Archives:
- Bangkok, via Barcelona
I am sitting, swathed in blankets, in a many-coloured but icy living room in Washington, D.C.
I drove here, if you can believe it, to make a dish.
I had planned 20 coffee creme brulees with candied pecans for a seated birthday dinner. Which somehow turned into two pounds of shrimp, buffet-style, in a smoked paprika broth. […]
- Mock Summer Salad
My parents sent me to a French school when I was 4 years old. People are often impressed that I speak French, but it’s really just a happy accident. (When people are impressed that I speak English, though, I get angry. I may not look terribly Caucasian, but it is my mother tongue.)
Speaking French won […]
- A Thousand And One Crepes
In the summer of 2004, St Petersburg succumbed to Tarkan-mania. I was a student then, and among those who fell. It didn’t matter that nobody had any idea what the Turkish superstar was singing about; his hit song “Dudu”, racy and undulating, pumped out of coffee shops, hair salons and blini stalls at all hours […]
- Apicius Remix
When I was 18, I spent a spring and summer living with my mother in Italy. In Florence, I remember the jarring, muddy taste of bread without salt (a regional curiosity, which a young Florence Fabricant, invoking Dante, wrote about twenty-six years ago). I remember our favourite cheap lunch spot, with tomatoes like you wouldn’t […]
