Category Archives: Reference

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

* 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

A German ornament depicting a baker. (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

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

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

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

Complete-Indian-Housekeeper and Cook cover

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

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A Few Marrons Glacés for the Season … A Gift for You

December 16, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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Memoirs of a Breton Peasant: Sifting Through the Nostalgia

November 21, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

It’s not often that the words of poor peasants appear in print. And when they do, it’s a cause for rejoicing, especially for scholars pertaining to the Braudel/Certeau school of the history of daily life. What’s more, our current nostalgic longings for a more paradisiacal past evaporate quickly in the light of these often ruthlessly real portrayals of life. Even though he’s been dead for over 100 years, nineteenth-century Breton peasant Jean-Marie Déguignet would be rubbing his hands together in glee […]

Categories: Book Reviews, France, French Cooking, Reference • Tags: France, French Cooking, Jean-Marie Déguignet, Memoirs, Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, Peasants

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Modernist Cuisine: French-Influenced, Of Course (Hint: “Cuisine”)

September 17, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Me, Etc.

August 26, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dear readers of Gherkins & Tomatoes /Cornichons & Tomates, Soon I will embark on a great adventure, doing research on France’s colonial empire at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Archives nationales d’outre mer in Aix-en-Provence, thanks to a grant from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Until I return, I will not have the time to devote to posting the intricate blog posts that I love to research, write, and share. I trust that you, gentle readers, will however […]

Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Algeria, French Cooking, Libraries, Local foods, Photography, Reference, Senegal, Tunisia, Vietnam • Tags: Aix-en-Provence, Archives, Archives nationales d'outre mer, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Colonial France

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The Cookbooks on Their Shelves: The First English-Language French Cookbooks in the United States, or, Who was Sulpice Barué?

May 17, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Much has been made of Thomas Jefferson’s influence on the “Frenchification” of cuisine in the young United States and in American diplomatic circles. Just take a look at “The French Touch,” a chapter in Even Jones’s American Food: The Gastronomic Story (1990) or Karen Hess’s “Thomas Jefferson’s Table: Evidence and Influences,” in Dining at Monticello (2005). But, as we have seen, other factors — including the hiring of French chefs by the British upper-class and the arrival of the French […]

Categories: Chefs, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Reference • Tags: Cuisine Francaise, Eliza Leslie, France, French Cooking, French Domestic Cookery, La Petite Cuisiniere Habile, Louis Eustache Ude, Madame Louise-Auguste B.-Utrecht-Friedel, Sulpice Barué, The French Cook, Vincent La Chapelle

Auguste Escoffier: Le Guide Culinaire, Revised

May 16, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

New, revised version of Escoffier’s premier work, unabridged fourth edition from 1921. In English, glory be. Translated from the 1921 Fourth Edition, this revision includes all-new Forewords by Heston Blumenthal, chef-owner of the Michelin three-star-rated Fat Duck restaurant, and Chef Tim Ryan, President of The Culinary Institute of America, along with Escoffier’s original Forewords, a memoir of the great chef by his grandson Pierre, and more than 5,000 narrative recipes for all the staples of French cuisine. Now that’s enough […]

Categories: Books, Chefs, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Reference • Tags: Auguste Escoffier, Chefs, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking

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

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Idylls of Cuisine, #80

September 19, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: France, French Cooking, Mushrooms, Paintings, Reference • Tags: Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Larousse Gastronomique, Mushrooms

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No More “Cookery”: New Library of Congress Subject Heading

July 22, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Culinary researchers: The new, official Library of Congress subject heading for over 800 cooking and food-related subjects changed recently from “cookery” to “cooking.” Here’s the official document, “Cooking and Cookbooks H 1475.”

Categories: Cooking, Libraries, Methods, Reference • Tags: Culinary Research, Library of Congress Subject Headings

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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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Lent, According to American Cookery, the Magazine, That is

February 26, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Lent can be a really interesting time of the year. For some of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, a mere glimpse outside our windows forces the introspection and reflection behind the whole idea of Lent. Who wants to walk around out there in that howling wind and blowing snow? Better to stay inside and contemplate life’s meaning. (Or whatever.) And, as we’ve talked about before, Lent comes at a time where food used to be rather scarce and so […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, American Cooking, Cooking, Lent, Menus, Reference, Spinach, Sweet Potatoes • Tags: Africa, American Cookery magazine, Boston Cooking School, Lent, Menus, Spinach, Sweet Potatoes

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Food Studies: A How-To Guidebook, a Bit Underdone

February 23, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Since one of my primary interests is methodology for studying food in history, when I learned that Berg Publishers recently came out with Food Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods (2009), you can imagine how quickly I got my hands on a copy of this book written by Jeff Miller, a sociologist, and Jonathan Deutsch, an expert on hospitality management with an interest in nutrition. My hopes towered as high as a golden soufflé. But, to paraphrase what Forrest Gump […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Books, Reference • Tags: Carol Counihan, Food Studies, Jeff Miller, Jeffrey Sobal, Jonathan Deutsch, Ken Albala, Methods, Psyche Williams-Forson, Research methodology

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Jane Carson’s Colonial Virginia Cookery: Procedures, Equipment, and Ingredients in Colonial Cooking

December 4, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Colonial Virginia Cookery: Procedures, Equipment, and Ingredients in Colonial Cooking, by Jane Carson (1968, reprinted 1985). Filled with the kind of details that come only from wallowing in primary sources, Jane Carson’s synthesis of several cookbooks written by a number of seventeenth- and and eighteenth-century English cookery authors offers modern readers an interpretation of how daily cooking took place in colonial Virginia. The most popular English cookbooks of the times, according to Carson, were Mrs. Smith’s (The Compleat Housewife, 1727), […]

Categories: American Cooking, Book Reviews, Cooking, Reference, Southern Food • Tags: Colonial Virginia, Cooking equipment, Cooking Techniques, Hearth cooking, Jane Carson, Southern cooking

No Thanks to Marco Polo: An Encyclopedia of Italy’s Pasta Shapes

November 6, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Marco Polo returned to Italy from his Chinese travels in 1296. The myth, legend, what have you, credits him with introducing pasta into Italy’s culinary repertoire. But Marco Polo did NOT bring pasta to Italy. And 73-year-old Italian author Oretta Zanini de Vita wants you to know that, immediately, upfront and center. Zanini de Vita says, Dried pasta, the kind made with durum wheat, is found in Italy from about A.D. 800. It was in fact the Muslim occupiers of […]

Categories: Archaeology, Book Reviews, China, Italian Cooking, Italy, Local foods, Pasta, Reference • Tags: Archaeology, China, Encyclopedia of Pasta, Italian Cooking, Italy, Marco Polo, Oretta Zanini de Vita, Pasta

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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

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Fermented Foods of the World

September 18, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

For those interested in the impact of fermentation on human history, here’s a useful tool: Fermented Foods of the World: A Dictionary and Guide, by Geoffrey Campbell-Platt (Butterworths, 1987). Now somewhat rare, with a price tag of over $600.00 for at least one used copy available online, it’s not a book that should be checked out of the library, but should remain labeled “non-circulating” in the reference sections of libraries. Although the printing date of 1987 may seem a little […]

Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Asia, Cooking, Europe, Fermentation, Methods, Reference • Tags: Dictionaries, Fermentation, Food Studies, Reference Books