T. Susan Chang
T. Susan Chang regularly writes about food and reviews cookbooks for The Boston Globe, NPR.org and the Washington Post. She's the author of A Spoonful of Promises: Recipes and Stories From a Well-Tempered Table (2011). She lives in western Massachusetts, where she also teaches food writing at Bay Path College and Smith College. She blogs at Cookbooks for Dinner.
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Buttermilk somehow seems perpetually cool and unruffled. It evokes cream without cream's over-the-top heft; its tanginess goes up to the threshold of yogurt and stops just shy. No matter how you cook it, a little bit of buttermilk has a thousand ways of making life taste better.
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Scapes are the gardener's dividend. The taste of that green garlic is haunting — biting, fresh, vegetal and verdant. It is to mature garlic what a string quartet is to an orchestra; what a sonnet is to a novel.
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Sometimes our eyes are bigger than our baking skills. Reviewer T. Susan Chang recommends three cookbooks with pictures that indulge our senses while sparing our waistlines. Do you have a favorite cookbook? Let us know in the comments.
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Rather than waiting for someone to give you a treat, why not make one of your favorites for yourself? Something you can snack on all week when no one's around. Or, better yet, something you don't have to share. Food writer T. Susan Chang recommends slow-roasted pecans, salty-sweet matzo candy and more. -
Salted and aged, the fruit develops mellow yet intensely lemony flavor, with none of the nose-tickling bright, high notes of the fresh version. Though they do take some time, preserved lemons are easy to make, keep practically forever, and make everything around them seem a little sweeter.
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Like many other intrinsically boring foods — say, tofu or grits — lentils shine because they get out of the way. They provide a vehicle and a backdrop for other flavors — whether it's good olive oil and gently gilded onions, or ground spices and lemony pesto.
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The rebels, rule breakers and renegades who rule this year's Top 10 list aren't looking for a Ph.D. in Traditional Cooking. They're pleasure seekers whose books are filled with quirky facts, gorgeous pictures and ingredients deployed in unexpected places. -
This season's standouts praise America's culinary traditions from coast to coast — and everywhere in between. Authors of these plainspoken and charming cookbooks craft memorable recipes around just a few well-chosen flavors: meals for every day that are anything but. -
This year, cooks poured their hearts into these carefully crafted, kitchen how-tos. T. Susan Chang says these cookbooks are like a properly seasoned skillet — heavy-duty, battle-tested and much to be prized.
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There's no reason not to eat well, even in tough economic times. Three cookbooks conjure deliciously simple dinners from the most ordinary of ingredients.
