Food news antipasto

For over 70 years, The Good Food Guide has reviewed the best restaurants, pubs and cafés across the UK. From 1951 until 2020, the guide was completely rewritten and compiled from scratch each year. Last May Waitrose announced that it would not publish the 2021 edition due to the pandemic, but vowed to return in a year’s time. However, we recently learned that the Guide is gone for good. This marks the end of an era for the Guide, which Waitrose purchased in 2013.

My friend’s grandmother lived to be 106, and in her late 90s was still a spitfire, putting in a large garden and canning fruits and vegetables. One of my fondest memories of her occurred when we were eating Sunday dinner at her son’s house, where roast beef was on the menu. The beef was fatty, and I carefully cut off a hunk of fat and put it to one side of my plate. “Are you going to eat that fat?” she queried. “I like the fat,” she continued, with look of satisfaction on her face as I placed the fat on her plate. That is why I loved a recent post about sops and drippings by Nic Miller, which explores the history around sopping up meat drippings with pieces of bread, the precursor to modern soup.

Water is one of a cook’s most essential ingredients. Not only is it a required ingredient in so many recipes, but it performs double duty by being a mechanism for cooking. The Washington Post’s Becky Krystal investigates all the ways to cook with water, including boiling, braising, and steaming. She left out sous vide, but I am not going to quibble with the great cooking tips she offers in her article.

Some wine enthusiasts insist that you need a variety of shapes and styles of wineglasses to fully appreciate the properties of each varietal. There are glasses specifically created for Burgundy, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, and so on. You may wonder if you really need all those different sizes and shapes. Wine Enthusiast takes a look at the issue, and provides information to help you decide how many – and which – styles of glasses will work for you.

If you don’t live in or have not traveled to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, you will be forgiven for not knowing about Wawa. The regional convenience store chain has a huge cult following, with its fans proclaiming it to have the best hoagies around. One of my friends lived in Philadelphia but moved to Oregon for work a few years ago, and she still occasionally posts about how much she misses Wawa. I have been to a couple of them but the visits did not instill the sense of reverence that I have heard others proclaim. If you want to know more about what makes Wawa (allegedly) so superior, head over to Eater. There, Meghan McCarron writes about the glory of the Wawa hoagie.

See Food News Antipasto for previous posts.