Category Archives: Lit & Food

Parsleyed Ham and Kitchen Breezes: The Letters of M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child

June 22, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Today is the 20th anniversary of M.F.K. Fisher’s death, so in tribute and at the request of her friend Leo Racicot, I am reposting this, something I wrote last year after attending Barbara Wheaton’s “Reading Historic Cookbooks” seminar at Harvard. Sometimes words, both spoken and written, take on terrible power. Use the wrong word and, at the sound, someone’s heart may crash to the bottom of their chest. Whisper another word and the soul flies straight up to heaven, if […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Libraries, Lit & Food, Methods, Pork • Tags: Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Cooking of Provincial France, Jambon Persillé, Julia Child, La Pitchoune, M. F. K. Fisher, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Michael Field, Schlesinger Library, Simone Beck

Triumphal Arch Sugar Sculpture (Copyright Ivan Day)

Ivan Day: Master Food Historian

February 25, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Those of you with a tremendous love of food history will be happy to know that Ivan Day blogs with all the beauty and erudite authority of his spectacular recreations of historical British food. (Yes, British food!) Take a look both his blog - Food History Jottings - and his regular Web site – Historic Food. You’ll love both.

Categories: Chefs, Cooking, English Cooking, French Cooking, Lit & Food • Tags: British Food, Cooking, Culinary History, Food History, French Food, Ivan Day

Why Bother with Culinary History?

May 9, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A friend recently asked me, “Why is culinary history important?” Actually, her words came out of her mouth a little more harsh sounding than that: ”Why are you wasting so much of your time on that stuff? Why don’t you just write up some recipes, like how to make that great bread you always make?” Momentarily speechless, I realized she asked me the question that I periodically ask myself. What difference does it make if we know about French chefs […]

Categories: Chefs, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, France, Lit & Food, Methods • Tags: Cookbooks, Culinary History, England, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, French cuisine, Rick Bayless, Tom Jaine, Virginia Woolf

Here Comes the Sun: Beautiful Golden Sunflowers All

April 13, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Lemons – Tiny Cathedrals of Gold

April 6, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Lemons, their pitted, nay, prehistoric, skins secreting golden oil, Shielding sourness, evoking memories of a grandmother’s kitchen, A grandfather’s garden. Born in the East, fruitful India, A kiss of cold, albeit fleeting, spawns the yellow Immortalized in stone, paint, and clay. A fruit reverenced, Blossoming from mountain and lake, Urging cooks to slice, pierce, and squeeze, Inspiring miracles among the pots and pans. Lemon curd … Lemon pie … Lemon chicken … Preserved lemons … Limoncello … Such richness! Pasta […]

Categories: Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Lemons, Lent, Lit & Food, Photography, Poetry, Uncategorized • Tags: Food Photography, Italian Cooking, Lemons, Meditations, Mint, Pasta, Poetry

Seeking Honey, in the Bee-Loud Glade

March 30, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The journey begins, with a glimpse, through the kitchen window, of golden dust shimmering in sunlight, a phantom shadow darting through the air. Hive-bound, the soaring bee dips and kisses the blue-hued flowers once more. Life blossoms with the promise of fruits and grains to come. Auriferous, gilt-laden with pollen. Honey. Nectar. Food for the common good. Alchemy. Sweetness dwells in the honeycomb, high up in trees or resting in sunken hollows of the Earth. A drop of honey calms […]

Categories: Cooking, Honey, Lit & Food, Photography • Tags: Back to the land, Bees, Blueberry Jam, Honey, Honeybees, Meditations, Photography, Poetry, Religion, Spirituality, Sustainable agriculture, William Butler Yeats

Salt of Earth, Crucible of Life

March 28, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Just a pinch, and the primal sea surges, memories filling your mouth. Weep, and you’ll know what fish first knew. Bleed, and you’ll smell the earth. Sweat, and you’ll sense ancient waters flowing. Building block of blood, sweat, and tears. Salt, not sugar, primeval taste. Ancient, this elixir. The essence of legends, myths, stories. Pillars of salt, sign of souls gone astray. Salt of the earth, logo of virtue. Sacred and pure, cleanser of souls and of pots, this simple, […]

Categories: Fish, France, French Cooking, Lit & Food, Photography, Poetry, Salt • Tags: Fish, Food poetry, France, French Cooking, Photography, Salt, Salt-Baked Fish

The Provençal Pantry in Poetry and Photos

March 6, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Readers of Gherkins & Tomatoes / Cornichons & Tomates will see something new in the coming weeks — tiny photo essays. A weekly showcasing of some of the basic components of the Provençal (and frankly French) pantry, enlivened with a blessedly small pinch of poetry, these meditative snippets incarnate my intense desire for fresh, nay primeval, ingredients.

Categories: Art, Cooking, French Cooking, Lit & Food, Photography, Poetry • Tags: France, French Cooking, Photo Essay, Photography, Poetry, Provence

Peregrinations and Pilgrimages: Egeria and the Flour Soup

September 30, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Rocks tumbled down the rugged sloping ground and dust spun like little tops as Egeria, a nun from early fourth-century Galicia, climbed toward the rocky summit of Mount Sinai. From that craggy point, she gazed at a world she defined by the holy sites mentioned in the Bible. And from there we saw beneath us Egypt and Palestine, the Red Sea, and the Parthenian Sea which leads to Alexandria, and finally the endless lands of the Saracens. (53) At night, […]

Categories: Lit & Food, Middle East, Reference • Tags: Christianity, Desert Fathers, Egeria, Holy Land, Middle East, Mount Sinai, Pilgrimage, Red Sea, Religion and Spirituality, Saint Benedict

Forgotten Recipes and Forgotten Cooks

August 17, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

If you think that real cooking needs to be resurrected, you’d be right. You can’t exist on McNuggets alone, as the film Super Size Me proved. But if you think we should all go back to cooking everything just like our foremothers (and sometimes forefathers) did, you’d be a bit misguided. Romantic, yes, and it’s not hard to be romantic about days that seem simpler as you struggle to get e-mail answered, peer at the Tweets streaming endlessly into your […]

Categories: Cooking, Latin America, Lit & Food, Photography, Poetry • Tags: Diana Kennedy, Ethnography, Locavores, Rachel Laudan, Real Cooking, Real Food, Recetas Olividadas, Venezuela

A Whiff of Madeleines and a Sniff of Curry: A List of Delectable Food Memoirs

July 15, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Why do you love to read food memoirs? Barbara Frey Waxman attempts to answer that question in “Food Memoirs: What They Are, Why They Are Popular, and Why They Belong in the Literature Classroom.”* But it doesn’t take an academic treatise to prove what you, and publishers, know: food memoirs sell because people love stories. Some of these memoirs enthrall, others end up tossed across the room, relegated to the Thrift Shop pile. A fine line wiggles between sheer narcissism […]

Categories: Books, Lit & Food • Tags: Autobiography, Bibliographies, Food in literature, Food Memoirs, Memoirs

Suffering — Sometimes it’s Just About Food and Sometimes Not

June 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival. ~~ Winston Churchill ~~ Suffering? Why on earth write about suffering on a food blog, especially one ostensibly about cookbooks and their history? Aren’t food blogs supposed to be full of fun-but-complex recipes that you can make in 1 minute, creating the illusion that you’ve cooked all day? Well, sometimes no. Food is more than beautiful people living it up in a glossy magazine or […]

Categories: Food writing, Lit & Food • Tags: Albert Camus, Frida Kahlo, M. F. K. Fisher, Pablo Picasso, Suffering

Snowbound … The Poetry, The Food, The Reality

February 8, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems now here to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Snow Storm. As the snow falls outside, I […]

Categories: American Cooking, Apples, Cakes, Cooking, Films, Lit & Food, Poetry, Spices • Tags: Apples, Cake, Donner Party, Donner Pass, Elizabeth David, John Greenleaf Whittier, M. F. K. Fisher, Madeleine Kamman, Madeleine Kamman’s Savoie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roy Andries de Groot, Snow, Snowbound, Spice Cake, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, Winter

In the Kitchen with Barbara Kingsolver: I

December 8, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’m going to bed every night now with Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, The Lacuna: A Novel, about Mexico, politics, art, El Norte, and — best of all — cooks. After her last book (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life), Kingsolver still finds food a fascinating part of life. In The Lacuna, here’s how she describes the cook who works for the chief protagonist’s family: When Leandro came he would push the fire to the sides, keeping the heat […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Books, Cooking, Latin America, Lit & Food, Mexico, United States • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver, Cooking, Cooks, Mexico, The Lacuna

Cooks Last Supper Assisi Piero Lorenzetti

To the Cooks, Prosit! Part II

November 25, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

He turns the spit who never tasted a morsel from it. Proverbes en Rimes, no. 117. Continuing our salute to cooks this holiday season (Thanksgiving), today’s post includes some depictions of male cooks, as well as female cooks. Medieval opinions of cooks, mostly men, tended to reflect the lowly status accorded to people who worked in the kitchen: Medieval attitudes toward the cook and his staff were mixed. There was always a certain contempt for a man with an obviously […]

Categories: Art, Cooking, Europe, Lit & Food, Thanksgiving • Tags: Cooks, Food in Art, Thanksgiving

To the Cooks, Prosit! Part I

November 23, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516), in delineating what would make an ideal society, said: .. all vyle service, all slaverie and drudgerye, with all the laboursome toyle and busines, is done by bondmen. But the women of every famelie by course have the office and charge of cokerye … and orderyng al thinges thereto belonging.” (Utopia, Book 2, Chapter 5, p. 70) It is fitting that there be a tribute to the women who cooked through the centuries. […]

Categories: Art, Cooking, Europe, Lit & Food, Thanksgiving • Tags: Art, Cooks, Cuisine, Flemish Painting, Food in Art, Thanksgiving

Why Cookbooks?

November 21, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Why on earth so many cookbooks, when no one cooks? Or do they? Read Adam Gopnik’s thoughts in the latest food issue of The New Yorker. He starts out by saying Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Critic's Corner, Lit & Food • Tags: Adam Gopnik, Cookbooks, Culinary History

Frederic Leighton: The Return of Persephone (1891)

Nightly She Sings on Yon Pomegranate-Tree

November 3, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Magic and myth wind through the history of many foods. At the crux of these stories the very mysteries of life clamor for explanation. In the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, for example, it’s possible to feel the foreboding of ancient humans when the first chill kissed the air and darkness descended over leafless trees and barren fields. Demeter and Persephone. Mother and daughter. Goddesses of Earth. Fertility. Loss. Hope. A very human story, actually. But first let’s gather […]

Categories: Agriculture, Lit & Food • Tags: Demeter, Myths, Persephone, Pomegranates

La Toussaint:* The Saints and Souls Who Preserve Us

November 2, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A novel about an arrogant food critic could only happen in France. Bien sûr! Some time ago, I set myself the challenging and Sisyphean task of reading Muriel Barbery’s first novel, Une gourmandise, in French. (Barbery’s reputation rests on her extremely philosophical second novel — The Elegance of the Hedgehog [what a title!], which took France by storm. The heavy larding of the text with academic philosophical bits proved to be the downfall of many American readers. But not all.) […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Food writing, French Cooking, Lit & Food • Tags: All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day, Book Reviews, France, French Cooking, Gourmet Rhapsody, Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Half-Baked Nuts and Gooseberry Fools: Food Similes and Metaphors

September 3, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Just for fun today, here’s a list of food words (now clichés) commonly used in English, often without the speaker thinking of the food connection. Most food sayings tend to sport a long history, but that’s the stuff of another post. (And there are many fascinating books out there about word histories in general.) Apple polisher (someone who attempts to garner favor with someone of higher rank or status) Bad apple (just what it says, a rotten item in a […]

Categories: Food writing, Lit & Food • Tags: Food Metaphors, Food Similes, Jay Jacobs, The Eaten Word

“Curry & Rice” on Forty Plates: The British Raj Encore

August 28, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In 1859, George Francklin Atkinson, a captain of the Bengal Engineers and a writer of some imagination as well as artistic skill, published “Curry & Rice” on Forty Plates: or the Ingredients of Social Life at “Our Station” in India. Illustrated with forty drawings, or the “plates” in question, Atkinson’s fictitious account of life in a British colonial enclave proves highly entertaining as well as instructive on a number of levels. Atkinson drew forty pictures, each “plate” representing various aspects […]

Categories: Books, India, Lit & Food • Tags: Bigotry, British Raj, Cooking, Cooks, Curry & Rice on Forty Plates, George Francklin Atkinson, India, Prejudice

Rediscovering Rabelais

June 19, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The world of food constantly and consistently offers opportunities for discovering convoluted linkages between the darnedest things. Take, for example, my initial goal of writing about melegueta pepper, a spice originating in Africa. A nice addition to some of the material on Africa appearing on this blog, I thought. I started with a foray into the background of melegueta pepper … and end up with belly laughs Chez François, Rabelais that is. Sixteenth-century Benedictine monk and priest, theologian, medical doctor, […]

Categories: France, French Cooking, Lit & Food • Tags: Fouaces, Fouées, France, Francois Rabelais, French Cooking, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life