I decided to sign up for a photography class, because I wanted to move out of AUTO on my lovely Nikon D5100 camera. Below, you’ll see some of the food photos that I’ve been fussing with:
Categories: Cabbage, Cheese, Chile Peppers, Cooking, Cucumbers, Ingredients, Photography • Tags: Cabbage, Caviar, Cheese, Chiles, Coffee, Cucumbers, Cups, Photography
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
Living today’s hurry-up-run-run-run-faster-faster-text-text lifestyle tends to blunt contact with more earthy things, like cooking. The act of cooking offers something that the stiffest drink or most potent tranquilizer cannot. Dare I say it out loud? It’s even better than sex, in a way. Especially when chocolate is involved, but that’s another story … . For me, cooking offers a glimpse of the spiritual, but it’s also a calming and mindful activity. After all, I must be in the present moment […]
Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Peaches, Photography, Pies--Sweet • Tags: Cooking, La Cucina, Lily Prior, Meditations, Peaches, Photography, Pies, Spirituality
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
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
Even years later, long after someone took this photo, I can see this young boy – I’ll call him Jacques – standing in the street, lugging his heavy basket made of tree branches, no doubt the same ones that Jacques’s father might use on the poor boy’s legs if he doesn’t sell all the bread that day. Look at his shoes, it’s hard to tell, but is one of the soles higher than the other? And his toes, poking out […]
Categories: Bread, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Bread, Elliott Erwitt, France, French Cooking, Photography
There’s something magical about food, fire, and cooking. Actually, primeval describes it better. After all, without food, I wouldn’t be sitting here staring at a computer screen and neither would you. There’d be only a barren wasteland, a moonscape of craters and crevices, instead of the Earth we love. Food is the magical bottom line of life. I’ve thought that for a long time. As a twenty-year-old student, I once stood on a street corner outside Mexico City’s colossal 5514-stall […]
Categories: Food writing, Mexico, Photography • Tags: Chocolat, Epiphanies, La Merced Market, Like Water for Chocolate, Magical realism, Mexico City, Saint Brighid, Zao Jun
I am sure everyone who ever lived could name one food they dreaded seeing when they sat down at the family dinner table. Where I grew up, we had to eat everything on our plates. Mom did not cater to anyone’s fussiness when it came to eating. And Dad enforced that, oh yes, he did. My most abhorred food – heading the list even before liver in any shape, form, or way – was broccoli. On the other hand, my […]
Categories: American Cooking, Broccoli, Broccoli, Cooking, Food writing, Ingredients, Photography • Tags: Broccoli, Sayings, Taste sensitivity, Vegetables
I cut the rosemary this morning, the lack of love and attention these past few weeks plainly written in its leggy tendrils, reaching too far for the sun, like arms longing for something to hug. Rosemary, the herb of remembrance. What do I remember when the piney, resinous odor of rosemary sticks to my fingers and leaves a lingering perfume on everything I touch? I remember Morocco, where I lived in a very modern house, its kitchen festooned with orange and […]
Categories: Africa, Beef, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Moroccan Cooking, Morocco, Photography • Tags: France, French Cooking, Herbs, Remembrance, Rosemary
The theme of next year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery centers around “Food and Material Culture.” The spoons captured my interest and so I decided to take a quick peek at other utensils. I never get tired of looking at the tools that people created for cooking their food, food that gave them the will and the power to keep on living in the direst of circumstances. The ingenuity of cooks never ceases to amaze me. And I wonder […]
Categories: Art, Asia, Cooking, Photography, Russia, Russian cooking • Tags: Cooking, Russia, Wooden spoons
I love this picture of a snail. Like many mollusks, snails seem to have been eaten in substantial quantities by early man, as witness the mounds of snail shells found in archaeological sites. See Prehistoric edible land snails in the cirum Mediterranean: the archaeological evidence (2004) (Extensive bibliography)
Categories: Art, France, French Cooking, Photography, Posters • Tags: France, French cuisine, Snails, Stereotypes
This morning I woke up to fog so thick that I wondered if perhaps I’d morphed into a another place altogether, like London. The branches of the large oak clinging to the hillside resembled nothing less than a print of a retina found in an old medical book. I started thinking of France as I made my coffee, even though last night it snowed in Paris of all things, as the author “Becoming Madame” so clearly shows, and I knew […]
Categories: Art, France, Photography • Tags: Culinary History, Food History, France, Paris, Snow
The frosty morning mists of early autumn roll through the hills, swirling like a white cotton-candy carpet at the base of the gnarly old trees. Branches creak and sway with the weight of the fist-sized apples, some blushing like tiny faces, or red-cheeked as it were from the chill of the windy gusts. So much a part of European culture and cuisine, apples seem to be a native food, an ingredient in so many traditional dishes. But the apples we […]
Categories: Apples, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Methods, Photography • Tags: Apicius, Apples, Culinary History, Food History, France, French Cooking, French culinary history, Kazakhstan, La Varenne, Le Menagier de Pari, Marianne Mulon, Tractatus de modo preparandi et condiendi omnia cibaria, Vivendier
Photo credit: Robyn Lee A while ago, I promised you a short list of facsimile/translated French cookbooks. The following list represents a number of old French-language cookbooks translated into English that you’ll find freely available on the Internet, something quite helpful when you’ve dropped your last holiday dollar on the fixings for Beef Wellington and a gilty box of exquisite marrons glacés. But I don’t need that box of candied sweetmeats; the words of people long dead taste better than […]
Categories: Christmas, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Paintings, Photography, Reference • Tags: Chestnuts, Culinary History, Facsimile Cookbooks, Food History, Le Ménagier de Paris, Medieval cookbooks
“If I had to choose between trees and people, I think I should choose trees.” ~~Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings If you’ve ever read The Yearling, you know the name and work of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Miz Rawlings owned a 72-acre homestead and citrus grove in Cross Creek, Florida, not that she was a native Floridian or anything like that. Her story began there in 1925, when she and her husband, Charles Rawlings, bought a rather delapidated homestead just south of Gainesville, […]
Categories: Florida, Photography, Poultry • Tags: Chickens, Cross Creek, Florida, Lochloosa Lake, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home, Orange Lake, Poultry, Southern cooking, The Yearling
Pasta and curtains – who would have thought they’d be so similar? And symmetrical?
Categories: Art, France, French Cooking, Pasta, Photography • Tags: France, Pasta, Photography, Symmetry
It’s a dog’s world in France.
Categories: France, French Cooking, Meat, Photography • Tags: Boucherie, Charcuterie, France, French cuisine
Mushrooms abound in the markets of France in October and early November. And since I found stalls bursting with all sorts of mushrooms, I began to wonder if there were any “street cries” or market songs or whatever you might wish to call them peculiar to mushrooms. Associated with various métiers (or trades) dating back to the Middle Ages, these cries/songs provide some hints about foods sold and the way people like ambulatory vendors advertised their wares in days before […]
Categories: France, French Cooking, Mushrooms, Photography • Tags: France, Mushrooms, Oysters, Paris, Pleurottes
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
Beauty comes in many guises. Appropriately for a restaurant in full view of Notre Dame and its mythical hunchback, the dining room of the Tour d’Argent in Paris resembles the prow of a ship sailing off into the sunset. Some critics say its reputation for good food departed some time ago. An auction in December 2009 cleaned out its wine cellar, the better offerings hidden from the Nazis by a false wall built during their occupation of France. These ugly, […]
Categories: France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Armagnac, France, French Cooking, Paris, Tour d'Argent
Or is lavender really the perfume of Provence?
Categories: France, French Cooking, Garlic, Photography • Tags: France, Garlic, Photography, Provence
Rustic pottery always draws the eye …
Categories: Art, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: France, Photography, Pottery, Provence
Leisurely Sunday lunches provide only one example of the difference between French and American ways of approaching life. Although many Parisian women often walk very fast along the sidewalk and drivers usually screech to a halt when the little green figures pop up at street crossings, the truth of the matter is that a slower pace prevails in nearly every endeavor. Take Monoprix, for example. Now it is true that Monoprix is not at all like Walmart, but for the […]
Categories: France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Chocolate, France, French Cooking, Monoprix, Paris, Shopping
Hot chocolate in Paris is like nothing else.
Categories: Chocolate, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Angelina's, France, French Cooking, Hot Chocolate, Paris
The French do food well. Scenery, too. History? Bien sûr! Washing machines? Mais non! Frankly, when it comes to household appliances in France, I’d rather walk the plank with a pirate than turn a knob. I’m quite mechanically illiterate and so I’ve never stayed in a Paris apartment where I felt truly comfortable with the machinery. And my current garret offers no respite from the annoying peculiarities of French washing machines. It’s like the monster under the bed that I […]
Categories: France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: France, French Cooking, French engineering, Washing machines
Categories: France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Cafe life, Nazis, Paris, World War II
The Belleville market — straddling the crossroads of Paris’s 10th, 11th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements — presents the determined photographer with a tremendous dilemma: how to take pictures without being literally swept up in the crowds and jostled like a buoy bobbing in heavy seas? Although the market runs from the Menilmontant metro stop to Belleville (about 2 km.), the easiest way to tackle it seems to be to get to the Belleville stop, the beginning (or end, depending your […]
Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Algeria, French Cooking, Moroccan Cooking, Morocco, Photography • Tags: Belleville, France, French cuisine, Open-Air Markets, Paris
After a long day flying, and given the “food” served on the airplane, the first order of business when I arrived in Paris included real food. I needed to drop my bags in the apartment and seek sustenance. Quick. (Actually, after taking the RER from Charles DeGaulle airport to the center of Paris, through the banlieues that François Maspero wrote about in Roissy Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs, I snapped a picture of my “new” (and quite decent) kitchen. […]
Categories: Cheese, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Bread, Cheese, France, Olive bread, Paris kitchens, Pavé d'Auge
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
Many years ago, when I first fell in love with Paris, I stayed in hotels and suffered through agonizingly mediocre dinners in nameless bistros, always longing for a kitchen of my own, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf. When I finally realized that renting an apartment made more sense monetarily and culinarily, why then I invested in a string bag and gaping basket with a maw like a lion’s, just for “le shopping” that occupies many Parisians’ waking thoughts. But what I […]
Categories: France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: France, French Cooking, Kitchens, Paris
Categories: Art, France, Photography • Tags: Art, Door knockers, Doors, France, Paris, Photography
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
Great article by Sarah Bakewell, on Paris Review site from November 2010: What Bloggers Owe [Michel de] Montaigne Don’t forget that Michel wrote about cannibalism, relating it to ethical issues. Read his essays in translation HERE. A taste, if I may be so bold: I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more […]
Categories: Food News, Food writing, France, Photography • Tags: Bloggers, Blogging, Cannibals, France, French Literature, Inspiration for Bloggers, Michel de Montaigne, Philophy, Renaissance
Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Algeria, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Belleville, France, French Cooking, Paris, Photography
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
Culinary History Has To Be Analyzed Like Art History ~~ Nathan Myhrvold “Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,438-page set that is destined to reinvent cooking. The lavishly illustrated books use thousands of original images to make the science and technology clear and engaging.” That tantailizing passage refers to the first edition of a book that costs as much as a new washer-dryer set or a computer or a scintillating diamond ring. Old news, yes, since the book took its first steps in early March […]
Categories: Books, Chefs, Cookbooks, Cooking, French Cooking, Photography, Reference • Tags: Carol M. Newman Library, Modernist Cuisine, Nathan Myhrvold, Peacock-Harper Culinary History Collection, Sous-vide, Virginia Tech
Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Gardens, Local foods, Photography • Tags: France, French Cooking, Local foods, Markets, Open-Air Markets, Photography
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
Categories: Asia, Photography, Vietnam • Tags: France, French colonial empire, Indochina, Indochine, Markets, Vietnam
