In 2018, S Jeevanandan migrated from the Kerala village of Ramassery to Chennai, a sunny city in the state of Tamil Nadu over 300 miles away. A former tea stall owner, Jeevanandan now has a job at the one-of-a-kind restaurant Kappa Chakka Kandhari. The kitchen there is partly run by a motley group of home cooks who specialize not only in skills, but also in specific Kerala-style dishes. Jeevanandan’s forte is Ramassery idlis, of which he makes 300 every day, and his family is one of only two in the world that still makes them in the traditional way, and in the dish’s place of origin.

Kappa Chakka Kandhari is an award-winning restaurant co-founded by chef Regi Mathew that specifically employs “special-skill cooks” like Jeevanandan. On a given day, approximately 20 chefs work together to cook their signature dishes for patrons. The restaurant came as a result of Mathew’s research tours that brought him to 265 homes and 70 toddy shops across Kerala over a three-year period. He embarked on these trips to procure the best-quality tapioca, pepper, coconut, chiles, rice, and other ingredients emblematic of Kerala—and also to archive approximately 800 homestyle recipes from across the state. It was during one of these trips that he chanced upon Jeevanandan and his Ramassery idlis. 

Idlis are steamed savory cakes made from rice and lentils and probably originated on the Indian subcontinent—though theories about the dish’s creation do vary. Some believe it arrived in India from present-day Indonesia around 800-1200 CE. Other historians claim Arab traders introduced it to Indians in the southern belt of the country during the 7th century; to avoid confusion around what food was halaal and what was haraam (forbidden), the traders began to roll rice balls, which were easy to make. But Mathew says he has a hunch that it was in the 10th century, during the Chola Dynasty’s expedition to East Asia, that South Indians acquired the technique of steaming black gram and rice—which eventually became the earliest idlis.

Today, there are more than 50 varieties of idli across India, including both modern and traditional interpretations. According to Vijay Kumar, a chef and partner at the Indian restaurant Semma in New York City, “One of the oldest uses of the idli batter led to Kanchipuram idlis that come from the city of Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. It used to be served as prasadam—sacred food of the temples—and what separates them is the flavoring of black pepper, cumin seeds, ginger powder and mustard seeds.”

Like Kanchipuram idlis, the majority of India’s idli varieties come from the state of Tamil Nadu, where most are made from rice. “Then there are others like rava idli—made out of semolina—which originated in a popular eatery in Bengaluru, Karnataka called Mavalli Tiffin Rooms,” says Sanjay Rawat, chef de cuisine at The Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Beach, California. “During World War II, when India was under a political emergency, the shortage of rice led to the chefs innovating and creating a new version of the dish. Another variety from Karnataka is thatte idli, which is made on a plate instead of an idli cooker.” (Thatte is the Kannada word for plate.) In South Kerala, Rawat adds, another variety is millet-based and uses no rice.

As for Ramassery idli, this variety is made from rice, lentils, and fenugreek soaked for a few hours, then ground in a wet stone grinder and fermented for six to eight hours. What separates it from other varieties is that it is flatter and spongier than regular idlis. It also uses a scented variety of rice called Iruppu chamba (more common idli varieties are usually made from a rice called ponni). When the Ramassery idlis are ready to be served, they are turned directly onto a plachi leaf instead of a plate or a bowl.

Ramassery idli is a rather unusual dish for Kerala, where the cuisine is known for aromatic meat curries, parotta and appams. “Ramassery idli was brought to Kerala by the Mudaliar sect, a weaver community who journeyed from the Thanjavur region in Tamil Nadu to Kerala around 200 years ago,” says Mathew. As these artisans moved around selling their weaves, they needed to carry sustenance on their long journeys, and idlis had a shelf life of three to four days. Eaten along with podi and gingelly oil, it was their ideal meal for the road. Today, idlis continue to be a source of nutrition during long journeys. “The Defense Food Research Laboratory in India declared that moistureless idlis, with sides of sambar powder and coconut chutney [are] to be packed for astronauts to take to space,” notes chef Rawat.  

The Mudaliar weaver families eventually settled in Ramassery, a small village on the outskirts of Palakkad, and this style of idli became a village staple. Over the years, the industrialization of weaving in India threatened the artisans’ livelihoods, so Mudaliars shifted their source of income to focus on running tea shops and selling idlis to villagers and travelers who passed through Ramassery. 

Ramassery idlis are cooked not in metal steamers but in curve-necked earthen pots. Because earthenware is porous and holds moisture better, these pots result in spongier idlis. The pot is lined with earthen rings, which are woven with thin cords to create a web-like structure on which a muslin cloth rests (a clear connection to the Mudaliars’ former vocation as weavers). The fermented idli batter is ladled onto the muslin-clad ring, and these rings are then stacked inside a pot filled with water. When it’s time to cook the idlis, the pots rest over a live fire made of tamarind wood. “In such a vessel, the steam travels right through the thin cloth, all the way to the top, and then the trapped steam comes running down, which results in air-soft idlis,” Mathew explains. 

Today, only two families descended from the original Mudaliars are preserving this legacy and passing it on. Both these families have a combined 17 descendants who are involved in running stalls that sell the Ramassery idlis. S Jeevanandan’s brother Shankara Narayana Mudaliar currently heads their family stall, Shankar Vilas, while Chithrayan Mudaliar is the successor running the other family’s Saraswathi Tea Stall. 

For Mathew, including dishes like Ramassery idli on the menu of his restaurant not only gives diners a taste of a bygone era of Indian cuisine, but also preserves foods that may otherwise be lost to time. “The generation before me made them, and the next generation will have no access to them,” he says. Feeling responsible to preserve those unique slices of culture and cuisine, he decided to help them live on—“before it goes extinct.” Mathew feels that Ramessary idlis are especially at risk of fading away because they are complex to make. Each earthen pot can only make three idlis at a time, while a regular steamer can usually accommodate many more. 

Similar to how the Mudaliars paired their idlis with gingelly oil and podi powder, Mathew’s restaurant serves Ramassery idlis with a helping of podi, a dry powder made from Palakkadan matta (a variety of red rice) and spices like chillies, asafoetida, and curry leaves. According to Mathew, other modern ways to serve Ramassery idlis are with dishes like sambar (a stew of lentils and vegetables) or chicken curry. 

Across India today, Ramassery idlis are beginning to spread—thanks in large part to Kappa Chakka Kandhari, which was among the first to serve Ramassery idlis in a restaurant format. Idlis are now popping up in eateries across Kerala and Tamil Nadu, on wedding menus, and several home cooks on YouTube have been demonstrating the technique for their viewers. 

Whenever he gets the chance to return to Ramassery, Jeevanandan trains his eager 16-year-old son, who is next in line for his role at Kappa Chakka Kandhari, to make Ramassery idlis: “Of course, once he completes his studies, he will be offered the job—and if he is still in the mood to make idlis,” says Mathew. 

Over the last 28 years that he has been cooking, little has changed about the way 50-year-old Jeevanandan makes idlis. “The cooking technique has not changed at all, but the crop of rice from the same paddy field in Ramaserry has changed. It’s less starchy these days. Also, we used to grind the batter in a manual grinder, now it’s mechanical,” he says. And he is happy and proud to be cooking this dish for the rest of his life. “This was handed over to me by my father. It is a legacy recipe. These idlis saved us when weaving stopped, and I consider myself lucky, the chosen one, its guardian,” he says.

Recipe

Thatte Idli with Podi

Get the recipe >

The post The Revival of an Under-the-Radar Idli from Kerala appeared first on Saveur.

At the Oakland Fortune Factory in the San Francisco Bay Area, fortune cookies glisten with neon sprinkles and pastel-colored Belgian chocolate drizzles. Alicia Wong, co-owner of the shop, spends her days carefully decorating them with vibrant designs in uplifting hues of fuchsia, electric blue, and sunshine yellow.

The non-traditional luster of the fortune cookies is an outward expression of the cultural messaging, both literal and figurative, wrapped within. Wong is using the cookies as a medium for challenging stereotypes about Chinese American food and people.

When she was a child, on the occasions when her mother would buy her a bag of fortune cookies from the Oakland Fortune Factory as a treat, it never crossed Wong’s mind that she would one day be running that business. The factory first opened in 1957, and her parents acquired the business in 2016. After finishing college on the East Coast, Wong returned home to find that her parents were struggling to keep the operation going. She stayed for what she assumed would be a temporary stretch, to assist her parents in translating copy and sorting out business affairs. On the side, she tinkered with decorating the cookies, to help boost sales and set the handmade confections apart from their mass-produced counterparts.

In 2020, when the murder of George Floyd prompted widespread protests across the country, Wong wanted to demonstrate support for the Black Lives Matter movement and the messages of equity and equality it championed. Her partner Alex suggested replacing the fortunes with civil rights statements in solidarity. The ability to disseminate messaging is, after all, baked right into the very concept of the fortune cookie. So Wong sketched out a design, stenciled the letters BLM onto the biscuits, and filled them with quotations like, “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together” (said by Desmond Tutu). Wong donated proceeds to the NAACP and the Innocence Project, and also joined the protests in Oakland and gave cookies away to fellow marchers. “This is [just] our little small thing to help and to show our support,” Wong recalls thinking. She was shocked by how much the community rallied around the factory’s initiative. “The response we got was very overwhelming.” 

After that, something shifted in Wong, and she began to see the greater purpose and potential of her work. “That, I think, was the catalyst that made [me] realize that we could do something,” she says. “I could actually make a positive impact with our cookie.”

Around the same time, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to sweep the world, Wong began to see story after story of anti-Asian brutality around the country. “Our morale was at an all-time low,” she recalls. The horrifying incidents angered her, and as the Asian American community began speaking up in outcry, her own pent-up frustration with how immigrants are often treated—feelings that had been lying dormant in her for years—surged to the surface.

“The Stop Asian Hate movement made me examine myself, and I realized that there were so many things that I internalized,” says Wong of the bigotry, both outright and subtle, that Asian Americans regularly face. Grasping the extent of the inequities that had embroidered her immigrant experience was “just so painful. I didn’t know how much pain it has caused me until I really spent a lot of time reflecting,” she says.

Yet, the way the Asian American community collectively stood up against the rampant injustice was something Wong had never witnessed in her lifetime. “Our kind of unspoken rule is we keep our heads low, we don’t say anything, we don’t make a fuss,” she says. “I never liked that sentiment. It was really, really cathartic to see so many people from my community and also my generation speak out and come together.”

To contribute to the mobilization in the best way she knew how, Wong decorated cookies with the letters SAH and filled them with Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai proverbs, then donated proceeds to the Asian Pacific Fund and the Asian Mental Health Collective. Wong felt it was important to include sayings from different countries. “The Asian community as a whole was suffering,” she says, noting that Asian Americans who hail from different ancestral backgrounds may share very similar experiences and struggles. “I didn’t want people to segregate us,” she adds, especially “when my own community is so diverse.”

Wong isn’t the only fortune cookie maker using the confections to spread messages of inclusivity. Kevin Chan, the owner of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory which his mother opened in 1962, was also horrified by the violent crimes targeting innocent Asian victims across the country. “Why do we get hate? Why are we getting beat up?” he recalls questioning in anger. To add a voice to the Stop Asian Hate movement, Chan joined marches and gave away cookies containing notes of equality to marchers and police officers to “send out the message that, Asian hate, we don’t tolerate that,” he says. Immigrants often sacrifice everything to migrate to a different country, then work hard to contribute to society in their adopted homeland, he notes. “We’re here. We are Americans. We’re part of the community.” 

Like the people who make them, fortune cookies are, in fact, American. When I was a child visiting China for the first time with my parents, we went to a restaurant with relatives, and after dinner, I waited for the fortune cookies to arrive. When they didn’t show up, I pointed out the curious absence to my cousins, who stared at me in confusion. Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, told me my experience is a common one among people accustomed to seeing fortune cookies with Chinese dishes: “Chinese people in China don’t recognize them. They think it’s very strange that there’s a piece of paper inside the cookie.”

Americans’ assumption that fortune cookies come from China is a widespread misconception of the food’s origins. How fortune cookies came to be inextricably linked with Chinese restaurants in the U.S. is the question Lee seeks to answer in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Throughout her research, she found that multiple sources, including the Japanese confectionery Fugetsu-Do in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo and the Hong Kong Noodle Company, claim to have created the famous cookie. Another commonly told origin story, which Chan recounted to me, is that fortune cookies as we know them today were first served in the Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Though claimants and historians have differing theories, one fact is agreed upon: the cookies did not come from China. According to Lee, fortune cookies likely derive from tsujiura senbei—crunchy fortune-containing confections that were made in Kyoto, Japan, as far back as the 1800s. Japanese bakers who arrived in the U.S. during the late 19th century likely brought the tradition with them, selling similar treats at the shops they opened, Lee explained.

The cookies’ jump from Japanese confectioneries to Chinese restaurants resulted out of necessity. “Fortune cookies are very much a reflection of economic survival” and “immigrant adaptation to the American landscape,” says Lee. In the early 20th century, because American customers were not familiar with eating raw fish, Japanese immigrants opted to open Chinese restaurants instead. Though ending a meal with something sweet is not a cultural norm in China, Lee explains, American diners expected dessert. Fortune cookies became a way to fulfill that need. 

During World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, countless Japanese American businesses closed. Shortly after, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, prompting a surge of Chinese immigration. “In addition, the wartime rationing of meat enhanced the appeal of Chinese dishes, which made a little meat go a long way,” writes Lee in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. “A sharp rise in demand at Chinese restaurants combined with a lack of Japanese bakers gave Chinese entrepreneurs an opportunity to step in.” Those restaurant owners popularized the cookie into the convention it is today—utterly synonymous with Chinese restaurants in America.

Wei Guo, the writer and recipe developer behind the food blog Red House Spice, used to feel that this was rather unfortunate. Guo, who was born and raised in China and now lives in the U.K., first encountered a fortune cookie in Sex and the City, when the character Miranda orders Chinese takeout. Eventually, Guo tasted one for herself: “My impression wasn’t very good. To me, they’re kind of poor quality. It doesn’t reflect how Chinese desserts or sweet treats can be—because they’re all produced by factories. They’re not homemade or made fresh.” Not only did the cookies perpetuate connotations of cheapness which many in the West continue to associate with Chinese food, Guo also found that the fortunes themselves misrepresented and exoticized Chinese notions of wisdom and luck by implying a certain mysticism. “I feel like the messages reinforce stereotypes of Chinese people by Americans,” she says.

But over time, as Guo became more familiar with American Chinese dishes, her opinion about the confections evolved. “There is lots of criticism on American Chinese food being not very authentically Chinese, but the food was made that way for a good reason,” says Guo, noting how immigrants who owned restaurants adapted the food—and served dessert—to cater to the American palate. She now considers American Chinese food a regional cuisine deserving of celebration. “Behind all that is the story of the real struggle of Chinese immigrants.”

Fortune cookies helped newcomers bridge gaps and hold the interest of their Western customers. “I think for many families in the Chinese diaspora, especially during the eighties, fortune cookies represent an important part of our assimilation,” author Hetty McKinnon—who penned To Asia, With Love, among other cookbooks—wrote to me recently in an email. To her, the confections were a “fun, non-threatening food that invited others into our culture.”

If fortune cookies indeed symbolize generations of immigrant adaptation, perhaps the food deserves better than being considered a post-prandial afterthought that diners can take or leave. To detach the confections from their prominent association with China, and to reframe them as an American Chinese food and respectable dessert in its own right, will certainly take time. But artists, cooks, and makers are, each in their own way, quietly spurring a reinvention. Wong, for one, is passionate about diffusing the image of the cookies as cheap and mass-produced, by continuing to craft handmade versions embellished with innovative designs and social activism. “I want to shift [people’s] memory of what a fortune cookie is,” she says. “I have the means and the capacity to, so in a way, I feel like I’m responsible to do so.” 

Chan continues to invite visitors for tours of the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, so they can see firsthand the care and labor that go into the art of making the biscuits by hand. “It’s so great to see tourists come in and [taste] one of our cookies, and they’re so happy. You can’t miss that moment,” he says. “That’s my fulfillment and enjoyment. That is my motivation.” To broaden assumptions about what a fortune cookie tastes like, the factory also sells a diverse array of flavors, from matcha to strawberry. Chan’s cookies have a fan in Bay Area-based cookbook author Kristina Cho, who wrote Mooncakes & Milk Bread. “They are, I think, probably the best fortune cookies that I’ve had,” says Cho. “It’s just so snappy and light and has this really perfect balance of brittleness to it, without being too crumbly.” The eating experience, she tells me, far surpasses that of biting into a mass-manufactured version.

Guo, too, wanted to use her platform to shift the cookies’ image from processed snack to homemade special-occasion treat. She developed a fortune cookie recipe for her readers to try at home, encouraging them to get creative with personalized notes to wrap inside. “I think it’s such a lovely way to deliver a message, a fun thing for parties or gifts. There’s so much potential in it,” she says. “I think fortune cookies deserve a place in the baking world.”

For many in the diaspora, the humble fortune cookie has always meant more than its stereotypical connotation as a negligible free treat at the end of a meal. McKinnon remembers eating them whenever her family visited her uncle’s restaurant in Sydney—memories she recalls fondly. “We always checked what our lucky numbers were on the back of the ‘fortune’ in case we wanted to use them for the next week’s lottery ticket,” she told me. “These memories are happy, when our extended family gathered for a raucous meal, with too much food, feeling like VIPs because we were eating at our family restaurant.”

Cho, too, feels endearment for fortune cookies, which her family’s restaurant in Cleveland always served atop a scoop of ice cream. “Everyone had to pick their cookie. And once you touched a cookie, that was yours, and you couldn’t trade with someone else,” she recalls with a laugh. “And you’d open it, and we’d all read our fortunes.” In Cho’s memories, the tradition is intertwined with warmth and family togetherness. 

More than a century after fortune cookies first took hold in the U.S., the place they occupy in the hearts of both Asian and non-Asian eaters is quiet but enduring, whether they know it or not. “I would say that Americans have a deep, deep affection for the fortune cookie, much deeper than I think they realize consciously,” notes Lee. “Americans have made fortune cookies a part of their life rituals, without necessarily realizing that they’re not from China.” 

“There are a lot of layers of meaning inside the fortune cookie,” she says.

The post How the AAPI Community Is Redefining the Humble Fortune Cookie appeared first on Saveur.

An overwhelming 30-foot technicolor tapestry of solid colors and patterned blocks greets guests as they enter the Museum of Food and Drink (MoFaD). It is a quilt portraying some of the names, places, and faces that have contributed to the story this exhibit tells. The images depicted in each square, crafted by visual graphics artist Adrian Franks, vary from portraits of historical figures to darkened silhouettes, close-ups of ingredients, and even location names. Made up of 400 individual tiles, this quilt was created by Harlem Needle Arts, a collective focused on educating and preserving textile traditions throughout the African diaspora and highlighting innovators in African American cuisine both past and present. It’s a fitting entry into the museum’s new exhibit, “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table.”

This month, MoFaD debuts its latest exhibit to the public, using a gallery space at the Africa Center in Harlem to honor the influence African Americans have had on America’s culinary history. James Beard Award-winning historian and author Jessica B. Harris led the development of this exhibit, bringing together a collection of artifacts, art, music, a chef-curated lunch, and a pop-up bookstore demonstrating and documenting the importance of African American contributions to the country’s foodways. “African Americans have had a substantial role in what we think of as American food,” says Harris. 

The quilt is one of the exhibit’s many visual metaphors that illustrate how countless people have contributed to this legacy over the course of hundreds of years. Just as individual squares collectively create a finished quilt, African American foodways consist of many pieces coming together to form a complete picture. While it’d be impossible to capture every name, legacy, and visage and represent them here, the exhibit is meant to showcase just how many lives intertwine to tell the larger story of Black foodways in America.

“It’s really an extraordinary thing,” says Harris of the quilt. Some of the quilt’s featured faces, such as legendary chef Leah Chase, the matriarch of New Orleans’ Dooky Chase’s Restaurant and perhaps the most well-known Creole chef, will be recognizable to visitors; other figures, no less important, may be less familiar. Emmanuel ‘Manna’ Bernoon, a freed Black man who opened Providence, Rhode Island’s first oyster and ale house, is represented alongside a panel featuring an oyster adorned with a single pearl. Some blocks represent whole, unnamed groups of people, like women harvesting rice and men tending to chicken coops. An outline of a jug symbolizes distilling, a practice that enslaved Africans turned into an art on plantations but were rarely given credit for, the most famous example being Nathan ‘Nearest’ Green who taught a young Jack Daniel how to distill whiskey. Everything comes together to create a story. 

“We’re hoping that visitors understand the foundational African American contributions that have created our shared culinary identity in this country,” says Catherine Piccoli, curatorial director for MoFaD. According to the museum, “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table” is the nation’s first major exhibition celebrating the contributions of Black culinarians who laid the foundation for American food culture. From enslaved cooks to free men and women, from entrepreneurs and chefs to brewers, distillers, and more, African Americans have baked, brewed, cut, tilled, harvested, planted, and nurtured American food over centuries. The exhibition preserves these stories and artifacts related to Black food culture and the many ways African Americans have shaped the nation’s food landscape. 

The exhibit explores how traditional tribal brewing practices in Africa led to distilling in the American South through archival photos and artifacts, and also spotlights cookbooks from African American chefs like vegan chef Bryant Terry and writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor that document regionality in Black foodways. 

Further along in the exhibition, visitors will encounter Ebony magazine’s sunburst-colored test kitchen, the setting where writer Frieda DeKnight tested recipes which would appear in her “Date with a Dish” column and The Ebony Cookbook, which was published in 1978. The kitchen, which showcased and cataloged recipes that spoke to America’s burgeoning Black middle class from the 1970’s to 2000’s, looks just as it originally did when it lived at Johnson Publishing Company’s headquarters in Chicago and features a soundtrack curated by musician, farmer, and chef Kelis, as well as video interviews with former Ebony food editors.

Visitors can end the exhibit by sitting down to a shoebox-lunch tasting, inspired by boxed lunches Black travelers packed to avoid having to stop for food during the Jim Crow-era, when simply stopping at a restaurant could be dangerous. The menu, created by chefs Carla Hall, Adrienne Cheatham, Chris Scott, and Kwame Onwuachi, rotates monthly.

Chef Scott’s menu includes a boiled peanut hummus and buckwheat crackers to show visitors the versatility of peanuts, also known as groundnuts, a direct link to West African cuisine. “I want to speak to the importance of agriculture and take that staple to make something interesting,” he says of his dish. Scott hopes people who visit the exhibit and eat lunch here will realize that it’s about more than what’s on their plate. “Come for the food and stay for the story, the hard work, and the emotion,” he says. “We were able to make something out of nothing. There’s beauty in that.” 

The story, Harris points out, will only continue. “Hopefully this exhibit is the first of many, and it grows and grows.”

The post A New MoFaD Exhibit Celebrates African Americans’ Impact on the Nation’s Foodways appeared first on Saveur.

According to The Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn, New York, there are nearly 50,000 Chinese-American restaurants in the U.S. While the menu of course varies from restaurant to restaurant—the vast majority of these establishments are independently owned businesses, after all—there’s one dish you can almost always expect to find: General Tso’s chicken.

Get seasonal recipes, methods and techniques sent right to your inbox—sign up here to receive Saveur newsletters. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at @SaveurMag.

The dish as most Americans know it today was invented by a Hunanese chef named Peng Chang-kuei in the 1950s. Fuchsia Dunlop, the English-language authority on Chinese cuisine, chronicled the chef’s story in her excellent Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Peng worked as an official chef for the Nationalist government, and after the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, defected with his employers to Taiwan. It was there that he created the original version of the now-famous chicken dish and named it after a Hunanese general, Tso Tsung-t’ang (or Zuo Zongtang), who was best-known for putting down a rebellion in the western desert region of Xinjiang in the 19th century.

This early iteration of General Tso’s chicken was very much true to Hunan cuisine. Peng described its flavors in Dunlop’s book as “typically Hunanese—heavy, sour, hot, and salty.” The dish had none of its current characteristic sweetness until the 1970s, when Peng began serving a Westernized version at his eponymous restaurant Peng’s in New York City. “The original General Tso’s chicken was Hunanese in taste and made without sugar,” Peng explained, “but when I began cooking for non-Hunanese people in the United States, I altered the recipe.”

The chile-laced sweet-and-sour sauce that resulted helped put General Tso’s chicken on the map. In her review of Peng’s for the New York Times, restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton lauded the dish as “a stir-fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature.” General Tso’s chicken soon became a trend at fancy Chinese restaurants before evolving into an everyday staple on Chinese takeout menus across the country. The dish not only planted a flag in the American culinary landscape, but it also had an enormous impact on the Chinese diaspora in the U.S. As Andrea Cherng, the chief marketing officer for Panda Express, told NBC , Americanized Chinese recipes like General Tso’s “are the reasons why Chinese immigrant families in the U.S. were able to provide for their families.” The final twist in General Tso’s journey is that the Westernized version of the dish has even traveled back to its home country in recent years, popping up on menus at upscale restaurants like Hong Kong’s Mott 32.

Curious to better understand the dish, we decided to skip delivery and make it from scratch. Here’s what to keep in mind when cooking this classic comfort food at home.

Start with a Flavorful Marinade

A thin cornstarch-and-egg mixture seasoned with soy sauce serves as both a quick marinade and a batter. Let the chicken (I prefer boneless, skinless dark meat) soak at room temperature until all the pieces are infused with flavor, about 15 minutes.

Lightly Batter Your Chicken

Using wooden chopsticks, lift the chicken from the bowl of marinade, shaking gently to remove any excess. The thin coating that remains will allow the chicken to fry up nice and crispy. Too much batter gives the meat an unappealing doughy and dense texture when it’s returned to the sauce.

Stir-Fry Your Aromatics

Frying ginger and garlic softens their flavors and infuses your cooking oil with their fragrance—but they don’t need long. The natural sugars in garlic in particular burn quickly, so do not walk away from the stove; 15 to 30 seconds should do the trick.

Use Dried Chiles

Mott 32 uses dried facing-heaven chiles, which are popular in both Sichuan and Hunan cooking, to give its General Tso’s chicken a spicy kick. The Chinese peppers have a powerful heat and a musky-nutty-tannic flavor that is enhanced by toasting.

They can be tricky to find here in the U.S.—check your local Asian markets or order them online. Tianjin chiles have a similar heat level and are easier to source. If you can’t track down either, don’t be discouraged; readily-available dried cayenne chiles are a near substitute.

If you are sensitive to heat but don’t want to skimp on the chile flavor, tone down the spice level by snipping the stems off the chiles, and shaking out and discarding the seeds before using. Either way, toast the chiles gently with the aromatics and take care not to burn them—they should be no darker than a rich, reddish tobacco brown.

Make a Well-Balanced Sauce

Two ingredients are key to this umami-rich, chicken stock-based General Tso’s sauce: tomato paste and Shaoxing wine. The addition of tomato paste may not be authentic, but it lends depth, acidity, and sweetness. It also tints the sauce that familiar red hue without relying on artificial coloring. Just don’t go overboard; the concentrated paste packs a lot of tomato-y flavor and can easily overpower the other ingredients.

Dark and complex, Shaoxing wine is made from rice in China’s Zhejiang province, where it is both consumed as a beverage and used as a cooking wine. It’s easy to find in Asian markets or online, but in a pinch, you can approximate its savory-astringent notes with an equal amount of manzanilla sherry.

Thicken the Sauce

A couple spoonfuls of apricot jam, while by no means traditional, serve as the sweetener in this General Tso’s sauce. It also adds a welcome dose of acidity, while the pectin, the natural fruit compound that causes jams and jellies to set, acts as a gentle thickener, boosting the body of the sauce. This allows you to go easy on the cornstarch, which tends to get gloopy when used in excess.

Add a Finishing Touch

A drizzle of toasted sesame oil enhances the nuttiness of the wine in the sauce and balances the acidity of the tomato paste and apricot jam. Sprinkle with sliced scallions for color and freshness, then serve with bowls of steamed white rice.

The post How To Make General Tso’s Chicken appeared first on Saveur.

Nuworld cheese is an American cult classic. Born out of nuclear research over 70 years ago, only the most devout of turophiles and science history buffs have even heard of—let alone tasted—the stuff. But despite its low profile, the wonderful weirdness of this biologically fascinating wheel makes it one worth seeking out.

The year was 1947. The place, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bacteriology professor Stanley Knight had long admired the research of Nobel laureate H.J. Muller, whose body of work within and after the Manhattan Project focused on mutations in living things exposed to radiation. Muller’s research had been weaponized, but his findings got Knight thinking: Could the science behind radiation-induced mutations be used for productive ends—to make a better piece of cheese? It was a highly Wisconsonian quest. 

Knight wondered what effect radiation might have on molds used in cheese ripening. Such a line of inquiry may sound wacky today, but Knight was the kind of enterprising mad scientist who spent his free time making cheese in beakers and pressing curds with textbooks. Postwar America was obsessed with efficiency and affordability and the dairy industry was no exception. 

Of course, Wisconsin was at the epicenter of midcentury dairy science. The University of Wisconsin-Madison was keenly focused on finding ways the cheese industry could increase production, and Knight’s personal bailiwick was microbes—specifically, how bacteria and mold interacted with milk to help make better, tastier cheese. Inspired by Muller’s research, he set out to determine whether ultraviolet (UV) light—a mild form of radiation—affected the growth of one of these microbes in particular: Penicillium roqueforti, the mold in blue cheeses like Roquefort, Stilton, and Gorgonzola.  

Petri dishes in hand, Knight made a beeline for the only place he knew that was outfitted with UV lights, a nearby greenhouse. He anxiously set up his moldy experiments, fixed his eyes on the samples, and waited for something to happen. Several days later, he saw it: One of the dishes was still growing mold, but unlike the other samples, this mold was colorless! What was this mutant, pigment-less “blue” mold, he wondered. 

The next logical step was to find out if the strain could be used to make cheese. Knight pitched his newly created mold in some milk and went about the usual cheesemaking process: fermenting and coagulating, cutting curds, and pressing those curds into a wheel. Upon aging this experimental cheese, Knight found that it had all the hallmarks of a standard blue—pungent aroma, piquant flavor, and a spreadable texture—all without a single blue vein. Amazingly, he had created the world’s first white blue cheese. A product of the future, the cheese was christened, appropriately, “Nuworld.”

Knight’s experiments were, scientifically speaking, a success. However, even in Wisconsin, nobody really knew what to do with a visually unremarkable cheese bursting with flavor akin to the punchiest Stilton. The professor eventually shared his recipe with the University of Minnesota, where it is still produced today. 

One of Nuworld’s biggest advocates is Dr. Mark Johnson of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, a world leader in cheese science. He recalls Knight’s ingenious application of UV light to encourage mutation, which until then was more commonly used to disinfect surfaces (UV radiation destroys microbes by damaging their DNA). “Knight used a mild form of this reaction to tweak the DNA instead of harming it,” Johnson explains, which got rid of the blue pigment while leaving the rest of its metabolic machinery intact—like how a hailstorm might pummel a car’s exterior but not its motor and upholstery.  

What’s the point of a blue cheese that isn’t blue? As Johnson points out, “Nuworld’s appearance is lackluster, but when used as an ingredient, its white color becomes useful, since mixing blue cheese into sauces or dips results in an unsightly gray.” But there are downsides. People know what to expect from blue blue cheese—that signature robust, tangy flavor. Without those visual cues, a “white” blue can be unpleasantly jarring.  

“Whether we realize it or not, we eat with our eyes,” says Cowgirl Creamery‘s Rory Stamp. “Nuworld is a niche product and probably won’t ever gain popularity for that reason.” And he might be right: Only one venue, the University of Minnesota Dairy Salesroom*, sells Nuworld today, and even there, it’s relegated to the “limited availability” bin due to low demand. However, the cheese’s restricted production doesn’t stop fans from waiting in line to buy it. 

Johnson sees potential in spotlighting the science that makes Nuworld special—after all, we’re talking about a sci-fi cheese from the atomic era. “Once folks understand the million-to-one mutation that occurred, they may begin to understand how special this product is,” he says. The Penicillium roqueforti strain can put on a flashy show while creating an extraordinary bouquet of aromas. Johnson explains how the flavor comes about: “[Penicillium roqueforti] mold targets the fat molecules in the cheese and causes them to break down into smaller, more flavorful components.” Both the mildest butter and the strongest blue cheese start with the same milk, but the mold’s metabolism has the power to transform that neutral base into something sensorially remarkable. 

Marketing considerations aside, Nuworld cheese is a testament to how a scientific discovery can have far-reaching and perhaps lasting impact in a totally unexpected way. Knight’s oddball science experiment resulted in a product that embodies the postwar spirit of discovery and invention. From Muller’s work on the atomic bomb, to Knight’s UV tinkerings, to gift-shop wheels of blue-less blue cheese, Nuworld is proof that food science is more than a body of knowledge—it’s a never-ending endeavor to improve how—and what—we eat. 

*Note: the University of Minnesota Dairy Salesroom is temporarily closed due to pandemic-related restrictions.

Pat Polowsky is a food scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research and a 2018 SAVEUR Blog Award winner for his website, Cheese Science Toolkit.

The post An All-American Cheese From the Atomic Age appeared first on Saveur.

You can probably picture the sort of menu that features Clams Casino, Crab Louie, and Steak Diane. It’s oversize, a single card-stock placard, handed to you with great flourish by a waiter wearing a white dress shirt and black bow tie. The background music is piano, played at a gentle volume just out of sight. Elegantly old-school, this kind of fine-dining experience demands a pre-meal martini and might even make you long for a post-dessert smoke.

Fare swanky enough to warrant a proper name began popping up at grand American hotels during the early 1900s, before Prohibition, the Great Depression, and two world wars conspired to stymie the trend. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the postwar boom—plus home-ec “innovations” like Swanson TV Dinners and Duncan Hines cake mixes—transformed eating out into an exercise in accessible extravagance. Suddenly, flambé ruled the day as sirloin (Steak Diane) and tropical fruit (Bananas Foster) were doused in alcohol and set afire tableside. Indulgences that had been denied in the lean years, such as shellfish, now came topped with bacon and butter (Clams Casino) or rich rémoulade sauce (Crab Louie). Since then, times have changed and changed again, especially as of late. But being stuck inside with your spouse on a Saturday night needn’t dictate sweats, Diet Coke, and DiGiorno. Dress to the nines, pour a stiff drink, and gild a few culinary lilies. These five classics from the Saveur vault prove that, even in the worst of times, more really feels like more.

Clams Casino

Former Saveur editor Kelly Alexander, who covered Clams Casino for our October 2003 issue, pointed readers to Inns and Outs, the 1939 autobiography of Julius Keller, once the maître d’hôtel of Rhode Island’s now-defunct Narragansett Pier Casino hotel. In his memoir, Keller claims to have first served the littlenecks topped with bacon and bread crumbs sometime around 1917, to a patron who had simply requested clams. “Seizing the opportunity,” he wrote, less than humbly, “I prepared a dish which I had tried on my own cultivated palate.”

Steak Diane

Considered a signature entree at Manhattan’s late, great Drake Hotel, Steak Diane is widely attributed to Beniamino Schiavon, the Drake’s maître d’hôtel from 1942 to 1967. The hitch? Schiavon probably invented the sirloin’s flambéed cream sauce in collaboration with chef Luigi Quaglino during the 1930s, when the two worked together in Belgium. And though many assume the name references the Roman goddess of the hunt, The New York Times, in its 1968 obituary of Schiavon, described the titular Diane only as a “beauty of the 1920s.” Saveur’s take on the steak, originally published in March 1997, upgrades the beef to filet mignon.

Crab Louie

There are plenty of theories about Crab Louie’s name, including a tall tale involving the outsize appetite of Louis XIV. A recipe for the dish first appeared under the title “Crabmeat a la Louise” in chef Victor Hirtzler’s 1910 The Hotel St. Francis Cookbook. The hotel, now the Westin St. Francis, still stands on San Francisco’s Union Square, but it doesn’t serve the city’s best Crab Louie. For that, you must wait in line on Polk Street to nab one of 20 seats at Swan Oyster Depot. Peggy Knickerbocker raved about Swan in Saveur’s March 1998 issue—and convinced the place to divulge its Louie secrets, including the dressing, comprised of mayonnaise, ketchup, pickle relish, olives, and onions.

Chicken Divan

Before the stately Hotel Chatham (designed by Warren & Wetmore, the same firm behind Grand Central) was razed in 1966, Anthony Lagasi, chef at its Divan Parisien restaurant, forever changed the way Americans viewed chicken and broccoli. By the early 1940s, Lagasi had debuted a dish that bathed and baked the otherwise bland ingredients in a rich bechamel sauce, creating the casserole we now know as Chicken Divan. Although the original recipe was never divulged, the restaurant’s maître d’hôtel hinted that Lagasi used poached chicken; Saveur’s version, which ran in Irene Sax’s December 2006 feature “The Age of Casseroles,” sautées the poultry instead.

Bananas Foster

Ah (or maybe ugh), to be the sole female sibling running a family-owned business some 70 years ago. In 1951, the late Ella Brennan, manager of the still-famous Brennan’s restaurant on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, found herself saddled with one older fruit-broker brother unloading his banana surplus, and another one demanding she devise a dessert to honor of his crime-commissioner crony, Richard Foster. Ella’s epiphany—bananas sautéed in brown sugar, butter, and combustible liquor, then torched—remains a top reason to eat in the Crescent City. Our Bananas Foster, which first appeared in the April 2013 feature “New Orleans” by Lolis Eric Elie, uses banana liqueur in addition to classic rum, heightening the banana flavor in this caramelized dessert.

The post The Drama of Dinner: How to Fine-Dine at Home appeared first on Saveur.

This story is part of our 25th Anniversary extravaganza, a celebration of the magazine’s first quarter century.

1994

• Saveur is born! The magazine launches with an editorial staff of 11, a cover story on Oaxaca, and an editorial advisory board that includes Marion Cunningham, Sheila Lukins, and Alice Waters.

• The Food Network celebrates its one-year anniversary. After lackluster reviews of How to Boil Water and Emeril & Friends, Chef Emeril Lagasse kicks it up a notch with the successful The Essence of Emeril.

• Jeff Bezos founds online bookseller Amazon. Quickly ­expanding into new markets, the site will eventually offer everything and, in 2017, will acquire Whole Foods Market. By 2019, Amazon will report more revenue than any other internet retailer in the world.

• The Flavr Savr tomato, the first genetically modified food product on the market, is approved by the FDA. Due to high costs, it will be discontinued three years later.

• The high-speed Eurostar train launches, taking passengers from London to Paris in a little over two hours.

The Class of 1994

The Class of 1994

Saveur has never worshipped restaurants. Forget about the hottest young chef in town; we’ve always been more interested in what his or her grandmother cooks at home. The exceptions: those places that carry substantial cultural weight, in that they speak to how we were eating in a certain place at a certain time. The following restaurants, all born 25 years ago, qualify.

• Astrid & Gastón

Lima

• French Laundry*

Napa, California

*at least the Thomas Keller version

• Gramercy Tavern

New York City

• Guelaguetza

Los Angeles

• Higgins

Portland, Oregon

• Il Buco

New York City

• I Trulli

New York City

• Judson Grill*

New York City

*closed in 2004

• La Pergola

Rome

• Le Bernardin*

New York City

*under Eric Ripert, who took over in 1994, following the untimely death of founder Gilbert LeCoze at age 48

• Les Amis

Singapore

• Nobu

New York City

• St. John

London

• Sullivan Street Bakery

New York City

1995

• Joe’s Shanghai in Flushing, Queens, introduces the soup dumpling (xiao long bao) to Americans. A New York Times review by Ruth Reichl the following year, declaring them “the best things in the whole world,” transforms Joe’s, and the dumplings, into dim sum legend.

• Epicurious, the first online recipe library, goes live. By 2019, it will catalog 35,000 recipes.

• The Soup Nazi makes his ­debut on Seinfeld, insisting that customers order to his exact specifications or be chastened with his famous pronouncement: “No soup for you!”

1996

• Magnolia Bakery opens in New York City’s West Village. The tiny shop will go on to ignite a cupcake craze following a ­season-three cameo on Sex and the City. The scene features Miranda and Carrie eating the treats outside the bakery as they discuss—what else?—­Carrie’s most recent love interest.

• The movie Big Night premieres, featuring Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as immigrants running an Italian restaurant in 1950s New Jersey. The authentic dishes, especially one labor-intensive pasta masterpiece, timpano, turn out to be the film’s biggest stars.

• A voluntary ban on hard-liquor ads on television, in effect since 1948, is lifted by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.

• The FDA approves the sale of Olestra, a fat substitute. Snack- food brands jump on the bandwagon—then jump off again when the substance is shown to cause intense gastrointestinal distress.

1997

• The Food Network mistakenly broadcasts a full minute of hardcore porn, the work of a mischievous employee who is never caught, during an early-​morning broadcast of the show Too Hot Tamales. Too hot, indeed.

• The seventh edition of The Joy of Cooking, by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker, et al., is published. Some recent trends make an appearance in the book, refreshed for the first time since 1975; among them, the molten chocolate cake that showed up on menus everywhere at the beginning of the 1990s.

1998

• Scottish-born chef ­Gordon Ramsay leaves Aubergine in ­London (where he garnered two Michelin stars as head chef) to open his gastropub, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay (today a three-star establishment), in the city’s Chelsea neighborhood. England’s Channel 4 follows along, capturing his ­tirades against staff, clashes with critics, and fiery rants in the documentary Boiling Point—i­ntroducing the now-infamous short-tempered Ramsay to television audiences.

• Google is launched by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. By 2019, the site will become the web’s most popular search engine—and our portal to an endless supply of recipes, ingredient information, cooking tools, and more.

1999

• Australian chef Bill Granger includes what might be the first published recipe for avocado toast in his cookbook Bills Sydney Food, though it has been on the menu at his eponymous restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst since 1993. The dish will eventually suffer a backlash, derided as $10 toast and the reason millennials can’t pay their rent.

• Seamless, an online platform for ordering from restaurants and caterers, debuts, initially serving companies only. Individuals get access in 2005; in 2013, Seamless will merge with GrubHub.

• OpenTable launches in the San Francisco area, allowing diners to make real-time reservations online. In 2019, users will be able to book a table at about 47,000 restaurants through the OpenTable app.

2005

• Chef Grant Achatz opens his restaurant Alinea in Chicago, creating a modern culinary extravaganza intended to blow patrons’ minds. He employs the likes of green apple helium balloons and french fry cream foam for the full sensory experience.

• Michelin brings its famed French rating system to America for the first time, bestowing three stars on the New York City restaurants Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, Le Bernardin, Jean-Georges, and Per Se.

2006

• Chicago becomes the first American city to outlaw the sale of foie gras, only to lift the ban two years later. California’s ban, established in 2012, remains in effect come 2019; New York City will enact a ban in October 2019.

• Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s ­Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, an indictment of industrial food production, is published.

2007

• New York Times food writer Melissa Clark tries a kale salad—an anomaly at the time—at Franny’s restaurant in Brooklyn, and declares it “a raw foods epiphany.” The salad’s creator, chef Joshua McFadden, is credited with putting the item on the culinary map.

• LA Weekly’s Jonathan Gold wins a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, becoming the first restaurant critic to do so. The board salutes his “zestful, wide ranging…reviews.” In 2018, Gold, by then writing for the Los Angeles Times, will die at 57 of pancreatic cancer.

2008

• Korean-born and California-bred chef Roy Choi establishes his Korean-Mexican taco truck, Kogi, in Los Angeles, elevating the food-truck concept and inspiring thousands of other “rolling restaurants,” as ­Anthony Bourdain called them.

2009

• Uber is founded as UberCab by tech entrepreneurs Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, changing the meaning of “designated driver” for restaurant-goers everywhere. Three years later, Lyft, a second app-based car service, joins the ride.

• In November, Gourmet magazine publishes its final issue after 68 years in print.

2010

• Instagram CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom posts the first food photo on his new app, a shot of tortilla soup taken at Tacos Chilakos taco stand in Todos Santos, Mexico. Comments range from “First Food Porn” to fire emojis.

• José Andrés, a Spanish chef with restaurants from L.A. to D.C. (and a few Michelin stars), founds World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit association of chefs brought together after providing aid to Haiti earthquake victims earlier in the year. The goal: Set up kitchens wherever disaster has struck and feed as many people as possible. By late 2019, the organization will have served more than 10 million meals.

2011

• Lucky Peach magazine is started by writers Peter Meehan and Chris Ying and chef David Chang. Known for its irreverent tone and deep dives into chef-y subjects, the magazine will shut down six years later due to conflict among its founders over the publication’s future.

• The diet book Wheat Belly is published by cardiologist ­William Davis, further boosting an anti-gluten frenzy that gained traction with low-carb dieting. Despite being widely debunked by health experts, the gluten-free diet will remain popular, even among those without celiac disease. By 2020, the gluten-free-foods industry is ­expected to reach $2 billion in the United States.

2012

• Taco Bell introduces the Doritos Locos Taco just in time for the fast-food chain’s 50th anniversary, exceeding $1 billion in sales of Dorito-shelled tacos in the first year.

• Saveur bursts onto the Instagram scene with its first post of…wait for it…“Tofu-bacon fritters: before and after the hot oil.” ­

2013

• Chef Dominique Ansel ­introduces the Cronut on the Mother’s Day menu at his bakery in SoHo. A hybrid of a doughnut and a croissant, the cream-filled indulgence is quickly discovered and long lines form. Ansel will later trademark the name and restrict production to 350 ­Cronuts a day.

• Marcella Hazan—author of the seminal 1973 guide to authentic Italian cooking The Classic Italian Cook Book—dies at age 89 at her home in Longboat Key, Florida.

• Created from bovine stem cells, the so-called test-tube hamburger makes its debut. Initial tastings declare it “not juicy,” with “some intense taste.” Back to the drawing board for the cultured-beef burger’s creator, scientist Mark Post, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who bankrolled the project to the tune of $330,000.

• Guinness World Records identifies the Carolina Reaper as the hottest chile in the world, supplanting the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. The Reaper measures 2,200,000 Scoville Heat Units; by comparison, jalapeños range from 2,500 to 8,000.

2014

• Resy, the restaurant-booking app, is introduced to the dining public, listing tables at more than 4,000 restaurants.

2015

• Chef Dan Barber organizes the three-week “WastED” pop-up at his Blue Hill restaurant in Manhattan, featuring a menu consisting entirely of food scraps, to show how much delicious fare we carelessly throw away. One of the most popular items: a burger made from juice pulp and served on a bun of repurposed stale rye scraps.

• A YouTube video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose goes viral, propelling a once-fledgling effort to banish single-use plastic straws into the mainstream. In 2019, anti-straw sentiment will remain strong, with many businesses implementing more-creative solutions. Bucatini with that soda? #stopsucking

2016

• Following the 2015 release of their high-calorie kale salad (featuring buttermilk-battered chicken, two kinds of cheese, tortilla strips, and ranch dressing—oh, my!), McDonald’s continues to push the leafy-green envelope, testing a sandwich topped with baby kale and spinach, as well as Sriracha Mac Sauce, cheddar, and crispy fried onions, in select markets. #kaleyeah

• Coca-Cola ceases production of its soft drinks in Venezuela, as the troubled economy there causes sugarcane shortages.

2017

• On December 11, Eater reporters Irene Plagianos and Kitty Greenwald break the story of four women’s accusations of sexual misconduct against celebrity chef Mario Batali. Decades of inappropriate behavior are exposed, and Batali becomes one of several high-profile chefs who will be brought down by the #MeToo movement. He takes a leave of absence from his restaurants, as well as from his position as co-host on the ABC daytime talk show The Chew.

2018

• Dominique Crenn becomes the first female chef in the US to receive three Michelin stars, awarded to her San Francisco restaurant Atelier Crenn.

A poster intended to resemble the familiar “What to Do in a Choking Emergency” placard, entitled “In Case of Sexual Harassment,” is created by San Francisco restaurateur and writer Karen Leibowitz and designer Kelli Anderson, in collaboration with feminist food magazine Cherry Bombe.

• Chef, author, and television personality Anthony ­Bourdain—known for his bestselling account of behind-the-scenes restaurant life, Kitchen Confidential, and for his groundbreaking politically tinged food and travel shows, No Reservations and Parts Unknown—dies by suicide while on location in France to film an episode of the latter show.

2019

• Popeyes introduces a spicy breaded chicken breast on toasted brioche. Chick-fil-A tweets smack about it. Wendy’s weighs in. The ­#ChickenSandwichWars have been waged, and the result will be shortages at Popeyes nationwide.

• Following a rollout of the plant-based Impossible Whopper at Burger King earlier in the year, Impossible Foods secures FDA approval to sell a key ingredient, heme (extracted from the roots of soybeans), in raw form. Its uncooked products can now be sold alongside its major competitor, Beyond Meat, for a piece of the approximately $100 million a year plant-based-protein market.

• Saveur magazine, with six National Magazine Awards and 23 James Beard Awards to its credit, celebrates 25 years of publication!

The post The Time Of Our Lives appeared first on Saveur.

The history of cheddar is the story of the transformation of our food supply. Over the past hundred and fifty years, cheddar cheese, once a regional specialty, has become one of the world’s most widely produced dairy products. Along the way, the cheese has evolved in style, flavor, and process. In spite of decades of mechanization, cheddar is still being made in vastly different ways—clothbound, lard-sealed wheels, wax-covered slabs, and six hundred and forty pound monster blocks—each style has its own uses and attributes, which makes defining “cheddar” a tricky proposition.

What is Cheddar?

The word “cheddar” refers to many things; it is a noun, a verb, and even a place. A town in south-western England gave cheddar cheese its name; the act of piling slabs of curd on top of each other to make a long-lasting cheese is known as “cheddaring”. However, a cheddar, even when it is not cheddared or from the town of Cheddar, can still be considered a cheddar.

Three traditional cheddars are recognized by Slow Food as the world’s most historically important versions of that cheese. West Country Farmhouse Cheddar is the name reserved for traditional producers from Cheddar’s Region of Origin. “Cheddar” without modifiers is defined rather bloodlessly by the food laws of different countries using only fat and moisture levels. In the United States, for example, the FDA dictates that a cheese labeled “cheddar” must have a “maximum milkfat is 50% by weight of the solids, and the maximum moisture content is 39% by weight.” The milk type, method of production, and age are up to the producers, so long as they hit those targets.

Cheddar Origins and Evolution

Cheddar is especially well-suited to mass production, industrialization, storage, and travel. The first recorded cheese from Cheddar, England dates back to the 12th Century. Historically, cheeses were named for their origin rather than method of production and it wasn’t until the mid-19th Century, when producers in England, Canada, and the United States began collecting and comparing their best cheesemaking practices, that cheddar became codified. In the mid-19th Century, cheddar became the most widely produced cheese in the US, and so it remained for 150 years.

At its essence, cheesemaking is a means for extending the life of highly perishable milk protein. This is central to understanding cheddar’s rise to prominence, because the innovations in its method of production coincided with the industrial revolution. As food production shifted from the farm to the factory, cheddar was poised to be the “it cheese”. Essentially every step made to improve it either increased yields or improved its stability for shipping and storage before the ubiquity of refrigeration.

Sharp Cheddar Sandwich

Starting in the mid-1800s, a series of technological and scientific improvements were introduced to adapt the already hearty cheddar cheese to fit into industrializing food production, propelling it into its current popularity.

The “cheddaring” process is a technique through which excess whey is expelled from the curd; it made the cheese dryer, more durable, and less prone to spoilage. The technique replaced the old method of cheddar-making called “stirred curd” which was precisely as labor-intensive as it sounds. At the time, cheddaring made the whey extraction process faster and more efficient. (Contemporary industrial cheddars are made using automated curd-stirring equipment and are no longer “cheddared” at all.)

The “scalding” process, by which the curds are heated to rapidly expel moisture, was also introduced, and a subsequent milling and curd-salting step stopped fermentation so that the cheese would not be prone to bursting during aging.

A number of different techniques were introduced to protect cheddar from weight loss and mold. Initially, salting the rind was common practice, then buttering it. When cheap cotton—made possible by slavery—became available in the late 18th century, cheesemakers found that wrapping the fabric around the cheese and coating it with lard created an excellent protective seal. Today, most cheddars are aged in plastic or wax which, on an efficiency level, protect the cheese even better.

Finally, and most importantly, there was an increased understanding and adoption of modern hygiene standards across the cheesemaking industry, which ushered in a dramatic improvement in consistency and food safety.

Though many individuals played their parts in the evolution of cheddar, an English cheesemaker named Joseph Harding is often called the “Father of Cheddar” for putting together these technical improvements and combining them with rules for timing, temperature, and acidity to create a recipe that produced consistently good cheese. This allowed cheddar to take its “great leap forward” to becoming the world’s favorite cheese.

Indeed, cheddar is now produced all over the English-speaking world, with large and small-scale producers operating in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In terms of volume, it is still one of the world’s most widely produced cheeses.

Cheddar Regions and Styles

Regionality has always had an impact on cheesemaking; differences between local milks traditionally affected the flavor of cheese and informed the preferences of the people eating it. And yet, there is arguably no cheese subject to as much regional particularity as cheddar—even on the industrial level. New England block cheddar boasts a bitter-sharp flavor which lends itself to pairing with apple pie. Wisconsin typically turns out a moist, sweeter, annatto-tinted version, while UK supermarket cheddar tends to be tart, acidic, and crumbly.

“Clothbound” or “bandage-wrapped” cheddar is the most traditional style available today; wheels of the cheese are wrapped in cheesecloth and sealed with butter or lard, which allows a firm natural rind to form. Clothbounds tend to be less “sharp” than waxed or plastic-sealed cheddars because the older method does not allow for the extended aging periods common with block cheddar. However, this doesn’t mean that clothbound cheddars are lacking in flavor; fans of this style favor the deep and complex notes that develop with a more traditional aging process—at once earthy, grassy, dank, and fruity. Clothbounds were once nearly extinct, but there has been a major resurgence of this style of cheddar, both in the UK and the US, over the course of the last twenty years.

A new style of cheddar is emerging as well. By combining traditional bacterial cultures with those usually used in other cheeses (such as aged gouda and parmesan), cheesemakers have begun to create sweeter, more crystalline cheddars that are surging in popularity throughout the US; Americans love sweet, even in cheese.

Cheddar is perhaps the only cheese that allows the taster to sample their way through the history of modern cheesemaking. That’s just one of many reasons it’s so easy to love.

The post A Brief History of Cheddar Cheese appeared first on Saveur.

It’s damp and chilly outside, but it’s toasty in Wendie Poitras’ kitchen, where rendered pork skins sizzle and pop in a cast-iron pan. Poitras—a teacher and artist who has become a vocal advocate along with scholars and activists to help define and commemorate African Nova Scotian culture—is cooking traditional dishes for a few friends and relatives. She’ll eventually add the pork to boiled potatoes and flaked salt cod. Yellow-eyed beans bake for hours to a deep brown, the ham hock in the center of the pot falling softly apart. Oxtails swim in a rich sauce next to a pot of rice and beans and a pan of cornbread.

This is Nova Scotia, a vaguely lobster-shaped peninsula that juts, with its surrounding islands, east out into the Atlantic, one time zone farther than the rest of Canada’s east coast. We’re in Dartmouth, just across the harbor from Halifax, and in the windows, the fog is thick like milk. Evergreens stand out like emerald-robed figures in the gray-white mist.

I’ve come with my mother and daughter—my first time here since I was a teenager—in search of a connection to my ancestors, my roots. I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital, but my grandmother’s family had lived in the region until moving to Montreal in 1955. My mother returned at age 21, when she was a private in the Navy. It was then that she met my father, a Quebecois, in the forces, and after I was born, we left permanently for Quebec. My parents took us back to visit Nova Scotia every few years, a 12-hour road trip backward into my heritage.

In my grandmother’s adopted city, people spoke a different language and ate different foods, so many of the ingredients she was accustomed to were not available. Rather than cling to the past, she chose to adapt to her new life and encouraged her five children to do the same. They left behind many of the African Nova Scotian recipes she was raised on. Every now and then, she would crave something from home—fish cakes, or “boiled dinner” (an old Irish staple of corned beef and cabbage adopted throughout Nova Scotia), or the salt cod and pork scraps she was practically raised on—and seek out what was needed to cook up the memories.

Blacks have lived in Nova Scotia since the early 1600s, but Canada’s black history is unknown to most Canadians—even to many black Canadians themselves. “We’re in the process of documenting and collecting information about our history,” says Poitras, who likens culture to an iceberg: Food, music, and language are among the parts visible above the water’s surface, but the vast, deep bulk of it—values, beliefs, shared experiences—can be hidden beneath. In the case of African Nova Scotians, even much of what’s traditionally above the surface has been lost or obscured over the years. It can feel like we’re still, as Poitras puts it, “trying to legitimize the culture. We’re figuring out the food piece. We’re still working on the other pieces.”

I met Poitras after I’d read about her efforts to promote African Nova Scotian culture by sharing her family’s recipes. She has cooked for her third-grade class and helped design menus for African Heritage Month events. “There is no one dish that’s particularly African Nova Scotian,” she explains. “It’s the collection of recipes from all these different places that make up the cuisine.” Indeed, African Nova Scotian food is heavily influenced by the places black settlers came from, the landscape and climate of the province, even the cuisine of British colonialists and Irish settlers.

According to the Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia, the province has been home to 52 black communities. But over the generations, migration to cities such as Winnipeg, Montreal, and Toronto since the Great Depression has left only about a dozen intact today. These areas, mostly rural communities and inner-city neighborhoods, were settled in waves: slaves brought by colonialists, and eventually the black Loyalists who fled the U.S. at the close of the American Revolution. (In exchange for their service, the British had promised the Loyalists freedom and land in the northern colonies, which included “New Scotland”—or in Latin, Nova Scotia.) In 1796, a small contingent of Jamaican warriors, called Maroons, were exiled to the province after an uprising. Most left a few years later for Sierra Leone, where a group of African Nova Scotians founded Freetown. More blacks came as refugees following the War of 1812, and after slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, Nova Scotia saw an influx of escaped slaves from the U.S.

As a child, I’d see 60-second ads depicting snippets of Canadian history air on CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In one, I remember a young black man hidden in the base of a church pew was reunited with his family: an escaped slave who had fled safely across the border. The message was that Canada was a place of compassion and refuge, which reflects how many Canadians view their country to this day. What the PSA didn’t reveal was how poorly the man was likely treated upon his arrival. Slavery had been abolished, but racism remained. The land promised to black Loyalists, when that promise was even kept, was the least hospitable, least arable. Early black settlers relied on fishing, foraging, and what meager farming the barren land would allow, such as keeping chickens and pigs, or growing root vegetables. They salted their meat and fish to preserve them, canned wild fruits and berries for winter, and picked dried dulse—a pungent purplish edible seaweed that grows in northern climates—from the shore to survive.

By the early 20th century, institutions and businesses in Canada had adopted Jim Crow–style practices, and legislation to prevent racial discrimination didn’t appear until after World War II (and wouldn’t be enforced until even later). Early in 2018, when a new $10 bill was unveiled bearing the likeness of Viola Desmond, many Canadians had never heard of her. Several years before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Desmond had taken a stand against entrenched segregation in Nova Scotia, refusing to move from the whites-only section of a movie theater in New Glasgow. But her story didn’t make its way across the nation the way Parks’ did, so she never attained status as a civil-rights icon. It was heard in enlightened circles on both sides of the border, even capturing the attention of W.E.B. Dubois, but for the most part, it remained a local legend—until now. In recent decades, thanks to the work of scholars and grass-roots organizations, the stories of black Canadians—­particularly African Nova Scotians—are emerging. Last year, the United Nations released a report on Canada’s relationship with its black populations. Despite the country’s image as a multicultural haven, the report cited the country’s history of black slavery and disenfranchisement, as well as its failure to recognize those black communities that have existed since the country’s earliest days. Such revelations are a rude awakening for most Canadians. For the blacks in Canada, it is a pivotal time.

In Poitras’ kitchen in Dartmouth, stories from the past are reflected in the steaming pots of braised meat, in the bubbling tin of ham-hock baked beans. Peeling potatoes for the salt cod and pork scraps always puts Poitras in mind of her mother, who would expertly pare the skins off her spuds in one long, magical spiral. Poitras’ father—who worked the dockyards and held a pastoral role within the community—would cook oxtail and other special-occasion dishes; her mother did the everyday cooking. Poitras remembers the vegetable man passing through the neighborhood to sell his fresh produce; her mother would buy 50 pounds of potatoes at a time and store them outside the back door. The mackerel man also passed through, calling out: “Maaaaack-erel! Mackerel-mackerel-mackerel!” She can hear it when she closes her eyes.

The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking In Nova Scotia

My daughter is talkative, happily plying a piece of lacquered oxtail meat from a bone. My mother has grown quiet, savoring the pungent salt of the cod fish tempered by the fluffy, peppery potatoes. She’s elsewhere now: her mother’s kitchen, her childhood. “We had baked beans every Saturday. I hated the routine of it,” she says in a small voice, mostly to herself. “But they were so good.” Poitras, too, wouldn’t fully appreciate her parents’ cooking until later. At one of her first jobs, she often traded her home-cooked meals for a co-worker’s fast food, thinking she was getting the better end of the deal. It wasn’t until she became a mother herself that she understood just how valuable her family’s recipes were.

As guests cram into Poitras’ kitchen, a few of us find seats in the living room, plates balanced in laps, glasses of cold Scotian rosé and bottles of Alexander Keith lager, the ubiquitous local beer, leaving wet rings on the coffee table.

Talk turns to identity. “Remember that when we came from Africa, through the Middle Passage to the southern United States, our language was taken from us. Our names were taken. We don’t really know why we eat certain things or speak certain ways,” says Poitras, a thick mop of tight curls framing her face. “As a people, we collected recipes from Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South, and put our own spin on them.” Baked beans might get a dose of maple syrup. Instead of hot sauce, the main condiment on the table is often chow-chow, a tangy green tomato relish. Boiled dinner is sometimes made with pig’s tails instead of beef in black homes. Oxtails have Jamaican roots, but with Canada not being a land of hot peppers, the Caribbean spices became muted. For other dishes you might find across the Maritime provinces, such as fish cakes, typically made with potatoes and salt cod or haddock, the flavors are revved up. “We tend to like a little more spice than our fellow Scotians,” says Poitras. “And probably a little too much salt.”

On one damp, foggy morning, my mother, daughter, and I set out for a place that no longer exists. Africville, on the outskirts of Halifax, overlooking the Bedford Basin, was home to a tightknit group of families who kept a few animals, fished and swam in the basin, and performed their baptisms in its cold, brackish waters. Kids even played ice hockey on it when it froze, although few alive today remember winters that cold. Life in Africville, which existed roughly from the mid-18th century to the mid-20th, could be difficult. Despite paying municipal taxes, residents weren’t provided with plumbing, garbage pickup, or paved roads. In the 1950s, the city dump was moved nearby. A decade later, after years of threats to seize the valuable waterfront property Africville occupied, the settlement, at its peak 400 strong, was razed to the ground. Its residents were forcibly relocated, and most ended up in public housing. The city used dump trucks to remove people’s belongings, a painful humiliation still fresh in the minds of former residents. Only a few families were compensated for the full value of their home. The rest were given a paltry sum and expected to start their lives anew.

Linda Mantley, a former Africville resident who cofounded the Africville Genealogy Society, gives tours of the Africville Museum, housed in a faithful replica of the Baptist church that was once the beating heart of the settlement. It was established as part of the apology and compensation package issued by the city of Halifax in 2010 for Africville’s destruction. Former residents are still fighting for personal compensation for their homes. “Our parents kept all that from us,” Mantley says of the cruel evictions. Instead, she recalls an idyllic childhood in the rustic settlement many outsiders would have thought of as a slum. She and the other children would pluck the periwinkles that clung to the rocks by the sea, left behind when the tide went out, and cook them in a pot or a can over a fire right on the beach. A pin or needle served as the utensil to dig the tiny snail out from its shell. They also picked apples, wild pears, and blueberries from brambly bushes to take home for their mothers to make blueberry duff, a steamed dumpling that would be served as dessert, or maybe tossed into a pot of boiled dinner.

At 72, Mantley is wiry, high-cheekboned, with a terse manner that belies her warmth. “We were a self-sufficient community,” she says curtly, walking us through the one-room museum, pointing out black-and-white photographs of the community, naming the people she knew. Mantley’s tour of the exhibit—made up of text, images, and a few household artifacts—feels like sifting through a box of souvenirs. Afterward, she hugs me like we’re old friends.

Juanita Peters, the museum’s general manager and a filmmaker who has directed two documentaries on Africville, feels strongly about the importance of telling the stories of African Nova Scotians. She recently moved back to Weymouth Falls, a historically black community by the Bay of Fundy, about 160 miles from Halifax, where her people have lived for nine generations, and where she would spend summers with her grandparents (she herself grew up in Toronto). Those summer meals consisted mainly of salted fish—herring, haddock, halibut head, or the dried smelts her grandmother strung up herself behind the wood stove. “She would sear them right on the stove, not in a pan,” says Peters. “Then she’d peel and eat them with toast and applesauce. And that was breakfast.” When they weren’t eating fish, it was blood pudding, cow’s liver, tongue, or lights (lungs). Most people had their own smokehouses. Today, many of the homes in Weymouth Falls are vacant, and most of the farms abandoned. With little need to smoke or salt foods now that people have refrigeration, many of the old recipes risk being lost to time.

“My cousins say they won’t come down because it’s like visiting ghosts. But I love it because it’s like visiting ghosts!” says Peters. She still cooks some of the foods from her childhood—such as smelts, fried, with a side of potato and chow-chow. “Food is about nostalgia,” Saje Mathieu—a historian and author of North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870–1955—tells me. “Migrant communities often stay stuck in the moment of the initial departure.” In such communities, food acts as a tether to a place of familiarity, of comfort. Food can be home. For African Nova Scotians, whose original home might be too far gone for them to remember, their foods can serve as a record, a map of the arduous journey of their ancestors. Mine came to Canada with little more than the traditions that fed and sustained them. But amid the emerald pines and damp, wet cold, a world away from their ancestral origins, they endured.

The post The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking in Nova Scotia appeared first on Saveur.

Easter is a major candy holiday, lagging behind only Halloween in sales volume. It wasn’t always so. While the other dishes that adorn the Easter table and filled Easter baskets—spring lamb, dyed eggs, and hot cross buns—all trace their origins to the pagan spring festivals of ancient times, candy is a newcomer, dating back just to the 1800s, when European candy-makers first started hand-crafting chocolate eggs for the holiday. Candy eggs were wildly popular, and by the late 1800s, fine candy makers in major U.S. cities were offering chocolate eggs both hollow and filled, jelly eggs, and exquisite panorama eggs of sugar, icing, and paper for the Easter holiday. —Samira Kawash

Read more about the history of Easter candies in Samira Kawash article Basket Cases: The History of Easter Candy »

Todd Coleman

Check Price

A box of chocolates today is a wonder of variety: caramels, nougats, truffles and pralines. But in the late 1900s, the most common sort of chocolate dipped candy was the simple chocolate cream–a handcrafted bonbon consisting of a fondant center coated in chocolate. The fondant could be colored and flavored, or it could just be plain white and intensely sweet. Plain fondant is almost obsolete in contemporary mass-market candies, with one exception: inside the Cadbury Creme Egg. The Cadbury Creme Egg, invented in 1875, is one of the most polarizing of Easter treats. Some love its sugary center, while others gag on the super-sweet filling. But love it or hate it, the Cadbury Creme Egg brings us as close as we can get to the chocolate creams so popular a century ago. –S.K.

Pictured: Cadbury Creme Eggs; $18.06 for pack of 64 CT at Amazon »

Todd Coleman

Check Price

Chocolate bunnies are the most democratic of Easter candies. They range from the cheap, mass market versions found in drug and discount stores to the exquisite, hand-made products of fine confectioners–with price tags to match. Molded chocolate novelties were among the first candies to be specifically produced for the Easter holiday. The first chocolate molds were made by hand from tin coated metal sheets in the 1830s; the art reached its zenith in the 1880s and 1890s. Chocolate back then was not the smooth, flowing stuff we know today. It was difficult to work with, and hand-molding chocolates was a high art. Intricate shapes like rabbits and chicks were especially challenging to perfect. Fine confectioners would show off their skill and entice customers by displaying beautiful molded chocolates created to reflect the changing seasons. In the twentieth century, innovations like plastic molds, cheaper chocolate recipes, and molding machinery brought shaped chocolates to the mass market. But whether high art or mass commodity, every chocolate bunny poses the same dilemma: Ears first, or last? –S.K.

Lindt Lindor Easter Gold Bunny and Eggs Gift Set at Amazon »

Todd Coleman

Check Price

These pretty pastel morsels are created by panning, a process that builds up a candy shell around a nut, chocolate, or chewy center. Before machines took over the work around the end of the nineteenth century, panning was a laborious practice that involved shaking a pan over a fire while slowly adding thin layers of sugar syrup. The widespread adoption of rotating steam-powered pans in the years after the Civil War, led to an explosion in panned candies. Panned chocolates didn’t appear until the 1930s; M&M;’s, of “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” fame, is one of the most famous examples. Just as appealing as the hard exterior that keeps the chocolate from melting is the beautiful palette of colors that can be layered onto chocolate to create a dazzling spring-time array. These beautiful eggs are from Koppers, a New York candy-maker that’s been making panned chocolate novelties since 1937 (including the famous, albeit not very Easter-ish, New York pickle). –S.K.

Pictured: Kopper’s Fruit Cordial Eggs; $8.99 for 1 lb. at ohnuts.com »

Todd Coleman

Check Price

Jelly beans trace their origin to the ancient Eastern delicacy known as Turkish delight. First appearing in the 1890s, jelly beans quickly became a year-round penny favorite and–due to their egg-like shape–an Easter staple. Jelly beans are so commonplace that it’s easy to forget that they’re a modern candy engineering marvel, combining the production of two of the most important candy machine inventions. The soft inside is made in a complex contraption called a starch mogul that combines and automates several steps of molding and pouring candy that were previously done by hand; the crunchy candy shell is built up in a rotating pan. Today, most jelly beans are made using a corn starch-based gel, which produces a firm, slightly sticky interior core. But I prefer jelly beans made with fruit pectin, which have a more tender bite. They’re not always easy to find, but Easter is the time many promote their (more expensive) pectin varieties. –S.K.

Pictured: Russell Stover’s Pectin Jelly Beans; $29.99 for 2 (12-oz) bags at Amazon »

Todd Coleman

Check Price

Marshmallow became a popular candy in the early 1900s, when candy-makers developed recipes that used low-cost ingredients like gelatin in place of more expensive gum Arabic. Shaped marshmallows could then be made in quantity, and by the 1920s many companies were selling Easter bunny and chick- shaped marshmallow confections. The original Peep was a product of the Rodda Candy Company, in Pennsylvania, where marshmallow chicks were laboriously piped by hand using a pastry bag, and then finished with painted eyes and marshmallow wings. In 1953, Rodda Company was acquired by Just Born, a company that eventually mechanized and streamlined the Peeps process, and today, the original yellow Peep chick has metastasized into dozens of colors and shapes, available in various forms year-round. –S.K.

Assorted Peeps; $21.50 for 5 CT in 24 CT case at Amazon »

Todd Coleman

Check Price

Today we associate candy corn exclusively with Halloween, but it wasn’t always so. Candy corn, invented in the 1880s, was a popular year-round penny candy, and used to feature prominently in Easter baskets, where the “corn” invoked fields, barn yards, and animals (a good match for bunnies and chicks). But over time, candy corn became more closely associated with Halloween, and nearly disappeared from the rest of the candy calendar. In the 1960s, the Jelly Belly company–which traces its candy corn bona fides back to the 1890s–reclaimed the candy for Easter with “Bunny Corn”, candy corn in pastel colors. You can buy cheaper versions of candy corn, but Jelly Belly’s tender, flavorful bites are worth the premium price. –S.K.

Pictured: Jelly Belly Bunny Corn; $5.99 for 7.5 oz bag at Amazon »

Todd Coleman

Check Price

For anyone growing up in the western part of the U.S. over the past half-century, no Easter basket is complete without an oversized decorated chocolate egg from See’s Candies. The eggs, massive versions of See’s regular line of chocolates, have been made the same way, with the same recipes, since the 1930s. There is something obscenely wonderful about these 7-ounce hunks of chocolates filled with everything from walnut buttercream to tender, marshmallow-y rocky road. But how to consume such a delicious monstrosity? The biters defend their technique as the most viscerally satisfying, while the more dainty slicers point out that gnawing on a hunk of fudgy candy is both unsightly and messy. Both factions will agree, though, that the egg never lasts long enough. –S.K.

Pictured: See’s chocolate butter egg with walnuts, $9.70; chocolate butter egg with pecans, $16.80 for 13.5 oz. egg; Mayfair egg, $6.25; chocolate butter egg, $7.50; Rocky Road egg, $11.80; undecorated Rocky Road egg, $5.45 at sees.com »

Panorama Eggs

Opulent panorama eggs–hollow sugar-shelled eggs containing miniature scenes that can be viewed through a peephole–first appeared in Victorian England, and became popular in US in the 1890s. The eggs are made by packing a sugar mixture into half-egg molds, allowing them to harden for several days, and then scooping out the inside until just a thin shell remains. Victorian-era eggs made use of many kinds of material, including paper, ceramic, fabric, and ribbons. Women frequently made these eggs as Easter treasures to give to friends and family, and they were treasured and handed down as family heirlooms. Modern food laws stipulate that panorama egg makers may use only edible frosting to create the interior scene, so today’s mass produced panorama eggs are less intricate than their predecessors, but several confectioners sell hand-made panorama eggs to order. –S.K.

Pictured: Caran’s Creations and Confections Panoramic Eggs; Large horizontal egg $26; large vertical $30; small horizontal $16 at caranscreationsandconfections.com »

The post 8 Classic Easter Candies appeared first on Saveur.