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I make a martini, Gordons or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matadors formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martinis being shaken is one of civilizations indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet. I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem...

I’d finished writing, I thought, when I sent the essay to my editor, but my editor had other ideas. Questions came back for which I had no answers. Suggestions came back with which I did not agree. The clock was ticking, I knew, and in New York the clock ticks faster than it ticks here in Tennessee. I went to the woods anyway. People often ask how long it takes me to write an essay, and I wish I...

I used to be a chef. Some might say “once a chef, always a chef—.” I don’t. I cooked through college to pay the rent, and some of my bosses were cool enough to let me experiment because I was curious, wanted to learn more about how things are the way they are. I came to understand this as art-energy. It was raw tongue and fire-proof hands and swollen feet in 120-degree heat. Food haunts me like...

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. To write about food means always occupying the realm of the ordinary. We can be reporting on deforestation for palm oil production, the destruction of mangroves for shrimp harvests, or the atrocious working and animal welfare conditions in industrial meat-processing, but, for the reader, it will all come back to the...

My husband, a professor of electrical engineering by trade, is the kind of obsessive for which I have an affinity in my writing life. A refugee born in Latvia, John loves Latvian rye bread fervently. He eats Latvian rye several times a day and is unable to leave home without a five-pound loaf crowding the shirts and shoes in his carry-on. This bread, a talisman for his lost homeland, nourishes...

A thing that has always been a source of inspiration for me is the city, is my environment. I wasnt born in New York City, but I grew up here in the city. I feel like its an endless source of inspiration culinarily. Its a melting pot. You can use Mexican ingredients with French technique. You can use French ingredients with Japanese technique, and its all acceptable. Its all fair. You can draw...