Food

Real tomatoes, grown out of doors and in the sunshine, tasting juicy and fresh, are everywhere. Buy them; you have no excuses.

I was reading a magazine article, the other day about colors and how they affect the appetite. Seems a man with a flair for experimenting got together a group of guests and seated them at a table with tempting foods. The guests were hungry and looking ahead to good meal. Then this experimenter turned on some special lights. The steak turned drab gray; the green celery looked pink, and the coffee become a muddy yellow. Most of the guests couldn't cat the food at all: yet it was precisely the same food they first saw in natural and appealing colors.

I wonder how many of us to stop to think when we are preparing tasty satisfying dish such as this how good a friend the onion is to cook. Some happy day a perceptive food writer will do a definitive monograph on the onion that will rank with Lamb’s essay on roast pork.

This isn’t a complicated cornbread formula, but the secret of its appeal, judging by the way our friends and neighbors eat at our Saturday and Sunday suppers — is the touch of allspice. Offhand, I don’t recall seeing any cornbread recipe calling for allspice. 

This recipe from the Star's archives is for a classic, country-style chicken fricassee, a stew that's only limited by the ingredients in the pantry.

A lady asked me the other day to define "old fashioned" chicken pie as contrasted with a "modern." I can tell you the chief distinction without any difficulty. The "old fashioned" had plenty of chicken meat in it.

Cinnamon comes from the inner bark of a tree that grows in Java, the West Indies, Brazil, Egypt, and Ceylon. The last area produces the best-quality cinnamon with a tangy, pleasant, and distinctive flavor due to the tree's aromatic oil. Since ancient days, cooks have used this spice for its unique flavoring power.

I am very partial to stews, soups, and chowders, and I have spent considerable time in evolving this recipe. This is due notice that this beef stew recipe supersedes any previous material I have written on the subject. I don't believe there's anything so basically wrong with our nation that more stews of this caliber will not correct it.

Ordinarily, I'm not a chiffon pie man. No sense in an airy, fluffy chiffon pie if you can have a mouthful of genuine fruit. But this pie, from the Woodbine Cottage in Sunapee, N.H., is different.

There are 57-plus varieties of salad dressings, and some citizens I know are unconscionably stubborn about insisting that theirs is indisputably the world's best. I’m not going to be contumacious about it; all I am saying is that after testing and messing around with a few dressings, I know that this is the best one discovered to date.