Appetizers

A Piece of Cake

The Gourmet Taste Kitchen guarantee is that every recipe we publish has been tested by either me or Amiel (and often both of us!), but sometimes we need help with the eating. Last weekend I tested a cake recipe from someone I’ve admired for years (clear your calendars and get ready to head to the fruit stand, this is the real deal) and had a dozen friends of Gourmet (FrOGs) and their kids (FrOGlets) over to co-taste. When one friend asked if she could take a slice home, I got ready to shove cake into a circular pint deli container. Another friend intervened to show us a better way: she put the slice on the lid, and then placed the container over it like a dome. Upside-down ingenuity! —N.S.

Sticker Shock

On a recent trip to my local ShopRite, I grinned as I tossed a package of Boursin Garlic and Fine Herbs Spreadable Gourmet Cheese into my cart. I’ve taken to setting out a squat cylinder of the stuff as a cheeky dinner party app, sometimes with a healthy drizzle of fancy olive oil and always with plenty of Triscuits alongside. Like onion dip made from a soup package, it feels like a true entertaining hack: midcentury kitsch that also tastes great; funny enough to get a pass for not being homemade; and, crucially, agreeably cheap. But as I wound my way through the aisles, I slowly started to do the math on that last part. $6.99 for a 5.3 ounce-disk. Which comes out to $1.32 per ounce. Which rocks up to…$21.10 per pound?? By the time I got past the checkout and to my car, I realized that I paid more for my beloved little Boursin than an equivalent amount of store-brand (but still DOP) Parmigiano-Reggiano. The French have tricked me again. —A.B.S.

Stake Frîtes

One of the most feared activist investors on Wall Street is coming for your French fries. The hedge fund Starboard Value bought up a sizable stake in frozen potato product manufacturer Lamb Weston back in March, which supplies fries to fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Chik-fil-A. Now, a month after disclosing its stake, the hedge fund—which also has activist positions in Papa John’s, pork behemoth Smithfield Foods, and the non-edible Calgon Carbon—is threatening a hostile takeover: it published a letter last week to Lamb Weston demanding an investor day to prove to the suits that it’s ready to turn over a new potato.

Why is one of the largest French fry purveyors vulnerable to hostile takeover? People are blaming a perfect storm of weakened demand and increased costs. (Though it should be said that Lamb Weston posted three percent revenue growth last quarter, hitting $1.57 billion in sales… which strikes me as doing pretty OK?) In any case, Starboard wants more, and believes the path to greater potato profitability, shockingly, is to lay people off and close some factories.

This is a hedge fund that Fortune magazine once described as “the investor CEOs fear most.” Starboard successfully took over Olive Garden parent Darden Restaurants in 2014, replacing its entire board despite owning less than 10 percent of the company. This is the level of intrigue and corporate shenaniganry most people don’t think about when chowing down on a fry. But Wall Street never sleeps in its pursuit of shareholder value, even in the starchy reaches of your McValue menu order. —C.G.W.