éclaircissements

Category: Eat-Memory

  • For the Abundance of Shad, the War Was Won

    When I was eight or nine and at the height of my Felicity Doll-catalyzed colonial America obsession, one of the books I read often was The Winter of the Red Snow. It was one of the Dear America books, those faux diaries that offered a child’s view on an important moment in American history. In…

  • These Days, My Berry Picking Happens Within Plastic Containers

    Mostly, my fingers shrink from mold and squooshy, caterpillar-like guts. But when I was little, I used to pick big knobbly blackberries and the rare black raspberry from the overgrown bramble that separated the end of our front lawn from the private road we called “the slow road.” Even as a kid, and certainly as…

  • There Is More than One Way to Skin a Cat

    But the best way, and the only way I know, is to start along typical marshmallow toasting procedures, and then bang a hard left, into heavy roasting. Most marshmallow roasters hold up as their paradigm a uniformly dun-colored surface neatly containing a roiling mass of fluff. Recreating this paradigm requires slow and methodical rotation in the flames’…

  • Eat, Memory: 2004 Diet vs 2015 Diet

    Every Friday, New York Magazine‘s food blog, Grubstreet, puts out a feature called “New York Diet,” wherein one New Yorker chronicles everything that’s passed his/her lips over the past week. The Dieters tend to be chefs, TV personalities and actors, musicians, or writers, which makes for a fun bit of window-peeping. Often, the diets contain a lot…

  • Eat, Memory: Rink Food

    I played hockey when I was a child. All four of us did, even my sister, though she never got past the stage of pushing around milk cartons. I was horrible at hockey — specifically, I was horrible at stick work. I was not horrible for lack of trying; I was horrible for lack of…