I don’t guess I can let Fastnacht Day pass without saying something about the doughnuts. On what the English call Shrove Tuesday and the French call Mardi Gras, the day before Lent begins — “Fastnacht” means “eve of the fast” — Pennsylvania Germans have traditionally made potato doughnuts instead of pancakes or beignets. Of course I made some, as I do every year. Read on

A few years ago I bought some fresh pasta at the farmers market. (Well, frozen fresh pasta, anyway.) I asked how much it cost, and the lady said six dollars. Not cheap for plain noodles, I thought, but ok — let’s try the new business. I handed over six dollars. She handed me a six-ounce package of noodles.

That’s sixteen dollars a pound for noodles, y’all. Silly me, thinking I’d get a whole pound for just six bucks.

As I have since learned, it isn’t actually all that difficult to make fresh noodles. What’s difficult is making them look perfect. That takes equipment and space. But if you are willing to accept the style commonly known as rustic, you can make fresh pasta for a weeknight dinner. Seriously. You need a food processor, but you certainly don’t need a pasta machine. And depending on how you shape your noodles, it only takes about ten minutes of hands-on work. Read on

One Sunday morning last winter I made pancakes, and then I made them again the next Sunday, and my daughter decided that twice was a tradition. Even the dogs started expecting pancakes. I go out to get the paper, I come back, they’re circling the stove. Ever since I have made pancakes nearly every Sunday morning, a lot of pancakes. Making a lot of something — making it often — is of course the best way to learn to do it well, especially when it comes to baking, which is harder to learn than cooking simply because it’s a black box; there’s no adjustment on the fly, no correcting the seasoning. And I would say that I’ve learned to make mighty good pancakes, but not because I figured out how to tweak the recipe (though I did) or discovered exactly the right turn of the stove’s knob (though I did that too). What I learned was that there aren’t any shortcuts: you have to work. And nobody, but nobody, tells you that in cookbooks anymore. Read on

For the past month I’ve been working on a chapter about the rise of the white cake, the layer cake, the fluffy and utterly unflavored cake, the “sweet nothings,” as I’ve tentatively titled it. I’ve nearly finished a draft that explains this phenomenon, really nothing less than the evisceration of the American sense of taste, by way of Victorian table manners, the invention of the eggbeater, a gastric fistula, yogurt enemas, jello salads, and fears of sexual excess. And that is just one chapter. People, seriously, you will want to reserve a copy on Amazon as soon as humanly possible.

In the meantime, I’ve needed to bake a number of Gilded Age recipes, including something called “cornstarch cake” that tastes distressingly reminiscent of an expired snack cake found in the trash after the vending machine has been refilled. But not everything that came out of that era of American baking was inexcusable. The angel food cake is lovely when made well. And the layer cake isn’t inherently bad; it’s just too often made that way. It can be redeemed. Consider, for example, the coconut cake. Read on

Of course I had to make gingerbread men for Christmas. You can’t be halfway through a book on gingerbread and then pass up the obvious opportunity to bake it; it simply wouldn’t be allowed. And, of course, I’m no longer happy with the recipes I had at hand. So I came up with a recipe with a genuinely historical flavor but the tenderness and richness we expect from a Christmas cookie. Read on