The English muffin has the distinction of being the only savory bread we modern Americans eat that’s cooked on a griddle. As I mentioned in a previous post, “griddling” is a style of bread cookery that’s long been out of style in the Old World. Yet once upon a time British cuisine was chock-a-block with […]
READ ONToday’s New York Times food section includes a profile of Jeff Varasano, a former New Yorker whose obsession with reproducing real New York-style pizza has made him the number one authority on New York and/or Neapolitan pizza on the internet. If you’ve never been to his web site, it’s worth a trip. It’s got everything […]
READ ONI’ve spent several days on American muffins, but while I’m on the subject, why not whip up a batch of the American muffin’s English-style cousin? Click here: www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_23595,00.html.
READ ONPick… …eat… …repeat. At least little Joan did until she all but blew up into a purple ball like Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka. You mean these things grow on trees? Nice to see that the local fruit orchards are managing to make a comeback after last year’s disastrous frosts. The patch where we usually […]
READ ONMake that the bush. I may post lightly today. The sky is blue, it’s 78 degrees and the word from the local blueberry orchard is there’s a bumper crop of my favorite jam berry. Pack up the kids and the sun screen, we’re headed to Indiana.
READ ONAllow me to introduce myself, I am Jo Pastry. I rarely appear on this site, and then mostly as the butt of one of my husband’s snide remarks. However after reading yesterday’s post on the history of the “health” muffin, I decided it was high time I put up a post of my own. Though […]
READ ONIt’s tempting to blame modernity for the abomination that is the bran muffin. Dry as dirt (though nowhere near as tasty) bran muffins have been impossible to get away from since at least the late 70’s. There’s an artisan bake shop not two blocks from here that sells only one kind of muffin — one […]
READ ONThe American-style muffin, as distinct from the English muffin, evolved around the time of the Second Industrial Revolution, which is to say the time when North Americans really got into the industrialization act (the second half of the 19th century). This was the golden age of American baking, when cast iron home stoves — complete […]
READ ONThere are certain cynics out there, most of them European pastry chefs and New York Times food writers, who claim that the blueberry muffin is the only real contribution the New World has made to the global (and when they say that they mean European) baking tradition. The entire idea is preposterous of course, since […]
READ ONAn anonymous email came in late last evening from someone claiming to be a representative of New Metro, manufacturer of the BeaterBlade, a product I expressed skepticism about in the below post, Scrape-O-Matic. I couldn’t tell anything about the sender because the email originated from a commercial ISP (Time Warner), apparently from a server in […]
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