Today’s word in Word.A.Day in my inbox, referencing a Sicilian uprising in 1282 led me to a recipe for one of my favorite easy pastas, pasta con ceci [aka chickpeas/garbanzos]. It happened this way. The word was shibboleth, which as…

After World War II, my mother moved north from a truck farm then outside of Houston, Texas with a taste for kidney and lima beans, okra and Fritos, a Texas cash crop since 1933. My father was from Brooklyn and…

Ohh, I just found a wonderful site  called Food Timeline if you’re wildly or mildly curious about what people ate in the 1910’s (my case) or in decades after. You’ll find menus, cookbooks, recipes, prices, new rages, like the “cocktail party,”…

Readers of When We Were Strangers may remember Lula, the cook and housekeeper for the Cleveland workhouse where Irma made collars. That was in the 1880’s. After the book came out, a suggestion was made by HarperCollins to write a…

Some of the seeming classics of Italian post-dinner cuisine — tiramisu’, torta caprese, limoncello, and panna cotta (lit. “cooked cream”) are in fact rather late, post 1980’s entries on the popular culinary scene. Renaissance folks didn’t eat them. Little Sofia…

Some Friday if you find yourself near Florala, on the (get it?) border of Florida and Alabama, you could do worse than stop at Sara’s Big R, “Southern Cooking at its Best,” for the Friday seafood buffet. For $11, heap…

Here is the arancini recipe of my mother-in-law, Sara Conti. Like many great intuitive cooks, much of what she does is by look and feel. But this is what she says she always does and the arancini are always wonderful.…

Arancini, or fried rice balls (literally “little oranges”) are a Sicilian wonder. My mother-in-law, Sara, from Licata on the southern coast of Sicily, is a master. You’d think that fried rice balls would be heavy, but not hers. They are…