We recently spoke to Mely Martínez about her cookbook, “The Mexican Home Kitchen” (Rock Point, September 2020), which compiles the traditional home-style dishes that feed Mexican families day in and day out. These include comforting foods like caldo de pollo and carne con papas, celebratory recipes like mole poblano and pastel de cumpleaños, and classics like tamales and pozole, as well as basics like corn and flour tortillas, salsas, rice, and beans. Mely is best known for her popular blog, Mexico in My Kitchen, which she started in 2008 for her teenage son, hoping that someday he will use it to recreate the Mexican food his mom made for the family. Although born and raised in the city of Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mely has traveled to most states in Mexico and lived in several of them.

If you hadn’t read the flyer closely before heading to Shanghai’s first ever MeatFest in June 2019, you might have been a bit disappointed upon arrival. The sounds and smells of sizzling meat might have seemed like a carnivore’s dream come true, but the name was tongue-in-cheek; the event was thrown by Vegans of Shanghai for “eco-conscious meat lovers” and served only domestically sourced plant-based “meat” products. It’s part of a bigger push towards eating a plant-based diet in China, where vegetarians make up less than 5 percent of the population. But even at such a low rate, that still comes out to approximately 50 million people (a population larger than that of Spain).

Naples and its people have a strong link to traditional pastries: For centuries the sweet trio of babà, sfogliatella and pastiera has dominated undisputed. But in the city’s historic center, a woman dares to challenge the sacred pillars of pastry, offering instead a tarte au citron or éclair au chocolat that wouldn’t look out of place in Paris. The pastry shop’s name – Mon Sciù – clearly spells out its love of French and Neapolitan culinary cultures. Mon is French for “mine,” while sciù is the Neapolitan word for “choux pastry” (it’s also used to describe a person who is particularly kind).

It’s a cold December afternoon when we arrive at the headquarters of Tamales de Tia Tila in San Gabriel Etla, about 45 minutes outside of Oaxaca City. Knocking on the door, we catch a whiff of spices and corn that the cold wind quickly steals away. But as soon the door swings open, revealing a family with faces half-covered in masks and hands busy at work, waves of warm, fragrant air envelope us. The tamal workshop is brimming: a man is moving stews, a woman pressing dough, an older woman laying corn husks and banana leaves on one of the many tables. Everyone’s movements are so precise and focused that we feel guilty for intruding. But that feeling fades away when a young girl waves us in and brings over a cup of hot coffee.

Immerse yourself on this multi-day trip in the complex cultural identity of Mexico City, where pre-Hispanic, colonial, and contemporary influences collide.

Today is Día de Reyes (Kings’ Day), also known as Epiphany, and in Catalonia, as in many places with Catholic traditions, we celebrate the Magis’ visit to the baby Jesus with a tortell de reis (roscón de reyes in Spanish), or kings’ cake. Made of brioche and shaped like a crown, the cake is filled with marzipan made from marcona almonds, wonderfully fragrant with orange-flower water and studded with jewel-like candied fruit – such as orange, cherries, melon or quince – as well as pine nuts and sugar. Most people purchase their tortell at a bakery and eat it for dessert at the end of their family lunch on Dia de Reis, as it’s called in Catalan. The Gremi de Pastisseria de Barcelona, a Catalan association of professional bakers, estimates that some 1 million tortells will be eaten in Catalonia this year.

It used to be the only favors I asked of Helena Bedwell were for phone numbers of particular officials I could not otherwise get from my usual sources. Helena, a journalist for 25 years, knows everyone in Tbilisi. Then last week, I called her for some help of a more domestic kind: I wanted to learn how to cook a Georgian holiday dish. She offered to show me pelamushi, a voluptuous tooth-smacking porridge. A couple of years ago, the Georgian journalist published her first cookbook, “Georgian Flavors from Helena,” a homey, straightforward collection of her take on classic Georgian recipes designed for “busy and on-the-go” people like her who may be abroad and want to recreate Georgian dishes with a limited supply of time and ingredients.

In Greece, Epiphany is celebrated on January 6 (some eastern Orthodox churches celebrate it on January 19). To say it’s significant is an understatement: For eastern Christians like the Greeks, the day commemorates the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, seen as his manifestation as the son of God. For western Christians, the celebration came to commemorate the visit of the Magi; as a result, the day is also called Three Kings’ Day, often shortened to Kings’ Day. Called Theofania (theos=god + faino=reveal) or commonly Ton Foton (Των Φώτων, which literally translates “Of the Lights”), the celebration revolves around the blessing of waters. The process begins on the day prior, January 5, which is called protagiasi or fotisi.

‘Tis the season of the Japanese New Year’s trinity: osechi, oseibo and nengajo. Like newsy Christmas cards, the nengajo is a recap of family or personal news mailed in postcards during the weeks preceding the end of the year and efficiently delivered all over Japan promptly on January 1. The winter gift-giving season is in full swing, with companies and individuals sending oseibo gifts as thank-you expressions for kindnesses over the year. Most gifts are food or household items like cooking oil or soap. The best of the traditions is osechi ryori, traditional New Year’s cuisine. Osechi is not something one can find in a restaurant because it’s eaten only one time a year, at home or when visiting others at home.

Some of my most powerful memories from 2020 are of the post-lockdown reunions with the owners of my favorite bodegas and grocery shops in Barcelona. After such a long period of confinement, it felt dizzying to move beyond the borders of my neighborhood and visit bars and restaurants again, which had newly reopened for takeaway. It was hard not to hug my friends – you know, we hug a lot in Spain. On one particularly ridiculous day in May, I remember sneaking a glass of vermut in a paper coffee cup at one of my local bodegas. The coffee cup was a disguise – any police patrolling the streets would think that I was just buying a takeaway coffee (permitted) and not having a drink inside a bar (forbidden).

Making chilaquiles always seemed a little out of my reach. I’m familiar with the dish’s humble beginnings, invented as a way of making use of day-old tortillas, but it still held some element of mystery for me: Under the practiced hands of locals, what seemed to be normal, everyday ingredients – fried tortillas, cooked salsa, raw onion, fresh cheese, double cream – transformed into a blend of flavors that felt impossible to recreate. This is a dish that I came to love after moving to Mexico City, where it quickly became my go-to when I sat down at a restaurant for breakfast. If I couldn’t find anyone to accompany me, I would often go out to breakfast alone just to eat chilaquiles.

When the first lockdown began in March 2020, one of the few things to disappear from supermarket shelves in Naples was yeast. Everyone was forced to stay home, where many got the idea to make pizza – baked, fried and stuffed. The result was that by mid-March, yeast was almost impossible to find. Fights broke out in grocery stores over packets of yeast. But I had my own secret reserves: Antonio ‘o fresellaro’s mother yeast. You see, on March 20 (at which point going out for food shopping was allowed), I escaped from home for a brief trip to buy Antonio Di Paolo’s freselle (twice-baked bread). While I was there, Antonio gifted me a piece of his family’s most precious treasure: their mother yeast.

For most of us around the globe, 2020 has been an unexpected and extremely challenging year. The world has never felt smaller. Here in Athens, we have been on a second strict lockdown for a month and a half now. My seven-year-old son is learning online, and I often feel like I’m juggling too many balls: coordinating and overseeing his schooling schedule, keeping the house as organized as I can considering that we spend almost all our time here, and trying to work at the same time. But the pandemic has had one positive effect, at least for me: I’ve found the time to experiment with recipes and spend quality time alone and focused (or at least semi-focused) in my kitchen. It has been keeping me sane, creative and positive. “My kitchen is my shrine and in it I shine!” is my motto for this weird year.

In the three months of confinement in Porto, I had to learn to live very differently. The days stretched on, embedded with a fear of going out. Those of us whose jobs permitted it learned to work from home, to spend all our free time confined within four walls, to look at the sky – and one another – always through a window. I stopped going to my favorite restaurants and asking about the dishes of the day, and became better acquainted with the concepts of takeaway and delivery. It was in the kitchen where I reinvented myself the most, where I found those little things that comforted my stomach and, at the risk of sounding cliché, my soul. It was in the kitchen that, for me and many other Portuguese, the phenomenon of making bread began.

Homemade bread was a byproduct of the Covid-19 lockdown worldwide, as witnessed by the lack of flour on supermarket shelves and proudly displayed loaves on Instagram feeds. I understood the trend – bread gave people a sense of purpose, warmed homes with comforting scents and filled the void left by closed-down everything. Plus, the act of kneading gave the one-two punch of stress relief and tactile pleasure. Yet, I felt no need to knead. For I live in France, the land where boulangeries churn out 30 million baguettes a day. A place where bread is such an integral part of life that no meal is considered complete without it. Whatever I made at home wouldn’t match the loaves of someone who has devoted their life to the craft of bread making.