On Gifts 🎁

I’ve put together nine gift baskets based on nine food-loving archetypes.

Nov 06, 2023

I was originally going to run the pitch guidelines for The Desk Dispatch this week—see this post about my 2024 relaunch plans if you haven’t yet!—but as paid subscribers know, I was sick last week and thus, I’m going to be catching up on a lot of work: I’d rather not open the floodgates just yet. So here’s my first-ever gift guide. Hope you love it!

What would make a regular day better for you? The most pleasing version of everyday things is my answer. It’s why I have a Louise Carmen Roadbook for my notebooks, ordered a 2024 Leuchtturm1917 weekly planner embossed with my initials, use black felt-tip pens to write with, and prioritize my morning coffee. I like to light a scented candle while I write, and I like to spray myself with perfume before I sit down to work. These little things help me enjoy every little act of the day. This is the philosophy that guides how I choose gifts for myself; thus, this is how I consider gifts for others.

(What’s on my wish list at the moment are nice candles, nice soaps, an external hard drive for my years of endless photos, and Lousie Carmen archives for my filled-up notebooks from the last few years. Just a hint for anyone reading!)

To create a gift guide for this holiday season—which is really just a sneaky way for me to tell you about some of my favorite things—I considered some archetypes of food people who read this newsletter (with help from friends) and put together dream gift baskets. Of course, mix and match; pick and choose. Some of these items are pricey, others are not—it’s about getting the wheels turning and thinking about what could be a good fit. If you don’t feel represented here, please come to me in the comments with more gift questions.

Note that while Bookshop.org links are affiliate links, I don’t make any money here except from my By Ren capsule collection collaboration. These are just things I love or admire!

The Plant-Based Chef

Few people have heard of my favorite cookbook, The Vegetarian Compass: New Directions in Vegetarian Cooking, by the late chef Karen Hubert Allison, who passed away before it came out in 1998. Seek out a used copy of this inventive, deep, and vegetable-loving book for the plant-based gourmand in your life. Give them a nice Acid League vinegar that will look nice on the counter and is a lovely finishing touch, and bless their salt cellar with Havsno sea salt from Norway. An oil and vinegar set from Le Creuest is classic, as is a White Bark Workwear apron made from hemp fibers.

The Emerging Writer

The poet Eileen Myles has long been someone young writers look up to, and I find myself more and more enamored of their honesty about the creative life the older I get in this business. For Now, their Yale Windham-Campbell Lecture in the “Why I Write” series, is about creativity and also rent—because we can’t have the former if we can’t pay the latter. One cannot write without notebooks, and Baron Fig makes my go-tos that are portable and sturdy, and I always have a stock of Le Pen felt-tip pens, which write beautifully and feel elegant. A subscription to Interruptions or a reading from its author, Cameron Steele, will be perfect for those who are considering dedicating themselves to a literary life.

The Food Nerds

(a suggestion from the SOURCED editors)
The nerds need Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden by winemaker Anders Frederik Steen, which is ostensibly about making and tasting wine over seven years, but really brings beauty to such a document: It reminds us how to pay attention. I also suggest seeking a copy of Madeleine Kamman’s The New Making of a Cook, because ever since reading Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers chapter on her, I’ve longed for more—I want to see a Kamman-aissance! You also can’t go wrong getting food nerds something they can only find at the source. For me, in Puerto Rico, it would mean bringing them Ron Pepón rum agrícola or Finca Cialitos coffee beans. Nerds will also appreciate a subscription to Isolarii, which sends out pocket-size books that are always intellectually nourishing.

The Vegan Baker

A New Way to Bake by Philip Khoury changes the vegan baking game by focusing on common pantry ingredients and prioritizing technique. Panela Cane Sugar from Burlap & Barrel makes a chocolate chip cookie (and basically everything else it touches) so much better. Make sure they’ve got an OXO kitchen scale, because imperial measures are not worth the headache. Dr. Bronner’s Magic Balm keeps hands healthy after doing a ton of dishes.

The Culinary Mom

(a suggestion from Cameron Steele of Interruptions)
Even when a mom loves food, I think the gifts should not suggest an expectation of domestic labor. Thus: A coffee- or tea-drinking mom might enjoy the onda mug, a collaboration between Conloque and Muns—two local Puerto Rico small businesses—that is painted with delicate blue illustrations of sea-related objects. Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, a slim book about the wonders and strangeness of adjusting to life with a child, is a favorite of mine. I also suggest looking through the selections at mom-owned Luca, a boutique here in Puerto Rico: They find such brilliant objects, like this Kihara soy sauce vessel. I’m also admiring the crossbody sling bags from GDS Cloth Goods, which are available for preorder. Or maybe the culinary mom needs some artwork, in which case I cannot suggest more highly the luscious paintings of Maura K. Spain.

The Dinner-Party Curator

Draw from Klancy Miller’s For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food: Interviews, Inspiration, and Recipes for food-life genius. Yayi by Yayi Perez, a designer who works here in Puerto Rico, has many home accessories—but I really adore this take on a runner-meets-placemat for serving two to four in an intimate meal. Hola Aida, who sells vintage clothing and housewares—another Puerto Rico small business—has a lovely collection, but I especially adore these mid-century Claus Josef Riedel glasses with indents for one’s fingers in such a wildly cool shape. For salts and other small sprinkles you might want on the dinner table, I must suggest my mom’s painted oyster shells. Oh, and for martinis, of course the pearl cocktail picks in my collection with By Ren.

The New Vegetarian

(a suggestion from writer Jill Damatac)
There is no meatless home that is complete without a book from Isa Chandra Moskowitz, and in honor of my mom giving me Vegan With a Vengeance back in 2011, I suggest that one, along with Joe Yonan’s Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World's Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein, with 125 Recipes and Lukas Volger’s Veggie Burgers Every Which Way. These are the building blocks of a new vegetarian’s bookshelf. Get the new vegetarian a fresh chef’s knife from Opinel, my go-to for everyday knives; a few spices from Burlap & Barrel or Diaspora Co.; and some Primary Beans Montana-grown chickpeas. They’ll be cooking in no time.

The Food Studies Student

Arts & Foods: Rituals since 1851, edited by art critic Germano Celant, is a thick collection exploring the connections between art and food over 150 years, with texts Celant commissioned. It’s a tome, and one that can be opened to any page for new ideas and points of view. Get them a combination notebook and passport holder for their travels and studies, by Louise Carmen (my preferred designer on notebook tools). They might like the Masienda molcajete, made from fine-grained lava rock, or perhaps the Opinel folding knife for picnics and foraging on the go.

The Eclectic Reader

(a suggestion from writer, photographer, and librarian Adalena Kavanagh)
I feel like Gary Indiana’s nonfiction is such a great vector point for finding out about more writers, artists, and happenings that I want to read about, so I’ll suggest his Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984-2021 and Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985-1988. I’ll also throw in Rene Ricard’s poetry collection God With Revolver, because I started reading Indiana while trying to read more about Ricard (about whom he doesn’t have nice things to say!). If you haven’t read it, Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya is about getting into the mind of someone endlessly reading about atrocities, and so it meets our day and age. Oh, and so does Before Brezhnev Died by Moldovan author Iulian Ciocan. I desperately want the rest of his books translated into English, so please buy this one, which reads swiftly, hilariously, and brutally about everyday life in the Soviet Union. We need to learn from the cracks and ends of empire.

This Friday’s paid subscriber dispatch will be a self-indulgent listicle, because it’s my birthday week! I’ll be listing 38 of my favorite meals, books, movies, and songs for the 38 years of my life thus far. If you’d like to give me a birthday gift, supporting the new era for the newsletter would be the best!

My desk earlier this year, with martini.

News

My small capsule jewelry collection with By Ren, whose designs are handmade to order in Philadelphia, is live through the end of 2023. There are cocktail picks with a pearl on them, which are my favorite thing ever! Perfect gift.

Reading

I’m writing this a few weeks in advance and I’m terrible at lying. I have no idea what I’m reading when you’re reading this! But I will say I’ve been reading on the topic of “food porn”: “Gastro-Porn” by Alexander Cockburn in the New York Review of Books in 1977 and Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought and Packaged by Rosalind Coward.