insalata, insalatón

Here’s the sort of salad I imagined we’d be eating as we rode our bikes through the hills of Tuscany: plates of field greens piled with herbs, fruit, roasted vegetables, cured meats, mozarella di bufala – everything local and in season. Peppery vinaigrettes. New olive oil. Verrry old balsamic.

The reality looked more like this: a glass bowl of green leaf lettuce, wedges of anemic tomato, and perhaps a few rounds of carrot or cucumber. Sometimes, an arugula salad, composed just of arugula. Accompanying the salad was not a vinaigrette – remember, vinaigrette is a french word – or, even ‘italian dressing’ (this may be an american invention), but the same four things that arrive with any contorno: olive oil, ordinary vinegar, salt, and pepper.

If you hail from the U.S., where the number of words a server uses to describe your entree seems directly proportional to the ‘fineness’ of the restaurant, the food of Tuscany requires a mental shift. Tuscan food is defined by a simplicity that verges on ascetic: antipasto is a plate of thinly shaved prosciutto, the primo piatto, a plate of hand-rolled pasta with olive oil, pecorino and black pepper, the secondo piatto, a perfectly grilled pork chop.

of peanut butter and procrastination

When’s the last time you had a homemade peanut butter cookie? Really? That long ago? Me too.

Which has me wondering – what happened? I grew up baking peanut butter cookies. But I didn’t know that there were only two generations before me with the same experience. I hadn’t remembered that peanuts weren’t even grown in the U.S. until just before the turn of the 20th century, when thanks to George Washington Carver they were cultivated as an alternative to boll-weevil infested cotton crops. Carver’s 1925 article, How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption, includes recipes for cookies containing peanuts (and peanut doughnuts, and peanut soup, and liver with peanuts), but nothing containing peanut butter. , which wasn’t even invented until the 1920s. A recipe for peanut butter cookies first appeared in the 1930s, along with the first time ever instruction to press dough balls flat with the tines of a fork, which is how my grandmother did it, and is still done today. Except that it is hardly ever done today.

What would cause peanut butter cookies to fall so out of fashion?