Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on climate...
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Bookshop|Amazon) is about the foodways and folkways passed down through five generations of a Black Appalachian family. The book, by novelist and...
Sara in Madison, Wisconsin, was reading an old edition of The Joy of Cooking and came across a recipe that described a cake’s ingredients as earrings for an elephant. She couldn’t discern whether the authors meant that was a good thing or a bad...
When a youngster misreads cooking instructions, the slash mark in the notation for the fraction 1/4 turns out to be a recipe for confusion. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Forward Slash Mishmash” We’ve talked many times about how...
Responding to our conversation about alternatives to the term mocktail, Rob in Wolcott, New York, reports on our Facebook group that he recently saw the term zero-proof drink to describe an alcohol-free beverage — a sophisticated cocktail of harissa...
Cher from Minneapolis, Minnesota, shares a funny story about her Alabama-born pastor, who was being welcomed to his new congregation with hot dish. The preacher had always understood the term hot dish as a slang term meaning “a sexy, scantily clad...