The Ghost in the Pantry

Nakládaný hermelín (marinated cheese) is the best thing on earth. The end. And it’s otherworldly with beer and brown bread. This I know. Yes, I also know that fresh is always better. But my spice cabinet begs to differ. And at 4:00 pm on a Sunday, it wins. Here’s how you make Nakládaný hermelín. Ing

The Ghost in the Pantry is now up on DailyLit.com! To start receiving installments of the cookbook, just sign up here, and you’ll get a dose of Czech and American cooking in your inbox each day. Next up on here, I’m looking forward to doing one of my favorites, nakládaný hermelín cheese, which isn’t

It’s too bad you can’t hold culinary seances. I don’t need any Blithe Spirit hijinks, but “Really? Ten eggs? No butter?” would do, for starters. A direct line to my great-grandmother’s baking spirit might settle what size eggs are critical for this recipe, and why it doesn’t require any butter or oi

This is a tiny digression from family recipes, but it’s too good to pass up! Between a toy store and the cheerful Řehoř Samsa cafe in Prague’s Lucerna passageway lies a forbidding closet of a bar. With its cramped depths and (appropriately) volcanic-red lighting, Bar Ignis is hardly welcoming, unles

This is one of the easiest (and most comforting, I think) fall dishes to cobble together when it’s pouring. (You probably know how to make it already!) No doubt you have apples and onions on hand, and there’s probably a pork chop or two stashed in the freezer. While the pork chops thaw, you can [...

Bábovka fit for a president. I finally did it. Before being socked by the early fall chill with a cold and going to bed for four days, I managed to whip up a pile of egg whites without using any motorized power but my own flailing elbows. At the end, the counter, tea tin, pasta [...]

My love of all things involving Austria, apricots, and family is documented here, today. :) Brainchild of food writer Kim O’Donnel and friends, the Canvolution is another great idea from the Pacific Northwest. If you’re a fan of jam, pickles (of all kinds), or anything else preserved, you’ll want to

In a brief detour from recipes of strictly friends-and-family provenance, I give you Mrs. Nováková’s bábovka. The intrepid Mrs. Nováková, doyenne/editor of the Czech section of the publishing house where I used to work, biked merrily to and from work in good weather, and poured homemade hazelnut liq

Gentle reader, I wouldn’t suggest mixing cream cheese and pickles unless I really meant it. I mean it. Reading this recipe from the photograph I’d taken of it in Prague, I had my doubts. “Cream cheese and pickles?” I asked Jakub, from the kitchen table. “Yes,” he said, looking up from watching a mov

The biggest secret of my stable, nuclear family is that we’re deeply nomadic, at heart. For the last hundred and twenty years or so, we’ve been moving away: on my father’s side, from northern and western Ireland, from New York and New Jersey to Indiana and Southern California; on my mother’s side, f