Embrace the Savory Side of Caramel
Cooks have been melting down sugar — often with heavy cream or butter — to make sweet caramel for dessert since at least the early 19th century. Now chefs are using it in unexpectedly savory ways. At Jr & Son in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the chef Patricia Vega, 41, is reducing equal parts chopped black olives and sugar to a treacly consistency before spiking the sauce with white vinegar and salt and spooning it over creamy stracciatella cheese. As inspiration, Vega credits both agrodolce — a classic sweet-and-sour Italian preparation of vinegar and sugar — and the flavors she encountered while working at Thai Diner, in Manhattan’s NoLIta, where she was previously the chef de cuisine. “Fish sauce caramel has been around for centuries” in Southeast Asia, says Jerald Head, 32, the chef and a co-owner of New York’s Mắm restaurant and Lai Rai wine bar, where he drizzles the savory-sweet concoction on milk-flavored ice cream and uses it to lacquer whole braised fish. In London, the chef and recipe developer Helen Graham, 38, paints eggplant with caramel made from soy sauce, sugar and star anise as a means of “teasing out the inherent sweetness” in the vegetable. And Julian Porter, 34, the chef and a co-owner of Juliets Quality Foods in South London, makes a mushroom version by lacto-fermenting the trimmings and peelings of cèpes into an umami-rich liquid that he blends with caramel sauce. The result, which he pairs with sourdough doughnuts, has a “wonderfully strange forest floor” aroma, he says. In Seattle, Johnny Courtney, 36, the chef and a co-owner of Atoma, has been combining dill-pickled red onions and their brine with hot caramel to make “a lush pickle nappé” — a thickened sauce — which he uses as a dressing for diced cucumbers. “It was an ‘aha!’ moment,” says Courtney, “a way to turn simple ingredients into something cool.”
— Lauren Joseph
The Cat’s All Over the Bag
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the English artist Louis Wain’s whimsical drawings of anthropomorphized felines overtook British culture, appearing in books and magazines and on postcards and nursery crockery. As the writer H.G. Wells once said, “English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.” Along with his illustrations, Wain also designed porcelain cat sculptures, their blocky forms made largely out of cubes and parallelograms and their surfaces glazed with unnatural shades. These “futurist cats,” as he called them, took inspiration from Cubism and Futurism, the early 20th-century Italian art movement that embraced technology and the speed of modern life. Perhaps that’s why now, more than a hundred years later, they feel fresh adorning a dozen handbags in Loewe’s holiday collection. One highlight is a dark denim version of the Spanish house’s cinched, hourglass-shaped Flamenco style, featuring 10 different kitties, including a pleased-looking pink one with orange whiskers, an inscrutable imp with a single green eye and its tongue sticking out and a lionlike cat with a golden-threaded mane. Tucked in the crook of an arm or sitting on your lap, a beloved purse can feel almost like a pet. This one offers a whole slew of them.
— Kate Guadagnino
Shoes That Let You Wiggle Your Toes
Cartier Expands Its Menagerie
The ornamented bestiary of the Belgian-born French designer Jeanne Toussaint, who oversaw the creative direction of Cartier for much of the 20th century, began in 1914 with the panther wristwatch, but truly took flight in 1940 when the Duke of Windsor commissioned a now-legendary flamingo-shaped diamond brooch, with plumage of calibré-cut emeralds, rubies and sapphires, for his wife, the American socialite Wallis Simpson. Over the decades, the 178-year-old house has only sparingly returned for inspiration to the leggy tropical bird, but now it rises once more in a brooch chiseled out of a single block of pink quartz. Its beak is made of black agate, and from a delicate cluster of meticulously carved feathers dangles a single diamond. Cartier En Équilibre High Jewelry Nakuru brooch, cartier.com.
Set designer’s assistant: Brankica Sanadrovic
The post The Chefs Making Caramel for Dinner appeared first on New York Times.
