Melanie Rehak

  • culture Feb/Mar 2015

    A Provençal Feast

    Most of the people who saw the 2009 film Julie & Julia agreed: It would have been better if it were simply Julia. (Indeed, one fan, who happened to be a film editor, was heralded as a hero vigilante when he posted a Julie Powell–free version of the movie called & Julia online.) Although the story of twentysomething blogger Powell—breaking down in front of her stove on a nightly basis, writing about her travails with complicated soufflés and slimy innards in her Queens apartment—should have been by far the more relatable of the two, somehow we were still less interested in her than in seeing

  • culture Dec/Jan 2015

    What Was the Hip Butcher?

    The holidays are fast approaching as I write this column, bringing the usual flurry of thoughts about what to cook for the rush of upcoming festive dinners. Whatever delicacies appear on my table (along with the family recipes that have been grandfathered in despite their dependence on canned soups), they’re guaranteed to be pretty different from what I, and everybody else in America, was making in the kitchen twenty years ago (heritage-breed turkey, I’m looking at you). Between then and now, the way we eat has evolved in ways both wonderful and worrying, and how we write about what we eat has

  • culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

    Repast Imperfect

    Long before I had any idea that Laurie Colwin was a food writer, I loved her writing about food. I discovered it not in the articles she wrote for Gourmet and other magazines, starting in the ’80s, but in her fiction, each volume of which, if I may borrow one of her titles, is another marvelous thing. They’ve been a part of my life for so long now, in steady rotation on my bedside table and in my brain, that I can’t remember when I read my first one, or even which one it was.

    What I do remember, effortlessly, are the meals that animate them. In tales of domestic life, which is what Colwin’s

  • culture June/July/Aug 2014

    Eat, Memory

    Some years ago, when my first child was finally old enough to sit through a book that (a) was not made of cardboard and (b) had more than four words on a page, I raided the bookshelves of my childhood bedroom with glee. Narrative, at last! All my old favorites were there—the Wizard of Oz books, The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, In the Night Kitchen. I loaded them into a bag and brought them home, and we started right in. Among the spoils was a picture book that had faded from my memory over the years, though its much-dog-eared pages were evidence of the central

  • culture Apr/May 2014

    Seattle Marinara-ers

    A few months ago, I found myself alone in Seattle, a city I know very little about. Yes, there’s Pike Place Market and the Space Needle and the Rem Koolhaas–designed Central Library. And, OK, I’ll just go ahead and show my age: Nirvana and all those plaid flannel shirts. But what I’m really talking about is where to eat, of course. No matter how much you love your local haunts—and I love more than a few of mine mightily—novelty always counts for something. And it always gives me an appetite.

    As it happens, this is a sentiment Molly Wizenberg can get behind. I know because in one of the many

  • culture Feb/Mar 2014

    Playing Chicken

    “This is the topsy-turvy world of luxurious toil,” Max Watman writes in Harvest: Field Notes from a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food (Norton, $25), his new book about his adventures with—oh, how I’ve come to dread this phrase—real food. He’s describing his preparation of a foraged meal during a recent summer vacation, which began with him making salt from seawater, because “what could be more guttural, more intrinsically oceanic than the ocean’s salt?” He then infused the salt with anise liqueur and used it to season codfish, but not before Googling “fun to eat” seaweed species, which led him to

  • culture Dec/Jan 2014

    Automat for the People

    I have always been inordinately fond of things with moving parts—pinball machines, record players, those clocks and watches in which you can see the gears and sprockets turning as the seconds tick away. As such, one of my great regrets in life is that I was born in Manhattan after the heyday of the Automat. That combination of food and simple machinery is like a holy grail for me. Looking for a little fix last summer, I lingered, far longer than it would have taken to eat an entire meal at an actual Automat, at the Horn & Hardart coin-activated metal compartments on display at the New York

  • culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2013

    Candy Darling

    Some years ago, I heard a fantastic story about Andy Warhol attending a banquet for wealthy Manhattan art patrons sometime in the 1960s. The tables were laden with all manner of delicacies—caviar, pâtés, the works. As Warhol stood near one of them and surveyed the spread, the hostess approached him and gaily suggested he help himself. There was a pause before he turned to her—not a hair of his silver wig out of place—and said, in a droll monotone, “I only eat candy.” Then he drifted off into the crowd, leaving her in stunned silence. Forget about his prints of car crashes or the electric

  • culture June/July/Aug 2013

    Soft-Boiled Wonderland

    Soft-boiled eggs make their first of several appearances in the opening paragraph of Kate Christensen’s memoir Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (Doubleday, $27). The scene is Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, sometime in the third year of the author’s life, at the family breakfast table. Sun streams in; Christensen’s beautiful young mother and baby sister are also present; the eggs, cooked to perfection by her mother and mixed up with pieces of buttered toast, are “so good, we’d lick the bowls clean.”

    Then disaster shatters the morning idyll, in the form of Christensen’s

  • culture Feb/Mar 2013

    Braising Hell

    “I wanted to rent a lion, but they said the insurance was too much,” Eddie Huang told me, offhandedly, one chilly afternoon late last year. We were discussing the four-minute TED talk he’s preparing to deliver at the organization’s annual conference this February, “I Dreamt of White Lions.” Its main point, according to Huang, who is a 2013 TED Fellow, is that “lions are the king of the animal kingdom like white people rule the world. But neither of those ideas have any power unless you give it.” He was hoping to illustrate his upending of the received wisdom by walking a tame lion onstage,

  • culture Dec/Jan 2013

    Season’s Eatings

    The holidays, their excesses, and the absolution of those excesses in the unblemished promise of the new year are nigh upon us. As such, I feel the need to come clean about something that seems especially timely: I am a fruitcake proselytizer. What’s more, I have successfully converted a rather large number of previously fruitcake-despising people—and they are legion—to my faith.

    Like all zealots, I am discriminatory. My secret weapon in the war against the anti-fruitcakers is a very particular brand of this dessert that has been part of my family since before I was born. It is a cake that

  • culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2012

    Cooking with Sass

    “The office can be a cold and lonely place.” So say the authors of CookFight: 2 Cooks, 12 Challenges, 125 Recipes, an Epic Battle for Kitchen Dominance (Ecco, $30). That they happen to be Julia Moskin and Kim Severson, food writers for the New York Times (Severson is now the paper’s bureau chief in Atlanta, but she manages to squeeze in plenty of pieces about southern cuisine while reporting on other equally critical regional issues), makes this declaration perhaps more noteworthy than it might otherwise be. If you’re anything like me, you imagine the life of a full-time food writer at one of

  • culture June/July/Aug 2012

    Trucking Out

    It all began with the Los Angeles kimchi taco truck. Rumors of this previously unimaginable and yet obviously brilliant invention began to float into our Brooklyn home from the West Coast sometime in 2009. My husband, a native Angeleno—and thus a taco snob—as well as a kimchi fanatic, immediately began trying to find a reason to fly out to the City of Angels as soon as possible. Surely there was a conference, a wedding, some critical gathering that would put him in close proximity to this ideal mash-up of two of his favorite food groups (unlike me and no doubt many other people, he counts

  • culture Apr/May 2012

    Dixie Chic

    Memo to the Powers That Be:

    When I die, I would like to be transported immediately, and in perpetuity, to the picnic that Craig Claiborne held on Gardiners Island, just off East Hampton, Long Island, on August 1, 1965. I will live there in a state of perfect bliss, feasting on the following Francophilic offerings:

    1. Squab split and grilled with mustard and bread crumbs by Jean Vergnes (late of the ultrachic Colony in Manhattan).

    2. Pierre Franey’s ceviche, served in a giant clamshell, and poached striped bass caught from the bay just moments before cooking.

    3. Jacques Pépin’s delectable

  • culture Feb/Mar 2012

    The Splendid Tablet

    Yes, that was me you saw in the produce aisle, clenching a spattered, warped, approximately five-pound copy of Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking under my arm as I attempted to bag some carrots for a Bolognese sauce. And yes, that was also me you saw having a conversation in the meat section with someone roughly twenty years my elder who was holding nothing but a smartphone and extolling the virtues of shopping from a list generated by a recipe app, while giving my battered, beloved Hazan a pitying glance.

    From the grocery store it was a few short blocks to my kitchen,

  • culture Dec/Jan 2012

    Lush Life

    In 1941, M. F. K. Fisher famously considered the oyster. To her many thoughts on how, when, where, and why to eat it, she added this little excursion into its amorous dimensions: “The love-life of an oyster is a curious one, dependent on the vagaries of temperature and the tides,” she mused. “The love-life of a man has also been called curious, and part of it has long depended on the mysterious powers of this bi-valved mollusc.” And that was pretty much the definitive word on oysters, sex, and love. Many other people have commented on and dissected and discussed the matter since, but never

  • culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2011

    Beauty and the Feast

    After spending some weeks luxuriating in the gorgeous presence of Penguin’s Great Food series—a collection of reprints that includes the genre’s classic titles from the past four hundred years—I have many questions. Would I ever actually make lambs’ ears with sorrel or fricassee of calves’ tongues, as suggested in Recipes from the White Hart Inn (1759)? Could I possibly live up to “the inward virtues of every housewife,” as detailed by Gervase Markham in The Well-Kept Kitchen (1615)? But perhaps most pressing is this inquiry, fortunately directed at someone living now: Designer Coralie

  • culture May 31, 2011

    The Great Popsicle Experiment

    What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never before coffee.) It is, I suspect, more than just a craving for sugar and cooler temperatures. I’m almost certain, in fact, that it’s the same thing that compelled me to wear a shirt with a repeating pattern of ice-cream parlors on it almost every single day the summer I was six, the feeling that makes me line up even now, when I should know better, for a soft vanilla twist with chocolate sprinkles the minute I see the season’s first ice-cream truck.

    What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never before coffee.) It is, I suspect, more than just a craving for sugar and cooler temperatures. I’m almost certain, in fact, that it’s the same thing that compelled me to wear a shirt with a repeating pattern of ice-cream parlors on it almost every single day the summer I was six, the feeling that makes me

  • culture Summer 2011

    Sweet Reveries

    What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never before coffee.) It is, I suspect, more than just a craving for sugar and cooler temperatures. I’m almost certain, in fact, that it’s the same thing that compelled me to wear a shirt with a repeating pattern of ice-cream parlors on it almost every single day the summer I was six, the feeling that makes me

  • culture Apr/May 2011

    Professor Achatz

    I am not the sort of person who would ordinarily elect to dine at Grant Achatz’s radical Chicago restaurant Alinea, which features “mischievous science-project cooking,” as New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton recently described it. I am generally put off by meals that are as much pyrotechnics as pleasure. I am not interested in dried crème brûlée, which appeared on Achatz’s first menu, and I find his description of angelica branches filled with apple puree—one element of the twenty-six-course dinner he prepared for a former Chicago Tribune food writer and his friend—more obnoxious, not