cooking
Kubasa Three Ways, and Why Store-Bought Can Still Be Heritage
Three things to do with a ring of smoked sausage, and a defence of the ingredient that arrives from the deli counter already perfect.
Everything, newest first
Recipes, the recipe box read as an archive, and the arguments that start when somebody says the recipe is wrong. The toggle splits them if you would rather have one or the other, and each side has its own feed.
Tarte au sucre, holubtsi, honey dill, a February supper built out of a cellar and a shelf of jars. A postcard from 1961 filed in with the pie cards. Whether a cure is preserving anything, and whether fifty retellings of one police statement amount to fifty sources.
French appears without translation, the way it does in the kitchen it came from.
Anything here that touches shelf stability is sourced and attributed to a named authority, because that is the one subject where a charming instruction can hurt somebody.
recipe archaeology
Wish You Were Here: Reading a Stranger's Whole Trip From Four Lines
Four lines of blue ballpoint from 1961, filed in the wrong drawer. How much of a stranger's life sits in a postcard, and how to read it back out.
recipe archaeology
The Underlines Are the Real Recipe
The printed recipe is a hypothesis. The pencil in the margin — too sweet, ½ next time — is the data, and the data is where the truth lives.
recipe archaeology
A Lump, a Teacup, Butter the Size of an Egg: When Measurement Was Personal
A teacup of flour, butter the size of an egg, a quick oven. Those measurements were not primitive; they were calibrated to a body and a kitchen.
cooking
Nalysnyky, and the Everyday Food Nobody Bothered to Write Down
Thin crêpes, farmer's cheese, twenty minutes in the oven — and the reason the dishes people actually ate are the ones nobody wrote down.
cooking
Perogies Are a Group Project (and That's the Whole Recipe)
Three cups of flour. Four pairs of hands. Varenyky from scratch, and why the recipe is correctly efficient for a kitchen with more than one person in it.
recipe archaeology
The Polaroid in the Recipe Box: The Background Is the Treasure
The cake was the subject and the kitchen behind it was an accident. Forty years on the accident is the treasure — how to read a background.
cooking
Poppy Seed Roll, the Bread That Only Exists Once a Year
Makivnyk takes an afternoon and grinds its own filling. Made once a year on purpose, and the once-a-year part is the whole argument.
cozy living
We Privatized Comfort and Wonder Why We're Lonely
We solved private comfort so completely that we forgot there was a public kind. A warm home and a warm public room are not substitutes.
cooking
Pyrizhky: Love You Can Put in a Pocket
Baked, sealed and portable — the perogy's cousin, engineered to travel. Dough, filling, and why a sealed bun is a whole meal in a coat pocket.
recipe archaeology
Send Me the Card You Can't Read
Everyone who has inherited a box has one card that defeats them. Send yours and we reconstruct it here, in public, with everyone reading along.
inheritance
The Recipe Box You Can't Cook From Yet
It sat on the counter for eleven months radiating reproach. Why you cannot open the box yet, and why that is not a defect in you.
recipe archaeology
The Recipe Written on the Back of a Hydro Bill
A recipe on a proper card was a decision. One on the back of a hydro bill was an emergency, and the substrate tells a story the recipe cannot.
recipe archaeology
Reconstructing a Dish From a Card With No Quantities Is a Collaboration
A card listing ingredients and no amounts cannot be recovered. It can be collaborated with, and that is a better thing — here is how it actually goes.
cooking
What a Prairie Kitchen Ate in February
A February supper built from a cellar and a shelf of jars, and the lost skill behind it — cooking that starts with what you have, not what you want.
cooking
Winnipeg Rye and the One Flavour That Means Home
A workable light rye loaf, and the argument that caraway is the one flavour this city decided means home.
cooking
Saskatoon Pie When You Can't Get Saskatoons
The real pie, and an honest account of the blueberry substitution: what changes, what survives, and when a place's food is still that place's food.
recipe archaeology
'Serves the Whole Church Basement': A Recipe That Outlived Its Crowd
Twelve pounds of flour. Yield: serves the hall. A recipe written for two hundred people who no longer gather, filed beside one that serves four.
cooking
Sour Cream Is Holding the Whole Cuisine Together
Temper it with a ladle of hot liquid or it curdles and sulks. The technique, and the case that sour cream is holding the whole prairie table together.
stardew valley
You Disturb the Cave Critters to Mine the Diamonds. Who's the Villain?
There is a cave. Something lives in it. You arrive with a pickaxe and leave richer. The game says you are the hero; look at the scene again.
stardew valley
Is Fishing Cruel in a Game About Kindness?
The fishing minigame is the most relaxing loop in the game, and it is killing. On harm made frictionless enough that you stop noticing it.
stardew valley
The Gift Economy Is a Spreadsheet: On Scheduling Your Way Into People's Hearts
Look up what they like, deposit it twice a week, watch the hearts fill. What it means that affection here is a completely legible meter.
stardew valley
Is It Monstrous to Min-Max a Game About Slowing Down?
I play the game about slowing down with a spreadsheet open on the second monitor. Taking the small monster that makes me seriously for a minute.
stardew valley
The Passing-Out Penalty: A Game About Rest That Has to Force You
Work past two in the morning and the game knocks you out and fines you. A game about rest that has to force it, and what that implies.