Singkong, Manioc, Mandioca, Mandió, Tapioca, Yuca: Singing the Praises of Manihot esculenta (Cassava)

May 10, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Chipa, chipa!” yelled the little Paraguyan girl – all of maybe 8 years old, thrusting a large flat basket draped with a smudged white cloth against the open window of the bus. I smelled the warm cassava bread even before she flicked off the cloth with a flourish, much as a magician reveals the white rabbit cowering under his top hat. I pointed to the bread closest to me and she held out her hand. Payment first, then food. I […]

Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Cassava, Cooking, Food writing, Latin America, Local foods, Paraguay, Photography • Tags: Brown streak disease, Cassava, Chipa, Latin American cooking, Manioc, Manioc flour, Paraguay, Photography

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

Banishing the Mustiness: What Cleaning Out My Spice Cupboard Told Me about My Life

April 15, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I reached into my spice cupboard for cinnamon and came up with cumin instead. As I pulled out a bag of white peppercorns and an empty jar that once contained coriander seeds, I knew I needed to do it. Clean out the bags, boxes, and bottles that hampered my cooking and my life more and more every day. My spice cupboard needed a thorough scrubbing and weeding out. And so I sat down on the floor – my spice cupboard […]

Categories: Cooking, Food writing, Photography, Spices • Tags: Food and Related Products, Herbs, Seasonings, Spices

Preserving Food Preserves Life, or, Mutton in the Pot

April 10, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

At first blush, it appears that people slaughtered sheep, being smaller than cattle or pigs, to cook and eat them in their entirety for feasts, or perhaps in times of famine. A closer look at the literature reveals that people also borrowed many of the methods used for preserving pork to mutton, including something called Macon, which took the place of bacon in Britain during the Second World War.* Many other ways for preserving mutton stem from the British Isles. […]

Categories: England, English Cooking, Food writing, Lamb, Mutton, Photography, Sheep • Tags: C. Anne Wilson, Darina Allen, David Hackett Fischer, Faroe Islands, Food Preservation, Hannah Glasse, Jennifer Stead, Lamb, Mutton, Peter Brears, Potted meat, Professor Gamgee

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

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

With Roots in Africa: Okra, a Veritable World Traveler

February 22, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Although my father used to fry fresh okra, rolling it first in beaten egg and then coating it with crushed saltine crackers, he never grew it in the vast backyard gardens of my childhood. So, quite by accident, I learned about the okra plant in an entirely different place. Rigoberto and his cousin dug the garden patch, stirring up the Honduran earth with a rusted shovel and a hoe missing a screw, which made a loud squeak each time it […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, American Cooking, Cooking, Ethiopia, Honduras, Local foods, Okra, Photography • Tags: Africa, Brunswick Stew, Charleston Receipts, Cornbread Nation, Ethiopia, Gumbo, Honduras, Karen hess, Margaret Holmes, Okra

The South is Rising Again: The 2013 James Beard Nominees

February 20, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In the culinary world, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize or the Oscars comes down to the James Beard Awards. This year, the list of nominees includes a large number of Southern chefs, restaurants, and other food-related entities. What’s so fascinating about this list lies in the evidence of increasing diversity – it’s not all barbecue and fried chicken and French or Italian. A prime example of the mixing and stirring of cultures that’s been going on for hundreds of […]

Categories: American Cooking, Chefs, Cooking, Restaurants, Southern Food, United States • Tags: Chefs, James Beard Awards, Restaurants, Southern cooking, Southern Food

Are Pole Beans Like Cows? A Crashing Tale

February 17, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Pole beans are sort of like cows. If you keep milking a cow, she produces milk. Likewise, if you keep picking pole beans, the plant keeps producing. Pole beans are not like bush beans, which render up a crop and then die back. I call them pole beans, but some people call them flat beans down here. That’s fine. I intended to write about pole beans from a practical angle. You know, to grow them, you need eight-foot poles for […]

Categories: Beans, Food Columns, Food writing, Southern Food • Tags: Pole beans, Southern cooking, Southern Food

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

* “We raise the wheat, they give us the corn” : a reflection on life in antebellum Virginia

February 4, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Not too long ago, before the snow fell and kept falling, I drove down to Critz, Virginia, the homeplace of Virginia tobacco baron, J. R. Reynolds. Reynolds’s parents, Hardin Reynolds and Nancy Jane Cox Reynolds, owned  several hundred slaves, who worked the 717-acre Rock Spring plantation. One of these slaves went by the name of “Kitty,” a cook so celebrated that her picture now hangs in the restored cookhouse. Nancy Jane – who could apparently write a fine hand – […]

Categories: Africa, Southern Food, Sweet Potatoes • Tags: Critz, R. J. Reynolds, Slavery, Southern cooking, Southern Food, Sweet Potatoes, Virginia

*”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

* 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

The Saga of a Virginia Coal Town (Part 1): By the Sweat of Your Face You Shall Eat Bread, till You Return to the Ground, for Out of it You were Taken

December 13, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I wandered again to my home in the mountains, Where in youth’s early dawn I was happy and free. I looked for my friends, but I never could find them, I found they were all rank strangers to me. (Traditional bluegrass lyrics, “Rank Stranger”) As I drove along the winding roads toward the coal town of Pocahontas, Virginia, dilapidated trailers and several abandoned Victorian houses lined the way, their filigreed porches sagging under the weight of the wild brush, vines […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cabbage, Cooking, Food writing, Hungary, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Coal mining, Cooking, Hungarian Cabbage Roll, Immigrants, Photography, Pocahontas, Pocahontas Coalfield, Southern cooking, Southern Food, Virginia

Savoring the Daily on the Fringes of the Coalfields

December 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Although grocery shopping here in the United States doesn’t quite reach the challenges I faced when grocery shopping in Morocco or Burkina Faso, the very act of buying food makes me think hard about eating and cooking and just plain living. Shopping for food entails making decisions. What choices do I make when my only option for grocery shopping – so-so Farmers Market* aside – lies with two major grocery chains which ousted a locally operated grocery chain years ago? […]

Categories: American Cooking, Hungary, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Appalachia, Cabbage rolls, Coalfields, Festivals, Grocery shopping, Hungary, Pocahontas Virginia, Southern cooking, Virginia

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

The Little Red Hen had a Point: The Tao of Baking Bread

November 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Categories: Baking, Bread, Cooking, Photography • Tags: Baking, Bread, Photography

Of Purple, and of Scarlet: The Mysterious Pomegranate

November 11, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof …” Exodus 28:33-34 Every autumn, just as leaves finally fall from the trees and gardens wilt and squashes go wild with bumps, I pass quickly by the bins of scarlet pomegranates in the grocery store. Their mystery intimidates me, yes, these pomegranates. I yearn for the courage to transcend my book knowledge of this ancient fruit, […]

Categories: Arab cooking, Art, Cooking, Photography, Pomegranates • Tags: Arab Cookery, Demeter, Fruit, Hades, Mythology, Persephone, Photography, Pomegranates, Song of Songs

Long Ago, When Chickens had Teeth …*

October 28, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ve never had to kill for my dinner, unless you count the time I mangled a lobster at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, crying silently as I tried to plunge the knife in the right place but failing to quickly put the creature out of its misery. I doubt I would have known how to kill a chicken, either, although my mother used to hint at what to do by exclaiming, “You’re running around like a chicken with […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Food writing, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Animal slaughter, Chicken, Fried chicken, Grandmothers, Photography, Southern cooking, Texas

The Meat of the Matter: A Question of Sacred Reverence

October 26, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Meat eating presents modern society with a bit of a dilemma. How to raise and slaughter large numbers of animals under humane conditions, while keeping the price down and within wallet reach of most consumers? That’s the major issue, tinged with other, often moralistic, questions. First, right up front, I am not a vegetarian, and never will be, despite having fumbled with the idea a few times. My first experience with vegetarianism came about chiefly out of curiosity. The central […]

Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Beef, Cattle, Cooking, Festivals, Hunger, Lent, Local foods, Photography • Tags: Beef, Bruce Aidells, Farming, Meat, Michael Symon, Photography, Vegetarianism

Ode to the Great Pumpkin [Pie]: Speak, Memory*

October 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye, What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie? ~ John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Pumpkin,” 1850 Some people moan and descend straight into mourning with the first frost. Not me. You’ll find me in my kitchen, with clanging pans and steaming windows, eager to put aside the perpetual salads and raw cucumbers of summer. Yesterday afternoon, I baked my first pumpkin pie of the season. Yes, I confess: I basically […]

Categories: American Cooking, England, Food writing, Photography, Pies--Sweet, Pumpkin • Tags: John Greenleaf Whittier, Libby's, Photography, Pie, Pumpkin, Southern cooking

No, Sir, I Did Not Love Brussels Sprouts: A Tale of Loathing

October 10, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One fall day about a year ago, struck by the guilty feeling that hits after baking a particularly wicked and sinfully rich chocolate cake, I vowed for the sake of health and all that’s dear to me to cook more vegetables. But not just any vegetables. No, I wanted to cook those that rarely, if ever, filled my pots or waited in vain in my vegetable crisper until I discovered their rotten remains long past their expiration dates. The litany […]

Categories: Cooking, Italian Cooking, Photography • Tags: Brussels sprouts, Food dislikes, Food Habits, Prejudices, Vegetable

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

The Zen of Artichokes

October 3, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I love autumn. If it’s not the leaves and all the color, then I find poignancy in the drying and dying weeds littering the ground. They embody survival to me. One plant I particularly love is a thistle-like plant, filled with tiny seeds attached to billowy white parachutes. The least puff of wind forces the seeds out of their pods and they float in the wind, just like paratroopers, over the landscape, falling where they may, taking root at times […]

Categories: Agriculture, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Local foods, Photography • Tags: Artichokes, California, France, Italy, Meditations, Normandy, Photography, Thistles, Writing, Zen

What the Eye Doesn’t See …

September 29, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Reflections on a Green-Grape Tart

September 28, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Sugary milky sweetness, that first delicious taste, imprints itself on a baby’s tiny tongue, and seals forever a great love. From the very beginning of life, then, a yearning for that nectar haunts us forever and never leaves us in peace. This primal urge for sweetness led to the scourge of slavery and fuels the modern obesity epidemic. Imagine, for a moment, vast fields of sugar cane, saber-sharp green blades swaying under gentle tropical breezes, fed by the merciless sun […]

Categories: Africa, France, French Cooking, Grapes, Middle Ages, Science of cooking • Tags: Grapes, Paula Wolfert, Sidney Mintz, Slavery, Sweetness and Power

Another Holy Trinity of the Kitchen: The Magic of Milk, Eggs, and White Flour

September 21, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

How Cooking Transforms the Aching Soul

September 12, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Two Moons and a Ksar

September 4, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Waiting for Pears

August 30, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Telling Stories, About French Bread

August 24, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Eat It or Wear It: The Broccoli Yuck Factor

August 17, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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

Where Rosemary Flourished, the Woman Ruled*

August 12, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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