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Christmas Deliciousness and the Crumbl Cookies Illusion 🎄
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Welcome to Secret Breakfast / An exclusive newsletter, the best place for eating Anthony Bourdain’s Soupe de Poisson, tasting pretentious ingredients, and living any kind of unrelated experience
Looking up. Notre Dame de Paris, by Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
Hi there!
They made it. The Notre Dame Cathedral reopened its doors within five years of the devastating 2019 fire.
As if we were living in a chapter of The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, people (and money) were stronger than ashes and destruction.
Still, fire and ashes are endangering lives in many other places. Like Damascus, Gaza, or parts of Africa, where there have been so many military coups recently. Somalia, Yemen, and Chad are at the top of the Global Hunger Index. In Kabul and Teheran, women face oppression and are excluded from society.
That said, the year ends, and - yes - the world looks famished as always was.
The hunger for food where people have nothing.
The hunger for justice where there is no real law.
We play with food, we love that, but sometimes we also need to pause and look up.
Piero
 | “In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case”. This essay (read a pretty good review) uses 500+ pages to show how the change from dietetics to nutrition science altered how we think about our food and its powers. Kudos for the iconic Beaneater by Annibale Carracci on the cover! |
Eating and Being: A History of Ideas About Our Food and Ourselves by Steven Shapin
→ Shortplot: 🍅 🌽 🍝 🌱
THE SIMPSONS, ft. CHEF’S TABLE, ft. RUTH REICHL
Nothing to add, your honor.
Juicy content from food creators
This is the space where I share some food (un)related stuff of my week
🎄If I Could… My childhood go-to dish for Christmas Eve Dinner: Anthony Bourdain's Soupe de Poisson (★recipe) with Rouille (★recipe) 🎅🏻Lunch on the 25th: Modena Style Tortellini (★recipe) 🍄Or this Veg alternative: Artusi’s Famous Mushroom Ragu (★recipe) 🇮🇹A repository of Italian Christmas Ideas (★recipes) ☕️“Mocha Mousse” was dubbed 2025′s color of the year by the Pantone Color Institute, now you make some (★recipe) 🇩🇰Noma Was Supposed to Close. That’s Definitely Not Happening 🥚Eggnog Gingerbread Tiramisu Mugs (★recipe) 🌶️How To Invent A New Vegetable (video) ☕️👨🏾🍳Chef vs Normal: Taste Testing Pretentious Ingredients 🍕In Pizza Heaven it’s always 950°, and this is the oven you need at home (better in the backyard) ☕️Some Coffee recipes on this super-nice content platform called Leaflet 🤖Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
Crumbl’s massive empire was never about the cookies | “Crumbl” was one of the trending topics on Google this year. This article explains how the dessert company taps into the never-ending cycle of hyper-consumption. TLDR: we should stop believing everything we see in ads on social media. Photogenic doesn’t mean good. |
How I Aged Into the Bad Christmas Movie | One December morning, a millennial critic awoke to discover she had been begrudgingly charmed by an onslaught of Hallmark and Netflix holiday films. Who can relate? |
➤ Last week's most clicked link was The 2023 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. And that's all for today.