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Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

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Fence with chain

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

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Fairclough 1 2

Cookbooks Tell Many Tales

June 25, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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

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Elizabeth David photo

The Dame* with a Pot and a Pen

June 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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

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White Hart Inn

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

May 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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

The Kitchen, Downtown Abbey

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

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Triumphal Arch Sugar Sculpture (Copyright Ivan Day)

Ivan Day: Master Food Historian

February 25, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Those of you with a tremendous love of food history will be happy to know that Ivan Day blogs with all the beauty and erudite authority of his spectacular recreations of historical British food. (Yes, British food!) Take a look both his blog - Food History Jottings - and his regular Web site – Historic Food. You’ll love both.

Categories: Chefs, Cooking, English Cooking, French Cooking, Lit & Food • Tags: British Food, Cooking, Culinary History, Food History, French Food, Ivan Day

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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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Captain Warren's Cooking Pot

Captain Warren’s Cooking Pot

February 6, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A type of pot used during the colonial era, as well as in Victorian England in general, Captain Warren’s Cooking Pot served many purposes. Mrs. Beeton wrote of it, giving dimensions and prices, in her Book of Household Management. The pot closely resembles the couscousière, a pot used in North Africa for making couscous and familiar to the French there, and an Asian bamboo steamer, another utensil familiar to the French. Probably by means of this invention less food is wasted […]

Categories: Cooking, England, English Cooking, Food Science, France, French Cooking, Lamb • Tags: Captain Warren's Cooking Pot, Colonial era, Cooking, Cooking equipment, Cookware, Culinary History, England, Food History

French cooks Verral  cook frontis 1759

Will Verral’s Masterpiece of 1759: A Complete System of Cookery

May 11, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The English could never catch a break in the kitchen. Why, as early as 1759, in A Complete System of Cookery, an innkeeper/author named Will Verral sniffed at the ragtag equipment that passed for a batterie de cuisine in even upper-class English households. Stir in the English and French antagonisms brought about by long enmity, and you have indeed a fine kettle of fish. Here’s what our Will said to the cook in one such establishment, he being hired to cater […]

Categories: Chefs, Cookbooks, England, English Cooking, Fish, France, French Cooking • Tags: A Complete System of Cookery, Cuisine Francaise, French Cooking, Pierre de St.-Clouet, Thomas Pelham-Holles, William Verral

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French cooks Duke of Newcastle and his cook

The Duke of Newcastle’s Pique, or, A Good Chef is Hard to Find

May 7, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The diarist Samuel Pepys,  no mean observer of human foibles that relieve the monotony of day-to-day human life, recorded — almost in real-time —  the Francophilic transformation of the English nobility after the 1660 Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Since Pepys devoted a portion of his library to cookery, it’s not surprising that his diary records some of  the culinary aspects of the Restoration. One of Pepy’s most favored books bore the title L’école parfaite des officiers de bouche, written […]

Categories: Chefs, England, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, Methods • Tags: Cuisine Francaise, Duke of Newcastle, Earl of Albemarle, France, French cuisine, London, Pierre St.-Clouet, Samuel Pepys, Tammany Hall, Thomas Pelham-Holles 1st Duke of Newcastle, William Keppel

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French cooks Newcastle house

French Chefs Abroad: Clouet to Newcastle, Part I

May 2, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Once upon a time, every duke and lord in the kingdom coveted his neighbor’s French cook (or chef). And no duke showed his ire and disappointment more than did the Duke of Newcastle [Thomas Pelham-Holles, British Secretary of State for 30 years and later Prime Minister] when chef Pierre de St.-Clouet left the duke’s entourage. By way of introduction to this most fascinating of tabloid-worthy stories, Elizabeth Robins Pennell*, an oft-quoted culinary bibliographer, wrote a small blurb about these gentlemen […]

Categories: Chefs, Cookbooks, England, English Cooking, France, French Cooking • Tags: A Complete System of Cookery, Duke of Newcastle, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, My Cookery Books, Pierre Clouet, Thomas Pelham-Holles, William Verral

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Christmas French soldier

Idylls of Cuisine, #92

December 19, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: England, English Cooking, France • Tags: Christmas in wartime, Christmas pudding, England, English Cooking, France, French soldiers, Guerre mondial, Soldats françaises, World War I

Elizabeth David Frenc Country Cooking cover

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

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Beeton grave

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Isabella Beeton (Part II)

August 26, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

(Continued from August 23, 2010): Brillat-Savarin’s comments about the English being the worst cooks in the world drew a sniff from the proper Isabella, sure that her book would right that situation. In spite of the moralizing tone, and the plagiarism, BOHM became a runaway bestseller. Readers and critics considered the soup, fish, sauce chapters the best. Quantities of food served at dinner now seem phenomenal. But Isabella emphasized strict economy,  sometimes distressingly so, especially with family meals. She tackled […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, England, English Cooking • Tags: Book of Household Management, Cookbooks, Cooks, English cookery, Food, Isabella Beeton, Rare Books

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mrsbeeton11

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Isabella Beeton (Part I)

August 23, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Today in Britain, “Mrs. Beeton” is a culinary trademark not unlike “Betty Crocker,” whom General Mills created in a Frankensteinian moment to boost sales by appealing to Every Housewife.

The difference between the two ladies is that Mrs. Beeton was a real, breathing, living personage who wrote a monster of a book with a monster of a title: The Book of Household Management Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort, BOHM for short.

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, England, English Cooking • Tags: Book of Household Management, Cookbooks, Cooks, English cookery, Food, Isabella Beeton, Rare Books

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Sliced Ginger Root (Used with permission.)

“Ginger Shall Be Hot i’ the Mouth Too”

August 19, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Sir Toby Belch: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Clown: Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too. Twelfth Night. Act ii. Sc. 3. If anyone ever makes a movie about ginger’s long and fascinating history, I want Leonardo DiCaprio to play the lead.  Imagine him sporting a multi-colored pair of hose, leaping from bow to stern on a flimsy wooden caravel … Anyway, Shakespeare described […]

Categories: English Cooking, Food Columns, Ginger, Recipes • Tags: Chicken, Cooking, English Cooking, Fish, Food, Ginger

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Dick and Jane

See Jane Cook:* A Word About Sophie Grigson’s Mum

July 7, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Jane Grigson is the nearest thing that we have on this side of the great green bouillabaisse to M.F.K. Fisher, with learning and wit that are rarely devoted to such a banausic subject as stuffing food down one’s cake hole. ~~ Philip Howard No wonder I’m feeling a bit green. The annual Oxford Food Symposium begins in a few days and this year’s theme trumpets “Cured, Fermented, and Smoked Foods.” Now, for foodists, foodies, gastronomes, and just plain folks, this […]

Categories: England, English Cooking, Food writing, French Cooking • Tags: Charcuterie, English cookery, English Cooking, Fermentation, Jane Grigson, Oxford Food Symposium, Sophie Grigson

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Simnel+Cake+1

Idylls of Cuisine, #54

March 14, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Cakes, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Lent, Photography • Tags: Food Photography, Mothering Sunday, Simnel Cake

Lent noumbles for Lent

A Bloody Fish Story

March 2, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The price of fish is something nice — for fishmongers through the centuries, that is. And over the years, observers noted the rise and fall in the cost of fish according to the liturgical season and changes in the rules of the Roman Catholic Church.* Because of the price of fish, or even the mere existence of fish in an otherwise protein-scarce environment, people utilized every bit of the fish in the same way they used the carcasses of pigs […]

Categories: Cooking, England, English Cooking, Fish, Lent • Tags: Blood-thickened sauces, Chaudron sauce, Chawdon sauce, Chawdron sauce, English cookery, Fish, Forme of Cury, Lent, Medieval Cookery, Samuel Pegge

Photo credit: Martin Deutsch

Shrovetide Pancakes — A Shrove Tuesday Tradition

February 15, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Shriven/Shrove: archaic : to confess one’s sins, especially to a priest* When they heard the “pancake bell,” people flocked to the church to be “shriven” or confessed on Shrove Tuesday, and ready to make the pancakes that date back to Saxon times. If you think of Shrove Tuesday pancakes as stodgy, thick American pancakes, think again. Meant to use up eggs, butter, and milk just before Lent, these pancakes resemble French crêpes and Italian crespelle more than the flapjacks so […]

Categories: Cooking, Eggs, English Cooking, Lent • Tags: English Cooking, Lent, Pancakes, Photo Essay, Shrove Tuesday

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Photo credit: Chris Blakeley

The Black Fast, a Mortification of the Appetite

February 10, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

With Lent fast approaching (February 17, 2010), an examination of fasting and other fleshly challenges seems apropos. Religious-based fasting, in the history of English speakers anyway, belies its importance in the commonly used word for the first meal of the day: breakfast or “break fast.” After all, for much of Western European history, almost half the days of the year counted as times of fasting. Locavores and vegetarians today will find much to inspire them in the dishes created to […]

Categories: Bread, England, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, Lent, Middle Ages, Monasteries, Soup • Tags: Bread Soup, Brian M. Fagan, Cod: A Biography, Fasting, Fish on Friday, Lent, Marc Meneau, Mark Kurlansky, Roman Catholic Church

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Evelyn John Cook Book

John Evelyn: Cook, Or, the 17th C. Man Who Would Be a Locavore

February 1, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Omnia explorate; meliora retinete (Explore everything; keep the best.) ~~ Evelyn family motto Somehow, and how I wish it were so, it would be nice to time-travel, to sit at table with the people I’m meeting through their words, written by long-dead hands with quill pens and India ink. One of my new “acquaintances,” if such a word be the correct way of putting things, went (goes?) by the name of John Evelyn. Seventeenth-century English author John Evelyn chronicled upper-class […]

Categories: Agriculture, Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, Desserts, Eggs, England, English Cooking, Gardens, Herbs, Local foods, Locavores, Milk, Pies--Sweet • Tags: Cheesecake, Chess Pie, Cooking, Cooks, Eggs, Eliza Smith, England, John Evelyn, John Nott, Rennet, Robert May

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Dig for Victory 1

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

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Chocolate pot

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

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Cooks Yorktown Virginia

Idylls of Cuisine, #43

December 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Cooking, English Cooking, Photography, Southern Food, United States, Virginia • Tags: Cooking, Cooks, Food Photography, Virginia

Christmas goose

Cooking One’s Goose

December 24, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The traditional English Christmas goose didn’t really make it over here on the other side of the Atlantic, chiefly because the native (and meatier) turkey prevailed. Neither did the other traditional dish of the English Christmas  season — roasted boar — with its tusked furry head, mouth filled with an apple. [That's a pagan custom, incidentally, handed down since the Druids, or so some authors claim. We'll delve into that one later. After all, we have until January 6th, 2010 […]

Categories: Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Middle Ages, Poultry, Recipes • Tags: Christmas, Cookbooks, Curye on Inglysch, Goose, Recipes

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Mulled Wine (Photo credt:  )

Mulled Wine, a Timeless Taste of the Divine?

December 23, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure,” said Fred, “and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health. Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the moment; and I say, ‘Uncle Scrooge’!” “Well! Uncle Scrooge!” they cried. “A Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to the old man, whatever he is!” said Scrooge’s nephew. ~~~ A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens ~~~ OK, blame it on Charles Dickens, that literary […]

Categories: Christmas, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Wine • Tags: Christmas, Cider, Eliza Acton, Honoré Balzac, Isabella Beeton, Mulled Wine, The Cook's Oracle, The Peasants, William Kitchiner

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Christmas Wassail_Bowl

Wassailing Through

December 21, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Wassaile the trees, that they may beare You many a Plum and many a Peare: For more or lesse fruits they will bring, As you do give them Wassailing. A foot of snow presses against the front door, the presents glimmer under the Christmas tree, and Aunt Lillie’s sugar cookies lie temptingly in the old painted tin box. And the Wassail punch simmers slowly on the stove, the fragrance of cinnamon wafting through the house. On a dark, cold winter […]

Categories: Christmas, England, English Cooking, Video • Tags: Celtic Music, Christmas, England, English Cooking, Recipes, Twelfth Night, Wassail

Christmas Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh_-_The_Wassail_1900

Idylls of Cuisine, #42

December 20, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Art, Christmas, Cooking, England, English Cooking • Tags: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Christmas, England, Wassail

Fruitcake cartoon

Fruitcake, Fermentation by Another Name

December 15, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

We never eat fruitcake because it has rum, And one little slice puts a man on the bum. Oh, can you imagine the pitiful plight Of a man eating fruitcake until he gets tight? A man who eats fruitcake lives a terrible life. He`s mean to his children and beats on his wife. A man who eats fruitcake dies a terrible death, With the odor of raisins and rum on his breath! “Away with Rum,” Temperance Union (Aussie Band) Christmas […]

Categories: Baking, Bread, Cakes, Christmas, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Fermentation • Tags: Breads, Cakes, Christmas, English Cooking, Fermentation, Fruitcakes

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Butter Churn Lid

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

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Christmas Nast_Civil_War_Christmas

Civil War Christmases

December 10, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 100 and 50 guns and plenty of ammunition, also about 25,000 bales of cotton. Telegram from William Tecumseh Sherman to Abraham Lincoln, December 22, 1864 Many authors write about the austerity of American Christmas celebrations prior to the Civil War (1861 – 1865), but that’s because those writers focus on the North’s Puritan heritage. Most of our current ways — mostly Germanic in origin — of […]

Categories: American Cooking, Christmas, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Menus, United States, Virginia • Tags: Accomplisht Cook, American Cooking, Christmas, Civil War, Eggnog, English Cooking, Menus, Robert May, Southern, Thomas Nast, Virginia

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Colonial Williamsburg wreath 1

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

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Mount Vernon, by Francis Jukes (1800)

Christmas in Antebellum Virginia: Part I

November 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

What is now the state of Virginia boasted the first permanent English settlement in North America. Despite its rocky beginnings in 1607, the settlement eventually flourished. The first Africans arrived in 1619 and the tobacco industry began in earnest. Along with the need for cheap labor, provided by slavery, the colonialists desired nothing more than to live as English gentlemen and gentlewomen on the edge of the vast wilderness. That all this transpired thirteen years prior to the Pilgrims’ landing […]

Categories: Christmas, English Cooking, Menus, United States, Virginia • Tags: Christmas, Cooks, George Washington, Martha Washington, Slavery, Southern cooking

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DSC00562

Christmas Cheer, or, Fire Up the Reindeer

November 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Black Friday marks the first “official” day of Christmas, er, shopping, that is. (You know it’s almost Christmas when the day after Halloween, the grocery stores start hauling out the red ribbon and fake mistletoe.) A bit premature, but that’s cultural change for you. Used to be that you couldn’t find a bit of tinsel or a reindeer before Thanksgiving was over. But Advent and Christmas will soon be upon us, along with visions of sugarplums and plenty of reindeer.  […]

Categories: American Cooking, Book Reviews, Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, United States • Tags: Black Friday, Book Reviews, Christmas, Christmas Cookbook, Cookbooks, John Clancy, Mimi Sheraton, Reindeer

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St. Catherine's College, Oxford, 2008 (Photo credit: Nick Atkins Photography)

Oxford Food Symposium 2009

November 7, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The Oxford Food Symposium 2009, from an article by Corby Kummer of The Atlantic. The 2010 Symposium will take place in July 9 – 11, at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, England; the conference topic is very timely — “Cured, Fermented, and Smoked Foods.” January 15, 2010 marks the deadline for proposals for talks. Guess what I want for my birthday? (Hint: It involves silver wings and Guinness.)

Categories: Cooking, England, English Cooking, Europe, Food News, Methods • Tags: Food History, Oxford Food Symposium, Prospect Books

Balt (Photo credit: Marshall Astor)

The Chicken or the Egg? 2. The Cooking of Eggs

October 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There is reason in roasting of eggs! ~~~ James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides In nineteenth-century America, giddy with conquest and Manifest Destiny, domestic science denizens rose up, called themselves home economists, and jumped on the bandwagon of cleanliness and right thought. The results of that movement set the stage for today’s proscriptions and prescriptions regarding eating and cooking, especially when it came to eggs. And eggs, thankfully,  seem to have survived the greatest roll-coaster ride in […]

Categories: Cooking, Eggs, English Cooking • Tags: American Cooking, Cooks, Eggs, English Cooking

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Zeus (Photo credit: Gord Spence)

Honey, I’m Cooking!

October 1, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

As an infant, Zeus, the Greek god of gods, fed on milk and honey, or so the story goes. And in Exodus 3:8 (KJV), Moses states, “And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey … “ By these ancient words, we know that honey served as an important food […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cakes, Cooking, Desserts, English Cooking, Honey • Tags: Apicius, Bartolomeo Scappi, Cheesecake, Cooks, Gingerbread, Honey, Martha Washington, Mary Randolph, Scappi's Opera, Zeus

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Mead 1

The Gift of the Bees: Mead

September 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

With a small tweak of the imagination, it’s not hard to see the scenario:  a little rain and some honey accidentally left in a hollowed-out piece of wood. For our early ancestors, it was — once tasted — a seemingly divine elixir. And no cooking required. In other words, mead, the first fermented drink. And so fermentation crops up again, a boon to the human race in so many ways. The tale’s been told a myriad of times, in a […]

Categories: Africa, Agriculture, Asia, Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, Herbs • Tags: England, Hilda M. Ransome, Mead, Metheglin, Sir Kenelme Digby, The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore

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Food forms the very essence of life, from the fruit fly to the elephant, with humans in between. So much of what we do revolves around cooking, eating, and the finding of food. Here you'll discover stories, meditations, and photographs celebrating the places that we call home. And, of course, the food that garnishes it all.

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What’s Cookin’ Here

  • A Bare Table is Like an Artist’s Canvas
  • “Stew’s so comforting on a rainy day.” *
  • Singkong, Manioc, Mandioca, Mandió, Tapioca, Yuca: Singing the Praises of Manihot esculenta (Cassava)
  • The Promise of Apple Blossoms

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