Eater - All

New Year’s Day Is Incomplete Without Soup Joumou

2024-12-24T10:00:00-05:00

AS Foodstudio/Shutterstock

Also known as “Haitian Independence Soup” or “Freedom Soup,” soup joumou is a taste of Haitian history and independence

New Year’s Day is one of the most exciting days of the year for me. Not just because it signifies the beginning of a new year, or because it means a new me (and the beginning of a resolution I’ll probably drop within a month). No, it’s because I get to indulge in a big bowl of soup joumou.

Soup joumou is a slightly sweet, incredibly savory squash soup that originated in Haiti. The soup is built on a base of either calabaza squash, butternut squash, or pumpkin; filled with root vegetables like carrots, potatoes, and turnips; seasoned with epis, a blend of peppers, garlic, and herbs found in most Haitian dishes; and topped with some form of carb. Every Haitian household and chef has their own recipe and way of preparing the dish. Many like to use rigatoni as their carb of choice, while some may opt for spaghetti. Others choose to use rice, a staple ingredient in Haitian cuisine, rather than pasta in their soup. Some Haitian chefs and home cooks prefer to keep the soup vegetarian whereas others, like my mom, use both beef and chicken.

“A lot of us think that soup joumou is this very one specific thing,” says Nadege Fleurimond, an author and the chef-owner of BunNan and Fleurimond Catering in Brooklyn. “It does vary from household to household.”

No matter what differences may lie between every cup, bowl, or pot of soup joumou, one thing remains the same: soup joumou means freedom.

On January 1,1804, Haiti became the Western Hemisphere’s first Black republic — the result of a 13-year revolution during which enslaved Haitians fought against and overthrew their French rulers. For approximately three centuries prior, the French and Spanish had enslaved the indigenous Taino people on the island of Hispaniola (the landmass that houses Haiti and the Dominican Republic), as well as captured Africans. The Taino population was decimated by disease, war, and forced labor. The relocated African population of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) was similarly devastated by chattel slavery, the main driving economic force of the region. In 1791, enslaved Haitians led by general Toussaint L’Ouverture began their revolt against Napoleon Bonaparte and their enslavers. Now known as the Haitian Revolution, the 13-year battle had ripple effects across the Western Hemisphere — including Bonaparte’s decision to sell Louisiana to the United States — and marked the beginning of Haitian sovereignty.

To celebrate their newly realized independence, Haitians began to indulge in the things that their enslavers had prohibited, including soup joumou. Under French rule, enslaved Haitians were required to harvest the ingredients and cook the soup, but were never allowed to consume it, as soup joumou was a delicacy that was reserved exclusively for the white enslavers. When Haitian independence was realized on January 1, 1804, Haitians across the country began a new tradition: every year on New Year’s Day, Haitian Independence Day, they will eat the soup.

This story of triumph, celebration, and reclamation is one that I, and many other Haitians and their descendants, grew up hearing. Soup joumou provided a simple vessel for learning Haitian history that we weren’t necessarily taught in school. When I was growing up, my mother would receive a pot of soup from a friend or family member every year. As my sister and I gathered around the pot, bowls in hand, ready for my mom’s ladle to provide us with our highly anticipated serving, Mom would remind us that soup joumou is a symbol of our freedom and how hard our ancestors fought for it.

The sharing of soup joumou — and as a result, Haitian history — is a time-honored tradition held by Haitians everywhere. “In our neighborhood [growing up in Haiti], families would go and trade soup with each other,” says Wesly Jean Simon, chef-owner of the Brooklyn restaurants Djon Djon and Market Bar. “Somebody would come and drop off a bowl, then I’d go drop off a bowl from my mother to another family member and then we’d all trade soup.”

In the United States, Haitians are sharing the soup with their communities, whether its members are Haitian or not. When we spoke, Fleurimond had just finished shooting a soup joumou tutorial for her social channels to help demystify the daunting dish. On December 26, she will be hosting a live soup joumou cooking class in Brooklyn in partnership with Little Haiti BK. In addition to teaching others how to make the soup, Fleurimond makes it for her family and friends who aren’t Haitian. “I think it is on our part as Haitians to keep sharing [soup joumou],” Fleurimond says.

For the last five years, Simon has been giving out free bowls of the soup at his restaurants. He also brings some to local hospitals and police precincts in order to show essential works his appreciation. Last year, he gave out 900 cups of soup to his community; this year, he hopes to hit 2,000. When it comes to giving out free soup, his focus is split between providing a little piece of home to Haitian migrants who may be struggling with food insecurity and non-Haitians who have never interacted with Haitian food before. “I know the Haitians are going to come anyway and get it,” he says. “But I focus on non-Haitians because it’s a part of Haitian history and I want the world to remember our history.”

When I moved out after graduating college, my mom began making extra-large portions of soup joumou and bringing a pot over to my apartment on New Year’s Day, providing enough for me to share with my friends. As I split my bounty that first year with my roommates, neither of whom are of Haitian descent, I made sure to share the dish’s storied history with them. Now, every year, even as early as Thanksgiving, my roommates ask me if my mother is bringing soup joumou again. One of them even told her co-workers that while her family doesn’t have any holiday traditions surrounding New Year’s Day, she looks forward to having my mom’s soup joumou with me. “That’s the beauty of it,” says Fleurimond. “Soup joumou is becoming a part of other people’s tradition.”

The Year’s Biggest Food Memoir Left Me Wanting More

2024-12-23T13:49:20-05:00

Ina Garten. | NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty

I’ve always liked Ina Garten. So why couldn’t I like “Be Ready When the Luck Happens”?

I’ve always liked Ina Garten. I’ve found affinity in the shared syllable in our first names, our mutual appreciation of chambray shirts, the fact that I too once had recognizable bangs. I appreciate the way she’s always seemed to see food as joyful and that she was always so eager about what she’d just made that she’d eat it on air.

I loved the way Garten paired a cool ease in the kitchen with a warmth of character. I, like most fans, longed for a relationship like hers with Jeffrey. And I didn’t grow up with a grandmother, so I imagined that what I saw in Ina wasn’t dissimilar to what other people — the ones who had “mommoms” to make cookies with at Christmas — gleaned from theirs.

So when Garten’s memoir was released this year, I was eager to read it. Be Ready When the Luck Happens, which hit shelves in October, adds depth to Garten’s public image. It marks the first time she has spoken publicly about more difficult experiences in her life, like the troubled childhood she and her brother experienced with both physically and emotionally abusive parents. She reveals that she and Jeffrey briefly separated in the 1970s, when the two of them had mismatched views on their roles in their relationship.

Penguin Random House

The book builds out the couple’s ever-fascinating lore: Garten in the doldrums as a nuclear policy analyst at the White House; Jeffrey transitioning from the military to governmental roles to investment banking. Setting everything on its new path, Garten makes an offer on a specialty food store in the Hamptons, despite never having had professional food experience and not even living in New York at the time.

Her new chapter gets off to a rocky start. On her first busy Memorial Day in business, she runs out of baked goods at Barefoot Contessa. The solution: She sends Jeffrey to buy out an entire local bakery so they can resell their pastries and earn the goodwill of customers for the rest of the season.

In some ways, Be Ready When the Luck Happens is an affirming story of getting your life together on your own timeline. Garten doesn’t transition into food until the age of 30, after years of essentially hating every job she has. In other ways, it’s redemptive. After growing up with a father who said that nobody would ever love her, Garten finds that she’s loved and adored, not only by Jeffrey but also by her dedicated fans. Overall, it’s a story of being gutsy sometimes in order to get what you want.

Over the course of the book, the couple goes from being broke in France on their honeymoon — when they’d followed the $5-a-day budget that was popular among Americans in Europe in the 1970s — to owning a multi-story apartment in the Left Bank that took years of renovations to be just right. They eventually agree that the single best day of their lives was the day Jeffrey came home to their new, perfectly customized Paris apartment. It’s a tidy, full-circle story and one that’s meant to inspire.

So then, why didn’t it sit right for me? Ultimately, Garten succeeds because she accepts what comes her way. She takes risks, she says yes, she figures it out after the fact. At least this is what she argues: You have to, as the book’s title states, just be ready when the luck happens. But this — the fundamental premise of the book — is where she loses me: Most of the time when she says luck, what she really means is money. And in the way she tells her story Garten herself seems to lack this awareness.

It’s folly to believe that any “tell-all” is the real truth, but my problem with Be Ready When the Luck Happens was that it felt intellectually dishonest, attributing to luck to what is largely the effect of a very comfortable financial cushion and circumstances that make it hard to fail too much.

Consider that Paris apartment again. One day, while Ina is filming her show in the Hamptons, she receives a call from the apartment’s caretaker: A flooded bathtub in the apartment above theirs has damaged the Gartens’ newly renovated home. “I should have been distraught about the damage; that would have been the normal reaction,” Garten writes. “But, no, all I could think about was the real estate. This was the chambre de bonne above our living room that I had wanted to buy.”

Instead of having the owner cover the damages, the Gartens offer to buy the apartment, allowing them to add on a cupola and expand their second floor. Again, Garten emphasizes a sense of luck: “This time I did know ‘my good breaks from my bad,’ and this was very good!”

This type of thing happens a lot. When Garten fails to make payroll early into her ownership of Barefoot Contessa, she tells Jeffrey, who asks his bosses at Lehman Brothers if he could have the money in his retirement account if he were to quit his job. “The answer was yes, but they thought it was crazy to quit for that reason (as did I!) and offered him a loan,” she writes, comparing it to “something out of one of those wonderful O. Henry stories.”

To be fair, Garten hides neither the fact of the success that she and Jeffrey eventually attain, nor the impressive set of connections that come with it. This keeps the book fun and frothy. Garten’s friend “Jen” is the actress Jennifer Garner, while her friend “Rob” is Chicago director Rob Marshall; at a dinner party, Jeffrey is casually seated next to Nora Ephron. I imagine this is what many people came to this book for in the first place.

Everyone reading the book is aware of the money. We’re reading for escapism, but we live in the real world. So why does Garten pretend that money isn’t the real thing making her decisions possible? She seems clouded by the constant of her stability, to the point that she’s lost sight of the fact that most people cannot ride on this level of financial risk, hoping luck will come their rescue.

This is, to be clear, not a plea for the kind of disclosure culture that’s been fueled by the bad-faith online reader: when authors feel they must pre-empt any statement with acknowledgment of all the things they might not be taking into account. What I mean is that we all learn to narrativize the events of our lives. We come up with the logline, keeping to ourselves the full story and our feelings on it. This seems especially true when one is writing an entire memoir.

Still, ideally, we know when what we’ve narrativized is a little bit bullshit. To me, the best memoirs acknowledge that; they interrogate their own narrative. The risky thing is coming to believe that bullshit yourself.

Garten does herself a disservice by attributing so much to luck; what she downplays is her shrewdness in business and her bullheadedness when needed. Consider another “lucky” moment: Due to a lease dispute, Garten realizes she needs to move her store to a new location. When the space opens up across the street, with a landlord offering her a better lease, she sees the potential for the market of her dreams. But it needs a $150,000 gut renovation and the bank will only give her half.

At the time, Jeffrey was reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, the biography of Robert Moses. Knowing the state wouldn’t walk away from half-finished projects, Moses would “routinely underestimate the cost, get started, then go back and say it was going to cost twice as much,” Ina explains. She starts $150,000 worth of work. “...And at the point of no return, I went back to the bank and asked for the rest of the money. Smart, if embarrassingly devious,” Ina writes. Of course, it takes a position of privilege to make a decision like this; what if the bank hadn’t pulled through?

We see a glimmer of more awareness in the epilogue. At the Matrix Awards, which recognize women in communications and the arts, Garten gives a speech to other women in media, talking about how lucky she was at every point in her career. But after returning to her seat on the stage, Oprah, sitting next to her, smacks her on the arm. “You weren’t lucky,” she says. “You make your own luck.” Here, Garten realizes: “My story was about hard work and luck.” It still feels a little flat.

Would I like this book more with a different framing? Yes. Give me the gossip and the fluff and tell me all about the expensive homes and famous friends; I know how to see the unattainable as entertainment. What I struggle with, as a reader, is being able to see something that the author themself so clearly doesn’t want to acknowledge, mistaking for luck what are really the pleasant side effects of wealth.

Gloriously Horny Milk Is the Unexpected Star of ‘Babygirl’

2024-12-23T13:00:00-05:00

Babygirl is in theaters December 25. | Photo illustration by Francky Knapp; see below for full credits

Nicole Kidman’s new erotic thriller uses dairy as a sexual chess piece

In a huge win for Big Dairy, Nicole Kidman has just declared that she “really like[s] milk.” The comment was made during a recent press interview for Babygirl, the upcoming erotic thriller from writer-director Halina Reijn (who also directed Bodies, Bodies, Bodies) in which Kidman’s character, a high-powered CEO named Romy, submissively chugs a glass of cow milk from her intern-turned-dom, Samuel (Harris Dickinson). It is one of two outstandingly milky moments in the film, both of which stand a tier above the rest of its erotic moments — above the grunting, the floor humping, and even the moonlit pool makeouts — because it does something for milk that I feel has been long overdue. In light of what feels like an ongoing, polarizing dairy discourse in American culture, Babygirl shifts the spotlight away from, say, the alarming rhetoric of RFK Jr. and conservative milk guzzlers. Instead, Babygirl pours its milk on the floor, licks it up on all fours, and reclaims it for a kinky corner that feels hot, playful, and free.

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As Eater senior reporter Bettina Malinkintal writes, heated conversations around milk have been bubbling for a few years now. Dairy consumption in the U.S. has increased in tandem with a repackaged, pastoral-pining brand of conservatism around which soy boys, sigmas, and tradwives orbit — and it feels like the answer to “got milk?” has become a barometer for where one stands amongst the controversy.

Babygirl, however, invites us into a different element of milk discourse. The film draws on the long history of the Madonna-Whore Complex, in which milk can become an agent of holiness or sexual fantasy; there is a milk-dedicated Catholic chapel in the West Bank, after all, as it was supposedly there that Mary’s breast milk spilled while nursing Jesus, turning the chapel from a muddy red to a pure white. Contrastingly, some top Google search results for “milk fetish” yield a crop of not just blushing, but concerned Reddit questions such as, “Do I dump my BF over his milk fetish?” and “Is it weird my BF has a breastmilk fetish?”

There is no nursing in Babygirl, but each character is in search of their own version of nurturing. Romy seeks an understanding, and feeding of her own erotic desires. Samuel, as steely as he can be, does ask Romy to curl up and hold him in one of their less guarded scenes. She is his babygirl. But, sometimes, even he needs to be babyboy. And don’t we all?

Milk becomes the pair’s first sexual chess piece. It is clear that Romy — like so many high-powered CEOs — dreams of being dommed, but struggles to initially give up the reins. One night, Samuel anonymously sends her a glass of milk during a company cocktail hour. She debates drinking it (“What is that?” her coworkers ask with disgust). Then, she does so voraciously (which wins her a “good girl” from Samuel). It’s the sort of behavior that breaks from her otherwise socially palatable, literally robotic world (her company builds Amazon warehouse-esque robots). Once the affair is in full bloom, there is a far more tender scene in which Romy laps up milk from a dish on the floor of a hotel room like an animal, mid-foreplay, while Samuel proceeds to lick it off her face. It is one of her most intimate erotic highs of the film, and also one of her most vulnerable.

Water plays an inverse role in the film. It is not used to prod Romy’s arousal, but bring her — and everyone in the wake of her dalliances — away from play and vulnerability, and back to a state of order and self-perceived goodness. Glasses of sobering water are distinctly present during a confrontational scene with Romy’s intern, Esme (Sophie Wilde), as well as with her amiable, hot, but erotically dull husband, who we are also told has picked up a Bible for respite during all of this.

To watch Babygirl is to partake in an unending, clandestine parade of horny tropes that somehow find new life in the hands of the film’s excellent cast and script — and especially within the warm, looming presence of milk. It feels fair to say that, here, dairy is not a one-note emblem for the far right, or even some nuclear family ideal. It becomes hot and loose; sweet and deviant. It leans into its multitudes with a wink. And in 2025, I hope we can, too.

Additional photo illustration credits: All photos via Getty Images

‘Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts’ Is a Delirious Introduction to a Baking Legend

2024-12-23T10:00:00-05:00

Lille Allen/Eater

Published in 1974, Maida Heatter’s first cookbook was full of perfect brownies and cakes, and plenty of humorous asides

Maida Heatter carried brownies with her wherever she went. They were always wrapped, for hygienic purposes, and also so her purse wouldn’t be filled with crumbs. She would distribute them to people she met during the day, the way other old ladies in Miami would give out hard candies. But this was not simple generosity. It was blatant self-promotion. If you were in the restaurant business or trying to sell cookbooks, especially in the pre-social media age, you had to prove over and over again that you had the goods. Heatter did — and she decided that the simplest way to make sure everyone knew that was to taste for themselves.

So I suppose it made perfect sense for Heatter to bring brownies with her to the 1998 James Beard Awards where her first cookbook, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts, was to be inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame. She carried them in a Versace shopping bag because she had style. Barbara Lazaroff, who was Wolfgang Puck’s then-wife and business partner, made an introductory speech. Heatter handed her a brownie. Then she reached into her bag again... and started chucking brownies into the audience.

“I could not believe what happened,” Heatter later wrote. “In the audience were Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, Martha Stewart (and her mother), Madeleine Kamman, Daniel Boulud, etcetera. The most sophisticated food people in the country. I had brought about fifty brownies. I wish I had more. The crowd went wild.”

I truly wish I could watch a video of this event. I would even sit through all the speeches, just for that one moment of brownie anarchy at the hands of a sweet-looking 81-year-old lady. Who probably couldn’t pitch very well, but that is all beside the point. Maida Heatter knew how to seize the moment.

But also — if these are brownies she wasn’t ashamed to throw at the people in the front row of the James Beard Awards, they’ve got to be pretty good, right?

Palm Beach Brownies were not in the original 1974 edition of Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts. It did have a brownie recipe that Heatter said she’d been messing around with since she was 10 years old and was similar to Palm Beach Brownies, though slightly less excessive: They had a mere 6 ounces of butter, 5 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, and ¾ pound of sugar. But she’d included Palm Beach Brownies in the introduction to the book’s 1999 edition because she knew that, after the Beard Awards story, her readers were going to want to try them. And she was absolutely correct.

Palm Beach Brownies contain ½ pound each of butter and chocolate and more than 1½ pounds sugar, plus 5 eggs, which I realize is more of a luxury now than it was 25 years ago. Not that Heatter would have cared. She got the original recipe from the owner of a Florida deli — she had no fear of requesting recipes — and then spent years refining and perfecting it. The recipe itself is more than three pages long, starting with very precise instructions for lining the pan with foil so a baker can easily remove the brownies at the end. Heatter left nothing to chance. According to a 2002 Saveur profile, “Maida’s goal is a perfect dessert every time — and she wants those who follow her recipes to achieve the same end.” (Once a reader called her at home to complain about a recipe and Heatter invited her over for an in-person investigation. It turned out the woman was using margarine and eliminating the sugar.)

The brownies Heatter brought to the Beard Awards also contained walnuts and a layer of York Peppermint Patties. In the interest of avoiding controversy, I eliminated both these elements from my own. But I stayed true to the fundamentals: the beating of the eggs and sugar and instant coffee powder — a trademark of any Heatter chocolate recipe — for 10 minutes, the late addition of the melted chocolate and butter mixture and then the flour, the night in the refrigerator. And they were indeed perfect — “the biggest, thickest, gooiest, chewiest, darkest, sweetest, mostest-of-the-most,” to quote Heatter, “with an almost wet middle and a crisp-crunchy top.” They can easily be mistaken for pure fudge.

Following Heatter’s advice, I cut them into small rectangles instead of the traditional squares. Again, correct. If you tried to eat these in mass quantities, you might actually die. But happily. (They are also extremely heavy. My full batch, when it came out of the pan, weighed 3½ pounds.)

Heatter was a lifelong baker. She learned from her mother Sadie, who, she wrote, taught her that “cooking is an act of love — and a beautiful, mountainous escape.” Her father, Gabriel, was a radio broadcaster and commentator in New York from the 1930s until the early ’60s. During World War II, he began opening his broadcasts with the catchphrase, “Ah, there’s good news tonight!” Heatter claimed he would also say this when she baked him Mildred Knopf’s Orange Puff Cake, his favorite. (The recipe appears in Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts.) I would guess he was the source of both Heatter’s optimism and her talent for self-promotion.

Heatter grew up on Long Island and on Park Avenue. She initially trained as a visual artist; her first career was making jewelry and painting silk neckties. Her first husband was a shoe designer. Her second was a department store heir. When they divorced, she got the house in Miami with the kitchen overlooking Biscayne Bay. Shortly after she married her third husband, Ralph Daniels — she won him over at their first meeting when she gave him a brownie — she began baking professionally. Baking, she believed, was also art. She convinced Daniels to retire from his job as an airplane pilot and open a cafe with her in Miami. She promised him that she would do all the hard work of baking desserts at home, and all he would have to do was transport them to the cafe either by car or by boat, pour coffee, and read the newspaper between customers. If he ever complained that running a cafe was a little more complicated than that, she never mentioned it.

Heatter was a meticulous baker, which she attributed to being a Virgo. She claimed she spent between 12 and 14 hours in the kitchen every day and had tested each of her recipes 15 to 20 times. She had cards printed with them to distribute to anyone who asked. She gave baking demonstrations in department stores. When national fame appeared, she was ready to meet it.

This was in 1968. The Republican National Convention and the national press were in town. Heatter thought a fun way to get attention would be to serve an elephant omelet. She tracked down cans of elephant meat at Bloomingdale’s in New York and called up chefs in Kenya for advice about how to cook it. It’s unclear whether she actually tasted it herself — she claimed it tasted “like giraffe’s neck” — and it’s also unclear whether anyone actually ordered it. But Craig Claiborne, the food editor of the New York Times, wanted to know more. Mission accomplished! When he showed up at Heatter’s house, she had 30 of her best desserts waiting for him, along with the omelet. Claiborne duly published some of the recipes in the Times (for the desserts, not the omelet), where he hailed Heatter as “hands down the foremost food authority in Florida,” and encouraged her to write a book.

It took her five years. On Claiborne’s advice, she went beyond the cakes she made for the cafe to include less easily transported desserts like souffles and ice cream. She wrote it out by hand, and when she finished, she put it into a box and sent it directly to Knopf because she’d heard they published the best cookbooks. Judith Jones, the legendary cookbook editor, was on vacation, so the manuscript ended up in the hands of another editor, Nancy Nicholas. Two weeks later, Heatter had a contract. And then an oven repairman told her that her oven temperature was off by 25 degrees, and she had to test everything again. Thereafter, she always advised her readers to use an oven thermometer, maybe even two, just to be sure.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts came out in 1974. Heater was 58 years old. She posed for the cover with a kitchen counter laden with desserts looking absolutely delighted.

There is something timeless about Great Desserts, aside from the lack of photos — which is a shame, because by all accounts, Heatter had a gorgeous house, and I feel like she would have enjoyed showing it off. (Instead, it’s illustrated with line drawings by Heatter’s daughter, Toni Evins, that are both lovely and useless.) Some of the recipes, especially the European tortes and cakes, feel old-fashioned, but in a nice way, like the contents of your grandma’s curio cabinet. None of them feel aggressively 1970s. Only one — Raspberry-Strawberry Bavarian — contains Jell-O, and in the headnote, Heatter seems almost apologetic: “This is not an authentic Bavarian ... There’s not only no cooking involved, there’s not even any preparation. Just some stirring. Honest.” There is no lighting of things on fire in this book. No trendy appliances — even the ice cream could be made with a regular mixer and a freezer. And definitely no margarine.

The timelessness also comes from the feeling that Heatter has made all these recipes many, many times before. She writes things like, “Mixture will look curdled — O.K.” with great frequency. It’s easy to read a Heatter recipe and feel like you’re already in your own kitchen sifting the flour, “opening” the eggs, making room for layers of Dobosh torte. Once you actually do it, the experience is much like you’d imagined, except when you do stupid things like drop eggshells into the batter because you didn’t take Heatter’s advice to crack them into a separate bowl. But Heatter also has advice about fishing them out. And if you do everything else she says, you will end up with a perfect lemon cake or pan of brownies or even a chocolate roll. Which I did.

“Instead of keeping you hopping like a drill instructor, her words built a world around you,” her final editor Michael Szczerban wrote in a tribute after she died in 2019 at the age of 102. “Her writing made me feel I understood what was happening in the recipe, with cues to prevent a cook from getting lost in the middle of the adventure and plenty of detail borne from serious experience.”

Like other great artists, though, Heatter didn’t confuse seriousness with solemnity. Sometimes she included little asides, the way she would if you were in the kitchen together — like how she’s not quite sure how to respond to people who tell her that her Coffee Buttercrunch Pie is better than sex. Maybe this is why readers didn’t feel threatened by her perfectionism the way they were by Martha Stewart’s. Instead they found it reassuring. She has attracted her own share of fans, including Martha herself, Dorie Greenspan, and Phillip Oliver, the author of the blog Mad About Maida, who has, for at least the past decade, set to baking all of Heatter’s recipes, a la Julie and Julia. Sometimes he makes them twice, in the interest of getting it right. Heatter would approve.

Perhaps the only better tribute would be to carry around brownies to hand out Heatter-style. You do get used to them, I’ve learned, so you don’t feel tempted to eat them all. If I worked in an office, I would throw them at people during meetings. Unfortunately, I have to settle for pressing them on neighbors and leaving a tray out for the mail carrier and delivery drivers. If the ghost of Craig Claiborne happens by, I’ll give one to him, too. You never know where it might lead.

This is, I am sad to say, the final entry in Shelf Stable, at least for now. I hope you enjoyed reading these columns just as much as I did writing them.

Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.

Unpeeling the Layers: How Do Food Banks Actually Work?

2024-12-23T09:57:00-05:00

Many are especially focused on charitable giving during the holiday season. | Lille Allen

Organizations like Feeding America support the nation’s food-insecure communities. But it’s not enough.

The Friday before Thanksgiving, at a high school in northern Westchester County, New York, I sat at my desk and called the last person listed on my Excel spreadsheet, “Families in Need 2024.” As one of the social workers at the school, I’ve called this woman before — the custodial grandmother of a student — but only because of her grandson’s attendance issues. When I told her I had a turkey for her, she said, “Huh? Are you serious? Hold on a minute.” A few seconds later, she returned to the phone and repeated, “Are you serious?,” her voice trembling. “Yes,” I responded. “Would you like it delivered?” She said, “Oh my God,” and began crying. She told me she had been trying to figure out how to get a turkey from a food pantry; she had fallen on her hip recently, complicating existing mobility issues.

About an hour later, I visited the walk-in freezer behind the school, grabbed one cold, unnaturally large turkey from a stack of boxes containing about a hundred, and delivered it to her fourth-floor apartment along with boxed cake mix, boxed cornbread mix, Stove Top stuffing, and a bag of potatoes. She invited me inside and showed me the ledge she tripped on and the rolling grocery cart she had been using as a walker (she finds it easier to use than her actual walker). I made a note to check into regular food deliveries from a local service. We said goodbye, and I heard her saying “thank you” and “God bless you” through the closed door until I reached the elevator down the hall.

Over 20 years working in the human services field, I’ve delivered countless frozen turkeys, scooped mounds of mashed potatoes onto disposable trays, and assembled hundreds of meal kits. Providing food has become routine, so the woman’s emotional reaction caught me off guard. It was a reminder that, despite broad access to charitable food, needs remain vast and personal.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 13.5 percent of U.S. households are food insecure. That’s 47.4 million people, the highest rate since 2014. To fill the hunger gap, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service operates 16 food and nutrition programs, costing, in 2023, $166.4 billion. The biggest line item is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), serving over 40 million people a month, amounting to $112 billion per year.

Still, despite extensive programming, the federal government can’t fill the gap alone. Like most of the food I’ve distributed over the years, the turkeys at my school came from local affiliates of Feeding America, the country’s largest private charitable organization. The government has depended on their services since the late seventies when a few grassroots food banks rapidly transformed into our industrial charity system.

Courtesy of Toups Meatery

During the holidays, hospitality workers and donation services increase their focus on providing food to those in need.

It began with a confluence of a few key sociopolitical factors. The 1976 Tax Reform Act enabled companies to make charitable donations in exchange for write-offs. Then, in 1979, a federally-funded development effort consolidated the food bank recipients into an association called America’s Second Harvest (which changed its name to Feeding America in 2008). Private donations to America’s Second Harvest, now Feeding America, began to flow.

Between 1979 and 1980, the poverty rate jumped from 26 million to 29.3 million people. Just as the country grew poorer, then-President Ronald Reagan slashed food stamps from the federal budget, leading to a national rise in hunger. At the same time, American farmers faced the worst industry downturn since the Great Depression. Owners had vast surpluses of unsalable commodities. To solve that problem, Reagan drew on a depression-era mechanism, the Commodities Credit Corporation, through which the USDA can purchase surplus commodities directly. According to this report, the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) was authorized by the Emergency Food Assistance Act of 1983. The new legislation directed the USDA to buy surplus commodities like fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, and grains and distribute them to food-insecure communities through food banks. The Second Harvest network received the bulk, adding to growing inflows from large private donors.

The food bank network, helmed by what is now Feeding America, ballooned. Today, it comprises 198 food banks and 60,000 food pantries operating in every county and state, including Puerto Rico. (Think of the food bank as a regional wholesaler or hub and the food pantries as the retailers or distributors.) Last year’s total support and revenue was $5.15 billion; 20 percent of its food still comes through TEFAP.

While each food bank and food pantry operates semi-independently, Feeding America network membership grants access to all the food and money through contacts with TEFAP, the USDA, Kroger, Walmart, Conagra, and other firms. Food banks use financial donations, large and small, to purchase items their communities need that haven’t been donated.

“We bought the turkeys this year — they didn’t come from the USDA — but we sell them to the pantries for about 40 cents a pound,” says Brad Kerner, Feeding Westchester’s vice president of community engagement and impact. “The pantries order what they need from us through an online system, and we deliver.” According to Kerner, Feeding Westchester distributes roughly 20 to 25 million pounds of food to 200 local pantries, schools, and churches each year. Like other regional banks, they tailor their operations to local needs; its staff includes caseworkers who connect people to SNAP and other services, three dieticians who design food packages for people with specific health conditions, and a mobile food truck that makes 60 monthly stops in neighborhoods in food deserts.

Operations escalate at Feeding Westchester and food banks nationwide around the holidays. Truckloads of frozen turkeys are delivered, stored in industrial freezers, and distributed to neighborhood-level providers. “It’s an extraordinary volume,” says Linda Nageotte, president and chief operating officer of Feeding America, “but food banks may need multiple truckloads to meet their needs.”

That volume is not just because people need to furnish a feast. According to Nageotte, “The fastest-growing population standing in that line is a working person whose earnings are too much to qualify for food assistance but not enough to cover necessities,” she says. “The weather’s getting cold; folks start seeing their heat and electricity bills go up, but their paychecks don’t change... We hear from folks facing hunger that inflation, rising rents, and housing costs, and the increased cost of accessing healthcare and medicines all put pressure on their budgets.”

Feeding America is still the only coalition poised to procure and deliver food at scale, and, as Amy McCarthy reported for Eater, a financial contribution to them is still an easy way to help put food on sparse tables. But even with a several billion dollars in support, the organization has never eradicated the root cause of hunger — poverty.

In his 2017 book Big Hunger, author Andrew Fisher argued that the current charitable food system fills the hunger gap while preserving it. Indeed, more people live in poverty today than when TEFAP started (though as a portion of the U.S. population, it’s down two percentage points since then, from 13 to 11 percent). Feeding America’s sizable lobbying budget — $1,348,193 in 2024 — focuses on efforts like the Food and Farm Bill, which bolsters SNAP and TEFAP. Some of Feeding America’s biggest donors, like Walmart and Amazon, also spend millions lobbying for the Farm Bill because they benefit directly from Feeding America (through tax write-offs) and SNAP (because recipients shop with them). For example, over 96 percent of SNAP recipients use their EBT cards at Walmart, many right after punching out of their work shift; their paychecks don’t cover their basic needs. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “commodity crop traders, meat and poultry processors, fertilizer and pesticide makers ... and all of their related trade associations” also support the bill because of their enormous subsidies.

Provisions for the next bill (it needs to be renewed every five years) include more support for marginalized farmers and environmental conservation efforts. The bill was extended on Friday evening after long negotiations. Paradoxically, the Farm Bill — like Feeding America — provides vital support during desperate times, not just to people, but to a consolidated food system that keeps people desperate. Some are searching for another way.

“The system is based on two false premises,” says Megan Larmer, senior director of programs at Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming in New York’s Hudson Valley. “One is that the consolidated food system is a good one. And the other is that hunger is a temporary problem in our society. Those two things are not true. So it’s a Band-Aid system that isn’t addressing the systemic causes of hunger and food insecurity.”

The limits of the consolidated food system were suddenly on full display during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Agencies didn’t have any food because they relied on the food bank,” says Larmer, “which relied on the global infrastructure of the global consolidated food system, which ground entirely to a halt.”

In the Hudson Valley, small-scale farmers reached out to Maggie Cheney at Rock Steady Farm, who is known for their food security work. Cheney set up a Zoom call to share and distribute resources. Glynwood offered to host. The Food Sovereignty Fund was born, and delivered 170,000 pounds of food grown on local regenerative farms in 2022 and 2023. Today, Larmer oversees the coalition. They directly pay 27 regenerative small farms run by historically marginalized (BIPOC, LGBTQ, and women) farmers to grow food for 25 regional pantries and access partners. Every part of what they do is healthier and more humane, from labor practices to land stewardship to food quality.

They can’t match the scale of Feeding America, but there are similar efforts around the country. The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance maintains a directory of similar organizations, all needing financial support. Glynwood accepts donations and distributes food year-round. (Disclosure: my wife, Zoraida Lopez-Diago, works there.)

This past October, there was some good news. The USDA announced that $1.13 billion would be released for states, territories, and federally recognized Indigenous tribes to purchase foods produced within the state or within 400 miles of the delivery destination to help support local, regional, and underserved producers. “The purpose of this program is to maintain and improve food and agricultural supply chain resiliency,” according to the USDA. The money will come through the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program.

We can only speculate what this might mean for someone who needs money on their EBT card or a holiday turkey today or tomorrow. To be clear, Feeding America is, at the moment, essential. When I asked my wife if Glynwood could supply turkeys for my school, they had all been earmarked for families. That was my fault; it didn’t occur to me to ask until too late, and the woman I delivered the turkey to was more than happy that there was a bigger safety net in place.

However, the incoming administration’s policies threaten to slash SNAP and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and drive the prices of imported groceries higher. Perhaps that will create an opportunity for a more localized food system. It’s also possible that our current charitable food system will be devastated. Unless there’s a surge of well-paying jobs and labor regulations, which seems unlikely, we’ll have to build something new. We should look to groups like Glynwood’s Food Sovereignty Fund and their national allies, who have been envisioning and planning for a better future for decades.

“If we accept that we must work within the current system, it’s only ever going to replicate inequity,” Larmer says. “But if we shoot for something grander, then even little steps are important progress.”

Mike Diago is a writer and social worker based in New York’s Hudson Valley.

The Best Places to Buy Spices Online That Are (Actually) Worth Their Salt

2024-12-23T09:56:00-05:00

Let’s make sure you never run out of Hungarian hot paprika again

The world spins a little smoother when my spice rack is well stocked. Unfortunately, my closest grocery store doesn’t always have the Pride of Szeged hot paprika that has become a veritable food group in my life, seasoning my egg noodles with fried cabbage, creamy chicken, and more, which means that (more often than not) I order my spices online.

Admittedly, I also have a Thomas Kinkade-y fantasy of replenishing my larder at a brick and mortar spice shop (ideally, owned by a someone in a bonnet who weighs out my cardamom on a copper scale), but I do not always have the time or bandwidth to make that fantasy a reality (though, Vices & Spices in my hometown of Santa Barbara comes pretty close). Luckily, the internet exists for such moments, and it has not only made stocking spices easier, but kind of inventive. Penzys offers trial bags of its unique blends, including its Outrage of Love blend, which the brand says was a direct spice-response to the January 6 insurrection attempt (it’s great with hummus!); then there are brands such as Spicewalla, whose collaborations with celebrities like T-Pain legitimately feel fresh and intentional (his most recent drop benefits folks impacted by Hurricane Helene).

So whether you’re out of cardamom or just out of ideas, let’s browse the shelves of the best places to buy spices.

Amazon

Listen, you can buy everything and the kitchen sink on Amazon (you can, in fact, even buy a prefab house), so of course you can find spices galore at the retail behemoth. I head to Amazon when I’m stocking up on vinegar sea salt seasoning to piment d’espelette, the light, fresh Basque region chili pepper that will punch up my fish and stews without feeling overpowering.

Burlap & Barrel

Burlap & Barrel (yes, of Shark Tank fame) buys directly from small farms, which means that you are doing your part in supporting the far more planet- and community-friendly practice of single origin spice sourcing when you bring home its blend of smoked black cardamom, Caribbean bay leaves, and more. Explore its offerings by categories such as spice, collection, collaboration (including the new Dr. Jane Goodall co-created honey line), and diet, and build your own subscription package (or gift one to a friend, which also makes for an excellent last-minute holiday present).

Diaspora Co.

Looking for South Asian spices? Head to Diaspora Co., which is home to dozens of single origin, heirloom spices primarily from India and Sri Lanka. The company was founded in 2017 by Sana Javeri Kadri, who, as she explains on the site, was tired of seeing so much colonial-caused inequity in the spice trade — particularly as a woman from Mumbai. As Kadri states, “We’re proud to pay our farm partners an average of 6x above the commodity price. In a system where fair trade is a mere 15% premium, we pay what we believe to be a living wage.”

Omsom

Omsom has saved me from eating boring, and (literally) sauceless dinners so many times. The women-owned, Vietnamese American-founded brand has made a name for itself with its line of instant, air dried noodles (think, boxed chili sesame noodles) that come with the perfect dose of their own spicy little sauce packets — but you can also just take home the sauce packets, too.

Shop Palestine

Shop Palestine is a Berkeley, California-based digital storefront, and an initiative of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, which works to secure more rights for children in the Middle East. The shop is home to more than just family business-blended spices from Palestine and Lebanon (books, jewelry, and ceramics abound), and buying za’atar and sumac from Palestinian farms not only assists MECA’s mission during the ongoing bombardments, but helps to preserve the culinary and cultural heritage of the regions’ farmers as well.

Pearl River Mart

The New York-based Pearl River Mart is an Asian marketplace offering everything from home decor to pantry staples — well as many Eater staff-loved stocking stuffers — and it also boasts a smorgasbord of chili crisps from brands such as Fly By Jing, Xi’an Famous Foods, Homiah, and others. (Swing by the recipe section of the site before you shop for inspiration.)

Penzeys

Ah, Penzeys — the spice company that launched a thousand (well, many) supportive Reddit threads and customers. This Wauwatosa, Wisconsin-based spice company was founded in the 1990s and is like a spice commerce manifestation of your coolest tie dye-wearing aunt (you know, the one who grew up following The Grateful Dead, and now campaigns for democratic candidates in her free time?). The spice blends have unforgettable labels (think, 1990s global village coffee house aesthetics) and unique blends designed to make frozen pizza less boring and sandwiches more exciting.

Savory Spice

Savory Spice is kind of like the spice equivalent of the Library of Congress, because it is home to more than 400 spices. It has found particular success, according to the site, with its Spice & Easy recipe blends, which are designed to help beginner and time-strapped cooks prepare onion dip, carne asada, and more in a pinch.

The Spice House

The Spice House has been operating since 1957, and I love that its many spice offerings (peep the cheese board-themed gift set during the holiday season) are also available as flatpacks, which are essentially tiny 2-ounce baggies; I often get jar fatigue when I’m replenishing my spice rack, and it’s refreshing to feel heard.

Spicewalla

Spicewalla is the colorful, energetic brand that I would most like to get two dirty martinis with, because its offerings, from a mignonette blend to various chais — always feel interesting. You can shop by collection, blends, herbs, and more categories, but it’s the collaboration section that is always whipping up something extra fun; right now there’s a speculoos blend from pastry chef Caroline Schiff that also benefits Southern Smoke Foundation, which is working to help recovery efforts in Asheville from Hurricane Helene.

Williams Sonoma

While it’s not a dedicated spice shop, I can always count on Williams Sonoma to deliver slightly yassified, highly giftable spice blends and bundles, from the classic salt players (think, Maldon and Jacobsen Salt Co.) to a veritable “rub library” with some of its bestselling blends for beef, poultry, vegetables, and more. It also somehow makes perfect sense that the site should have a dedicated truffle section.

The Year Cow Milk Won — or Did It?

2024-12-23T09:30:00-05:00

Lille Allen

In 2024, we watched tradwives milk cows, bought milk perfumes, and generally thought way too much about raw milk

Cow milk’s resurgence has been building for years. In 2021, Emily Sundberg wrote for Grub Street that — at least anecdotally — whole milk was back, with public sentiment on plant-based milk starting to curdle at coffee shops and online, not unlike almond milk in hot coffee. Sundberg referenced a tweet: “Hot girls are ditching the alternatives and are going back to basics.”

Though a 2023 Purdue University analysis found that sales of dairy milk have, in fact, decreased between 2018 and 2022, at least on a vibes level, cow milk has seen a wave of new champions.

This year, “why I went back to whole milk” videos made the rounds. So did videos of “milk mukbangs,” in which the creator Peggy Xu scooped the thick cream top from bottles of Straus Creamery milk, causing a surge in sales for the longstanding California dairy. In an episode of the hugely popular Subway Takes video series, comedian Danish Maqbool claimed that “America has gotten soft ever since we stopped drinking whole milk.” On TikTok, that clip now has over 8 million views and 1.3 million likes, with commenters co-signing things like: “He is actually speaking facts,” and “Organic Whole Milk is the new wave.”

Some of the renewed interest in cow milk seems fueled by growing fears around ultra-processed food, which has been a major talking point this year. Cow milk is natural, its fans claim, unlike non-dairy milks with their oils and additives. The rise of raw milk took this distrust of food-processing and the federal government to the next level, despite the fact that bird flu has recently been detected in raw milk, causing California to declare a state of emergency.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ascension as President Trump’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services only emboldened raw-milk drinkers, with Kennedy citing raw milk as one of several things being aggressively suppressed in the FDA’s “war on public health.”

Dairy milk has become a kind of cultural flag, especially among conservatives. That Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman — who is perhaps the most prominent face of the current tradwife moment — had such a successful year fits seamlessly into this. Though the video in question was uploaded in 2022, one of the enduring images of Neeleman is of her making mozzarella cheese from scratch, using raw milk from her own farm, with her children — she has eight — audible in the background. Through milk, farming, and family, Neeleman has offered a conservative fantasy of American life that’s resonant in a society that’s shifting toward the right.

For trad-leaning types who post on X about “Western civilization,” the tradwife, whose feminine aesthetics often channel milkmaids, continued to represent the type of culture that they see as in need of defending. Consider that one well-known trad influencer goes by the name “Gwen the Milkmaid”: A former OnlyFans model, she now touts “faith, femininity, [and] holistic health” and shills “grass-fed tallow skincare.” (It’s been a big year for cows, as a whole: Tallow, too, has had a moment recently and is poised to rise further.) Continuing this connection between milk and femininity, milk also made up one of the biggest women’s fragrance trends of the year.

Naturally, this culminated in the year’s final gasp of milk-adjacent discourse when the conservative women’s magazine Evie released its “raw milkmaid dress” last week. The dress’s description reads: “Designed in the French countryside and inspired by the hardworking dairymaids of 17th-century Europe, The Raw Milkmaid Dress is handmade from luxurious organic cotton and 100% feminine energy.” It’s also not exactly modest, which highlights the fact that for all milk’s ties to family, tradition, and purity, the whole milkmaid thing seems to be at least a little tied to sexual fantasy too. Of course, academics have argued that, especially in Western society, milk is a symbol of female sexuality and has thus become “sexy” itself.

And with that we can end on what seems to be milk’s last big, sexy moment for the year: the forthcoming movie Babygirl, out in theaters on Christmas. Babygirl centers on a CEO, played by Nicole Kidman, who’s struggling with her own desirability and begins to explore the submissive fantasies she’s hidden her whole life after meeting one of her company’s new interns.

At one point, as part of this new dynamic, she publicly chugs a big glass of milk, so thick and white it’s unmistakably meant to be dairy. Though the production eventually switched to using dyed water, shooting the scene involved drinking “huge amounts of milk,” Kidman said in an interview. The hot girls, it seems, were the canary in the coal mine.

Banana Jam Is the Hero Spread We’ve Needed All Along

2024-12-23T09:23:00-05:00

On the final day of the Eater Advent Calendar, we’re laying it (this banana jam, that is) on thick to upgrade our PB&Js and more

I am an unapologetic banana lover. Banana Runts, banana taffy, frozen bananas, I’m taking it all. Which is why, when I saw a jar of this small-batch banana jam at my local cheese store, I had to have it. It has since become a clutch morning staple, spread — along with some peanut butter — on toast or an english muffin, stirred into oatmeal, or spooned atop yogurt. It’s like banana pudding, but more concentrated and, well, jammy. Give a jar to the crazy little monkey or banana-loving minion in your life, or keep one for yourself and prepare yourself for the greatest PBJ of all time. You’re welcome.

No peeking! But check out what the Eater Advent Calendar has already revealed. And check back each day for a new clutch condiment, gadget, or nibble that, yes, makes an amazing gift — but these surprises are just for you.

A Brief Guide to Buying Champagne

2024-12-23T09:18:07-05:00

Harry Dempster/Getty; Mirrorpix/Getty

In the market for Champagne for whatever reason? Start with a bottle from one of these Champagne houses.

I love Champagne — the way it smells, tastes, and bubbles up while I’m enjoying a nice full glass. As we stride toward the time of year (and what a year) when Americans consume the most Champagne, there are decisions to be made, should we all be so lucky: namely, which bottle to pick?

Champagne’s legacy of luxury and connection to upper-class marketing has created a worldwide industry distributing 300 million bottles in a typical year. It’s also resulted in a good deal of confusion and opacity when it comes to choosing what to drink. My suggestion for ease of enjoyment? Start with a smart bottle from one of the great Champagne houses.

For centuries, power and money in the Champagne region have flowed through the big Champagne houses (sometimes called Grande Marques), many of which are household names: Veuve, Dom, Roederer’s rap-famous “Cristal” bottling, and so on. French luxury multinational LVMH typifies a modern take on this, formed in the ’80s upon the merger of iconic French fashion label Louis Vuitton with Champagne house Moet & Chandon, which in the 1970s acquired the cognac producer Hennessey.

But the wines produced by these houses have been snubbed over the last decade by a certain kind of drinker, typically younger, relatively new to wine, and predisposed to drinking natural wines first and foremost. I’ve been guilty of this very thing, having gravitated far more toward so-called “grower Champagnes,” humbler bottlings (in production scale, not necessarily price) in which the wines are produced by the estate that grows the grapes. By contrast, the bigger Champagne houses might source the fruit for the wines from dozens, or even hundreds of individual growers across the Champagne region, blending them together under the careful guidance of a chef de cave, a term that denotes the head winemaker and cellarmaster in charge of the whole operation.

Indie and natty they aren’t, but for pure drinking pleasure I’m convinced many house Champagnes are due for a reappraisal by anyone who likes a good glass of something nice — after all, marketing isn’t the only reason these wines are enjoyed by millions. For a drinker easing themselves into the decision-making process, it’s helpful to start by focusing on a handful of firms and their entry-level offerings, typically described as “non-vintage” (NV), meaning that they’re made from grapes across multiple years of harvest (sometimes also denoted as “reserve,” depending on the house). These house Champagnes represent a broad range of prices, each one readily available in the U.S. market.

Suffice it to say that Champagne is not for everyone this year; such is the weight of the world we inhabit. At the same time, I think there is an understandable and very human impulse behind the desire to find comfort and celebration in the relative safety of a sturdy bottle. If you’ve got the means and bandwidth to think about enjoying a bottle of Champagne this holiday season, there’s ample cause to say cheers. Here’s to a little light in the darkness.

The most popular Champagne is actually pretty good

Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label

It’s not possible to really engage with the world of Champagne houses without confronting the phenomenon of Yellow Label Veuve. Thanks to its near-total market saturation, Veuve overtook Moet in 2013 as the most widely consumed Champagne in North America. LVMH sells 1.5 million cases of Veuve each year across the brand’s various bottlings, and a cool 400,000 of these are sold to the United States, a considerable majority of which is Yellow Label. It is a global product, like Coca-Cola or Guinness beer.

There’s a good reason for that. This wine is made to a precise formula, unvarying from year to year and bottled with the inclusion of Veuve’s vast collection of reserve wines, blended into Yellow Label to ensure consistency. Yellow Label gets 10 grams per liter of dosage (which refers to the sugar added into Champagne at bottling to balance acidity and promote longevity), and is composed of grapes from more than 60 parcels across Champagne.

For the price, there may be more interesting wines on the market, but if your heart is set on Veuve, or it’s one of the few Champagnes available where you live, I certainly understand (especially if you’ve been pulled in by one of Veuve’s flashy seasonal boxes). There is no other wine that tastes quite like it. And about that price: Yellow Label Veuve can run close to $60 or as low as $39, depending on where and when you make your purchase. I recommend checking different shops (including grocery and big-box retail) in your area for pricing. It’s the same stuff in the bottle, no matter where you buy it.

The best cheap Champagne

André Clouet Brut Grand Reserve

“Budget” Champagnes are often kind of disappointing, but for the price (as low as $33 at some retailers), the entry-level wines of André Clouet punch above their bracket. Clouet’s Brut Grand Reserve is 100 percent pinot noir sourced from vineyards surrounding the famed Champagne villages of Bouzy and Ambonnay. It receives just six grams of dosage.

In the glass, you’ll taste a drying, green plum malic acidity and unmistakable Champagne crispness. There’s red fruit here, as well as strawberry and Anjou pear, which makes sense — you are drinking Champagne made entirely from red grapes, after all. A portion of the wines in this blend spend time in Sauternes barrels, a style of sweet white wine from Bordeaux, which imparts pleasant thoughts of honey and pie crust. If Christmas gatherings were a thing this year, it would make a fine party favor.

The most versatile $40 bottle of Champagne

Gosset Brut Excellence

Many Champagne houses have cred that goes back 100 or even 200 years, and then there is Gosset, in business since 1584. Gosset is located in the village of Ay, and was family owned for more than 400 years until being sold in the early ’90s to Renaud-Cointreau, whose portfolio of French products includes cognacs, liqueurs, and ratafia.

This is a really fine Champagne for the price, offering an approachable, aperitif-style drinking experience — think Campari and jasmine tea — balanced with crisp freshness and a whiff of chimney smoke. Traditionally Gosset was known for not allowing any malolactic fermentation in the winemaking process, but this began to change around a decade ago, specifically for the Excellence bottling, the house’s entry-level cuvee. This promotes a softer, rounder experience, and results in a more accessible and easy-drinking wine. Around 30,000 cases are made each year, typically consisting of three parts pinot noir to two parts chardonnay, with a dash of meunier thrown in for weight, although this ratio changes between releases.

There is not a tremendous amount of hype or buzz around Gosset. Though owned by a conglomerate, Gosset’s marketing footprint and bottle design are decidedly measured — understated, even. Think of that no-nonsense approach as a virtue, especially when backed up by a product of such high quality. More than perhaps any other wine in Champagne, Gosset is highly versatile and cruises effortlessly across whatever activities you have planned for the holiday season, particularly if they include television, Thai food, and a second glass.

House Champagne for people who don’t think they like house Champagne

Pol Roger Reserve

I adore the house Pol Roger, a wine long synonymous with England thanks to a history of exporting wines in a brut style, with minimum dosage, favored by U.K. drinkers. The house is still family owned, now in its fifth generation of production, and proudly sports its association with Sir Winston Churchill, who was an eager ambassador for the brand and even named one of his racehorses after it.

I think the entry level Pol Roger, known as “Reserve,” is one of the most elegant and refined NV Champagnes you can buy at any price. Pol Roger, like Roederer, straddles the line between grower and house, with more than half of the wines it makes coming from the firm’s own 93 hectares of vineyards. Every bottle is riddled by hand (“riddling” is the process of carefully turning a bottle of Champagne to collect sediment in the neck), and the wine is made of equal parts pinot noir, pinot meunier, and chardonnay, undergoing malocatic fermentation and fermented entirely in stainless steel — there are no barrels at Pol Roger. A quarter of the bottling is made from reserve wines, held back from proceeding vintages, and each bottle ages a full four years on the lees before release.

Understatement and finesse are the watchwords here, owing to Pol Roger’s unusually long respite in the house cellar before public release. Both ripe and fresh, this wine balances deep red fruits with ginger zip and buttered toast. If I could only drink one house Champagne for the rest of my life, this would be it. Pair with binge-watching the latest season of The Crown, or, if that’s already exhausted, The Great British Baking Show.

The Champagne splurge that’s worth it

Krug

There is an undeniable mystique around Krug, one of the best-known wine labels on the planet, Champagne or otherwise. Though the house does offer a range of single-vineyard and single-year vintage wines, it is the non-vintage Grande Cuvee for which it is rightly famous. Make no mistake: This is not an entry-level wine, with prices starting at around $160, or $78 for the half-bottle. Each modern Krug comes marked with a Krug ID on the back of the label, which allows you to quickly look up what you’re drinking and learn more about its composition. I recently tried a bottle from the 168th edition of Krug Grand Reserve, “a blend of over 120 individual wines from more than 10 different years,” per Krug ID. This particular release is a blend of dominant pinot noir (53 percent), alongside chardonnay (35 percent) and pinot meunier (13 percent).

In the glass, this wine is deeply structured and muscular, like drinking really good white Burgundy or classy California chardonnay. Wine lovers will go on and on about Krug’s finesse, balance, depth, piquant measured sweetness, and long finish. More casual drinkers might be just as happy with a bottle half the price. For what it’s worth, I think Krug is better than Dom, better than Cristal even (the top-shelf Roederer bottling), and second only to the unscalable heights of Salon for the finest house Champagne in the world. There is no other wine that’s like it. I’m a Krug truther, especially if you’re buying.

Jordan Michelman is a 2020 James Beard Award winner for journalism, and a 2020 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards shortlist in the Emerging Wine Writer category.

How Restaurants Offer a Helping Hand During the Holidays

2024-12-23T09:18:00-05:00

Lille Allen

From Refettorio Harlem in NYC to Truth BBQ’s partnership with Houston’s Sky High for Kids, chefs are in the spirit of giving

Next week, couple Amanda and Issac Toups will leave their Mid-City restaurant, Toups Meatery, load up a few vehicles, and make some deliveries to the surrounding New Orleans communities. Boxes filled with whole chickens, collard greens, apple pies, cranberry sauce, macaroni and cheese, and cornbread will reach roughly 2,000 people.

“Food is a right,” Amanda says. “It’s not a ‘maybe’ — it’s a right, a human right. If the government’s not going to step in, then we’re going to step in, because that’s our business. We care about our fellow citizens here in New Orleans.”

For restaurant owners like the Toups, who strive to combat food insecurity year-round through their non-profit, Toups’ Family Meal, giving back during the holidays is just as important as the job of serving others at their restaurant. Across the country, restaurants have taken strides to use their buildings and craft to support those in need, and the holidays are an especially apt time to support local communities. For many, including the restaurant experience is part of that mission.

“Restaurants are places where people can both celebrate and grieve, and come together in community,” says Katie Button, Asheville chef and co-owner Cúrate. “That becomes especially true during the holidays.”

As North Carolina began to recover from the disastrous effects of Hurricane Helene, the pintxos expert, who was forced to temporarily close Cúrate due to hurricane damage, was determined to help others in need by way of community engagement. She began hosting pintxos parties to gather folks in a joyful setting, eventually teaming up with local Asheville chef Ashleigh Shanti, owner of Good Hot Fish (which was also impacted by the hurricane), to raise funds for those in need. In early December, she and Shanti led a collaborative pinxtos dinner at the re-opened Cúrate, using the proceeds to assist employees impacted during the restaurant’s closure.

“Restaurants are critical to economic recovery in a community,” Button says, citing the importance of supporting other local businesses, too. The fall release of Shanti’s cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens, inspired the chef to collaborate with local bookseller, Malaprop’s Bookstore, who came by the restaurant to sell some of Shanti’s cookbooks. The team sold out of their copies, and the effort inspired many guests to donate to a relief fund for Shanti and Button’s workers — all of whom were impacted by the storms — through a QR code placed on each dining table.

“We are a community of small Asheville businesses and entrepreneurs,” Button says. “People don’t have large, deep pockets, so we help each other however we can.”

Carrie Turner

Chefs Ashleigh Shanti (right, in baseball cap) and Katie Button cooked up plenty of pintxos to support restaurant workers in need.

In Houston, the holidays are also an extension of constant work to combat issues like poverty and food insecurity. Pitmaster Leonard Botello and his wife, Abbie Byrom-Botello, are best known for their Michelin-recognized smokehouse, Truth BBQ. “A restaurant or chef can always cook you something,” Byrom-Botello says. “Before we really got into this work I [didn’t] believe that something like a barbecue sandwich would change anybody’s day, but it actually does. It becomes very personal to them, which in turn becomes personal to us.”

In August, Sky High for Kids, a Houston-area nonprofit, launched with the goal to provide comfort to vulnerable communities, fund research, and save the lives of those fighting pediatric cancer and other life-threatening conditions. (As a hub for medicine and cancer treatment, numerous people from around the world relocate to Houston each year to seek treatment in the city’s renowned medical center.) Botello and Byrom-Botello participate in a series of “Sunday Suppers,” which allow patients and their families to enjoy fresh meals from some of the city’s best restaurants. Many patients in the cancer ward, as Byrom-Botello explains, are food insecure, and the couple, along with other local restaurants like Eunice and Hungry’s, use their culinary gifts to support them during a remarkably difficult period. During early December, they spent several hours delivering meals that received the Truth BBQ holiday treatment: dozens of deliveries include smoked prime rib with horseradish sauce, Brussels sprouts, the restaurant’s beloved tater tot casserole, and a brownie.

“It’s all about constantly asking the question: What can we do to help people in need?” says Botello.

At Refettorio Harlem, underserved communities are the primary target for the institution’s dining goals. The “only free restaurant in New York” focuses on creating dining experiences that reinforce dignity and beauty, and addresses an important and growing challenge during the holidays: loneliness.

“The top line mission is to address social isolation, food waste, and food scarcity at the same time,” says Bob Wilms, director of the restaurant’s parent organization, Free Food Harlem.

Repurposing 2,000 pounds of food per week, Refettorio Harlem operates food pantries and hosts regular three-course dinners catered to lower-income communities. During this year’s annual Holiday Soiree fundraising event, the Harlem Brewing Company and neighborhood chefs JJ Johnson, Russell Jackson, and Contento’s Asia Shabazz, all of whom have taken various steps to support their surrounding Harlem community throughout the year, served dishes like oxtail and grits and triple chocolate cake. The event was ticketed, and proceeds from the event benefitted Free Food’s community food and social justice programs. “The chefs are really aware of what we’re doing and the impact that we’re making” Wilms says.

While chefs and restaurants aim to serve a wide range of people, children remain the focus of efforts, especially during the holidays. The child poverty rate in the United States more than doubled in recent years, increasing from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Black, Native American, and Latinx children are three times more likely to experience poverty than white children, making the efforts at Houston’s Original Ninfa’s on Navigation all of the more important. An extension of the charitable efforts put in place by the restaurant’s founder, Maria Ninfa Rodriguez Laurenzo, the Houston institution is a mainstay in the city’s prominent Latino community. During Christmas time, it’s decorated with ornaments handmade by students at nearby Our Lady of Guadalupe School, a predominantly Latino elementary and middle school. Ninfa’s supports the tuition needs of lower-income children each year around the holidays (recent years have included $25,000 donations in the month of December), an intentional effort by way of the team to support the specific needs of the Latino community.

Sergio Trevino

During the holidays, students from Our Lady of Guadalupe School create ornaments to decorate the Original Ninfa’s on Navigation.

“There are a lot of underprivileged young Hispanic students that needed help and over there on the East End,” says Ninfa’s director of operations Justin Solomon. “And at Our Lady of Guadalupe, they know that at any point, if they need anything, they can reach out to us, and we’re going to do everything that we can to help out.”

In New Orleans, the Toups are packing more packages for children in their community. After spending years standing up to politicians enacting problematic policies that devastate the poor, and cooking Creole and Cajun fare for those in need, the holidays provide a renewed sense of energy to support others, especially children.

“We are one of the greatest food cities in the world, and one in three of our children are sitting below the poverty line — that’s just unacceptable,” Amanda Toups says. “So we’re going to do whatever we can to change that.”

During Thanksgiving week, the duo served 1,500 people; during the week of Christmas, they’ll serve 2,000. At the heart of the restaurant industry is service, and it remains the center of the team’s local efforts, in and outside of their eatery.