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This staple of summer gatherings tells a story about who we are.
By Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture. On his podcast, “Cannonball,” he spoke with the food historian Jessica B. Harris about potato salad’s place in the nation’s culinary canon.
Published July 4, 2026 Updated July 4, 2026
Not long ago, I found myself drowning in recipes for potato salad. I wish I knew why this happened. An idea had possessed me, and I was trying, if not to exorcise it, then at least to apply the pressure of research.
So I turned to Bonnie Slotnick, who runs a shop in the East Village of Manhattan that specializes in rare and antique cookbooks, and started riffling through every book she could find me with a recipe for potato salad.
What we found took us from the late 19th century to the four potato salad recipes in “The Settlement Cook Book,” from 1943, and the joyous wanderlust of Clementine Paddleford’s 1960 compendium “How America Eats.” I pored over Mimi Sheraton’s 1965 “The German Cookbook,” with its instructions for one hot and one cold potato salad. I beheld the tossed-off nerve that suffuses “Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook,” from 1969, and marveled at the more elegantly earthen approach of “Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine,” a 1978 book by the sisters Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden-Lloyd. Classics all.
Really, I was looking for confirmation. Could what I sensed be true? Because what I sensed sounded a touch absurd, and it was this: Potato salad is the Great American Dream Dish.
In any year, potato salad is what you put out or bring to gatherings between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But now, as this country turns 250 years old, I think a hearty vat of mayonnaised (or oiled) Yukon golds carries an even heftier significance, as the most characteristically American food we have, that we’ve ever had.
I can already hear you: What about the hot dog? A hot dog does say “America.” I just read a love letter to Costco’s hot dog that gave me momentary pause about the singular glory of potato salad. But when’s the last time you made a hot dog from scratch and brought it to a cookout?
I believe that
When someone new to this country arrives, they learn — somehow! — that this is the dish you bring to a gathering. It’s the dish that indicates a desire to understand this place, and they appear to have heard that this bowl of lubricated tubers is the way to go. Depending on whom you heard that from and whence you hail, you might feel free to add some cured pork, a scoop of gochujang or a jar of capers.
That’s your contribution to the complexity of this dish, your contribution of your culture to ours, of yourself to the promise of this place. This is an offering that can say both “welcome” and “we are.”
Every culture in America already seems to have some expression of potato salad. Jewish deli. Japanese. German. Calabrian. Nepali. Bodega. A dear friend of mine is Peruvian and knows from a potato. She told me that in Peru it’s ensalada rusa, and in Spain, ensaladilla rusa: potatoes, carrots, peas and sometimes cubed beets with mayonnaise. Somebody has brought a beety rusa to this Texas barbecue!
Potato salad isn’t a meal. It’s an accompaniment, support for whatever else surrounds it. It unites a plate and soothes the palate. It complements the fried and cools the hot. It’s reliable. It’s expected.
It can also go a little wild. Take a chance. Innovate. No matter what, we the eaters hold the truths of your dish to be self-evident.
It’s true, too, that potato salad can polarize. The choice of mayonnaise alone could start a war. Please, whip your miracle somewhere else. If no one brings a potato salad, an existential breach has occurred: How could nobody care enough to bring one?
But also: Who has what it takes to dare, to meet the moment? Potato salad is the Thanksgiving turkey of summer summits. No one will forget that time you messed it up. (Conversely, we’ll all rejoice anytime you put your foot in it.) I love potato salad for this. If getting our founding documents in order was a trial, imagine a constitutional convention to define potato salad. It’s the most divisive dish we have that we also agree we’d feel incomplete without. A true soul food.
Who knows when I became a potato salad person? Probably the minute somebody in my family — my mother, born Judith Lavern Smith — figured out that I could handle a knife and survive an onion. I’m going to say I was 11.
My mother’s potato salad was onion-y enough that it bit you back. For a sous-chef, this meant getting a softball as close to slurry as your sinuses would permit. I’d quarter the onion, chop it up, present it for inspection, fail, then resume and chop until I passed. This could take half an hour. My mother needed less than five minutes. But if she was making potato salad, it often meant she was making something else, too, and something else and then one more thing. So even a slow helper was a help.
By the time I was 14, I had graduated to taking on more tasks: mincing the celery, pulverizing sometimes a dozen eggs, peeling potatoes and carving them into dice, drizzling the mustard, strangling the relish to drain every drop of its syrup, scooping out the Hellmann’s then slapping it onto everything else.
When it was time for paprika, salt, pepper and the all-but-accidental pinch of sugar my mother used, she took over. It’s perfectly fine to trust a child with a paring knife. Bad parenting is entrusting one with seasoning.
Everybody adored my mother’s potato salad. They could taste the love (and, if I may say, the labor). It was essentially the recipe her grandmother used, and now the potato salad I make. Every bite contains every ingredient. So what you’re savoring is cream and crunch, sweetness and — because I’m a seasoned seasoner now — the paprika’s heat. This is a vivid, lively dish, sparked by a convergence of texture and flavor and color. Not once had I considered that harmony as being anything more than what my mother learned from her grandmother, a family thing.
It wasn’t until I started poking around Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks and sitting with the recipes Bonnie indefatigably kept serving me that I could see a story taking shape. In book after book by Black authors, or books that could claim a Black author (because, say, a white woman published what she swore were her cook’s recipes), it became evident that my people’s potato salad was more or less My People’s: the mustard and variations on mayonnaise, the egg and onion, sometimes celery and a cucumber.
There had never been a recorded recipe in my family. Like music and storytelling, food was lore, a byproduct of a slavery, an institution that denied literacy to enslaved people for fear of what a literate slave could achieve. We made do. We made potato salad. What I found at Bonnie’s was a history. What I found was an inheritance.
But! Something else to appreciate about this dish is that unlike, say, macaroni and cheese, potato salad is not a product of enslavement. Black Americans have a claim on it, but it belongs to no one.
The covenant this country has made to individual liberty and pursued happiness, to justice and equal protection, can feel false, impossible, elusive. Not when it comes to potato salad. Potato salad is the covenant and the country — this wet mess of harmonic convergence, achieved only through imagination and patience and a kind of violence (So. Much. Chopping), but also some fealty to our core, earthen values.
This dish is a present Americans have been giving one another for much of the past 250 years. It’s a dish that keeps insisting that we belong.
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Cabbage makes for a salad that’s just as crunchy, but holds up over time.
Melissa Clark never gets tired of Caesar salad.
Published July 1, 2026 Updated July 1, 2026
The allure of a Caesar salad lies in its dressing — the sting of raw garlic, the salty umami of Parmesan, that anchovy funk. What you toss it with is less important. As long as it’s sturdy enough to bring that dressing to your mouth, any green will work just fine.
Mild and crisp romaine has been the classic since the 1920s, when the salad was first put on the menu at Caesar’s restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. Kale Caesars and brussels sprouts Caesars had their moments, those ruffled leaves adding an earthy, mineral tang. But I think cabbage works best of all.
Of all the greens, cabbage is the sweetest and crunchiest, with a pronounced contrast to the dressing that’s both satisfyingly textural and a little unexpected. Cabbage makes the whole salad livelier to eat.
It also keeps well. Unlike romaine, which starts to wilt the moment it meets the dressing, cabbage stands its ground. I made this salad one evening for dinner, then stuck the leftovers in the fridge. The next day, it was just as good — the flavors more integrated, the cabbage, though softer, still gratifying in a coleslaw kind of way.
If you do make this salad ahead, though, don’t add the croutons until serving. You want those to stay as crunchy as possible.
To further increase the crunch, I tear the bread rather than cut it. Torn bread has ragged, uneven edges that get extra crisp as they toast. Tossing the pieces with olive oil and a few tablespoons of grated Parmesan also helps the cause. As the croutons bake, the cheese melts into brittle, lacy patches along the edges. Use a spatula to scrape them up and fold them into the salad. Those fricolike bits are arguably the best part.
As for the anchovies, to me they are nonnegotiable in a Caesar salad. But sticklers will tell you that they’re not actually traditional. The original recipe gained its saline bite from Worcestershire sauce (which contains anchovies). It’s unclear when the salted fish made their way into the bowl, but now their presence has been firmly established. That said, if you want to skip them, use capers instead. Or olives, or even feta, all of which will add the necessary brininess.
You see, at its heart, Caesar salad is very adaptable. That’s one reason it’s been around for the past century — and it bodes well for the next.
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A spicy, peanutty, sour, sometimes-sweet sauce, salsa macha enhances anything it tops with its signature crunch.
By Kristina Felix
Published June 30, 2026 Updated June 30, 2026
Few sensory pleasures are as satisfying as taking a bite out of something that has been topped with a good salsa macha.
A spicy, peanutty, sour, sometimes-sweet sauce, salsa macha enhances anything it tops with its signature crunch, its slick oil base and its notes of smoke and earth. (In 2020, The New York Times Magazine called it the year’s most valuable condiment.)
The name salsa macha can refer to the feminine form of macho, describing a sauce that demands courage of the eater, or to the Spanish word machacar, which means to pound or crush, alluding to how the ingredients are prepared. And while salsa macha’s popularity on both sides of the border is rather recent, Indigenous people throughout Mexico have ground dried chiles, pumpkin seeds and peanuts into pastes for centuries, and long before olive oil’s arrival in the country.
An essential building block, the oil in salsa macha secures its place among other oil-preserved condiments that arose across the trade routes that radiated out from Spanish-held ports. Think Catalonian romescos and picadas, and Chinese chile crisp. Their emergence seems less like a recipe and more a shared instinct, oil as a vehicle for the ferocious bite of chile and spice. As salsa macha sits, the oil carries the flavor and essence of everything in it. It’ll last as long as the oil stays fresh, evolving in flavor over time. Keep it in the refrigerator, bring it to room temperature before serving and try not to eat it all in one sitting.
There are many variations, but generally, salsa macha is made up of dry chiles, garlic and peanuts, all toasted and ground, along with a hearty amount of oil. Many recipes include seeds like pepitas or sesame, tree nuts, splashes of vinegar, and sugar or dried fruit to round out the subtle bitterness that dried chiles can acquire when over-toasted, something that takes practice to avoid. Though one would be wise to follow a recipe, salsa macha’s history is an invitation to play. Add dried cherries, cacao nibs, vanilla or fermented black soybeans to the mix as some cooks do, and make something specific to your palate.
Salsa macha’s expansiveness is why one jar can do so much. Yes, it works on a quesadilla. But have you ever spooned it over a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a few slices of ripe mango? You can toss it with hot pasta the way you would pesto and top with a dollop of ricotta, or use it to coat ramen noodles paired with ground pork. Or drizzle it over grilled meats or roasted fish. Spoon a generous amount over labneh, hummus or a simple bowl of rice, and yes, over your morning eggs and toast. There’s nothing this salsa won’t improve upon. So make a big jar this summer, and relax, the salsa is already made, and you’re more than halfway to a good meal.
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Here’s our home-cook-friendly recipe.
By Kayla Hoang
Published June 29, 2026 Updated June 29, 2026
As a recipe creator, digging into a recipe, ingredient by ingredient, is my favorite part of the job. Often, it’s easy to predict how they’ll act and adjust accordingly. Sometimes, though, a recipe can feel impossible to crack. Enter butter rice cakes.
Also known as Shanghai butter mochi and butter tteok, butter rice cakes are a style of mochi that are subtly sweet and deeply buttery. They have taken the internet by storm, especially in Korea. As with many viral recipes, this one’s history is vague. The cakes are often attributed to bakeries around Shanghai. One theory credits a baker in Nantong, China, just north of Shanghai, who combined the traditional Chinese rice cake nian gao with custardy French canelés. Other influences may be Hawaiian butter mochi and Filipino bibingka; though their ingredients and cooking methods differ, their batters are similar.
Coming up with a version for home cooks that was browned and crisp on the outside while still bouncy and buttery in the center when baked in a muffin tin was ambitious.
Early on, I used a fluid batter made, in part, with tapioca flour and a good amount of milk. But those cakes separated from the pan and browned unevenly. I knew I needed a denser batter, so I lessened the milk. The tapioca was eventually replaced with more mochiko, as suggested by Genevieve Ko, my editor, who had found results could vary from brand to brand of tapioca flour.
To ensure that crisp brown crust, the batter is baked in a well-buttered tin. But exactly how much butter to use was hard to gauge. At first, thinking the water from the butter was steaming the bottoms, I cut back. Instead, too little butter made the crust hard, while still unevenly browned. A generous, almost excessive, amount of butter was needed.
The most important piece to the puzzle, though, was the baking pan. After testing exclusively in a nonstick muffin tin, the most even browning came from an uncoated pan: In a nonstick muffin pan, the butter proved more likely to spread unevenly.
It took over a dozen tests for the recipe to take its final shape, but it felt incredible when it did. The resulting mochi have deeply caramelized crusts that produce that addictive A.S.M.R. crunch and give way to their bouncy, chewy center. For the best texture, enjoy them while still warm. A drizzle of condensed milk makes them all the better.
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Eric Kim’s riff on aglio e olio is simple, summery and the best use of summer squash.
By Eric Kim
Eric Kim is a food columnist for The New York Times Magazine and a recipe developer and video host for NYT Cooking. A native of Atlanta, he is also the author of the cookbook “Korean American.”
Published June 26, 2026 Updated June 26, 2026
One of my favorite challenges as a cook is to find the soul of a dish, especially one that has never wowed me. Sometimes it takes years, even decades. But I’m an equal opportunity eater and try not to discriminate. I do my best to cook my way through multiple versions of a dish I don’t care for until I respect it and, ideally, learn to crave it.
So Italians, forgive me, but for years I never understood the appeal of spaghetti with garlic and olive oil, or aglio e olio. It’s a pantry pasta, arguably the pantry pasta. But why turn to it when there are much more flavorful dishes like carbonara, amatriciana and pomodoro at my disposal? I’d take a simple buttered noodle over an aglio e olio any day, or so I thought.
My part-Italian fiancé, Paolo, is a purist when it comes to classic Italian pastas and admits that aglio e olio is never his first choice either. But with him by my side over the years, traveling in many countries, I’ve gathered evidence that garlic-oil spaghetti can be life-changing, something worth craving. In my mind, you won’t necessarily find the dish’s soul in the aglio, but rather in the olio.
Last year, in Takayama, Japan, we made the short walk from the train station to find a small restaurant that serves one of the best aglio e olios I’d ever had. It was deeply savory yet elegantly sparse, and, slurping my way through the mound of dynamically spiced spaghetti, it dawned on me that what made this particular version sing was the flavorful oil that slicked the noodles. It had been seasoned with a single dried red chile, whole parsley leaves and, true to its name, slivers of garlic. All of those things had been fried in the oil, tinting and flavoring it. The garlic was evenly golden, decidedly not brown, and piled atop the noodles like treasure, another signal that much care and attention had been put into my little lunch.
One summer, in Zermatt, Switzerland, we stopped by a restaurant in the mountains for beer, French fries and a plate of garlic-oil spaghetti that lit up our senses. It was, as usual, visually unassuming, but after taking a bite, I noticed a gentle flurry of grated Parmesan threaded throughout, which some would argue took the dish beyond the realm of aglio e olio. The reason it worked here, I surmised, was that it helped the flavorful oil cling to the noodles. There was something almost fluffy about the spaghetti strands, each tangle delivering an avalanche of savoriness, a comforting bounciness not just in taste but in texture as well.
At home, after months of trial and error, I found my dream aglio e olio. It relies on the freshest bulb of garlic I can find and thinly sliced cloves that won’t burn. The parsley, as well, I look for a fluffy bouquet of, something juicy and fragrant. Good parsley smells and tastes almost as strong as celery, have you noticed? The pepperoncino element here comes in the form of whole dried red chiles, like the kind I found at the bottom of my plate in Japan. I like to use guajillos for their smoky, savory, almost jammy flavor, but a recently dried Calabrian chile would be phenomenal. They’re torn into large pieces and fried in good extra-virgin olive oil until their dull brick color turns a brilliant ruby red. Anything you toss in that oil — like spaghetti or, I don’t know, zucchini — blooms in flavor.
I’m of the belief that eating zucchini raw is often the best way to enjoy it, as long as it’s good and fresh. But there are other ways to maximize its deliciousness. Different cuts of zucchini, for instance, bring out different qualities when cooked. With this recipe, I tried all of the shapes: thin coins (which, annoyingly, stick to one another), thick rectangular prisms (which taste like bland bricks), even fine shreds (which get mushy in a flash). But the shape that tasted best with long noodles was a ½-inch-thick baton, thicker than a matchstick but thinner than a steak fry. I love turning my dainty zucchini sticks in that ridiculously savory garlic-chile-parsley oil, letting them drink it up.
So what makes some aglio e olios bland and others revelatory? With old garlic, dusty red-pepper flakes and bland olive oil, it’s hard for pasta aglio e olio to do anything more than get the job done. The secret to a great version, I’ve learned, is a little soul.
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Eric Kim’s riff on aglio e olio is simple, summery and the best use of summer squash.
By Eric Kim
Eric Kim is a food columnist for The New York Times Magazine and a recipe developer and video host for NYT Cooking. A native of Atlanta, he is also the author of the cookbook “Korean American.”
Published June 26, 2026 Updated June 26, 2026
One of my favorite challenges as a cook is to find the soul of a dish, especially one that has never wowed me. Sometimes it takes years, even decades. But I’m an equal opportunity eater and try not to discriminate. I do my best to cook my way through multiple versions of a dish I don’t care for until I respect it and, ideally, learn to crave it.
So Italians, forgive me, but for years I never understood the appeal of spaghetti with garlic and olive oil, or aglio e olio. It’s a pantry pasta, arguably the pantry pasta. But why turn to it when there are much more flavorful dishes like carbonara, amatriciana and pomodoro at my disposal? I’d take a simple buttered noodle over an aglio e olio any day, or so I thought.
My part-Italian fiancé, Paolo, is a purist when it comes to classic Italian pastas and admits that aglio e olio is never his first choice either. But with him by my side over the years, traveling in many countries, I’ve gathered evidence that garlic-oil spaghetti can be life-changing, something worth craving. In my mind, you won’t necessarily find the dish’s soul in the aglio, but rather in the olio.
Last year, in Takayama, Japan, we made the short walk from the train station to find a small restaurant that serves one of the best aglio e olios I’d ever had. It was deeply savory yet elegantly sparse, and, slurping my way through the mound of dynamically spiced spaghetti, it dawned on me that what made this particular version sing was the flavorful oil that slicked the noodles. It had been seasoned with a single dried red chile, whole parsley leaves and, true to its name, slivers of garlic. All of those things had been fried in the oil, tinting and flavoring it. The garlic was evenly golden, decidedly not brown, and piled atop the noodles like treasure, another signal that much care and attention had been put into my little lunch.
One summer, in Zermatt, Switzerland, we stopped by a restaurant in the mountains for beer, French fries and a plate of garlic-oil spaghetti that lit up our senses. It was, as usual, visually unassuming, but after taking a bite, I noticed a gentle flurry of grated Parmesan threaded throughout, which some would argue took the dish beyond the realm of aglio e olio. The reason it worked here, I surmised, was that it helped the flavorful oil cling to the noodles. There was something almost fluffy about the spaghetti strands, each tangle delivering an avalanche of savoriness, a comforting bounciness not just in taste but in texture as well.
At home, after months of trial and error, I found my dream aglio e olio. It relies on the freshest bulb of garlic I can find and thinly sliced cloves that won’t burn. The parsley, as well, I look for a fluffy bouquet of, something juicy and fragrant. Good parsley smells and tastes almost as strong as celery, have you noticed? The pepperoncino element here comes in the form of whole dried red chiles, like the kind I found at the bottom of my plate in Japan. I like to use guajillos for their smoky, savory, almost jammy flavor, but a recently dried Calabrian chile would be phenomenal. They’re torn into large pieces and fried in good extra-virgin olive oil until their dull brick color turns a brilliant ruby red. Anything you toss in that oil — like spaghetti or, I don’t know, zucchini — blooms in flavor.
I’m of the belief that eating zucchini raw is often the best way to enjoy it, as long as it’s good and fresh. But there are other ways to maximize its deliciousness. Different cuts of zucchini, for instance, bring out different qualities when cooked. With this recipe, I tried all of the shapes: thin coins (which, annoyingly, stick to one another), thick rectangular prisms (which taste like bland bricks), even fine shreds (which get mushy in a flash). But the shape that tasted best with long noodles was a ½-inch-thick baton, thicker than a matchstick but thinner than a steak fry. I love turning my dainty zucchini sticks in that ridiculously savory garlic-chile-parsley oil, letting them drink it up.
So what makes some aglio e olios bland and others revelatory? With old garlic, dusty red-pepper flakes and bland olive oil, it’s hard for pasta aglio e olio to do anything more than get the job done. The secret to a great version, I’ve learned, is a little soul.
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These versatile sidekicks to soups and stews are full of possibility. That’s what should keep you coming back, Yewande Komolafe writes.
Yewande Komolafe has been a recipe developer, columnist and video host for The New York Times since 2018.
Published June 24, 2026 Updated June 24, 2026
Across Africa and its diaspora, swallows evoke not an avian image but a vessel and an act.
A dumpling-like dough made from a cooked starch and meant to accompany soups and stews, swallows are a full category of foods in our recipe index.
Known generally to the Yorùbá-speaking people of South West Nigeria as òkèlè, to the Igbo-speaking people in the South East as ụtara and to the Fulani and Hausa people of the Sahel and savanna regions of the North as tuwo or nyiir, they get their English name (swallows) for their ability to be eaten without the need to chew. If you’ve ever molded a starch with your fingers, and then used it to scoop a flavored broth or sauce directly to your mouth, then you understand the modest role of a swallow.
I love considering the powerful interplay between dishes. Light broth, thickened stew, hearty porridge, sinewy draw soup or pepper sauce — all are opportunities to hover my whole face over, to intimately understand the dish’s qualities with all my senses. These are the comforting kinds of meals I make most often at home. Whether I’m trying to master a novel soup that I’ve experienced on a recent outing or conjure a stew straight out of dreams from my Nigerian childhood, I’m always thinking about which kind of swallow will be its brilliant sidekick.
Learning to make swallows will invite you into a world of starches and redefine your relationships to your favorite dishes. It’s a topic I’ve covered before, but I’ve found myself wanting to say more. There’s always something to be said about swallows.
The list below is by no means comprehensive. I would have loved to have gone deeper into others, like the East African Highland banana swallow, made from matoke, a green fruit similar to plantain. There’s also Ghana’s firm kenkey, made from fermented maize, and the dainty omo tuo (tuwo), from cooked rice. And don’t forget about bespoke banku, a mix of cassava and maize. Some styles cross many parts of Africa, such as àmàlà, made from a dried, fermented plantain or yam flour, and semolina, made from durum wheat.
Ingredient availability defines the styles, and, in essence, any available starch is an opportunity. Swallows contain myriad possibilities, and that’s what should keep you coming back. With an understanding of a few key techniques, you can broaden your relationship to the starches that sustain you.
Traditionally, making swallows is a multistep process of simmering a starch in a pot until it softens. A large mortar and pestle is then used to crush and pound the tender pieces into a dough. While still hot, the dough is kneaded against the side of the mortar until it’s rich, smooth and elastic.
My preparation has you instead make a slurry, and then cook it while stirring to avoid any lumpy pockets. It thickens into a soft dough, which is repeatedly folded and kneaded against the side of the pot over heat. In both cases, after a bit of an arm workout, the starches relax and take on a glutenlike stretchy texture in a process that is quite magical to behold.
I’m learning to cook, eat and exist with significant changes in my abilities, including the loss of digits on both hands. The classic technique of pinching and rolling a small bit of swallow in between my index, middle finger and thumb is a distant desire. But my prosthetic hands are a point of pride, an enabler of sorts. Meals have become a time for discovery, when I find myself wielding a fork or spoon to eat my swallow. We should each bring the swallow to our lips however we’re able. It will nourish us all the same.
A staple crop across the Caribbean, West and Central Africa and South America, the West African yam, not to be confused with a sweet potato, grows underground as a magnificently large tuber. It goes by many regional names: ìyán in the Yorùbá-speaking part of Nigeria, igname pilée in Benin, yam fufu in Ghana and foutou in Ivory Coast, to name a few.
The process of making it can be exhilarating and exhausting. It never fails to surprise me how the crumbly looking starch is transformed into something glossy and stretchy after minutes of repeated folding. As a yam swallow, ìyán shares the name of its main ingredient. As dense as it is, it provides nourishment and sustenance throughout the day.
This recipe is for anyone who truly enjoys the subtle and mild taste that only fresh yam can provide. It skips a few steps for convenience: The peeled yam is puréed in a blender, and then cooked into a stiff pliable dough.
PAIR IT WITH Vegetable-rich stews like èfọ́ rírò, ègúsí or a saucy braised meat for a deeply satisfying meal — comfort in a bowl.
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Flours milled from grains or any starch can be the basis for swallows, with each imparting a particular flavor and texture. Grains such as maize, millet and sorghum, and tubers such as yam, cassava and potatoes all star in different swallows across Africa. Across East Africa, a swallow, like this one, made from milled white maize flour (called mahindi flour), goes by different names: ugali, posho, nsima and sadza.
Although you may be tempted to use a yellow cornmeal, you may not get the same results. The white cornmeal is starchy and lends itself well to vigorous folding.
PAIR IT WITH Any vegetable soup such as light soup, the spinach-rich cagaar, the coconut-laden kuku paka or any grilled beef kebabs.
Cassava shows up in different dishes and in many forms — grated, crushed, fermented and dried — across Africa. It’s also found as a flour, known as garri or gari across West and Central Africa, and farofa in Brazil. Cassava swallows have a woodsy depth and can range from mild to sour, depending on how lengthy the fermentation process has been.
When garri is made into a swallow, it is known as eba or generally as fufu in the diaspora. The garri swallow recipe here is lightly seasoned with a bit of red palm oil to give it a notable bright color and a floral taste.
PAIR IT WITH Eru, okra soup with shrimp and greens or ègúsí soup, and top with ọbẹ̀ onírù or any braised meat.
Vaughn Vreeland is a supervising video producer for NYT Cooking. An avid baker and home cook hailing from North Carolina, Vaughn can be seen making his latest creations on the NYT Cooking YouTube channel, Instagram and TikTok.
Published June 23, 2026 Updated June 23, 2026
In an ideal world, the word picnic evokes wicker and gingham, cucumber sandwiches and glass pitchers of iced tea, all backlit by golden hour sunshine.
But in the real world, you’re batting away an army of flying critters and creepy crawlers trying to storm the hot fermented watermelon you forgot to put back in the cooler. Inevitably, something, or someone, is sticky. There’s never enough water, your friend forgot napkins — and why did the music stop?
Picnicking doesn’t have to be an ordeal, but you may be doing a few things wrong. Here are a few common mistakes — and some smart, easy fixes — that’ll make everyone’s alfresco dining more enjoyable.
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Why they’re perfect for picnics: Potato salad is a quintessentially picnic food but doesn’t always do well under the hot sun. This one skips the mayonnaise for a creamy (and vegan!) dressing that won’t spoil, while the pepperoncini add little bursts of brightness to each bite.
Whether you’re going for a snacking spread or a full-on dinner party, a smart picnic starts in the kitchen. So choose your ingredients and dishes wisely, and keep mayonnaise-based salads, leafy vegetables, soft cheeses, soft fruit and seafood to a minimum. If potato salad is a must-have in your picnic spread, choose a creamy, more stable recipe; I use whipped tahini as the foundation for my dressing, then add lemon, lots of herbs and pepperoncini for a bit of bite.
And nothing ruins a sandwich quite like soggy lettuce, so instead of romaine, opt for a thinly sliced cabbage slaw as in this picnic hoagie. It provides the same crunch and vegetal respite as lettuce, but it stays crisp longer. Doubling the roasted red pepper spread gives you enough to use as a dip for guests with little, if any, extra work.
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Why they’re perfect for picnics: Who doesn’t love a saucy, crunchy sandwich? The red pepper spread is complex, slightly sweet and a bit spicy. Leave the leafy greens behind and make cabbage slaw — it offers all of the crunch without getting soggy from the sauce or the sun.
No chopping at the function! When coming up with the menu, prioritize minimally messy crowd-pleasers like a smattering of chips and dips, charcuterie boards with cured meat, grapes, sliced hard cheeses and precut vegetables. Slice any sandwiches into manageable segments and place them cut-side up. That lets your guests grab them without making a mess or touching three other portions along the way.
Why it’s perfect for picnics: Refreshing, boozy and highly sippable, this batch cocktail makes eight to 10 servings, enough for a sizable crowd. It also takes well to being paired with frozen fruit, which acts as ice (and doubles as a fun treat when you’re finished).
Suzette Louis-Jean, an event planner and the owner of La TAS Events in New Jersey, prefers dry ice to keep things chilled, but regular ice in an insulated bag or cooler works just fine. The more important part is how you pack it: Place the ice at the bottom to keep anything delicate from getting crushed. (Our friends at Wirecutter came up with a great method, along with a helpful diagram.)
The most frustrating part about ice is also the most obvious: It melts. To keep the party going well after you’ve arrived with your chilled cooler, ask your most reliable (and punctual) friends to bring two bags each. Overestimate how much you’ll need: You can really never have enough ice.
And don’t forget that frozen fruits are another brilliant way of chilling your punch, lemonade, tea and other fruit-friendly drinks. Add frozen cherries and pineapple to your tropical drinks, or frozen peaches in your iced tea. If you’re really planning ahead, freeze lemon wedges and cucumber slices for spa water. It won’t water down the drinks, and often bolsters the flavor. It’s also very cute.
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If picnicking is to become your summertime personality, it might be worth investing in some key things that make traveling easier. Airtight storage containers prevent leakage, and stackable ones are especially good for picnicking, as are lidded baking vessels, like loaf pans or 9-by-13 pans.
Rimmed baking sheets or plastic cutting boards are great ways to secure container foundations. Pack your items as flat as possible, rather than stacking them vertically and leaving gravity to topple it all. Lay things on their bigger, flatter sides and stack upward. Pad and secure your containers with things that have several uses — like kitchen towels — to keep the food from tumbling around too much.
Why they’re perfect for picnics: These sturdy brownies are great to take just about anywhere and are a much more viable way to celebrate than a cake you spent forever on, only to see the buttercream weeping. I like to precut them, then place each square on its side to show off its cross section.
If you go through the trouble of making all of that food, count on your friends. (People are often delighted to be appointed to meaningful tasks, research suggests.) Ask them to bring the rest.
Trash bags
Paper towels
Portable speakers
Hand wipes
Sunscreen
Bug spray
Drinking water
Seltzer
Chargers
Bottle openers
No matter what, remember that you’re at the mercy of the weather and your environment. Bugs will happen, wind will happen. Don’t be too hard on yourself if it isn’t perfect.
“It’s about the thoughtfulness that goes into it,” Ms. Louis-Jean said. “A picnic is a state of mind. Remember that you are the vibe. You are the secret sauce.”