[An award-winning profile of Nathan Myhrvold and his Modernist Cuisine, from February 2011.]

The man thinks big about nearly everything. And he wants his french fries to be perfect.

A Yucatan-Based American Tries to Re-create the ’50s-Era Market-Tested USDA White Pan Loaf No. 1, and In Doing So Reveals How Today’s Miracle Food Can Become Tomorrow’s Catastrophe.

Many people engage in dubious experimentation in their youth. Some get involved with intravenous drugs. Others sleep with problematic men. A few tattoo their faces. I, for my part, went on a spree when I was nineteen of cooking exclusively from a 1917-era cookbook.

The book, A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband (with Bettina’s Best Recipes), might sound vaguely titillating. It’s not. ATWtPaH, by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron, is the story of Bettina and Bob’s first year of marriage. The fictional, surnameless couple, who populate a series of domestic vignettes (with menus and recipes), seems to live on the outskirts of an anonymous American city where Bob does … well, some kind of office job. By the time we meet the pair, on their first night in their brand-new, cozy brown bungalow, the honeymoon is over—literally.

For a meager grocery store, Trader Joe’s has a supernova persona. It’s not Whole Foods, a culinary Neiman Marcus whose prices can leave you feeling mugged. It’s not Fresh & Easy, where Home Depot-style savings have been passed along by replacing workers with DIY checkout scanners. It’s certainly not Ralphs. We prize Trader Joe’s because it has auspiciously pulled off being none of the above.

Yes, the parking lots are a misery, the store passageways a crush. If you can’t smash into someone while reaching for the mochi, it’s not a Trader Joe’s; all that sanctioned rubbing up against strangers produces a frisson of small-town life, the missing element in our metropolis.

On the letters of Elizabeth David and Avis DeVoto, Americanizing pasta and pine nuts:

There was absolutely no reason for Alfred A. Knopf to publish a substantive book on high-end Italian cooking in the 1950s. America’s aspirational cuisine was French, and ambitious home cooks had their hands full trying to perfect coq au vin and crêpes suzette. Unless you were lucky enough to have grown up in an Italian family, Italian food meant spaghetti and meatballs, and Betty Crocker had a nice, easy recipe for it.

On Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland:

I remember biting into one of these objects in a salad and thinking: Now there’s a supposedly tasty thing I’ll never eat again.

On the current crop of farm nostalgia, and how hard living off the land really is.