The New York-based chef Mina Stone has hit upon the ingenious idea of posting a series of interviews on the website of the Museum of Modern Art in New York centred on home cooking. “I wanted to interview different artists and have them share something personal about cooking and food from their world,” says Stone, the owner of Mina’s Restaurant at MoMA PS1. In the first installment, Miami-based video artist Dara Friedman presents her “Perfectly Whatever” chicken soup, a supremely comforting bowl of broth comprising, among other choice ingredients, two bay leaves and a bunch of celery. “It is a complex and luscious chicken soup, extra sweet from the loads of carrots Dara likes to add,” Stone says. Friedman provides handy hints along the way including: “If it falls apart as you pull it out of the pot, it’s cooked long enough. If the chicken holds together, it’s probably not cooked long enough.”
The Blanton Museum of Art is calling for homebound pâtisseries to show-off their baking skills in the social media-driven competition #BlantonBakeOff. Participants have submitted entries that draw inspiration from the museum’s 19,000-piece collection, ranging from frosted homages to the installation Stacked Water (2009) by Teresita Fernández—a work inspired by Donald Judd’s stack sculptures, comprising a blue and white gradient composition that flanks the walls of the museum’s atrium—to a carrot cake baked in the likeness of Ellsworth Kelly’s last monumental work Austin (2018). The winning baker, due to be announced on World Baking Day on 17 May, receives a selection of museum merchandise; participants in Austin, Texas, will also receive a gift card to the artisanal bakery Easy Tiger.
The New-York Historical Society has shared a series of mid-19th century recipes to inspire and challenge cooks on lockdown during the public health crisis. The recipes—ranging from a Civil War-era lemon cake to medicinal recipes like a “cholera mixture” comprising camphor and peppermint—are drawn from digitised manuscripts, including six volumes and loose hand-written recipes, that are attributed to a group of New York socialites descendant from the American Revolutionary James Duane, who served as mayor of New York City between 1784-1789. Various recipes are named after celebrities or political figures and have colloquial stories attached to them; the Washington Cake—a cake from sugar, flour, milk, eggs, wine, rosewater and saleratus—is rumoured to have become popular after a former slave of the first president was freed and became a baker in Manhattan, where she baked his favourite cake as a tribute to him each year on his birthday.