[Photographs: Evan Sung and Christopher Smith for The New York Times ]
Welcome to the first edition of Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!
Heston Blumenthal's Mad Scientist Christmas Dinner
This video showcases Heston's perfect Christmas meal...and I thought my Christmas dinner of f...
Obviously, this site is mostly devoted to cooking, and always has been. But watchful readers may have noticed over the years the occasional post slipped in about drinking. We've thankfully improved our recipes since the very first drinking post on this site, which involved mixing dark beer from New York's oldest pub, McSorley's, and some cheap vanilla ice cream. The result was the beer shake...
To stretch the metaphor, the essential DNA of the Daisy involves adding a little soda water to a Sour (spirit, citrus, sweetener). Beyond that, though, you can take some liberties .
- Imbibe Magazine
If you're not too careful, cocktails can swallow you into an alternative universe of reason where there are no right answers. The perfectly proportioned Negroni , which I wrote a...
"A proper Negroni is as perfectly and tripodically balanced as, say, a water molecule. "
- Jonathan Miles
The Negroni is an incorruptible drink. While the martini can be perverted by nefarious substances like apple pucker and vodka and many places make Margaritas by simply drizzling a little tequila in a cup of sugary mix, a Negroni is a Negroni. It has three ingredients (gin, sw...
Recently Nick and I were in the gritty West Loop neighborhood of Chicago, after a long, pork-ridden meal at The Publican , where we fed on cracklins, rillettes, belly, shoulder, and all manner of sausages. We slipped out of the restaurant happy and stuffed into the long fluorescent shadows, in search of a good bar to aid all the oncoming digesting to be done.
We ended up at Matchbox ...
The authentic Julep is a drink from the Heroic Age of American Tippling, and as such is not for novices. That's perhaps the chief reason it's fallen out of favor in these weak-livered times.
- David Wondrich
I'll get to the julep soon enough. But first I want to talk about the Kentucky Derby. Though I grew up on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, I don't care much about the Indy 5...
Over the past year or so, Nick and I have developed a kind of unhealthy obsession with cocktails -- some could argue literally. We've quietly stocked our cabinets with liquers, liquors, bitters; our fridge doors are weighed down with vermouths (yes, they should be refrigerated ) and simple syrups; a regular supply of rye whiskey, bourbon and gin comes and goes, mixed with a recurring stoc...
I took a little break from food this past weekend, turning my back on all the pieces of meat curing in my stairwell (I’ll get to those later in the week), and set off for the rolling hills of Kentucky to sip the best bourbon I could. I’d been blabbering on and on to my brother-in-law about the stuff for well over six months now and it was about time to actually see where it all came from...
My drink of the summer so far has been the margarita, a fact that may leave most of you thinking, “so what?” And normally that's fine--nothing is that impressive about a cut-rate tequila mixed with a big bottle of margarita mix that’s dumped in a salt crusted glass the size of a punch bowl. But I’ve been messing with the holy trinity of lime, tequila and triple sec, thanks to one l...
Feeling a little bit under the weather and a bit perturbed with my job, I returned home last night needing some kind of a cure. Like hot chocolate made by your mother, I needed a home remedy with exactly zero medicinal value, which would warm me up and send me straight to bed. I didn't have any chocolate, but I did have a great big bottle of Bourbon and one idea.
I wanted a hot toddy, eve...