My Grandmother Svec was a formidable cook. She could size up the day’s larder at a glance, start lunch and dinner for twenty, then spend the day in the vineyards clipping grapes, before returning ahead of us to get the food on the table. The best part of her cooking was her baking. She was a master of the flaky or yeasty fruit-filled concoctions that are a Czech trademark, and she baked in such quantity that it all seemed to […]
Serves: 4-5 servings in demitasse cups Prep time: 15 minutes, plus refrigeration time of 2-3 hours Variations: Any summer squash may be used as a vegetable base for this recipe, as well as cucumbers, potatoes, asparagus, broccoli, green beans, wax beans, or Jerusalem artichokes. If appropriate, certain beans should be “stringed” before cooking.
Bess Abell was Lyndon Johnson’s Social Secretary. The daughter of Earle Clements, a man who served Kentucky as both its governor and senator, she has lived her entire life around politics, and is currently the dean of the former social secretaries sorority. I love being around Bess. In addition to having some of the best social secretary stories of all time, she is a gifted raconteur, and always draws roars of laughter with her tales of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was […]
This post may not be wildly relevant to everyone, but it has a wider application: we all find ourselves introducing mutual friends from time to time, and often with a certain amount of anxiety. Will they like each other? Will they each make an effort to be friendly and find some commonality of interests? These are all things that a hostess needs to take into account when seating a dinner party. There is protocol in every dinner. It may not […]
I keep a list of food holidays on my desk, both because it’s inspiration for this blog, and because it gives me an excuse to make something like a chocolate milkshake in the middle of the day for no apparent reason. Today is National Chocolate Milkshake Day, as you probably surmise. After I take food photos, which is a bit of a frantic process when it involves something melty like ice cream or a cocktail, the food remains, waiting to […]
