cooking

No Smoke, No Fire

Despite the gas lobby’s best efforts, Americans are waking up to the health impacts of gas stoves. There’s no going back.

February 1, 2023

Honing My Knife Skills

How mother and daughter reconciled different ways of being Chinese-American—in the kitchen.

March 13, 2021

My Secret

All writers have some secret about the way they work. Mine is that I write in bed. Big deal!, you are probably thinking. Mark Twain, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Truman Capote, and plenty of other writers did too. Vladimir Nabokov even kept index cards under his pillow in case he couldn’t sleep some night and felt like working. However, I haven’t heard of other poets composing in bed—although what could be more natural than scribbling a love poem with a ballpoint pen on the back of one’s beloved?

February 10, 2012

Modernism in the Kitchen

Cooking odors grow stronger as visitors approach the gallery where *Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen*—a stimulating show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on food preparation in the twentieth-century home—is installed. Although the aromas actually emanate from a café next to the second-floor exhibition, the pervasive food smells that can be so distracting throughout the restaurant-riddled MoMA are for once appropriate here.

January 21, 2011

Eats and Reads

For Italian columnist Giacomo Papi, the essence of contemporary society has been revealed once and for all in the way we eat. It all started, he maintains, in the 1980s, when bow tie pasta with salmon in cream sauce began to appear on Italian menus.

December 2, 2010

The Things I Learned at Dinner

Back in the early 1970s, when I was teaching in California, I had a colleague named Bob Williams who taught fiction writing and was famous for beginning each semester with a lecture on the art of cooking.

November 24, 2010