Cooking at the Crossroads

March 16, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

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Just about a month away now from the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge, my memoir with recipes of a year in Slovakia 1993–1994, I thought it was time to give a little love to an unjustly neglected cuisine at the four corners of a defunct empire.

The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire is how the Time-Life “Foods of the World” characterizes it and accordingly entitles that entry in the renowned series. I imagine the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be rather irritated by their absence from this name, but as usual, Slovaks have more cause to complain: author Joseph Wechsberg fails to include a single recipe attributed to Slovakia (even “Liptauer Cheese,” the German name for a spread from the Liptov region of Slovakia), presumably assuming—as Czechs are wont to do—that Slovak is a subset of Czech.

For all that, it’s a marvelous cookbook and a good place to start if, as is generally the case in the English-speaking world, central Europe is kind of a blank on your mental map…

Memoirs with Recipes

February 16, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Now that I am—finally!—counting down the days and not the years until the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge: An American Girl’s Hilarious and Heartbreaking Year in the Fledgling Republic of Slovakia, I have found myself more and more curious about the other contenders in my subgenre: the memoir with recipes.

It came as no surprise that memoirs with recipes lean heavily toward the crosscultural and international. Nothing evokes the reality of having a foot in more than one reality than the different, even conflicting tastes you develop along the way. Being an international person means always being hungry for something you can’t get…

The Meta-Cookbooks of Niki Segnit, Part II

December 8, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

When we last saw our heroine, she was departing France in a blaze of glory, forever unleashed from bondage to the strictures of cookbooks and their hidebound recipes.

Well, not really, to be honest. I still have a great big cookbook collection and I still use them all the time, though I am considerably less obedient than while I was acquring the skills and concomitant instincts of an intuitive cook.

However, the intuitive-cook-skills-and-instincts have, over time, resulted in a great deal of grumpiness about cookbooks. (See some of that grumping here.) Excessive fussiness, no attention to streamlining the use of bulky pots and pans, taste bought for a huge sum instead of through skillful execution, and constantly reinventing the wheel rate high on my list of complaints.

Which is why Lateral Cooking was a game changer all over again…

The Meta-Cookbooks of Niki Segnit, Part I

November 23, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Sometime in 2012 I was languishing in France because I had nothing good to read. Still weirdly resistant to ebooks, unwilling to pay the postage for overseas delivery, and having reread everything on my own shelf, I searched with faint hope through the selection of English novels available in the local bookstore. They were (pinch nose here) “literary.” Beautiful sentences about nihilistic individuals, containing nothing so bourgeois as a plot. I resolved never again to pick a work of fiction sight unseen off the shelf and resigned myself to reading through all seven volumes of Harry Potter again because nothing else was worth the trouble.

Then hope twinkled anew, because I found The Flavour Thesaurus…

Why You* Hate to Cook, or, What I’ve Learned from Snooping around in Your Kitchen

September 1, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

*This “you” is a composite of the many people whose kitchens I’ve snooped in. Don’t worry, your identity is safe with me!

If I have spent any time at your house, then you have caught me rooting through your fridge.

Later, despite a puzzled look or even a rebuke, you have seen me give a guilty start when you found me in your pantry.

Then you caught me red-handed sorting your plastic storage containers and quite possibly trying to throw some of them out.

Yes, it’s a bad habit, but if I have been engaged in such nefarious activities in your kitchen, then you know that I also ended up cooking you dinner.

You liked this part.

The one is logically connected to the other. Please sit back, digest, and allow me to explain…

To the Outer Limits of Hummus and Beyond

June 24, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Ten years ago I paid my first and only visit to Israel/Palestine and I had a conversion experience. Not to Jesus or Judaism or any of the many flavors of ancient Christianity on offer.

No, I was converted to olives.

Understand that up to this point my primary acquaintance with olives was in the form of the flabby black rings that came from a can and looked and tasted like tires. Or, more rarely, a pimento-stuffed one nicked out of a parent’s martini: hard to say which was worse, the drink or its garnish.

I was always rather sad about this because olives seemed, in principle, to be cool and sophisticated. I wanted to be the kind of person who eats olives. Alas. I was not.

And then, by one of those odd series of circumstances in life in which you end up at the Greek Orthodox monastery attached to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (not the Armenian Apostolic or the Roman Catholic monastery, mind you), I was confronted with a lavish feast amidst which sat a plate heaped with glistening, oozing olives. They were honestly black, not chemically black, wrinkled and puckered and very inviting. I don’t like olives, I said to myself. But a taste can’t hurt.

Well, I won’t bother you with the immoderate and propagandistic praise of the convert. Let’s just say that I love them now—the real ones, not the imitation horrors that show up on pizza.

This naturally led me on to Israeli cookbooks to make good use of my newfound love…

Your Best Omelette Now!

April 23, 2020 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

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The pandemic has prompted the adoption of all sorts of unusual behaviors, such as 1) abandonment of all pretense of screen time limitations, 2) worshiping via Zoom, 3) grown-up podcasters building blanket forts in their closets to mimic the sound studio, 4) shifting from print books to ebooks no matter one’s previous Luddite habits, 5) wearing face masks and homemade ones at that, and finally 6) cooking.

Or at least from what I gather, a lot more people are doing a lot more cooking. This can turn into a whole new species of maladaptive competition—have you fully taken advantage of this precious and irreplaceable time to start your first batch of sourdough, ferment your kombucha, and construct architectonic pastries!?—and it can equally well turn into dreary repetition of the same ol’ same ol’.

Well, to those of you suffering in culinary confinement, I release you from the burden of achieving Great Things in Solitude or acquiring a New and More Wholesome Perspective on Life, the Universe, and Everything, and offer you instead something much better: a fantastic omelette you can make in three and a half minutes…