David A. Ross

In the Taiwanese village where my wife grew up, three or four of the burliest men made the traditional New Year cake called nian gao (“year cake”). Bent over a cavernous wok, they gripped wooden paddles and stirred a flubbery goo made of glutinous rice flour, sugar and water. The mixture was placed in molds […]

Nearly every culture has come to the same realization: Pancakes are warming in some inner way. On rainy mornings and winter evenings, they thaw our chilled spiritual recesses. Served at festivals, holiday gatherings and reunions, they are the symbolic wheel of family and cultural unity. Show me someone who shrugs at pancakes and I’ll show […]

I haven’t perused Nathan Myhrvold’s four-volume, $600 Modernist Cuisine, but I can envision its vast architecture. I imagine it as the Brasilia of cookbooks, all elegant linearity and sun-bleached vistas of knowledge. Where to find an old bench and a shady tree? I am ambivalent about laboratory gastronomy, not in practice but in concept, no […]

Auguste Escoffier, the patriarch of all subsequent cookbook writers, includes a single éclair recipe in his Guide Culinaire (1903): “Prepare some very small Chou Paste éclairs and fill them with a purée of the trimmings and intestines of woodcock prepared à la fine Champagne then rubbed through a fine sieve and mixed with butter and […]

Pad thai belongs to an exasperating category of food in which I would also place the breakfast pancake, the Southern biscuit and the Mexican tortilla: painfully simple in concept, simply painful in execution. The challenge involves intangiblesheat, timing, touchthat have nothing to do with the comforting math of tablespoons and half cups and are all […]

Chiles rellenosa pillar of the Lenten table in Mexicobelong to a culinary category of their own: the deep-fried soufflé. The dish’s crowd appeal stems from the delightful tension between the ethereality of the egg batter and the funk of chili heat and drooling cheese. Fiesta Grill, the characteristically packed tin-shack eatery on the western outskirts […]