Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

Many cultures engage in some form of traditional eating on New Year's Day. The idea is that eating lucky things, or one particular time-honored dish, will bring good fortune in the coming year. 

This coming year, more than ever, the world needs some good luck. That's why we're posting our version of a New Year's Pie, based on Mrs. Bliss's 1850 recipe for "A New Year's Pie." The original recipe is reproduced, with commentary, in our book Northern Hospitality, p. 261.  Read More 

Don't Make It Snappy
In the middle of the nineteenth century (before chocolate invaded and displaced all other sweet flavorings), Americans were partial to the zippy combination of ginger and molasses, which they used as the basis for untold varieties of treats. The spicy-sweet flavor duo lent itself to both "soft" gingerbread (like modern shortbread) and denser forms of hand-held treats. Toward the solid end of the spectrum were ginger snaps and a kind of ginger cookie that, sadly and inexplicably, has fallen by the wayside—ginger nuts. Our goal today is to entice you to bake up a batch of these long-forgotten Victorian chews so that you too can experience the deep, glorious taste of a really gingery cookie. Read More 

Scrod is most often broiled, so Mrs. Bliss's recipe for roasting it intrigued us. What would be the difference in taste between a nice piece of broiled scrod, as we've had any number of times at home and in restaurants, and roasted scrod? We were eager to find out.

But there was a prior question in need of an answer: What, exactly, is scrod? In our commentary on this recipe in Northern Hospitality, we discuss the word's etymology--few people have any idea what fish they're eating when they eat scrod, despite its enormous popularity in New England.  Read More