About
All The Things I Eat started off as a photo blog, a way to document the unique foods I found around New York City or while traveling, like this post about an Italian chocolate powdered-sugar covered cookie. The blog took an 8 year hiatus while I was writing a book about the history of Italian American food.
Then one afternoon I cooked a cassoulet. The crust photographed beautifully and I decided to write about it. I enjoyed writing about history and food and restaurants, and decided to return to old-fashioned blogging.
I primarily write four types of articles on this blog:
1. Restaurant Reviews
I don’t get out to restaurants as often as I want to because we have a toddler. But I try to document the experience with photos, take notes, and then do research about the history, writing up the experience.
2. Books About Food
I read a lot of nonfiction books about food for fun and research. I regularly write reviews of new books at the Chicago Review of Books. The books I review here have been published less recently and are focused on food. I’m also interested in looking at and examining older cookery books.
3. Things I’ve Cooked
If I try to recreate a dish from a restaurant, or just want to try out a recipe, I’ll write about the experience. While I do think of this as a recipe section, I don’t always include a recipe. I usually link to the source recipe I have referenced, but often modify it. I know there is a lot of discourse about how recipe sites have too much personal writing leading into a recipe and readers just want the recipe. This site is focused on the essay portion and less concerned with the recipe portion.
4. Things I Ate
The writer Jake Wolff had a viral Tweet about the style of contemporary nonfiction. His example looks at how writers treat hot dogs wherein he jokes nonfiction writers start off with a personal essay, add a section break, and then do a deep dive into the history. He’s not wrong, and it’s a lot like this piece I wrote about Nathan’s hot dogs. That’s the whole point of this section: I eat something and then write about the history of it.
Subscribe
If you like reading about, considering subscribing to the All The Things You Eat substack. I send a weekly roundup of curated food-related stories called Food Notes, as well as post short musings about food and recipes that don’t warrant a full essay or blog entry.
Further Reading
If you like food history, check out Red Sauce America, where I write about the history of Italian American food, interview people, and write about Italian food books.
Support All The Things I Eat
You can help me eat more food by buying books from Bookshop.org. I even occasionally create curated lists.
