Foodies Clan

Trust me, it’ll change the way you cook

This post originally appeared in the February 22, 2021 edition of The Move, a place for Eater’s editors to reveal their recommendations and pro dining tips — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes weird, but always someone’s go-to move. Subscribe now.

There’s a persistent myth in American life that as you get older, the homes you occupy will get bigger, or at least more comfortable. When my daughter was born this summer, I knew we were on borrowed time in our one-bedroom apartment, and after months of searching we found a place with some major upgrades: two bedrooms and in-unit laundry. But the kitchen and living space are meaningfully smaller than our last apartment, and I’ve had to be smart about the collection of cooking tools I’ve amassed over the years — years I spent thinking that someday soon I’d be in a home with a bigger, better kitchen than any of my apartments ever had.

The problem was my round 5.5-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven: No matter how clever I got, I just couldn’t find space to store it. It was too wide for my cabinets and too heavy for the coat-closet shelves. For the first few months after we moved, it just lived on the floor under the perpetually cluttered desk/table that’s in the living room. When I finally couldn’t take it anymore, I moved it to the stovetop, where it would at least look nice while also taking up space. I’m not the first person to think of this, of course; scroll through enough kitchen inspo accounts on Instagram or Pinterest and you’ll see plenty of Dutch ovens on stoves as a chic accent piece. What I didn’t know then, but can now tell you definitively, is that keeping a Dutch oven on the stove has changed the way I cook, and changed it for the better.

Now that it’s always on the stove, I use it daily. It’s not just that I’m constantly reminded of its existence, which, of course, I am. The Dutch oven has the added advantage of already being set out, clean and ready to use, which is an enticing prospect compared to rummaging through the lower corner cabinet that holds every other pot I own. It took me years, but finally, I understand what a versatile tool it is, too. It comfortably fits a steamer basket, and I’m in a phase of life where I am steaming a lot of foods to make them soft enough to offer the baby. It’s way more fun to boil water in a gorgeous enameled cast-iron pot than in my Ikea stock pot, so I’ve been cooking a lot of pasta in there. It’s perfect for caramelizing onions and thus a great place to build easy pasta sauces (once you drain the pasta from it), making one-pot meals a breeze. And since it’s so much easier to clean than stainless steel, I’m starting to experiment with using it instead of my skillet for tasks like searing skin-on chicken thighs before roasting them in the oven.

Not only is it lovely to look at, moving one of my fanciest pieces of cookware to a permanent home on the stove has transformed my relationship with it. Before, I only used my Dutch oven when a recipe specifically called for it. And I often felt guilty about letting it sit fallow: It was a wedding gift from my registry, and there’s a particular shittiness to knowing someone you love spent a lot of money on a thing you said you wanted but that you’re not actually using.

But putting something fancy in arm’s reach acclimates you to it; suddenly, it’s not so Important. For me, this shift has been liberating. It’s already there, so I might as well use it to cook some zucchini spears for the baby, you know? So if you’re like me — you’re getting older but your kitchen isn’t getting any better — give this a shot with your fanciest pot. You’ve got nothing to lose but a burner and some hang-ups.

The union — Doughnut Works United — says that if the company does not officially recognize the union by Thursday, it will file for an election with the National Labor Relations Board

Get in on Eater Wine Club, a monthly wine subscription

One of the things we love most about food is wine. Specifically, the wine you get to drink while dining out at your favorite restaurant, be it your go-to local joint or the fanciest place in town. This is wine selected by someone who knows what they’re doing — a professional who understands how to decode a label and what kind of grapes will make your food taste that much better. So what if, we wondered, we made it possible to experience that kind of hospitality right at home?

Get to know Eater Wine Club, a monthly wine subscription box. Our extensive network of local editors have teamed up with sommeliers and beverage directors from some of our favorite restaurants, bars, and shops across the country to curate a new experience each month, with ever-changing themes and bottles (two or four per box, your choice!) and plenty of perks. Sign up and you’ll get a box full of surprising and highly drinkable wines on your doorstep every month, plus an exclusive newsletter and an invite to our monthly wine party.

For March 2021, our wine curator is Rania Zayyat, the Texas-based wine director behind East Austin’s Bufalina. Rania’s theme is inspired by the wanderlust we all may be feeling these days, especially with winter still upon us: island wines from the Mediterranean and Aegean seas.

So join the club and invite your friends — from the one who geeks out over cool labels and funky tastes to the one who just wants you to hand them a glass of something delicious that’ll make their food pop. Sign up for Eater Wine Club here — we’ll see you at the party.

Something as simple as eating pork rinds on a patio felt like a transformative experience after a year in a pandemic and a week of brutal winter turmoil

While the power grid struggled and Texas officials dithered, mutual aid groups demonstrated their capacity for fast, effective disaster relief

Outdoor dining will be first — assuming the reopening plan continues, indoor dining and drinking will return in mid-May

Taco Bell says yes

Taco Bell is wading into the chain competitive cash grab known as the “chicken sandwich wars” with its own take on the item: a chicken sandwich taco.

Made up of crispy chicken and chipotle sauce cradled in a folded flatbread, the so-called “taco” will be tested at select locations in Nashville, Tennessee, and Charlotte, North Carolina, starting March 11. A nationwide rollout is planned for later this year.

This isn’t the first time Taco Bell has served fried chicken. In 2019, the chain briefly introduced an item called crispy tortilla chicken, and before that, there was the stuntiest of stunt food, the naked chicken chalupa with a fried-chicken shell instead of a tortilla. But the chain’s current reentry into the arena signals a willingness to get down and dirty in the fast-food fight for customers’ souls — by which I mean their appetite for fried chicken sandwiches, best exemplified by the Popeyes chicken sandwich craze of summer 2019.

Other chains that have recently added new chicken sandwiches to their menus include KFC, Wendy’s, and Shake Shack. McDonald’s announced a slate of three new chicken sandwiches that will be available starting February 24. Burger King also announced that it will replace its current crispy chicken sandwich offering with a new version later this year.

• Taco Bell enters chicken sandwich wars with its own spin: A taco version [CNBC]
• Taco Bell joins the chicken wars with a new taco [CNN]

Boosted by aid from the LEE Initiative, chef Michael Fojtasek of Olamaie fed local organizations in need of hot meals while buying up frozen produce from local farms

From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week

This post originally appeared on February 20, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

I’m curious about your position on indoor dining. I’ve read through all the articles, here and elsewhere, about why it is dangerous for customers and workers. I’ve listened to my epidemiologist mother complain about the risks of indoor dining in her region. I’ve received texts and emails from restaurant workers telling me about unreported COVID outbreaks at their restaurants. Meanwhile, my friends who are dining inside in other cities tell me how rarely they are asked for contact info, how customers almost never wear masks between courses.

But I’ve also read the entreaties from restaurant owners who are opening to save their businesses and the livelihoods of their employees. I’ve talked to restaurateurs who feel good about the lengths they’ve gone to to make their spaces as safe as possible. I see the unemployment numbers. I see the food insecurity in my own neighborhood.

My main take is that I envy those with strong enough convictions to know what the right answer is.

This debate (and it is a debate) isn’t new. In most of America, indoor dining has been going strong for the last month — if not the last six. And the tension at play is one that’s been explored over and over again this past year: lives versus livelihoods (when livelihoods often equal lives if you have no social safety net).

When our critic Ryan Sutton and I were discussing his piece about the premature reopening of indoor dining in New York, we agreed he should lay the blame on the government, which has left this restaurant community out to dry. Yes, if we were in a perfect world, the government would shut down restaurants and pay everyone to stay home and unemployed. They would get workers vaccinated before opening dining rooms. But we live in this world.

So I don’t envy restaurant owners who see opening as the only way to save their businesses and their staff, or workers who see returning to work as the most viable option for staying afloat. I don’t fault their customers for supporting them. Takeout may keep the lights on for some businesses, but it’s not bringing back very many jobs. At the same time, critics aren’t wrong to think indoor dining is dangerous, because it is. If you’ve lost a family member to COVID, there’s no justification for keeping businesses open before community spread is greatly reduced.

So on Eater, you’ll see reports on the risks of dining out and the impossible decisions high-risk workers have to make before going back to work. You’ll see our writers’ opinions about those risks and restaurant owners’ opinions about opening inside. You’ll read about an industry divided. You’ll also see maps and guides that include restaurants that are open for indoor dining, because people can make their own decisions.

As someone who oversees a team of journalists in over two dozen cities who are in contact with restaurant owners and workers every single day, all I can say is this is such a painful story, and the journalists, restaurant owners, workers, and diners are wracked with fear, unease, guilt, uncertainty, and anger.

For this and so many other reasons, I’m anxious to get to the other side.

Please send me your thoughts to amanda@eater.com.

On Eater

Nixta Taqueria/Facebook

The biggest story this week is, of course, the winter storms that impacted many of our cities across the U.S. and absolutely devastated much of Texas. Restaurants rallied to feed people in need, serve as warming stations, and offer fresh water. Mutual aid networks activated to respond to the crisis, while farmers worried about the long-term implications for crops and livestock. Our full coverage is here.

— San Francisco restaurant workers will be eligible for the vaccine on February 24, while LA’s and D.C.’s will be eligible in March. Meanwhile, an employee at Red Hook Tavern in Brooklyn was allegedly fired for refusing to get the coronavirus vaccine.

— Restaurants and pubs in London probably won’t be able to reopen until May.

— California plans to award $2.1 billion in aid to restaurants and bars and $125 million to undocumented workers.

— Guy Fieri opened a string of ghost kitchens in 23 states and Washington, D.C.

— Wild to me that in the last month, Osteria Morini, Cote, Uchi, and Carbone all opened in Miami.

— Our well-meaning attempt to support Asian-American communities via consumption is a start, but it’s not going to be enough to fight the intense Sinophobia in this country.

Joseph Weaver

I love this piece about how pop culture has pushed the “lunchbox moment” — when a child of immigrants is bullied for their school lunch — in immigrant narratives when for so many, it’s not representative of their experience.

— If you didn’t make pizza babka this month, what were you doing?

— A new restaurant opening in San Francisco aspires to be the Domino’s for Chinese-American food.

— A look at how much one D.C. restaurant had to invest in takeout containers, outdoor heaters, and cleaning supplies to get through this pandemic year.

— Watch: How a sushi chef transformed his four omakase restaurants into upscale takeout operations.

Off Eater

• The hypnotic joy of FoodTok. [Jezebel]
• Rethinking policy for Black America. [Vox.com]
• Newly vaccinated older Americans are hitting the road. [NYT]
• Just a reminder that ghost kitchens are not restaurants and therefore cannot be the future of restaurants. [Grub Street]
• An incredible story of an immigrant restaurant family in the Pacific Northwest and how they’ve overcome all kinds (so many kinds!) of adversity over the last 50 years. [BA]
• “Ugly” grocery delivery services have thrived during the pandemic. [Modern Retail]

Bowery Farming uses technology to prioritize accessibility and sustainability in their produce growing operations

To some, the pristine growing conditions and perceived mechanical interference of a vertical farm can seem unnatural, but at Bowery Farming “interference” is actually not the goal at all. “We don’t really think about how people are involved in the growing process, but how to take people out of the growing process” says chief science officer Henry Sztul. “Our goal is actually to have as few people walking around our plants as possible.”

Bowery Farming is a network of vertical farms working to reengineer the growing process. Using a system of light and watering technology, Bowery is able to use 95 percent less water than a traditional outdoor farm, zero pesticides and chemicals, and grow food that tastes as good as anyone else’s.

Bowery Farming uses vertical farm-specific seeds that are optimized for flavor instead of insect resistance and durability. Seeds are mechanically pressed into trays of soil, and sent out into growing positions, or racks within the building that have their own lighting and watering systems. Each tray gets its own QR code so that they can be monitored and assigned a customized plan for water and light until they’re ready to be harvested.

Irving Fain, Bowery Farming’s founder and CEO contemplates the prediction from the United Nations that 70 to 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in and around cities in the next 30 years. “Figuring out ‘how do you feed and how do you provide fresh food to urban environments both more efficiently as well as more sustainably?’ is a very important question today, and an even more important question in the years to come.”

What happens to SoMa restaurants when SF’s biggest employer lets everyone work from home

Washingtonian obtained a “Standard Operating Procedure” booklet that outlined the process

Sending limits on mobile payment platforms like Venmo and CashApp have made it difficult to distribute the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for Dallasites in need this week

Instacart workers say they’ve been suspended from accounts for failed deliveries, even in cases where the customers don’t pick up their calls or aren’t home

Apps like Uber, Instacart and Postmates initially drew in gig workers with the promise of easy money (pick up a shift on your lunch break!), flexible hours, and unlimited earning potential. The reality, however, is that the apps’ workers face increasing challenges like low wages, scams, and penalties, all of which have been getting worse in recent weeks.

According to a report from Motherboard, Instacart has been temporarily suspending the accounts of Instacart workers who cancel deliveries, even in “no fault” special cases where no one was home or a minor ordered alcohol. Instacart says the suspensions happen when the company “suspects fraudulent or unusual activity related to an order,” but workers say being locked out of their accounts for 24 hours means Instacart is keeping them from work, often for no reason.

Shoppers have complained on Facebook and Reddit groups about the policy. “Even tho I didn’t cancel I couldn’t even get in the gate. Customer wouldn’t answer my calls or agents’ calls,” one wrote on Facebook. “No pay...no batches for 24 hours!” On Reddit, a shopper wrote that they accepted an order from a store in Texas, only to find it at closed early because of the storm. “[Instacart] said I would be compensated for going to the store and assured me that my account wouldn’t truly be suspended. Today, my account is currently shut down and I have no way of contacting them,” they wrote.

Vanessa Bain, an organizer with the Gig Workers Collective, told Motherboard that Instacart is taking away the control that gig work initially promised. “Let’s be real, with this, they’re restricting us so we don’t have any power to determine when we work,” she said. “It’s a situation in which shoppers have a lot less agency and flexibility than they used to.”

Meanwhile, the Markup reports that some Postmates shoppers are experiencing phishing scams that result in hundreds of dollars of lost pay and, because so much of the communication with Postmates is done over an app, it’s difficult to get in touch with anyone who can help. “In regular employment arrangements, there is a company culture and there are always people you can talk to. One word for that is social transparency,” Elizabeth Watkins, a senior research assistant at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, told the Markup. “In gig work, they don’t have this—it’s called digital isolation.”

Workers in California, where Prop 22 solidified that gig workers would not be considered employees of the apps they work for, have also reported pay cuts, since companies are now under no obligation to pay a minimum wage. One driver told the Guardian he makes about $5 an hour, and can come off an eight-hour day with only $100 before gas and other expenses. Prop 22 determines that workers meeting certain thresholds are eligible for benefits, but apps are allowed to pay for the time when a driver is actively shopping or delivering, and not time waiting for an order or driving to a destination.

“A lot of drivers were duped because they expected they were magically going to be able to qualify for benefits that the companies made it sound like they were going to pay for up front and that drivers were going to be getting reimbursement for the mileage,” said driver Ben Valdez. “They also made drivers believe that if Prop 22 didn’t pass then Uber and Lyft were going to leave the state of California because they couldn’t afford to pay drivers as employees.”

Delivery apps like Instacart, Postmates, Grubhub and UberEats have amassed even more power in the pandemic, thanks to a sagging economy and more people relying on delivery meals and groceries than ever before. So far, they’ve been able to wield that power to exploit gig workers and lobby for more legislation like Prop 22 around the country.

Look past the giblet pudding and cholera cures, and you’ll find a 19th-century cookbook that anticipates a 21st-century cooking trend

The full title of Mrs. Levy’s book, as it appears on the cover, is Mrs. Esther Levy’s Jewish Cookery Book on Principles of Economy Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers With Medical Recipes and Other Valuable Information Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management and Being the First Jewish Cookbook Published in America as Published in Philadelphia, 1871.

Ludicrously long by modern standards, the cookbook’s title seems even more laughable once you flip through the recipes: They look abridged, written in a kind of cooking shorthand. Measurements, if they’re included at all, may call for “enough” or “good sized pieces.” Instructions — such as “let [the onions] cook to take the strength out of them,” “the addition of a piece of beef would improve the flavor,” and “when it has fermented properly” — rely on a similarly terse brand of intuition.

But it’s their very brevity and ambiguity that make Mrs. Levy’s 150-year-old recipes look a lot like the paragraph-style “no-recipes” that have become popular on digital food outlets and in email newsletters during the last few years. A reaction to the glut of overly technical recipes, no-recipes take a contrarian stance to the gospel of optimization, offering recognition to overworked home cooks already exhausted by Wednesday night. They prioritize speed without too much fuss over cup measures or baking times.

The Jewish Cookery Book is fascinating for all the ways it feels at once familiar and foreign, even to a Jewish reader acquainted with Mrs. Levy’s religious dining instructions (if not her prescriptive rhetoric on gender roles). Mrs. Levy, nee Jacobs, is a bit of a mysterious figure. Nearly every reference to her book — including the one on the back of my 1988 reprint — is accompanied by the statement that “not much is known about the book’s author.” So the book stands on its own merits.

Jewish Cookery shows its age in dishes like giblet pudding, “old” pea soup, and calf’s pluck with margen (stewed offal), along with its requirements of its audience: A reader will need to stock saleratus, sago, and suet; measure liquid by the wine glass; preserve butter for winter; and boil pudding in a tied-up cloth (a method some British readers might recognize as “shirt-sleeve pudding” or “dead man’s arm”).

As its unabridged title promises, the book is not merely a cookbook: Its “Other Valuable Information” includes a housekeeping section where you can learn to “give a gloss to shirt bosoms,” make pomatum (hair oil) from scented beef marrow and lard, put out a fire on another person, and “destroy” roaches with snuff. You take your life into your own hands wading through the medical recipes section, where there’s both a regular cure for cholera (soda, cinnamon, clove, brandy, sugar) and a “good cure” that includes Hoffman’s anodyne (ether) and laudanum (opium).

For all its oddities, the book hangs together with a certain logic if you spend enough time with it. Mrs. Levy addresses her book to young Jewish American women, essentially newlyweds or soon-to-be-weds unprepared for the domestic duties thrust upon them. I can’t help but imagine this target reader as someone like the “Young Wife,” the satirical still life painted 17 years earlier by Lilly Martin Spencer, an artist who portrayed the travails of newlywed life.

“There is no opportunity for attaining a knowledge of family management at school,” Mrs. Levy frets in her introduction. “The direction of a table is no inconsiderable branch of a lady’s business, as it involves judgment of expenditure, respectability of appearance, the comfort of one’s household, and of those who partake of the hospitality thereof.”

She is equally concerned that parents aren’t adequately passing down customs. “If the daughters of the family were to take the head of the table, under the direction of their mother, they would fulfill its duties with grace,” she writes. That would obviate the need for a book like this, but she exclaims elsewhere, “The want of a work of this description has long been felt in our domestic circles.” So Mrs. Levy took it upon herself to provide immigrants and their offspring with a crucial link to their ancestral food practices. Included among her many instructions in the book are how to properly set a table, follow specific rules for holidays, and arrange a menu for a whole week.

At the same time, Mrs. Levy helped immigrants learn to integrate Jewish dietary laws with the global foodways they encountered in the American melting pot, something (fittingly) evident in the soup section, which includes tweaked recipes for gumbo, mulligatawny, and pepper pot. A generation later, cookbooks devoted to Jewish-American cooking, like the more famous 1901 Settlement Cookbook by Lizzie Black Kander, reflected a more complicated relationship with integration, specifically the fear among established German Jewish immigrants that the Eastern European Jews then entering the country would reflect poorly on all Jews and spur anti-Semitism. Pressure for immigrants to Americanize was coded into the Settlement Cookbook, which included education about American cultural norms but few Jewish recipes.

By contrast, Mrs. Levy’s encouragement seems more optimistic, promising her readers they can merge culinary traditions while preserving their heritage. She neutralized the temptation of sumptuous American foods considered treif (or not kosher) by creating kosher versions so that no one would have to miss out on the fun of an aspirational American appetite, even developing a Charlotte-style dessert with matzo for Passover. “The contents of our Book show how various and how grateful to the taste are the viands of which we may lawfully partake,” she writes.

In this context, the book’s format makes sense. Rather than offer complex recipes for individual dishes, Mrs. Levy teaches by repetition, like a parent might. There are over 40 recipes for puddings, and only by reading all of them does a reader begin to learn the basic components of pudding, get a feel for texture, and internalize the methodologies. A relatively extensive recipe may feature a key detail that is then applied in another recipe, but Mrs. Levy doesn’t always explicitly connect the two. There are no page references, no shortcuts; you just have to find both recipes in your own time. It’s an empirical approach, full of trial and error, almost like learning to play music by ear.

Outlets that produce modern paragraph-style recipes lean away from this parental instinct, instead acknowledging the independence of home cooks and the quotidian realities that prevent them from prioritizing cooking. But these non-recipes only do so much for amateurs. You have to know how to cook to some degree before you can disregard recipes altogether, and there is little motivation to push through the cacophony of internet cooking advice until you have achieved that mastery.

The Jewish Cookery Book can just as easily feel frustrating to novices (which in this case includes anyone not versed in 150-year-old cooking lingo and customs). But the recipes provide reassurance through their number and cohesion. If the author’s own encouragement isn’t enough, the recipes collectively tell you to keep going. Or, as Mrs. Levy says, “Be careful to observe these rules, and you will succeed.”

Food service staff are included in Phase 1C of D.C.’s vaccination plan, which begins in March

Restaurants are serving breakfast tacos, gumbo, and whatever else they can to feed the community and support mutual aid organizers

These mutual aid funds, nonprofits, and community groups are getting hot meals and other supplies to people on the ground right now

Advocates say restaurant workers shouldn’t be required to provide proof to get the shot as some can’t provide pay stubs or other forms of documentation