Food news antipasto

The IACP is offering a free webinar on March 18 featuring J.M. Hirsch and Deb Broide of Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. The topics will include everything from book and magazine planning to travel, reporting, and recipe development. Hirsch, a James Beard and IACP Award-winning writer and Milk Street’s editorial director, and Broide, the company’s media relations director, will share insights they have gleaned through their positions.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but would a renamed steak taste as good? If the Lieutenant Governor of Texas has his way, we could find out. Dan Patrick recently posted on social media that he was working with the State Senate on a bill that would rename the New York strip steak to Texas strip. Outside of Texas, people scoffed at the idea, with one New York restaurateur saying “I guess the lieutenant governor is looking for some P.R., but a New York steak is a New York steak.”

Suzanne Mulholland, a/k/a The Batch Lady, ironically turned her distaste for the drudgery of everyday cooking into a string of bestselling cookbooks. Known as a time-saving guru and a family-cooking expert, she shares her expertise on how to prep so you don’t have to spend endless hours in the kitchen. The Independent interviewed Mulholland shortly after the release of her latest book, The Batch Lady Rapid Dinners. The author explained that she does, in fact, like to cook – just not every day of the week, saying “It’s like, take your favourite thing you love to do, say it was yoga, and then I’m going to make you do it every single night at the same time, every single night for the rest of your life – you’re probably not going to enjoy yoga!”

If you have a subscription to The Atlantic or don’t mind signing up for a trial, there is an interesting article on how kosher salt came to replace regular table salt in many American kitchens. Once something that you had to seek out in specialty grocery stores, kosher salt is now available in supermarkets across the country. Hat tip to an EYB Member who alerted us to this article.

Good news for coffee lovers: recent research has found that in addition to its many other benefits, drinking coffee can help you have a healthier gut. After studying stool samples from over twenty thousand participants (whoever did this isn’t being paid enough), researchers found that coffee drinkers had a strain of bacteria that is known to be beneficial to a healthy gut. Here’s hoping that coffee growers will find ways to keep coffee available with the many threats posed by climate change.

Once again I am highlighting Vittles in this week’s roundup, because they recently posted a series of articles exclusively about cookbooks. Ruby Tandoh discusses 15 cookbooks that changed everything, Johnathan Meades writes about Alex Jackson’s Frontieres, Rosa Leister talks about being Machiavelli in the kitchen, and Yemisí Aríbisálà explains why there are so few Nigerian cookbooks. There is also a compendium of great non-English cookbooks.