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Professional golfer Bryson DeChambeau partners with Google Health to track fitness metrics using Fitbit Air to bring data-driven athletic training to daily health routin…

10 Jul 2026 4:12pm GMT

Studying for a test, but not sure where to start? Study notebooks, a new feature in the Gemini app, can help you get organized and learn more efficiently.Think of study …

10 Jul 2026 4:00pm GMT

David Snead, director of the Secure Hosting Alliance and a long-time Internet policy leader, shares his perspective on the complexities that emerge when technological solutions like age verification are implemented in the digital infrastructure space. Dave's reflection highlights how the push for more secure, regulated environments can unintentionally create barriers for vulnerable or less tech-savvy […]

10 Jul 2026 2:34pm GMT

HTML and XML are markup languages based on plaintext files. This means that any given character could be part of a syntax form (a tag, a comment, a character reference, etc…) or it could be representing itself the way it reads in the file literally.

Whenever a character might be ambiguous, both languages require explicit indication of the intent of the character. In HTML this occurs via escaping, while XML allows escaping or wrapping the content in a marked section, specifically a CDATA section.

These terms confuse me at times, especially since CDATA and CDATA sections are distinct forms of the same content, and it's easy to conflate each term. This post is here to disambiguate the terms, their meanings, and why they exist.

The punchline comes at the end, but the story is hopefully worth the read.

Markup and mixed content

One of the first jobs of a parser for any plaintext-oriented format is to determine if the next input character represents real text or is part of a syntax form that carries special meaning. If it's a syntax form we would call it markup, but if the characters are part of real text meant for display or rendering or reading then we call it data.

Anything that is not syntax is data.

The interpretation of the next character depends on the region of the document in which it's parsed. While the rules for syntax forms are complicated¹, this post will focus on the data forms.

PCDATA - "parsed character data"

May form: tags, comments, sections, character references, literal text.

Characters in this region could be data or could form the start of a new markup element. It's "parsed" because it needs parsing before determining what it represents.

The HTML specification renames this to Data, which is simpler and a bit harder to search for. In XML, however, it's used in a document-type definition (DTD). When an element may contain content - text - its data model must include #PCDATA. Otherwise the only characters allowable within that element are other elements, comments, and whitespace. XML documents are required to be valid SGML documents, so its own specification adopts the terminology from SGML's.

Those who have worked with DTDs might note that elements in XML may contain #PCDATA while attributes contain CDATA instead. First of all, the # is there only to make it explicit that PCDATA is referring to the reserved keyword, rather than a <pcdata> element. Secondly, there's a good reason for this, which is that attributes can only contain text - they can't contain other elements of markup. If an attribute value could contain a <span> element, for example, then the attribute value would need to be #PCDATA instead, but this is prevented by design.

PCDATA actually contains more than just literal text and elements. In addition to comments, processing instructions, and other node-like syntax, one important feature of PCDATA is the character reference. These make it possible to represent characters that would conflate with syntax (such as '<' - <) or which might be cumbersome to enter on a keyboard (such as '§' - §). When parsing, each character in these sequences neither creates an element nor displays as the text itself; rather, the entire sequence is parsed and translates into the character it refers to.

HTML pre-specifies a fixed set of named character references, but any Unicode code point may be referenced by its decimal or hexadecimal numeric index. While XML also allows referencing code points by their index², it only pre-specifies the five named characters which correspond to its main markup introducers: <, >, &, ', and ". In XML, any additional named character references are created through the DTD by defining entities.

CDATA - "character data"

May form: [character references], literal text.

If a character isn't markup, then it's character data, which means that it's representing its literal self or it's part of a character reference. Once the parser has entered this region it will not create markup elements.

CDATA is the most confusable kind of character data; this is because there are many kinds of CDATA that share the same name:

• XML attributes may contain CDATA, where character references are decoded.
• XML CDATA sections only contain CDATA, but character references are not decoded.
• HTML kind of has the same CDATA sections, but only in foreign elements (inlined SVG and MathML elements).
• SGML elements may be declared to have a CDATA content model, in which case all content until the appropriate closing tag is to be parsed as character data, where character references are not decoded.

CDATA sections contain only literal text

Many people are familiar with CDATA sections, but it took me far longer to understand them than my intuition led on. They are the vestige of SGML "marked regions" which tell the parser to handle a specific range of bytes in a special way. The CDATA section is one of those, which tells the parser to completely turn off until it reaches ]]>.

It had other marked sections, however, which served different purposes.

The IGNORE and INCLUDE sections may seem strange, since SGML already has comments, and INCLUDE effectively does nothing, but the sections can be marked by replaced entities, making for conditional inclusion which can be overwritten via command-line arguments when invoking the SGML parser.

XML only retained CDATA sections from SGML, while HTML never included them. They are useful because they are so easy to parse. All characters inside of them are to be treated as literal text, up until the first occurrence of the terminating ]]>. Unlike elements, the marked sections do not nest.

There are no CDATA sections in HTML

The Internet is full of discussions about the use of CDATA sections in HTML, but there are no such things, mostly. HTML itself is an amalgam of pure HTML and embedded SVG and MathML. Content inside of those embedded SVG and MathML elements is parsed differently, and within this "foreign content" there are CDATA section nodes.

When something which look like a CDATA section appears in an HTML document, it's transformed into a "bogus" HTML comment and considered a snippet of malformed markup. To make things more confusing, the parsing rules differ inside an HTML document for these regions depending on whether they are found within HTML elements or foreign elements.

• When a real CDATA section appears within SVG and MathML, it parses as in XML or SGML - everything is literal text until the nearest ]]>.
• When a malformed CDATA look-alike appears in an HTML element, it gets special treatment - the parser only turns off until the nearest >. This means that these sections end even without a closing ]]>, and when they do, all of their contained content disappears from the page.

That small difference confuses naïve parsers and is a regular source of bugs.

SGML contains CDATA regions outside of marked CDATA sections

SGML made it possible to define more kinds of content than XML does for a given element. For example, an element in SGML can be declared to have a CDATA content model, in which case the element itself behaves like a CDATA section. All characters after the opening tag are treated as literal text until the parser finds the nearest appropriate end tag3. XML rejected this ability because it increases the complexity of the parser and requires that every document also contains a full DTD when parsing. For example, if an element were declared to have CDATA content, then a <at> b would represent that literal string; on the other hand, if it were declared like any other normal element, it would have three children: "a ", the <at> opening tag, and " b".

These kinds of elements do exist in HTML, though a few were modified when HTML5 was standardized in 2008. Inside of the elements, the parser essentially turns off, which makes them easy to parse and can help avoid the need to extensively escape content. These elements are, of course, <script> and <style>4.

Were it not for the CDATA declared content model, every angle bracket and ampersand would have to be escaped in included JavaScript and CSS. In XHTML this was required, because it had no CDATA declared content model (since it was XML)⁵.

All text in XML is CDATA

Herein lies the most-confusing aspect of discussing CDATA - XML contains CDATA sections as well as CDATA as normal text. After parsing there is no distinction between <tag> and <![CDATA[<tag>]]> in the parsed content.

Many XML generators (or serializers) provide two mechanisms for creating text content: one wraps text in a CDATA section and leaves the text as it came (apart from avoiding including the terminating sequence); the other escapes syntax characters instead. While there are times where it would be appropriate to intentionally pick one over the other, a good library design would at least offer a third mechanism (if not only providing this third mechanism) which simply produces CDATA, itself determining when to wrap and when to escape⁶, and whether or not to produce chunks of wrapped text interspersed with chunks of escaped text.

The real difference between these two kinds of CDATA is purely presentational in the source document, as the XML snippet below only contains one text node, not two. Creating CDATA does not imply creating a CDATA section!

RCDATA - "replaceable character data"

May form: character references, literal text.

There's one more confusing designation for characters in the HTML and XML input streams: RCDATA. RCDATA is almost identical to CDATA, except that in contexts where CDATA does not decode character references and entities, RCDATA will decode them into CDATA. This is confusing, because in the context of an XML attribute, the CDATA designation in a DTD automatically implies that character references are decoded, unlike the CDATA sections in content.

To this end there are no RCDATA attributes, since character references are always decoded inside attribute values. The RCDATA declaration is like the SGML CDATA content declaration: all characters following the opening tag for this element will be treated as text until the nearest matching closing tag (the difference being only that character references are recognized and decoded).

It's worth remembering that XML rejected the CDATA content type because of how it complicates parsing, and it also rejected the RCDATA type. On the other hand, RCDATA was incorporated into HTML, but statically so. HTML has no configurable DTD, but in its specification two elements contain RCDATA content:

• TITLE
• TEXTAREA

While it's easy to comprehend the way that <textarea> works, and that's probably because we are used to entering text into one on a web page, the behavior of <title> is consistently confused in all manner of programming languages, platforms, and HTML-parsing code.

The TITLE element only contains character data - it cannot contain other markup. The parsing is among the easiest sections of an HTML document to parse: once the <title> opening tag is detected, the parser can capture everything until the nearest </title> closing tag. Everything it captured is literal text, after decoding character references.

This complicates content management systems like WordPress which allow posts to have HTML in their post titles, because a page can show richly-formatted article titles which cannot be represented in the browser tab's label, and care must be taken to extract the plaintext content from that HTML before display in those contexts.

Coda

HTML and XML both speak about different kinds of characters in their source documents and content models, which traces from the complicated ways that SGML documents could be constructed. SGML's complexity almost always stems from the central idea that computers should do extra work to remove the hassle for humans to enter structured content in plaintext documents.

HTML, inspired by SGML, adopted some of the names and mechanisms for parsing those regions of text in distinct ways, but codified a single parsing standard independent of SGML. When XML was later developed, it was meant to form a simplified subset of SGML. This subset flipped the tradeoffs, leaning on humans performing extra work to remove the hassle for computers to parse structure in plaintext documents. For these text forms, this meant rejecting a few of the constructs while retaining others.

This is also another demonstration of how balanced tags are not enough to have well-behaved HTML with a naïve parser. A well-formed XML document may be parsed with a terse PERL script and regular expression, but HTML relies heavily on the context in which characters are found. Any HTML parser must know the special rules for each kind of element's content model.

In summary

• When it's unclear whether a character forms text or markup, that is PCDATA. Once parsed, there is no PCDATA anymore; it's either a form of DATA or MARKUP.
• All text nodes in HTML are "DATA."
• "CDATA" just means "character data" and means that after parsing, the content is text. It does not indicate whether character references are to be decoded or not; that comes from the region in the document, based on its context.
• There are no CDATA sections in HTML7.
• All text nodes in XML are CDATA, but only after being parsed.
• CDATA sections offer a convenient way to avoid escaping, but are indistinguishable from the equivalent escaped text.
• HTML contains two special RCDATA elements which only and always contain a single text node child: <title> and <textarea>. Everything until the closing tag will be parsed as text, even if it looks like markup.

This post is already long and still over-simplifies the picture. SGML is a rich and robust specification and includes NDATA and SDATA, HTML includes a latching PLAINTEXT parsing mode in which the rest of the entire document is parsed as literal character data, and there are other surprising goodies in how entities interact with the character mode.

Thanks for making it through to the end, or jumping directly here if you couldn't wait.

1. As an example, each part of a tag - its name, attribute names, attribute values - carries its own parsing rules. The same is true for comments, DOCTYPE declarations, and every other syntax form. ︎
2. XML only allows character references to the characters in its "character set," which is almost all Unicode code points, but excludes some control characters and U+FFFE and U+FFFF. ︎
3. Because SGML was designed to minimize the amount of necessary syntax, it's not necessary to have a full end tag for an open element, but that's a simple-enough model to understand the concept. ︎
4. The <style> element is straightforward, but the <script> element has its own complicated modification of the CDATA content model. It's mostly CDATA, but makes it possible to escape the closing tag so that very old pages won't break. HTML also applies this parsing mode for the <iframe>, <noembed>, <noframes>, and <noscript> elements (as well as for the deprecated <xmp> element), but these nominally should have no content inside of them (or shouldn't be used); applying the CDATA content model prevents creating other elements as their children. ︎
5. Frustratingly, in XHTML one must escape JavaScript and CSS in the page to avoid parsing failure, while in HTML one must not. This alone makes for a complicated stage in any reliable HTML/XHTML converter. ︎
6. Wrapping a language like HTML inside a CDATA section is a convenient way to represent the HTML visually and retain the ability to easily modify it, but entities present a problem. The serializer must either pre-translate the entity into its resolved character content, losing the macro-like behavior and its name; or leave the entity in place, thus nullifying it because it will not be recognized as an entity on parse. However, in such a situation, a serializer is free to terminate the CDATA section, append the entity, and open a new one to continue. ︎
7. As mentioned in the discussion about CDATA, embedded SVG and MathML elements can contain CDATA sections, but these are not technically HTML elements. ︎

10 Jul 2026 11:07am GMT

WordPress 7.0.1 is now available. As the first maintenance release of the 7.0 cycle, it's strictly a bug-fix release: every included ticket addresses either a regression introduced during 7.0 development or an issue intentionally deferred at the end of the cycle.

The release ships fixes for 17 core Trac tickets and 14 Gutenberg PRs. Because this is a maintenance release, sites with automatic background updates enabled will update to 7.0.1 automatically - everyone else should update as soon as possible. Here's what stands out for each audience.

Kudos to release lead Aaron Jorbin and his team for pushing this release over the finish line and getting it into hands of WordPress users quickly.

The most important fixes for end users

Registration page spam is shut down (#63085). The account registration page could be abused to send "Login details" spam emails from your site. This is arguably the most impactful fix in the release for anyone running a site with open registration - it protects both your users' inboxes and your domain's email reputation.

The 7.0 admin reskin gets its rough edges sanded off. WordPress 7.0's refreshed admin design shipped with a handful of visual glitches that this release cleans up:

• Form elements are now standardized in the mobile viewport (#64999)
• The image editor's scale and crop inputs no longer mismatch in size, and the info icon uses the new color scheme (#64937, #65428)
• The publish settings panel no longer crowds its primary action buttons together (#65286)
• The Media Library's loading spinner is properly aligned in the modal filter toolbar, and the search bar no longer jumps position after a search (#65275, #65296)
• A "black flash" that briefly appeared on wp-admin pages before the interface finished loading is gone (Gutenberg #78493)

Emoji behave correctly again. Two related fixes: the emoji detection script is once more printed in the admin (#65310), and certain characters are no longer incorrectly replaced by Twemoji images (#64318).

Accessibility improvements to the new revisions experience. The Visual History / Revisions feature introduced in 7.0 receives several accessibility fixes: focus now moves to the revisions slider when entering revisions mode, and changed blocks are marked with a CSS outline as a secondary, non-color indicator - important for users with low vision or color blindness (#65122, Gutenberg #77530, #78393, #79691).

The most important fixes for developers

wp_kses() no longer corrupts valid CSS (#65270). Since 7.0 RC4, wp_kses() could mangle legitimate background-image: url(…) declarations into a broken style=")" attribute. If your theme or plugin outputs inline background images through KSES-filtered content, 7.0.1 restores expected behavior - any workarounds you shipped can now be removed.

global-styles-inline-css can be dequeued again (#65336). Since 7.0, developers were unable to remove the global styles inline stylesheet. If your build pipeline or performance optimization strips this and re-serves it another way, that control is back.

PHP 8.5 compatibility fix in wp_get_attachment_image_src() (#64742). An incorrect array access triggered issues under PHP 8.5. If you're testing sites on newer PHP versions, this removes one blocker.

A removed Navigation function returns as a deprecated shim (Gutenberg #78484). block_core_navigation_submenu_render_submenu_icon() was removed in 7.0, breaking themes and plugins that called it directly. It's restored as a deprecated shim - but treat this as your migration notice, not a reprieve. Update any code that references it.

Editor state management fixes reduce false "unsaved changes" warnings. Two Gutenberg fixes matter here:

• controlled/mode block changes are now marked non-persistent (#79350), and
• related navigation entities are no longer dirtied during passive renders (#79000).

Together these should mean fewer spurious dirty states and a cleaner undo history - a quality-of-life improvement if you build with template parts and navigation blocks.

Block Visibility: "hide everywhere" keeps working after a block opts out of visibility support (#65389). If you register blocks that disable visibility support, previously hidden instances now stay hidden as expected.

How to update

You can update directly from Dashboard → Updates in your site's admin, run wp core update with WP-CLI, or download WordPress 7.0.1 from WordPress.org and install it manually. Sites that support automatic background updates for minor releases will begin updating on their own shortly.

The full ticket list is available in the release candidate announcement, Trac report 4, and the 7.0.x editor tasks board on GitHub.

What's next: WordPress 7.1

With 7.0.1 out the door, attention turns to the next major release: WordPress 7.1 is scheduled for August 19, 2026. To see what's planned for the release, check out the Roadmap to 7.1 on the Make WordPress Core blog.

10 Jul 2026 9:34am GMT

We're introducing new AI transparency features to help people understand the ads they see and give advertisers simple disclosure tools.

09 Jul 2026 4:00pm GMT

Effet Dunning-Kruger : découvrez pourquoi certaines personnes surestiment leurs compétences, tandis que les véritables experts doutent davantage de leurs connaissances.

L'article Effet Dunning-Kruger : pourquoi les moins compétents se croient souvent les meilleurs est apparu en premier sur 20SIX.fr.

09 Jul 2026 2:23pm GMT

Pourquoi certains grands-parents sont-ils présents auprès de leurs petits-enfants et d'autres choisissent de prendre leurs distances ?

L'article Grands-parents démissionnaires : pourquoi certains disparaissent de la vie familiale tandis que d'autres sont omniprésents est apparu en premier sur 20SIX.fr.

01 Jul 2026 1:35pm GMT

Générez des revenus sans dépendre d'un seul salaire grâce à une stratégie de dividendes durable et des choix d'investissement avisés pour avancer sereinement !

L'article Investir pour générer des revenus passifs : comment les dividendes peuvent financer votre indépendance financière est apparu en premier sur 20SIX.fr.

30 Jun 2026 5:58pm GMT

Acheter des originaux sur le site LesDessinateurs.com Vous pouvez me suivre sur Instagram, Bluesky ou Facebook.

02 Jan 2024 10:41am GMT

Dans le journal L'Equipe du dimanche et du lundi, vous pouviez trouver un de mes dessins en dernière page. Voici un petit échantillon des dessins réalisés en 2023 pour le quotidien sportif. Acheter des originaux sur le site LesDessinateurs.com Vous pouvez me suivre sur Instagram, Bluesky ou Facebook. Acheter des originaux sur le site LesDessinateurs.com Vous …

Continuer la lecture de « Une année de sport »

01 Jan 2024 9:11am GMT

Acheter des originaux sur le site LesDessinateurs.com Vous pouvez me suivre sur Instagram, Bluesky ou Facebook.

30 Dec 2023 1:06pm GMT

Much as I love pasta, I'm not sure it loves me. Last year my carb-heavy comfort food diet led to some weight gain so I looked into low carb pasta as an alternative. There's a lot out there and I'm still trying different brands and styles, but I thought now would be a good time to share what I've learned so far.

Pasta with Butternut Squash and Brussels Sprouts

My introduction to legume and bean-based pasta was thanks to Barilla. I was lucky because I got to attend a webinar with Barilla's incredible chef, Lorenzo Boni. I tried his recipe for pasta with butternut squash and Brussels sprouts which I definitely recommend and have now made several times. If you've seen his wildly popular (150k+ followers!) Instagram feed you know he's a master at making all kinds of pasta dishes and that he often eats plant-based meals. I followed up with him to get some tips on cooking with pasta made from beans and legumes.

Pasta made with beans and legumes is higher in protein and so the recommended 2-ounce portion is surprisingly filling. But the texture isn't always the same as traditional semolina or durum wheat pasta. Chef Boni told me, "The nature of legume pasta makes it soak up more moisture than traditional semolina pasta, so you always want to reserve a bit of cooking water to adjust if needed." But when it comes to cooking, he says that with Barilla legume pasta you cook it the same way as semolina pasta. "Boil in salted water for the duration noted on the box and you'll have perfectly al dente pasta." They are all gluten-free.

Chickpea pasta

When I asked Chef Boni about pairing chickpea pastas with sauce he said, "Generally speaking, I prefer olive oil based sauces rich with vegetables, aromatic herbs and spices. Seafood also pairs well with chickpea options. If used with creamy or tomato-based sauces, keep in mind to always have some pasta water handy to adjust the dish in case it gets too dry." He added, "One of my favorite ways to prepare a legume pasta dish would be a simple chickpea rotini with shrimp, diced zucchini and fresh basil. The sauce is light enough to highlight the flavor of the pasta itself, while the natural sweetness helps keep the overall flavor profile more appealing to everyone." I like the Barilla brand because the only ingredient is chickpeas. Banza makes a popular line of chickpea pasta as well although they include pea starch, tapioca and xanthan gum.

Edamame pasta

I tried two different brands of edamame pasta, Seapoint Farms and Explore Cuisine. The Seapoint pasta has a rougher texture than the Explore. With the Seapoint I found the best pairings were earthy chunky toppings like toasted walnuts and sautéed mushrooms. The Explore Cuisine edamame & spirulina pasta is smoother and more delicate, and worked well with an Asian style peanut sauce. I was happy with the Seapoint brand, but would definitely choose the Explore brand instead if it's available.

Red lentil pasta

Red lentil pasta is most similar to semolina pasta. Barilla makes red lentil pasta in a variety of shapes. But for spaghetti, Chef Boni says, "Barilla red lentil spaghetti is pretty flexible and works well with pretty much everything. I love red lentil spaghetti with light olive oil based sauces with aromatic herbs and some small diced vegetables. It also works well with a lean meat protein." I have to admit, I have yet to try red lentil pasta, but I'm excited to try it after hearing how similar it is to semolina pasta. It is made only with red lentil flour, that's it. It's available in spaghetti, penne and rotini.

Penne for Your Thoughts

Do you remember seeing photos from Italian supermarkets where the shelves with pasta were barren except for penne? I too seem to end up with boxes of penne or rotini and not a clue what to do with them so I asked Chef Boni his thoughts on the subject. He told me, "Shortcuts such as rotini and penne pair very well with all kind of ragouts as well as tomato based and chunky vegetarian sauces. One of my favorite ways to prepare a legume pasta dish would be a simple chickpea rotini with shrimp, diced zucchini and fresh basil. The sauce is light enough to highlight the flavor of the pasta itself, while the natural sweetness helps keep the overall flavor profile more appealing to everyone." Thanks chef! When zucchini is in season I know what I will try!

15 Feb 2022 6:46pm GMT

Julia is a new film based on Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz and inspired by My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme and The French Chef in America: Julia Child's Second Act by Alex Prud'homme. Julia Child died in 2004, and yet our appetite for all things Julia hasn't waned.

I grew up watching Julia Child on TV and learning to cook the French classics from her books, And while I never trained to be a chef, like Child I also transitioned into a career focused on food, a subject I have always found endlessly fascinating. I enjoyed the new film very much and while it didn't break much new ground, it did add a layer of perspective that can only come with time. In particular, how Julia Child became a ubiquitous pop culture figure is addressed in a fresh way.

I reached out to the filmmakers,Julie Cohen and Betsy West to find out more about what inspired them and why Julia Child still holds our attention.

Julia Child died over 15 years ago and has been off TV for decades. Why do you believe we continue to be so fascinated by her?

In some ways Julia is the Godmother of modern American cooking - and eating. Her spirit looms over cooking segments on the morning shows, The Food Network, and all those overhead Instagram shots the current generation loves to take of restaurant meals. Beyond that, though, Julia's bigger than life personality and unstoppable joie de vivre are infectious. People couldn't get enough of her while she was living, and they still can't now.

There have been so many Julia Child films and documentaries, what inspired this one?

Well there'd been some great programs about Julia but this is the first feature length theatrical doc. Like everyone else, we adored Julie & Julia, but a documentary gives you a special opportunity to tell a person's story in their own words and with the authentic images. This is particularly true of Julia, who was truly one of a kind.

The impact of Julia Child how she was a groundbreaker really comes across in the film, are we understanding her in a different light as time passes?

People understand that Julia was a talented television entertainer, but outside the professional food world, there's been an under-recognition of just how much she changed the 20th century food landscape. As Jose Andres points out in the film, almost every serious food professional has a sauce-splashed copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" on their shelves. We also felt Julia's role in opening up new possibilities for women on television deserved more exploration. In the early 1960's the idea of a woman on TV who was neither a housewife nor a sex bomb but a mature, tall, confident expert was downright radical. She paved the way for many women who followed.

The food shots add an extra element to the film and entice viewers in a very visceral way, how did those interstitials come to be part of the film?

We knew from the start that we wanted to make food a major part of this story, not an afterthought. We worked with cook and food stylist Susan Spungen to determine which authentic Julia recipes could be integrated with which story beats to become part of the film's aesthetic and its plot. For instance the sole meunière is a key part of the story because it sparked her obsession with French food, and the pear and almond tart provides an enticing metaphor for the sensual side of Julia and Paul's early married years.

Note: Susan Spungen was also the food stylist for Julie & Julia

Julia is in theaters now.

23 Nov 2021 11:30pm GMT

I met Rick Rodgers early in my career as a recipe developer and food writer when we were both contributors to the Epicurious blog. Not only is he a lot of fun to hang out with, but he has also been incredibly helpful to me and is usually the first person I call when I'm floundering with a project, client, or cooking quandary. His interpersonal skills, business experience, and cooking acumen explain why he's been recognized as one of the top cooking instructors in America. Literally.

You built a career as a cooking instructor and cookbook author. How many cookbooks have you written?

I was asked recently to make an official count, and It looks like an even hundred. Many of those were collaborations with chefs, restaurants, celebrities, bakeries, and business entities, such as Tommy Bahama, Williams-Sonoma, and Nordstrom. I made it known that I was available for collaboration work, and my phone literally rang off the hook for quite a few years with editors and agents looking for help with novice writers or those that wanted a branded book.

Which cookbook(s) are you most proud of?

There are three books that I get fan mail for almost every day: Kaffeehaus (where I explore the desserts of my Austrian heritage), Thanksgiving 101 (a deep dive into America's most food-centric holiday and how to pull it off), and Ready and Waiting (which was one of the first books to take a "gourmet" approach to the slow cooker). These books have been in print for 20 years or more, which is a beautiful testament to their usefulness to home cooks.

How did you get started as a cooking instructor and what are some highlights of your teaching career?

I was a theater major at San Francisco State College (now University), so getting in front of a crowd held no terrors for me. When more brick-and-mortar cooking schools opened in the eighties, I was ready for prime time. During that period, there were at least twelve cooking schools in the Bay Area, so I made quarterly trips here a year from the east coast, where I had moved. My Thanksgiving classes were so popular that I taught every day from November 1 to Thanksgiving, with a couple of days off for laundry and travel. The absolute pinnacle of my teaching career was being named Outstanding Culinary Instructor of The Year by Bon Appétit Magazine's Food and Entertaining Awards, an honor that I share with only a handful of other recipients, including Rick Bayless and Bobby Flay.

Flódni

How have cooking classes changed since you started?

Because there are so many classes available, I can teach at any level of experience. At the cooking schools, we tended to walk a fine line between too difficult and too easy. The exposure to different cuisines and skill levels on TV also has seriously raised the bar. Unfortunately, students want to walk before they can run. They want to learn how to make croissants when I doubt that they can bake a pound cake correctly. It is best to build on your skills instead of going right to the top. That being said, in my online classes, I am concentrating on the more challenging recipes because that is what the market demands of me.

Tell me about your baking school, coffeeandcake.org

As much as I loved my cookbooks and in-person classes, I knew there was a more modern way to reach people who wanted to cook with me, especially since so many cooking schools had closed. I retired the day I got my first Social Security check. But…as I was warned by my friends who knew me better than I did…I was bored, and wanted a new project. I heard about online classes through other teachers who were having success. I found an online course specifically for cooking classes (Cooking Class Business School at HiddenRhythm.com), got the nuts and bolts down, and I finally entered the 21st century!

How do you decide which recipes to teach?

I felt there were plenty of other places to learn how to make chocolate chip cookies and banana bread-just take a look on YouTube alone. I had a specialty of Austro-Hungarian baking thanks to my Kaffeehaus book, so I decided to niche into that category. I have branched out to a few other locations, but my goal is to expose students to something new and out of the ordinary. I also survey my students on what they would like me to teach, and those answers are amazing. People are truly interested in the more difficult desserts. Perhaps it is because so many people discovered baking as a hobby during the pandemic?

For students who have your cookbooks, what are the advantages of taking an online class?

There is no substitute for seeing a cook in action. Plus you get to answer questions during class. In a recent class, I made six-layer Dobos Torte in two hours' real-time to prove that you can do it without giving up a week of your life. And we don't have to travel to each other to be "together." My classes are videotaped so you can watch them at your convenience.

What are some highlights of your upcoming schedule of classes?

Honey cake

In October, I am teaching virtually all Hungarian desserts, things that will be new to most people. I am making one of my absolute favorites, Flódni, which is a Jewish bar cookie (almost a cake) with layers of apple, poppy seeds, and walnuts between thin sheets of wine-flavored cookie dough. San Franciscans in particular will be happy to see a master class that I am teaching with the delightful Michelle Polzine, owner of the late and lamented 20th Century Cafe and author of Baking at the 20th Century Cafe. We will be making her (in)famous 12-layer honey cake on two coasts, with me doing the heavy lifting in New Jersey and Michelle guiding me from the west coast. That is going to be fun! In November and December, I am switching over to holiday baking and a few savory recipes for Thanksgiving, including my fail-proof turkey and gravy, which I have made over 300 times in classes over 30 years' worth of teaching. It ought to be perfect by now

Head to Coffee and Cake to sign up for classes or learn more.

05 Oct 2021 3:56pm GMT

03 Dec 2014 8:12pm GMT

16 Jul 2014 6:08pm GMT

Après presque un mois et demi d'absence, deux bouclages d'albums et plein de projets, je trouve enfin le
temps de poster quelque chose sur ce blog ! Ces jours-ci, je vais avoir pas mal de choses à vous montrer !
On commence tranquille avec un petit dessin aux couleurs estivales.

14 Jul 2014 4:25pm GMT