21 Recipes Our Editors Are Cooking on Father's Day (It's Not Just Steak!)
Smoky, sticky, and spicy—these skewers bring the heat and the sweet with every juicy bite. A quick marinade seasons the surface and allows salt to penetrate the chicken, resulting in juicy, flavorful meat.
Get Recipe: Harissa-Honey Glazed Chicken Skewers
This thick and meaty pan-seared steak is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Contrary to popular belief, flipping your steak frequently helps it develop a great crust and ensures it'll cook more evenly. Basting the steak with butter deepens its crust while also distributing flavor from aromatics like fresh rosemary or thyme.
Get Recipe: Pan-Seared, Butter-Basted Thick-Cut Steak
With juicy sausages nestled in crisp, tender Yorkshire pudding, covered in plenty of gravy, toad in the hole is a British classic worth recreating at home—regardless of whether it's Father's Day or not.
Get Recipe: Toad in the Hole
Tender and meaty pork ribs with a crusty bark or rich glaze of sauce—no smoker required.
Get Recipe: Sous Vide Barbecue Pork Ribs
Smashing ground beef firmly into an ungreased pan increases contact points, delivering maximum browning and flavor. Here, we cook two 2-ounce patties instead of one 4-ounce patty, which increases the amount of surface area for browning.
Get Recipe: The Ultimate Smash Cheeseburger
Chicken piccata—fried chicken cutlets bathed in a bright, savory lemon-butter pan sauce—is a staff favorite. Crispy, juicy, and loaded with punchy lemon juice and briny capers, it's an easy, impressive meal that dad will love.
Get Recipe: Chicken Piccata (Fried Chicken Cutlets With Lemon-Butter Pan Sauce)
This pan pizza recipe is for those who love a thick and crispy crust that's golden on the bottom, but puffy and soft under the layers of sauce and mozzarella.
Get Recipe: Foolproof Pan Pizza
Pan-searing duck breast is a restaurant-worthy main that's surprisingly easy to make at home. For tender, crisp, and juicy duck, score the skin, start with a cold pan, then cook it low and slow.
Get Recipe: Pan-Seared Duck Breast With Orange Pan Sauce
This vodka sauce is a powerhouse of tomato flavor smoothed over with the silky richness of heavy cream. Using a hefty dose of tomato paste gives the sauce the deeply sweet base notes it needs, while a small can of tomatoes adds a brighter layer of flavor.
Get Recipe: Rigatoni alla Vodka
Inspired by Popeyes, this fried chicken has that signature airy crust of rugged and scraggy bits, coupled with some personal touches.
Get Recipe: Extra-Crispy Fried Chicken With Caramelized Honey and Spice
How about a classic Margherita pizza with a spicy 'nduja twist? The spicy Calabrian cured pork holds its shape when baked quickly in a high-temperature pizza oven, and complements the simple tomato sauce, Parmesan, and fresh mozzarella on this pizza.
Get Recipe: Outdoor Pizza Oven 'Nduja Pizza
With medium-rare beef tenderloin, a rich mushroom duxelles, foie gras, and prosciutto all wrapped up in buttery puff pastry, beef Wellington is impressive no matter the occasion.
Get Recipe: The Ultimate Beef Wellington
A low and slow start guarantees medium-rare doneness all the way from the edge to center, and blasting the prime rib with heat just before serving gives you a crackling-crisp crust.
Get Recipe: Roasted and Reverse Seared Prime Rib
Lasagna Bolognese is the king of all lasagnas: Thin layers of delicate fresh pasta and savory ragù are bound by creamy besciamella. While robust and meaty, the dish has a hint of sweetness to it. Sounds like a meal fit for a king.
Get Recipe: Classic Baked Lasagna Bolognese (Lasagne alla Bolognese)
Filled with a rich custard and topped with whipped cream and toasted flaked coconut, this coconut cream pie is fragrant, nutty, and a delight to eat.
Get Recipe: Coconut Cream Pie
This fresh mint ice cream has an unbeatable roundness of flavor you just can't get with extract. Steeping fresh. mint leaves in hot dairy helps extract the herb's minty-fresh flavor, and blending the chocolate with a little oil and drizzling it into the churning ice cream ensures it melts smooth and creamy on the tongue.
Get Recipe: The Best Mint Chip Ice Cream
This majestic cheesecake gets its creaminess from a combination of cream cheese and fresh goat cheese. An initial burst of high heat encourages the cheesecake to puff, lightening its texture slightly, and a deep, sturdy pan helps it bake up nice and tall.
Get Recipe: Epic New York Cheesecake
With espresso- and liqueur-soaked ladyfingers, creamy mascarpone, and a dusting of rich cocoa powder, tiramisu is an elegant dessert that dad is sure to love.
Get Recipe: Rich and Creamy Tiramisu
Cap off your Father's Day celebration with this devil's food cake, which gets its rich chocolate flavor from a combination of dark chocolate and Dutch cocoa powder.
Get Recipe: Devil's Food Cake Recipe
Is there a dad who doesn't love a gooey apple pie? For an apples that retain their shape during cooking, par-cook the fruit to 160°F (71°C), which sets their pectin into a more stable form. A mixture of cornstarch and sugar help thicken the juices of the chunky, lightly sweetened filling into a gooey syrup, resulting in a deeply satisfying apple pie.
Get Recipe: Gooey Apple Pie
Part Rice Krispies Treat, part candy bar, this sticky-sweet classic belongs at every potluck. Using brown sugar instead of granulated sugar amplifies the bars' caramel notes, while bittersweet chocolate helps temper the sweetness of the butterscotch.
Get Recipe: Scotcheroos
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Atlantic
a day ago
- Atlantic
Washington's Quiet Work
In August 1775, nothing particularly dramatic was happening among the roughly 14,000 soldiers of the Continental Army besieging the British army in Boston. Indeed, nothing particularly dramatic happened for the next six months. And then, in March 1776, the British suddenly evacuated Boston. Which is why the months of apparent calm deserve a close look. The semiquincentennial of American independence has begun: The anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill are behind us; the reenactment of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys' storming Fort Ticonderoga was a smashing success. Other big moments await, culminating, no doubt, in a big party on July 4, 2026. One hopes and expects that there will be plenty of hoopla, because that is the American way. But 250 years ago today, the real and unspectacular work of American independence was under way. The Continental Army, created in June of 1775, had warily welcomed its new leader, George Washington, without much fuss. A slaveholding Virginia gentleman and loosely religious Anglican was going to lead an army that was mainly made up of New Englanders—including both psalm-singing, Bible-quoting descendants of the Puritans and dissenting freethinkers. For his part, Washington was appalled at what he saw: militia units that elected their own officers and called them by their first names, free Black men carrying weapons, money-grubbing Yankees (as opposed to land-grubbing Virginia gentry), and general squalor. 'They are an exceeding dirty and nasty people,' he told his cousin Lund Washington. Lindsay Chervinsky: The 'dirty and nasty people' who became Americans What happened that summer outside Boston was of monumental importance. If this was to be an American army and not just an assembly of colonial militias, then Washington would have to be the first American general, and not just a provincial. He would have to create a system out of chaos, and hold together a force against a dangerous enemy. Although slightly outnumbered and bottled up in Boston, which connected to the mainland by only the narrowest of peninsulas, the British army was tough, cohesive, professional, and eager to avenge its unexpected defeats and Pyrrhic victories. Washington did the work in many ways—by organizing the army in divisions and brigades, inspecting the troops, regularizing discipline, hammering home the importance of digging latrines, and quarantining soldiers who had smallpox. It helped that he looked the part of a military leader: tall, well turned out, graceful, and the best horseman in the colonies, by most accounts. No less important, he was able to transcend his aversion to those strange New Englanders. Two men utterly unlike his social set in Virginia quickly became his most trusted subordinates: Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, a Quaker with a talent for organization, and a tubby Boston bookstore owner, Henry Knox, who became the chief of artillery. The former was eventually made quartermaster of the army and then commander of the southern army, where he displayed a flair for field command. The latter brought 59 heavy-artillery pieces from Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga to the army outside of Boston in the dead of winter, before developing the artillery arm into the equal of its British opponent. Washington quickly realized that his most talented military leader was a third New Englander, the Connecticut merchant Benedict Arnold, who, until he committed treason, was the best field commander on either side of the conflict. In the autumn of 1775, Washington sent him off on a daring march through the Maine wilderness that very nearly wrested Quebec from British control. The commander in chief needed a headquarters guard—what we today call a personal security detail—and so in March 1776, the army created a unit known as the life guard. Washington selected men from each army unit, which meant that the life guard's personnel skewed in favor of New Englanders; as its first commander, he chose a Massachusetts man, Caleb Gibbs, who lasted until 1780. He chose southerners, too, for crucial positions, and not all of them gentlemen—Daniel Morgan of Virginia, for example, was a roughneck leader of riflemen who formed an elite corps. The point was clear: This was an American army, and talented men, no matter their background, could win their leader's trust and rise up the ranks. Washington remains in some ways the most remote of America's national heroes; he is more distant from us than Abraham Lincoln because of his greater austerity and reserve. He mastered his volcanic temper; prudently handled both his subordinates and his superiors; and knew the value of dignity and a certain distance in exercising command. He was brave but not particularly gifted as a tactical leader, and he was prone to devising overly aggressive and complicated plans, but these did not matter as much as the larger leadership qualities that he had brought with him to Boston. Small wonder that many years later, men who were his intellectual superiors—Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams—worked for him. His story shows why character and good judgment are far more important in a leader than mere intelligence. Despite wonderful writing about Washington in recent books, including Ron Chernow's 2010 biography and the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the history of the Revolution, Americans do not value him as we once did. The fault lies across the political spectrum. For some (think of the 1619 Project), the fundamental sin of slavery overwhelms every aspect of biography. Washington controlled several hundred enslaved people on his Mount Vernon estate; he often treated them badly, and as of 1775, he felt no shame about that. Being a plantation owner was part of his identity, but not all of it, and more important: Like some of the other Founders, he became uneasy about reconciling the ideals of the Revolution with the practice of holding men and women as chattel—which is why he manumitted all of his slaves in his will. At a deeper level, this view of American history cannot help but crush patriotic pride in what remains, in retrospect, an astounding achievement. The Revolution culminated not in despotism but in a new political order based on liberty and self-government, built on ideals that, described with exceptional eloquence by another slaveholder, Jefferson, eventually blew up the evil institution on which their way of life rested. George Packer: A view of American history that leads to one conclusion A different form of relentless present-mindedness afflicts the current administration, which seeks to purge national parks and museums of references to the darker sides of American history, beginning with slavery but also including the slaughter and dispossession of American Indians, and various forms of discrimination and persecution thereafter. In everything from signage to artwork, the Trump administration reaches for pabulum and kitsch, a false and unidimensional depiction of the American past. As for academic historians, although some exemplary ones are at work—including Gordon Wood and David Hackett Fischer—the contemporary trend is to shun great individuals in favor of subaltern history. There is not much place for a commanding general in a pantheon composed of people overlooked by previous generations. That summer and fall in Cambridge and the other towns surrounding Boston, George Washington's work made a difference. It reminds us that American independence was won by dramatic deeds, to be sure, but also by mastering—slowly and painfully—the undramatic things, such as insisting on rank insignia and saluting, managing gunpowder production, and digging latrines properly. It reminds us that there is such a thing as individual greatness, and that it can make all the difference. And particularly in an age of self-righteous scorn, we would do well to recall how Washington's lifelong struggles with himself—his prejudices, his emotions, his upbringing and background—contributed to final victory. We can still profit by the example.
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
A bid to undo a colonial-era wrong touches a people's old wounds
Their efforts to repatriate ancestral remains, which have been in a British museum for more than a century, have been 'a trigger for the Nagas,' said Dolly Kikon, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is Naga herself. Naga society has changed immensely since those remains were taken. To contemplate their return means reckoning with those changes, and with how many of them are the result of external forces and violence. Advertisement Members of Naga communities in northeastern India have worked for five years with the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, whose collection of Naga cultural objects is the largest in the world, toward the goal of repatriating the hundreds of human remains in the collection. In June, a delegation of 20 Naga leaders, elders and scholars visited the museum and saw those objects for the first time. 'I stood there beside them quietly, feeling a deep sorrow in my heart,' Kikon said. The human remains in the collection, which number more than 200, include a warrior's cranium, a woman's skull decorated with buffalo horns and a piece of skin with hair attached. Naga tradition holds that human remains are sacred, carrying life and spirit. 'They are restless, the spirits will not be in peace unless they find a resting place,' said K. Ongshong, a Naga elder from Longleng village in the Indian state of Nagaland. Advertisement Most of the remains were donated to the museum by J.P. Mills and J.H. Hutton, British colonial administrators in northeastern India. While some were given to the men as gifts, most were collected against Naga people's will during military expeditions into villages, according to experts. For years, the skulls were included in a Pitt Rivers exhibit titled 'Treatment of Dead Enemies,' under the label 'headhunting trophies' alongside remains from other Indigenous groups, including the well-known shrunken heads of the Shuar people of South America. That changed in 2020, when 120 of the human remains in the collection, including the shrunken heads and Naga remains, were removed from display and put in storage. In their place stand blue information boards explaining the contentious collection and the museum's decolonization efforts. 'These displays didn't match with our values any more,' Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum's director, said in an interview. Headhunting was practiced among Naga warriors, who collected the heads of enemies they killed in raids or war. (Despite the labeling by the museum, experts said it was unlikely that all the Naga skulls were enemy trophy heads; some may have been taken from burial sites.) Because of the gruesome nature of the practice, and the way it helped to feed a persistent stereotype of the Nagas as violent and warlike, some Nagas are hesitant to bring the remains home. The repatriation discussions are also touching on deeper wounds for many of the Naga people, who number about 2.5 million. Advertisement That is clear from the difficulties raised, in this case, by one of the first questions in any repatriation process: Where should these objects go? Today, most Nagas live in the Indian state of Nagaland. But Naga communities can also be found in the states of Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh -- and in Myanmar. Before the British colonists drew their borders, the Nagas lived in a contiguous region loosely known as the Naga hills, now divided among those modern states. In 1928, Nagas began making formal demands for independence, not wanting to be a part of the British Raj or India. 'The Nagas shared no cultural similarities with India,' said Akum Longchari, a peace and conflict activist based in Nagaland. But when the British left the subcontinent in 1947, Nagas were brought under the control of the Indian state. Decades of political struggle and armed resistance followed, broadly known as the Naga National Movement. India saw it as a threat and suppressed the insurgency. The fighting killed thousands over the years. India implemented laws that gave sweeping powers to its security forces and protected them from prosecution, which experts say led to human rights violations. Although a ceasefire was reached in 1997, the state of Nagaland remains one of India's most militarized regions. For some Nagas, the truce feels precarious, and much suspicion and mistrust remain. Longchari said Naga society had been in a constant state of struggle since British colonization in the 1800s. 'Nagas have had no time for reflection,' he said, adding, 'One colonizer left and another took their place right after.' Another factor complicating the repatriation process is the enduring legacy of American Christian missionaries, who first arrived in the Naga hills in the 19th century. Advertisement If the remains are laid to rest, some Nagas wonder, what funeral rituals should they be accorded -- the rites of Christianity, since that is the religion most Nagas now follow, or traditional, animistic ones? Knowledge of those older rites may now be limited, since the missionaries changed the region's culture along with its religion, said Nepuni Piku, a human-rights activist. 'They did not just come with their Bible, but with their cultural baggage,' Piku said. Naga culture was painted as backward and outdated, Christianity as modern, which led to the abandonment of many Naga cultural practices and rituals, he said. Naga activists and scholars, along with the Forum for Naga Reconciliation in Nagaland, a civil society organization, have been trying to build consensus on these questions and more. Once there is agreement on a plan for repatriating the remains and artifacts, a claim will be made to the university. If the university accepts the claim, then the governments of both countries will get involved. Last fall, a two-day conference on the proposed repatriation brought together community elders, scholars and students in a nondenominational Christian church in Dimapur, the largest city in Nagaland. A college student at the conference asked what relevance the traditions of the past had for the urban world he inhabits. Loina Shohe, a sociologist, replied that Naga culture, like any other, is not static but evolves with time. 'Our ancestors were self-sustained, not primitive or savage,' she said. The Nagas' history has caused them immense intergenerational trauma, Dr. P. Ngully, a psychiatrist in Nagaland, said in an interview last year. He was part of the delegation that visited Oxford, one month before he died in July. Such trauma, which he called an 'invisible epidemic,' can exacerbate alcohol and substance abuse, he said, problems that Naga society is trying to address among its youth. Advertisement Some younger Nagas are looking for ways to reconcile with that traumatic history. Throngkiuba Yimchungru, 35, conducts art workshops that he calls DeConstructing Morung. Long ago, morungs were youth dormitories where Nagas came together to socialize -- one of the traditions lost to Christianity and time. Yimchungru said he wanted to adapt the concept to the present. 'Morungs can be anywhere -- in a school, office, within a big city,' he said. 'They needn't be within an architectural structure.' Nagas' discussions with the Pitt Rivers Museum have also been an attempt to reconcile with the past. But the return of the remains in the museum's collection could conceivably take decades. The fastest repatriation the museum has ever carried out took a year and a half, while the longest -- the repatriation of Tasmanian human remains -- took 45. The Naga delegation to the museum opened its June visit with an Indigenous chant that alludes to the original parting of the Naga ancestors from their creator. The chant concludes with the hope that the ancestor will be reunited with the creator and help to heal the wounds of the past. 'I don't know if the process of repatriation will do the healing for us,' Kikon said. 'But I do know there's a lot of trauma and we need the healing.' This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
Sneaking into the Spy Museum's new vault
As with most museums, a vast majority of those objects are not on display. And until a few weeks ago, they were far away, stored at a location outside the capital -- making it a challenge for museum historians to reach the objects for study and preservation. Advertisement In 2020, the museum began consolidating its collection in its new building, a project that it completed this year. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Many of the artifacts in the vault came from one man: H. Keith Melton, a founding board member of the museum, who became one of the world's renowned spy collectors. He is not a former intelligence agent himself; rather, he made his money as one of the country's largest McDonald's franchise owners. A condition of his donation, which he first pledged in 2016, was that the collection would eventually be moved to the museum itself, Melton said. 'To properly care for, maintain, catalog, access the artifacts, they needed to be on the premises,' Melton said in an interview. 'You can't deal with it remotely. Artifacts need care and feeding and vigilance, and they need to make sure they're not deteriorating ." Advertisement The collections team at the International Spy Museum recently opened the doors to its den of secrets, offering a reporter and photographer a look at tools of the trade that, like much of spycraft itself, are kept out of public view. There are roughly 4,000 books in the vault, most of them donated by Melton. The most treasured of these is a World War II-era briefing book created by MI9, a wartime branch of British intelligence, to get Americans up to speed on its top secret espionage innovations. It includes designs for cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, coat buttons and gold teeth concealing compasses, and maps printed on clothing. Laura Hicken, the museum's collections manager, estimated that there were fewer than 20 copies of this book in the world. Among the museum's newest acquisitions are original courtroom sketches by William Sharp, an illustrator who died in 1961. One is of Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy who operated undercover in the United States for almost a decade and who was portrayed by Mark Rylance in the 2015 Steven Spielberg thriller 'Bridge of Spies.' In the drawings, Sharp portrayed Abel as looking stressed. 'For us, where so much of our history is told through gadgets and weapons and concealment devices, this is so incredibly personal and such an intimate look into the consequences of the things we cover,' Hicken said, referring to the sketch. (The museum, which is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's largest espionage museum, has come under criticism in the past for sanitizing the unethical behavior of spy agencies.) Advertisement Another set of Sharp-penned sketches is from the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were arrested in 1950 for espionage and executed in 1953. The drawings feature Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who sentenced them to death, and an unguarded Ethel Rosenberg, whose culpability has come under doubt in the last decade. The Spy Museum has also received gifts and loans from international governments. The South Korean government, for example, lent items said to have been seized from a North Korean spy who crossed into the south. Among these is a pen that, when clicked a certain way, would have been capable of injecting a paralyzing agent into an unsuspecting victim, as well as a code sheet that spies could use to communicate with someone equipped with a counter code sheet. The German government lent an army propaganda rocket from the early 1940s. These were launched over Russian soldiers on the battlefield, where they would eject pamphlets encouraging them to abandon Josef Stalin. According to a translation, the pamphlets inside the rocket say: 'Red Army men! You will not experience peace, you will not return to your home. Stalin will not allow this because he knows that any Red Army soldier who has been in Europe will pose a threat to the Stalinist system.' Sitting on top of a large shelf is a couch that belonged to Robert P. Hanssen, a former FBI agent who spied for Moscow off and on for decades. Hanssen died in 2023 in his Colorado prison cell. Melton also persuaded Hanssen's family to donate other items, including a suit and watches. The museum has no shortage of knives, some of which are hidden in spatulas and boots. But there are less subtle blades, including one developed by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, to be a combat weapon. Advertisement 'There are a lot of challenging elements to our collection because so much of it was meant to kill or destroy or distract,' Hicken said. 'We have powders that were meant to be tipped into gas tanks that would essentially erode the gas tank very quickly so you could disable somebody's vehicle.' Also in the vault are several items that once belonged to Tony Mendez, the celebrated CIA officer who was played by Ben Affleck in the 2012 Academy Award-winning movie 'Argo.' Mendez was particularly known for disguises, exfiltration and forgery. One drawer in the vault includes wigs he designed and a pair of shoes with lifts inside to make the wearer appear significantly taller. In addition, there's a self-portrait of Mendez, a former board member of the museum, depicting several aspects of the 'Argo' story, which involved Mendez's plan to rescue American diplomats trapped in Iran in 1980. 'Everything in our collection is two things,' Hicken said. 'The purse actually conceals a camera. The pen conceals a microdot viewer. The shoe has a knife in it.' This article originally appeared in
