Butter, Ramadan and Egg Marinades 🧈
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start asking questions, discover the real nature of fungi and drink stacked water (whatever that is)
Hi there! And Ramadan Mubarak!
This week we have fasting and butter, mushrooms and chili ganache.
I think we're good, then.
Piero
✹Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. This one is a classic. Perfect if you loved The Last of Us (no, just kidding).
There's only one 'but' in butter
If I could write a book dedicated to butter, what would it look like? Mine shaped like a stick of butter. Too bad Anna Stockwell and Chronicle Books got there first with this little manual of butter-based delights. Click the link below and you can even copy a few recipes, without getting your hands dirty. Ah, with 112 pages, this book is exactly one stick of butter — no more, no less. There's nothing more to say, except that it's not recommended for vegans.
Butter Book by Anna Stockwell
→ Shortplot: 🧈 🧈 🧈 🧈
What a Celebrated Maestro Taught me About Cooking
Max Richter is one of the most significant composers of our time — a post-minimalist architect of slow, aching beauty. He also holds a peculiar record: Sleep, his 2015 eight-hour lullaby designed to be heard unconscious, is the longest classical composition ever commercially released (and probably the most streamed online).
So, clearly, he has nothing to do with food or cooking. And yet meeting him last week made me think about something important in the world we care about most here at Secret Breakfast.
At some point I asked him whether he ever feared other people's judgment of his work.
Today, in the age of social media, public reaction — online, in real time — is one of the first challenges anyone faces when they want to communicate something. And yet to make art, or to serve a dish at the table, you need to find the courage to strip yourself bare and put yourself out there.
If any of you ever feel anxiety, or catch yourself self-censoring out of fear of others — here's what Richter told me.
I see creative work as being half of a conversation. You make a piece of music and then you're asking the world a kind of what/if question. How about if I made this, so what is it? Please tell me. So you then get the other half of this conversation. And then that's culture, that's a dialogue and shared understanding. And it's fascinating.
Not bad, right? To create is to ask a question, to write half of a conversation. The other person's response is the other half. That's how culture is made.
Let's cook. Let's make culture.
Disclaimer: I met Richter for work, as part of a collaboration he did with Maison Krug. It's a fascinating project — if you're curious, you can read more here and also watch a short documentary that explains it.
Trivia: 2008 was a damned good year for Champagne. Even though the harvest began on the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed.
🍿Being Gordon Ramsay, on Netflix 🥖Why the Hotel Bakery Is Becoming as Popular as the Hotel Bar 🤖Now you can take your AI chatbot on an actual date at NYC’s companion cafe 🍰Chocolate Mochi Cake with Thai Chili Ganache (★recipe) 🥺How to network when you’re socially anxious 🚰Stacked Water,the Internet’s New Hydration Hack 🇫🇷Where to Eat in Marseille (let's go NOW) ♥️50 Non-Awkward Questions for a First Date That’ll Actually Spark a Connection 🛏️The Case for Having a “French Sunday” (I'm sold) ☪️Ramadan special: How to plan Ramadan meals: minimal work, maximum readiness; BBC's 48 Ramadan Recipes; Serious Eats' 31 Ramadan Recipes for a Nourishing, Flavor-Packed Iftar; 25 Plant-Based Middle Eastern Ramadan Recipes for you, veganzas
How To Eat When You’re In Love/Not In Love
Sreya Vittaldev / Table For One
We forget to eat when we fall in love — and we forget ourselves along with it. One woman traces her relationship through flavour: the electric first dates she can't remember tasting, the bland meals she cooked to please someone else, the appetite that vanished before the breakup did. The question she's left with is uncomfortably simple: why do we only start taking care of ourselves when we're alone?.
