If you spend Christmas in Portugal, sooner or later a plate of rabanadas will appear in front of you. Thick slices of bread, golden and crisp on the outside, soft and custardy within, dusted with cinnamon sugar or drenched in a glossy syrup, warm from the pan. At first glance they look like French toast, …
The first time I served Greek lemon potatoes at our table in Madrid, something slightly embarrassing happened. I had spent the afternoon on a roast chicken, fussing over the skin and the resting and the pan juices, and I had thrown the potatoes together almost as an afterthought, the way you do with a side …
Some of the best food in the world is also the simplest, and there is no better proof than a plate of pasta al limone. This is the bright, silky lemon pasta of the Amalfi Coast, where the lemons grow the size of your fist and the cooking is built on letting a few perfect …
It’s not magic. It’s a pot of broth that makes the house feel normal again, and that’s sometimes the only “cure” you actually get. My mother-in-law doesn’t do dramatic wellness. She’s Spanish, practical, and allergic to anyone selling “immune support” in a pastel label. But she does have one Italian habit she picked up years …
Somewhere in a country restaurant in Andalusia right now, a pan of potatoes is cooking very slowly in a generous pool of olive oil, softening rather than crisping, mingling with green pepper and onion and garlic until the whole thing turns meltingly tender and fragrant. This is patatas a lo pobre, poor man’s potatoes, and …
Ask an American home cook what it takes to make a proper French beef stew, and you will hear a familiar liturgy of rules, most of them absorbed, directly or secondhand, from a certain famous French cookbook and the TV chef who wrote it. You must brown the meat in small batches so the pan …
There is a dish you can order in almost any bar in Spain, from the grandest in Madrid to the smallest in an Andalusian village, and it arrives the same way everywhere, a small earthenware dish still violently bubbling, shrimp curled in golden oil thick with sliced garlic and a confetti of red pepper, a …
Köfte is one of Turkey’s most beloved culinary exports, a dish that transcends regional variations to embody the flavors of Turkish cuisine. Essentially Turkish meatballs, Köfte is made from ground meat often lamb, beef, or a combination thereof mixed with herbs, spices, and sometimes with onions and garlic. This versatile dish can be found grilled, …
In the Netherlands, New Year’s Eve has a smell, and it is hot oil and powdered sugar. All over the country, on the last day of the year, the air carries the scent of oliebollen frying, from street stalls on every corner and from kitchens in every home. Oliebollen, which means oil balls, are the …
Spend a week in Italy and you’ll watch desserts disappear without the sugar hangover. Gelato tastes round and not cloying, breakfast cakes are barely sweet, and that glossy drizzle over fruit isn’t maple or corn syrup it’s something older. Here’s the open secret: Italians don’t rely on one industrial sweetener; they rotate grape must reductions, …
If you are American, you almost certainly know zuppa toscana as one thing: the rich, creamy soup studded with Italian sausage, bacon, and sliced potatoes, flecked with kale, that you order at Olive Garden. It is warm and comforting and genuinely delicious, and there is nothing wrong with loving it. But here is the plot …
On Christmas Eve in Greece, a very particular bread comes out of the oven. It is round and golden and fragrant with spices you may not recognize, and across its top lies a cross made of dough, with a single walnut pressed into the very center. This is christopsomo, which means Christ’s bread, and it …