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

The Promise of Apple Blossoms

May 6, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Spring, when she sashays in, always takes my breath away. Such vivid raiments cover her, so radiant that Joseph with his coat of many colors could only turn green with envy. The eye hardly knows where to light, much as a honey bee – turned loose in a field of daisies – darts from one nectar-filled delight to another, drunk on the experience. Apple trees always draw me close. I suppose it has to do with the apple tree that […]

Categories: Apples, Art, Food writing, Photography, Poetry • Tags: Apple blossoms, Apples, Art, Food writing, Haiti, Kenscoff, M. F. K. Fisher, Meditations, Photography, Still life, Susan Branch

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

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

* 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

Remembering the Magic and Wishing for Peace on Earth

December 16, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I dedicate this post to the children and the parents, everywhere, especially Newtown, Connecticut. Every year, in December, a marvelous thing happens. At least I think it’s wonderful. And not for the reasons you might think. Christmas comes around, bringing with it a sense of magic in the air, some thing that I felt as a child. And lest you think me not sensitive to the cultural experiences of those who do not celebrate Christmas, I say that no matter […]

Categories: Christmas, Editorials, Festivals, Photography • Tags: Children, Christmas, Gingerbread, Magic

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

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

Fallow Time, or, The Rewards of Lying Low and Following Winding Paths

November 28, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The photographs said what I couldn’t. The winding paths on Roanoke Island, site of Raleigh’s Lost Colony, ending up in as-yet-unseen destinations, presented me with an unanticipated gift, fruit of the fallow time thrust upon me recently. What does it mean to be fallow? Uncultivated, unplowed, untilled, unseeded, unplanted, unsown, unsowed, empty, neglected, unused, idle, dormant, resting, inactive, inert, barren, unproductive, unyielding, unfructuous, unfruitful, fruitless, uncultivable, exhausted, depleted, worn out, impoverished, poor, bare, bald, arid, dry, waste – according to […]

Categories: England, Food writing, Photography • Tags: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fallow time, Julia Cameron, Meditations, North Carolina, Outer Banks, Photography, Roanoke Island, Southern Food, The Lost Colony, Walter Raleigh

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

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

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

Food, Life’s Magical Bottom Line

August 23, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There’s something magical about food, fire, and cooking. Actually, primeval describes it better. After all, without food, I wouldn’t be sitting here staring at a computer screen and neither would you. There’d be only a barren wasteland, a moonscape of craters and crevices, instead of the Earth we love. Food is the magical bottom line of life. I’ve thought that for a long time. As a twenty-year-old student, I once stood on a street corner outside Mexico City’s colossal 5514-stall […]

Categories: Food writing, Mexico, Photography • Tags: Chocolat, Epiphanies, La Merced Market, Like Water for Chocolate, Magical realism, Mexico City, Saint Brighid, Zao Jun

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

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

Parsleyed Ham and Kitchen Breezes: The Letters of M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child

June 22, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Today is the 20th anniversary of M.F.K. Fisher’s death, so in tribute and at the request of her friend Leo Racicot, I am reposting this, something I wrote last year after attending Barbara Wheaton’s “Reading Historic Cookbooks” seminar at Harvard. Sometimes words, both spoken and written, take on terrible power. Use the wrong word and, at the sound, someone’s heart may crash to the bottom of their chest. Whisper another word and the soul flies straight up to heaven, if […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Libraries, Lit & Food, Methods, Pork • Tags: Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Cooking of Provincial France, Jambon Persillé, Julia Child, La Pitchoune, M. F. K. Fisher, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Michael Field, Schlesinger Library, Simone Beck

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

Advice for Food Writers

June 14, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The buzz not long ago came from the keyboard of Amanda Hesser, a former food writer for The New York Times, who proved with a click of the mouse that controversy gets people reading, Tweeting, Facebooking, and just plain screaming. Or sniffling. Ah yes, that last one.  I hate to say, is what almost happened to me. What a tear-jerker! If Amanda Hesser now struggles to be paid for writing about food, where does that leave the rest of us […]

Categories: Books, Cooking, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food Columns, Food News, Food writing • Tags: Amanda Hesser, New York Times, Trish Deseine

The [Fatal] Flaw*: What’s Wrong with [Food] Writing Now

June 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Writing is not about the “me,” it’s about the “not me.”  This is always true, even in personal essay and memoir. ~~ Michael Ruhlman Something seems wrong these days with food writing in America. And, to be honest, not just food writing. What is the problem? You’re probably getting ready to hit DELETE. But hold on, hold on, please. The other day, trying to come to grips with some rather negative feelings about being a writer and the way the […]

Categories: Books, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food writing • Tags: Confessions of Nat Turner, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong, Kate Christensen, M. F. K. Fisher, Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison, William Styron

When it Comes to Writing, Define Your Terms

June 5, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. ~~ M. F. K. Fisher With every story ever told, there’s usually a beginning, at least in an ideal world. The reader progresses toward a soft plump middle, where the real action occurs, like a jelly doughnut harboring cherry filling. And, if the author is a considerate sort, the ending makes sense, too, recalling the finale of any satisfying meal. That’s the definition of writing, […]

Categories: Cooking, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food Columns, Food writing • Tags: Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth David, Gourmet, Joseph Wechsberg, Ludwig Bemelmans, M. F. K. Fisher, New Yorker, Ruth Reichl

Becoming a Writer

May 23, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

It’s funny how things work out. You pick up a book in a bookstore or a friend presses you to read something, “Hey, I KNOW you’ll love this.” You read the words on the page and suddenly you’re soaring above your bedroom ceiling, your sorryass childhood forgotten, your past mistakes and your current cares evaporate, like rain splashing on a steaming hot summer sidewalk. You learn about a larger world when writers release their words into the Universe. As I […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Books, Editorials, Food writing • Tags: Food writing, M. F. K. Fisher, Writing

War. Cook. Eat. Love.

April 10, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey* (Free Press, 2011) , isn’t the first person to cook her way through trying times. Nor will she be the last. But the makeshift kitchens where Ms. Ciezadlo peeled purple eggplant or stirred onions caramelizing for Mjadara Hamra (Lentils with Bulgur Wheat) happened to be in a couple of war zones, neither one in a New York high-rise or a Tuscan olive grove. No, unlike the heartbroken cook in Lily Prior’s La Cucina […]

Categories: Arab cooking, Book Reviews, Food News, Food writing, Garlic, Iran, Middle East • Tags: Annia Ciezadlo, Baghdad, Christian Science Monitor, Day of Honey, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Mohamad Bazzi, New York Times

Eating Black Beauty,* Or, Horsemeat, a Taboo That Became a French Stereotype

March 1, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Taboo: A custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing. One of the most emotional experiences of my childhood came when I read Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, a story of a mistreated English horse. I remember sobbing for hours in the way that children can when they experience something so hurtful that only tears will do. Later, I saw a movie based on the book and the same thing happened, the […]

Categories: Asia, Cooking, Europe, Food writing, France, French Cooking • Tags: Culinary History, Emile Decroix, Food History, France, French Cooking, Henriette Davidis, Horsemeat

The Roger Smith Cookbook Conference

February 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Just a reminder that you will be able to see some 10 of the 28 sessions live and for free on Friday and Saturday, February 10 and 11, 2012. See schedule of free sessions below. To brighten up a dreary February in 2011, a group of food scholars and cookbook writers started a cookbook conference. It was so successful that they’re doing it again this year, bigger and better. Unfortunately, this year’s Cookbook Conference is completely sold out, and there’s a […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food News, Food writing, India, Methods • Tags: Cookbooks, Culinary History, Food History, Roger Smith Cookbook Conference

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

The Expert (French) Cook in Enlightenment France: A Review

January 14, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

If you scrutinize sixteenth-century Dutch artist Pieter Aertsen’s painting, “The Cook in Front of the Stove,” you will see a rather stereotypical image of servant cooks, one that persisted in popular memory in Europe until well into the nineteenth century. Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason University and codirector of Zotero, attempts to get beyond that image in his thought-provoking new book, The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France. Beginning with the premise that much what passes for fact […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Chefs, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Methods, Paintings • Tags: Chefs, Cooks, Culinary History, Food History, France, French cuisine, Pieter Aertsen, Sean Takats

The Apples of France: What’s the (Hi)Story?: Speculations about the Origins of Apples in France (Part II)

January 6, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The frosty morning mists of early autumn roll through the hills, swirling like a white cotton-candy carpet at the base of the gnarly old trees. Branches creak and sway with the weight of the fist-sized apples, some blushing like tiny faces, or red-cheeked as it were from the chill of the windy gusts. So much a part of European culture and cuisine, apples seem to be a native food, an ingredient in so many traditional dishes. But the apples we […]

Categories: Apples, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Methods, Photography • Tags: Apicius, Apples, Culinary History, Food History, France, French Cooking, French culinary history, Kazakhstan, La Varenne, Le Menagier de Pari, Marianne Mulon, Tractatus de modo preparandi et condiendi omnia cibaria, Vivendier

Bringing Home the Bacon … and the Onions and the Cheese: Tarte Flambée, Flammekueche, or Alsatian Pizza Bread

December 18, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One cold, rainy day in October, I sat in front of a fireplace in a  small weinstub, or bistro, in Strasbourg, France, listening to my growling stomach. I couldn’t face another round of choucroute, that heavy Alsatian ode of love to the pig and the cabbage. On the greasy menu, fingerprints from previous guests clearly visible on the laminated plastic, one dish stood out: Flammekueche, also known as “Tarte Flambée.” I ordered it. And a bottle of Alsatian Riesling, never […]

Categories: Food writing, French Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Alsace, Bacon, Bread, Cuisine Francaise, Culinary History, Flammekueche, Food, Food History, France, French Cooking, Tarte Flambee

Michel de Montaigne: “Literally” an Ancestor?

September 25, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Great article by Sarah Bakewell, on Paris Review site from November 2010: What Bloggers Owe [Michel de] Montaigne Don’t forget that Michel wrote about cannibalism, relating it to ethical issues. Read his essays in translation HERE. A taste, if I may be so bold:  I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more […]

Categories: Food News, Food writing, France, Photography • Tags: Bloggers, Blogging, Cannibals, France, French Literature, Inspiration for Bloggers, Michel de Montaigne, Philophy, Renaissance

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

New Clothes Always Help

July 28, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Today Gherkins & Tomatoes / Cornichons & Tomates begins its fourth year of blogging by donning a new look. The  new design minimizes sidebar distractions, allowing readers to focus on the latest post. Sleek, like a little black dress without even a string of pearls …

Categories: Art, Food News, Food writing • Tags: Little black dress

Celebration! With Champagne …

July 25, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Gherkins & Tomatoes / Cornichons & Tomates celebrates an anniversary in a couple of days, and I would like to thank all readers — old and new — for their ongoing and strong support. A special thanks goes to friends and family, who keep me going by saying nice things and bringing me champagne. This post brings the total number of posts to 751 since July 28, 2008. Imagine that, three years! So join me for a glass or two […]

Categories: Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Holidays, Wine • Tags: Anniversaries, Champagne, Food Blogs, France, French Cooking, French cuisine

Dining Alone – Not the Loneliest Number that You’ll Ever Do: Just Ask Louis XIV

May 27, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

King Louis XIV did it. M. F. K. Fisher did it. The faceless man in Edward Hopper’s painting, “Nighthawks,” did it. Mr. Bean did it, too. And so did I. Daring to eat alone in public probably ranks as one of the few acts that cause normally confident people to quiver a little. It dredges up memories of being the new kid at school, faced with walking into the cafeteria and eating all by your lonesome. So public, so humiliating, […]

Categories: Chefs, Fish, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Menus, Spain, Spanish cooking, Wine • Tags: Alphabet for Gourmets, Brian Edwards, Desmond Morris, Edward Hopper, El Jaleo, Elaine Sciolino, José Andrés, Louis XIV of France, M. F. K. Fisher, Scrofula, Washington DC

Why Bother with Culinary History?

May 9, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A friend recently asked me, “Why is culinary history important?” Actually, her words came out of her mouth a little more harsh sounding than that:  ”Why are you wasting so much of your time on that stuff? Why don’t you just write up some recipes, like how to make that great bread you always make?” Momentarily speechless, I realized she asked me the question that I periodically ask myself. What difference does it make if we know about French chefs […]

Categories: Chefs, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, France, Lit & Food, Methods • Tags: Cookbooks, Culinary History, England, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, French cuisine, Rick Bayless, Tom Jaine, Virginia Woolf

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