Eater: All Posts by Jaya Saxena

In ‘You Gotta Eat,’ You Don’t Gotta Cook

2024-09-12T10:00:00-04:00

Lille Allen/Eater

Margaret Eby’s new cookbook is as much about granting permission as it is showing you how to assemble a meal

Most days, my partner and I have something we call egg lunch. At its most basic, it is an egg and rice. Sometimes there’s soy sauce and American cheese, or chile crisp, or the last of a wilting scallion and some other condiment, but sometimes it’s just egg and rice. Because did you know meals come three times a day? That you can’t just eat one big meal and be sustained for the rest of the week like a snake? You just keep needing food. It’s ridiculous.

Margaret Eby’s new cookbook, You Gotta Eat, out November 19 from Quirk Books, opens with a mantra that might seem antithetical to cookbooks: “You do not have to cook.” Sometimes you are depressed. Sometimes you are too broke to buy fresh herbs. Sometimes you are just so busy that suddenly it’s 7 p.m. and your stomach is growling and you are too overwhelmed to even think about following a recipe. You Gotta Eat was written for those moments. It’s divided not into appetizers and desserts, but by what you feel you have energy for. Can you open a can? Here’s how to make a bean salad. Can you work the microwave? Make a baked potato with it. There are some recipes, but mostly, Eby guides you through technique and flavor, whether it’s how to make rice in a mug or doing a choose-your-own-adventure canape recipe (Triscuits with cream cheese and hot sauce can absolutely be dinner).

You Gotta Eat is as much about granting permission as it is showing you how to assemble a meal out of the dregs of your kitchen. Eby notes the absolute mess human society has made of food, from the diet-industrial complex to gendered domestic labor to the welfare of every worker that gets canned beans into your pantry. But despite all that, you can’t just opt out of eating. “When food felt like a chore, I kept reminding myself: The best food is the food that you’ll eat,” writes Eby. We spoke to her about rediscovering the joy in cooking, surprising flavor combinations, and why the microwave is your friend.

Eater: There’s a whole genre of cookbook purporting to make cooking easy, but yours feels really distinct from that. What did you want to do differently?

Margaret Eby: One of the things I think about with easy or simple recipes is: Easy for who? Recipe development is a translation project that requires you to make so many assumptions about the person using the recipe: What their skill level in the kitchen is, what kind of equipment they’re working with, what’s in their pantry, and how comfortable they are with various techniques, and with recipes in general. “Easy” means something radically different to different people. What I was hoping to do with this book is to break things down to a starting place that was as unintimidating as possible. So before we even get to the stage of chopping an onion, ask, ok, what are you up for? Do you have time and energy to turn on the oven at all, or is today an assemble-things-from-cans kind of meal day? Do you have time and bandwidth to boil water or do you just want to figure out how to make a cheese sandwich slightly more exciting? What are the things that feel hard to you in the kitchen for whatever reason, and how do you avoid them when you can’t face them?

So many of those cookbooks make these assumptions, like, all you need to do is dig up fresh herbs you’re supposed to have on your patio. I’m like, I have wilted spinach, half a jar of peanut butter, and this is my energy level. What I need is someone to talk me into not ordering delivery again. I really admire a lot of those cookbooks, and I took a lot of inspiration from them. There’s no knock against them. But I really wanted this to be so accessible, and give people permission to use what they have, and take it easy on themselves. Do what you can with what you’ve got.

There’s this fallacy in food media, where you and I are both participants, that every meal should be the best meal you’ve ever had. No, some meals are frozen burritos, and that is fine. And I know also from experience, many of the people putting together the beautiful and aspirational food and making the photos look gorgeous are like, Well, I have 20 minutes for lunch, so I’m going to eat a cheese rind and an orange.

Reading your book made me realize just how many expectations are in other “easy” cookbooks. They all seem to think I have fresh lemons around, and I just don’t.

Another big thing was I wanted to make sure not to introduce an element of shame. What’s actually in people’s pantries is so varied, so dependent on their lives and how often they get to go to the supermarket, or how much time and money they have to devote to fresh produce versus frozen things. A lot of these casual assumptions end up boxing people in rather than actually helping and being instructional.

You talk a little bit in the introduction about the life and health things that can get in the way of cooking, like depression, or just being overwhelmed with other things. Was there a moment when you realized this book needed to be made for those moments?

During the pandemic, when I was working for Food & Wine, I was in this exact scenario. There was a lasagna on the cover of the magazine and it was completely gorgeous. And it took literally two days to make, doing the noodles from scratch. It was a real showstopper recipe. Meanwhile, I was so anxious and stressed out, and so tired of cooking. The only way for me to get through was to eat like a child. I bought an economy-sized bag of Bagel Bites, because it’s technically food and it’s delicious.

Being in that place, and having a lot of people who aren’t in food come to me for advice, made me think a lot about this aspirational branch of food media. Like the Martha Stewart image, or this idea that food people have secret knowledge that regular people do not have that allows them to constantly make beautifully plated lunches. I can do that, and I can tell you how to do that, but I was also amazed how much it helped people when I was just being very honest with them about where I was at. I can tell you how to make that lasagna if you have the energy, but I’m making cheese toast.

Speaking of shame, you talk about all the ways that we’re told our instincts are wrong in the kitchen. How did you start to get over that? Because even reading it, I had this immediate gut reaction when you said something about putting beans in tuna salad. I was like, You can’t do that! And then thought, Actually that sounds good, why do I think you can’t do that?

I think in my head I had for a long time — and kind of still do, to be honest — this idea of a secret cabal of “real” food people who are constantly judging me. Maybe that’s just an anxiety thing. I came into the food world as an entertainment journalist who was just interested in food, but I hadn’t worked in restaurants. But I put myself through French culinary school, very duck l’orange and mother sauces, and it started to dismantle the cabal. They don’t exist, but even if they did, who cares? In real life, people are like, You put Doritos on your sandwich? Nice. Maybe Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud would think it was gross, but I don’t know them.

It made me realize how much I had internalized this Eurocentric, patriarchal idea of food. People have been making food for themselves for as long as people have existed. Why are they wrong? Why is it wrong to approach a problem differently than a man in the 1800s who was cooking for a French king? The more I realize that, and the more I talk to actual people who work in restaurants who are mostly enthusiasts and weird nerds, the more I see these rules are made up. What you really need to be able to do is take care of yourself in whatever way you can. I was really hoping to make it more useful than something that felt like it was holding people back, to explain why you add butter to stuff or where you can add a bunch of salt, as opposed to being like, Oh, you don’t know how to make a bechamel sauce?

Is there a recipe or flavor combination that shocked you when it worked?

The one sandwich that always makes people freak out at me is the mayonnaise and pineapple one. Everyone is going along with the ride, and then I’m like, Have you tried canned pineapple and mayonnaise? And everyone’s getting off the train. But you try it and it’s pretty good! It feels very like born of the Great Depression, or maybe a stoner thing, but it is a flavor combination that really works,

How else did your friends react when they were helping you try out these recipes?

One of my first readers is my wonderful friend, Jett Allen, they’re a cartoonist. I was like, you’re a regular human, will you please read this book and tell me if these are food things that are helpful to you or make sense. And I was so happy with their response, because they read it, and they gave me a few notes, and then they made nachos. Nachos are limitless, and you can do whatever you want with them. I wanted to be a pep talk from your friend about what you should make for dinner when you’re not feeling up to it, but you want someone to convince you not to order takeout.

I know that the point of this book is allowing yourself to do less when you need to do less. But I’m curious if there are any kitchen appliances that have come in handy for cooking like this.

For a lot of the book I come off as this midcentury small-appliance evangelist. Like, have you heard of the microwave? But it’s really amazing how much it helps to have a microwave or a blender or a food processor, and also to not feel like they are less legitimate ways of cooking something. My aunt is the queen of cooking eggs in the microwave. You can just use it to make your life better. But also, I had a recipe in the book for crispy garlic that you can make in the microwave, but you can also buy crispy garlic. There is often this mentality that if you can’t do it with a cast iron skillet and a knife, you are inadequate as a cook, and that’s stupid. It’s fine to embrace newer technologies. Mine are maybe a bit old-fashioned. I love my toaster oven. I love my blender. I love my microwave. And I use my rice cooker every day.

You mentioned crispy garlic. Are there other ingredients that yes, you can technically make, but store-bought really is fine?

This whole book is absolutely the mantra, store-bought is fine. There’s a green sauce recipe in there, because I love making random science-experiment green sauces, but jarred pesto, totally fine. Similarly, you can make noodles from scratch, but you absolutely do not need to, because box noodles exist. I always have a stack of tortillas in my fridge. Could I make my own tortillas? Yes. Have I made my own tortillas? Yes. Are they as good as the ones that I buy? Maybe, but they’re like, 3,000 percent more effort. There’s a wonderful Mexican market down the street from me that makes hot corn tortillas every day. If it’s worth it for you to make it yourself, then don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t. But also, if you have decided that your time investment in this thing is less valuable to you than having tortillas immediately, then that is absolutely legitimate.

Restaurant Math Isn’t Working

2024-09-11T09:30:00-04:00

Lille Allen

Six chefs and restaurant owners from across the country explain why restaurants feel so expensive right now, and how they’re coping with high prices and customer complaints

Dining out involves calculating the intangible: What is hospitality worth to you? On the one hand, you get the possibility of technique and flavor you cannot, or don’t want to, create yourself, plated and served with attention. On the other hand, going out to a restaurant means risking mediocrity or outright unpleasantness for which you still have to pay. Every meal is an attempt to solve for this unknown, with a different equation each time.

Lately, the calculus is becoming more complicated. Or maybe the answer just keeps shaking out in one direction. Everything feels so expensive. Every check is a shock. My friends and colleagues can’t stop talking about it, our personal and professional budgets strained to the breaking point. We are eating out less often. We are ordering less when we do. We recommend new places with caveats. “The food was great,” we say, “but.” Was it worth it?

As diners complain of expensive bills and stick with the familiar, restaurateurs feel their own squeeze. Margins are tighter than ever as restaurants try to balance higher costs of rent and ingredients, reservation site fees and insurance premiums, and paying fair wages, all while trying to keep prices at a level customers will actually pay. By many accounts consumer inflation is down, and sure, the GDP is up, but something isn’t working on either side of the restaurant equation. This isn’t a problem of one city or class or demographic. Things are feeling more expensive everywhere. That the price of food feels high is an issue acknowledged at even the top level of politics. We spoke to restaurants around the country about what their books are looking like: what costs more, who’s coming in, and how they’re making it work — or whether it’s working at all.

“There’s a cultural expectation in America around how much Vietnamese food should cost”

Vien Dobui, chef and co-owner of Công Tử Bột, a modern Vietnamese restaurant in Portland, Maine

“I’m going to be completely transparent; we filed for bankruptcy in December 2023. We might break even this year. Most of our costs go to labor; our restaurant is actually unionized, so our labor percentage is almost unsustainably high, around 50 percent. And that’s by design. When I am pricing our food, I generally take the highest-cost ingredients, and multiply that by a factor of three and a half to four and a half, and that usually captures my labor costs.

“That’s still not quite enough. Because there’s a cultural expectation in America around how much Vietnamese food should cost, especially if it’s not presented as fine dining. Right now, our bowl of pho is $26. We use chicken from Joyce Farms, and our broth takes three days. But if you look at our negative reviews they’ll say it’s $26 for pho, when they can get “comparable quality” for $10, which is just not true. Recently, we had a fried rice dish that was popular that used chinese sausage and red hot dogs made by a local company using nice beef, which were $9 a pound. And I couldn’t charge appropriately for it, because the expectation is that hot dogs are cheap. So we had to change it to shrimp, which is the same price per pound, but people were more willing to pay $27 for the dish.

“I’m not saying there’s not space for $10 pho, but there should be space for a range. And some of the most vocal critics have been Asian. I’m always like, Don’t you want us to get paid? It’s hard to showcase the value. And everyone is feeling the pinch. Recently, my wife and kids and I went to Applebee’s, and the four of us ate for $75. I felt good about the value. But I also knew someone along that chain is underpaid.”

“It’s important for us not just to be the expensive spot”

Cody McCain, co-owner and general manager of Elvie’s, an all-day cafe in Jackson, Mississippi

“Because we’re doing something more elevated, we do get a little bit more play with what the price is — we’re not trying to beat people to the bottom price-wise. Obviously prices have gone up in the past couple of years, but it’s helped us to focus more locally on what farmers have around us. Getting our ingredients locally has helped us with food costs, because it’s less affected by national trends. Our local eggs used to be more expensive than your typical eggs from a distributor, but now that margin has gotten slimmer, so it makes more sense to dive into what’s around us.

“It’s important for us not just to be the expensive spot. We want to be approachable. A lot of Mississippi, and Jackson specifically, is a food desert, so what’s sustainable is to be able to reach the people that are around us, to meet needs in our community. So we have to be creative on our menu. Instead of a filet for steak, we use a butcher cut that people aren’t as familiar with. But it’s cheaper for us to buy, and benefits our butcher to use cuts that are harder for them to sell. Customers are generally more attuned to the way restaurant pricing works, but you do get people who are upset that we’re charging for bread and butter. We have a local guy that makes our sourdough bread, and we make our own onion butter, and they’re like, ‘But I can go to this chain and eat bread for free.’ In those situations, it opens up some good conversation. You may disagree with how we price this, but here’s why we’re doing this.”

“I’m not going to start cutting quality as a way to roll back into profit”

Peter Hemsley, chef at Aphotic, a seafood-focused tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco with a Michelin green star

“San Francisco is going to skew a bit abnormal in terms of what you’re seeing around the country or even in other affluent areas. We’ve held ourselves back in terms of hiking the price of the menu, even though in the past year, we have done significant menu increases due to our reputation after earning a Michelin Green Star, and also, what we feel is the true value of the service that we’re providing: We went from $135 for a 10-course tasting menu to $200. To get our sustainable seafood, you have to physically get out there, establish contacts, provide materials, and communicate. It becomes exponentially more expensive. But [if] you take a look at the competition, our menu is actually on the lower end of that scale.

“People are still sticker-shocked. I think it just has to do with the appetite for spending on restaurants. We’ve definitely seen a downtick in a more happy-go-lucky, free-wheeling kind of clientele. But my fundamental belief is I’m not going to start cutting quality as a way to roll back into profit. We’ve only increased the quality of the plates we’re buying, the material assets that create the experience. When diners are spending that kind of money, they want an amazing experience. We have to compensate for that in whatever way we can with hospitality — hot towels, scraping crumbs off the table, never making a mistake about still and sparkling water — so they have that perception of value.

“I will say, we had a weird month when California legislation flip-flopped on a legislative mandate where hidden fees, including service fees, were going to be done away with, and we reverted to this old-school system of tipping. In that one month I saw some really bad tipping, because if you give people the choice to tip, they’re stingy. They will not go beyond a certain point.”

“When you’re the only vegan chocolate business in the game, everyone has to pay what you’re charging”

Lagusta Yearwood, owner, Lagusta’s Luscious Cafe, a vegan chocolate shop and cafe in New Paltz, New York

“I picked chocolate [to sell] from the beginning because I really wanted to overtly talk to customers about why it costs more — because you’re paying not to have child slaves, you know? So it was interesting when we got news that the price of our chocolate will go up 34 percent this fall. Even Hershey’s is going to have to raise their price, it’s an across-the-board thing, but the big three chocolate makers constantly say they’re working to end forced labor in their supply chain, and I’m sure this will be yet another excuse to not work on those programs. All of our chocolate is from Peru and Ecuador, which isn’t experiencing the same climate issues as Africa, but the global market is still being affected.

“I wrote a cookbook for vegan confections that came out in 2019, and in the past few years there’s been a real boom in plant-based food. As a vegan I love it, it’s like the world I wanted to see. But there are so many more players in the vegan confections space, so we’ve done a lot of soul-searching. There’s a lot of cheaper stuff available now, and we’re never going to compete with people who have a $10 million investment. So we’ve been contracting, seeing how we can be sustainable within our communities, and pay our workers well. I think we always provided really good jobs. We want our starting wage to be $24 an hour. But the cost of living has skyrocketed in the Hudson Valley in the past few years. When we first opened, everyone who worked at the shop lived right in the village of New Paltz and walked to work, and now a lot can’t afford that.

“With these chocolate price increases, it looks like we’re going to be increasing the prices of our pieces from $3 to $3.25. That much for a tiny piece of chocolate is a lot. When you’re the only vegan chocolate business in the game, everyone has to pay what you’re charging. But now that there are more options, you find out: Are people still attracted to that homemade, ethical ethos?”

“We can’t tell our guests we have to raise the price of food because rubber gloves are more expensive”

Garrett Benedict, chef and owner of G-Love, a vegetable-forward restaurant in Portland, Oregon

“Our check averages are usually between $60 and $70 per person. Our labor costs are about 38 percent, all of our costs are really within industry standards. But our food is on the expensive side. To me, that means we have to deliver on quality 100 percent of the time; that’s what will set us apart and create value.

“Our prices have risen substantially since 2020. Pre-pandemic, I was really proud of the fact that there was no food item on the menu at G-Love that cost more than $20. And now I would say 45 to maybe even 50 percent of our dishes are over $20. Protein prices have gone up exponentially. It’s good for us, because we’re a vegetable-focused restaurant, but there are other costs too. I remember in 2020, nitrile gloves went from costing $70 a case to over $400 a case. But we can’t tell our guests, ‘Hey, we have to raise the price of food because rubber gloves are more expensive.’

“We’ve been able to keep the same level of guests coming in the door and keep our revenue going because we’re so laser-focused on quality, instead trying to cut costs and compete with everyone on the cheap end. Like, we have a $25 roasted pork dish on the menu, but we serve 4 ounces, not your standard 12-ounce pork chop. People see the price and think it’s not too bad, and then they get it, and it might look a little bit small to them. But once they eat it, they forget completely about the price. I think people understand the value there.

“There’s definitely been part of our customer base that’s been turned off by price increases, but we have to do what we have to do. In the summer, because of our outdoor space, we’re operating at around $270K to $300K in revenue a month. But in winter that’s a much different story. We can’t operate at a loss. If that ends up alienating about 10 percent of our past guests, that’s the price we have to pay. Hopefully, we can find new guests that don’t have those concerns and are excited about the quality.”

“We can’t lose money”

Gehad Hadidi, owner of La Bonne Soupe, a classic French bistro in New York

“La Bonne Soupe was opened in 1973. It was a very simple concept, a casual French bistro mostly serving the Midtown lunch crowd. We always say we’re where workers go when they’re paying for their own lunch, not when they’re expensing it on the company card. So that limits our ability to increase prices much as some of our neighbors. But we pay people the same as everyone else, and our food costs the same as everyone else’s food. So it has been challenging.

“We’re known for our French onion soup, but the price of cheese has gone up so much — Gruyere has gone up over 50 percent since 2019. But also staples like canola oil, butter, and potatoes have become more expensive, by double-digit percentages. And we have to eat these prices. We probably have fewer people working at the restaurant than we did in 2019. Our staff’s prep lists have gotten a little bit longer, servers might have an extra table or two, and less support on some days. But we can’t lose money.

“We’re off Fifth Avenue, and near Central Park, so we have tourists that are coming. We get a lot of the office crowd. But it’s usually people looking for a cheaper meal than what else is in the area. But also, the office lunch crowd has changed a lot. You have more people doing flex work and not coming into Manhattan. And for the people that are here, they’re ordering dessert a little bit less, or being more cautious about having a second glass of wine, or not having a drink at all. You can tell people are more cautious of how much they’re ordering.

“One thing we implemented about two, three years ago, is a 2 percent kitchen appreciation fee. It’s printed on our menus, and 100 percent of that goes towards our kitchen team — in New York, the law is that tips can only go to front-of-house staff. But as an individual restaurant, there’s only so much we can do to really change the model. If there’s going to be a change to the industry, it probably has to come from government regulations that all of us have to follow at the same time. Otherwise, no one is making heavy margins, because if they do, people will see it as a rip-off and go to the place next door.”

When Did All the Recipes Get ‘Garlicky’?

2024-09-05T11:00:00-04:00

Subin Yang

Before calling a recipe “leeky” or “lemony” was a joke, these descriptors were a revelation

It was the post on X that stopped food media in its tracks. On April 23, 2024, comedian Karli Marulli joked about offerings in the Cooking section of the New York Times, imagining the platonic recipe that comes up no matter what you’re making: “beany leeky greens with greeky rampy beans.” The riffs kept coming in the comments, mentions of jammy eggs and brothy, garlicky stew, each “-y” twisting the knife. Perhaps at some future date we’ll declare that on that day in April, the trend of naming recipes with conversational adjectives officially died.

But how was it born? Lemony greens and garlicky beans are not to be found in the Joy of Cooking or any missives from Martha. It may seem like these colloquial descriptors burst forth from the forehead of the millennial internet, fully formed on Bon Appétit. But recipe naming is an act of scene setting, and from the moment recipes were codified into books and the pages of magazines, there has been the challenge of what to name them to lure the home cook. Too broad and the reader won’t know what they’re cooking, but too specific and you risk clunkily listing every ingredient in the title. Do you name a texture? One primary flavor or three? Nod to the country a recipe takes inspiration from? Convey authority or informality?

Before it was a joke, a descriptor like “leeky” was a revelation; casual yet informative, fun and inviting, a rebellion against the authoritative tone of recipes of the past. And its rise and fall reveals the changing ways home cooks want to think of themselves — and how recipe creators market to those ideas.

“I do sort of feel like I created a monster within that genre,” says Alison Roman. You were probably picturing her work when thinking about these conventions. She’s published recipes for “garlicky” carrots and sweet peppers, “lemony” white beans and trout dip, “brothy” chicken, chicken with “all the garlic,” and her famous shallot pasta (#ThePasta) was originally billed as “The Tomato-y, Shallot-y Pasta You Didn’t Know You Wanted.”

Roman says it was an uphill battle to get her editors at Bon Appétit, where she first began publishing recipes in 2012, to let her get loose with recipe names. You can see her earliest recipes for things like “Salted Pistachio Brittle” and “Mint Chip Ice Cream Cake” are named more straightforwardly, though she does get slightly more conversational with “The Ultimate Straight-Up Regular Kosher Dill Pickle Recipe.” Her goal was not just to be descriptive, but to get at the core of what makes the recipe special. “To me, ‘garlicky’ is the essence of garlic, it’s how you would describe something if somebody asked you what it tastes like,” she says.

me: what should i dooooo
nyt cooking: beany leeky greens with greeky rampy beans
— Karli Marulli (@karlimarulli) April 23, 2024

The late aughts and early teens were a watershed moment for home cooking. Food Network had built a generation of not just viewers but fans, who saw shows like Good Eats and 30 Minute Meals as both education and entertainment. Top Chef premiered in 2006, showcasing the specific talents of restaurant chefs. The same year Michael Pollan published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, pushing readers to think about American foodways and where their ingredients come from. Cooking as entertainment, and as moral good, appeared to liberate it from gendered household labor (though of course, it didn’t actually). Cooking was now considered a hobby, something you could build a personality around, rather than something necessary to keep yourself and your family alive.

The boom in cooking television, as well as the birth of the internet’s food blogs, gave anyone looking for what to make for dinner almost infinite options. This meant that anyone naming recipes had to figure out what would attract someone looking for one. Melissa Clark, food columnist at the New York Times who has published recipes for garlicky chicken and pasta with garlicky breadcrumbs, says that when she began her column there in 2007, she started taking more liberties with the recipe titles. “You are already opening yourself up, and you’re already creating an intimate space. So it seemed natural to make the recipe titles more fun and a little more conversational,” she says.

But the dominant food-as-entertainment culture was still very chef-driven, which was reflected in recipe names. “When I started at Food52 in 2010, people were still using more articles and adjectives that might be considered redundant now, probably a reflection of fancier restaurant menus at the time,” says food writer and cookbook author Kristen Miglore, who gives the example of “something like Simple Summer Pork Chops with a Balsamic-Pepper Plum Reduction and Fresh Thyme,” a wordy title that intimidates more than it inspires.

The sense of familiarity that “lemony” adjectives and suffixes evoke was a rebellion to these restaurant-based naming conventions. “A lot of my creative decisions, especially early in my career, were made as a reaction to something that was happening,” says Roman. “I wasn’t really trying to make a point. I was just like, why can’t we use the word ‘frizzled’?” Instead of how you would speak to a customer or a subordinate, it’s how you would speak to a friend.

My copy of 1879’s Housekeeping in Old Virginia includes a recipe for “Common Pancakes” that includes no actual cooking instructions, just ingredient measurements, as well as a recipe for “Brunswick Stew” that only says to stew the ingredients together for “some time.” Like many early cookbooks, it was written for either a wife or household cook who already knew what she was doing. This was not about inspiring creativity. This was about getting dinner on the table.

Of course, home cooks (mostly women) have long swapped recipes and wanted to try new things, and as magazines and the women’s pages of the newspapers became more prevalent, they began printing recipes from staff, readers, and advertisers. These started out as straightforward as they had been when cookbooks were first published — a 1922 issue of Better Homes & Gardens has a whole section on cooking with currants, including Currant Catsup and Currant Dumplings — but soon it’s clear recipe developers wanted to catch readers’ eyes. By 1942, Gourmet was publishing recipes with mysterious titles like “Bachelor’s Defense” and “Eggs Obstaculos,” and in the 1950s Kraft was advertising in BHG with recipes like “Sassy Shrimp Mold.”

The recipes were also more detailed, inviting those who had never cooked before to try with foolproof instructions. Through magazines, and later television, the assumed audience welcomed not just women who were only ever expected to run a household, but also that most modern invention — a woman who didn’t know how to cook. Or, technically, anyone who didn’t know how to cook. As food television emerged as a genre, and took off with Food Network’s launch in 1993, the appeal was to entice the curious gourmets who felt both excited and intimidated by the mere presence of a professional chef on their screen. There began to be an emphasis on achievability, the idea that you, who never went to culinary school, could make this.

By the ’90s, the gourmet, by then called a “foodie,” was a whole class of people: people who sought out good, exciting restaurants and prided themselves on their knowledge of many cuisines. Part of the entertainment of food television was just watching a professional make the dish they might cook in their restaurant kitchen. Here were the cheffy titles Miglore spoke of, things like Florida Lobster and Fresh Pappardelle with Tomatoes and Chives or Olive Oil Grape Cake with Honey-Ginger Glaze.

The cheffy names were also one solution to a secondary problem. By the time food television became more common, recipes were readily available — anyone wanting to make pancakes could find five different ways to do so in their mother’s cookbook collection. The recipes on television had to be different, unique to the show or chef. Viewers had to be able to master them, but more importantly, they had to stand out enough that they’d remember what they saw.

No one embodied the possibility of language on food television more than Rachael Ray. The cook and host of shows like 30 Minute Meals and $40 a Day created a whole lexicon to ensure her recipes and techniques stuck in viewers’ brains. In 2007, The Oxford American College Dictionary added the Ray-ism “EVOO” to its listings, and she invented phrases like “garbage bowl,” “entréetizer,” “stoup,” and “choup,” as well as punctuated her instructions with words like “delish” and “yum-o.” And her 2010 cookbook, Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats, includes more relaxed titles like eggs with “lemony” greens, and “about 15 minute soup.”

“So many things she said are burned into my brain,” says chef and cookbook author Sohla El-Waylly. Which was exactly the point. Ray may have been the immediate precursor to the internet-driven style of casual suffixes — these portmanteaus and silly adjectives make you remember her. “Making a great recipe is just one small part of it. Selling it is the bigger part,” says El-Waylly. Sure, Ray could have just called it a soup or a stew. But stoup, like lemony and beany and “all the garlic,” makes you remember. Especially if you’ve only heard it on TV or YouTube.

By the 2010s, magazines and blogs were publishing recipes online, and YouTube offered a new — pausable, instantly rewatchable — format by which to watch someone cook, which sites like Bon Appétit dove into. This is where the garlicky greens really thrived. There were material reasons why this sort of language proliferated. “With ever-more recipes and limited space in email subject lines and social media captions, word choices had to be more eye-grabbing and visceral to inspire clicks,” says Miglore. “We started seeing more garlicky, mustardy, honeyed, coconuttiest, crispety cruncheties, all of the ___.”

But this was also just the way millennials talked. “With video personalities becoming bigger drivers of recipe traffic, the language of the young and hip spilled over into recipe titles, making all the ‘reductions’ and ‘sesame-encrusted medallions’ of earlier generations seem fusty and impersonal,” says Miglore. “All of the garlic” sounds like a meme. These recipe titles signaled a new generation was at the helm of food media, one that was willing, like Rachael Ray, not to speak down but to.

“I think that we’re living in an age where people don’t want an expert to tell them what to do, they want a friend to tell them what to do,” says Clark. Descriptions of “brothy meatballs” and “Greek-ish chicken” of the 2010s made the recipes sound like someone casually walking you through what they do, not like you’re in culinary school. A generation raised on Food Network had turned out a number of people who loved the concept of cooking elaborate, flavorful meals, but perhaps had not grown up doing it themselves or had grown up cooking one cuisine and didn’t know how to incorporate new-to-them flavors. “We see people who are nervous. And so we want to take them by the hand and say, it’s okay,” says Clark.

The rejection of the authoritative tone, as well as a healthy fear of claiming expertise over cultures and cuisines one is not a part of, has also added to the hedging in recipe titles through more casual adjectives. Miglore mentions interviewing Samin Nosrat, who said her Persian-ish Rice with Tahdig “was insurance, so that people wouldn’t expect whatever their definition of authenticity was in her technique.” Priya Krishna says much the same in her introduction to her cookbook, Indian-ish, writing the recipes are “60 percent traditional Indian, 40 percent Indian-plus-something-else ... but they all equally comprise our family’s unique culinary canon.” This is about the specificity of this cook’s point of view, not authority.

Like with any trend, however, it became impossible to escape, and then tipped over into cringe. For instance, the new Kismet cookbook titles a whole chapter “Salady” and another “Eggy + Meaty.” In More is More, Molly Baz has a recipe for “yummy dust,” and on her Instagram she titled a burger recipe “Caesar Boigaz,” later clarifying they were “wit chovies.” And, as Roman laments, the descriptors that were once meant to emphasize the essential flavors of a dish have been watered down. “I look at recipes and am like, you’re just finishing it with a squeeze of lemon, that’s not ‘lemony’,” says Roman. “So many people did bad things with those words.” Of course “garlicky” turned into a joke.

In July, Dan Pelosi published a recipe in the New York Times for “Spaghetti Sauce.” It doesn’t claim the heritage of marinara or Bolognese, nor specific flavors, nor Pelosi’s specific flair for indulgent ingredients. It doesn’t claim much of anything. This is perhaps the next wave of recipe names. Pelosi has published other recipes like Pasta Primavera and Angel Hair Pasta, the latter of which doesn’t even hint at a sauce. Eric Kim has a Chocolate Birthday Cake. Justine Doiron has Zucchini Risotto and Strawberry Shortcake. Even Alison Roman’s most recent recipes are things like Stovetop Jam and Baked Shells.

The names are definitive but not authoritative, casual in their straightforwardness. They are neither implying they’re the best baked shells or overloading you with flavor detail. Instead, they rely on the home cook to make some jumps. Part of this, says Clark, is an emphasis on SEO — unless you’re looking for a specific recipe, you’re probably not searching for “crispiest chicken thighs with garlicky greens.” Now that so much of recipe finding has moved online, a more straightforward name catches the most searchers. Miglore also notes there’s ever less space to grab someone’s attention, whether it’s in 20 seconds on TikTok or as someone is about to scroll past you on Instagram, so you need to “communicate so much in just a word or two.” She mentions popular recipes like Pizza Beans, Latke Cookies, Samosa-dillas, and Croffles that try to get at the heart of a recipe without any adjectives at all.

As with any trend, the time just comes for change. “It’s a little bit of decluttering,” says Clark. And after hundreds of years of printed recipes, we’ve landed close to the beginning, with recipe developers assuming a knowledge, or at least self-sufficiency, from home cooks. Think about it — you probably know exactly what “spaghetti sauce” means. And if you don’t, well, it includes six cloves of minced garlic. So it’s probably pretty garlicky.

Subin Yang is a freelance illustrator based in NYC and Seoul, South Korea.

What Will Be on Chick-fil-A TV?

2024-08-21T16:35:06-04:00

Shutterstock

The chicken chain is launching a streaming service, and we have some ideas for whoever’s in charge of programming

You ever go to Chick-fil-A and think, damn, I would love an unscripted, family-friendly show loosely based around this chicken sandwich? You, and only you, are in luck. According to Deadline, the fast-food chicken chain is planning to launch its own streaming platform, with a slate of original programming. Guess everyone has to diversify in this economy!

Deadline reports that Chick-fil-A is considering scripted shows and animation, along with unscripted content, and already has plans for “a family-friendly game show” from the same production team behind NBC’s The Wall. And apparently it’s not even the company’s first foray into entertainment; in 2022 Chick-fil-A produced a series of animated shorts called Stories of Evergreen Hills, a series of vaguely Christmas-y stories about being kind and spreading joy.

But just what kind of television combines the ethos of family friendly entertainment and not-even-that-good food served with an overtly Christian, homophobic message? We probably know as well as Chick-fil-A, so here are some ideas.

Eat Mor Chikin: A cooking show starring the famous Chick-fil-A cows, showing you all the amazing meals to be made with anything but beef. This will run for four episodes before the cows’ anti-red meat messaging and guerrilla activism tactics become too didactic for viewers.
Chick-N-Strips: Imagine Naked Attraction meets The Newlywed Game, but far more uptight. Teams of romantic couples (no gays) must remove items of clothing for each question they get wrong about each other, but don’t worry, all PG-13 bits (so everything from your neck to your knees) are covered by the chain’s delicious Chick-n-Strips. The winner takes home a cash prize and any strips on their body, which will be good for at least three meals, probably.
American Chicken Warriors: This is just parkour through the drive-thru window.
Spicy Deluxe Love: A Hallmark-esque rom-com in which a “career girl” from the big city visits her hometown for Christmas, falls in love with a handsome country boy over a banana milkshake, and moves back to be a stay-at-home wife. Who needs ambition and your own income stream when you can’t even get a good Christian shake?
Moo Patrol: Also starring the Chick-fil-A cows, as they roam the countryside arresting chickens with impunity to feed the chain’s expansion goals.
Pickle Me This!: It’s like a game show where you throw the pickles on the sandwich at stuff, for prizes or something??
Food Time Treasure: Not wanting to pay any more writers, this is the show that happens when the company decides to create an entirely AI-generated cooking competition. AI recipes, hosts, contestants, even the title! It’s miserable. Nothing works and the animation is too uncanny for anyone to enjoy. The whole thing goes under.

Kamala Harris Wants Your Groceries to Be Cheaper

2024-08-16T10:15:56-04:00

Kamala Harris at her presidential campaign rally in Las Vegas | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The Harris-Walz campaign is announcing a plan to crack down on grocery price gouging

The Harris-Walz campaign is set to propose a federal ban on “corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries.” On Friday, August 16 the campaign will hold a rally in North Carolina, during which Harris will announce her broader economic goals, with a focus on reining in the cost of living. “There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign said in a statement to NBC. “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”

This comes as good news to anyone who recently went shopping for some basic baking supplies and got a receipt for $64 (say, your friendly local author). Though economists insist the economy is doing fine, the average cost of living feels unsustainable to many, with food prices 21 percent higher than they were three years ago, wages stagnating or even falling, and no one able to afford rent on minimum wage. Yes, unemployment might be low, but clearly employment is not letting a lot of people live comfortably.

Part of the plan is to crack down on mergers between large food groups, such as the Kroger-Albertsons merger, which would create the second largest retail chain in the country unless the FTC’s suit to block the merger is successful (however, as of now that is seeming unlikely). There was the announcement August 14 that Mars is buying Kellanova, the sellers of brands like Eggo, Pop-Tarts, and Cheez-Its, for $30 billion.

Mergers like these allow fewer people to dictate not just the price of food, but what food is even available to the average consumer. “Kroger’s acquisition of Albertsons would lead to additional grocery price hikes for everyday goods, further exacerbating the financial strain consumers across the country face today,” Henry Liu, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, previously said in a press release.

Frustration around exorbitant grocery prices has been building for a while. “Decades of failure by federal leaders to tackle food monopolies have sent grocery prices skyrocketing. President Biden finally turned the corner with real action against ill-advised corporate mergers, and the Harris campaign’s signals of intent to work even harder against food profiteering are encouraging,” said Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Action, the lobbying arm of the sustainable food and climate nonprofit Food & Water Watch, in a statement to Eater. “We look forward to seeing robust antitrust policy that will make a difference in our wallets, and send the food monopolies packing.”

Harris, if elected, will indeed be following in President Joe Biden’s footsteps. In May, the Biden administration released a statement saying it had met with CEOs of major grocery chains to ask them to lower prices, noting the “record profits” these companies have made in recent years. According to Forbes, “the average CEO to worker pay ratio was 324 to 1, up 23 percent” from 2019 to 2022, noting many food companies are raising prices to pad profits. For example, “in 2022-2023 Kraft Heinz profits skyrocketed from $225 million to $887 million, an increase of 448 percent,” says Forbes, as the company raised consumer prices 21 percent on popular brands like Velveeta, Lunchables, and Oscar Mayer.

Harris is supposedly setting her sights on the meat industry specifically, saying “soaring meat prices have accounted for a large part of Americans’ higher grocery bills, even as meat processing companies registered record-breaking profits following the pandemic.” Presumably, meat processing companies would face fines from the FTC or state attorneys general for price gouging.

In the meantime, The FTC is making its own attempts to crack down high grocery prices. The organization has proposed an inquiry into why prices remain high after inflation has come down. In a public meeting earlier this month, FTC Chair Lina Khan said, “We want to make sure that major businesses are not exploiting their power to inflate prices for American families at the grocery store.”

Everything We Know About the New Anthony Bourdain Biopic

2024-08-13T13:55:46-04:00

Courtesy of CNN | CNN

Production studio A24 is in talks to acquire the film, entitled “Tony,” while Dominic Sessa is attached to star

Over six years after his death, the Anthony Bourdain entertainment complex continues apace. There have been books and documentaries and a whole day dedicated to unpacking the life of a man who had a profound and powerful impact on the food world. His own books are being republished and spun off into other media. And now, perhaps inevitably, we have an Anthony Bourdain biopic in the works.

Who’s making the newest Bourdain movie?

According to Deadline, production studio A24 is in talks to acquire the film, dubbed Tony, from production company Star Thrower Entertainment. Matt Johnson, who directed BlackBerry, is in talks to direct, and Dominic Sessa, who you might remember as the kid from The Holdovers, is attached to star as Bourdain, probably because audiences know he can do the gangly, personable-but-depressed kid from the ’70s thing.

Deadline says it’s unclear what period of Bourdain’s life the biopic will cover, though Sessa’s presence probably means a younger Bourdain will at least make an appearance. If there’s room for an older Bourdain, I hope Eric Bogosian is getting a phone call.

The script is written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, whose IMDB pages are relatively sparse. However, Bartels purports to be a restaurant fan, and has written a pilot about New York’s restaurant scene in the ’90s. As of now, it’s unclear what role those closest to Bourdain may have in the film.

How have Bourdain’s friends, family, and fans reacted?

Bourdain’s biographer Laurie Woolever has not yet said anything publicly about the film, and neither has his widow, Ottavia Bourdain, who has previously been vocal about her involvement — or lack thereof — in works about him. In 2021, Roadrunner director Morgan Neville said he had the blessing of the estate to use AI to mimic Bourdain’s voice in the documentary, but Ottavia publicly claimed she never signed off on it.

Roadrunner, which Woolever consulted on, also came under fire from critics. Marya E. Gates said the film felt “less like a loving tribute to a man no one ever fully knew, and more like vultures picking the last meat off his bones,” the latest in a line of attempts to cash in on his name. And online, after the news of the A24 film broke, some fans confidently posted that there are hundreds of hours of television of the man speaking in his own words, and that Bourdain would not have loved that there was a movie being made about him.

The “why watch a biopic when you could watch No Reservations?” argument is a little facile. A fictionalized film and a documentary TV series are different media with different goals. After all, why watch Dracula when you could read Bram Stoker? Why watch Walk The Line when you could listen to a Johnny Cash album? It’s just not the same thing.

It’s also impossible to know what Bourdain’s response to the film would be — the majority of us did not know him personally, and even those who did probably can’t know for sure. But we can glean from his persona and his works that he had a complicated relationship with the spotlight; it’s not hard to imagine that he would have found the near deification he’s receiving in his death, at best, lightly absurd.

Dosa Kitchen Wants To Make Dosa a Household Name

2024-08-08T11:17:03-04:00

Dosa Kitchen’s ready-made batter | Lille Allen/Eater

With its dosa batter, Dosa Kitchen hopes to educate people about everything dosas can do. But why do Americans still need an education?

Open the fridge in many South Indian homes, and you’ll probably find a tub of dosa batter bubbling with fermentation. Perhaps it’s homemade, or it could be from the number of brands selling premixed batter in South Asian markets across the country. It’s a kitchen staple like anything else, unremarkable except to those for whom the dosa remains unfamiliar. Which, in America, is a lot of people.

Dosa Kitchen wants to speak to those people, who may have encountered dosa in a restaurant or more likely never at all. The brand, born out of a food truck run by husband-wife team Nash Patel and Leda Scheintaub in Brattleboro, Vermont, has been selling premade dosa batter throughout New England since 2022, with plans to expand into other areas — the batter will soon be available at Kalustyan’s in New York City. The batter doesn’t include the preservatives or flavorings common in other dosa batters, and the packaging, with a lightly Indian design flare, describes the batter as a “ready-to-pour pancake, waffle and crepe batter.” It emphasizes that it’s gluten free, vegan, and “stone ground.” Illustrations show how to expertly spread the batter on a hot griddle for a classic dosa, but they also suggest making pancakes and waffles. According to Scheintaub, “[The packaging is] meant to educate people on what dosa batter is and what you can use it for.”

Dosa Kitchen has joined other South Asian American brands like Brooklyn Delhi, Heritage Kulfi, and Peepal People, which are sold outside traditionally South Asian stores, making them something non-Asian people could casually encounter. These brands are juggling staying true to culinary tradition, making room for experimentation, and trying to explain it all to people who still think “Indian food” begins and ends with garlic naan.

It feels like South Asian food is in a constant state of introduction in America. “We hope Doosra introduces anyone unfamiliar with Indian snacks to the wide array of both sweet & savory treats we and the broader SouthAsian culture has to offer,” writes Doosra, an Indian snack brand. Droosh, a spice company started by three Indian American women, says it was “conceived to demystify Indian flavors and make them more accessible.”

Often, the mission is not just to introduce, but to correct previous misconceptions; as Kolkata Chai Co. explains, “Chai has been repeatedly bastardized and appropriated in the Western world. We’re putting it all on the line to make sure our culture and traditions are represented accurately and honestly.” Or as Tasting India writes, “We want to shatter the stereotypes that have plagued Indian cuisine; and showcase the versatility of spices across global culinary traditions.”

There of course is a first time for everything. But almost 60 years after the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the National Origins Formula and paved the way for South Asian immigration, Indians now represent the second biggest immigrant population in the country, which of course doesn’t account for other South Asian countries, Indo-Caribbean populations, or other various South Asian diasporas. And yet Indian flavors have not achieved popularity and familiarity in American culture the way, say, Mexican or Chinese flavors have. In 2014, Scheintaub told Eater that dosa was becoming a craze, perhaps in the same way chai or turmeric have inched their way into Americans’ culinary vocabulary, but a decade later the Indian diaspora is still explaining. Could dosas finally be next?

Patel grew up eating and making dosa in Hyderabad, India, and met Scheintaub while waiting tables at a South Indian restaurant in New York. So when the two moved from New York to Vermont in 2009, Scheintaub says, “we were trying to figure out what Nash should do. He made the best dosas, so we had this crazy idea of opening a dosa food truck.” They began selling dosa at the farmers market, where business was initially slow. “Trying something new is not that easy around here. It’s not like in New York where people are always wanting to try new things,” says Scheintaub. But gradually, they began to talk to more farmers market customers about what dosa is, emphasizing the sort of buzzwords — gluten free, sugar free, vegan, fermented — customers were interested in.

They opened a truck in 2014 serving dosa with Patel’s family recipes for beef keema and sambar, but also Vermont-ish innovations, like dosa with melted Vermont cheddar, or the dosa dog, a hot dog served in a thick uttapam with cheese, sauerkraut, and their mysore chutney. Dosa Kitchen’s instagram and cookbook are also full of “non-traditional” inspiration, like dosa topped with smoked salmon, dosa blintzes, and pancakes stuffed with ham and Gruyere.

The dosa has often been described to Western audiences as a South Indian crepe. On one hand, I balk at all such comparisons that try to make Asian food more appealing and familiar by using a French word. But on the other hand, dosa is just batter made of grains and water, like dozens of similar recipes around the world. How else do you convince someone to try something they’ve never eaten, other than comparing it to something they may already like?

Scheintaub admits she’s heard people say these more modern dosas are sacreligious. I get it. Even though South Asian people are behind all these brands, it’s like watching a band you’ve only seen in 50-person basement clubs play Madison Square Garden, thrilling and knee-jerk unsettling to see all these people like the same thing you like. Why should they get to enjoy something they only heard about a month ago? So often, Indian cuisine is watered down for Western tastes and palates or renamed something “easier to pronounce;” to paraphrase a politician, like it was dropped out of a coconut tree and divorced from the context of all that came before it. That knee-jerk is entirely justified.

But it’s also small, defensive thinking that punishes members of any given diaspora for trying something new — whether that’s dosa batter with no preservatives, chutney pizza, or popcorn seasoning with chaat masala — and punishes anyone else for being curious about something they’ve never had before. Perhaps dosa becoming a kitchen staple is the wrong way to think of it. This isn’t about convincing everyone to like one thing. Instead, it’s about ending the cycle of introduction. It’s saying dosa is here and has been here. Would you like to participate or not?

If you look at the state of South Asian cuisine, both in South Asia and in its diasporas, you’ll see a whole mess of experimentation. In her new cookbook, Amrikan, Khushbu Shah includes a recipe for dosa with maple syrup. In India, dosas are served with a wide variety of fillings, including processed cheese, Chinese noodles, and chocolate. Saying you can only use dosa batter but for a narrow range of traditional recipes is like saying you can’t use white bread for anything but a ham and cheese sandwich. “Dosa is really like a blank canvas for so many things,” says Scheintaub. “It doesn’t feel disingenuous to do other things besides curry with it, because it would be a wasted opportunity.”

It had never occurred to me to make dosa at home. Despite spending decades ranting to anyone who will listen that Indian food is not difficult to make at home, the dosa has seemed to me, frankly, difficult. But Dosa Kitchen’s batter smelled like a dosa restaurant, and I was bolstered by the fact that Indians have been doing this at home for centuries.

For my first time, I think I did pretty well. There is a learning curve, but my dosas were thin and mostly round and had a perfect tang. I paired them with a traditional potato masala, and the next day, my partner and I made steamed idli with chutney. But then, they had an idea. What if we used the batter to make thicker pancakes to wrap around leftover masala, eggs, and American cheese? A kind of Indian-ish breakfast burrito? I’d never thought of something like that before. It sounded great.

Something Must Be Done About the Names of Plant-Based Food Companies

2024-08-07T12:05:00-04:00

Illustration by Lille Allen

There’s Vrimp, Malk, and now Plonts. Stop making me say these out loud.

A few weeks ago, I sat down to a vegan charcuterie board and truly marveled at how far we’ve come. The cheese was creamy and tangy, spreadable but with weight and texture. It tasted like cheese. There are legitimately impressive leaps being made in the vegan food industry, plant-based options that truly do mimic the “real” thing, for those who want to avoid animal products but miss their tastes and textures. The problem is, they almost all have the absolute worst names I’ve never heard.

I was reminded of this with a press release for Plonts. Plonts! (My spellcheck keeps insisting I want to say “plants,” but no, Plonts.) Plonts is a fermented soy milk-based cheddar, which describes itself as “a new plant-based cheese that stinks.” Plonts will be introducing itself on menus in New York and San Francisco this month, including at S&P Deli and Court Street Grocers in New York, and at Moongate Lounge and Shuggie’s in San Francisco, in case you wanted to try Plonts: The Cheese That Stinks™ for yourself.

The idea of a plant-based cheddar that melts and shreds and tastes just like dairy cheddar sounds fantastic. But Plonts reminded me there’s a growing list of plant-based products that make me feel like I’m gargling leeches every time I say their names. There’s Malk, which I had been under the impression was the vitamin-lacking milk substitute from the Simpsons. Vrimp, a shrimp dupe from Nestle. Klimon, a line of almond-based desserts that is just “no milk” spelled backwards.

Try asking your grocer for THIS PKN, pecan milk, out loud. Or for Doozy Pots plant-based gelato. Simulate is at least a real word, but also sounds too much like the nutrient slurry from The Matrix. And please don’t ask me to order my coffee with Sproud.

There’s murky legal territory around naming plant-based foods. Alternative milks can call themselves milk, but in certain states plant-based meat alternatives can’t use the word “meat” to describe their products. But none of that explains why the product names themselves are so goofy. It makes me long for the comparative abstractness of Boca Burgers.

I do not envy anyone having to name a brand. There is a reason why I haven’t started my own business, aside from not having any ideas or desire and generally being pretty bad at spreadsheets. You can name your brand anything you want, and that comes with a lot of pressure. But any name in the world, and you choose Plonts! And now I have to teach Google Docs that it’s not a mistake! The indignity.

That Italian Gymnast Isn’t the Only Olympian Sponsored by Cheese

2024-08-06T09:22:00-04:00

Runner Elle Purrier St. Pierre and her post-run milk. | Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images

Both Giorgia Villa and Elle Purrier St. Pierre, a U.S. runner, train on cheese

It’s understandable why everyone is freaking out over photos of Italian Olympic gymnast Giorgia Villa having been sponsored by Parmigiano Reggiano. Villa posted photos of herself eating Parmigiano Reggiano snacks and flipping over wheels of cheese back in 2022, as part of her work with the brand: How simple, how refreshing to see someone who just won a silver medal credit physical success to something I enjoy on pasta.

It feels especially gratifying as the “performance food” industry feels like it’s gotten out of hand. New products seem to appear every day insisting that you optimize some aspect of your existence, that you shouldn’t dare eat without considering your gains or brain fog or circadian rhythm. Everything has adaptogens, which, what even are those? I recently saw a bottled iced coffee that boasted 20 grams of protein, which is like if you blended chicken leg into your morning latte.

But Villa is not the only Olympian powered by the glory of cheese. Elle Purrier St. Pierre, who is competing in the women’s 1500m race for the U.S. on August 6, was sponsored by Cabot Cheese in 2021. The sponsorship included her posing with cows, eating cheese snacks, and grilling some burgers with cheddar.

St. Pierre and her husband are dairy farmers in Vermont, so it makes sense that she’d partner up with another local dairy; Cabot Creamery is a farmer-owned cooperative, which uses milk from its member farms to make its products. “My family’s farm has been working with Cabot for many years,” she said in a 2021 Instagram post. St. Pierre has also done ads for the Dairy Farmers of America, and can regularly be seen drinking milk.

Cheese does feel like a legitimately good post workout snack. An ounce of cheddar cheese has about 7 grams of protein, while Parmigiano Reggiano has 11 grams, and both probably taste a lot better than whatever chalky protein bars are at the checkout counter. Which is great news for me, as I frequently eat far more than one ounce of cheese while watching the Olympics. I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing as training.

The Best Gift You Can Buy Yourself Is Better Kitchen Supplies for Your Parents

2024-07-30T11:46:22-04:00

All this could be your(parents’)s | Shutterstock

They might never use these kitchen tool upgrades, but you will when you cook at their place

When I was a kid, my mom bought her parents a beautiful espresso machine for Christmas, knowing how much they loved cappuccinos. She helped them set it up, showed them how to steam milk and pull espresso, and they thanked her profusely for the beautiful gift. Then, they promptly continued to make coffee in their drip pot. The espresso machine was only used when my mom visited and could make the drinks for them. “It’s just so much nicer when you do it,” they said.

Buying your parents or grandparents cooking-related gifts is a gamble. Some might greatly appreciate a new meat thermometer or an offset spatula for frosting cakes. Others have likely been creating elaborate meals for decades with the same dull paring knife and the thin, nonstick pot they got at Sears when they first moved to this country and do not need your fancy food gadgets when those still work perfectly fine, thank you very much. But you shouldn’t let their potential lack of enthusiasm keep you from buying them gifts from the kitchen department this year, because there is one person that will always be grateful: you, the person who has to cook in their kitchen when you visit.

If you’ve ever cooked a meal in someone else’s kitchen, you may have noticed some things you lacked. In Eater’s Slack, staffers have bemoaned not having sharp knives, adequate mixing bowls, a microplane, or more than one cutting board. It causes stress and resentment to have to either lug all the supplies you need from your own kitchen, or to risk cutting off your fingers because they don’t have a peeler. And when it’s the kitchen of an elder, it honestly makes you question how on earth they managed to keep you fed without a single vessel to boil water. Are you telling me you’ve been making tea in the microwave this whole time?

Giving your family the kitchen basics may never mean they use them — my dad has strained pasta by pouring the water out through an angled pot lid my whole life and isn’t going to stop now — but it means that when you cook there, you get the benefit of pristine utensils purchased to your tastes. You don’t have to pack your suitcase full of knives and pots and spices and appear to TSA like a very specific criminal. You can arrive and cook without worry.

Sure, my mom may have had to make her parents cappuccinos for the rest of their lives. But she also got to make herself one. When you give your parents good kitchen supplies, you’re really buying them for you. So treat yourself.