San Marzano tomatoes are prized for their balanced flavor and distinct tomato-iness. Yet as home cooks become more and more enchanted with the Italian variety, questions arise over what exactly is in that can with the San Marzano label.

Gone are complicated sauces and bloated menu descriptions. Here are meal kits and unflinchingly cool, back-to-basics recipes. But does this movement toward pared-down eating help us understand the future of home cooking?

What happens when immigrants have to adapt to cooking in a new home? A new cuisine, forged from sensory memories and new ingredients.

Prized for its purity and flaky texture, kosher salt has been a home-cooking standard for decades. But the two major brands, Diamond Crystal and Morton, are very different products. Your ruined meatballs can attest.

Stored in fancy vases. Cooked with care and finesse. Served in the Titanic’s first-class cabin. There were days when celery was not just boring crudité, but a luxury.

The Atomic Age Jewish cookbook Love and Knishes was written in a voice so skeptical, so long-suffering, so unapologetically, unfashionably Jewish that you could only imagine its author, Sara Kasdan, as an old woman living on the fifth floor of a Lower East Side tenement. But that was far from Sara Kasdan’s story.

Why do we get so collectively annoyed by food and drink trends that we associate with women? Because it’s an ugly double standard.

Baumkuchen is a centuries-old staple of German weddings and Christmases, but it’s getting harder to find. Except one place.

On a North Carolina mountainside, the chefs of Chai Pani introduce us to an exciting new era of Indian-American home cooking.

A blood-splashed culinary school binder recalls the timelessness of French culinary pedagogy and the bold awfulness of ’80s restaurant food.

With help from Dominique Ansel and the executive chef at Cinnabon.

A summer in New York City gives one West Coaster reason to look at the fruit closely.

Developing a decent meatless burger recipe is hard. It’s why so many of them are terrible.

For some, a box of Bisquick is a magical path to baking bliss. For others, it represents a corner not worth cutting. And possibly something more sinister.

For kids learning to cook for themselves, a mistake is sometimes the secret ingredient.

Cookbook author and dogged journalist Melissa Clark is the voice of American home cooking. And she’s here to stir the pot.

In his brief but influential television career, Graham Kerr taught people to cook heartily, with lots of clarified butter, and laugh even harder.

For the best pineapple cake, just say no to eggs.

In San Antonio, a cookbook collection has plenty to tell us about a fascinating, complex, and frequently misunderstood cuisine.

These salt-encrusted spuds are usually attributed to western New York, but the unusual cooking method has been used for hundreds of years in some corners of the world.

Classically plain Jane, the gâteau Basque continues to pop up at some of the more interesting restaurants and bakeries.