“Stew’s so comforting on a rainy day.” *
And so are flowers. *Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948) © 2013 C. Bertelsen
Categories: Agriculture, Photography, Poetry • Tags: Flowers, Photography, Rain
Category Archives: Agriculture
Singkong, Manioc, Mandioca, Mandió, Tapioca, Yuca: Singing the Praises of Manihot esculenta (Cassava)
“Chipa, chipa!” yelled the little Paraguyan girl – all of maybe 8 years old, thrusting a large flat basket draped with a smudged white cloth against the open window of the bus. I smelled the warm cassava bread even before she flicked off the cloth with a flourish, much as a magician reveals the white rabbit cowering under his top hat. I pointed to the bread closest to me and she held out her hand. Payment first, then food. I […]
Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Cassava, Cooking, Food writing, Latin America, Local foods, Paraguay, Photography • Tags: Brown streak disease, Cassava, Chipa, Latin American cooking, Manioc, Manioc flour, Paraguay, Photography
A Pictorial Paean to Farming and Food
© 2013 C. Bertelsen. No copying of photographs without my permission.
Categories: Agriculture, Cattle, Local foods, Photography, Sheep • Tags: Artist statement, Cattle, Farming, Food, Injera, Photography, Sheep
Mushroom: A Global History – New book coming out
I am thrilled to announce that my new book about the culinary history of mushrooms is due out in September 2013. A sneak preview: Known as the meat of the vegetable world, mushrooms have their ardent supporters as well as their fierce detractors. Hobbits go crazy over them, while Diderot thought they should be “sent back to the dung heap where they are born.” In Mushroom, Cynthia D. Bertelsen examines the colorful history of these divisive edible fungi. As she reveals, […]
Categories: Agriculture, Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, France, Local foods, Mushrooms, Photography, Reference • Tags: Mushrooms, Reaktion Books
Look Up, Look Down: Escaping to the Real World
When spring peeks stealthily through the trees, the smell of the air transports me – as it were – to my grandmother’s vanity table. There I used to sniff her talcum powder, inhaling an aroma reminiscent of flowers, patting my face with the fluffy white powder puff, until I looked like a singer in a Japanese Noh drama. Memories like this pour forth when I walk through a lush garden not far from a busy street on a campus teeming […]
Categories: Gardens, Photography • Tags: Gardens, Meditations, Photography
Preserving Food Preserves Life, or, Mutton in the Pot
At first blush, it appears that people slaughtered sheep, being smaller than cattle or pigs, to cook and eat them in their entirety for feasts, or perhaps in times of famine. A closer look at the literature reveals that people also borrowed many of the methods used for preserving pork to mutton, including something called Macon, which took the place of bacon in Britain during the Second World War.* Many other ways for preserving mutton stem from the British Isles. […]
Categories: England, English Cooking, Food writing, Lamb, Mutton, Photography, Sheep • Tags: C. Anne Wilson, Darina Allen, David Hackett Fischer, Faroe Islands, Food Preservation, Hannah Glasse, Jennifer Stead, Lamb, Mutton, Peter Brears, Potted meat, Professor Gamgee
The Zen of Sheep: More than Just a Photo Shoot
It seemed simple enough. A quick visit to a small sheep operation, twenty or so sheep on a spread of five muddy acres, owned by a retired agronomy professor, some fast snaps of the shutter and off I’d be. But that’s not exactly how it happened. When I first walked up to the owner, the sheep came running. “They’re hungry,” he said. “I waited until you got here to feed them, otherwise all you’d get would be butts and backsides.” […]
Categories: Agriculture, Lamb, Local foods, Photography, Sheep, Virginia • Tags: Agriculture, Farming, Farms, Lamb, Local foods, Photography, Sheep
With Roots in Africa: Okra, a Veritable World Traveler
Although my father used to fry fresh okra, rolling it first in beaten egg and then coating it with crushed saltine crackers, he never grew it in the vast backyard gardens of my childhood. So, quite by accident, I learned about the okra plant in an entirely different place. Rigoberto and his cousin dug the garden patch, stirring up the Honduran earth with a rusted shovel and a hoe missing a screw, which made a loud squeak each time it […]
Categories: Africa, African Cooking, American Cooking, Cooking, Ethiopia, Honduras, Local foods, Okra, Photography • Tags: Africa, Brunswick Stew, Charleston Receipts, Cornbread Nation, Ethiopia, Gumbo, Honduras, Karen hess, Margaret Holmes, Okra
The Story Behind a Kitchen-Counter Sweet-Potato Patch
There’s something about sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) that I cannot seem to shake. Maybe there’s some sort of cellular memory thing going on, like perhaps my ancestors sat around somewhere, gratefully chewing on roasted sweet potatoes, surviving a dry spell in food production. A good reason to foster a sweet potato patch. We Americans now harvest far fewer sweet potatoes than 50 years ago – 190,000 acres in 1960 as opposed to 116,000 in 2010 according to statistics from the […]
Categories: Africa, Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, Gardens, Local foods, Photography, Southern Food, Sweet Potatoes • Tags: Elinor Fettiplace, George Washington Carver, Hilary Spurling, John Gerard, John Parkinson, Sweet potato, Thomas Dawson
* The Legacy of a Typo: A Meditation on Tomato Gravy
Stirring the flour into bacon drippings, creating a blond roux, and sautéing finely chopped yellow onions in the mixture turned out to be quite an adventure. No, I didn’t burn myself – for once – on the lethal combination of hot fat and flour. No, in the seemingly simple and slow act of making tomato gravy, to serve over biscuits or fried chicken, I started thinking about the role of gravy in Southern cooking, and by extension, in American cooking […]
Categories: Cookbooks, England, Gardens, Local foods, Photography, Southern Food, Tomatoes • Tags: Colin Spencer, Cuisine of the Southern United States, Kate Burridge, Mary Randolph, Southern cooking, The Virginia House-wife, Thomas Jefferson, Tomatoes
* Biscuits and Buttermilk: A New Year and New Directions
After a long fallow period, spent baking (and eating) many Christmas cookies, I have decided to bloom/cook where I am planted, so to speak. Lately I’ve become more intrigued by the cuisine that surrounds me, here in the American South. After all, I’ve basically been a Southerner for over 30 years. Although many cookbook authors write about the South, I feel that something’s missing in most discussions, chiefly an in-depth examination of the English and French impact on the cuisine. […]
Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, Gardens, Photography, Pork, Southern Food • Tags: Cuisine of the Southern United States, Culinary History, Glen Alton, Roanoke Times, Southern cooking, Southern Food, Virginia
With Time and Frost, Things Fall Apart
Fall can be a bittersweet time, a time to look forward to cool-crisp nights, hearty meat-and root-vegetable stews, and the smell of burning leaves, that is, you’re allowed to burn them where you live. On the other hand, the coming of fall and frost signifies the end of the growing season, and the beginning of fallow time. The life force fades from the trees as their iridescent leaves drop. But it’s in the garden where the change in temperature registers […]
Categories: Agriculture, Chile Peppers, Gardens, Herbs, Photography, Tomatoes • Tags: Gardens, Jalapeños, Lavender, Photography, Tomatoes
The Meat of the Matter: A Question of Sacred Reverence
Meat eating presents modern society with a bit of a dilemma. How to raise and slaughter large numbers of animals under humane conditions, while keeping the price down and within wallet reach of most consumers? That’s the major issue, tinged with other, often moralistic, questions. First, right up front, I am not a vegetarian, and never will be, despite having fumbled with the idea a few times. My first experience with vegetarianism came about chiefly out of curiosity. The central […]
Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Beef, Cattle, Cooking, Festivals, Hunger, Lent, Local foods, Photography • Tags: Beef, Bruce Aidells, Farming, Meat, Michael Symon, Photography, Vegetarianism
The Zen of Artichokes
I love autumn. If it’s not the leaves and all the color, then I find poignancy in the drying and dying weeds littering the ground. They embody survival to me. One plant I particularly love is a thistle-like plant, filled with tiny seeds attached to billowy white parachutes. The least puff of wind forces the seeds out of their pods and they float in the wind, just like paratroopers, over the landscape, falling where they may, taking root at times […]
Categories: Agriculture, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Local foods, Photography • Tags: Artichokes, California, France, Italy, Meditations, Normandy, Photography, Thistles, Writing, Zen
Another Holy Trinity of the Kitchen: The Magic of Milk, Eggs, and White Flour
Every time I pour crêpe batter into my 8-inch Teflon*-lined crêpe pan, I see deep scratches, the ones that Habiba made with the fork she used while cooking a three-egg cheese-and-herb omelet one wintry Moroccan morning. The scratches don’t affect the pan’s performance, just as wounds and scars don’t fundamentally change who we are and how we function in the world. Pots and pans, like sugar-burned hands and fingers cut by dull knives, bear pale scars. These blemishes remind me […]
Categories: Agriculture, Cattle, Cooking, Eggs, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Milk, Morocco, Photography, Techniques • Tags: Crêpes, Eggs, Flour, France, French Cooking, Meditations, Milk, Photography
Two Moons and a Ksar
It’s funny how sights, sounds, and smells trigger memories, isn’t it? Tastes, too. When I photographed a blue moon the other night, a very specific image bubbled up for me.* Perhaps, in a way, you could deem it a Proustian madeleine moment. Although I didn’t really eat anything. Standing there, trying to keep the camera still as the small telephoto lens pulsated in rhythm with each of my heartbeats, I remembered a night in Morocco, in El Kalaa des M’Gouna, […]
Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Arab cooking, Cooking, Food writing, Moroccan Cooking, Morocco, Photography • Tags: Morocco
Waiting for Pears
I bought four very green, very hard pears four days ago. Waiting for them to ripen made me think about how quickly everything happens in our lives today. There’s something soothing about watching the ripening process, something profound actually, because no matter how much I might have wanted to make a pear cake, I just couldn’t do it until the moment was right. Every day I examined the pears, noting changes in their color, their texture, and their aroma. And […]
Categories: Agriculture, Food Science, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Pears, Photography • Tags: Canning, Gardens, Pear Cake, Pears
The Curse of Corn: Poverty and Politics and Pellagra
Dr. Joseph Goldberger stands watching the children eating. He’s about to prove his hunch that pellagra occurred in the face of nutritional deprivation. He devoted years to discovering what caused the curse of corn, pellagra. Although the fat cats in the South of the time, and we’re talking early 20th-century here, didn’t want to spend money on feeding programs, Goldberger managed to set up situations where he proved that insects and bacteria had nothing to do with the scourge of […]
Categories: Agriculture, Corn, Hunger, Italy, Local foods, Paintings, Southern Food, Spain • Tags: Gaspar Casal, Joseph Goldberger, Maize, Niacin, Pellagra, Southern cooking
Apples in French Indochina: Chapa (Sa Pa) – The Phantom Hill Station in Vietnam
In looking at pictures of the former French colonial hill station of Sa Pa/Sapa (formerly called Chapa by French colonizers), Shangri-La comes to mind. But James Hilton’s 1933 novel of that name likely took place in the Nepalian Himalayas, not in the highlands of northern Vietnam. A little taste of paradise, that’s what Sa Pa might have represented to French colonizers longing for the cool breezes of Normandy or the crisp fall days in Burgundy. Sa Pa also meant, though, […]
Categories: Apples, Asia, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Vietnam • Tags: Apples, Cat Apples, Culinary History, David Burton, Erica Peters, Food History, French Armed Forces, French colonial empire, Hmong people, Luke Nguyen, Sa Pa, Vietnam
Worshipping Different Gods … The French (Food) Reformation
People throughout history reveal their preoccupations through their architecture, artifacts, and the written word. These aspects reflect what matters to societies at various times. It comes down, in a way, to questions of taste, not just alimentary, but cultural and moral. The fashions, the trends, the modes of the day pass and morph into others as the years go by. Like all ideas, current preoccupations – with simple, natural, sustainable, green – mirror the concerns of a certain segment of […]
Categories: Art, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores, Photography • Tags: Aix-en-Provence, Cafés, Choir stalls, France, French Cooking, Paris
The Last Vineyard in Paris? Clos Montmartre
Through the seasons of the year, the Montmartre vineyard prevails … the temple of Bacchus no longer sits on the steep slopes and the vineyard covers only a small portion of prime real estate, 1500 square metres to be exact. Benedictine monks in the 12th century produced wine here, their monastery destroyed during the French revolution. A group of artists in the 1920s saved the vineyard and prevented it from being overrun by developers hungry for another type of greenery. […]
Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Photography, Wine • Tags: Clos Montmartre, France, Grapes, Paris, Photography, Vineyards, Wine
Lavender, France’s Balm for the Soul
The lavender lingers on my sloping hillside, autumn rain running in rivulets between the dying leaves. At summer’s peak, the purple flowers tantalized the bees and butterflies and me, the glorious scent perfuming the air of evening and morning both. No lambs frolicked in the lavender this year, but maybe someday a friend’s weanlings will lie in the hot sun, their tails flicking, noses pressed to the mauve blossoms, savoring the taste of this ancient nard. Like the lambs, I […]
Categories: France, French Cooking, Herbs, Photography, Poetry • Tags: Flowers, France, French Cooking, Herbs, Lavender, Photography
Belleville, Paris, France: I
Belleville, the site of my upcoming study in France, filled with other worlds and other tongues, other ways and other dreams, but all French, just the same.
Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Photography • Tags: Africa, African Cooking, Belleville, France, French Cooking, Open-Air Markets, Paris
The Joy of France: Open-Air Markets II
Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Gardens, Local foods, Photography • Tags: France, French Cooking, Local foods, Markets, Open-Air Markets, Photography
The Joy of France: Open-Air Markets I
Markets in France reflect a long tradition of local foods, now sadly giving way to supermarkets like Franprix, Monoprix, and Intermarché, but still holding their own. With any justice at all, such markets will continue as the local foods movement takes firmer root.
Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Gardens, Local foods, Photography • Tags: France, French Cooking, Markets, Open-Air Markets, Photography
The Man Who …
… in a way … holds the future of French cuisine in the palm of his hand, French Agricultural Secretary Bruno Le Maire: Given this short biography, it’s not clear where farming enters into his background: Bruno Le Maire became Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries in June 2009. Prior to this appointment he was the Secretary of State in charge of European Affairs. Mr Le Maire studied at the École Normale Supérieure and at Sciences Po, France’s academic institution […]
Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores • Tags: Agriculture, Bruno Le Maire, France
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Me, Etc.
Dear readers of Gherkins & Tomatoes /Cornichons & Tomates, Soon I will embark on a great adventure, doing research on France’s colonial empire at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Archives nationales d’outre mer in Aix-en-Provence, thanks to a grant from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Until I return, I will not have the time to devote to posting the intricate blog posts that I love to research, write, and share. I trust that you, gentle readers, will however […]
Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Algeria, French Cooking, Libraries, Local foods, Photography, Reference, Senegal, Tunisia, Vietnam • Tags: Aix-en-Provence, Archives, Archives nationales d'outre mer, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Colonial France
Famine in Somalia: Why are Food Writers Not Talking about the Black Horse?
“When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come!’ I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, ‘A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!’” (Rev. 6:5-6 NIV). I […]
Categories: Africa, Agriculture • Tags: Al-Shabaab, Djibouti, Famine, France, French Somaliland, Horn of Africa, Malkhadir M. Muhumed, Mogadishu, Somali people, Somalia
Breadfruit: Blight of Captain Bligh
When Captain James Cook entrusted thirty-three-year-old William Bligh (at the time a Commanding Lieutenant) with the HM Armed Vessel Bounty in 1787, breadfruit — not adventure — drove what became an infamous voyage. Bligh and his mutinous men sailed to Tahiti (the largest island in French Polynesia) to bring breadfruit trees back to Caribbean in hopes that the fruit would provide adequate food for the slaves working on sugar plantations there. (Bligh later undertook a second voyage as a captain […]
Categories: Agriculture, Cooking, Gardens, Haiti, Local foods, Recipes • Tags: Ahupua'a, Breadfruit, France, French Colonies, Fritters, Haiti, Hawaii, Limahuli Botanical Gardens, Tahiti, William Bligh
Here Comes the Sun: Beautiful Golden Sunflowers All
I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers. – Vincent Van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo Sunflowers (Helianthus Annuus), so yellow, so grand, like yawning lions with sleep-rumpled manes. A flower with an ancient past, sunflowers originated in the Americas* and not in Europe, although lovers of Provence associate the enormous sun-following heads of these flowers with warm, endless […]
Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Gardens, Lit & Food, Photography, Poetry • Tags: Alan Ginsberg, Anthony van Dyck, Claude Monet, Historie of Plants, John Gerard, National Sunflower Association, Paul Gauguin, Simon Wiesenthal, Sunflower seed, Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh
Le Potager du Roi, a Kitchen Garden Fit for a King
Winter still chills those of us north of equator and so the time has come to dream of gardens and kings and and cabbages and things like seed catalogs. A while ago (OK, more than a while!), because of the burgeoning trend nowadays for local foods and backyard gardens — the most famous being the Alice-Waters-inspired White House veggie garden, a news story about Versailles came to my attention via Rachel Laudan’s excellent blog on food history. Published by The […]
Categories: Bibliographies, France, French Cooking, Gardens • Tags: Bibliographies, France, French Cooking, Kitchen Gardens, Louis XIV, Potager du Roi, Times Literary Supplement, Versailles
Scenes from La France Profonde
Categories: Agriculture, Cattle, France, French Cooking, Mushrooms, Photography • Tags: Cattle, En plein air, Food Photography, France, French cuisine, Mushrooms, Restaurants
Vitis, Vin: Gift of Life
Reach out a hand and take the ruby fruit, gift grown of sun and rain. Vitis. Grapes. Gift too of earth, of chalky soil, sloping and stone-filled, redolent with vistas and vast horizons. Hard toil, yes — certainly this truth the hands of peasants knew. Cutting and pruning, trimming back. Thus, from that harsh care, life blooms and grows amidst the green of summer. Beneath lacy leaves and soft spiraling tendrils, tiny globes pregnant with sweet nectar lie, dormant, red […]
Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Photography, Uncategorized • Tags: Cuisine Francaise, France, French Cooking, Grapes, Photography, Vineyards, Vintners, Wine
A Taste Sweeter Than Meat, More Ancient Than Wine
Olives, pungent, demanding, a taste acquired. Their beauty belying their bitterness, their hardness. Sunshine and human hands transform tartness into fragrant fruit and nectared oil — fare of peasants, armies, kings, and saints. From ancient, twisted roots comes timeless provender, oily, meaty, food until long journeys’ end. Spread out under the vast sky, waiting for the signs That signal harvest, a reaping of first fruits Beaten with sticks or prodded with hooks, the branches weep their bounty, tumbled to earth, […]
Categories: Agriculture, Arab cooking, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Olives, Photography, Poetry • Tags: France, French Cooking, Kalamata, Olive, Olive oil, Photography, Tagines, Tapenade
Foie Gras and Ties of Tradition in France
With the ban on foie gras in California, I think it’s time to take a closer look at just what foie gras means in French culinary tradition and how it came to be. This post appeared a few years ago, but like tradition, not much has changed, except that some misguided purists want to impose their beliefs on others. Enchanting photos of grey geese and sleek ducks, truffle-hunting dogs and pigs — all signs of autumn in the French countryside. […]
Categories: Agriculture, Cooking, Foie gras, France, French Cooking • Tags: Cuisine Francaise, Ducks, Foie Gras, France, French Cooking, Gavage, Geese, Madeleine Kamman, Recettes, Recipes
Disappearing Act: Will Centuries-Old French Fruits and Veggies Go the Way of the Dodo?
According to an article (in French) recently posted on the ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) discussion list (a great list for people interested in food and culture in all their permutations), 25 — yes, 25 — familiar fruits and vegetables — many that you might consider quintessentially French — will soon disappear from France’s agricultural repertoire if recent production rates continue. Unfathomable as it is, the stark statistics tell a gloomy story for those of us […]
Categories: Agriculture, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Soup • Tags: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Cooking, France, Parsley, Parsley Root, Persil, Pottage, Soup, Soupe
The Potager of Thomas Jefferson: A Kitchen Garden in Photos
Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, that amazing genius and inventor, and — according to the late food writer, Karen Hess — probably America’s first real gourmet. Any lover of books, art, architecture, wine, and food should dream of visiting this place at least once. [Note: It's the only house declared a UNESCO World Heritage Centre in North America.] Jefferson’s two-acre potager (loosely translatable as “kitchen garden”), located on the southeastern side of what used to be the slave quarters […]
Categories: African Cooking, American Cooking, Cooking, French Cooking, Gardens, United States, Virginia • Tags: Colonial Virginia, France, Garden, Menon, Monticello, Potager, Thomas Jefferson
Is Cooking Necessary?*
No, it’s not. That’s your immediate answer, isn’t it? After all, you’ve got more important things to do, don’t you? Or do you? You can live your life without cooking. You can go to your nearest grocery store and bypass all the technology and knowledge that took your ancestors centuries to refine. You can buy all the ready-made food you could ever eat. You can eat plastic food. And you’d survive, too. But, in spite of all that, well, and […]
Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Local foods, Locavores, Recipes, Science of cooking • Tags: Community, Cooking, Empowerment, Fast Food, Local foods, Locavores
Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Elizabeth David
Foxed, spotted, acid-rich, the paper crackles under the slightest touch of my hands. The book’s an old Penguin paperback, worth only 74 cents on Amazon.com. As I turn the pages of French Country Cooking (1951), I vaguely recall a comment I once read, written by food activist and restaurateur Alice Waters in her book, The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (p. x), where she talked about how she got started in the whole business of food and cooking: I bought Elizabeth […]
Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores • Tags: Alice Waters, Cookbooks, Cooks, Elizabeth David, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores
