a comeback. Breakfast cereal brands are attempting to woo back jaded millennials with “retro recipes” for favorites like Trix, Golden Grahams, and Cookie Crisp, which promise a “permanent return of the ‘80s taste.” Whether or not these nostalgia-fueled foods will actually comfort us in a time of extreme crisis — existential and otherwise — seems contingent on the individual, but clearly we’re pining for them.

If this flavor were not a limited time offering — and $12 a pint, to boot — I could envision myself keeping a pint of the macaroni and cheese ice cream in the freezer, just waiting for a hot apple pie to come out of the oven. In my lower moments, I might dip straight into the container with shortbread cookies. Either way, this is an ice cream that somehow manages to be much more compelling and appealing than the gimmick that birthed it.