At Home

New Yorkers turned an eye to shelf stable comforts–beans, pasta, soups

March 17: Gourmet-level recipes for your coronavirus pantry staples

March 22: The Best Way to Cook Beans 

April 20: Easy Recipes to Cook During Your Coronavirus Self-Quarantine

April 21: How I stock the smitten kitchen

May 28: The Comfort and Power of Asian Cooking in Quarantine

May 29: Our Best Recipes and Tips for Quarantine Cooking

May 30: Quarantine Cooking Chronicles — Part 1 

June 22: Eating habits: How have they changed since Covid-19?

July 1: Quarantine Cuisine: How COVID-19 Could Change a Generation’s Eating Habits

With more time on their hands New Yorkers experimented with cooking and baking projects, as well as other food related activities at home, like gardening and composting. 

March 20: Here’s What You’ve Been Cooking During Coronavirus Self-Quarantine

March 25: Food Supply Anxiety Brings Back Victory Gardens

March 26: Bread recipes to try during coronavirus lockdown

March 28: Here’s Why All the Yeast Is Sold Out Right Now

March 30: Stress Baking More Than Usual?

April 8: Becoming a master of cuisine during coronavirus

April 10: Quarantine bakers are making flour a hot commodity

April 20: Coronavirus Farming: Don’t Want To Go To Grocery Stores? Here Are Tips For Planting Cold- And Warm-Weather Veggies

April 21: Gardening in the time of coronavirus: Grow a ‘victory garden’

April 22: Regrow Scallions for a Future Full of Alliums 

April 30: Forget the Sourdough. Everybody’s Baking Banana Bread.

May 8: How to Grow a Victory Garden of Any Size

May 11: Most Popular Quarantine Recipes in Every State

May 12: Where Is All the Flour? Why Pandemic Baking Is So Popular

May 20: The Pandemic Has Turned Us All into Gardeners

May 24: Baking bread at home: A knead for comfort

May 27: NYC Bakeries Selling (or Giving Away) Sourdough Starter Right Now

June 12: Residents Fight to Keep Composting From Getting Trashed in New York City’s Covid-19 Budget Cuts

July 9: Richaud Valls Turned a Bread Habit Into a Bakery Business 

February 16: Stuck at Home, Pastry Chefs Find Freedom. New Yorkers Find Cookies.  

The Black Lives Matter protests brought many people out of their homes and onto the streets. Some people showed their support through food: feeding protesters, ordering from Black owned restaurants, and donating to related causes. At the same time, serious criticisms of mainstream food media began in late spring, and began to highlight some of the material inequities that people of colour experienced in the field.

May 9: Alison Roman and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture

June 4: Black cookbooks and memoirs

June 5: A Comprehensive Guide on How to Support NYC’s Black-Owned Restaurants

June 8: How to Feed Crowds in a Protest or Pandemic? The Sikhs Know 

June 9: Reckonings at Bon Appétit, the New York Times, and others in media can’t undo years of racist damage and voices silenced.

June 19: Cooks are nourishing protesters and a social movement by sending food to the front lines

June 24: A Seat at the Table: Amplifying the Voices of Black Cookbook Authors

June 26: How Can Food Media Fix Its Racism Problem?

July 21: When the Bake Sale Goes Global, Millions Are Raised to Fight Injustice: Online sales have become blockbuster events as long-sidelined pastry chefs lead a charge toward activism.

July 30: How Food Media Flattens Ethnicity Into Identity

People turned to Zoom and other platforms to maintain some semblance of important and needed socializing through food and drink. This was not only a means of connecting families and friends, but also a way for chefs and others in the food industry to connect with their customers and audience virtually. 

April 7: Passover Seders Go Digital During COVID-19 Lockdown

April 13: Celebrity Chefs Take to Instagram, and to the Pantry

April 23: Free Online Cooking Classes During Coronavirus

May 4: Virtual cooking classes with NYC chefs

May 6: Baking Tips for New Yorkers Stuck at Home

May 12: NYC Sanitation Department Debuts Coronavirus Cooking Show | New York City ; NYC’s Dept. of Sanitation has a cooking channel — and it’s not garbage

June 3: NYC buildings host virtual cooking classes for residents

June 6: Learn to Cook Online: A Guide to the Best Classes at Every Level

June 12: Hey Food Lovers, The Virtual Cooking Classes by NYCWFF Are Fantastic!

August 7: A Cooking Camp Chef’s Recipe For Remote Education: Make It Ambitious

August 26: Brooklyn-Based Chef Goes Virtual Amid COVID-19

August 27: I can’t cook, but it’s the only way to connect to my last living parent—who I can’t visit.

February: The 7 Best New York City Cooking Classes of 2021, 11 Best Online Cooking Classes 2021 

Whether an enjoyable chore that brought satisfaction and comfort, or yet another chore on top of the stressful double duty of work and childcare, home cooking was imbued with multiple meanings, These pieces of food writing explore the symbolic meanings behind  food, cooking, and eating during the pandemic.  

April 2: Opinion | How to Cook a Coronavirus

April 8: The 33 Most Comforting Recipes Our Readers Are Cooking Right Now

April 23: Everyone Is Cooking Right Now. Except Me.

April 28: A Mother, a Pandemic and Scorched Rice

April 28: Coronavirus is turning badass NYC women into housewives

May 4: Quarantine Stew

May 6: After surviving the coronavirus, I turned to my mother’s recipes

May 19: Survey: 29% in New York see quarantine up side

May 20: What Happens When Coronavirus Takes Your Sense of Taste

June 2: For Those Who Don’t Know How to Cook, Quarantine Presents a Challenge

June 18: How COVID-19 Has Changed Our Relationship With Food 06/19/2020

August 20: Are Americans fed up with making their own meals?

As months of social distancing, isolation, and home cooking wore on, some people experienced cooking fatigue

August 20: Are Americans fed up with making their own meals?

November 10: For Home Cooks, Burnout Is a Reality This Holiday Season

November 15: Once Enthusiastic, Americans’ ‘Cooking Fatigue’ Simmers As Pandemic Drags On

November 25: The Joylessness of Cooking

Check out the Brooklyn Library Oral History Project and The Counter for narratives of the New York experience during the pandemic