I have done some nattering here about buffalo meat, which I like very much, despite my irrational aversion to most meats not familiar to me from childhood. I think it tastes very like beef, only even better, sweeter, cleaner. Until recently, though, I’d only had the ground meat, which was all that was available to me locally. Recently, I found a “minimally processed” (whatever that means), “additive free” 2 pound buffalo chuck roast (it magically…

It cannot be denied that my culinary heritage inclines to the, well, leaden. It comes most directly from Eastern European Jews on the one side, and the East End of London on the other, but most of all it comes from poor people and hard times. All of my grandparents were genuinely, seriously hungry pretty regularly, and my parents, later reasonably prosperous, did not have all they wanted to eat as children. People who are…

At the Kennywood Amusement Park, when I was a whippersnapper loving the rollercoasters and fearing the Ferris Wheel, there was a lot of food of the sort that appeals primarily to the young and very hungry. Much of it was destined to cause alarming rumblings in tummies that went upside down, and spun all around. There were the usual corndogs, cotton candy, caramel corn mixed with peanuts, and iceballs topped with brilliantly colored chemicals. Among…