Cooked Books

Photo courtesy of Soho Grand's Grandlife If one could create a timeline of one’s life using restaurants and bars as the only measurement, Tortilla Flats would occupy a very happy and spec...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2018/10/bingo-and-burritos.html

 Beets from The Vegetable Grower's Guide > Don't let the girl pare these esculents all over as she does > turnips. Don't let her cut off the tops and roots with a�...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2016/06/dont-let-girl.html

Photo from The Daily News .  O'Casey's Irish Bar and Restaurant , which closed a few weeks ago, was never in the running for a James Beard Award. It's not listed in Zagats, nor will you find i...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2015/01/kaddish-for-ocaseys.html

Eight months after its opening, Lunch Hour NYC is closing this Sunday. It will be a bittersweet day for me, but it had a healthy run and I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to work with ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2013/02/clearing-lunch-table.html

Happy Birthday, Julia. Thanks for giving me a childhood of delicious food, cooked with love by my parents from their splattered cookbook bible.  Quiche Chicken Breasts Spinach o...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-child-is-born.html

Vassar/Yale Bike Race, 1952. Courtesy of Life Magazine For those of you who received an incomplete, unedited version of this in your RSS reader -- my apologies. I published (by accident), ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2012/08/what-vassar-girls-eat_6.html

Lunch Hour NYC , the exhibition I wrote  about last November on this very blog, is now up and free and open to the public. My co-curator, Laura Shapiro , and I are incredibly thankful to ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2012/08/lunch-time.html

It's been a hard few months for a couple of classic midtown institutions. First Bill's Gay Nineties closed. Now Primeburger is shutting its doors after 74 years in business. Stepping into ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2012/05/primeburger.html

 (Courtesy of NYPL ) Forget cleanses. Forget atoning for gastronomical sins. That's what I try to remind myself every January when it seems as though everyone and their sister (and by si...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2012/01/bobby-shorts-chicken-carlyle.html

I have a complicated relationship with lunch. As much as I'd like to say that I take my full lunch hour to savor every delectable bite of my homemade meal, and that I use real silverwear, ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/11/schmatz-lunches-at-steidl.html

Norman Rockwell This Thursday, many Americans of different religions, ethnicities, and backgrounds will be chowing down on Thanksgiving fare. For some, the Norman Rockwell scene above offe...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/11/thanksgiving-project.html

Berenice Abbott, 1938, courtesy of NYPL It's the first meal regularly taken outside the home, it's associated with school children, workers, women, power players, and with charities. It's a...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/11/lunch-break.html

I've always loved this menu for the Lobster Oyster and Chop House. It reminds me of the lobster image on this Soviet children's book featured on a wonderful McGill University library project ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/04/red-lobster-and-red-flag.html

This past Monday evening, the New York Public Library launched What's on the Menu? , a web site which invites the public to transcribe our digitized historical menus.  It all started abo...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/04/whats-on-menu.html

Danny Meyer's beloved Tabla closed a few months ago after twelve years in business. And although I wish the Library had more Tabla menus than the small handful from 2007, I am pleased tha...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/04/tablas-unleavened-bread-bar.html

Paul Freedman, a medieval history professor at Yale, has been not-so-secretly flirting with food history for a few years now. First there was the James Beard-nominated Food: A History of Tas...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/04/doing-dishes-paul-freedman-on-19th.html

A couple of weeks ago, at a birthday/dinner party for our friend Johnny, my friend Kyung served the best kind of appetizer one could give to a group of peckish, gab-happy adults: BLTs. But...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/03/updated-app-duck-blts.html

Merguez, orecchiette, tikka masala, veggie. What do those words have in common? They were all added to the Oxford English Dictionary in the same year, 1975. Ryan Haley, an editor at Ugly Du...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/02/lexical-life.html

While it may seem rather small to acknowledge the historically momentous events in Cairo last week with a plate of food, I can think of few better ways to to mark the occasion and celebration...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/02/in-name-of-fava.html

When GOOD food editor, Nicola Twilley , called upon various bloggers to discuss food writing, it forced me to stop and think more about the things I choose to write about. Usually it's as sim...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/01/food-for-thinkers-few-good-menus.html

Queen Elizabeth II's first state visit to the United States took place in October, 1957. After a few days in Canada, she and Prince Philip met with President Eisenhower in Washington, D.C., w...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/01/god-serve-queen.html

(photo by s.alt via flickr) On October 19, 1957, in West Hyattsville, MD, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip paid an unexpected visit to a local supermarket, their first to any American ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2011/01/queens-trip-to-american-supermarket.html

Many people have their own recipes for converting Brussels sprouts haters into Brussels sprouts lovers. The key to success, it seems, is adding fat. Firmly in the lover camp myself, I had two ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/jean-strouses-brussels-sprouts.html

I recently took advantage of Target Free Thursdays at the New Museum to view their exhibition The Last Newspaper , which uses the newspaper "as a platform to address issues of hierarchy, at...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-city-reader-food-edition.html

Those familiar with the writer Len Deighton most likely know him as a spy novelist. His debut in 1962, The IPCRESS File , was a big hit and many other spy works followed as evidenced by his ...

http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/len-deighton-spy-who-came-in-from.html