Hello friends,

How many food-centered newsletters are you subscribed to? I'm embarrassed to tell you how many I attempt to read each week. Some are recipe-focused, others go deep into a particular city's food culture while a few are travel-related. Then, of course, some focus on the larger issue of politics and food. I would really love to know which ones you read. I have extreme FOMO when it comes to the written word. Of course, I follow the OGs who started with blogs back in the day and who have been sharing their thoughts and recipes with us for well over a decade. David Lebowitz continues to be thoughtful and entertaining, regaling us with stories of daily life in Paris and beyond along with very smart recipe work and occasional cookbook commentary. Dorie Greenspan's XOXO Dorie now has a staff who help her create extensive well-tested recipe content, but it's her weekly letter from the East Coast or Paris that's keeps me coming back as well as her sagas about working on her latest book. Many of you know I'm close to Elizabeth Minchilli with whom I collaborate on the occasional tour in Italy. Her Elizabeth's Newsletter from Italy is a place to get intel on restaurants, travel, and good solid recipes. Basically she feeds the fantasy of getting the heck outta here. I love reading Gillian Longworth McGuire's Gillian Knows Best. She lived in Rome for a long time and is now in Venice. Seeing that city through her eyes is so entertaining. Most of the ones I subscribe to have an Italian focus (big surprise) but I'm always looking to branch out so let me know your faves. 

On the local front, I love Samanta Helou Hernandez's What is Making a Neighborhood? It's a series of photos and essays on LA. I recently found Emily Wilson's The Angel. She writes about food and drink in LA. As does Jared Cohee in his free Eat the World Los Angeles newsletter.

As for the show this week I want to point out two segments. Brigit Binns is an old friend who briefly worked as my assistant decades ago, and who went on to author 29 cookbooks! Brigit has written a memoir titled Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival. Have you ever had a friend who had so many stories of their youth that you couldn't get a handle on their personal timeline? I was gasping at her story on the page. And journalist Hannah Drier's article "Kid's On the Night Shift" was groundbreaking journalism on child labor in the chicken processing plants of the "broiler belt." She continues to report on the story in the NY Times.

Your woman in food, Evan

From nopales and horchata to jalapeño matzoh balls and Manischewitz paletas, the intermingling of Mexican cuisine with Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions is longstanding. Profs Ilan Stavans of Amherst and Margaret Boyle of Bowdoin merged their Mexican and Jewish backgrounds to create Sabor Judio: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook.

As early as the 17th century, the American South became home to Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews looking for places to settle. They brought with them culinary traditions that evolved as homemakers worked side by side with enslaved and African American cooks. It's a unique history documented as a series of essays by Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey in their book, Kugels & Collards.

The stretch of the country running from Delaware to the South is known as the "broiler belt" because it's dotted with towns that specialize in chicken processing. At night, children as young as 10 years old clock in at midnight so they can clean heavy machinery and pick up chicken carcasses. In many of these towns, child labor has become an open secret. NY Times reporter Hannah Drier went deep into the culture of the towns and processing plants where the practice is an open secret.

"I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and a knife in my back," writes cookbook author Brigit Binns in the opening of her memoir, Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival. Growing up the child of actor Edward Binns came with privilege. But his work often took him away from home, leaving Brigit in the care of her narcissistic mother, a journalist who worked with broadcast luminaries such as Edward R. Murrow. Binns found her way to the kitchen to soothe her feelings of neglect and mistreatment, eventually authoring 29 cookbooks. 

In the summer of 2023, the jazz-funk groove of Herbie Hancock’s 1973 recording of “Watermelon Man” bounced into Tyler Boudreaux's ears and fixed itself on a loop. After the reporting she did for her James Beard award-winning story on the Black Republican Cherry, she took that inspiration to follow a Chicago watermelon man — Kenny Smith. Listen to the full story.