Gherkins & Tomatoes

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

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Bread loaf 2

Cheese + Flour + Yeast + Salt + Eggs = The Ancient Mystery of Bread

March 22, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

To contemplate bread even more, please go my previous post, Panis Gravis, or, Bread, Endless Nurturer. I’ve baked bread for years and years. In fact, except for the odd hamburger bun, my family never eats “boughten bread,” as my mother-in-law called it. In a time when “carbohydrate” evokes images reminiscent of horror films, singing the merits of bread may seem like advocating for the return of feudalism. But, in spite of all the denial of bread as a food in […]

Categories: Baking, Bread, Cheese, Cooking, Eggs, Photography, Russia • Tags: Acharuli khachapuri, Baking, Bread, Celiac Disease, Demeter, Gluten intolerance, M. F. K., Persephone, Republic of Georgia

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Russian Wooden Sppons

From Russia with Love: Cooking Utensils

August 10, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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Culinaria Russia

Culinaria Russia: A Picture Cookbook for Grownups

April 7, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ve only known two Russian cooks in my life. First there was Olga, the cook who sustained me during my Peace Corps years, whose Russian roots rarely extended to the table of her Paraguayan pension. Always tripe and manioc and beef à caballo, never borscht or blini or piroshki. Sometimes meat laced with chimichurri, a green sauce from Argentina, which reminded Olga of home, as we shall see. And then there was Marina, who only cooked for me once. She […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, Russia • Tags: A Gift to Young Housewives, Cookbooks, Culinaria Russia, Culinaria series, Elena Molokhovets, Green sauce, Russia

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Russia Easter icon

From Mother Russia with Love: Kulich and Paskha

March 31, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Because Russian Orthodox Easter falls on the same day this year (2010) as the Western Easter, it seems appropriate to include recipes for Russia’s most well-known Easter sweets: Kulich, a tall puffy “baba” or sweet-bread cousin to Italian Panettone (maybe with phallic overtones and fertility in mind?) and Paskha, a cheesecake-like dairy-rich concoction eaten with Kulich. Imagine … In the darkness of midnight, you hurry to the church, carrying your baskets filled with Kulich, Paskha, and brightly decorated eggs, seeking […]

Categories: Bread, Easter, Russia • Tags: Easter, Festive Breads, Kulich, Paskha, Russia

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Russia Ivan_the_Terrible_begs_to_become_a_Monk

From Mother Russia with Love: The Domostroi

March 29, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Cabbage soup and gruel are our food. (Shchi da kasha, pishche nashe.) ~~Russian peasant proverb Trying to ferret out tidbits about Russian food history can be tough going. Aside from the language barrier, anyone interested in Russian culinary history suffers from a major weakness: there is a terrible lack of written material contemporaneous with Forme of Cury and other such books found in the Western culinary history lexicon.* Happily, however, there’s Carolyn Johnston Pouncy’s translation of the sixteenth-century Russian household […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Lent, Methods, Reference, Russia • Tags: Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, Domostroi, Ivan the Terrible, Lent, Russia

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Russia blinis

Idylls of Cuisine, #56

March 28, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A photograph, or two, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: Photography, Russia • Tags: Blinis, Food Photography, Russia

Russia kulebyaka

From Mother Russia with Love: A Fish in Every Pie

March 26, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The kulebyaka should be appetizing, shameless in its nakedness, a temptation to sin. ~~ Anton Chekov, “The Siren” Fish dishes abound in Russian cuisine, in large part because of the Russian Orthodox Church’s strict rules on fasting during Lent other times of the year. But we cannot ignore the simple fact that fish thrive in the thousands of rivers and lakes crisscrossing the face of that immense land mass, bordered by twelve seas. Again we see the impact not only […]

Categories: Fish, Menus, Pies--Savory, Russia • Tags: Cooking, Fast days, Fish, Kulebyaka, Lent, Pies, Russia, Sturgeon, Vesiga

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Russia mushrooms

From Mother Russia with Love: Meaty Mushrooms and Relentless Lent

March 25, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribi (looking for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest. ~~ Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory Nabokov hits on something many of us reading his words cannot really sense, cannot really feel. For those of us who grew up on canned […]

Categories: Beef, Cookbooks, Cooking, Lent, Mushrooms, Russia • Tags: Beef Stroganoff, Classic Russian Cooking: A Gift to Young Housewives, Cookbooks, Cooks, Elena Molokhovets, Joyce Toomre, Lent, Mushrooms, Recipes, Russia, Vladimir Nabokov

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Russian Lenten food tolokno

From Mother Russia with Love: A Monster of a Stove and Tolokno

March 23, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

You can’t cook porridge with a fool. ~~ Russian Proverb ~~ An example of Russian Lenten food, tolokno or oat flour with liquid, demonstrates the use of the astonishing Russian stove. Streamlined in the 15th century, the Russian stove incarnates the old adage, “The kitchen is the heart of the home.” Much of Russian peasant folk culture and ritual derives from these massive stoves. Taking up anywhere from a fifth to a quarter of the living space in a peasant […]

Categories: Lent, Oats, Russia • Tags: Lent, Oats, Russia, Russian stoves, Tolokno

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Kvass

From Mother Russia with Love: Great Lent, the Beginning

March 22, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Many years ago, a high school history teacher of mine asked our class to write down everything we knew about Russia within the space of about 30 minutes. Most people wrote a brief paragraph, describing the red Communist flag with its hammer and sickle. Some delved a little into the cruelty of the tsars and others brought up the dark and heavy literature of Dostoevsky. Still others spouted all the Cold War propaganda about the dangerous spread of Communism. I […]

Categories: Beer, Cooking, England, Lent, Russia • Tags: Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford Redesdale, Great Lent, Kvass, Mitford family, Russia

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Mardi Gras egg 2

Butterfly of Winter — Fabergé’s Mardi Gras Egg

February 12, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Carnival is a Butterfly of Winter whose last mad flight of Mardi Gras forever ends his glory.” ~ Perry Young, The Mistick Krewe: Chronicles of Comus and His Kin Theo Fabergé,  grandson of Carl Fabergé, created this dazzling egg to commemorate Mardi Gras in New Orleans:

Categories: Art, Eggs, Lent, Russia • Tags: Eggs, Fabergé eggs, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Theo Fabergé

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Postcard of the "Bund" in Shanghai

“The White (Wo)Man’s Burden”: Household Management in the Colonies (With Bibliography)

March 4, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

European women who lived in nineteenth- and twentieth-century foreign outposts sought authoritative voices to guide them through the challenges of living far from the familiar. Although local labor bore the brunt of  daily domestic work, wives of the colonialists need information on how to direct their servants. And as the list below amply illustrates, plenty of authors and authoresses took up their pens to relieve the white woman’s burden.  Today, many of the books are scarce and rare. Take Bon […]

Categories: Bibliographies, China, English Cooking, Recipes, Russia, Wine • Tags: Africa, British Colonial Shanghai, Cocktails, English Cooking, Recipes, Zakuska

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yevtushenko

A Symbol of the Season

December 20, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Many years ago, I read A Precocious Autobiography, by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. One passage moved me to tears and I am sharing it with you this year, during this season symbolic of hope. In the darkness of winter, at least now in the Northern Hemisphere, we face the longest night, lighting candles and Christmas trees, and celebrating family and friends and love. In Moscow in 1944, Yevtushenko and his mother stood in a crowd of Russians, watching 20,000 German […]

Categories: Christmas, Russia • Tags: Bread, Christmas, Russia, Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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Food forms the very essence of life, from the fruit fly to the elephant, with humans in between. So much of what we do revolves around cooking, eating, and the finding of food. Here you'll discover stories, meditations, and photographs celebrating the places that we call home. And, of course, the food that garnishes it all.

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What’s Cookin’ Here

  • A Bare Table is Like an Artist’s Canvas
  • “Stew’s so comforting on a rainy day.” *
  • Singkong, Manioc, Mandioca, Mandió, Tapioca, Yuca: Singing the Praises of Manihot esculenta (Cassava)
  • The Promise of Apple Blossoms

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