New York Times Crossword Answers: Belgian Expressionist James - The New York Times

Aimee Lucido whets our craving for words and flavors to savor.

FRIDAY PUZZLE — This puzzle is a crunchy offering from Aimee Lucido, and by that I mean it is full of words that are rewarding to chew on and pronounce aloud, a practice some of us indulge in as we ponder the possible meanings of a clue. Words with crisp sounds or a crackling-mouth feel add an extra dimension to solving.

With today's entry, Ms. Lucido, a veteran constructor who is also an author, brings her total number of New York Times puzzles, including collaborations, to a baker's dozen.

Tricky Clues

Two early clues — 1A, "Offers a fist, in a way," and 5A, "Speak like Clint Eastwood" — are entries that play with slippery sounds; both of them took me a while to fill in. The first answer is DAPS and the second is RASP. Four letters seemed inadequate, especially for describing Mr. Eastwood's voice, but RASP summed it up perfectly, at least the voice we hear these days. But this picnic scene, from 1968, which I had not seen before — I don't think I'd ever even imagined his being young — is perhaps more fun than something fresher.

52D. "Toll unit, at times" could be a misdirection that refers to a bell. Or an E-ZPass. Or a token from the distant past. But it's none of the above. The word is AXLE, the kind found on vehicles, and their number is often the basis for calculating toll amounts. If you have only two axles, you won't have to pay the freight extracted from those big rigs with many axles.

11D. "Field that involves blood, sweat and tears?" This is a crackerjack clue that will lead your imagination astray, far from this puzzle. In fact, it's terribly straightforward: FORENSICS. You can't get much more literal than that, but the journey to the correct answer was an enlightening one.

Another toughie was 61A, "It's bald on its face." That's easy. A "lie," which leaves five empty white squares. It turns out it's not just any lie, but a NAKED LIE, not a combination that came readily to mind.

Fave clue: 10D. "Thick noodle," because it's not about someone who can't get something through their head or is suffering brain fog. It really is a thick noodle: UDON. Picture it bathing in a fragrant, shimmering dashi broth, with all the fanciful trimmings, a memory of the perfect lunch in Tokyo when I was working there.

After noodling around, Ms. Lucido presents more Asian food in this themeless puzzle. At 20A is "Deep-fried Japanese pork cutlet," which some of you know and love as TONKATSU. This time, she has dredged up a debut with the chicken-fried pork, one of five words in this puzzle that have never appeared before. I won't spoil them for you by giving you the answers for the other four, but I'll share their locations and clues: 17A, "Mental goof"; 36A, "Pool class"; 55A, "It's hardly Châteauneuf-du-Pape"; and 18D, "Small-scale study, for short."

Ms. Lucido is something of a master at introducing new words and has made a habit of it. She is, after all, the constructor who brought us the debut phrase BACON NUMBER a mere 11 years ago. The clue was, "Degrees of separation in a Hollywood parlor game." It's not a term you'd want to overuse, and it may already be dated, but you can still play it and its brilliance is unmarred.

And there is the inimitable IGNORATI, which made its debut in a collaboration with Ella Dershowitz and has not been seen since. It was clued as "The uninformed masses, colloquially."

Constructor Notes

One of the many things I love about making crosswords is how a single puzzle becomes a fingerprint of who you are while you are making it. The words you choose to put into a grid say something about your interests, your obsessions, your values. For example, I think this puzzle makes it pretty clear that I'm interested in food, since TONKATSU and BOXED WINE are both given prime real estate in the grid. Similarly, this puzzle highlights my juvenile sense of humor, since both BRAIN FART and NAKED LIE are some of the first and last words you see while solving. And, as you may know if you solve a lot of my puzzles, I absolutely love books. BODICE RIPPERS, yes, but also, mainly, children's books. I always try to sneak references to children's books into my clues (see 45-down) and this is, in large part, because children's books are my profession.

The juxtaposition of these many facets of a constructor's personality is always fascinating to me as a constructor, but it's especially intriguing to me as a writer. I've always enjoyed playing with the definition of poetry in my books, and the unique poetry of a crossword puzzle is something I've been trying to write about for years.

Today, I'm thrilled to share the news that my third book, "Words Apart," will be coming out in the winter of 2024. This book combines poetry, comics, word definitions and, yes, fully solvable crossword puzzles. It's the story of two sisters, Olive and Mattie, and their sometimes tumultuous relationship, as they realize that life doesn't always have a right answer, spelled out perfectly inside neat black-and-white boxes.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle as much as I enjoyed making i, and I look forward to sharing "Words Apart" with you!

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