Good taste, comfort, ease, luxury — the qualities that characterize gracious living. To live graciously is to be certain of the correctness of one’s aesthetics, and to construct one’s domestic environment in such a way that those aesthetics are expressed fully and in harmony. It is a life which is built around an artifice so […]

This past week I’ve been writing about lost foods. We covered foods that have disappeared and may or may not be reborn, foods that have left traces in history we can follow, and how our relationship to our own lost foods can be used for creativity or self-absorption. Every one of us is haunted by […]

The idea behind these food in movies posts isn’t really to review the film, so much as look at the role food plays in the movie. With that being said, I can just go ahead and get this out of the way — Flakes isn’t a very good movie. The food they eat in the […]

Creative Cooking Made Easy: The Golden Fluffo Cookbook was published in 1956 by the Procter & Gamble Company, in collaboration with Seranne & Gaden, the food consulting company run by the two women who quietly shaped midcentury American cooking. It’s a handsome little book, spiral-bound for easy use in the kitchen, decorated with Eileen Gaden’s […]

Here’s something you may not know about cooking — when it first started, the comic strip Cathy was really pretty good. Cathy Guisewite’s eponymous strip premiered in 1976, delving immediately into its constant themes of guilt and insecurity, themes that were very much on the mind of a nation that was still reeling from the […]