The cardinals gathering for the conclave hope to pick the very best among them to be the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Their culinary expectations are not so high. “Food you could eat at a train station” was how Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, a conclave veteran from the Italian city of Genoa, famous for its…
More than a billion cups of coffee are consumed daily: French-press, espresso, cold brew, whatever it takes. Arnold Mathijssen, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, is partial to pour-over coffee, which involves manually pouring hot water over ground beans and filtering it into a pot or mug below. Surely, he figured, applying the principles…
As a young pastry cook at Eleven Madison Park, Genie Kwon grew accustomed to a kitchen tradition: Every time the chef shouted out an order, the other cooks responded in unison, “Oui, chef!” Or as you may have heard it on the FX show “The Bear”: “Yes, chef!” For a long time, Ms. Kwon, who…
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In 1949, as the chef Lena Richard stirred steaming pots of okra gumbo and shrimp bisque on live TV in New Orleans, viewers across the city — mostly white housewives and the…
A colleague approached Ernesto Di Maio, a materials scientist in Naples, Italy, and an expert in plastic foams, with a blunt suggestion: “You should do something cooler.” The colleague had a project in mind, Dr. Di Maio recalled. He wanted a perfectly boiled egg. The task was harder than it might seem, as many home…
Charles Phan, a self-taught chef whose family fled Vietnam when he was a teenager and whose sleek restaurant helped change America’s perception of Asian food by replacing menus of inexpensive noodle dishes and spring rolls with ones that married the best local ingredients with the food he grew up on, died on Monday in San…