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

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

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

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 Curse of Corn: Poverty and Politics and Pellagra

July 24, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dr. Joseph Goldberger stands watching the children eating. He’s about to prove his hunch that pellagra occurred in the face of nutritional deprivation. He devoted years to discovering what caused the curse of corn, pellagra. Although the fat cats in the South of the time, and we’re talking early 20th-century here, didn’t want to spend money on feeding programs, Goldberger managed to set up situations where he proved that insects and bacteria had nothing to do with the scourge of […]

Categories: Agriculture, Corn, Hunger, Italy, Local foods, Paintings, Southern Food, Spain • Tags: Gaspar Casal, Joseph Goldberger, Maize, Niacin, Pellagra, Southern cooking

The Curse of Corn: Pellagra

July 20, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

  To be continued … 

Categories: Archaeology, Corn, Southern Food • Tags: American South, Corn, Pellagra, Southern cooking

Hog Butchering Time with Harry Crews

April 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I came within ax-handle length of hog butchering only once. And that was enough for me. My grandparents lived agrarian lives and they carried over many of their habits to their small acreage in southern California, where they raised chickens and rabbits for their table. I, on the other hand, grew up in the shadows of a land-grant university. The cows in the Dairy Science barn were like zoo animals, their slobbering tongues licking me when I offered them an […]

Categories: Books, Pork, Southern Food • Tags: Bacon County Georgia, Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Harry Crews, Hog butchering, Southern cooking

Let Me Count the Ways: St. Valentine’s Day 101 (Yes, There’s a French Connection)

February 14, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Remember the old shoeboxes for valentines in your grade school classroom? How you’d decorate your box with all sorts of frou-frous and hope the cute little boy (or the cute little girl) with the dimples would give you a valentine card, one of those mass-produced things? In school, at least, probaly no teacher ever told you why so much was made of Valentine’s Day. Right? In fact, the American way of celebrating St. Valentine’s day really began in the nineteenth […]

Categories: Cakes, Coconuts, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Cake, Claudius, Coconut Cake, Cooking, Feast Day Cookbook, Food, Geoffrey Chaucer, History of St. Valentine's Day, Juno Februata, Lupercalia, Recipes, Saint Valentine, St. Valentine's Day, Valentine Cards, Valentine's Day, Valentines

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

Cabbage and Black-Eyed Peas, Oh My! An Easy New Year’s Dish with a Long History

December 22, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Yes, I know, you’re overwhelmed with preparations for Christmas. If you’re like me, you’re still trying to come up with THE menu that will knock Uncle Scrooge out of his foul grinchy mood. So how come I’m looking at New Year’s foods already? There’s a good reason — there’s only one thing to eat that day. Black-eyed peas, a gift from a part of Africa ruled by the French for a long time. [They were there as early as 1659 at […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Cooking, France, New Year's Day, Southern Food • Tags: Africa, African Cooking, Black-Eyed Peas, Cabbage, Chou, Dawadawa, New Year's Day, Niebe, Pois yeux noirs, Science Magazine, Senegal, Southern cooking, Striga, Virginia, Witchweed

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

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Edna Lewis

September 2, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Who was Edna Lewis? Why call her an American Idol? Before she wrote The Edna Lewis Cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, In Pursuit of Flavor, and co-authored that recent jewel of a book, The Gift of Southern Cooking with chef Scott Peacock, well, Edna Lewis did many things in her long, experience-rich life, including campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt. But she always cooked — what Southern girl from her background didn’t? After all, she was the granddaughter of freed slaves […]

Categories: Cakes, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Cooking, Cooks, Edna Lewis, Food, Malinda Russell, Mary Randolph, Southern Food

Idylls of Cuisine, #73

August 1, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Corn, Southern Food • Tags: Food Photography, Fried Tomatoes, Grits, Southern cooking

Ats Jaar: A Little Taste of Southeast Asia in the Antebellum South

February 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A little prickle of recognition, a sense of déjà vu — that’s what happened when I turned to page 86 of A Colonial Plantation Cookbook: The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry, 1770 (1984, edited by historian Richard J. Hooker*). There it was: “Ats Jaar, or Pucholilla.” My first thought was, “What is an Indian (as in India) pickle recipe doing in a cookbook from colonial South Carolina?” And then I read this, in a footnote provided by the editor: […]

Categories: Asia, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, India, Methods, Science of cooking, Southern Food • Tags: Colonial Plantation Cookbook, Fermentation, Hannah Glasse, Harriott Pinckney Horry, Pickling, Richard Briggs, Richard J. Hooker, Southern cooking

Being Catty: Hey, Did You Know That Catfish Tastes OK?

January 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

(Due to family obligations for a few weeks, I’m posting some previous posts that I’ve dusted off and updated. ) Well, it’s not “National Catfish Month,” not yet. You have to wait for August for that. But there’s no time like the present for dreaming of summer. Some people hate the cloying texture of these temperamental and be-whiskered fish. Others, well, they love the crunch, and the hush puppies, that come with well-prepared catfish. This article is for them. You […]

Categories: Fish, Food Columns, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Catfish, Catfish Institute, Food, Food Columns, Southern cooking

Idylls of Cuisine, #44

January 3, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Home Economics, Photography, Southern Food, Virginia • Tags: Appalachian Electric Power, Canning, Cookbooks, Virginia, World War II Food

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

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

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

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

Christmas in Antebellum Virginia: Part II

December 3, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dey ‘s a-wokin’ in de qua’tahs a-preparin’ fu’ de feas’, So de little pigs is feelin’ kind o’ shy. De chickens ain’t so trus’ful ez dey was, to say de leas’, An’ de wise ol’ hens is roostin’ mighty high. You could n’t git a gobblah fu’ to look you in de face– I ain’t sayin’ whut de tu’ky ‘spects is true; But hit’s mighty dange’ous trav’lin’ fu’ de critters on de place F’om de time dat log commence a […]

Categories: Africa, American Cooking, Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, Menus, Pork, Recipes, Southern Food, United States, Virginia • Tags: Booker T. Washington, Cooks, Edna Lewis, Liver Pudding, Plantation Cookery, Slavery, Southern cooking, Virginia

Counting Beans: A Soupçon of History

June 26, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Not too long ago, I looked at the messy pile of one-pound bags of beans in my pantry and knew I needed to start using them up. But how? For some reason, the night before, I’d cooked chicken-and-sausage gumbo and maybe I could just make red beans to go with the leftover rice. Yes, that would be it. Never having made red beans and rice in the style of New Orleans, I could feel that little frisson of excitement that […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, American Cooking, Beans, Haiti, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Bean Soup, Bean Stew, Beans, Haiti, New Orleans, Southern cooking, West Africa

Moonshine

June 17, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Living as I do in the heart of moonshine [white lightning] country, I just about dropped the cookbook when I saw the word “Moonshine.” If it had been a Southern cookbook or a Foxfire book, I would have turned the page without a second thought and been done with it. But this reference to “Moonshine” came from English food writer Elizabeth David’s book, Summer Cooking (pages 65-66). And when my eye darted from the title of the recipe to the […]

Categories: Eggs, English Cooking, French Cooking, Southern Food • Tags: Cooks, Eggs, Elizabeth David, Moonshine, Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook

West African Origins of Southern Cooking

March 28, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Nearly all writers on Southern food agree that African slaves influenced the evolution of Southern food. Here’s a video of Burkina Faso, where I lived for two years, and a lunch served in a village.

Categories: Africa, Southern Food, Video • Tags: Africa, African Cooking, Cooking, Culinary History, Food, Southern cooking, West Africa

A Story of Shrimp

March 26, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Every night the roar of that “hog” outside announced her, foretelling the laughing and the clunk-clunk of feet plodding upstairs to the restaurant. Shannon always came to work astride her boyfriend’s Harley. Every night. Or nearly. In the little Gulf-coast town of Cedar Key, we knew everybody’s business before they knew it themselves, or so it seemed. Working in a fish shack, set in the middle of that tiny paradise — except for the gnats, that is, soon turned into […]

Categories: Florida, Southern Food • Tags: Cooking, Food, Restaurants, Shrimp, Southern cooking

The Cross Creek of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings

March 25, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

No longer a well-known writer, Pulitzer-Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings deserves more attention. Author of the popular coming-of-age novel, The Yearling (1938), Rawlings immortalized the lives of the rural people of north Florida, often derisively called “Crackers.” This photo essay grew out of my recent trip to north central Florida, as well as from long-term admiration for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s celebration of the small rural town of Cross Creek.  Rawlings lived there on a small farm in her later years, […]

Categories: American Cooking, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Cooking, Cooks, Florida, Food, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Photography, Southern cooking

Another Fish in the Sea: Mullet

January 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Of all the nurslings of the sea, mullets have the most gentle and just disposition, harming neither each other nor any other creatures, never staining their lips with blood but…always feeding on the green seaweed. ‑‑Oppian‑‑ Ancient Greek Poet Silvery jumping mullet cause otherwise staid fishermen to jump for joy, especially now since fall passed us by and winter now flails us. After all, cooler weather means fatter mullet.  And  do Southerners ever love fat, firm‑fleshed mullet found all along […]

Categories: American Cooking, Fish, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Cooking, Food, Mullet, Recipes

Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America, by Frederick Douglass Opie

October 22, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Several books on African-American cooking tempt me right now, all brilliant in their own way. See Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power, by Psyche Williams-Forson; Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food, by Andrew Warnes; African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture, edited by Anne L. Bower; and Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860, by Sam Bowers Hilliard (an oldie, based no doubt on the […]

Categories: Africa, Book Reviews, Southern Food • Tags: Africa, Books, Cooking, Food, Southern cooking

Okra’s Obstreperous Origins

October 16, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus, previously Hibiscus esculentus), that beveled beauty so beloved by Southern American and West African cooks for its mucilaginous nature, originated in Ethiopia. With its seeds slipped into clothing and grasped in the hands of enslaved West Africans, okra came to America as a stowaway. From the Niger-Congo language family, the term “okra” derives from a Twi word, nkuruma, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). By the early 1800s, English speakers called it “okra.” Other names include […]

Categories: Africa, Okra, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Cooking, Food, Gumbo, Okra, Southern cooking

BARBECUE = BARBARIC? A SHORT, SUCCINCT HISTORY

September 15, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The All-American favorite cooking method, “barbecue,” sounds uncannily like “barbarism.” When warm nights and hotter days rev up cooks’ tempers as summer suddenly seems interminable, cooks turn to the trusty (and maybe rusty) BBQ grill and primal techniques of searing meat over an open flame. Age-old these methods are, indeed. And frankly barbaric, to the Western mind anyway. Even if there is no link linguistically between the two words. (“Barbarian” comes from the Greek bárbaros, meaning “the sound foreigners make.”) […]

Categories: Chicken, Fish, Pork, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Andrew Warnes, Barbecue, BBQ, Cooking, Food, Southern cooking

Corny Delights

August 27, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Pig fodder? I don’t think so. Some Europeans refer to corn as pig fodder and use it accordingly. For many Americans, particularly those who grew up on farms or whose parents tended back-yard vegetable gardens, like mine, no summer food tastes better than corn-on-the-cob. Lots of butter and grainy tongue-puckering salt, for me, corn-on-the cob spells S-U-M-M-E-R and I don’t apologize for it. I’ll wrestle a pig any time for the pleasures of corn. Corn, golden gift from the New World to the […]

Categories: Corn, Italian Cooking, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Cooking, Corn, Food, Recipes, Southern cooking