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A quick reminder: The Mini Food Essay two-hour classes are coming up on October 27 and November 17, with day and evening sessions available. I hope you can join us! $150 for non-members; $100 for members.

“These stories are studies of home and how we make it, and with whom: over which tables, bars, and grocery shelves; which trees become part of our lives, food, and landscapes; and how we find our way toward our ancestors at the counter, rolling gnocchi.”

“‘But mum, how much flour does it need?’

‘Don’t worry about that. You will just know. See? It’s a thin powdery ribbon. Too much flour results in a dense gnocchi. We must only add whatever flour the potato requests.’

Delia was an avid learner but the instructions didn’t make much sense. Her mum talked about ingredients as if they were alive.”

“Leith is a former port town, and though it sits—even at its outer edges—no more than an hour’s walk from Edinburgh’s city center, its hospitality ecosystem feels like its own world, distinct from the rest of the Scottish capital.”

“The American chestnut proved essential for the colonists, who ate its nuts, used its hard wood for building houses and furniture, and extracted tannin from its bark for the leather industry. In Appalachia, the chestnut functioned almost as a form of currency that families could use to barter for what they needed to get through the winter. Everywhere the trees were, there were harvest festivals in the fall and chestnuts roasting on the streets of cities.”

“Mainers are notoriously skeptical of outsiders. Depending on whom you talk to, this could refer to visitors ‘from away,’ transplants, part-timers, coastdwellers, southerners (that is, Mainers from the more populous bottom half of the sprawling state), or prodigal daughters who return to open a restaurant.”

“Can an upscale marketplace or a curated vignette of muscat grapes and radicchio at an activation still act as community catalysts, a return to simple indulgences, at the pace of New York City?”

“There will be a patch of land where the grass will take longer to grow. Something stops there. The light, the water, some hands try to arrange some stones carefully, to mark out the space where the soil will need its own rhythm, where we wanted to leave a tree.”

“Restaurants across the United States have a puzzle to solve: how to incentivize diners to drink. Although it would be premature to bid the old system farewell, a 300 percent bottle markup is no longer a given.”

“Annos: A meal, portion, or in certain contexts, a dose. A dose of salmon soup, for example. A portion of painkillers.”