If you want to know what’s for dinner in the Middle East or Africa, look no further than this marvelous book. Here a Persian dish of eggplant with saffron and yogurt, there a Ghanaian soup of chicken and ground nuts scooped up with a dumpling called fufu, there a Lebanese stuffed grape leaf from Arnold [...]

Musings on the history, shapes, and ubiquity of donuts on the occasion of the holiday.

By Sally Levitt Steinberg
National Donut Day (the first friday in June) falls under the sign of Gemini, the sign of divided souls, and so it is not surprising that the donut leads its own divided life. We love ‘em, we hate [...]

What is the food that Luis Melendez paints? Is it food? More than food? Less than perfect food? Food stand-ins for something else? What is this stuff called “every species of food produced by the Spanish climate”? Is it about the food or something beyond, beyond the canvas?
by Sally Levitt Steinberg
What fruits! What [...]

It’s not every day you meet a new food, one you’ve never seen or tasted, one you can’t identify. You can never know everything about food. It’s humbling, just when you thought you were getting a handle on things. There’s always a new ingredient from somewhere on the planet. One year Szechuan pepper, another year [...]

Food was front and center in the here and hereafter. A sumptuous feast was in the offing. But what was for dinner in the afterlife? Chasing the whim of what food went with funerary art, after several blind alleys I landed at Oleana, the Inman Square restaurant invented by Ana Sortun, a Norwegian Seattle native.
by [...]

by Sally Steinberg
American chef Steve Johnson knows what he’s doing. A rendezvous in Central Square is a rendezvous with well-being.

What’s in a name? When it comes to the restaurant Rendezvous in Central Square, a lot. There’s location, the crossroads thing. There’s social resonance, the people thing. There’s the history of Steve Johnson, chef/owner and [...]

The tall multi-paned windows at Clink. look on to fall colors or the night, the river outside. The style is inviting, informal, and the food is elegant, the taste as good as it gets. Let’s clink to that.
By Sally Steinberg
Where in America is there a Filipino chef using Spanish arrope (candied pumpkin, for the uninitiated), [...]

The Massachusetts State Sandwich? Fluffernutter as Icon?
By Sally Steinberg
No serious eater, no gourmet, no culture vulture, no thinking person, no person of discriminating taste, no one interested in nutrition could……
But wait! The Fluffernutter might just be one of the secret food grails, its own Umami, all by itself, an elusive, indescribable, uncategorizable, euphoria-inducing sensation, with [...]