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Sifting through the aftermath of a disastrous blaze. The romance that launched a thousand Supreme Court opinions. A poetic ode to a simple life, well lived. Tracing the arc of food writing. And examining the hidden costs of a particularly sensitive surgical procedure. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.
Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words
Megan Greenwell’s piece does what the best longform features do: It mesmerizes you with an opening so powerful and a story so compelling that you deliberately read it slowly, just to make it last. This piece—about a devastating fire at a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration that happened to contain records belonging to Greenwell’s grandfather—is nearly 8,000 words long, but the prose is so sharp and cinematic that you’ll wish it was longer. “The National Personnel Records Center fire burned out of control for two days before firefighters were able to begin putting it out,” she writes. “Photos show the roof ablaze, a nearly 5-acre field of flame. The steel beams that had once held up the glass walls jut at unnatural angles, like so many broken legs.” Even were it not set against a backdrop of the U.S. government, this would be a fascinating mystery: What or who started the fire and how do workers attempt to uncover precious facts from seriously damaged files? Did Greenwell’s grandfather’s records survive the blaze? Be sure to take it slow and let this story smolder. I’m certainly glad I did. —KS
Kerry Howley | New York | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words
My husband sent me this story while I was reporting in Idaho last week, with a message that said, “Isn’t this by that writer you like?” The answer, reader, is yes. Kerry Howley’s 2022 story about anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser was rightly named a finalist for a National Magazine Award—one of several nominations Howley’s work has received in the last several years—and I suspect this piece about Clarence and Ginni Thomas will be in the running for many, many honors. Whereas with Dannenfelser, Howley was shedding light on a powerful person who isn’t a household name, here she tackles two of the better-known political (yes, SCOTUS justices are political) figures in America. She does it without access to them, instead surveying pre-existing material on the Thomases with remarkable facility, mustering everything she needs, and nothing she doesn’t, to tell the story of their marriage. Take the seemingly mundane detail of Ginni telling a bunch of right-wing youth that her favorite charm on a bracelet Clarence gave her is a pixie because, to her husband, she is “kind of a pixie…kind of a troublemaker,” which Howley convincingly positions as a metaphor for the havoc Ginni has wreaked on American democracy. Consider this brilliantly constructed sentence: “They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift.” And that’s just in the first section! This piece is one for the ages in both substance and style. I mean, damn. —SD
Jeremy B. Jones | The Bitter Southerner | June 6, 2023 | 1,580 words
I have never before picked an obituary for our Top 5, but Jeremy B. Jones’ ode to his grandfather deserves recognition. At just over 1500 words, it’s not a particularly long piece, but it’s a particularly poetic one, and is enough to get to know—and respect—Jones’ Papaw. Ray Harrell lived a simple life on a little bit of land in Fruitland, North Carolina. To many, it would not be enough; for Harrell, it was plenty. After all, as Jones writes, he had “a reliable tractor and a fiery woman.” It was a good life because he appreciated what he had, was contented with his lot. Jones notes that these quiet lives often slip past unnoticed, “yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.” A small essay about a simple life that I found hugely moving. —CW
Marian Bull | n+1 | June 15, 2023 | 3,978 words
In reviewing Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires, Marian Bull looks at how infusing recipes with introspection and experience begat the cooking memoir. What I loved about about this piece—besides spurring me to pick up Small Fires, which also appeared in our recent feature “Meals for One”—is that while Bull surveys chef memoirs, she hails Johnson’s book as one for the home cook, the self-trained enthusiast. “Johnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a ‘memoir’ with recipes,” she writes. Johnson looks at cooking as translation and recipes as a form of performance, which is comforting for someone like me who views a recipe as a guide: “The unpredictable ‘I that cooks,’ who resists the recipe again and again, generates new translations.” How inspiring and affirming to be invited to take a seat at this generous table where nothing is lost and everything is gained in translation. —KS
Ava Kofman | ProPublica and The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words
It’s easy to think that “men trying to upgrade their dongs” is a journalism cheat code of sorts. Having written about them myself many years ago, I can assure you that it’s not. Pitfalls abound. Tone is everything. Jokes are easy; reserve is hard. (So is avoiding double entendres.) Yet, Ava Kofman manages to thread every needle in her stunning examination of the state of penile-enlargement procedures, which focuses primarily on issues surrounding the popular Penuma implant. She writes compassionately about the patients, not dismissing the complex psychological situations that led them to pursue surgery. She writes unblinkingly about the doctor who popularized the procedure, and whose practice seems at times to operate with all the care of a 30-minute oil change joint—and about the surgeon who “was doing such brisk business repairing Penuma complications that he’d relocated his practice from Philadelphia to an office down the street.” And speaking of unblinking, I dare you not to wince as she plays fly on the wall during an implantation; you may never hear the phrase “inside out” the same way again. This story may have drawn you in with its imagined salaciousness, but it delivers something far better: truth. —PR
What piece did our readers love most this week? One that makes clear that the kids are not all right.
Joseph Cox | Vice | June 20, 2023 | 2,111 words
Those looking for dirty deeds to be done seem to be going no further than the Comm, a series of Discord communities in which people order violence, including commissioning robberies for bitcoin, and organizing swats against vulnerable people for perceived slights and insults. For Vice, Joseph Cox infiltrated this vile, testosterone-fueled world of crime. —KS
In this gorgeous essay for Vittles, the poet Seán Hewitt recalls weekend nature walks in England and his grandfather’s lessons on the wonders of foraged food. Inspired by the abundant hawthorns in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Hewitt writes about making his own hawthorn gin.
When the hawthorns were all done and the gin was in the jar, I put it into the cupboard, then checked on it every week, turning it, watching the colours darken. Now I’ve learned to leave it in peace, and I don’t turn it that often anymore. I just bide my time until December when, on some foggy, cold evening – when it feels like winter has begun – I take it out of the cupboard.
The main difference between sloe and hawthorn gin is that, where sloe gin is fruity and sweet and mixes well with tonic or soda, hawthorn gin is like a dark sherry, perfect for winter. It has a velvety texture, a rich smoothness. I also like that, unlike sloe gin, you can’t buy it anywhere, so hawthorn gin becomes a secret, shared thing between friends, a preservation of summer pulled into winter.
Last week I was introduced to Lagusta’s Luscious’ Rosemary Seasalt Camarels and my life will never be the same. How can vegan chocolate be this good? What? Thank you Tim!
I became a vegetarian in the summer of 2008, and went vegan in the summer of 2019, which means I have not eaten meat for the majority of my life. And in a family that has its own “secret” pasta sauce and meatballs recipe brought over from Italy (or maybe found in some 1940s housekeeping magazine, I’m not sure yet), it meant I had to learn how to cook a lot of my own food. So I’ve also been cooking for most of my life too.
And apparently, cooking is some great feat among most of my friends, all of whom seem to primarily subsist on ordering Taco Bell for every meal (even though everyone knows they should be ordering Del Taco).
Like, for fuck’s sake Julian, you DO NOT need to water down your pasta sauce to heat it up. What the fuck is wrong with you.
When I cook, I don’t really follow recipes. I just throw some stuff together and seem to be decent at using enough garlic to cover any/all sins. Still, my fiancée wife has been trying to get a book of “our” recipes together, which means I have to start writing down what I do. And what better place to write something down than here?
I’m told that I should actually be doing that in the recipe book that we have for just this sort of thing, but whatever. Where am I supposed to put the life story section there? In the margins? No one will read it then. If I write it here, then they’re forced to read it. In fact, if you’re reading these last few sentences, you just did exactly that.
Thanks.
Anyways, this is the semi-recipe thing that I follow to make vegan cheesesteaks.
So the first thing I do here is start on the peppers and onions. I season them to taste using a subset of the spices and whatnot that are part of this recipe; just the dry spices (excluding ginger), and vegan butter. So: garlic, salt, season-all salt, black pepper, and crushed red pepper. And also butter.
I season things to taste (read: put in enough garlic and season-all salt to kill a normal person) in a pan with some oil and butter, and then cook it on medium-high heat until this ends up nice and browned.
I actually set the burner to the highest possible setting, but that’s just because my stove takes forever to actually heat up that high. So by the time it actually gets to 11, things are pretty much where they need to be.
They say a watched pot never boils, but apparently it still takes 20 minutes of total neglect before even the little bubbles start forming at the bottom.
So once the peppers and onions are mostly, but not all the way, done, I then add the vegan steak slices to the same pan. I break them apart, add more of the same dry spices, finally add a little bit of ginger (which I was out of and did not realize until after I had already started cooking so I did not get to use it this time), and then add the sauces (steak sauce, spicy brown mustard, and soy aminos). And again, more butter.
I’ll mix that all together in one half of the pan, and then throw it back on the heat. Once things have heated up a bit, I mix everything together, and let it cook through a bit more.
While everything in the pan is doing various cookings and sizzlings and whatnot, I then prep the bread. The rolls I bought were not pre-sliced, but thankfully there’s an knife for that. It’s not the kind that makes you run faster, but it works well enough to tear through bread.
I spread a little bit of butter inside and outside (top and bottom) the rolls, and then stick them in the oven at a low-ish temperature (~250F) for a few minutes.
You know, looking at how much (vegan) butter I use here… and everywhere else… and how much butter everyone in my family uses… maybe our predisposition to heart disease isn’t that much of a mystery.
Eventually, the pepper-onion-steak mix will look pretty done. That’s when I know it’s done.
And once it is done, I pull the bread out of the oven and start topping the rolls with the pepper-onion-steak mix and tornt up slices of vegan cheese (about 2, 2 and a half, slices per roll).
Since the bread and sandwich fillings don’t always get along and stay in place, I use wooden toothpicks to hold things together. I then throw the sandwiches in the oven (at, like, 350F) for a bit (for, like, 10 minutes) to finish things off. Mostly to let the cheese melt.
But the meltiness of the various brands of vegan cheese is hit-or-miss, so it doesn’t always do what’s expected of it in the oven. So a minute or two in the microwave helps finish off the finishing off.
Sure, if I had the time, I could make, like, a cheese sauce from the slices and some soy/oatmilk, and use that. Or maybe I could even just mix the cheese into the pepper-onion-steak mix. But, whatever. This way is good enough.
And yeah, it came out good enough this time. Pair with sweet tea. Because it’s good.
This “recipe” (in quotes and italics because can I really call it that if I, like, measured nothing and only have estimates for temperatures and times?) usually makes about 4 sandwiches, but that’s just because that’s how many rolls came in the bag I bought. I guess if you had more rolls you could probably thin out the sandwich fillings per-roll and make more sandwiches.
Most people out there, from celebrity chefs to ordinary folks, love their gas stoves, despite the hazards and health risks. Some gas-stove enthusiasts insist that food over an open flame, atop iron grates, tastes better. Some homeowners just think they look superior, even sexy, in their kitchens. And others, apparently, would die before giving them up.
What if the majority of Americans just don’t know that there’s an alternative? Enter induction, a cooking technology that’s popular in Europe and Asia, but has captured less than 5% of the U.S. market. For Bloomberg Businessweek, Aaron Gell writes an informative and entertaining piece that explores induction’s benefits and its potential to change the way we cook. (The hero image, too, will make you laugh.)
But a home appliance that summons gorgeous blue flames with the twist of a knob still induces a bit of wonder, and people aren’t likely to give it up without a fight. “I mean, gas has the UX [user experience],” says Sam D’Amico of Impulse Labs, a Silicon Valley startup gearing up to pitch its new induction stove to the masses. “The UX is, literally, you’re turning the valve and gas is burning. That’s going to be tough to defeat.” There’s a reason that nearly all competitive cooking shows—with the notable exception of The Great British Bake Off, which uses induction—feature chefs frantically turning out dishes on commercial gas stoves. “It’s kind of sexy,” says Stacy Jones, founder and chief executive officer of product placement agency Hollywood Branded. “You see the flames licking up into the pan, and you can almost feel the heat coming off of it even though you’re on the other side of the television.”
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
The painter and poet Florine Stettheimer should have been easy to cook from. Her poetry, commercially published for the first time in the 2010 collection Crystal Flowers, has a section devoted to “comestibles”—including airy tributes to ham, bread, and tomatoes with Russian dressing—and her paintings often portray food. She was born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York in the late eighteen hundreds, part of a social circle that included Neustadters and Guggenheims, and she held salons that were a Who’s Who of the New York art world. (Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Leo Stein were regulars.) Stettheimer did not oversee the cooking, but part of her work’s deliberate feminine aesthetic involved recording the parties, personalities, dishes, outfits, interiors, furniture, and floral arrangements that made up her life. On one canvas, Soirée, a plate of salad and pitcher of cocktails adorn a table in the foreground of a drawing-room scene, where assembled luminaries gaze at Stettheimer’s paintings-within-the-painting. These were unorthodox choices for a woman artist of her time—many others made strenuous efforts not to seem too overtly feminine.
The artist Heidi Howard painted a portrait of me while I cooked from Florine Stettheimer’s work. Notice the stuffed peppers, left, and Baked Alaska, right. Photograph by Erica Maclean.
Yet perhaps this femininity was also subversive. Today’s art world is reevaluating Stettheimer in the wake of the publication of Crystal Flowers and a 2022 biography by Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer, published by Hirmer. Bloemink situates Stettheimer as a surprisingly modern figure whose “female” topics—furniture and domestic interiors, flowers and frills, diaphanous fabrics, social events, her family, social narratives—were presented both unapologetically and with a wry, critical distance. Through the witty, effervescent tone of her poems and the originality of her painterly technique, she transformed her subjects into baubles for the artist’s gaze—and in so doing, de-gendered them. The following untitled poem is representative: “Mary Mary of the / Bronx aerie / How does your V garden / Grow? / with beans and potatoes / peas and tomatoes / and shiny bugs all in a / Row” is representative. Stettheimer’s choice of wording and image show the poem to be about making art, not salad. The “V garden” is cheekily abbreviated; its rhyming food is aesthetic and playful.
To cook from Stettheimer’s work, then, would be to acknowledge that her interest in food was not literal. In the section “Comestibles,” rhyming ditties, light as meringue, are entry points into discussions of sex and desire. Stettheimer went about this with a frankness unusual for the time period, and with a dollop of irony as well. A “comestible” is alimentary but not elementary; the fancy and fanciful word removes food from the cupboard and makes it more like art, if a bit unconventionally. In one poem, Stettheimer writes: “You stirred me / You made me giddy / Then you poured oil on my stirred self / I’m mayonnaise.” A frothy crush comes to a gluey and unsexy end in a mere four lines. Another untitled poem runs, “You beat me / I foamed.” In the next lines, its subject is “drowned” in sweetness and “parceled” out. She concludes, “You made me hot – hot – hot / I crisped into ‘kisses.’” Here, Stettheimer puts a lover’s attempts at mastering her into her oven and bakes them into female pleasure.
Stettheimer’s sophisticated soirees demanded sophisticated ingredients. I used crayfish tails in the salat Olivye inspired by her poems. Photograph by Erica Maclean.
In order to re-create Stettheimer’s fare, I needed to transform such dishes into something visual and concrete, which seemed beyond the purview of mere food and was complicated by some of the work’s details. Despite Stettheimer’s adulthood in Manhattan, the food her poetry suggests is the stodgy fare of the old world, a reflection of how her family ate. At their homes and country homes, Bloemink wrote in her biography, they consumed elaborate several-course meals, served on fine porcelain. In the “Comestibles” section of Crystal Flowers, there are grandmotherly stuffed peppers and a family staple, the gross-sounding “chaud-froid,” a gelatin sauce made from a reduction of boiled meat. Stettheimer described it as follows: “You are hot / You are cold / Your black beauty spots / Enhance your creamy whiteness.” I considered making dramatic banquet-style versions of these dishes but have not had success in the past with making jellied meat look (or taste) edible. And there were price considerations—I needed veal and crayfish for a salad inspired by the “V garden,” and I couldn’t produce old-world banquet food at new-world prices. The Stettheimers served champagne every night in the family drawing room; I could afford only Crémant d’Alsace, a French sparkling wine produced in the traditional champagne method but in a less expensive region for growing grapes. My spirits consultant Hank Zona found me a good-quality vintage Crémant from Domaine Albert Mann that had a thematically appropriate painting on the label.
Crémant sparkling wine for the drawing room on a budget. Photograph by Erica Maclean.
And so I turned to the artist Heidi Howard to make my Stettheimer-inspired food into something more. Howard’s style of portraiture documents social spaces, as Stettheimer did, and they are interested in depicting the passage of time in painting, as Stettheimer was. Howard explained to me that portraiture opens up “a new painted space” that creates a conversation between the painter and the sitter, and that offers a more flexible way of existing collaboratively. We decided they would paint me in my kitchen, along with the dishes I’d chosen, the cookbook I’d used, and even the Crémant d’Alsace wine. The profusion of these domestic details, down to my Christmas tree in the background, evoked Stettheimer.
Our time together passed quickly. Howard brought a sixty-inch-by-forty-six-inch prepared canvas to my kitchen. While they painted, I made two old-world dishes that were inspired by the Ballets Russes. I took “Black-Swan Effect Stuffed Peppers,” from the cookbook Summer Kitchens by Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules, a recipe that swaps the usual meat in the filling for vegetarian-friendly apples. The “black swan” in the title is a reference to the ballet Swan Lake, where a small change (in the coloration of a swan from black to white, as with the swap from meat to apples) makes a huge difference. Second, the vegetables in Stettheimer’s untitled poem about Mary in her Bronx aerie, and the mayonnaise from the other poem quoted above, reminded me of the Russian dish salat Olivye. In its modern incarnation this is a depressing Soviet-buffet standby made with beans, tomatoes, peas, cubed potatoes, cubed ham, and plenty of mayo, but it has roots as an elegant czarist concoction with more elevated ingredients, and this was the direction I aimed for.
The artist Heidi Howard, at right, was inspired by Stettheimer’s subversive takes on floral arrangements and domestic interiors. Photograph by Erica Maclean.
I took artistic license for dessert. The poem that begins “You beat me / I foamed” and ends “I crisped into ‘kisses’” implies meringue, a material that has some of the glossiness, shine, and plasticity of Stettheimer’s beloved cellophane, which she often wore and painted herself wearing. I made piped-meringue kisses, flavored with freeze-dried raspberry powder and pulverized rosemary. And since the chaud-froid’s hot-and-coldness and mysterious black spots reminded Howard of a Baked Alaska (later revealed to have been a challenge on an episode she’d recently watched of The Great British Bake Off), I made one. In place of the usual sponge-cake base, I used a layer of Russian-style walnut cake.
As I’d suspected, turning Florine Stettheimer’s airy comestibles into food-on-a-plate meant losing something of the artist’s spirit. My stuffed peppers were excellent, but humble. The rosemary-raspberry meringue “kisses” tasted delicious, but after several errors with the piping bag, I wound up with a prudishly small quantity of them, not enough to make anybody “hot – hot – hot.” My salat Olivye was banquet-worthy—I had never made one before, and was surprised at the painstaking demands of its assembly and seasoning. In the end, I forgot ingredients and ran out of time, but the recipe below has been adjusted. An attempt to make my own mayonnaise by hand was an abject failure—I should have known that all the Modernist women bought Hellmann’s.
A Baked Alaska makes for a dramatic tableside presentation. Photograph by Erica Maclean.
It was the Baked Alaska that best channeled Stettheimer’s spirit—despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was a sticky, flaming, melting mess. Here was a dish, finally, that seemed to transcend mere food and generate a symbolic presence. The painter often depicted herself with huge, vaginal flower bouquets hovering near her genitals, which were simultaneously art-historical in-jokes and a transformation of the vagina’s creative power from vessels for bearing babies to sites of aesthetic production. My dessert was about the same size as the arrangements and had a similar firepower.
To make a Baked Alaska, you line a bowl with plastic wrap, fill it with layers of ice cream, insert a sponge-cake layer as a base, and put it in the freezer to set. Just prior to service, you whip up a pot of sugar and egg whites, decant the frozen Alaska, slather it with the meringue (attractively!), and then set it on fire. The fire is best produced by pouring a ninety-proof alcohol into half an eggshell nestled in the pillowy meringue atop the Alaska, quickly spooning it all over the sides, and then dropping a match into the eggshell. (You could use a kitchen torch instead, but the burnt alcohol imparts a necessary final touch of flavor.)
My Baked Alaska was a giant dome of creamy white, encrusted with sticky little points of wet, uncooked meringue. It was heavy to carry to the table. I had to use more than one match to get it going (messily dropping burnt matches into my meringue), and when it caught fire it flamed aggressively for several minutes, crisping and blackening the final product and truly creating the “beauty spots” of the poem. I thought it stood in well for one of Stettheimer’s blooming vaginal-symbolic arrangements.
When my guests and I cut into it, the following lines about “chaud-froid” applied:
You are delicious
You are a dream
You are full of softness
Full of delicacies
Marvelously blended
I gloat over your perfections
And voluptuously destroy you—
You wonderful hot-cold thing
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
Russian Salat Olivye, Imperial Style
You stirred me
You made me giddy
Then you poured oil on my stirred self
I’m mayonnaise
—Florine Stettheimer
Mary, Mary of the
Bronx aerie
How does your V garden
Grow
With beans and potatoes
Peas and tomatoes
And shiny bugs all in a
Row
—Florine Stettheimer
Adapted from The Russian Tea Room Cookbook by Faith Stewart-Gordon & Nika Hazelton.
For the salad:
1/2 cup each of the following items:
crayfish tail, cooked and cubed
veal, cooked, seasoned, and cubed
kidney beans, cooked
potatoes, cooked and cubed
green peas, cooked and cubed
tomatoes, chopped
hard-boiled eggs, cubed
For the dressing:
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/3 cup sour cream
1 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tbsp pickles, chopped
1 tbsp capers, drained
1 tbsp minced parsley
1 tbsp minced dill
In a large bowl, combine all the elements for the salad. Combine all the elements for the dressing in a small bowl and whisk to combine. Add dressing to taste. Toss, season, and serve.
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
“Black Swan Effect” Stuffed Peppers
Your sharpness
Brings tears to my eyes
And only
When I have dug through
To your inner softness
I breathe freely once more
—Florine Stettheimer
Adapted from Summer Kitchens by Olia Hercules.
For the filling:
2 tbsp butter with a splash of oil
1/4 of a fennel bulb, grated
1 large carrot, grated
2/3 cup white or brown rice, cooked
2/3 cup corn kernels
1 green apple, cored and diced
1 tbsp thyme leaves
For the sauce:
2 tbsp butter with a splash of oil
1 onion, thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 large ripe tomatoes (or one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes, pureed in the blender)
1/2 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup vegetable stock
Salt
pepper
a little sugar
To assemble:
4 large bell peppers
salt and pepper
chopped parsley and dill to serve
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
To make the filling, heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan over medium-low heat. Add the fennel and carrot and cook until soft, then stir in the rice, corn, apple, and thyme. Season generously with salt and pepper. The filling should be very well seasoned, almost on the verge of being over-seasoned, as it will also serve as seasoning for the peppers.
To make the sauce, heat the butter and oil in a medium frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for five minutes, stirring frequently, until it begins to soften. Add the garlic, turn down the heat to low, and cook gently for three more minutes, to mellow the flavor. Grate in the tomatoes, discarding the skins, or add the pureed tomatoes, and cook for fifteen minutes, stirring from time to time. Add the cream and the stock and stir. Season with salt, pepper, and a little sugar if it needs it. The sauce should be silky and luscious.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Cut the peppers in half, seed them, and stuff with the filling. Pour half the sauce into a baking dish that will snugly hold all the peppers. Arrange the peppers in the dish and pour the rest of the sauce on top of them. Cover the dish tightly with a lid or foil and cook in the oven for thirty minutes. Take off the lid or foil and cook for another ten minutes or until cooked through and golden. Do not overcook. Serve topped with parsley and dill.
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
Rosemary-Raspberry Meringue Kisses
You beat me
I foamed
Your sweetest sweet you almost drowned me in
You parceled out my whole self
You thrust me into darkness
You made me hot – hot – hot
I crisped into “kisses”
—Florine Stettheimer
4 large egg whites, at room temperature
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp superfine sugar
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup freeze-dried raspberries, bashed into powder
1 tsp rosemary, very finely chopped
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a tray with parchment paper and assemble a piping bag fitted with a large cake tip (I used one with a fifteen-mm round opening).
In a mixing bowl, beat the whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat at medium speed while gradually adding two tablespoons of the superfine sugar. When soft peaks form, add another tablespoon of superfine sugar and increase the speed to high. When stiff peaks form, gradually add the remaining superfine sugar and beat until stiff and very glossy. Gently fold in the powdered sugar, raspberry powder, and rosemary.
Fill the piping bag with the mixture and pipe into “kisses.” Bake for one hour, then turn off the and leave inside to cool for one hour more.
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
Walnut, Orange, and Pistachio Baked Alaska
You are hot
You are cold
Your black beauty spots
Enhance your creamy whiteness
You are delicious
You are a dream
You are full of softness
Full of delicacies
Marvelously blended
I gloat over your perfections
And voluptuously destroy you—
You wonderful hot-cold thing
—Florine Stettheimer
For this recipe you will need an old-fashioned, five-pint metal dessert mold or other deep bowl with a nine-inch round opening.
For the cake layer:
4 large eggs, separated, at room temperature
a pinch of salt
1/8 tsp almond extract
1/2 cup superfine sugar, divided
1/3 cup flour, sifted with 3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup walnuts, toasted and finely chopped
For the meringue:
4 large egg whites, at room temperature
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp superfine sugar
1/2 cup powdered sugar
To assemble:
1 pint orange sherbet, softened
1 pint pistachio ice cream, softened
1 pint vanilla ice cream, softened and mixed with 1/3 cup orange marmalade
2 tbsp rum, vodka, or other alcohol, 90 proof or above
1/2 of an eggshell
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
To make the cake layer:
For best results, make the cake layer the day before you intend to assemble the Baked Alaska. Set a baking rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a nine-inch springform pan with wax paper covering the bottom and coming slightly up the sides, and grease the paper.
In a large bowl using a wooden spoon, stir the egg yolks vigorously with a pinch of salt for thirty seconds. Add the almond extract, stir, and reserve. With an electric beater, whip the egg whites at high speed until soft peaks form, add three tablespoons of the sugar and continue to whip at high speed for two minutes. Add two tablespoons more of sugar, whip until stiff peaks form, add the remaining sugar and beat three minutes longer.
Fold the whipped egg whites, flour, and walnuts into the egg yolks as gently as possible, working quickly but in small batches. This process should take about two minutes altogether. Fill the pan, distributing the batter evenly, and bake for twenty to twenty-four minutes, until the cake turns pale beige and tests done with a skewer. Remove from the oven and let cool.
To make the meringue:
In a mixing bowl, beat the whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat at medium speed while gradually adding two tablespoons of the superfine sugar. When soft peaks form, add another tablespoon of superfine sugar and increase the speed to high. When stiff peaks form, gradually add the remaining superfine sugar and beat until stiff and very glossy. Gently fold in the powdered sugar.
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
To assemble:
Line a nine-inch bowl or dessert mold with plastic wrap. Fill with ice cream in three even layers, leaving an inch or two at the top for the sponge cake. Insert the sponge cake and return to the freezer. When it is time to serve, invert the frozen Alaska over your serving plate and remove the saran wrap. Using a rubber spatula, cover with meringue. Nestle the eggshell on top of the dessert and fill with alcohol. Tableside, just prior to service, quickly spoon the alcohol over the sides of the dessert and drop a match into the eggshell. When the flames have subsided, remove the eggshell, slice, and serve.
Photograph by Erica Maclean.
Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.
Chef Brian Lagerstrom's YouTube channel is one of my favorites. I have never had bad luck with any of his recipes, and the techniques he's shared have made a huge difference in my kitchen. This video shares six pantry items he'll spend big money on, relatively, as he's found they make a real tasty difference in his cooking. — Read the rest
For the most part, whenever possible, we all prefer to use reusable bags, cloth napkins, and glass containers to store our leftovers in the fridge. That said, for those moments when life happens, or you work in a plastic wrap reliant, fast-paced kitchen, you can now find several BPI certified fully compostable cling wraps on the market, like For Good + Zefiro. Now, of course, you should always check your composting facility to see what they accept. But these clings are made with PLA & Biobased PBAT plants that meet internationally recognized standards to safely biodegrade, break down into carbon and water, in a home or commercial composting facility. It’s high-performance cling, doesn’t compromise strength or firmness by including pre-perforated sheets. Both brands have successfully made the packaging fully compostable and recyclable, by eliminating the blade and keeping this packaging plastic free.
And then there’s Great Wrap, an Australian biomaterials company, that offers another alternative to cling film that’s made from discarded potato skins and packaged in an abnormally alluring and fun container with a built-in cutter.
The wrap naturally biodegrades in as little as 180 days into food and energy for the microbes in your compost. For all intents and purposes, its components are organic – discarded potato skins, cooking oil, and starch from the cassava root – more popularly known as tapioca. So, if ingested, it isn’t toxic or harmful, but don’t go putting it on the menu.
Currently, the Australia-based company sources its potato skins/peels from Idaho, which dramatically increases its carbon footprint. They are working on being able to find local sources for discarded potato skins, to help reduce their overall carbon impact.
Another barrier is the fact that Great Wrap doesn’t break down or degrade in marine environments like ocean ecosystems. But by working with researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University, they are close to converting potato waste into polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), which can break down in oceans and other aquatic environments in less than a year. In 2023 they launched in the US and will begin building their PHA biorefinery that will divert over 50,000 metric tons of potato waste from landfills every year.
And that’s no small potatoes.
To purchase Great Wrap, visit greatwrap.co.
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