Joe in Miniature

Here are the kind of posts I’d be putting up if I were four inches tall, made of clay and living in a cardboard box. The techniques are amazingly similar. Terrific stuff. Thanks to reader Lisa H.!

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Oh, right.

What do macarons and macaroni have in common? Not much, other than the fact that they’re both made from pulverized ingredients (almonds and wheat, respectively). Though etymologists debate the subject, it’s thought by many that the Italian word maccheroni comes from an earlier Italian word, maccare that means “to reduce” or “make smaller.” The present […]

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On the Origin of the Macaron

Macarons are such simple preparations, their origins are fairly easy to triangulate. Their principal ingredient is sugar, which means they date no further back than the Colonial period, the time when cane sugar was flowing in earnest from the West Indies. That supposition is bolstered by the fact that they are meringues, which means they […]

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The Macaron Mojo Problem

Tell an experienced gourmand that you’re planning on making macarons for your dinner party this weekend and he’ll look at you as though you’ve just announced you’re going to jump the Snake River Canyon on a rocket-propelled sky-cycle. You can’t! It’s too dangerous! Such is the aura of fear that has come to surround this […]

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Request #17: Macarons + Request #38: Macaroons

Here are two projects that I couldn’t resist lumping together since they’re ostensibly the same thing, at least to an etymologist. In practice of course they are very, very different. One — at least if it’s made by master pastry chef Pierre Hermé — is widely considered to be bakingdom’s ultimate one-bite delight. It’s also […]

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A Joe Thanksgiving

Hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving this past week had a terrific holiday. As for me, I want to offer my own thanks to yet another anonymous StumbleUponer whose posting of my jelly doughnut tutorial brought some 300,000 visitors to the site over the weekend. Now if I only could have persuaded each one of them to […]

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Water, water everywhere.

Reader Chana continues the conversation on Marie the Jewess (Miriam) and her connection to the bain marie: In classic Jewish commentary, Moses’ sister Miriam is always associated with wells and water. (Although I doubt the classic Jewish commentators cooked anything, much less in a bain marie.) The bible says that after Miriam died, the people […]

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More Sugar

Chef Mike C. offers this: My Banquets & Catering chef at the CIA would always sprinkle an initial layer of sugar onto his brulees as soon as they came out of the oven. This way, that sugar would melt and fill in the little pits or uneven bits on the surface. That way, he said, […]

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What’s a “bain marie”?

As I mentioned last week, it’s a water bath (bain being “bath” in French). But then why do we use a French term and who the heck was Marie? I’ve wondered that for quite a while but have never found much on the subject. Leave it to Jim C. of Chez Jim to chime in […]

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