CategoryFOOD

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the worlds leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew talks to Anya von Bremzen, author of National Dish, about popular foods, like pizza and borscht, as forms of oppression and symbols of resistance. Find more Keen On...

I arrived in in Paris with a plan in my mind: to make a pot-au-feu recipe from a nineteenth-century French cookbook. It was for a book project that had begun to bubble and form in my mind, about national food cultures told through their symbolic dishes and meals, which I would cook, eat, and investigate in different parts of the world. Now I sat on a Parisian park bench in the multicultural 13th...

Nigella smiles to the camera in a pristine kitchen. She wears a pink, twinset-style button-up cardigan. She strokes and pats gleaming implements with the tips of her fingers. She walks downstairs in a satin dressing gown and spoons dessert into her mouth in a dimly lit kitchen. When I am young, I think that Nigella on TV binds the act of cooking to a nostalgic image of the “Woman in the Kitchen.”...

I’ve often, in my mind, likened the perfect reading experience to sitting in a bar and finding myself drawnat first reluctantly, then less so all the timeinto a stranger’s story. There’s something unique and compelling in that narrative space, and it’s an effect Jon Michaud conjures up masterfully in his new book, Last Call at Coogan’s: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar. For a span of...

According to a 2020 poll by Bosch, a full 51 percent of Americans self-identify as “obsessed” with ice. As I write in my new book Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, the American ice trade was by the mid nineteenth century the largest of its kind in the world. Nowhere else on earth were people consuming as much ice as people were in the United States...

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the worlds leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew talks to Jon Michaud, the author of Last Call at Coogans, about the life and death of one of New York’s most beloved saloons. Find more Keen On episodes and additional...

In April of 2018, I took a train to Barcelona to help my friend Carmen present her wines at a fair held in the citys regal maritime museum. We set up her table in the sunlit event room and placed bottles of red wine on ice so they wouldnt overheat. She gave me a speech to remember: Were based in Toledo, a 14-hectare vineyard with Graciano and Tempranillo, soil is clay and limestone. Five hundred...

One morning in October of 2016, a young woman walked to the corner of Tonalá and Zacatecas in Mexico City, toward a restaurant with a simple black awning. Its white lettering read, Máximo Bistrot Local. She had been enrolled in a vocational cooking program and had come to Máximo in search of a job. If successful, she would join millions of local service workers who undertake hours-​long commutes...

We seek a certain kind of writing when we want to be told what to do. Self-help manuals, policy papers, and sermons come to mind. While I am suspicious of art that tells me what to feel or believe, I love to crack a cookbook, relax that defensive crouch, and follow along. My favorite recipes are the ones that suggest the lived life behind the wordsthe messiness and rebellion of actual ingredients...

For Fidellia Holley Alexander and Alice Johnson Smith The people who give you their food give you their heart.Cesar Chavez* Theres this scene in the film Like Water for Chocolate where Tita prepares quail in a rosepetal sauce from a rose given to her secretly by Pedro. In the first ten seconds of the scene, no one is talking. Theyre just eating and being overwhelmed by desire. The meal serves as...