Meet Johnna Holmgren, a person with more Instagram followers than you and I combined. She goes by the handle foxmeetsbear, and her carefully curated feed looks like any other food personality-meets-Wes Anderson fever dream, filled with caressing ducks, mushrooms artfully strewn, and eggs with herb crowns and faces…
The year 2008 was when I first noticed chefs performing chef-y things to a burger. It seemed like forever ago, but it was only 10 years back—a blip in our celestial existence—when the idea that a hamburger could be high art was still a novelty. Outside a handful of steakhouses that could repurpose trimmings and scraps…
I used to feel guilty asking chefs for recipes. In a roundabout, nonsensical way, by making that dish at home it felt like I was taking business away from the creator. However, I made one exception in my seven years as a restaurant critic at the Chicago Tribune. It was for a marinated Chinese eggplant side dish I had…
Our family moved to a new home this weekend, and one thing I’m delighted about is we’ll now have room in our kitchen to display our many cookbooks. Last night, my wife and I were sitting on the floor of the kitchen surrounded by a half dozen boxes, filing our cookbooks onto our bookcase.
Because 2017 has been an objectively crummy year, I’ve started taking better mental care of myself, and the first step is shielding myself from the outside world as much as possible. This was the year I regularly turned off the television, placed my phone in a faraway room, and curled up on my couch with a cookbook.
The best cookbooks share the vicarious, time-and-place-traveling qualities with our most beloved works of fiction. What other genre of literature stimulates pleasure centers in the brain that respond to satiation, and fires your imagination to consider its taste possibilities?
Yesterday, we presented a list of cookbooks we consider to be the finest tomes published so far in our young century. Today, we open it up to The A.V. Club staffers and contributors, and rephrased it as a question: If you could save one cookbook from your burning kitchen, which book would you save? (Let’s assume…
