Walk up to most bars and order a julep, and you’ll find yourself facing a glass of bourbon, muddled mint, and sugar: the classic mint julep. But to the cocktail purist, “julep” doesn’t mean mint. It’s a type of drink, one in which any spirit (not just bourbon) is mixed with any herb or spice (not just mint) and any sweetening element (not just sugar). With that definition in mind, we decided to start riffing. Of course, there’s a reason the mint julep is the most famous version of the drink—it’s a perfectly balanced beverage—so we took it as our starting point. 

The first stop was the herb: we swapped out the mint for its cousin, basil, which has some similar notes, but whose aromatic sweetness and clean flavor completely transforms the drink. To emphasize the punched-up herbal element, we turned to Irish whiskey in lieu of the traditional bourbon. In Irish whiskey, we found a subtle citrus note that intermingled beautifully with the basil and added to the drink’s summery feel. With a splash of simple syrup for sweetness, we poured it over crushed ice to serve—this is a strong drink, and it mellows as the ice melts.

The post Basil Julep appeared first on Saveur.

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.

The post Papa’s Favorite Wild West Hamburger appeared first on Saveur.

Tomato and Avocado Sandwich

Goat Cheese and Olive Tapenade Sandwich

Ricotta and Honey Sandwich

Radish and Butter Sandwich

Peanut Butter and Bacon Sandwich

Ham and Hard-Boiled Egg Sandwich

Smoked Gouda and Apple Butter Sandwich

Cucumbers and Cream Cheese

Sharp Cheddar Sandwich

The post 9 Sandwiches That Use Just 2 Ingredients Each appeared first on Saveur.

If my ideal hamburger were a novel, its author would be Ernest Hemingway: I prefer my burgers powerful and spare, brutal yet refined. But when I learned that Papa himself was partial to a maximalist patty—one containing minced carrot and tomato, cheddar cheese, grated apple, capers, India relish, and a brace of spices all mixed directly into the beef—I had to try it out for myself.

Hemingway’s hamburger recipe resurfaced only recently, one of 2,500 pieces of ephemera digitized in 2013 by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The typewritten page is a testament to the meticulousness with which Hemingway approached food. Titled “Papa’s Favorite Wild West Hamburger” and covered in handwritten marginalia, it’s a literary work in its own right. “Let the meat sit, quietly marinating,” he writes. “Now make four fat, juicy patties with your hands.”

While the document is fascinating, the burger itself is spectacular. Juicy and vibrant, the complex patty stands in stark contrast with Hemingway’s unembellished prose. But like the man’s writing, it’s masterful.

See the recipe for Papa’s Favorite Wild West Hamburger »

The post A Writer’s Beef appeared first on Saveur.

The cheese sandwich in The Catcher in the Rye; the raspberry cordial in Anne of Green Gables; the madeleines in Swann’s Way—in my favorite books, the food is as important to me as any character. Artist Dinah Fried is inclined to agree. In Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals (HarperCollins, April 2014), she brings the food of fiction to life with beautifully staged photos of literature’s greatest repasts. Each shot is accompanied by an excerpt from its inspiration, with annotations that give gastronomic and historical contexts. A visual library of mouthwatering moments, with the occasional witty aside (the meal for Valley of the Dolls is a sink top scattered with pills), it feeds the imagination.

Clockwise from top left:

The strawberry picnic in Emma is one of Jane Austen’s most memorable scenes. “I wanted to do an Austen novel, but she actually doesn’t discuss food very often, which is something I didn’t really think about before getting started,” says Fried. “There’s so much more attention paid to the conversation, to the relationships. But I remembered that the strawberry-picking scene in Emma, a picnic scene where the character Mrs. Elton goes on and on about how much she loves strawberries as a method, on Austen’s part, to demonstrate the annoyance of a certain personality type. I love the image of these women in their clean dresses and white gloves on a strawberry picnic, a scenario in which they’ll probably get them all covered in juice.”

The hero of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn seeks solace in fast food, which was a challenge for Fried. “I don’t eat very much meat, and I definitely don’t eat White Castle. Plus, I live in San Francisco right now, and there aren’t locations out here where I am. But I have a friend who lives in Bushwick, and I asked him if he’d have any desire to go there for me. He went—I think he might have gotten himself sliders—and he asked the people behind the counter if they’d just give him empty versions of the burgers’ packaging. These in the picture are the frozen White Castle sliders that you’ll find at the grocery store, so that was an access thing. I had people all over the place going and getting me things. The scene was a very fun one to do, because it was such a break from the images that are so neatly styled. The protagonist in Motherless Brooklyn is a man who has Tourette’s syndrome and all sorts of weird tics. One thing that calms him down is eating, so throughout the book he drives in his car and eats White Castle.”

In A Confederacy of Dunces, a hot dog sets the protagonist’s heart aflutter. “It’s sort of a disgusting scene,” says Fried of the photograph’s inspiration. “The protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a grotesque character, a slovenly guy who lives with his mother. In this particular scene, he follows his nose to the hot dog, inspired by the scent of it on the air. The book takes place in the late 1970’s, so the prop styling was a challenge: I wanted a Coke can that didn’t have the pop-tab that we have now, which could have been quite a search. But my husband has a lot of stuff that used to be in his grandfather’s basement, and we happened to find in a cabinet a Coke can that was from this precise era. I kept stumbling upon things that felt just right. I’d find myself collecting different types of paper napkins wherever I went, and among them were the perfect napkins. I want the props to feel time- and place-appropriate. My favorite thing about this whole project was fixating, being obsessed with finding something, and then discovering exactly what I was looking for.”

Johanna Spyri’s Heidi elevates simple cheese and bread to an incredible feast. “For me, this meal is such an intense childhood memory,” Fried says. “The description of Heidi, who is an orphan, living with her grandfather, and she’s so excited as she watches him melt cheese on toast for their dinner. For me that’s a scene I remember reading as a child and being completely entranced by. For some reason, in children’s literature for girls the main characters are so often orphans, they’re deprived, and when they’re given these small things that feel luxurious to them, they respond in a way that’s so memorable for the reader.”

Few meals are as iconic as the mad tea party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Of the shot, Fried says: “This was one of the first in this series that I did. There’s actually very little food in it; it’s a nonsensical scene with an elaborate table setup, and the only thing they’re serving is tea. I found the props in a variety of places: the little silver pieces were my grandmother’s, most of the plates came from Savers in Rhode Island, a big thrift store, and the silverware came from a friend. I was asking around for props, and a friend dismissed my request saying, ‘You don’t want my stuff, it’s all mismatched and crazy.’ And I was like, ‘No, that’s exactly what I want! Wild and off-kilter!'”

Canned fruit is a near-unimaginable luxury in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. “This is the most spare of the images,” Fried says. “It was a great challenge because McCarthy—whose writing style is also so spare—is describing a moment where a father and son, who are starving, find a trove of canned food. It’s cafeteria food, we as readers don’t think of it as a luxury, but in this context it was everything; the characters had to slow themselves down because they were so hungry. It’s a very bleak landscape, in which this is a moment of great intensity, and so with the photo, I asked myself how to make this fruit look alive in the context of something that’s otherwise very dreary.”

The post Literary Lunches appeared first on Saveur.

It wasn’t the beaches that made me fall in love with the ritzy French Caribbean island of St. Barths. It wasn’t the sultry nightclubs, the villa-studded green hills, or the sweeping ocean views. What did me in was breakfast.

Sunrise on any tropical island is a beautiful thing, but where I was staying, at Hotel Le Toiny on the southeastern shore—the côte sauvage, rocky and beachless with great, thundering waves—the early morning is particularly extraordinary. The ocean there is dotted with surfers who crest and crash in the pink and yellow light, and each morning I’d sit on the terrace with my breakfast and stare at them, mesmerized by the distant rhythms of the rising and falling bodies. On one particular day, while reaching for something to spread on my baguette, I picked up a small jar that was sitting on the table. It was filled with a pale-green condiment that smelled rich and bright—a simple jam of coconut milk, lime juice, and sugar, made fresh just a few hundred yards away in the hotel’s kitchen.

The smooth, sweet jam—literally melting into my warm bread—turned out to be a revelation. With its multiple Hermès boutiques and yacht-filled harbor, one tends to forget that tiny St. Barths is in the West Indies, not the Côte d’Azure. But in that one bite of coconut jam on baguette, it all came together. St. Barths is an island that was colonized by the French in the 18th century. Its harsh soil meant it wasn’t much good for agriculture, but its deep-water harbor made it a natural trade port, filling the markets with sugar cane, citrus, and plants imported from Pacific colonies, like coconut, which thrived under the Caribbean sun—not to mention wheat flour so that the French expatriates could bake loaves of the bread that reminded them of home.

This jam, with its unmistakably tropical flavors—tangy lime and rich coconut—spread generously on a chewy, crusty baguette crystallized the French Caribbean island’s character. The confluence of cultures and flavors in my simple breakfast served as my own communion with the island’s complex personality, no surfboard necessary.

**See the recipe for Coconut-Lime Preserves »

The post Sunshine in a Jar appeared first on Saveur.

​

Let’s begin with an important fact: The relatively new Long Island City restaurant M. Wells Steakhouse has a menu item called “Caviar Sandwich,” and it is actually, literally, a caviar sandwich. Two inch-thick slices of buttered brioche bookend a modest smear of butter and a massive amount of sturgeon roe that’s been compressed into a dense, extravagant square that resembles nothing so much as a black, briny slice of cheese, a Kraft single for the czar. It’s fantastic.

I ordered the caviar sandwich for two reasons. The first: Caviar is a weakness of mine, as are sandwiches. The second, more important: It was my birthday. M. Wells Steakhouse has a menu made for birthdays—or anniversaries, divorces, big raises, or new jobs. With caviar, foie gras, butter, and cream at every turn, the restaurant specializes in celebration fare, not meant for everyday eating. Beside the caviar sandwich, we kicked things off with geoduck “a la peacock”—thin-sliced crudo surrounded by a vibrant fan of radish—and an iceberg wedge that approached a platonic ideal of salty bacon and rich buttermilk dressing, cleverly pushing the salad’s high-low appeal by skipping tomato in favor of sweet-savory shards of what turned out to be dehydrated ketchup.

That was followed by an assault: Dense pretzel rolls with a cellar of violently spicy mustard; French onion soup enriched with bone marrow, with an additional marrowbone sticking up through the broiled cheese like a meaty periscope; a dish of absurdly cream-laden mashed potatoes, topped with root vegetables, topped with black truffles; and an order of two glistening, foie gras-stuffed gnocchi. After that came a massive lamb chop—warmly spiced, with a scattering of couscous—and a dish that the menu described just as “brisket,” but which our server elucidated as a one-up of chicken and waffles: A pound of meltingly tender, long-cooked beef brisket atop a slab of duck fat-fried French toast. “This,” said my husband approvingly, gesturing with his fork at our plate-cluttered table, “is fuck-you food.”

He meant it as a compliment, and I’m inclined to agree. There’s a thrilling dichotomy at play at M. Wells Steakhouse, a mood that’s equal parts nonchalance and ostentation. The restaurant nods to the classic steakhouse format—blood-red walls, masculine materials like wood and metal and leather—but the space is informal, a warehouse of a room that doesn’t try to hide its previous life as an auto body shop. The menu is so full of lobster and cream and meat and richness that it almost veers into parody, but then the prices are approachable. (Sure, the caviar sandwich is dear at fifty bucks, but besides a massive cowboy steak and a few gargantuan large-format entrees, it’s the most expensive thing on there.)

Realizing that it was my birthday, our server—refusing our full-bellied protests—insisted on bringing out a cloudlike Paris-Brest bearing both a lit candle and a full two inches of buttercream, and somehow we found the will to eat on. It felt strange—but not at all wrong—to be eating such a refined and toffee-nosed dessert against the backdrop of an open kitchen, all fire and fierceness and, unexpectedly, flapping fish. About that: Much has been made in the press of the trough full of live trout that holds pride of place just inside the kitchen area (order the Truine au Bleu as your main course and you’ll see a chef reach in, grab one, kill it, and turn it into your dinner) and maybe that’s with good reason. It’s a weird, somewhat unnecessary, entirely appealing, ultimately quite brilliant thing—it is, in short, a perfect reflection of the restaurant itself.

M. Wells Steakhouse
43-15 Crescent Street
Long Island City, New York 11101
718/786-9060

The post Where We’re Eating: M. Wells Steakhouse appeared first on Saveur.

In my whiskey collection, like that of any serious drinker of brown spirits, you’ll find a few fine specimens that I’m patiently saving for a rainy day. But there’s also a bottle I’ve been saving for a snowy one. Cocooned in a straw sleeve tied with red string lies a green glass bottle; in it, 750 milliliters of a remarkable liquid: a faithful recreation of the whisky that Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton brought along on his famously unsuccessful 1907 attempt at reaching the South Pole, three cases of which were uncovered exactly a century later by conservationists restoring the Cape Royds hut from which Shackleton and his team set out.

The bottles recovered frozen in the Antarctic ice revealed labels from Chas. Mackinlay & Co., a distillery now owned by Whyte & Mackay, whose master blender Richard Paterson set out to recreate the blend found within. Distilleries—or maybe just tastes—were different back at the turn of the previous century. Smoky and bracing, Shackleton’s is exactly the sort of whisky you’d imagine a hoarfrosted, half-starved, incorrigibly determined man in a fur-lined hood would throw back by the generous dram: more fire than water, more sharp than sweet, with a ferocious 47.3 percent alcohol by volume.

While most whiskeys have great and varied stories behind them, once the bottles are open, the spirits tend largely to demand the same kind of scenery: A warm mood, a warm fire, and warm company. But to me, Shackleton’s Scotch, with its backstory of hubris and hunger—despite never reaching the pole, the expedition ran a month overlong, and the woefully under-prepared men resorted to eating the ponies that they’d brought along to pull their sledges—demands at least a token drink outdoors, in the winter, preferably in the snow. And so as the latest winter storm swirled over New York City, I ran outside with my bottle and took a fervid swig, imagining Shackleton and his men, small figures against a vast, violent continent. And then I brought the rest of the bottle inside, where I watched the snow float and swirl beyond the sheltering safety of my window, and poured myself another glass.

Mackinlay’s Shackleton Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, $161, available at masterofmalt.com

The post Drink This Now: Mackinlay’s Shackleton Rare Old Highland Malt appeared first on Saveur.

At first glance, I could have sworn I was looking at an oil painting by a Flemish master circa 1650. But no, the still life in front of me was contemporary—and it was a photograph, one of an ongoing series constructed and shot by artist Paulette Tavormina in her New York City studio. For each image, Tavormina scours farmers’ markets for fruit, sources 17th-century Dutch tableware from antique dealers, and keeps her eyes peeled for props. (The photo above, “Lemons and Pomegranates,” includes a butterfly she found on the street and a bee from her brother’s hives.) While the scenes Tavormina builds are meant to evoke 400-year-old masterworks, she’s occasionally willing to sacrifice historical accuracy for visual appeal: “If I find something that I just fall in love with and I know they didn’t eat it in Holland in the 1600s,” she says, “well, that’s okay.”

The post Picture Perfect appeared first on Saveur.

For me, the whole thing began with radishes. When I was seven, thanks to the spiral-bound 1965 edition of the Betty Crocker Boys and Girls Cookbook—my mother’s childhood copy—I was introduced to the extraordinary notion that radishes could become roses. I learned to carve thin petals into them and drop them into ice water, where they would blossom. I’d savor them with a little sprinkle of salt.

There’s nothing new about eating raw vegetables, but in the States it wasn’t until the first half of the 20th century that an austere serving of celery sticks was recast as an opulent appetizer. The distinction is partly semantic: Fashionable French restaurants in America offered first-course relish plates of raw vegetables, referring to them in their native tongue (the word crudité itself is French for “rawness,” though the presentation may include cooked or cured ingredients), and the term caught on. To me, the definition is also an aesthetic one: Crudités live or die by their composition, by their balance of colors, and the allure of the arrangement. Whether it’s a single sliced carrot or a polychromatic cornucopia, it’s meant to be admired.

Crudités’ popularity has waxed and waned over the years. They never really went away at a certain type of gilded brasserie, but only very recently has the dish been showing up at the hipper sorts of restaurants. I’m proud not to have been a fair-weather fan—and I’m in good company. James Beard called crudités “the most appetizing dish imaginable,” and artist Wayne Thiebaud immortalized them in his 1963 painting Plate of Hors d’Oeuvres. What accounts for their timeless appeal? For me they’re the best demonstration of earthly abundance you can lay on a table. Broccoli is just a starting point; I might add wedges of raw fennel, pickled caperberries, or blanched green beans, and always several dips. I never make the same composition twice—but I always use radishes, and sometimes I even carve them into roses.

See the recipe for Creamy Watercress Dip »

See the recipe for Lemon Parmesan Dip »

See the recipe for Roasted Carrot and White Bean Dip »

The post In the Raw appeared first on Saveur.

Open since 1895 and using the same oven for over a hundred years, Syracuse’s Columbus Baking Company produces what is arguably the best Italian bread in upstate New York. Owner Jimmy Retzos is the third generation of his family to run the bakery, which makes one dough, airy and chewy, formed into three different shapes: A sandwich loaf, a round, and the most popular, a classic long loaf that regulars know to refer to just as a “flat.” Unlike some shops that get all the oven work done in the morning, Columbus keeps baking all day, meaning you can get a steaming-hot loaf—and a whiff of that sweet, yeasty, just-baked-bread smell—any time you like.

Columbus Baking Company
502 Pearl Street
Syracuse, New York 13203
315/422-2913

The post VIDEO: Columbus Baking Company in Syracuse, New York appeared first on Saveur.