I don’t think I viscerally understood the importance of a Christmas tree, or a Hanukkah menorah, or a St. Lucia’s crown until I moved into an apartment with lots of windows: the night is long and dark out there this time of year, in this part of the world, and adding a little extra light goes an awfully long way toward brightening the mood. It makes sense that the cold months are when we, warm-bodied animals, want to come together, to be celebratory, to affirm and reinvigorate our affections. And what better way than with the exchange of useful, lovely, or absurd objects? Here, for the food-focussed and the culinarily inclined, are some of my favorite things that solve no real or urgent problems but might, in small and surprising ways, make life more enjoyable to live.
I’ve said this before, but it’s as true now as in any other year: if nothing on this list feels right, then what you should probably give your loved one is a cookbook. Drop an e-mail to the good folks at a culinary-specific bookstore, such as Kitchen Arts & Letters, in New York, or Now Serving, in L.A., where the obscenely well-informed staff can recommend an ideal gift based on the recipient’s interests and aspirations. Or, if your giftee’s cookbook stack already teeters too high, try exploring the adjacent category of culinary-art books—recent favorites of mine include the portrait photographer Melanie Dunea’s witty, provocative “Amuse-Bouche” ($295), featuring lithe bodies adorned in radicchio undergarments and octopus-tentacle necklaces, and “Leaked Recipes” ($26), the artist Demetria Glace’s painstaking compilation of all the cooking content that’s been revealed in major data breaches, including the Sony hack, WikiLeaks, and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. All you have to do is wrap them up with a bow.
Enter a Blue Period
When I first began working in food media, I learned that there was a taboo against cookbooks or cooking-magazine covers that prominently featured the color blue. I remember once asking the creative director of the magazine where I worked why that was: “People just don’t like the way food looks on a blue background,” he replied. Don’t they, though? I think virtually any dish looks stunning when presented against a backdrop the color of the sea or the sky: a pile of bronze-skinned chicken legs on an oceanic Sur La Table stoneware oval ($50), or orange parentheses of roasted squash arranged on Settle Ceramics’ shallow-rimmed circular platter in vivid Yves Klein blue ($165). Wouldn’t it be awfully fun to serve an actual herring on Royal Delft’s herring dish ($329)? Or a spinny orange swirl of spaghetti pomodoro atop Porta’s Tommaso platter, which features sardines in a cerulean sunburst ($198)? I can’t imagine a lovelier color to introduce a bounteous feast.
Utensils with Staying Power
I’ve purged most of my cooking utensils in the past few years, motivated in part by the great black-plastic freakout, and in part by simple ennui. The small group of items that survived the cull are almost all brusquely utilitarian (OXO tongs, $18; a superior design does not exist) or deeply meaningful (a red melamine ladle that my parents owned well before I was born, and which I stole from them twenty years ago, and which I suspect they’ve been looking for ever since). When replacing tools, I’ve looked for designs that will work better than anything else or will last forever. For instance, a sleekly aerodynamic turner spatula (starting from $44), fabricated from a single piece of stainless steel, from the hundred-and-sixty-six-year-old French cutlery producer André Verdier. Or Gestura’s remarkable 01 Silver Spoon ($27), which is brilliantly designed with a deep well to prevent spilling, a tapered point for drizzling, and a flared-out edge for scraping; plus, it holds precisely one tablespoon, for on-the-fly measurement. Given how “tweezer food” has become something of a gastronomic punch line, I’ve been shocked by how I’ve come to rely on a pair of pointed cooking tweezers ($24), for turning small things in a hot pan or fishing out the bouquet garni from a pot of soup, or click-clacking together happily for no reason at all.
The Kids’ Table Is All Right
Any virtues sung of kids’ tableware tends to focus on its functional features: its durability, its ease of cleaning, its suction-to-table properties or spill-averting gyrodynamics. What a pleasure, then, to recommend such products on the strength of emotion. I am simply in love with everything made by Anelia Co., a baby brand that translates the shapes and colors of traditional Mexican tableware into kid-proof cups and plates. Its whole suite of items is terrific—such as a barro-inspired silicone set ($28), which includes a plate, a cup, and a lidded bowl that resembles a salsero de barro—but I’m particularly enamored of its collection of toddler talavera mugs ($13 each), a rainbow selection of lidded, soft-handled silicone vessels printed with leafy motifs that evoke the traditional Mexican glazing technique.
Crustacean Decoration
Every season has its own fashionable non-fish sea life—we have been through the hegemony of the decorative shrimp, the reign of the graphic-designed lobster, the era of the octopod. In the spirit of unity and openness, I propose that we fling these trendy follies aside and finally celebrate the magnificent alien beauty of all creatures of the deep. A good start is the work of the artist and jewelry designer Nana Watanabe, who creates stunning, intricately embroidered crabs, shrimp, and other marine invertebrates. Imagine being served your next shrimp cocktail while wearing a pair of enormous iridescent shrimp earrings ($493); hosting your next crab boil in a necklace made of the most beautiful blue crabs you’ve ever seen ($1,693); or pinning an octopus brooch ($1,077) to your shoulder for good luck on your next fishing trip.
Jungian Therapy
Dora Jung, the pioneering Finnish textile artist, treated linen as her painter’s palette. From a studio in Helsinki, from 1932 until her death, in 1980, she spun out work that was, according to one breathless Danish critic, “fantastic, imaginative, emotional, exquisite.” Her “Play of Lines,” woven from impossibly fine linen, put Finland on the design map. She understood that beauty lives in the everyday, that a tablecloth could be both art and utility, and that every single thread matters. Many of her designs have fallen out of production, but several were recently reissued by the Finnish manufacturer Lapuan Kankurit, among them tablecloths woven with Jung’s iconic “100 Roses” pattern (from $348) or with “Play of Lines” ’s traced-out spiky triangles (from $441). Alternatively, you can find plenty of vintage out there, at thrillingly reasonable prices—such as this “Timber” pattern tablecloth ($86) or a “Princesses” tea towel ($25), which would look awfully nice in a frame. (N.B.: A fascination with Dora Jung is a natural complement to an Eva Zeisel fixation, if you happen to know someone who is already down that particular road.)
Placemats, Please
I love a well-dressed table, but all the fabric and fuss of a full-on tablecloth can be an ordeal, especially if your dining table (like mine) serves multiple household roles in the course of a day: mail tray, work surface, grocery triage station, etc. Rather than dramatically sweeping all the crap off every four to six hours just to lay down a lovely large piece of fabric, I prefer to enliven my table with placemats. These little rectangles offer the perfect dose of wit and elegance and color; they’re quick to drop down, quick to pick up, and chic as all get-out. For fancy dinners and special occasions, I adore Misette’s embroidered ones with colorful squiggles ($260 for a set of four) or a more austere and graphical vintage set bearing Jacquard peacocks ($95 for four) from the aforementioned Dora Jung. For a daily jolt of joy, I recommend these polychromatic plaid placemats ($32 each; also available in yellow!) from Block Shop Textiles—easy on, easy off, easy delight.
Garum? I Barely Know ’Em!
The funky fermented-fish sauce that provided umami to the cuisine of ancient Rome is having a fresh moment, I’m so happy to say. A zingy, amber-hued concoction made from fermented fish intestines, salt, and time, it functions like Vietnamese nuoc mam or Thai nam pla, and the process by which it’s made is more or less identical to those across other cultures, involving the enzymatic breakdown of fish proteins into glutamates whether you’re in Pompeii or Phu Quoc. Garum’s recent resurgence, part of the culinary world’s ongoing fermentation renaissance, has led to all sorts of fascinating experimentation among chefs and home-kitchen mad scientists. I’m a big fan of the version produced by Maine Garum Co., which partners with fisheries in the state to turn eel and other seafood by-product (what the company evocatively describes as “the rejects, trim, bones, and viscera left behind”) into liquid bronze. A six-ounce bottle of this magical, magnetic stuff will run you $25 or, for a truly worthy recipient, pick up a 1.5-litre “Big Boy” of the juice for $99. (For any non-meat-eaters in your life in need of a bit of a savory boost, Noma Labs—yes, that Noma—sells a mushroom garum for $25 with a wonderfully husky complexity.)
Let Us Now Feel Aesthetically Conflicted About Eating Animals
It is perhaps outside the conventional scope of a holiday gift guide to philosophize on the consequences of human hegemony over all other life on Earth. It is not exactly fun or festive to think about the fact that, as the biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote, “in pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches,” or that, in our age of maximally efficient factory farming, wild mammals make up only four per cent of the total number of mammals on land. But there is a sobering beauty in this set of carved-wood animal blocks ($83, ships to the U.S.), designed by the artist Johan Olin, in which each species is sized according to the relative proportion of its population. Look at those tiny crocodiles! So cute! Also extremely upsetting.
Knives Out
A knife made of carbon steel, rather than typical stainless steel, can attain terrifying sharpness and retain a magnificently honed edge seemingly forever, so long as it’s well taken care of. If the knife person in your life doesn’t have a carbon-steel blade already, the Japanese knifemaker Misono’s Swedish Carbon Gyuto ($125 for the twenty-one-centimetre blade) is a perfect start. If the knife person in your life does have one (and you’ll know, because they never shut up about it), get them a care kit: a rust eraser ($9); an if-you-know-you-know polishing cloth from Fabulustre ($13), pre-treated with anti-tarnish solution; and a little bottle of camellia oil ($12), for keeping things silky. Maybe also add a little note telling them not to get too persnickety about insuring the blade is mirror-shiny all the time. What I love most about my carbon-steel knife is the constellation of spots and stains that have accumulated on the blade, a visual record of time and care and labor.
Knives Out, But Slightly More Chill About It
You don’t need to be a knife person to appreciate a little blade, especially if it’s a really fun one, like this clever picnic knife from Opinel ($40), which can also transform into a fork or a spoon. Another great option is a classic mushroom-forager’s knife ($30), double-ended, with a folding blade on one side and a gentle dirt brush on the other. Scissors, too, are an essential part of any cutting kit: I love Joyce Chen’s colorful kitchen snippers ($36, in a range of hues), which are perfect for snipping herbs and twine, and I think every refrigerator-owning person I know needs a little set of scissors that looks like a daikon or a carrot ($8 each), with a handy magnet in the cover for sticking right where it’ll be most useful.
If You Want to Gift Two Thousand of Something
Tatung rice cooker and steamer
Like roughly three quarters of humanity, I am obsessed with rice. There’s beauteous simplicity to a pot of ordinary grains made with the most minimal of tools. There are also so many worthy ways to gild the ritual, starting with the rice itself. I love Golden Queen’s spectacular short-grain variety ($26 for a five-pound bag), which is grown in Korea and then freshly milled to order in New York; its customers include fancy-pants restaurants such as Atomix. Elevate the act of washing rice with this ingenius “3-Ways” rinsing bowl ($38), whose clever angled design allows you to soak, rinse, and drain all in the same vessel. For steaming the grains to an ideal fluffy-stickiness, the Taiwanese electronics brand Tatung makes a beautiful, retro-chic, steely-shiny electric rice cooker ($250, also available in apple green and cheery red), which has remained virtually unchanged since the nineteen-sixties. Throw in a bottle of artisanal soy sauce ($19 for five hundred millilitres) from the cookbook author Clarissa Wei’s new brand, Heydoh, for your recipient to drizzle on their perfect, and perfected, rice.
Fruit Fantasia
Chocolate-dipped fruits
Earlier this year, I received a gift—from myself, for me, because I wanted it—of a large box of chocolate-dipped fruit from the California confectioner Compartés ($140), and I am now utterly devoted to giving the same gift to others. There’s something intensely satisfying about the way the pieces of fruit are nestled together mosaically in their container, the way jewel-like slivers of apricot or sultry curves of orange peek out from their chocolate shells. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever given or received, and the rare gift that feels truly universal, equally fitting for the hard-to-shop-for, the distant relative, or the intimately beloved.
Spendy Suds
My favorite authority on dishwashing, the late Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh, recommended cultivating mindfulness while performing the chore: “There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes, and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.” If we are always rushing to get the job over with, rather than relishing the moment, he explained, then we are letting ourselves be “sucked away into the future.” I don’t expect your loved ones to enjoy dishwashing any more than I do, but maybe an utterly over-the-top bottle of bergamot-scented dishwashing liquid from the storied parfumerie Astier de Villatte ($45 for five hundred millilitres) would ground them in the miracle of the here and now.♦
Dining and Cooking