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

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

* 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And to Think it all Started with a French Cookbook: Forty Years of Chez Panisse

August 23, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Alice Waters often said that Elizabeth David’s  French Provincial Cooking started the whole thing, meaning Chez Panisse the restaurant. And of course, the ensuing local foods movement. The following excerpt comes from a review I wrote, published today on the Web site of The New York Journal of Books: The many talented cooks and chefs she hired over the years—Jeremiah Tower, Paul Bertolli, Lindsey Shere, Joyce Goldstein, and Judy Rogers— went on to influence other restaurants and customers across the United […]

Categories: American Cooking, Chefs, Cookbooks, Cooking, Critic's Corner, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Restaurants • Tags: Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, Edible Schoolyard, Jeremiah Tower, Local Foods Movement, Restaurants

Grits, Georgia, and Escaoutoun on My Mind

July 7, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Big Hominy Grits (Photo credit: James Bridle) These days, when you drive through the endless piney woods of low-country Georgia and South Carolina, you will see fields of corn, and not so much cotton. And, if you’re lucky when you stop for breakfast, there will be grits on the menu. Not just any old grits, not instant, God forbid, but the real deal: stone-ground little bitty bits of corn flecked with chaff and germ. People who grew up with grits […]

Categories: African Cooking, American Cooking, French Cooking • Tags: Arthur Barlowe, Escaoutoun, Espelette pepper, Florence Fabricant, France, French Cooking, Gascony, Grits, Hélène Darroze, Maize, Mushrooms, Périgord, Southern cooking, Walter Raleigh

Thomas Jefferson: The Francophile Who Became the First U.S. “Foodie”

February 21, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Thomas Jefferson. President. Scientist. Writer. Man of many passions, some hidden, some not. In his writings and in his actions, food clearly revealed itself as one of those passions. Above all, Jefferson was a Francophile. From the design of his dining room in his house, Monticello, to the gardens surrounding him in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from Paris to the White House — Jefferson’s obsession with food and its preparation inspired him to train his African slaves, particularly […]

Categories: Recipes, French Cooking, Southern Food, Desserts, American Cooking, White House • Tags: France, French Cooking, Food, Cooks, Southern cooking, Mary Randolph, Fritters, Thomas Jefferson, Karen hess, Monticello, Cuisine Francaise, Etienne Lemaire, The Virginia House-wife, James Hemings, American Presidents

From Velouté to Casserole: A Question of Green Beans, Amandine, and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup

November 1, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I didn’t mean to write about Campbell’s soup. You see, I started out pondering a super French soup recipe, Velouté aux Champignons. Somehow I ended up contemplating Campbell’s canned Cream of Mushroom Soup, definitely not one of Antonin Carême’s sauces mères or Mother Sauces (velouté, espagnole, allemande, béchamel)! Though you could argue that Campbell’s soups play the role of sauces in retro American cooking. If you’ve ever eaten soup from those little red-and-white cans, you’re really taking in one of […]

Categories: American Cooking, Beans, Cooking, French Cooking, Mushrooms, Recipes, Soup • Tags: Campbell Soup Company, Cook with Campbell's, Cream of Mushroom, France, John Dorrance, Joseph A. Campbell, Mother Sauces, Mushroom Soup

The Potager of Thomas Jefferson: A Kitchen Garden in Photos

October 28, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, that amazing genius and inventor, and — according to the late food writer, Karen Hess — probably America’s first real gourmet. Any lover of books, art, architecture, wine, and food should dream of visiting this place at least once. [Note: It's the only house declared a UNESCO World Heritage Centre in North America.] Jefferson’s two-acre potager (loosely translatable as “kitchen garden”), located on the  southeastern side of what used to be the slave quarters […]

Categories: African Cooking, American Cooking, Cooking, French Cooking, Gardens, United States, Virginia • Tags: Colonial Virginia, France, Garden, Menon, Monticello, Potager, Thomas Jefferson

MORE THAN MEETS THE PIE

October 18, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

    The other day I saw another sign of autumn: a smashed pumpkin lying along the side of the road, pieces scattered like the crumbs in the forest that Hansel Gretel dropped on the way to the witch’s house. Pumpkins deserve more respect.  Think about it. Remember Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, who bashed poor Ichabod Crane with a carved pumpkin?  And year after year, pumpkins get to strut their stuff only in pies.  […]

Categories: American Cooking, Pumpkin, Recipes, Thanksgiving • Tags: Cooking, Food, Pumpkin, Recipes, Thanksgiving

Is Cooking Necessary?*

October 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

No, it’s not. That’s your immediate answer, isn’t it? After all, you’ve got more important things to do, don’t you? Or do you? You can live your life without cooking. You can go to your nearest grocery store and bypass all the technology and knowledge that took your ancestors centuries to refine. You can buy all the ready-made food you could ever eat. You can eat plastic food. And you’d survive, too. But, in spite of all that, well, and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Local foods, Locavores, Recipes, Science of cooking • Tags: Community, Cooking, Empowerment, Fast Food, Local foods, Locavores

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Elizabeth David

September 20, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Foxed, spotted, acid-rich, the paper crackles under the slightest touch of my hands. The book’s an old Penguin paperback, worth only 74 cents on Amazon.com. As I turn the pages of French Country Cooking (1951), I vaguely recall a comment I once read, written by food activist and restaurateur Alice Waters in her book, The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (p. x), where she talked about how she got started in the whole business of food and cooking: I bought Elizabeth […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores • Tags: Alice Waters, Cookbooks, Cooks, Elizabeth David, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: The Other Mrs. (Lydia) Child

September 16, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Events constantly reinforce the old saying, “History repeats itself.” Like the other Mrs. Child (Julia, that is), Mrs. Lydia Maria Child wrote a best-selling cookbook, The Frugal Housewife, Dedicated to Those Who are Not Ashamed of Economy (1829). Like Mary Randolph (author of The Virginia House-wife), Lydia Maria Child (1802 – 1880) married a man more in love with bad debts and other troubles than with her. And again like her modern “namesake,” Julia Child, Lydia Maria lived in Boston. […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cookbooks • Tags: American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooks, Food. Cooking, Lydia Maria Child

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: The Other Mrs. (Abby) Fisher

September 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Before M. F. K. Fisher, sometimes known as plain Mrs. Fisher, there was Mrs. Abby Fisher. And Abby Fisher’s personage couldn’t be more different from M. F. K. Fisher than if a novelist like Flannery O’Connor dreamed her up. The author of what food historians long believed to be the first African-American cookbook,* Abby Fisher counted on others to actually write What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking in 1881.** As a former slave from South Carolina she went […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cookbooks, Corn, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Abby Fisher, African-American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Cooks, Corn, Food, Recipes, Southern cooking

Remembering Julia Child, “Our Lady of the Ladle”*

August 12, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

(Julia Child died on August 13, 2004. Her birthday was August 15; she would have been 92 years old. The following article originally appeared in The Roanoke Times on Sunday, Aug. 22, 2004, page 3 of the Horizon section.) “Julia Child dies at 91.” Stunned at the breaking news, I read the flickering words on my computer screen one more time, tears slowly welling up in my eyes. Why should I be crying for Julia Child? I only met her […]

Categories: American Cooking, France, French Cooking • Tags: French Cooking, Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Obituary

Hamburger Heaven, or the Global Burger: A Medley of Recipes

August 9, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Hot weather does funny things to people, especially to cooks. Certain instincts crop up at about the same time that air conditioners crank up the juice. Primeval visions prevail, usually of smoldering coals and roasting meat, prompting the almost daily obeisance to that great American tradition, the summer barbecue grill. And summer just wouldn’t be summer without another American tradition — the barbecued hamburger sandwich. Originally a chopped beef gravy-covered patty characteristic of German cooking, the hamburger became a sandwich […]

Categories: American Cooking, Beef, Recipes • Tags: Beef, Cooking, Food, Grilling, Hamburgers, Labor Day, Summer Food

Hippie Cookbooks, Alice’s Restaurant, and Whole Wheat: How We Got Organic

July 1, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One day, Alice Brock saw a tour bus coming up the drive to her restaurant and she suddenly remembered she was supposed to feed 40 people a full lunch. She didn’t have any soup made … When the war in Vietnam ended in 1975, so did The Age of Aquarius, fading away like smoke on a hazy summer night. Was it all just a dream? Well, no. If today you focus a lot on Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, if […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cookbooks • Tags: Adelle Davis, Alice May Brock, Alice's Restaurant, Anna Thomas, Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé, Hippie Kitchen, Jean Johnson, Laurel Robertson, Mollie Katzen, Moosewood, Vegetarian Cooking, Vegetarian Epicure

A Few Choice Morsels: Children’s Cookbooks

April 21, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

British star chef Jamie Oliver, in spite of the flapdoodle surrounding his school lunch efforts in West Virginia, is just one more person in a long line of moralists and do-gooders hoping to change the food people eat, this time children. So let’s take a quick look at children’s cookbooks. Pretty common, aren’t they? For starters, there’s the bestselling The Princess and the Frog: Tiana’s Cookbook: Recipes for Kids (Disney Princess: the Princess and the Frog), by Cindy Littlefield and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Methods

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

Snowbound … The Poetry, The Food, The Reality

February 8, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems now here to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Snow Storm. As the snow falls outside, I […]

Categories: American Cooking, Apples, Cakes, Cooking, Films, Lit & Food, Poetry, Spices • Tags: Apples, Cake, Donner Party, Donner Pass, Elizabeth David, John Greenleaf Whittier, M. F. K. Fisher, Madeleine Kamman, Madeleine Kamman’s Savoie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roy Andries de Groot, Snow, Snowbound, Spice Cake, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, Winter

Thomas Jefferson and His Magic “Maccaroni” Machine

January 11, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Thomas Jefferson, rightly or wrongly credited with first bringing pasta to the tables of Americans, drew a picture of  a pasta-making machine. This drawing, now in the Library of Congress, resulted from a trip to Italy taken by Jefferson in 1787. Don’t forget that “macaroni” served as a generic name for pasta and doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re talking about elbow macaroni … Here’s recipe for Macaroni Pudding from Thomas Jefferson’s Cook Book (the recipe actually comes from Mrs. Horace […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Pasta, United States, Virginia • Tags: Macaroni, Pasta, Pasta Making, Southern cooking, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia

Dig for Victory! Locavorism in Eons Past

December 31, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Looking at the past almost always calls up that old adage: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”* Take locavorism’s wartime antecedents … As these WWII posters from England’s “Dig for Victory!” campaign prove, the idea of local foods is not one whose time has come, but whose time has come again. Aimed at encouraging the civilian population to grow their own gardens, “Dig for Victory” freed up commercially grown food for the troops.  The “Dig for Victory” program began in […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Art, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Europe, Gardens, Hunger, Local foods, Locavores, Posters, United States • Tags: Art, Cooking, England, Food, Posters, Propaganda, United States, Victory Gardens, Wartime, World War II

Chocolate and Coffee Pots from Colonial Williamsburg: Slideshow

December 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Chocolate and Coffee Pots from Colonial Williamsburg collections, a parade of eighteenth-century goodies. Note the lamb’s head on the end of the spout!

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, English Cooking, Photography, Virginia • Tags: Chocolate Pots, Coffee Pots, Colonial Williamsburg, Eighteenth Centucky, Kitchen Equipment, Southern cooking, Virginia

Souls of Cooks

December 17, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Slipping like honey off  a silver spoon, all the words build up to an earth-shaking, and revolutionary, crescendo. For the first time in history, cooks’ words crisscross the globe,  through thin wires and invisible waves of energy, thanks to the Internet. Never before have the words of so many cooks reached so many people, making history daily. Not necessarily chefs — though some are or consider themselves to be, most of these cooks stand over the heat day in and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Methods, Oral History • Tags: Cooks, Foxfire Books, Squirrel Meat

Buttering Up

December 14, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Peppermint flavoring, almond extract, gooey candied fruit, thick dark molasses, perfumey cardamom … the list could go mouth-wateringly on and on. Christmas cooking and Christmas baking demand many ingredients not normally used in everyday cooking. And that’s what makes the holiday season such a sheer delight for those besotted with all things culinary. But one ingredient stands out, essential in many Christmas dishes, and likely resting quietly in just about every refrigerator of every serious cook. Not because of its […]

Categories: Africa, American Cooking, Butter, Christmas, Cookies, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Morocco, Southern Food • Tags: American Cooking, Butter, Christmas, Edna Lewis, Harriott Pinckney Horry, Smen, Southern cooking, Sugar Cookies

Idylls of Cuisine, #42

December 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: American Cooking, Art, Christmas, Cooking • Tags: Art, Christmas