Emma Allen on crisis-mode cooking and the search for the perfect pizza via the Franny’s cookbook: http://t.co/1OQDIhUV82

Cartoon by Joe Dator. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/VISJ6z

Cartoon by Roz Chast. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/XX24up

In this week’s Food Issue, Mimi Sheraton remembers the European sausage and salami she’s loved, and seeks similar specimens in the US: http://nyr.kr/TfEfKk

Here, meet Cesare Casella, the executive chef at Salumeria Rosi, on the Upper West 

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Thanksgiving is not easy,” Sam Sifton warns turkey tyros in his new book “Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well.” Handily enough, Sifton, who was the restaurant critic at the Times for two years before becoming the paper’s National Editor in 2011 (food + America = Thanksgiving expertise), has produced “a primer on how to face down the Thanksgiving meal… a Thanksgiving ambulance in book form.” With a quarter century of Thanksgivings at the stove—“I have seen a lot of birds”—and experience manning the Times’s holiday hotline, he boasts, “I can help.”

Emma Allen valiantly attempts to cook a Thanksgiving dinner with the help of Sam Sifton’s stern advice: http://nyr.kr/Xif4dC

That is what it means to learn to eat. Few of us are encouraged to do as Julia did, and eat in a way that lets us be formed, neatened, honed; that lets us take on eating as a thing to learn, a path that may leave us, god forbid and god grant, tasting and thinking of things differently than we do now.

[P]erhaps the best way to remember Julia is by looking back at images and words of Julia herself, because she is one of those rare stars who is somehow better in reality than in the popular imagination. No matter how many times one hears about how charismatic, how natural and unembarrassed, or how funny and charming she was, seeing Julia onscreen or hearing her talk about food always surpasses those expectations—she’s so perfectly Julia every time. 

Click-through for Rachel Arons’ compilation of “essential Julia Child material to remember the culinary icon on her centennial”: http://nyr.kr/NnoUC7

(Source: newyorker.com)

Happy Independence Day! In honor of the holiday and the celebratory barbecues it often invites, here’s a look back at Calvin Trillin’s 2008 piece on then-ranked best Texas BBQ in the world: http://nyr.kr/mGsC

In discussions of Texas barbecue, the equivalent of Matt Damon and George Clooney and Brad Pitt would be establishments like Kreuz Market and Smitty’s Market, in Lockhart; City Market, in Luling; and Louie Mueller Barbecue, in Taylor—places that reflect the barbecue tradition that developed during the nineteenth century out of German and Czech meat markets in the Hill Country of central Texas. (In fact, the title of Texas Monthly’s first article on barbecue—it was published in 1973, shortly after the magazine’s founding—was “The World’s Best Barbecue Is in Taylor, Texas. Or Is It Lockhart?”) Those restaurants, all of which had been in the top tier in 2003, were indeed there again in this summer’s survey. For the first time, though, a No. 1 had been named, and it was not one of the old familiars. “The best barbecue in Texas,” the article said, “is currently being served at Snow’s BBQ, in Lexington.”

April Bloomfield: The “Not-So-Nasty Bits”

Reading “A Girl and Her Pig”—and you can read it, as much as you can leaf through and gawk at pigs’ ears and mark the recipe for “Smoked Haddock Chowder and Sausage-Stuffed Onions” that you want to make—brought back, for me, the pleasure of Bloomfield’s company (“Drain the chard well in a colander, but don’t squeeze it to buggery,” she writes), while deepening my understanding of her aims in the kitchen. Before I wrote about her, I had assumed that the success of the Spotted Pig was down, perhaps, to the “gastropub” concept—that the charm of the place lay in the fact that someone had thought to hang a shingle, unspool some tartan, and ply New Yorkers with blue-cheese burgers and rosemary-flecked shoestring fries, rather than in their execution. I realized soon, as I watched Bloomfield prepare a radish salad with a maneuver that she and her friend the chef Fergus Henderson refer to as “the claw”—it’s a way of “smooshing and bruising things to get all the flavors to come together”—that I was badly mistaken. Bloomfield is humble; her food is sophisticated.

Cartoon of the day. Don’t forget to enter this week’s caption contest: http://nyr.kr/r46had