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In Season
The Grown-Up Blueberry That Goes Perfectly With Ice Cream
By Tanya Bush
In the northern corners of Canada, early summer brings haskap, an inky indigo berry shaped like a bluebell. Native to the subarctic regions of Japan, Russia and northeastern China, the fruit also proliferates in Canada, where it thrives in below-zero temperatures and freezes beautifully, meaning its tart, tannic, almost black currant-like flavor can be preserved long after its short blooming season ends. In Toronto, the chef Zach Kolomeir, who runs the restaurants Dreyfus, Vilda’s and Bernhardt’s, says he was first drawn to haskaps for their “grown-up blueberry” quality. He sources them frozen from Ontario and uses the berries year-round, simmered into jams for sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts), tucked into lemon cream mille-feuille or blended with lemon zest in seasonal soft serve twists of haskap berry and vanilla. “They work great in creamy and crunchy components, and also with citrus,” Kolomeir says. At Proof Line Farm, which includes a creamery and market in Ontario, the co-owner Janan McNaughton first encountered haskaps when a neighboring farmer began experimenting with growing the berry. She was surprised by how well it maintained its deep color and flavor in a rich ice cream base. “Most berries get lost in whole milk. Not haskap,” she says. It’s become a seasonal staple, starring in gelato flavors like Northern Lights, a violet-hued swirl of haskap and mint. This season, she will also be selling haskaps fresh at the farm: “Everyone connects with berries — haskap walks a nice line of being familiar while also novel.” On Canada’s west coast, the chef Warren Chow of Wildlight Kitchen and Bar in Vancouver uses fresh haskaps in both sweet and savory dishes, from cheesecakes marbled with haskap jam to a compote that cuts through a fatty duck breast. “They’re extremely nutrient-rich, full of antioxidants and vitamins,” he says, “and we have an abundance here.”
Wear This
Perfume Necklaces for a Portable Mood Boost
By Laura Regensdorf
For centuries, fragrance has found its way into wearable accessories. Spherical cases filled with aromatics, called pomanders, dangled from waist belts in Renaissance Europe; perforated boxes known as vinaigrettes, intended to hold a sponge soaked in scented vinegar, made the rounds in the Georgian and Victorian eras. In the 1970s, Elsa Peretti put her stamp on the category, reworking her Halston perfume bottle into a teardrop necklace. “It’s a cool party trick,” says Carol Han Pyle, the founder of the fragrance house Nette, speaking about her collaboration with the jeweler Dévé: a bullet-shaped silver pendant that neatly conceals one of her sample vials (or any other). The designer Sophie Buhai took inspiration from Austria’s Wiener Werkstätte movement for her silver Obelisque holder, accented with jade and onyx and set on a handmade chain. While suited for any material (one client slipped in a mezuza scroll), Buhai created it for essential oils. An appreciation for history also guides the small-batch beauty line Kindred Black and the jewelry brand J. Hannah, which have adapted their Modernist silver bottle (a limited edition from 2022) for the neck, using repurposed chains. Launching July 24, each comes with a tiny glass bottle of their perfume oil, Drink Deep, Psyche — a grounding floral with rose, vanilla and frankincense — along with a small piece of wool to absorb the scent and tuck inside. Vintage hounds will appreciate Liis Found, a capsule collection of silver perfume pendants sourced by Leslie Hendin, who co-founded the fragrance brand Liis. After an initial spring release, the second drop of minimalist necklaces arrives today. The designer Jean Prounis recalls how her grandmother’s jewelry box was heady with Chanel No. 5. Channeling that memory, Prounis steeps strands of porous materials — in this case, turquoise and sandalwood — in her own signature amber oil. Available July 22, each scented necklace features a 22-karat gold clasp modeled on ancient Greek fibulas used to fasten clothing. The effect conjures a far-flung talisman, warmed by the sun.
Stay Here
On the Spanish Island of Minorca, a Pair of Hotels Immersed in Nature
By Gisela Williams
In rural northern Minorca, where wild meadows slope down to beach coves with red-hued sand, a pair of former farm estates have been turned into boutique hotels. Son Ermità, which opened in mid-June, is an elegant neo-Classical building on a hill that overlooks the sea on one side and a valley with a network of centuries-old stone walls on the other. Binidufà, scheduled to open Aug. 22, is a restored 18th-century finca next to an ancient forest that’s a 30-minute walk away on a hiking trail or a 10-minute ride on a four-wheel-drive buggy. Son Ermità has a formal restaurant that serves French- and Spanish-inspired dishes like crayfish ravioli with seafood Blanchette, while Mesura, the main dining room at Binidufà, will offer plant-based dishes like avocado served with pico de gallo and yogurt, including ingredients grown on the property’s farm. Marta Madera Fernandez, a co-founder of Vestige Collection, the family-run hotel group behind the openings, says the company chose Minorca because “the island is one of the few places in Spain that is still very protected. It has a stillness that’s not easy to find anymore.” Rooms from about $870 a night for two guests, including breakfast, vestigecollection.com.
Read This
Exiled From His Home Country, a Writer Travels the World
By Jenny Comita
The T writer at large Aatish Taseer’s new book, “A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile,” out July 15 from Catapult, is, in the broadest sense, a collection of travel essays, bringing together eight pieces he wrote for T between 2019 and 2024, each of them centered on a major trip. In Uzbekistan, he traced the old Silk Road. In Mexico, he explored the concept of Indigenous culture through food. In Spain, he teased out the legacy of Muslim rule. His most ambitious undertaking took him from the high Andes to the Mongolian desert to Iraq, following three major religious pilgrimages. Together the stories are also a record of Taseer’s internal journey toward liberation and wholeness. In 2019, after he wrote a critical story about Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an American newsmagazine, Taseer, who was by then living in New York, saw his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) revoked, essentially banning him from the country where he’d grown up and where his family still lives. The experience was disorienting, robbing him of the place he’d always considered home, but also strangely freeing: He could finally stop trying to fit into a country where he felt compelled to downplay his identities as a gay man, the estranged son of a Pakistani Muslim and a native English speaker with an elite Western education. “I woke up one day to find the bars of my prison had magically disappeared and, far from being scared, I felt a new vein of intellectual curiosity had opened for me,” he writes in the book’s introduction, noting that “a strand of elation runs through” the essays. “With the idea of home gone, I stepped out into the world again.”
See This
Ceramic Sculptures Both Functional and Frivolous
By Coco Romack
Every year since 2016, Manhattan’s Museum of Arts and Design has allotted work space in its Columbus Circle building for at least one artist fellow, an expansion of the residency program it began offering eight years prior. Alumni of the fellowship have included the artists Michelle Im and Anthony Akimbola. This year’s recipient, the 29-year-old sculptor Joël Brodovsky-Adams, has filled his studio with an evolving array of wonkily shaped ceramic objects that resemble pieces of furniture (like chairs and stools) but are, in several cases, decidedly impractical. One piece that Brodovsky-Adams describes as a “handbag” is charcoal-colored and rounded like a jug; at over 16 pounds, it would be better hung on a wall than slung over a shoulder. Other artworks marry their form and function: The artist has wheel thrown every element of a floor lamp that illuminates the corner of the room, from its leaflike shade to its light switch that’s speckled with orange globs. A black-and-white glaze gives its base the appearance of a stretched-out soccer ball. The artist says this “tension between frivolous and indulgent things versus the utilitarian and essential” is what animates his work, which he’ll discuss in July when he and the other two residents, the artists Rhea Barve and Sulo Bee, invite visitors into their studios on the museum’s sixth floor to discover the pieces they’ve made over the course of the program. The Museum of Arts and Design will host artist talks and open studios on July 18, madmuseum.org.
Try This
Vegetables Take Over the Dessert Menu
By Katie Chang
Lately, chefs across the United States have been making vegetables the star of the dessert menu with dishes that go beyond carrot cake and sweet potato pie. At the modern Vietnamese restaurant Moon Rabbit in Washington, D.C., the pastry chef Susan Bae serves a tofu cheesecake that’s an ode to one of her childhood comfort foods, doenjang jjigae (Korean soybean stew), garnished with Jimmy Nardello pepper jam and a kabocha squash confit for umami — “that perfect balance of sweet, savory and salty,” she says. At Nicosi, a dessert bar in San Antonio, the chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph works celery into a grassy marmalade that he layers on strawberry curd and hibiscus meringue for his Tapa y Porrón, which is served on top of a glass vessel filled with strawberry consommé. Manhattan’s subterranean seafood restaurant Smithereens also highlights celery in a float that incorporates the vegetable into both the soda and the ice cream. Chicago’s Maxwells Trading pays tribute to the Chinese red bean pastries that the chef Erling Wu-Bower grew up with in its sundae, which heaps vanilla ice cream, peanut fudge and curried peanuts on a red bean brownie. For its sticky-chewy cassava cake, the Filipino restaurant Kaya in Orlando, Fla., replaces the traditional condensed milk with a housemade coconut version so vegan guests can also indulge. Earlier this year, the pastry chef Sam Allen of L’Ostrica in Charlotte, N.C., plated her pink strawberry rhubarb torte with a vibrant ring of green nettle gastrique for added color and freshness. And in Portland, Ore., at the Indonesian street food spot Pasar, the chef-owner Feny Lim brightens her talam ubi, a bouncy steamed cake, with purple sweet potatoes. The vivid hue means there’s no hiding the veggies here.
From T’s Instagram
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