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A celebration of the sandwich, and an attempt to create a taxonomy for its many diverse forms.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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Sohla El-Waylly is here for the holiday’s best side, which she griddles into sandwich filling, fries into croutons and simmers into dumplings for soup.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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I am a home cook in New York City. I have shared more than 1,400 recipes on my website, Smitten Kitchen, and I’ve written two cookbooks. I am the kind of insufferable person who squeals when the first tomatoes of the season show up at the farmers’ market and I post about them on Instagram with abandon. But there are many good reasons to never cook at home. I know because I bail regularly. First of all, those tomatoes are often staggeringly expensive, as they should be. Farming is brutally hard work. And the results are highly unpredictable, I’ve found in my few failed stints as a Gentlewoman Balcony Farmer. In a city where rents have never been higher, groceries also cost huge chunks of money. As long you can buy five dumplings in Chinatown for $1.25 — forever, I hope — it’s never going to be purely economical to cook at home. And what kind of monster wants to turn on an oven in August, anyway? That wheezing window air-conditioner can only do so much. Did your landlord find your grill on the fire escape and confiscate it, your only way to cook without melting in your apartment?

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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Anthony Bourdain devoured the world. That’s not hyperbole. It’s not even metaphor. There was no place that he wasn’t curious to explore, no food that he wasn’t determined to try, no cap on his hunger and no ceiling, or so it always seemed, on his joy. In his writing and especially on his TV shows, most recently CNN’s “Parts Unknown,” he exhorted the rest of us to follow his lead and open our eyes and our guts to the wondrous smorgasbord of life. He insisted that we savor every last morsel of it. It turns out that he himself could not. Bourdain, 61, was found dead on Friday in a hotel room near Strasbourg, France, where he was shooting an episode of that CNN show. The cause, according to the network, was suicide. His death ends a blazing career that contributed as much as anybody else’s to Americans’ increased fascination with, and knowledge about, food in all its multiethnic splendor. If we’re savvier to the ways of banh mi, bo ssam and dim sum than we were two decades ago, we have Bourdain in large measure to thank. With television cameras in tow, he showed us Asia, Australia, Africa — and he tasted all of them for us.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge