FLAVORS + kNOWLEDGE

Welcome to the table of the 15th and 16th centuries. Pull up a chair. Try not to use your fork too conspicuously. If you wanted to understand power in Renaissance Florence, you did not study the ledgers of the Medici bank — you watched what they served at dinner. The Medici family, who essentially ran Florence for much of the 15th and 16th centuries while technically just being very enthusiastic “...

Today, I want to talk about something I see every day in my classroom and in the hallways of American schools: the urgent need for real food education. As a teacher, I watch how what our students eat shapes their energy, their focus, their moods, and ultimately their long-term health. Yet too many schools still treat nutrition as an afterthought. I believe we have a responsibility to help students...

The American diet, from where I stand, feels like a monument to convenience and abundance that has somehow lost its way. It’s a whirlwind of drive-thru, giant plastic cups of soda, and shrink-wrapped everything, where the default lunch is often a sad desk sandwich and a bag of chips. I see it as a diet of contradiction: we have access to the most incredible, diverse produce in the world, yet we so...

The Mad apple Between August and early September, nature offers the eggplant, a vegetable with intense color and spongy flesh found in kitchens around the world. The eggplant (*Solanum melongena*) has a history as old as plant domestication, fascinating botanical characteristics, and culinary versatility that make it almost indispensable. Botanically speaking, the eggplant belongs to the Solanacea...

Appreciating the Value of Imperfect Produce. Through years of culinary experience, I have observed that nature rarely produces flawless food. Many of the finest ingredients I have used are those commonly discarded. Crooked carrots often possess greater sweetness, and a scarred heirloom tomato typically offers more flavor and character than any visually perfect hothouse tomato I have encountered. I...

A Taste of Panforte I still remember the first time I held a slice of panforte in my hands. It was a cold December afternoon in Siena, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and winter. Someone handed me a small, dense wedge dusted with white sugar, and when I bit into it the world seemed to slow down. Honey, toasted almonds, candied orange, cinnamon, and a quiet heat of pepper unfolded all at once. It...

In Whitman, Massachusetts, between Boston and Cape Cod, Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, transformed a modest Cape Cod-style house into the Toll House Inn in 1930 (The Toll House, Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield, Whitman, Massachusetts, 1930-1935, 2024). At a time when roadside dining options were limited and reliable hospitality was rare, the Toll House Inn rapidly became a regional lan...

The Palio di Siena is far more than a horse race. It is a living medieval ritual that still defines the identity of an entire city. Twice each summer, on 2 July and 16 August, ten bareback horses thunder around the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo while thousands of Sienese scream for their contrada. The prize is a painted silk banner — the palio itself — but the real stakes are pride, rivalry, and c...

During World War II, food rationing in the United States reshaped daily life on the home front in profound and lasting ways. After the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, the government moved quickly to control scarce resources so that troops overseas and Allied nations could be supplied. The Office of Price Administration (OPA) introduced a system of ration books and stamps beginning in the sp...

The Birth of the Doggy Bag: From Wartime Thrift to Everyday Ritual Long before paper sacks and foil swans appeared at the end of a meal, people found ways to carry food home. In ancient Rome, dinner guests often brought their own napkins, which served dual purposes: wiping hands and mouths between courses and, by around the sixth century BCE, wrapping leftover morsels to take away. The practice wa...

The impact of the Columbian Exchange on Indigenous agriculture in the Americas was profound, complex, and often tragic—a story of innovation clashing with catastrophe, where new tools and resources arrived amid devastation that reshaped entire ways of life. Before 1492, Indigenous peoples across the Americas had developed sophisticated agricultural systems perfectly adapted to their diverse enviro...

The Boston Tea Party (1773) — Colonists protesting British taxation dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, sparking the American Revolution. Tea became a symbol of resistance and "taxation without representation." In the chill December air of 1773, Boston Harbor lay restless under a gray sky, its waters reflecting the tensions that had simmered for years between the American coloni...

Chinese Buddhist Temple Cuisine (Published) Long ago, in the mist-shrouded monasteries of ancient China, Buddhist monks and nuns began a quiet revolution at the table. More than fifteen hundred years ago, during the spread of Mahayana Buddhism, they took the principle of ahimsa to heart—non-violence toward all living beings—and let it shape every meal. Meat, fish, eggs, and often even dairy disapp...

Today, we’re talking about a food that doesn’t just belong to a place—it is the place. It’s a culinary tradition so fiercely local, so stubbornly secret, that if you haven’t grown up with it, the name won’t just confuse you; it will actively mislead you. We’re talking about the Rhode Island pizza strip. Depending on who you ask, it goes by different names. Pizza strip. Red strip. Bakery pizza. Par...

The Champion's Pantry How to stock your kitchen like an athlete — and why everything on that shelf matters Let me tell you something that took me a long time to understand, even after decades of cooking professionally and working with athletes at every level of sport. The most important meal you will ever eat is not the one you have the night before a big game. It is not the recovery shake you...

Food Around the World — How Different Cultures Eat Smart Every Culture I Have Ever Cooked With Has Taught Me Something I Couldn't Have Learned Any Other Way Sometime in the 1990s, I started keeping a list. Every time I traveled — and I traveled a great deal, following food the way other people follow art or music — I wrote down the single most important thing I learned about how the people of...

Chapter 5 — Kitchen Science — Cooking Is Chemistry The Kitchen Is the Greatest Laboratory I Have Ever Worked In I have had the privilege, over a long career, of working alongside some extraordinary minds. Farmers who understood soil science with an intuitive depth that rivaled any academic. Fishermen who read weather and water with almost supernatural precision. Winemakers who could taste a barrel...

Chapter 4 — Where Does Food Come From? I Once Spent a Week on a farm, and It Changed Everything I thought I Knew About Cooking. In the summer of 2001, at the insistence of a farmer friend who had grown tired of my asking him questions about produce over the phone, I spent a week working on his farm in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. I was not a young man — I was in my early fifties,...

Chapter 3 — Food Detectives — Know What's in Your Food The Day I Read a Label and Couldn't Recognize Half the Ingredients I remember exactly where I was the first time I carefully read a processed food label. It was 1994. I was standing in a supermarket aisle in suburban Rhode Island, holding a jar of pasta sauce — the kind marketed directly at children, with a cartoon character on the fro...

Chapter 2 — The Color Game — Eating the Rainbow The Most Important Lesson I Ever Learned Came From a Market in Florence, Not a Classroom In the autumn of 1987, I took a sabbatical from my restaurant and traveled to Tuscany. I had been cooking professionally for nearly two decades by then, and I thought I knew quite a lot about food. Florence humbled me within forty-eight hours. Not the restaurants...

You Are What You Eat: My Fifty Years of Feeding People — and What I Learned About Food and the Human Body I was seventeen years old the first time I stood at a professional stove. It was a small trattoria in Providence, Rhode Island — barely twelve tables, a kitchen the size of a large closet, and a chef named Marco who communicated almost entirely through grunts and hand gestures. I spoke Italian...

Friends: If cooking is your passion, you may want to read this article and hopefully take some suggestions on how to use various fats in your kitchen. Fats play a central role in shaping flavors, textures, and the nutritional profile of meals. Beyond serving as cooking mediums, they embody historical significance, chemical diversity, and ongoing debates regarding health. Understanding the producti...

Understanding Shojin Cuisine Once, in the quiet dawn of Japan's ancient temples, a way of eating took shape that turned every meal into a silent prayer. It was the sixth century when Buddhism crossed the sea from China and Korea, carrying with it a gentle vow to refrain from taking life. Monks set aside meat and fish, choosing the humble gifts of the fields and forests instead. Centuries later...

The Day Rhode Island Gasped Columbus Day 1910, the Fabre Line, and the Italian immigrants who transformed Natick and Pontiac. If you had stood along the main road through the villages of Natick and Pontiac in the early 1900s, you would have heard a medley of accents and languages. The British, the Irish, the Swedes, and the French-Canadians had all come before, each group finding its place in the...

How Federal Hill, Providence, Got Its Name. The Battle Over an Ox Roast In 1788, a makeshift army of angry farmers stormed into Providence, Rhode Island, and broke up a Fourth of July ox roast at the base of a hill. That hill, thanks to the chaos, would later become known as Federal Hill. But to understand how a celebration turned into a riot—and how a hill got its name—we need to go back long bef...