Short essays on ingredients, ritual, and the slow work of keeping a small studio alive in a noisy world.
Every July, Antonio takes the truck out to a four-acre farm outside New Hope and comes back with twelve flat boxes of bound stems. Here's why we keep doing it the slow way, and what we've learned about the difference between Provence varietals and the hardier Munsteads that thrive in Bucks County.
Read the essay →The case for an hour, once a week, of doing nothing — and a few small things we keep on hand to make the hour feel like a ritual rather than a chore. Includes Mira's exact recipe for what she calls a "long bath water," which is mostly salt and orange peel.
Read the essay →A note on the math behind our batch limit, and why every time we've been tempted to scale past it the work has suffered. Includes a chart that probably doesn't need to be a chart but which Antonio insisted on drawing by hand.
Read the essay →An afternoon with the family who has supplied our beeswax since 2017, and a primer on the difference between yellow and white wax — and why we have never used the white kind.
Read the essay →Six books we've been passing around the studio this season, from a memoir by a perfumer in Grasse to a short novel about a Brooklyn bakery. None of it is about apothecary work — and all of it has, somehow, shaped how we work.
Read the essay →A short, opinionated guide to the independent places we send visitors when they come to the studio — a bookbinder, a record store, two coffee bars, and the best loaf of rye bread in the state of New Jersey.
Read the essay →A short email on the first Tuesday of each month — what we're blending, who's stopping by the studio, occasionally a recipe. No promotions, no algorithms, no more than once a month. To subscribe, send us a note at privacy@tucker2015.com.
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