Ground almonds and full-fat cottage cheese lend body and flavor to this delicate and creamy strawberry cheesecake from Asa Johansson, a gardener and writer who lived on the Swedish island of Oland. For the Midsummer holiday, she served the cake with clouds of whipped cream and ripe berries.

Featured in: “A Midsummer’s Dream.“

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In 2013, this hamburger recipe resurfaced at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. After Hemingway’s death in 1961, in spite of chilly diplomatic relations, JFK and Fidel Castro put aside their differences long enough to help get many of the author’s possessions back to his family. Many documents eventually landed at the president’s library. The maximalist formula calls for minced fruits and vegetables, spices, cheese, ham, capers, and zippy India relish (the sweet, slightly piquant cucumber condiment invented by H.J. Heinz in 1889) all mixed directly into the beef. The result is juicy and vibrant, its many constituent parts melding into a single, intensely savory whole. Make your own Beau Monde seasoning—a blend of salt, onion powder, and celery seed—or get it from the Spice Islands brand, as Hemingway did.

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The defining drink of Midsummer is undoubtedly aquavit, a neutral grain- or potato-based spirit infused with a variety of herbs and spices that’s been made in Sweden since the 17th century. While most commercially produced bottles tend to the savory side—Swedish law requires that they be flavored primarily with caraway and dill—the drink lends itself to experimentatio. Enjoyed as a digestif and as a snaps (a bracing drink taken throughout the meal), to Swedes, aquavit is the spirit of celebration distilled.

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Serravalle Scrivia native and local cook Davide Gheezi makes this pasta dish with mushrooms that have been foraged, dried, and stored over the winter. The silver-dollar-size rounds of corzetti (sometimes called croxetti) are elevated with a mushroom sauce bolstered by a savory veal stock.

Find this recipe in our cookbook, SAVEUR: Italian Comfort Food

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These Malay poached rice flour dumplings, coated with shredded coconut, are plump with a filling of melted palm sugar that floods the mouth when bitten into. Pandan, the aromatic leaves of a perennial grass, gives them a green color and a vanilla-like scent.

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Fragrant leaves of pandan, a perennial grass with an intoxicating vanilla-like aroma, bring a floral dimension to this Malay dish of chicken simmered in a thick chile-spiked tomato gravy. Seasoned with coriander, cinnamon, lemongrass, and ginger and sweetened with honey, it first appeared in our June/July 2014 issue with Christopher Tan’s story “Blades of Glory.”

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A gelée—in essence, a sauce made from liquid, sugar, and gelatin—is summer dessert at its most refreshing. In this recipe, which first appeared in our June/July 2014 issue with Sophie Brickman’s story “The Feast of Life,” ripe peaches are suspended in a light, fruity gelée flavored with semisweet fizzy moscato wine. The key to this elegant sweet is letting the gelatin set up before pouring the mixture into a mold.

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Burning Urge

Every summer, tens of thousands of “burners” descend on the Black Rock Desert, toting survival supplies for the weeklong performance-art fantasia called Burning Man. Here, across more than 3,500 acres of sand under the relentless August sun, they build massive interactive art installations—a fractal meditation pod made from timber and climbing nets; a fire-breathing dragon that melts down aluminum cans for sculptures; a 21-foot-tall tetrahedron of baseball bats and softballs—and they erect hundreds of themed encampments. At the festival’s apex, a 90-foot-tall effigy, The Man, is set ablaze. I’ve been attending for eight years. Out in the desert, there’s no running water or electricity; we bring everything we need in and out: construction cranes, club-quality sound systems, and freezer trucks. Best of all, the whole place runs on a gift economy—no bartering, no buying, only giving—including the “restaurants.” I love to explore the culinary camps, where scrappy cooks whip up a bacchanalian spread—North African lamb stew, ice cream frozen on the spot with liquid nitrogen, sushi made from salmon flown to the desert. Festgoers set up countless makeshift cafes, bakeries, and supper clubs where you’re free to go in and eat your fill.

Burning Man Setup

Feels Like Home

Music plays a central role at Burning Man, where revelers like the Mohawked woman at electronic music encampment Distrikt have their choice of dance parties. But camp themes are wide ranging: Last year I came 2,000 miles from my home in New Orleans only to happen upon another French Quarter here. Five hundred people built a fever-dream version from scratch with blue, yellow, and pink pastel facades, and a massive generator powering the enclave. As in the original, food was at the heart of this French Quarter: The Santopalato Supper Club featured a different chef’s cooking each night. I traveled there, and everywhere, from my tent using the festival’s preferred mode of transportation: a bicycle. It’s amazing what you can discover peddling through the dust, like the Pacificana pop-up at Santopalato. Marketing consultant Victoria Davies grilled ginger flank steak and chile-laced sweet-potato cakes over an open fire. Down the street, Darias Jonker and other volunteers at Black Rock Bakery turned out crusty breads from an old airport Cinnabon oven. The efforts of these temporary restaurateurs are astonishing. Yehonatan Koenig, an Israeli-born ad agency director from California, started planning six months out for his special boil dinner, for which he flew in 100 pounds of live crawfish, cooking everything in two 80-quart pots.

Burning Man Santopalato Supper Club

City Limits

Even with room for 68,000, Burning Man sold out last year. It may seem impossible to find anyone or anything in this sprawling temporary “Black Rock City,” but it’s laid out with street signs in a semicircle around The Man and a central temple. Some camps are mobile, though, setting up off the packed, curving grid of streets in unannounced locations: To find the popular Dust City Diner—a ’50s-era greasy spoon run by California artists Michael Brown and David Cole—I biked into the central open sand, searching for its LED sign. At a Formica counter jerry-rigged in a flatbed truck, servers in blond beehive wigs sporting names like Dixie dished out coffee and pancakes on classic blue china. At other eateries, some of my favorite things are the sweets. When you’re tussling with sandstorms, you just kind of want a treat—something like Davies’ yogurt cake with passion fruit sauce—to keep your spirits lifted and primed for yet another crazy experience on, say, a 30-foot pendulum swing or an animal-shaped art car.

Burning Man 50’s Era Diner

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Nothing beats the satisfaction of cracking open a fresh coconut. Young varieties contain only a thin lining of meat. So when we were making onde-onde, we used mature brown-husked ones, which have a thicker layer of flesh. To determine ripeness, choose a heavy coconut that audibly sloshes with liquid when shaken. If fresh coconuts aren’t readily available, we have a trick. Unsweetened, dehydrated coconut meat—not to be confused with the moist, sweetened variety—can be steamed and used as a substitute for freshly grated. To find it, look for it labeled as coconut powder, desiccated, or finely shredded for baking. To rehydrate desiccated coconut, boil 1″ water in a 14″ flat-bottom wok fitted with an 11″ bamboo steamer. Spread a layer of coconut in a 9″ pie plate and place the plate in the steamer base. Cover and steam the coconut, stirring occasionally, until it is moist and fluffy, about 10 minutes. Let coconut cool completely before using.

See the recipe for Onde-Onde »

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Maine’s rocky shoreline and frigid coastal waters provide the ideal habitat for Homarus americanus, the American lobster, a cold-loving crustacean that hides in crevices and feeds on mollusks and baitfish. For our clambake, we mail-ordered these lobsters from such outfits as Cousins Maine Lobsters and Hancock Gourmet Lobster, one of 54 companies in the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative. Lobsters release a toxic by-product that renders them inedible if they die before cooking, so they must be either precooked or shipped live; these sustainable options are sent from Maine within 24 hours of harvest, and they arrive super fresh and ready to cook. They should be prepared quickly, as lobsters start to metabolize their flavorful nutrients as soon as they are taken from the water.

See more stories about the food of Maine in our Essential Maine guide »

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A century ago, World War I broke out, and with it came a cocktail. While blends of champagne, cognac, and lemon preceded it, without the war, the drink may have been lost to obscurity; surely, it would have a different name, as “French 75” was American slang for the 75-mm field gun. One tale credits it to flier Raoul Lufbery of the French air squadron the Lafayette Escadrille, who allegedly spiked his bubbly with cognac for oomph. Easier to pinpoint is the modern recipe made with gin; historian David Wondrich says it first ran in the 1927 bartending book Here’s How! Today the 75 still inspires. A rosé take from San Francisco’s Slanted Door, a blood orange one from Manhattan’s Louro—like the namesake gun, these are light but pack a wallop. As WWI reporter Irvin S. Cobb wrote, “I couldn’t tell whether a shell or the drink hit me.”

See the recipe for the Classic French 75 »

See the recipe for the Sicilian 75 »

See the recipe for the Pomme Rosé »

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