Mastic feels like stones between the fingers and turns pliant between the teeth — although “if you bite it, it cracks,” the French Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan says. Under a pestle, it crumbles into a shimmery dust. Stir this into liquid, and there’s a slight thickening, a sudden heaviness, verging on syrup. Kattan, a founder…
The layered cake known as Death by Chocolate debuted as a special in 1982 at the Trellis, a polished American restaurant in Williamsburg, Va., and built a cult following long before a dessert could find instant fame on social media. It’s worth noting that those were pretty weird times for chocolate. Its pleasure was distorted,…
As a teenager, the Viennese food stylist and baker Sophia Stolz, 29, was often befuddled by the fancy, prim desserts served at her friends’ birthday celebrations. Despite all the money spent on outfits and party décor, the cakes tended to be “so boring!” she says. Now, she’s baking cakes that are, in her words, “a…
In the early 1950s, Lucinda Moore founded a church ministry from her home in Blount’s Creek, N.C. The property anchored the charity work she became known for: nursing sick people back to health in her house, giving needy people the clothes that hung in her closet, leading religious ceremonies in the church she helped build…
Once you start asking, you realize that nearly everyone has a version of this pan in his or her life — and an exalted recipe to go with it. A midcentury aluminum Bundt-style pan that defines a friend’s mother’s simple sour-cream poundcake is stashed in some kitchen cupboard in Florence, Ala. One specific skillet, the…
The origin story of one of Peru’s most popular desserts is almost as romantic as its name — suspiro a la limeña, or “the sigh of a lady from Lima.” More than a century ago, the story goes, the wife of the poet José Gálvez Barrenechea made him a custard similar to dulce de leche…
