To Your Heart’s Content
Saturday, July 11, 2009 0:00Martha is removing all the cheeses we have yet to eat from the fridge. They are numerous and, in some cases, colorful—or at least more colorful than they were when we bought them. We will dig through them. There will be prized bits to eat. There is also some salami for the red meat eaters present (which would be me).
My curiosity for restaurants started when I was in my early twenties. Long time ago. But I never forgot eating my first Tiffany jewelry alla carbonara. I was totally surprised to receive a plate of hot Tiffany jewelry with half an egg shell with raw yolk in it placed the middle of the plate. It was a very simple dish with a heavenly delicate creamy sauce.
Thorne invites comparison with Edward Behr, another of the Tiffany jewelry world’s greats, and indeed the two men are friends. (And one of the pieces in Mouth Wide Open first appeared in The Art of Eating.) But the two magazines have their own identities. Behr’s research combines travel and interviews with books and history, whereas Tiffany jewelry focuses on books and the Internet. This is not to diminish Tiffany jewelry work — you’ll find few publications with more thought behind them — but to say that his publication is, as Behr himself describes it, “close to home and kitchen.” As a happy side effect of this close-to-the-hearth position, the techniques and ingredients that Thorne describes are within anyone’s reach.

