Category Archives: Bibliographies

*”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

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

SUGARPLUM VISIONS: Christmas Cookies

December 20, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

…visions of sugarplums danced in their heads. ~~Clement C. Moore~~ ” ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” Happy Holidays to all readers and visitors to Gherkins & Tomatoes / Cornichons et Tomates! I will “see” you again on January 2. ‘Tis soon the season to be jolly. And to bake cookies, the sugarplums of today. I’m about to head out to the kitchen to do just that right now. For many Americans, especially those of Northern European descent, Christmas without special […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Christmas, Cookies • Tags: Bibliographies, Christmas, Cookies, Cooking, Culinary History, Food, Food History, Gingerbread man, Recipes

French cooks Leon Isnard cuisine africaine

Léon Isnard: Bringing the Cuisines of Africa to France

June 24, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“It seems that the word couscous is a Gallic version of “rac keskes,” which means “crushed small.” ~ Leon Isnard Whether you think about it consciously or not, the nineteenth-century European drive for overseas colonies still molds our world. Ever since the Portuguese sailed for Prince Henry the Navigator out of Sagres, an ocean-facing place now boasting a top-flight pousada, the world was destined never to be the same again. France grabbed just as hard for her share of the […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Algeria, Bibliographies, Chefs, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Morocco, Tunisia • Tags: Algeria, France, Henry the Navigator, Léon Isnard, Le Grand Hôtel Bourelly, Maghreb, Oran

Versailles, The King's Kitchen Garden (Photo credit: Pete Reed)

Le Potager du Roi, a Kitchen Garden Fit for a King

April 11, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party"

FOOD FOR ART’S SAKE: Eating with the Impressionists

February 7, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In celebrating art, the Western world owes a tremendous debt to France. Once a mecca for Impressionist artists and others, France nurtured both their souls and their bellies. And in France, art goes back a long way, back to the time of Cro-Magnon man who left his indelible marks on the dim damp walls of the caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne area of southwestern France.

Categories: Art, Bibliographies, Food Columns, French Cooking, Mushrooms, Pies--Savory, Potatoes, Recipes • Tags: Artists, Claude Monet, Cuisine Francaise, Fish, Food, France, French Cooking, Impressionism, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Mushrooms, Potato, Quiche, Recipes, Salon des Refusés, Shrimp

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: M. F. K. FISHER

August 30, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Anyone who reveres food and eats oysters, who yearns for security and longs for love, and who seeks out experiences and thinks much must discover M. F. K. Fisher. Just who was M. F. K. Fisher and why did James Beard, that gentle giant of the food world, call her a national treasure? And why did John Updike refer to her as “the poet of the appetites”?

Categories: Apples, Beef, Bibliographies, Desserts, Food Columns, French Cooking, Recipes, Salads • Tags: Cooks, Desserts, Food, Food writing, France, French Cooking, M. F. K. Fisher

What’s New in Culinary Books

July 22, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Pigs and hams, barbecue and ice cream — all are foods associated with joy and love and celebration. In the United States, anyway. And writers take these foods and weave words around and around like so many carefully knitted stitches, creating new books, making this year an exciting time for food and history lovers. The increasing onslaught of books on preserving and preparing traditional foods promises to create a generation of cooks far more savvy than those of the previous […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Cookbooks, Food News, Food writing, Methods • Tags: Food History, New Publications

The Fiction of Food: Good Reads

July 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A novel thing, novels about food? Not really, not any more. It seems like every publisher, and every writer, is racing behind the food-as-novel bandwagon, grasping at the flying straws, straining to hop aboard before the cart crashes. Like all fads, trends, what-have-you crazes, some of these novels succeed, while the others appall, so frightfully bad and boring that you can only blush with embarrassment for the proud authors. If you have time to laze about this summer, here’s a […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Food writing • Tags: Food, Literature, Novels

Tilting at Windmills with Don Quixote, Or, A Meditation on Spanish Herbals

May 27, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ll confess something here: until just recently, I never read Don Quixote, except for snippets here and there. No, thanks to the preferences of my Spanish professors, instead I spent days swooning over the lyricism of poets Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda or stumbling through conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s account of Hernando Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. That’s really too bad, because even though Díaz recounts vivid details of the markets of the prehispanic Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (now Mexico […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Cookbooks, Cooking, Spain, Spanish Cooking • Tags: acerca de la material medicinal, Andrés de Laguna, Arnald of Villanova, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Don Quixote, Federico García Lorca, Libro de Medicina llamado Macer, Longaniza, Luis Lobera de Ávila, Macer Floridus, Melitta Weiss Adamson, Miguel de cervantes, Nicolás de Monardes, Odo of Meung, Pablo Neruda, Pedacio Dioscorides Anarzabeo, Penelope Casas, Rafael Chabrán, Rosemary, Sancho Panza

Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg

December 7, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Now Christmas comes, ‘tis fit that we Should feast and sing, and merry be; Keep open house, let fiddlers play, A fig for cold, sing care away; And may they who thereat repine, On brown bread and small beer dine. Virginia Almanack 1766 To paraphrase former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld: There’s the Williamsburg Christmas we ought to have and the Williamsburg Christmas we actually have. And thus are culinary myths born. Modern-day Williamsburg Christmas only faintly resembles Williamsburg Christmases […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Christmas, Cooking, English Cooking, Oysters, Southern Food • Tags: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Christmas, Colonial Williamsburg, English Cooking, Southern cooking, Virginia

Hunger The-Four-Horsemen-Of-The-Apocalypse

Hunger is the Best Sauce

November 11, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers. [Lat., Nec rationem patitur, nec aequitate mitigatur nec ulla prece flectitur, populus esuriens.] De Brevitate Vitoe (XVIII), Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) Chronic hunger is something that most of us in the United States will never really know.* Yet we, like most humans, fear it. Just as people have feared it for centuries. That fear permeated ancient myths and led to such collective cultural […]

Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Bibliographies, Bread, Cooking, Ethiopia, Europe, Evolution, Italian Cooking, Local foods, Methods, United States • Tags: Africa, Discorso sopra la carestia e fame, Famine, Giovan Battista Segni, Hunger, United States

Ghosts of Gourmet: Ann Seranne

October 17, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

About three days ago, caught in the throes of egg cookery, I realized that Ann Seranne’s name doesn’t ring a whole lot of bells these days in food circles. Who? Even Alice Arndt’s celebrated Culinary Biographies fails to mention Seranne. We shouldn’t ignore this lady and her place in the pantheon of culinarians contributing to the world of food. After all, not only did Seranne serve as executive editor of now-defunct Gourmet magazine, she worked as food editor of the […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Cookbooks, Food writing • Tags: Ann Seranne, Bibliographies, Complete Book of Egg Cookery, Cookbooks, Cooks, The Art of Egg Cookery

A Honey of a Bibliography

October 2, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals. ~~Sue Hubbell, A Book of Bees Here are some of the many resources I’ve relied on for the series on honey and bees (9/28/09 through 10/1/09). If you read no other material on bees and beekeeping, be sure to read Dr. Eva Crane’s work. Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind, by Stephen Buchmann and Banning Repplier (2005) In Letters from the Hive, Professor Stephen Buchmann takes us into the […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Books, Reference • Tags: Bees, Bibliographies, Honey Bees

Coming Up: New Food Memoirs & Other Treats

August 29, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Food memoirs form just one of many research items on the list of materials used by culinary historians. In rounding out the larger picture of just what was going on in a specific time in history and related to the life of a specific individual, food memoirs cannot be beat. The following memoirs and other food-history tomes will be out and on shelves soon: Elena Kostioukovitch’s book is more narrative history than personal story, but who cares? It still sounds […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Italian Cooking • Tags: Confections of a Closet Master Baker, Cookbook Trends, Cooks, Elena Kostioukovitch, Gesine Bullock-Prado, Jason Epstein, La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy, Methods, Why Italians Love To Talk About Food

Old Cookbooks Online — Some New Goodies

August 22, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

165 of Virginia Tech’s Newman Library’s collection of thousands of rare and antique cookbooks just went digital. Most of the books stem from the late nineteenth century and many illustrate the trend toward scientific home making, or home economics. Browse the entire list HERE. Some of the highlights include: Edward Smith’s Foods. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873. Maria E. Rundell. A New System of Domestic Cookery: Founded Upon Principles of Economy. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1844. (Mentioned in […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Books, Cookbooks, Libraries • Tags: Cookbooks, Home Economics, Libraries, Online Cookbooks, Virginia Tech

The Random Herbalist: Books About Monastic and Medieval Gardens

July 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I find the following books enlightening, soothing, and motivating. My plan is to create/design a medieval/monastic herb garden over the upcoming winter and plant it starting next spring.* Monastic Gardens, by Mick Hales (2000) Private worlds glimpsed by a privileged few, monasteries have long maintained an aura of mystery. Outsiders imagine the silent seclusion, the austere settings, the rigorous routines of a religious life. But these sacred places share a common bond with the secular realm. Monks and nuns, too, […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Gardens, Herbs, Monasteries • Tags: Bibliographies, Brother Cadfael, Chicken, Fennel, Gardens, Herbs, Hildegard of Bingen, Medieval Gardens, Monasteries, Monastic Gardens, Monks

Reveling in Books: DIY (Old) Food, Knowledge Lost and Now Found

June 11, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Want to make your own cheese? How about pickles or chow-chow? Sausage and headcheese? Raise a couple of cows or keep a flock of geese? At a time when people want, no, need, to know the how-tos of old foodways, it seems that there’s a book for making just about everything. Fortunately, because this knowledge is dying out along with the older generation, many of whom had hands-on ties to pre-World-War-II American agriculture one way or another. If they themselves […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Bibliographies, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, French Cooking, Locavores • Tags: Agriculture, American Food, Barnyard in Your Backyard, Bibliographies, Canning, Charcuterie, Cheesemaking, Culinary History, Food Preservation, Foodways, Foxfire Books, Locavores, Meat-Smoking, Root Cellaring, Wood-fired ovens

American Cookbooks: History 101 (II)

April 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Continued from April 28, 2009: By the 1820s other cookbooks followed, The Virginia Housewife among them, written by Mary Randolph, a member of one of Virginia’s first families. These cookbooks were different from what we know today. They failed to mention of the size of the dishes used in baking, the number of portions the recipe made, the temperature at which to cook the dish, or even details about the addition of flour. All (or nearly all) cooks at that […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Cookbooks • Tags: Charity Cookbooks, Cookbooks, Cooking, Eliza Leslie, Food, Mary Randolph, Miss beecher's Domestic Receipt Book, Southern cooking, The Virginia Housewife

“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

First You Settle the Pampas: Food in Colonial Argentina and Today (Conclusion)

December 4, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Throughout the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, the Roman Catholic Church proselytized the vast distances and founded convents. And the nuns who lived in those convents, and their Indian servants, soon became known for intricate sweets and other confections that had roots in the sweets that predominated in Moorish-ruled Spain for eight centuries until the Moors were expelled by the Catholic monarchy of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1502. Lay sisters did most of the cooking in the convents, where class […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Latin America • Tags: Argentina, Cooking, Food, Latin America, Recipes

Celebrate Colonial American Cooking: Cookbooks for Thanksgiving and Christmas

November 13, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Want to celebrate American food history and ingenuity this year? The great state of Virginia gave birth to eight U.S. presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. And they all liked to eat, some more than others. In fact, Thomas Jefferson still claims the title of being the most gourmet-minded of the lot. The following books will help you greatly in planning meals, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Cooking, English Cooking • Tags: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Colonial America, Colonial Virginia, Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, Food

Cooking Italian Food — Rooted in the Past

October 14, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Note: For further reading on cooking, spirituality, and religion, check out my work-in-progress “Food, Spirituality, and Religion Bibliography,” which right now tends to lean a bit more toward Christianity, but will eventually reflect more in-depth aspects of other religious traditions. I find the first-hand experience of cooking delicious Italian food to be one of my callings in life, one of life’s endless riches. Finding the right recipe for the ingredients I have on hand, fussing with my tiny pantry space, […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Italian Cooking • Tags: Cooking, Food, Italian Cooking, Spirituality, St. Benedict

Arab Food and Cuisine — Inspirations

September 24, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Cooking in the Arab world, in general, adheres to one of the most healthful food patterns on earth, probably healthier in many ways than the Mediterranean model (and that is the stuff of a special future post). The freshest food, the most beautiful colors, the greatest imagination in wielding the pan, this is what the food of the Middle East offers. But most of all, I hold women like this woman in my heart, because she is Everywoman, Arab and […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Middle East • Tags: Arab cooking, Bibliographies, Books, Cooking, Food, Middle East

Turkey Talk and Stuff: A Gobble Ahead

August 30, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“When the wine has stopped fermenting in November, the turkey is ready for roasting.” –Italian Proverb– The slight chill in the air lately conjures up dreams of fall nights replete with soup and crunching leaves underfoot and turkey dinners. Wild turkeys dart in and out of the bushes around the woods near my house. And I whisper to them, “Godspeed, run, for Thanksgiving will be upon you before you know.” Some people consider the turkey, and not the bald eagle, […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Cuban food, English Cooking, Recipes, Thanksgiving, Turkey • Tags: Bibliographies, Cooking, Food, Jamestown, Pilgrims, Plymouth, Thanksgiving, Turkey, Turkey Dressing, Turkey Stuffing

Cooks’ Quirks, Complete with a List of Good Reads at the End

August 22, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Quirky cooks—they’re everywhere, if you look. Read Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe detective series and you contend with chef Fritz Brenner, whose kitchen is like the Pentagon—impenetrable. Turn to Madeleine Kamman’s book, In Madeleine’s Kitchen, and you hear James Beard saying, in the preface (and in an understatement), that Madeleine “is a very outspoken person on the subject of food.” And that is the secret: a true cook is one tough customer and nothing but the best will do or else. […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Chicken, French Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Chefs, Cooking, Cooks, Escoffier, Food, French Cooking

Spice Display (Used by permission of Tinou Bao.)

Spice of History, or the Long Winding Road and Some Spice Blends for Today

August 14, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Variety’s the spice of life, That gives it all its flavor.” ~~William Cowper, English Poet~~ Picture narrow passages, in some exotic locale, thronged with humanity peering at bulging baskets of spices and herbs, heavily laden donkeys swaying along behind them. You’re breathing the smoke-filled air, the smell of the smoke competing with the odor of freshly baked bread and strong brewed coffee. Throw in a little diesel fuel odor, too. But most of all, it’s the whiff of the spices […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Recipes • Tags: Age of Exploration, Food, Middle Ages, Recipes, Spices

The Metamorphosis of Italian Cooking in America: The Myth and the Reality

August 11, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Typical Italian-American dishes that one will not find on menus in Italy: Stuffed Shells Penne Alla Vodka Spaghetti w/Garlic and Oil Penne Ala Bolognese Baked Ziti Pasta and Broccoli Pasta Primavera Macaroni and Cheese Fettuccine Alfredo Vegetable Lasagna Chicken Cutlet Parmigiana Chicken Francese Chicken Cacciatore Cheesecake Italian Rum Cake And the litany of differences continues on, reality blurring with myths and stereotypes. Italian-American cooking differs a great deal from Italian cooking as known in the various regions of Italy. The […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Food writing, Italian Cooking • Tags: Bibliographies, Cookbooks, Food, Italian Cooking

African Cooking and Food: A Select Bibliography

August 1, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The Africa News Cookbook: African Cooking for Western Kitchens. New York: Penguin, 1985. Ayensu, Dinah Ameley. The Art of West African cooking. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1972. Bayley, Monica. Black Africa Cook Book. San Francisco, Calif. : Determined Productions, 1977. Beier, Georgina. They Keep Their Fires Burning: Conversation on Food, Manners and Hospitality in Africa. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth African Studies Series 72, 2005. Boahene, Christine Joyce. Recipes for West African Foods. Accra, Ghana: Black Mask Ltd., 1994. Board on Science […]

Categories: Africa, Bibliographies, Cookbooks • Tags: Africa, Bibliographies, Cookbooks, Food

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life