Essay – FoodWatcher

How Summers in Greece Taught Me the Joy of Frying

A few years ago I made donuts at home for the first time. To some, this may feel trivial, and to others, impressive. Personally, I was in awe. Moi? Me? I can make donuts at home?! It was as if I’d discovered how to print money on a 2002 LaserJet. I was…

A few years ago I made donuts at home for the first time. To some, this may feel trivial, and to others, impressive. Personally, I was in awe. Moi? Me? I can make donuts at home?! It was as if I’d discovered how to print money on a 2002 LaserJet. I was surprised by how easy the process was and shocked by how judgmental, or perhaps intimidated, I’d previously been by the idea of deep frying at home.

To some, this epiphany may sound basic. As a child of latkes, I wasn’t a total stranger to frying food at home, but, growing up, frying was not in our regular repertoire, nor did I seek it out in early adulthood. Of course, I love a fried good—fried chicken, fried dumplings, samosas, katsu, empanadas, donuts—you name it, I love it. But for some reason, I compartmentalized these items as “things I eat out.”

The Magic of My Harabeoji’s Avocado BLT

My harabeoji had many secrets, and one of them was tucked inside his BLT.

He kept many things hidden—grief, remorse, worry—in an abyss of stubborn silence. He left Korea for San Diego in 1978 after enduring more than half a century of instability and …

My harabeoji had many secrets, and one of them was tucked inside his BLT.

He kept many things hidden—grief, remorse, worry—in an abyss of stubborn silence. He left Korea for San Diego in 1978 after enduring more than half a century of instability and loss. It was then, at 67, that he started anew, not to retire to manicured golf courses and poolside card games like other sexagenarians, but to work in a corner deli. He had been a widower, briefly, and now, in his new city, he was a newlywed with a new business.

How This 130-Year-Old Kitchen Tool Holds My Family’s History

I’ve never seen my grandmother drink a single sip of coffee. No pourover, fancy French press, or flavored brew will tempt her away from her cabinet of caffeine-free teas and herbal tisanes. Known for pulling tea bags out of her pocketbook at restaurants, she once even brought bags of her favorite tea across the Atlantic when I took her on a research trip to the tea-steeped English countryside. Meanwhile, my grandfather drinks his coffee black, all day long, and by the bucket. His coffee set-up—a small drip machine—is relegated to one slim corner counter with a canister or two of Folgers tucked in a small cabinet below. Between his minimal coffee gear and the prominent kettle, cozies, and tea strainers, my grandmother’s kitchen is clearly meant for making tea, which is why I’ve always found it strange that she kept an old wood-and-cast-iron, hand-cranked coffee bean grinder on display in the pass-through window.

The grinder has sat there for longer than I've been alive. Most of those years, I didn’t realize what it was, just another wood-and-metal antique blending in with the other rustic touches in my grandmother’s rooster-themed kitchen in North Texas. Now, as a food scholar with a specialty in food-related material culture—the study of the power and meaning of everyday objects—I see the same utensils and kitchen tools we touch and use multiple times a day with slightly different eyes.

My Mom Says ‘I Love You’ with Aloo Paratha

The first question my mom asks when she hears I’m coming home for a visit is “What do you want to eat?” It has been this way since I left for college, and to her undying frustration, I always say something like “Whatever’s easiest!” She throws out suggestions. “Chicken curry? Matar paneer? Biryani?” and I just annoyingly reply “Yeah, that all sounds good.” I'm indifferent about what she cooks for dinner because everything she makes is always so reliably good that it’s hard to choose one thing over another.

Since the pandemic emerged in 2020, traveling to see my parents has become harder. This past summer, I stayed with them at their home in Michigan for the first time in two years for my childhood friend’s wedding. I had exactly one week, which at first seemed like more than enough time. Then I started to think realistically about what the week ahead entailed and the guilt set in instantly.

Failing at Croquembouche Helped Me Overcome Bullying

When I was a freshman in high school, I was nearly pushed down the stairs, startled by pop-up jocks from behind doors and called homophobic slurs. The day before Christmas break was one of the best school days of the year for most kids, second only to the last day of school. Every teacher would show movies while hungry teenagers ate every holiday treat in sight. I, however, couldn’t get out of bed. Just the thought of those checkered halls made me sick. So, I told my mom I wasn’t feeling well, faked a cough for good measure, crept back into bed, my duvet wrapped around me like a boa constrictor, and cried. I had never felt like I entirely fit in, but I had never been bullied like this. So, I tried to think of things that made me happy, like baking cookies with my mom and trying new recipes from my first cookbook, Flour by Joanne Chang.

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Eventually, I got myself out of bed and scanned through my mom’s recent issue of Food Network magazine. I was enchanted by the colors and textures of weeknight dinners and garnished cakes. I came across a 2-page spread about how to make a croquembouche. It looked at me like a pâtissier Uncle Sam, demanding me to put on an apron and go to war. I read about [choux pastry]https://food52.com/blog/14068-how-to-make-crullers-master-pate-a-choux-along-the-way), wet caramel, and how to wrap your pastry tower with spun sugar. I pictured a 7-foot version in the living room instead of my family’s Christmas tree and, without a second thought, gathered flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla. I tied my barely-worn “I want chocolate and I want it now” apron around my waist and got to work.

How Baking Angel Food Cake Made Me Realize I’d Fallen in Love

I wasn’t used to the kind of date where you’d bake something together. I was used to being taken out to bars that smelled like hops and bleach and you had to yell to be heard over the music. I’d come of age at a college obsessed with fraternities and then moved to New York City just as Tinder exploded, both of which gave me the sense that dating happened exclusively at bars and parties. So when I moved to Virginia in my late twenties and a guy named Ben invited me out on a series of dates that felt too good to be true—a sunset walk, dinner at his house, and then, after those improbable first two dates, suggested we make a pumpkin angel food cake together—I assumed he must be joking.

Forget the fact that I thought dates should involve late nights and at least one kind of alcohol. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to make an angel food cake. The ones I’d experienced came from a grocery bakery or a box mix. They were sticky and spongy, their texture a sweet cakey facsimile of a marshmallow.

How Homemade Mayonnaise Saved My Postpartum Sanity

My mum worried so much that she staged an intervention with me via FaceTime from New Zealand. “You can’t survive on frozen pizza,” she said. I glanced at the fig bar wrappers, cartons of chicken broth, and greasy cardboard dotted with dried pizza sauce…

My mum worried so much that she staged an intervention with me via FaceTime from New Zealand. "You can't survive on frozen pizza," she said. I glanced at the fig bar wrappers, cartons of chicken broth, and greasy cardboard dotted with dried pizza sauce overflowing the trash can. "We eat burgers, too," I reassured her.

Before Arthur arrived, I spent Sunday afternoons making pappardelle by hand, using “00” flour, kneading the dough with my knuckles, and rolling it out into one smooth, even layer.

The Remarkable Variety of Caribbean Cornmeal

In Caribbean restaurants across America, patrons have become accustomed to common dishes such as jerk chicken, beef patties, and oxtail. The heat and vibrance of Caribbean food has made a splash stateside, but some of the more home-style, foundational …

Fungi—pronounced “foon-ji,” with no relation to mushrooms—is one of them. A staple Caribbean cornmeal dish flaked with okra and laced with butter can be found throughout the islands, particularly in the West Indies and Virgin Islands. The thickened, earthy porridge-like dish has roots in slavery itself, and is one of many dishes that demonstrates the importance of cornmeal in Caribbean foodways.

Rediscovering My Family’s History Through Cornmeal Dumplings

My family moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Boston, Massachusetts when I was a child, a dislocation that was the source of much tragedy, small and large. To be southern was to be special, but we seemed to lose our identities and our drawl overnight. At the same time, my mother discovered the price of heating oil for a drafty New England colonial home, died of shock, and then rose again to buy down booties and electric blankets. Not only were we no longer special, we had elf feet and slept in fear of being electrocuted by the blanket. Lost in the shuffle, I barely noticed that we could no longer buy Stivers’ Best, our family brand, in the grocery store.

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The brand hadn’t been ours for a generation, even when we lived in our proper place where the dirt was red and the daffodils bloomed on my birthday. But it was founded by my great-grandfather, Theo Stivers, a miller from Cleveland, Tennessee. He moved his headquarters to Rome, Georgia in the 1930s and the flours, cornmeals, and grits were widely available in the regional grocery stores of my youth. My grandfather and his siblings grew up working for the Theo Stivers Milling Co., and the loss of it during the Great Depression was a theme of his conversation until the end of his life.

My Hometown’s Salty-Sweet Sundae Still Holds Up 90 Years After Its Invention

I’m from Canton, Ohio–the meat-and-potatoes middle of the country. A town most famous for being home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame and lots of cream soup–based casseroles. It’s the kind of Midwestern place where the food is abundant and uncomplicated, often forgettable and occasionally sublime. The Canton-born Bittner, a 90-year-old ice cream sundae, falls into the latter category and remains one of the best desserts I’ve ever eaten, beating out my new favorites like Milk Bar’s cereal milk ice cream and my old standbys like Nestle Drumsticks.

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The Bittner is a sundae created by Taggart’s Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor that opened its doors in 1926. Taggart’s looks nearly the same almost 100 years later—blue and white tile floors, sticky wooden booths, and a marble bar—and it’s still serving the same kind of food it was serving during the roaring 20s: overflowing sloppy joes, thick malts, tuna melts on white bread, and tangy phosphates from the soda fountain. The whole place is a trip back in time, but the thing people get most nostalgic for is the Bittner, a frozen delight that’s kind of like a sundae, sort of like a milkshake, and a little bit like a Wendy’s Frosty®.

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