Foodie Wednesday: Chocolate Means Love

It’s the time of year to rewrite my favorite story.

More than 20 years ago I was a contributing editor to a fine regional magazine called Wisconsin Trails. Basically, my job was to roam around the state documenting vanishing authentic experiences.

And because I was no dummy, they were usually food-related. 

I wrote about Wisconsin’s local cheese factories, community breweries, European sausage shops, supper clubs, bakeries, and old-time candy stores, with the odd soda fountain thrown in.

Obviously, this was during the time when authentic food and drink experiences were going the way of rabbit ears and the tailfin, since these are now the experiences people travel thousands of miles for. Especially the beer.

When I became a writer for The New York Times I resurrected the candy-store story in time for Valentine’s Day, and it was a huge hit. And now, with Valentine's Day so near, I’m happy to resurrect it again for you.

The premise is that there’s a candy belt in Wisconsin that basically follows U.S. Highway 41 from Oshkosh to Green Bay, with a side trip down U.S. 10 to Manitowoc.

There’s an inordinate number of chocolate shops in this 200-square-mile area, most of them family-run for a century or more, all of them serving up heirloom recipes in atmospheres so timeless and sincere you expect to find the Great Pumpkin manning a mixer in the back room.

There’s Beerntsen’s in Manitowoc, with its plate lunches and ice-cream sodas; Wilmar Chocolates in Appleton, with its old-time awnings and state-fair prizes; Kaap’s in Green Bay, with its jar of jawbreakers on the counter; Seroogy’s in De Pere, with its magical meltaways; and a different Beerntsen’s in Green Bay, with its candy-striped wallpaper and dark-walnut woodwork. 

None of these places should be where they are doing what they’re doing. But in eastern Wisconsin, when it comes to chocolates, reality thrashes logic in straight sets.

The place to start is Oshkosh. Oaks’ Candy Corner is a chocolate mirage. Its gingerbread exterior yields to an interior that in winter is as sugary warm as the inside of a circus peanut and in summer goes down cool as a wax Coke bottle. 

It smells like caramel corn and cocoa butter rubbed into the floorboards with a pair of Red Wing boots. It’s the shop around the corner in an unremittingly blue-collar part of an unremittingly blue-collar town. It shouldn’t still be there, but there it is.

If Oaks’ is a mirage, Hughes’ Homaid Chocolates, less than half a mile away, is a whole-cloth figment. It’s ridiculous – an 80-year-old bungalow two blocks from Lake Winnebago with only a small neon sign to state its trade and a full-blown candymaking operation in its basement, complete with a small sales counter by the cellar stairs.

Almost everyone who’s been in Oshkosh more than a week has an opinion on Oaks’-versus-Hughes’. “Hughes’ is more of an undiscovered treasure, while Oaks’ has ambience going for it,” said Oshkosh teacher Pat Kilday.

“If you grew up on the north side, you probably prefer Oaks’,” said longtime Oshkoshite Cynthia Becker. “I was raised on Hughes’ chocolate,” countered Oshkosh police officer Kari Pettit. “I can't control myself when I go in the door. Hughes is so good I won’t even eat Oaks.”

The dueling pistol in this skirmish is the meltaway. A meltaway starts where a 3 Musketeers ends, with a middle of chocolate-infused cumulus and a pumped-up profile. Hughes’ meltaways are the size of a large LEGO block and comparatively creamy. The Oaks version is the Melty-Bar.

With its Art Deco wrapper and hotel-soap shape, the Melty-Bar is true to its slogan – “The Aristocrat of Candy Bars.” Add malt, turn the Melty-Bar into a Malty-Melty, and the aristocrat gets a peerage.

“When people say they like malt they like malt, so why put in just a little malt?” said Bill Oaks, vice president of Oaks’ Candy, as he coaxed vanilla cream out of a 100-year-old mixing machine. Mr. Oaks, 59, is slender and a little stooped, but years of stirring the candy kettles have given him Wayne Gretzky forearms. “It’s strong flavors, so when you bite into a piece you taste something besides chocolate.”

Hughes’ counterpunch is the “oyster” – chopped nuts and chocolate surrounding a ball of vanilla cream that rests in the hand like a shot put. When they award the prize for Best Vanilla Cream Emanating From A Basement, Hughes’ wins in a walk.

“It’s all simple stuff – butter, sugar, cream, corn syrup, chocolate,” said Tom Hughes, the third generation of Hughes to make candy in the Doty Street bungalow. “Nothing’s hiding under a rock.”

After Oshkosh, Manitowoc. The Oshkosh-Manitowoc route is interrupted by Lake Winnebago, so the chocolate-belt tourist has to backtrack north or tack south to Fond du Lac and cut over. The southern route is recommended for its small towns, farm fields, lake views, and the homemade cheesecake at Roeck’s Bakery in Kiel.

Once in Manitowoc, Beerntsen’s offers up gooey hand-dipped creams and mint meltaways, high-waisted display cases, a soda fountain, and, through a clock-crowned arch that’s a figurative doorway to another time, two rows of booths where soup-and-sandwich lunches are served. Choosing is murder, but the peppermint stick candy “is so good that I would eat it as fast as it came off the line,” said former employee Amy Tolbert – “and they let me!”

Forty miles up the Lake Michigan coast, Seroogy’s, in the Green Bay suburb of De Pere, makes more than 300 different chocolate products and displays them in long, immaculate cases. Indulge in chocolate-covered fudge and cast-chocolate high heels if you want, but the smart money cuts to the incredible, candy-bar-sized meltaways, in flavors from peanut butter to mocha.

“Something like a meltaway, you just can’t skimp,” said Joe Seroogy, whose family began making chocolates in De Pere in 1899. “It’s such a tight balance of what you add to the center, the amount of air, the proper ingredients, the way you temper the chocolate. It’s old-fashioned, but it’s the only way to do it.”

Seroogy’s is only five minutes on city streets from Kaap’s. Once a downtown landmark, Otto Kaap’s expansive restaurant with its mile-long menu and huge candy counter was malled out of existence. The Kaap’s that remains has a strip-mall location with no restaurant but a palpable sense of place and an almost perfect confection: simple wintergreen wafers slathered with a splendid dark chocolate.

“It’s a part of the tradition of the city,” said Karl Johanske, who bought the business not knowing a thing about candymaking and had to be taught from 100-year-old recipes how to make the homemade marshmallow and the creams so creamy they spill down your chin. “It’s a lot of hard work, a lot of hours, but also pride involved in keeping it going.”

From Kaap's, the tour heads to a century-old shopping district on Green Bay’s west side, where Beerntsen’s– same origins as the Manitowoc store, but different owners – thrives in a new old-fashioned storefront. Its creams are dense and rich, and its chewier pieces proclaim the good news of butter and sugar, together forever.

It’s 40 minutes on a four-lane fronted by Packer-themed sprawl from Beernsten's to Appleton, where Wilmar, with its new-age music, India-spice truffles and imported chocolate chips, plays it cool and upscale. But the smell of chocolate emanating from the back is old-school aromatherapy, and Wilmar’s signature candies are decidedly proletarian. Its “Wilmarvels” are turtles done right, its caramel nut logs are a toothsome version of the last candy left in the box, and its chocolate-covered cherries defy convention and deliver a piece that neatly balances the tartness of a real cherry with the sweetness of its surroundings.

“Our cream and butter come from a creamery outside of town,” said Liz Garvey, who owns Wilmar with her brother Jack. “You can tell what the cows have been eating just by tasting the cream,” added Jack Garvey as he drizzled a quart of local butterfat into a piccolo timpani full of boiling caramel, looking just like Jeff Daniels in a hairnet.

“When you’re around our candy all day you get a little more discriminating,” Ms. Garvey said. “I was out last night and someone said, ‘Hey, did you try that new Snickers?’. I said, ‘Sorry.’”

The candy belt isn’t going anywhere. The next generations are involved at Seroogy’s and Oaks’, and even Hughes’s basement operation is staying put.

“People come to us and say we should make different things and move somewhere else, but I say if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” Mr. Hughes said, drinking coffee at the kitchen table impervious to the stirring, cooking, enrobing, and packing going on below decks. “A bigger building means more overhead, more headaches. It’s nice keeping it the way it is.” 

Foodie Friday: Where The Cake Is King

Ash Wednesday is a little more than a month away, and that means Mardi Gras, and Mardi Gras means … well, lots of things. Cheap beads in the horrifically incompatible colors of green, gold, and purple. Eight-foot-wide masks that could double as sets for a Wes Anderson movie. Enough sketchy renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In” to make you hate the kitten meme of classic Dixieland songs. A spike in drunk-and-disorderlys. 

And for us, one of our favorite things ever: king cakes.

We will not declare the king cake to be nature’s most perfect food, because nature had nothing to do with it. However, it is a perfectly wonderful concept: the doughnut, made even larger and sweeter, so that one can feed many (or just a few, or just one, depending on how you play it). 

The prototypical king cake is a sweet dough ring, baked or fried to a turn, gobbed with white frosting and buried under green/gold/purple sprinkles. The cake is often filled, like a kringle or a jelly doughnut; some come with even more sprinkles on the side, and all come with a key ingredient that’s even more indigestible than anything mentioned previously: a baby.

The baby is key to the king-cake tradition. The baby – not a real baby, silly, but a very small plastic one – represents Jesus, and the cake celebrates the three kings’ visit and their three gifts, hence the three colors of sprinkles. (A different variation on the story states that purple, gold, and green stand for justice, power, and faith. But nothing says they can’t stand for that and frankincense, gold, and myrrh.)

The baby is baked into or buried in the cake; the person who finds it in their piece by tradition buys the next king cake, since one king cake is hardly ever enough to cover a holiday that is technically only one day – Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday (March 6 this year) – but actually started Jan. 6.

You can argue persuasively that there’s no such thing as a bad king cake. Even so, here’s where we find some of our favorites:

Willa Jean Bakery, New Orleans: Formerly a Chef To Watch at high-end Nawlins restaurant Domenica, LisaMarie White has created a king cake that veers off in some interesting, higher-end directions. No mountain of colored sugar here; instead, you get an abundance of salted caramel, roasted pecans, mascarpone, caramel creme, bananas, and praline glaze. Her king cakes aren’t cheap, but $36 (plus shipping) buys you an awful lot of quantity and quality.

Cochon Butcher, New Orleans: Yes, you can get king cakes at Cochon Butcher. And of course, toppings include bacon. We don’t care if the cake is made of OSB and latex paint. We want one.

Antoine's Bakery, Gretna and Metarie, La.: Ever the home of lagniappe, Antoine's not only offers king cakes but also queen cakes, which come with four-count-‘em-four different fillings for reasons unstated (but which could be construed as vaguely sexist). A large queen costs $46.98 plus lots of shipping (though Uber Eats can take care of you of you’re in the vicinity), with regular medium king cakes going for $19.20. But who wants just a regular medium king cake after all that?

Poupart’s Bakery, Lafayette, La.: We’re still mourning the departure of Meche’s Donut King from this charming bayou town. In its absence, a king cake from Poupart’s will have to do. It’s really not that much of a sacrifice. Poupart’s standard cake combines a ring of fresh brioche dough with fruit, nut, and cream-cheese fillings, while its highly recommended traditional French King Cake combines puff pastry with almond filling. Buy one, take it home, warm it up with some good New Orleans coffee, and, yeah; heaven. Don’t forget to stop at Dwight’s for crawfish on your way out of town.

Broad Street Baking Co., Jackson, Miss. Broad Street’s lead pastry chef Jen Adelsheimer says some people trek up I-55 from New Orleans to Jackson get their king cakes from Broad Street, and some of them are sober. Ish. The big draw here, besides the palpable lack of intoxicateds, is Broad Street’s savory crawfish king cake, made with jalapeno and-cheddar brioche and filled with crawfish dip.

The Lighthouse Bakery, Dauphin Island, Ala.: The Lighthouse wins the award for best setting. Its location in a 1912-vintage house delivers equal measures old South and island life, and its bakery case is as seductive as any in the area. Lighthouse’s king cakes are more of a local secret, and only available in season, but that’s all the more reason to trek down Mobile Bay to this placid getaway. Incidentally, here's one more positive about Mardi Gras in Alabama: in Mobile, they throw Moon Pies off the floats. And Moon Pies go great with king cakes.

Foodie Friday: A Food A Day

If you’ve ever wondered exactly why they invented the internet, look no further than Checkiday. This indispensible tool tells you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about what day it is today – and believe me: Every day is way more of a day than you had ever suspected.

For instance, did you know that today (Jan. 4) is World Hypnotism Day, National Trivia Day, Tom Thumb Day, and Dimpled Chad Day? And every other day is just as magical.

This coming week is extra-special, too, with Fruitcake Toss Day, National Take Down The Tree Day, National I Just Can’t Take It Anymore Day, World Typing Day, and Bubble Bath Day all on the docket.  And if you can’t take it anymore you should take a bubble bath.

But this is Foodie Friday, and what we really want to get to are the food days. What great food days are coming up this week?

Glad you asked that. You’re in luck; there are some amazing food days coming up this week, and here’s where you should go to make the most of them.

Bean Day, Jan. 6

You think beans, you think Boston, but here’s the deal: There really aren’t great baked beans to be had at any Boston restaurant. You want great Boston baked beans, you need to make them yourself.

Given that, the scene shifts rightly to barbecue beans, because no self-respecting BBQ joint is going to serve you beans out of a can, plus you get to eat barbecue along with your beans, as opposed to scrod or somesuch in Boston.

Texas is where you want to go to get your bean fix; not only are Texas beans mighty tasty, but the current climate has Boston beat eight ways to Bean Day. Our pick for the prime bean-eating destination is Kreuz Market, in Lockhart. It’s traditional, it’s just enough off the beaten path, and it’s really, really good. Whatever you want from Texas barbecue, it’s all right there.

National Tempura Day, Jan. 7

We want to celebrate National Tempura Day in the Bay Area, not because New York or Chicago don’t have great tempura, but because New York and Chicago don’t have sunny and 60.

Again, we’re thinking of tempura as a side dish, accompanying sushi this time, and our pick for the sushi-tempura combo is Wako, in the Richmond area of San Francisco. Portions are large, the fish is fresh, the preparation is flawless, and the atmosphere is coolly elegant. 

Oh, and the tempura is feather-light, which combined with the freshness of the ingredients being tempuraed, makes a simple side dish something unforgettable. Happy National Tempura Day, indeed.

National English Toffee Day, Jan. 8

This is a hard one, because everyone around here is partial to our own English toffee recipe, further down this page. 

However, if you’re all thumbs in the kitchen and still want your share of buttery, chocolaty yum, we can recommend without reservation the toffee from Littlejohn’s Candies, in Los Angeles.

Toffee is 90 percent freshness of ingredients and 10 thermodynamics, and Littlejohn’s nails both. Its toffee has won awards, and it only takes one taste to know why.

Lucky for you, they ship.

National Apricot Day, Jan. 9

Scraping the bottom of the barrel, day-wise? Not when you taste the apricot-pecan cake from Eilenberger’s Bakery, in Palestine, Texas. 

Let’s let them do the describing: “This fabulous dessert cake is the best of both worlds: The moist, mellow richness of our popular Australian Apricot Cake plus the light, crisp sweetness found only in our beloved Texas Pecans.”

Moist and mellow meets light and crisp: Bet you want some now, don’t you? Thought so.

Good thing they ship.

National Oysters Rockefeller Day, Jan. 10

Based on the name, you’d probably think this dish of oysters baked with a butter-and-parsley sauce and breadcrumbs has its origins in New York, but it’s actually a New Orleans thing, first served in 1889 at Antoine’s Restaurant.

You know what? Antoine’s is still the best place to get Oysters Rockefeller.

It’s always reassuring when the original is not topped, and no one has quite been able to duplicate the combination of flavors in this deceptively simple dish. And if you’re a real oyster-lover, you can have Oysters Rockefeller for dessert, with Oysters Thermidor for an appetizer and Oysters Bienville for a main course.

And no, they don’t ship. But we could all use a little lagniappe right now, oui?

Foodie Friday: Nuts To Pie

To paraphrase food writer Mike Lintal: Pie. Is. Delicious.

Especially this time of year, when harvest fruits, nuts and vegetables are everywhere, vegetable and nut pies are dessert that eats like a meal – especially at some of our favorite diners, orchards, and bakeries that specialize in pie.

Day was when these were regional favorites. Pumpkin pie ruled the northeast and pecan was the south's own. No longer. Great fall pies are available everywhere, as you can see:

Pumpkin Pies

Ithaca Bakery, Ithaca, N.Y. (Pumpkin): Whole-wheat flour and unsalted butter are the keys to this pie’s delectable crust. Cloves and cinnamon give the filling its zing. And the funky, artsy college-town atmosphere of this 100-year-old establishment can’t be beat – if you like funky, artsy, college-town atmospheres.

Mama’s Daughters’ Diner, Irving, Texas: (Pumpkin): The home of Texas diner cooking at its best, Mama’s is equally famous for its pies, which include pumpkin on a rotating basis (best to call ahead). Nothing fancy, but its meat-and-three-sides lunch finished with a slice of pumpkin is more than enough to tide you over ‘til dinner.

City Bakery, New York (Pumpkin): City Bakery is the place where the New York cognoscenti get their pumpkin pies. Head pieman Maury Rubin switches out the traditional lard-and-flour crust for a buttery graham-cracker crust, and delivers an ideal balance of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and brown-sugar flavors through a perfectly textured custard.

Sweet Auburn Bread Company, Atlanta (Sweet Potato Cheesecake): Minneapolis-based writer John Seals knows pie, and Atlanta, and he says: “There is only one place to go for pie in Atlanta. It's the Sweet Auburn Bread Company. Three words: Sweet Potato Cheesecake. It's so good I took my Mom there once, and after having a piece she bought the last two complete pies out of the display case and took them back to Minneapolis with her on the plane. If anyone mentions pie in Atlanta and does not talk about the Sweet Auburn Bread Company they simply do NOT know pie. Shoot. Now I want to drive there right now.”

Pecan Pies

Petsi Pies, Somerville, Mass. (Southern Brown Butter Pecan): Grandmother's-kitchen-trained baker Renee “Petsi” McLeod makes you choose between bourbon chocolate pecan and southern brown-butter pecan at her four north Boston locations. Tough choice. While we prefer to eat the brown butter in the pie and drink the bourbon on the side, rest assured you can’t go wrong with either, or the pumpkin, or the salted caramel apple, or anything else crusted on the menu.

Brigtsen’s, New Orleans (Pecan): Pecan pie has been on Brigtsen's menu for all 23 years of its life, and for some very good reasons. Number one, hey, it's New Orleans, and New Orleans sits squarely at the intersection of pecans and cane sugar. Number two, it's a wonderful pie, a testimony to Brigtsen's broader philosophy of cooking simply, traditionally, and smartly, honoring the traditions of the South by recreating a classic Southern dessert. Grated butter in the crust makes it more crisp cracker-like and and a shade less flaky, and two types of pecans, dark and light roast, make for a more consistent pecan flavor. But don’t take my word for it. Read the recipe here.

Three Babes Bakeshop, San Francisco (Chocolate Pecan): Warning: After you eat just one piece of this pie – baked by two-not-three, yes, babes and sold out of the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market -- you will never want to eat anything sweet ever again. Hey, but what a great way to go, carried off to Savoryville on rivers of rich chocolate, graham crackers (gluten-free!), Karo syrup, and those delectable roasted pecans. And if you’re not desiring to end the sugar-fix phase of your life just yet, the Babes have been known to turn out amazing pumpkin, bourbon-pecan, and bittersweet-chocolate-pecan pies. Not in the Bay Area? They’ll ship their chocolate-pecan and bourbon-pecan pies.

Foodie Friday: Stollen Moments

Foodie Friday has returned, and for those of you who are wondering where it’s been and why it’s back, let’s just say it was a very popular part of a blog that is no more, people missed it, I missed it, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to do it again.

 Now, on to the food. 

 What’s the best holiday food? All of them, except duck’s-blood soup. And what’s the best thing about holiday eating? Everything – except losing weight in January.

Actually, some of the the best holiday edibles are baked goods. Almost every European country has its special holiday bread, and most of those breads made it over here, where they were Americanized to varying degrees and transformed into the carby delectables we enjoy today. 

Here are some of our favorites.

Stollen

Stollen is a German fruitcake full of rum-soaked fruits and rich butter dough. Like many holiday carbs, the flavor actually improves with age, as the ingredients interact, the rum mellows, and the butter just keeps doing its buttery thing. 

The hands-down best stollen come from the Dresden Stollen Bakers, but shuckie-darn they’re all sold out for 2018, so we choose the stollen from Wisconsin’s New Glarus Bakery. It features almonds, butter, imported spices, Myers rum, two kinds of raisins, and a roll of marzipan down the middle, just because marzipan. The bakery also features other traditional European holiday favorites like pear bread (dried apples and pears in profusion, with the smallest amount of dough for a wrap) and bratzeli (Swiss pizzelles). They’ll ship, but we recommend picking up your treats in person. Why? Because New Glarus is cute as a Swiss bug’s ear, especially around the holidays, and you can visit the New Glarus Brewery on your way out of town and get one of their special only-in-Wisconsin holiday brews like Uff-Da Bock. That’s why.

Babka

Babka is sweet yeast bread traditionally eaten by Jews around Hanukkah – sweet challah, basically. Traditional versions can have raisins, nuts, and candied fruits, but the version we like, from New York’s Breads Bakery, has chocolate. And pie. And if there’s one thing we love, it’s two things we love mashed up together, like sweet bread and pie. The chocolate babka pie is New York-expensive ($52.95) and temporarily sold out, but keep trying, because if you’re like us, this is something you need.

Julekake

If that looks suspiciously like “Yule cake,” you got it. Julekake is less sweet than some of the other holiday yeast bombs, but with a generous sprinkling of candied fruits and raisins along with cardamom, that go-to Scandinavian spice, it’ll hold you ‘til dessert. The best place to get your hands on some is a place that’s more Scandinavian than ABBA’s wardrobe, like Denny’s 5th Avenue Bakery in Minneapolis. If you don’t see julekake ask for it. They’ll haul out the cardamom and fix you up in a jiffy.

Panettone

Another country heard from – literally. Italy’s take on the whole stollen-julekake thing is panettone. Like the others, it’s a yeasty, fruity bread. Unlike the others, it has a measure of lightness to it – or it can when it’s made right. Avoid the oversized muffins that pass for grocery-store panettone and grab yourself a specialty panettone From Roy, in – natch! – New York. They’re not cheap ($49.99), but the unbelievable rarely is. And after you hear “chocolate candied-orange panettone,” is there anything more to say other than, “Yes, please”?

Cozonac

So how far afield do you want to go? Cozonac sounds like a lethal New Orleans cocktail or an asthma medicine, but it’s merely the Romanian/Bulgarian take on all the above. It’s hard to find in North America now that Pastisserie Angelica has shuffled off the mortal coil (depriving us of another excuse – er, reason – to visit Montreal), but if you stay in Canada you can find them seasonally at Pias’ Passion Bakery in Toronto. And ‘tis the season. 

Kringle

Maybe you think of kringle as seasonal, but in the Upper Midwest kringle isn’t just for breakfast anymore – and not just on Christmas morning, either. Every day is a kringle kinda day, but if you’re looking to lay in a holiday supply of these fruity, nutty, flaky, ring-shaped Danish delights, there’s only one place to go – Racine, Wis., home to more than half-a-dozen kringle bakeries.

This Chicago Tribune piece has the low-down on the players, but our bets are Larsen’s and Bendtsen’s – Larsen’s for the extra-special bourbon-pecan kringle made with genuine Maker’s Mark, and Bendtsen’s for their dedication to keeping things handmade.

“Versus a card, kringles are something tangible,” says Larsen’s General Manager Don Hutchinson. “And, of course, they taste good.” That they do.

Bolo Rei

This is the Portuguese take on the king cake (move up the page for details), only more bread-like and less doughnutty. It’s awfully good, though hard to find outside of the motherland. However, this time of year bolo rei is always on the menu at Natas Pastries in Thousand Oaks, Cal. It’s just as you remember it from the old country – and if you don’t remember it from the home country, that’s okay. It’s just like that. And Thousand Oaks could use a little love right now, so order one for yourself and one for a friend.

Everything Else

Or maybe just everything. Basically, if you’re looking for something A) holiday, B) baked, C) European, and D) delicious, you’ll find it at Bennison Cakes in Evanston, Ill., as this entry from an earlier Foodie Friday column points out:

“Many of the most delectable holiday treats are European, and this North Shore tradition makes them all: Weinachtstollen … croquenbouche (a tree of cream puffs filled with Grand Marnier pastry cream and held together with caramel), buche de Nöel (Yule log), pfeffernüsse (nut cookies flavored with honey and cognac), zimsterne (cinnamon-almond stars), springerle (anise-flavored pressed cookies), julekake … and cardamom coffee cake. And though we are sorely tempted by the holiday-themed petit fours and the rum-eggnog pie, we are saving them for another plate.”

You may be tempted to try all these goodies, but take our advice: Savor. They keep well. And if you can’t, there’s always next year.

Hope you like the relaunched Foodie Friday. If you do, let us know. And come back next Friday, y’hear? It’s the holidays, and there’s so much good stuff to write about.

Nov. 26: Toffee

It’s officially toffee season in our house, and that means stocking up on butter and pecans and shaving off a few calories here and there to justify one more piece of nutty, chocolaty, brown-sugary goodness.

I wrote this for a long-gone blog, and dusted it off just for you, a little sooner than the Friday before Christmas this time, because a recipe this sweet deserves to be shared. Happy Holidays!

This is the Friday before Christmas, and foodwise, there should be only one thing on your mind.

OHMIGOSHCHRISTMASISNEXTWEEKANDIHAVENTMADEANYTHING!

Exactly. So hearing that the bûche de Noël is to die for at Angelina in Paris really does you no good, since there are people right outside, on the stoop with their fingers poised over the doorbell, and you need something fantastic to give them right this minute – and if not right this minute, certainly within the next 10, after which they will start gnawing on table legs in hopes they might be made of marzipan.

Okay. So let’s break from the usual Foodie Friday routine and help you out of that particular predicament, because believe us, we’ve been right there with you, more times than we’ve had hot meals involving sea cucumber.

You're going to feed those people some toffee, and here’s what you do. Grab a stick of butter from the fridge. (You need to be far enough along in your foodie evolution that you have a stick of butter in your fridge. If there are people on your stoop with their fingers poised at the doorbell and all you have is a half-stick of Blue Bonnet and some squeeze Parkay, your only option is to hide behind your sofa for several hours until they wander away.)

Pack brown sugar so that it fills a three-quarters-cup measuring cup. Grab a 9x9 or 8x8 pan and sprinkle a layer of pecans in the bottom. If you don’t have pecans any tree nut will do, this side of coconuts.

Find a heavy-bottomed pot, dump in the brown sugar and butter, turn the heat to medium, and start stirring. The butter will begin to melt and the brown sugar will start to liquefy. Perfect. When the mixture starts bubbling in the middle, start a timer and grab a beverage BUT DON’T STOP STIRRING. Who said you could stop stirring?

Stir the mixture and drink the beverage for around seven minutes. The mixture will be a darker brown by then, and quite cohesive. You, on the other hand, will not be, if you make more than one batch of this in an evening and have a beverage per batch.

After seven minutes remove the mixture from the heat and pour it over the pecans in the pan. Sprinkle two-thirds of a package of chocolate chips over that, cover the pan with a metal cookie sheet and start eating the remaining chocolate chips, like you need our permission to do that.

After you’ve polished off the chips, remove the cookie sheet and spread around the melted chocolate with a spatula. When the chocolate chips no longer look chip-like, sprinkle chopped or powdered pecans over everything.

Go answer the door, and invite your guests to burn their tongues on the barely not-boiling toffee, or have them wait half an hour until it’s edible. (When you put it that way they’ll want to wait, no question.)

After half an hour of cooling, break the toffee into pieces and enjoy. You can share it with your friends, but you won’t want to.

And that is our Christmas gift to you. Joyeux Noël, fröhliche Weinachten, and we’ll see you on the other side!

July 24: Sweet Corn, Zucchini, And Tomatoes

Do you really need a recipe? Give the corn a quick boil and a long cooldown, cook the zucchini with olive oil and garlic about a minute less than you think you should, slice the tomatoes, throw on some salt and pepper (and maybe some olive oil and a jalapeño-lime white balsamic, if you're feeling fancy), and set to it. No meat, no mess, no problem.

Of all the things in life that we overthink, cooking might be at the top of the list. It's summer; keep it fresh, simple, and delicious, and you've won.

July 24: The Summer Tomato

Before you get too besotted with the things to think rationally, walk out to the garden and pluck a tomato off the vine. Nothing too big or ostentatious; something a little smaller than a tennis ball should do. 

Feel it in your hand, warm and alive and slightly heavy with juice, and remember that it was your care, the watering and weeding, that brought it to you in this state of perfection.

Grasp it like an apple and bite in, sucking down the seeds and juice to keep it from spreading down your shirt (a light-colored tee, of course, because what's eating a summer tomato without an element of danger?).

Take all the flavors – the fruitiness, the meatiness, the salt – and commit it to memory. You'll need those memories when the days turn short and sharp and the store-bought tomatoes taste like pasteboard and wire.

If there were only two or three of these available all summer we'd cherish the summer tomato like it were a porterhouse; instead, we have to force ourselves to acknowledge that they really are perfect in their roundness and redness, and we have two months' more of these memories to look forward to.

Thank you for that.

July 17: Sam Sifton

Psssst! Sam Sifton is being brilliant again. Don't care if you cook the recipes. Subscribe to the newsletter and read. It's as good as eating, almost.

July 5: The Summer Strawberry

To paraphrase one of the greatest unknown books ever, Ernie Pyle's Home Country, I don't know whether you know the fresh, glorious pleasure of the first strawberry of summer. To me, the first strawberry of summer – a strawberry you pick yourself, preferably, from a field still and damp from the night and surrounded by the sounds of nature awakening to a long, bright day – is one of the most sensuous yet one of the most melancholy tastes you will ever experience. 

A ripe berry explodes with a fruitiness that carries memories of other fruits – oranges and apples and blueberries and pears – all borne on a current of moisture taken from the earth and transformed miraculously. Water into wine has nothing on water into the lusciousness that gushes from a fresh strawberry. Sweet communion, indeed.

Berries are fragile beyond belief, and like the full taste of a field-picked berry popped into the mouth shortly after dawn, their experience is not highly portable. Over the kitchen sink while being cleaned, yes. Crushed slightly and spooned over still-warm shortcake, probably. Snatched from the refrigerator the next day, probably not.

It's the knowledge that such a pleasure can be so fleeting gives a summer strawberry the richness of melancholy. Yes, it will return. But will it be the same? One can never say for certain.

June 21, 2018: Burger, Owen & Engine, Chicago

The debate over the best pizza, and the best type of pizza, is a never-ending Hudson River of invective. (There's really no debate, though. It's thin-crust, New Haven-style. Boom.) Why is the debate so much less passionate over the best burger?

It's not like Americans eat fewer burgers than pizza. Actually, one of the big reasons why IHOP pulled the IHOB stunt was because all the metrics were in favor of burgers, and none were favoring pancakes.

Maybe the reason for the civil debate on the best burger is that there are fewer types of burgers than pizza. Actually, there's one: the burger. Now, go figure out the best one.

That's easy: The best burger for me has always been and will always be the burger from Chicago's Owen & Engine. 

Everything you could want in a burger is here. Juicy? Like one of Anita Bryant's oranges. Flavor? Off the chart, from a mix of flavorful cuts and spot-on seasoning. Presentation? Flawless. Sides? Impeccable, especially if you go with the pork rinds as an appetizer.

Eat all the burgers you want, establish a firm baseline, and then go to Owen & Engine and prepare to have your burger mind blown. 

'Coz that's what the best does.

June 8, 2018

Dang. And now Anthony Bourdain's gone. As M.F.K. Fisher and many others have shown, some of the best writing is food writing ... when it's also travel writing done right, which means people writing. Write about people in interesting places cooking and eating wonderful food, and it's hard to go wrong.

Fortunately the wonderful Sam Sifton has provided a pitch-perfect remembrance here. Read it, cook the food, and savor everything – especially life. That's what it's about.

June 6, 2018: Lemon Meringue Tart

We. Love. Lemon. And we can't get enough of this lemon meringue tart from New York Times Cooking. (If you haven't subscribed to the Times' Cooking newsletter, get on that right now. Sam Sifton is one of the joys of this life.) This is not only the perfect summer dessert, this is the perfect dessert, and not only is this the perfect dessert, but it's the perfect food. And you get to use a blowtorch when you make it.