At any Filipino gathering, there is a quiet, unspoken competition happening at the buffet table, and lumpia is always at the center of it. These crispy, golden, finger-sized spring rolls, hot from the fryer and piled on a platter, vanish faster than anything else in the room, so fast that the smart move is to …
Walk past any pastry shop in Naples in the weeks around Christmas and you will see them in the window: glistening golden mounds of tiny dough balls, slicked with honey and scattered with colored sprinkles, piled up like edible treasure. These are struffoli, the honey balls of Naples, and they are one of the most …
Watch a Spanish cook deal with a tomato and you will witness something quietly ingenious. Instead of blanching it in boiling water to loosen the skin, shocking it in ice, slipping off the peel, and chopping the flesh the way so many American recipes instruct, they simply cut the tomato in half and grate the …
On the evening of the twenty-fourth of December, all across Portugal, families gather for the meal that is the true heart of the Portuguese Christmas. It is called the Consoada, and at its center you will not find a roast turkey or a goose or a glistening ham, but something far humbler and, to the …
Imagine ordering “Greek salad,” then watching a mound of spring mix arrive under a blizzard of crumbled “feta,” sticky balsamic glaze, and three heroic cherry tomatoes trying to prove a point. You picked up your fork and felt the betrayal. This is not Greece. It is a hotel buffet with confidence. Somewhere, a farmer who …
Walk through almost any Spanish neighborhood on a Sunday morning and you will find, somewhere nearby, a small shop with a row of whole chickens turning slowly on spits behind the glass, golden and glistening, filling the whole street with the smell of roasting garlic and paprika. This is a polleria, a roast chicken shop, …
Wander through a French Christmas market on a cold December evening and the smell will find you before the stall does. Warm red wine, orange, and spice, rising in clouds of steam from great kettles, drawing you in with the promise of something to cup in your cold hands. This is vin chaud, which means …
Walk past any pastry shop in Spain in the last days of October, and the window will be full of what look, at a glance, like a tidy pile of small white bones. They are pale, cylindrical, ridged like a section of marrow bone, and dusted or glazed to a soft ivory, and Spaniards are …
There is a particular kind of Italian genius that has nothing to do with truffles or aged cheese or anything expensive, and pasta e fagioli is its purest expression. The name just means pasta and beans, and that is almost the entire ingredient list: a handful of dried beans, a little short pasta, a soffritto …
There is a moment when an American first watches a Hungarian grandmother make chicken paprikash, reaches the point in the cooking where the paprika finally goes in, and quietly panics, because she does not shake in a modest little pinch the way a nervous, cautious cook might. She tips in spoonful after spoonful, a small …
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 …
There is a small, dark, almost black bean grown in the Basque town of Tolosa that the people of that region hold in a reverence bordering on the religious, and once you have tasted it slow-cooked into a deep, glossy stew, you understand exactly why. The Basques do not merely eat these beans, they venerate …