Mushroom: A Global History – New book coming out

April 28, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Foods for a Funeral and a Farewell

March 8, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

What to make of the lavish feasts that come after a funeral? When I attended my first funeral, at age 27, I cried a lot, even though I didn’t know the  deceased, my sister-in-law’s father. My grandparents all died before I turned 20 and lived 1250 miles away. Living as my family did on a poor college professor’s salary, attending funerals wasn’t going to happen. Add to that my mother’s extreme reluctance to even speak of her own mortality and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cakes, Cookbooks, Cookies, Cooking, Desserts, Norway, Photography, Pies--Sweet, Reference, Southern Food • Tags: American Cooking, Death, Dying, Funerals, Norway, Southern Food, Wisconsin. Southern cooking

Burnt Toast, or, What Most Food Blogs Never Mention

March 7, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

After waking up to yet another gray, frigid day, I read – not without little frissons of envy, to be honest – the latest crop of great food bloggers selected by The Huffington Post, which run the gamut from folksy to romantic. The photos certainly could festoon the walls of great museums, vying for space next to some of the classic still lifes, which of course still inspire many food photographers. Why is it that I rarely see bad, burnt, […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Critic's Corner, Photography • Tags: Burnt food, Food Blogs, Huffington Post, Toast

The Story Behind a Kitchen-Counter Sweet-Potato Patch

February 6, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

*”Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new”: A Sweet Potato Rhapsody

January 25, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new,” or so confessed St. Augustine, a Catholic saint born in 354 A.D., in what is now Algeria. And I, I could also say the same, about many things. One of them being sweet potatoes, a beloved Southern staple.** It was a Thanksgiving Day. I was five, going on six. Old enough to know what I liked to eat. But that day I added another “yuck” food to a list […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, American Cooking, Bibliographies, Southern Food • Tags: George Washington Carver, Old Ebbitt Grill, Southern cooking, Sweet potato, Thanksgiving, Virginia, World Food Habits

* New Bibliography Available, on Southern Food & Cooking & Stuff

January 22, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I love books passionately, especially cookbooks and any books about food. Because of my current emphasis on foods and cooking and foodways of the American South – tied as all that is to social change and the influx of new population groups – I have created a small (to me) bibliography of books about the South and its ever-changing food. You will find the bibliography by clicking HERE, or by clicking on […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Books, Cookbooks, Libraries, Photography, Reference • Tags: Bibliography, Cooking, Cuisine of the Southern United States, Southern United States

* The Legacy of a Typo: A Meditation on Tomato Gravy

January 21, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

* A Cuisine Created by Slave Women: A Review of Kitty Morse’s Mint Tea and Minarets, and a Brief Word about Dadas**

January 8, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dealing with the death of beloved parents takes a great toll on people, leading them on journeys of self-discovery often not possible while parents still live and breathe and exert influence on their adult child’s life. Rarely does settling up an inheritance take sixteen years of patience and hair-pulling, constantly reminding the bereaved of their loss. But that is exactly what cookbook author Kitty Morse endured as she stayed true to her English father Clive Chandler’s last wishes, to preserve […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, Morocco, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Azemmour, Kitty Morse, Leonora Peets, Marrakech, Mint Tea and Minarets, Moroccan cuisine, Morocco, Southern cooking

* Biscuits and Buttermilk: A New Year and New Directions

January 2, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Using Cookbooks in Historical Archaeological Research: New Mexico as a Case Study

December 17, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Using cookbooks as a tool in historical archaeological research might sound a tad bit absurd, but by examining certain characteristics of these books, it becomes possible to see dirt-covered artifacts in a slightly different light. As a tribute to my childhood friend, Meli-Duran Kirkpatrick, and at the request of her husband, archaeologist Dr. David Kirkpatrick, I wrote an article DAILY LIFE THROUGH COOKING AND COOKBOOKS: A BRIEF GUIDE TO USING COOKBOOKS AS A TOOL IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY about the feasibility […]

Categories: American Cooking, Archaeology, Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, Spain, Spanish Cooking • Tags: Archaeology, Cookbooks, Culinary History, New Mexico, Research methodology, Spanish Cooking

How to Tempt the Scrooges, or, Christmas, the Cooking Season

December 5, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I love Christmas. Yes, I really do. For I see Christmas as a time that allows us – in these rather sterile, rigid United States, anyway – to cut loose and string up gaudy gee-gaws all over the house. To transcend the daily. To feel the seasonal and mythic cycles of past times. To celebrate the sheer miracle of being alive. That, to me, is what festivals mean, be they football games or saints’ days or other special days. All […]

Categories: American Cooking, Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, Holidays, Photography, Reference • Tags: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Christmas, Cookbooks, Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas, Great Scandinavian Baking Book, Rose Levy Beranbaum

Libraries, Passageways to the Universe

November 6, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Without libraries, I would not be the person I am today. Without free access to books that libraries (and taxes) provide, I would have been bereft indeed as a child. My family only owned a couple of copies of the Bible foisted on my father by Baptist grandmother and volumes of novels from the Book of the Month Club, in highly excerpted form. For me, as you can surmise, libraries represented Paradise. I spent many hours in the public library, […]

Categories: Art, Books, Libraries, Photography • Tags: Architecture, Books, Libraries, Meditations, Photography

Weaving the Ties that Bind, One Bite at a Time

October 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I stood by the wooden fence, peering over the barbed wire fringing it like a lace collar. For some reason, I couldn’t focus the camera lens clearly on the Holstein standing a few yards away. The cow gazed back at me, her jaws moving with the steady precision of a slow motor. When I stooped just a bit, I saw it clearly. But it wasn’t the cow in the viewfinder. No, the camera had zoomed in on an exquisite spider […]

Categories: Books, Cheese, Cooking, Food writing, Photography • Tags: Charlotte's Web, Cooking, Cows, E. B. White, Feta, Photography, Spider webs, Spiders

Dear Julia, Happy Birthday! #100, or, Why I Loved You

August 15, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dear Julia, Happy 100th birthday! Today lots of famous food writers will write or post reams of flattering words about you. I know, I’ve already seen them, the New York Times leading the charge with three features about you, one by your friend Jacques Pépin. Like Jacques, many others will point out, once again, that you almost singlehandedly transformed the sorry excuse for food in the 1960s United States into the bounty and abundance that we see today in nearly […]

Categories: Chefs, Cookbooks, Cooking, France, French Cooking • Tags: Birthday, France, French cuisine, Jacques Pépin, Julia Child, Julie Powell, Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Julia Child’s “The French Chef, ” by Dana Polan

July 17, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“a history of early American television telescoped through the persona and history of Julia Child. . . . fascinating . . .” When you walk the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, you can’t miss the lingering traces of heroes and history. From the names of the men who brought you the Boston Tea Party to the dead in the Old Burying Ground near Harvard Square, the past perfumes the air. Nearly everywhere you’ll see pictures of a more modern hero, too. […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, Food News, France, French Cooking, Uncategorized • Tags: Book Reviews, Dana Polan, Dione Lucas, Florence Hanford, Food Television, France, French Chef, French Cooking, Julia Child, Nigella Lawson, Paul Child

Macarons – Food of Dreams and Fairy Tales

July 11, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Macarons. Truly an example of “Don’t try this at home.” But how I longed to recreate the taste and the crunch of the macarons I greedily ate as often as I could, when I passed that fairy-tale bakery on the Rue de Rivoli, close to the Hotel de Ville metro stop: Maison Georges Larnicol. Although they’re kissing cousins of a sorts, modern French macarons don’t much resemble American macaroons. The extra “O” has nothing to do with it. Macarons likely […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cookies, Cooking, Desserts, French Cooking, Uncategorized • Tags: Bérengère Abraham, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Macarons

French Bistro: Seasonal Recipes

July 5, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“A visual feast as well as a gastronomic one . . . Organized by ten essentials that any successful bistro must have, French Bistro almost reads like a graphic novel, thanks to the prolific and colorful photographs.” When you walk into a Paris bistro straight off the street on a cool fall day, the odd leaf rustling at your feet as you cross the threshold, you expect something almost magical to happen, don’t you? And, according to the authors of yet another […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Chefs, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking • Tags: Bertrand Auboyneau, bistronomy movement, Bistros, François Simon, France, French cuisine, Paris, Parisian bistros, Paul Bert, Restaurants

At My French Table

July 2, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

If as a child you loved fairy tales and dreamt of being Cinderella, or if you longed to be the handsome prince with a turreted castle, you’re going to adore Jane Webster’s gloriously illustrated At My French Table: Food, Family and Joie de Vivre in a Corner of Normandy. The book imparts the warm feeling you get snuggling up in bed with a magical story and a steaming cup of sweet cocoa. Along with Anne Willan’s From My Chateau Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 2000), Susan […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, France, French Cooking • Tags: Amanda Hesser, Australia, Cookbooks, France, French cuisine, Jane Webster

Cooking Classic French Food, the Easy Way

June 27, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

If French cuisine, or at least the cooking of it, intimidates you, you’re not alone. A perception of too many fussy techniques and hard-to-obtain ingredients stops people who might otherwise wield a wooden spoon with Julia Child’s enthusiasm. The great popularity of Italian food testifies to people’s desire to take simple ingredients and transform them into delicious food. Unfortunately, most cooks don’t see French cooking in that light. In French Classics Made Easy, Richard Grausman shatters those preconceived notions about French […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Books, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking • Tags: Elisabeth Brassart, French Classics Made Easy, Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Nora Ephron, Richard Grausman

Cookbooks Tell Many Tales

June 25, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The doorbell rang with that eerie little tinkle, the one you hear when you’re watching a movie and a phone rings somewhere off camera, unseen and slightly unnerving. I jumped up and ran to the door and yanked it open. Tires churning, the UPS truck took off, throwing gravel at a speed that would be criminal, provided a policeman lurked in the bushes, as they are wont to do around here. I glanced down at my feet. The box lying […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Europe, Food writing, France, French Cooking • Tags: Alexander Hamilton Sands, Archie Graham-Palmer, Auguste Escoffier, Charles Herman Senn, Gloucester Road School of Cookery, M. A. Fairclough, The Ideal Cookery Book

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

The Dame* with a Pot and a Pen

June 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

She’s a little bit like liver, you see. You either hate her or love her. Elizabeth David, according to this blog post from The Dabbler in the U.K., deserves a lot more kudos than she’s getting: I confess to having fallen just a little in love with David since I first discovered her books a few years ago. She was wilful, adventurous, determined and uncompromising. But for more than anything, I love her for significantly improving the quality of my […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking • Tags: Cooking of Provincial France, Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking, Haiti, M. F. K. Fisher, Order of the British Empire, The Dabbler

Advice for Food Writers

June 14, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The buzz not long ago came from the keyboard of Amanda Hesser, a former food writer for The New York Times, who proved with a click of the mouse that controversy gets people reading, Tweeting, Facebooking, and just plain screaming. Or sniffling. Ah yes, that last one.  I hate to say, is what almost happened to me. What a tear-jerker! If Amanda Hesser now struggles to be paid for writing about food, where does that leave the rest of us […]

Categories: Books, Cooking, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food Columns, Food News, Food writing • Tags: Amanda Hesser, New York Times, Trish Deseine

Dawn of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends

June 12, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Rich with the flavor of words . . . a marvelous and kaleidoscopic view of Paris . . .” Gazing on Paris now from the vantage point of the Pont Neuf or the top of the Eiffel Tower or down the Champs Élysées, it’s nearly impossible to grasp the fact that in 1871 Paris lay smoldering, burning in the same way you’d rid yourself of your stinky garbage after a week without trash pickup. The Franco-Prussian War left hundreds of […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Critic's Corner, France • Tags: Alfred Dreyfus, Basilique du Sacré Coeur, Belle Époque, Berthe Morisot, Communards, Dawn of the Belle Epoque, Eiffel Tower, Erik Satie, Eugene Manet, Franco-Prussian War, Mary McAuliffe, Paris, Paris Discovered: Explorations in the City of Light, Paris Notes, Roger Shattuck, Sarah Bernhardt, The Banquet Years, Victor Hugo

The [Fatal] Flaw*: What’s Wrong with [Food] Writing Now

June 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Writing is not about the “me,” it’s about the “not me.”  This is always true, even in personal essay and memoir. ~~ Michael Ruhlman Something seems wrong these days with food writing in America. And, to be honest, not just food writing. What is the problem? You’re probably getting ready to hit DELETE. But hold on, hold on, please. The other day, trying to come to grips with some rather negative feelings about being a writer and the way the […]

Categories: Books, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food writing • Tags: Confessions of Nat Turner, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong, Kate Christensen, M. F. K. Fisher, Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison, William Styron

When it Comes to Writing, Define Your Terms

June 5, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. ~~ M. F. K. Fisher With every story ever told, there’s usually a beginning, at least in an ideal world. The reader progresses toward a soft plump middle, where the real action occurs, like a jelly doughnut harboring cherry filling. And, if the author is a considerate sort, the ending makes sense, too, recalling the finale of any satisfying meal. That’s the definition of writing, […]

Categories: Cooking, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food Columns, Food writing • Tags: Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth David, Gourmet, Joseph Wechsberg, Ludwig Bemelmans, M. F. K. Fisher, New Yorker, Ruth Reichl

Paris to the Past – Traveling Through French History by Train: A Book to Love and Cherish

June 2, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“If you’ve even the slightest interest in France and her history, you will enjoy this highly innovative book. If you love France, and you’re a committed Francophile, you will swoon over Paris to the Past. As Ina Caro writes in her introduction to this delicious book, ‘I charted a route you could follow.’ And indeed she does.” What is it about trains that fascinates people so much? Obsessive collectors stockpile toy trains in their basements, singers like Johnny Cash sing longingly of […]

Categories: Book Reviews, France, French Cooking, Reference • Tags: André Le Nôtre, France, Ina Caro, Paris to the Past, Rail Europe, Robert Caro, Travelogues

Culinary Memoirs: What’s the Point?

May 29, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

They usually start by describing a kitchen from that vast desert common to all of us: memory. Filled with nostalgia, and sometimes not a little anger, culinary memoirs tend to hover around the memoirist’s stomach, in what I would call extreme navel-gazing. What is culinary memoir? And why are there so many of them springing up like mushrooms on a wet spring morning (over 250 published since Ruth Reichl’s 1999 Tender at the Bone)? And – more to the point […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Books, Cooking, Critic's Corner • Tags: Art of Eating, Autobiography, bildungsroman, Cuisine, Culinary memoir, Della Lutes, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Julia Watson, Julie & Julia, M. F. K. Fisher, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Memoir, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Ruth Reichl, Serve It Forth, Sidonie Smith, St. Augustine, Tender at the Bone, The Country Kitchen, The Feasts of Autolycus, The Physiology of Taste

Becoming a Writer

May 23, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

It’s funny how things work out. You pick up a book in a bookstore or a friend presses you to read something, “Hey, I KNOW you’ll love this.” You read the words on the page and suddenly you’re soaring above your bedroom ceiling, your sorryass childhood forgotten, your past mistakes and your current cares evaporate, like rain splashing on a steaming hot summer sidewalk. You learn about a larger world when writers release their words into the Universe. As I […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Books, Editorials, Food writing • Tags: Food writing, M. F. K. Fisher, Writing

Recipes from the White Hart Inn: An 18th-Century Cookbook for Today’s Cook

May 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The writing of cookbooks often becomes fraught with injured egos and accusations bordering on the libelous. William Verral’s Recipes from the White Hart Inn provides a splendid example of that truism. During the heyday of Whig political power in eighteenth-century England, the Duke of Newcastle enjoyed the services of a chef named M. Pierre de St.-Clouet until that gentleman decided to cut and run to the service of another, William Keppel (Earl of Albemarle), the Duke’s friend and then the British ambassador […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Chefs, Cookbooks, Critic's Corner, England, English Cooking, Europe, France, French Cooking • Tags: A Complete System of Cookery, Clouet, Duke of Newcastle, Earl of Albemarle, Recipes from the White Hart Inn, Thomas Gray, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Whig Party, White Hart, William Keppel, William Verral

An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–1831) by Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, Translated by Daniel L. Newman

May 14, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“For readers interested in early encounters between European and Arabic culture, An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–1831) provides an alluring glimpse into the life and thoughts of one man who recorded Parisian life around the time that Orientalism firmly captured the European imagination.” Rare is the native English speaker who reads and writes Arabic, classical or otherwise. And thus a vast body of literary work lies inaccessible to those who desire to increase their understanding and appreciation of the Arabic-speaking […]

Categories: Arab cooking, Book Reviews, Egypt, France, French Cooking • Tags: al-Tahtawi, Arabs, Daniel L. Newman, Egypt, France, Ottoman Empire, Travel memoirs

La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life: Explaining the French

May 7, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In celebration of the 2012 French elections … “. . . your best bet for understanding the French would be to pick up La Séduction and read it at your leisure, preferably with a glass of wine and Debussy playing on your iPod.” While making coffee one morning in Paris, where she now lives, journalist Elaine Sciolino noticed the slogan on the Carte Noire coffee bag. The company touted its product as “A Coffee Named Desire.” Ms. Sciolino, author ofPersian Mirrors: The […]

Categories: Book Reviews, France • Tags: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Elaine Sciolino, François Hollande, France

Hog Butchering Time with Harry Crews

April 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I came within ax-handle length of hog butchering only once. And that was enough for me. My grandparents lived agrarian lives and they carried over many of their habits to their small acreage in southern California, where they raised chickens and rabbits for their table. I, on the other hand, grew up in the shadows of a land-grant university. The cows in the Dairy Science barn were like zoo animals, their slobbering tongues licking me when I offered them an […]

Categories: Books, Pork, Southern Food • Tags: Bacon County Georgia, Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Harry Crews, Hog butchering, Southern cooking

War. Cook. Eat. Love.

April 10, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey* (Free Press, 2011) , isn’t the first person to cook her way through trying times. Nor will she be the last. But the makeshift kitchens where Ms. Ciezadlo peeled purple eggplant or stirred onions caramelizing for Mjadara Hamra (Lentils with Bulgur Wheat) happened to be in a couple of war zones, neither one in a New York high-rise or a Tuscan olive grove. No, unlike the heartbroken cook in Lily Prior’s La Cucina […]

Categories: Arab cooking, Book Reviews, Food News, Food writing, Garlic, Iran, Middle East • Tags: Annia Ciezadlo, Baghdad, Christian Science Monitor, Day of Honey, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Mohamad Bazzi, New York Times

Assimilating “The Other”

March 15, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Leslie Page Moch, author of Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe Since 1650 (1992, Indiana U. Press), has written another book, Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris (Duke University Press, 2012). Her book promises insights into the process of integration, a very useful understanding of present-day migrants in France, people from France’s former colonies: Beginning in the 1870s, a great many Bretons—men and women from Brittany, a region in western France—began arriving in Paris. Every age has its pariahs, […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Europe, France, Reference • Tags: Bretons, Brittany, France, Integration, Leslie Page Moch, Migration, Paris, The Other

Who were the Cooks? What We Know (More or Less) about Kitchen Servants (1)

March 6, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

While studying The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (Steel and Gardiner, 1888), I found the instructions concerning servants a fascinating insight into the mindset of the authors and – by extension – their time period. And the current intense interest in the British TV series “Downton Abbey” allows us to answer some of  the questions of how servants, their roles, and their presence, made possible many things in history that we take for granted. Cooking, for one thing. And not […]

Categories: African Cooking, American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, French Cooking, Reference • Tags: Downton Abbey, Hannah Glasse, House & Garden, Household manuals, Julian Fellowes, Servants, Slaves, Southern cooking

Heat and Dust and Cooks: The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook

February 10, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“The tale of the British in India holds keys to the universal story of colonization. A no-nonsense book, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook provides a very engrossing narrative and amplifies the story of how a small island off the coast of Europe managed to run an empire of millions of souls. It can be said that it all began in the kitchen. . . .” European women who lived in 19th and 20th century foreign outposts sought authoritative voices to guide […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, English Cooking, India, Reference • Tags: Culinary History, Flora Annie Steel, Food History, Grace Gardiner

The Roger Smith Cookbook Conference

February 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Just a reminder that you will be able to see some 10 of the 28 sessions live and for free on Friday and Saturday, February 10 and 11, 2012. See schedule of free sessions below. To brighten up a dreary February in 2011, a group of food scholars and cookbook writers started a cookbook conference. It was so successful that they’re doing it again this year, bigger and better. Unfortunately, this year’s Cookbook Conference is completely sold out, and there’s a […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food News, Food writing, India, Methods • Tags: Cookbooks, Culinary History, Food History, Roger Smith Cookbook Conference

The Ancient Sin of Gluttony: What’s Really Behind the Shunning of Paula Deen

January 26, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

We need strategies that do not drag us back to the dispositional focus of the Inquisition’s witch-hunts, that propelled the notion of the “Satan Within,” when much good and evil is the product of situational and systemic forces acting on the same ordinary, often good people.  ~~ Philip Zimbardo  It’s been with a great deal of amazement that I’ve watched the reaction to the American food-media celebrity Paula Deen’s announcement of her Type 2 diabetes diagnosis three years ago and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food News, Food writing, France, French Cooking, United States • Tags: Culinary History, Food History, Gluttony, Paula Dean, Southern cooking