What would you say if I told you my father’s most significant piece of industrial design work—the BRUTE—is in the Smithsonian. Supposedly. I’ve looked for it there but have never seen it. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. It’s big and takes up space. This could restrict its appearance on the museum floor to temporary exhibits, which have never coincided with my visits. Or perhaps it’s been there in plain sight, all along, on the loading dock out back, being used as it was meant to be used, as a trash can.

My father designed the BRUTE during the sixties, the Golden Age of plastics. It came out in 1968, just one year after movie goers heard Mr. McGuire, in The Graduate, give Benjamin Braddock the career tip of a lifetime in a single word: plastics. At that time, the then glamorous material was the promise for the future: it could answer all design problems, more inexpensively, and make the world a better place.

Today we know that’s not true. We know the opposite is true—that plastics are the source of many of the earth’s problems, affecting the health of the planet and her inhabitants on a macro and micro level.

The BRUTE would be a fitting object to include in a Smithsonian exhibit contrasting the zeal for plastic in that era with the present fallout. What was thought to be an inherent good by many leading ultimately to unintended consequences. Can we solve the problem of plastics? This problem we created for ourselves.

Now that the Commander-in-Chief has become a curator of the Smithsonian Institution, that exhibit would surely not occur. It’s too negative, too realistic, and too anti-business. The ideologically correct exhibit would be a look at the innovative Golden Age of Plastics, celebrating iconic design achievements, like the BRUTE, and that is all.

Ironically, this new development of President-as-Curator could help to give my father’s innovative design more time, maybe permanent time, on the museum floor. Since it’s big, it could help to fill up holes in exhibition space created by the removal of other objects that tell the problematic history of America. Such as a “White’s Only” public bathroom sign, a relic from America’s apartheid past.

In the aim of focusing entirely on objects that tell a positive story of the United States, perhaps President Trump will issue an executive order to bring all BRUTES off the Smithsonian’s loading docks and inside the institution’s walls, where they can live out their slow-to-degrade 1,000-year lifespan in complete inutility.

BASQUE CHICKEN HAS LONG had its Nashville hot chicken moment. To get it, you no longer have to go to its place of origin, the Pays Basque in the southwest corner of France. It is a beloved national dish, so commonplace that it’s easy to find as a convenient, grab-and-go food in grocery stores all over France.

Last winter, my husband and I ate a lot of the stuff. We were living in France, in the Loire Valley, some 560 kilometers northeast of the Basque region. We spent much of our time redoing the kitchen in a sixteenth-century house my husband bought more than twenty years ago. To eat, we set up a makeshift kitchen in a small, unused room on the top floor, equal in

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One Friday morning, in early December, Mike and I drove out of Richmond, Virginia, heading west and south toward Knoxville, Tennessee.

As we rode, we listened to Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, a novel set in Knoxville in the early 1950s. Its epic length requires more than a drive to Knoxville and back to hear the whole thing, even when taking a slightly longer return route, through North Carolina, to eat a barbecue lunch.

All of the writing in Suttree is vivid, overflowing its pages. Crossing over from Virginia into Tennessee, we heard a particularly visceral passage about


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Yesterday, I arrived in Inverness, Florida. I’m here to visit my mother and Gary. One of the first things we’ll do, as soon as I’ve published this posting, is to head over to a nondescript strip mall on Highway 44 West where one of the most unique ice cream establishments in America is found: Lynn’s Ice Cream & Belgian Waffles.

During a previous trip to Inverness, I spent several hours with the owners, Lynn and Rudi Weber, they answering my many questions so that I could write something about them for this blog. It’s amazing what

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From Turner Ham House in Fulk’s Run, Virginia, slowly cured ham, sliced luminescent-ly thin, salt and sugar preserved, deeply flavorful.

A gift for my family, by love and the color of blood, not skin.

Other gifts: a half-gallon of must-shake raw apple cider from Smith’s Fruit Market in Augusta, West Virginia, comfortingly tart; fresh-made biscuits from Bonnie Blue Bakery in Winchester, Virginia. Winchester, proclaimed apple capital of the world, is located in the Northern Shenandoah Valley at 39.1670° N, -78.1670° W, making it practically the most north-western spot in Jim Crow South.

To Bond Street, home of 95-year-old Mary Virginia Cook Cross, and

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Fresh river herring roe

Fresh river herring roe. Now that is a Christmas gift to satisfy even the most jaded food lover. It’s available in a small can, the perfect size for a Christmas stocking, and there’s no need to wrap it—it’s quaint vintage-looking label is part of its charm. As an added bonus, it comes with plenty of built-in Christian symbiology, being a fish product, for

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It is with guilty pleasure that I write this: pleasure because it’s an ice cream fable; guilt because it has diverted my attention from Odette, a dear French lady with decades of cooking skills whom I’ve written about three times so far.* There are so many more Odette stories to tell and Odette recipes to share.

For the last couple of months, in a spare hour here and there, I have been slowly transcribing and translating what Odette said about her life in an audio interview I did with her this summer. I’m particularly keen to decipher what she says about living and eating in Nazi-occupied Paris when she was a young girl. She recounted a war-time food story

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Compare and despair. That is what my friend John Camilleri said to me after I sized myself up this way: So and so is more successful than me, more confident than me, more charming, more fashionable. That exchange was had years ago, on a subway platform in New York, where we both lived at the time. Those three magic words still resonate.

In cooking, however, most everything that’s learn-able—techniques, flavor pairings—is done by direct comparison. In the kitchen, comparing isn’t despairing, it’s illuminating. Take mint and dark chocolate. When do you ever get a chance to fully appreciate why those two ingredients are a classic pairing? When you buy a peppermint patty, thin mints, or mint chocolate chip ice cream, the flavor components are

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Not an ounce of good taste is wasted in this house. Sesame seeds collected at the bottom of the paper bag that once held a loaf of sesame rye bread are saved and sprinkled on buttered and honeyed toast the next morning. The residue of mushroom liquor and butter clinging to the insides of a container that held sautéed mushrooms is freed with a splash of hot water and put into the service of a mushroom omelet.

I have to admit, I sometimes slip up and forget to be mindful; I forget to give that over-looked throw-away item a second life in my kitchen. When I do, I berate myself. But one type of missed taste opportunity that is never lost on me or my husband, Mike, are the remnants of dressing, sauce, or appetizing drippings in plates or bowls or pots or pans. A swipe of bread through these flavorful dregs becomes dessert (and if we’re out of bread, a spatula or index finger works).

At these savor-the-flavor moments, Mike often does the honors. He’ll rip off a piece of bread and run it through the serving bowl. Then, like a rooster

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Mid-August is not a great time to turn on the oven in Richmond, Virginia. But it is a great time to enjoy the masses of locally grown height-of-the-season tomatoes tumbling out of farmer’s markets and gardens. Thanks to Odette Podevin, my French Patroness of Cooking, I knew just what to do with my own bottomless supply, churned out by our plot in a community garden. I would make Tomates Farcies au Riz à la Chair à Saucisse, or Tomatoes Stuffed with Rice and Sausage Meat.

Last Sunday, along with

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