God help anyone who chops up their brisket. Or anyone who adds apples, raisins or any of the myriad abominations that ruin a hunk of perfectly good meat. It’s not that I dislike these ingredients. When it comes to brisket, I am a purist because I was lucky enough to grow up eating the best brisket in the world: My mother’s. She set an exceptionally high bar with her brisket, and anything that deviates from this standard is suspect, probably unfairly so, in my opinion.
My first and still favorite ice cream is an obscure flavor, available almost nowhere and made, as far as I know, by only one company.
In the three decades since I first tasted it, Swensen’s Swiss Orange Chip remains the only ice cream — the only dessert — that evokes in me such a heady mix of desire and nostalgia. Even the mind-blowing mascarpone gelato I once tried in Florence in my post-college years comes in at a distant second.
In case the New York Times’ “Cooking with Dexter” column isn’t twee enough for you, we now have “Twin Chefs.” Sooner or later, the lucrative world of food media (I say that ironically and unironically) was bound to crash head-on into the creepy netherworld of “Toddlers and Tiaras.” I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner. After all, living out your parents’ dreams for stardom, what could possibly go wrong?
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