The Perfect Pantry

Butter (Recipe: green grapefruit curd)

Ten things I know about butter (you'll be glad to know them, too):

Pomegranate molasses (Recipe: pomegranate snow swirls)

My Cousin Martin travels the world to search out all sorts of foods and kitchen tools for The Perfect Pantry.

Well, maybe that's not his only reason for traveling, but he does bring me wonderful things. Wooden spoons from everywhere, and ravioli cutters and gnocchi paddles. Iranian saffron. Tahitian vanilla beans and Mexican vanilla extract. Cookbooks from Costa Rica and Mongolia. Silicone baking sheets from France, years before Silpats were common here.

I've grown accustomed to these treats from far-off lands. So, when Cousin Martin unveiled his latest gift, I looked at the bottle and said oh, ho hum, more Tahitian vanilla.

But no, this was better. Much better.

The little bottle that once held precious vanilla extract from Tahiti now contained something infinitely more interesting: homemade pomegranate molasses, from his own kitchen.

Marshmallow Fluff (Recipe: Rhode Island hot chocolate, with faux fluff)

Despite having close to 250 items in The Perfect Pantry, I can think of dozens of ingredients that might be in your pantry but are not in mine.

Almond extract. Anchovies. Bacon. Wild rice. Fennel pollen. Marshmallow Fluff®.

I know... you think Fluff is not an ingredient. But here in New England, it is.

Without Fluff, there would be no Fluffernutters or Whoopie Pies, two of our regional claims to fame.

Yogurt (Recipe: lemon waffles)

Every story about the origin of yogurt involves a nomad and a camel.

Was it Mongol villagers, trying to poison Genghis Khan, who first left milk to sour inside a drinking gourd?

Or was it a Turkish traveler carrying milk inside a goatskin pouch on camel-back in the desert, where the heat and agitation caused the milk to thicken?

We may never know the truth, but we know a lot about yogurt.

Gifts for food lovers: From travels near and far (Recipe: Suspiro de Limena)

Part Three of an eight-part series.

A strip of edible seeds of the Andes, from a market in Peru.

When I was growing up, my parents loved to take me to the theater.

Not the movie theater.

Broadway shows, and off-Broadway, and incredibly-far-off-Broadway, in unfamiliar neighborhoods and alternative spaces like the room behind the room behind a restaurant, or an empty warehouse with some folding chairs, or an elementary school auditorium or church basement. Going to the theater was an adventure.

In the years before there were half-price ticket booths, there were twofers. Two, for the price of one.

Scoring those twofer tickets required cunning and good luck, and when my parents found a twofer, we looked on it as a gift from the theater gods.

For the food lover in your life, a gift from your travels -- near or far or armchair -- can be a twofer, too.

Vanilla bean (Recipe: pears poached in vanilla)

When I was an easily-bored teenager (is there any other kind?), my friends and I called everything that bored us vanilla.

"Oh, that's soooo vanilla" described anything from physics homework to piano lessons, to a hair style or lipstick color or having to babysit on a Saturday night.

And what did we call people who bored us, the math teacher with the monotone voice, the boy who had a reputation as a bad kisser?

Vanilla beans.

We were so unkind. Vanilla deserved better.

Agave nectar (Recipe: grilled peaches with balsamic and granola)

A year ago, when I first started using agave nectar, I'd mention it in my cooking classes and be met with the dreaded uuhhh.

(Actually I can't even spell the sound a kitchen full of puzzled cooks makes. Something more gutteral, more visceral, more eeewww. The sound you hear when people watch a horror movie and a creature crawls out of a lagoon. Often accompanied by a no-please-no-not-me waving of the hands.)

Ah-GAAAHHHH-vay?

What is thaaaaaaat?

You'd think I'd proposed cooking with innards, or Pepto Bismol, or eye of newt.

Maybe I should have told my students that tequila comes from the same plant.

Sweetened condensed milk (Recipe: microwave dulce de leche)

Native Americans, when introducing themselves to each other, identify by their clan name.

In that tradition, I am Salt Craver, married to Sweet Tooth.

Put a bag of potato chips in front of me, and you can kiss that bag goodbye. Except for chocolate, though, most things sweet -- a box of candy, sugar-coated cereal, leftover cake -- could sit untouched for years.

So, not being a natural-born sweets person, and growing up in a house where Weight Watchers was the dominant culinary influence, I didn't add sweetened condensed milk to my pantry until I met my husband. Ted defines Sweet Tooth; he'll leave all of the salty chips to me, but he goes for anything with sugar.

Assorted frozen fruit (Recipe: strawberry fruit whiz)

Updated from the archives, with new photo and links, and a favorite summer recipe.

In the beginning (1973), Carl Sontheimer, an engineer who loved to cook, created the Cuisinart food processor.

Not long after that -- well, okay, fifteen years later -- I created frozen fruit whiz.

Mexican chocolate (Recipe: pots de creme)

Thank you, Moctezuma II.

You may have lost the entire Aztec empire to Spain back in the early 16th Century, but you did tell Cortés (the guy who got your empire) about Mexican chocolate, and he brought it home to the king, who shared it with the French, who carried it around Europe, and pretty soon chocolate was everywhere.