Snack Tins and Lifesaving Panini 🥜

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start cooking punk spaghetti, while freezing pickles and talking to yourself in your favorite fast-food

Hi there!

I'm having a supermarket 100% fake Greek salad while sending this.

At least the company is good.

Enjoy your week more than me!

Piero

✹Ana Huang, with this King of Gluttony (book 6 of a saga I'm not familiar with) she's #3 in The New York Times bestseller's list. But you find this quote here because I often don't set knives on the table when I think what I've cooked doesn't need one. Apparently, it saves my life too.

The Best is Yet to Come

Reading this cookbook felt like when I started learning English and couldn't tell an American accent from one from Cambridge. Everything sounds like cooking, but the results are worlds apart. Now I get that same feeling watching Ella Quittner compare twenty versions of the same scrambled egg. Obsessed with the Best is what happens when someone refuses to stop asking why. Quittner traveled from Alabama to Tokyo to figure out the single right answer for biscuits, meatballs, roast chicken. The book delivers 24 head-to-head method tests and 100 recipes built on that research. It also reads like a essay collection, with reported pieces on people who share her particular flavor of obsession.

Obsessed with the Best by Ella Quittner
→ Shortplot: ⚖️ 🍪 🙀 🥞

Welcome to the Haunted House

In one of my favorite films — widely panned by critics — Bradley Cooper plays a troubled chef who conducts a job interview with a talented cook at a London Burger King (it was clearly a product placement, but stay with me). When she asks why there, he says: «This place is easy, accessible, cheap, it's easy to find and they don't kick you out if you talk to yourself, which for me is crucial».

In a book published in Italy, a brilliant and underrated writer named Tommaso Labranca dedicated the acknowledgments of his novel Haiducii to the regulars of a McDonald's restaurant in Milan — low income migrant people from dozens of different countries — where he had written most of the manuscript.

Now, also in Italy (forgive the navel-gazing, but I think this lands closer to home than it seems), the writer Claudia Durastanti has published an essay on exactly this in the excellent magazine L'Integrale, published by Iperborea.

Her argument: as cities get devoured by the hunger for authenticity and good food becomes a luxury, the people left behind find shelter in the very places that supposedly represent everything wrong with how we eat. Fast food chains. Or, I'd add, terrible bars. What Durastanti calls "haunted houses", as in... places you go not for the food, but to get cheap comfort you for a while.

Honestly? I think about this almost every day. Which probably says something about me. Or about the city I live in.

Does it happen where you live too?

P.S. Two small ideas worth sitting with: some cities have started turning fast food spaces into hybrid community hubs, cheap food, free wifi, no judgment on how long you stay. And some chefs and restaurateurs are quietly pricing one or two dishes for the neighborhood, not the algorithm. Neither fixes the system. Both are a start.

🥪 52 Writers on the Best Sandwich of Their Life 🥫 Oh my God I love the snack tin 🥧Yuzu-miso glazed asparagus tart with feta (★recipe) 🛒 America's Hottest New Club Is The Grocery Store. What? 🥒 Freeze your pickle, someone had to say it 🧊Since you're there: try some Fruit Ice-Maxxing (and, please, stop using the expression maxxing) 🫖Earl-Grey Syrup (★recipe) 🌊 Try this Mediterranean summer, fig and yogurt cake (★recipe) 🍞 The sexiest rolls are these Bread Packs 🎬 Inside Grand Abandoned Cinemas ⏲️Inside The Midcentury Kitchen 🎸 The Punkest Food Picture of the Day: Italian band Skiantos at Bologna Rock, 1979 set up a full kitchen on stage, cooked spaghetti, ate it, left. No music performed

What I Learned When I Became Food

Jess Mayhugh / Saveur

For years she wrote about food. Then she had a baby, and food wrote back. A tender, unsettling essay about the moment a cook becomes the ingredient.

Disclosure: I received a copy of L'Integrale for editorial review. I also contributed to the magazine a few years back.