Culture

Weekend Reading: An Apple Infographic, Hemingway’s Burger, the Joy of the Hotel Minibar, and More

What we’re reading, cooking, and clicking this week

• The Paris Review just resurfaced this 2011 essay about the allure of the hotel minibar, and I love everything about it: the history of the minibar's invention, the dramatic ways travelers try to beat the system, and the wonderful, tiny joy of pouring a tiny drink from a tiny bottle found in a tiny fridge. —Helen Rosner

• Every picture tells a story—but usually not the whole story. That's the case with Karl Bissinger's 1949 photograph "Salad Days" [pictured above], which depicts New York's then-reigning intellectual elite (a pontificating Tennessee Williams and a brooding Gore Vidal, among others) seated around an outdoor table at Manhattan's Café Nicolson. Years later, writer John T. Edge picked up a postcard of the image, and always wondered the identity of the unnamed African American waitress serving everyone. Edge's story "Debts of Pleasure," recently published in the Oxford American, completes the story of this iconic photo, and reminds us how, in Edge's words, "the restaurant industry remains one of the last bulwarks of a system in which nameless workers of color labor out of sight, and often out of mind." —Keith Pandolfi

• NPR's The Salt reports on a French study which reveals how your football team—if they're not doing so well—may be making you fat. Surprisingly, it's not about the calorie count of game-day snacks, but how winners, and losers, eat the day after. —Karen Shimizu

• Everyone knows Ernest Hemingway as a master of fiction writing, but did you know that he also constructed a killer burger? Working from Hemingway's newly published Cuba letters, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan has recreated his recipe, which includes "ground beef, onions, garlic, India relish, and capers, cooked so the edges were crispy but the center red and juicy," so you can try it out for yourself (she even found workarounds for discontinued spice blends) in the Paris review. _—_Melissa Hahn

• Our friends over at PopSci.com have rightly pointed out how very weird the names of different apple varieties can be with this infographic on apple varieties and what they're best used for. While Northern Spy to Maiden's Blush sound intriguing, my favorite might still be my namesake, the Baldwin. —Cory Baldwin

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