Fiesta bits and scorpions on a stick 🦂
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to braise ox penis in curry in explicit violation of the sacred rules of hospitality
Hi there!
Last week I've been busy with a few things, plus days and days of an annoying heatwave that drained all my energies.
Did I have some of the recipes suggested for the hottest days? Maybe I should have had some...
Let's not make the same mistake this week.
Piero
✹Homer, Odyssey. This line, from the second most famous Homer of all time, isn't only about the episode where Odysseus' men get turned into pigs. Think about it for a moment, and it also speaks to us: to the abundance we live in, while injustice keeps persisting everywhere else.
Home cooking for one
What does it mean to cook for one, in a world built for two, or more Davies takes the single woman's kitchen and turns it into a lens. Not just recipes, but a whole culture: shopping alone, eating alone, cleaning up alone. The book asks what happens to food once you strip away domestic duty and romance. What's left is something closer to freedom added with garlic toast with fresh tomato, steaks for one, martinis and practical advice on stocking a solo kitchen without overspending. But the real subject is independence, precarity, loneliness, pleasure. Cooking as a way of building a home when no one else is coming home to it.
The Spinster Cookbook by Eli Davies
→ Shortplot: 🍕 🍸 🥩 🩵
Not Japanese Food. Just Food in Japan
Scorpions on a stick. Deep-fried frogs. Pig brain stir-fry. Braised ox penis in curry sauce. Duck blood soup. If friendship can be born over lunch, what are the odds this is really how it starts?
That's exactly what happens in the first episode of Tokyo Salad Bowl (NHK, Netflix). The title feels a bit on the nose, but that's what the original manga was called too. And I'm enjoying this show more than I expected.
At its core, it's a series about crimes tied to Japan's migrant communities. It uses that premise to make a simple point: understanding beats fear, and curiosity beats suspicion.
The show pulls this off by combining elements that shouldn't work as well together as they do. There's a compassionate, unconventional detective obsessed with food, especially the kind most people won't touch. There's a former policeman turned translator, guarded and hard to read. Around them, a cast of characters carries the same passions, tics, and quiet abuses you'd find in any society, not just Japan's.
«People and food culture have crossed country borders and boundaries. And they continue to evolve after reaching their destinations», says Koda Mari, the detective with green hair. In a way, she's speaking for all of us.
🇪🇸Spain won the football world cup, here are 10 pintxos to try at home now (★recipe) 🍇Sweet and Salty Frozen Grapes (★recipe) 🎄Baumkuchen: a German cake more famous in Japan than at home (★recipe) 🌸Flowers, Wine, and the Host Gift Faux Pas according to the French dinner party etiquette 🏠The Rise of the Real Estate Foodie Influencer ⏳How to Slow Down Time when life feels like it's speeding up 🍜Why the Best Food Cities Aren't Always the Best Restaurant Cities 👩🏻🍳In November you'll need $450 to buy the seven volumes of Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Arts School stack
I Am Completely Exhausted by Restaurant 'Experiences'
Jaya Saxena / Ravenous
Restaurants are turning bread service, cocktails, and even desserts into full theatrical productions, complete with $5,000 martinis served with diamond bracelets. The piece argues that as dining becomes a rare, expensive occasion, restaurants overcompensate with spectacle, often at the expense of real hospitality and thoughtful service.
Athena is dead. But Nolan feels just fine
Lucio Di Gaetano
This is a powerful essay (with a weak headline) about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey film. It's written in Italian, but there's one passage that stands out. Here's the gist: Xenia as a legal system, not just a literary theme. Every monster in this Odyssey becomes a violation of hospitality. Polyphemus devours his guests. The Suitors devour the house that shelters them. Calypso holds Odysseus against his will. At the top sits the original violation: the Trojan Horse, a gift turned into a weapon. The collapse of the Mycenaean world becomes a moral collapse, not just an economic one.
