Category Archives: Beef

The Meat of the Matter: A Question of Sacred Reverence

October 26, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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

Where Rosemary Flourished, the Woman Ruled*

August 12, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I cut the rosemary this morning, the lack of love and attention these past few weeks plainly written in its leggy tendrils, reaching too far for the sun, like arms longing for something to hug. Rosemary, the herb of remembrance. What do I remember when the piney, resinous odor of rosemary sticks to my fingers and leaves a lingering perfume on everything I touch? I remember Morocco, where I lived in a very modern house, its kitchen festooned with orange and […]

Categories: Africa, Beef, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Moroccan Cooking, Morocco, Photography • Tags: France, French Cooking, Herbs, Remembrance, Rosemary

French Chefs Abroad: Alexis Soyer and His Irish Famine Soup Kitchen

April 26, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

It is to be regretted that men of science do not interest themselves more than they do on a subject of such vast magnitude as this; for I feel confident that the food of a country might be increased at least one-third, if the culinary science was properly developed, instead of its being slighted as it is now. ~~ Alexis Soyer, A Shilling Cookbook (1855) Jamie Oliver’s fight to bring nutritional nirvana to West Virginia might remind you of somebody. […]

Categories: Beef, Chefs, Cooking, England, France, French Cooking, Nutrition, Soup • Tags: Alcide Mirobolant, Alexis Benoît Soyer, Cuisine Francaise, England, Famine Soup, France, French cuisine, Irish Famine, Pendennis, Reform Club, William Makepeace Thackeray

Afterwards ... (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

Brassai’s Paris, a View Through the Tunnel of Time

January 8, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Before the second world war, filled with the wandering souls of the “Lost Generation,” Paris throbbed with the fluttering notes of jazz and the clattering of horse hooves on cobblestones. And Paris also served as a subject for the art of photographers like Brassai, one of the earliest photojournalists, influenced by surrealism. Brassai (born in Hungary as Gyula Halász) moved to Paris in 1924, worked as a journalist, and started taking pictures in 1930 to use with his articles. He had […]

Categories: Beef, France, French Cooking, Photography, Potatoes • Tags: Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Art, Brassai, France, French cuisine, Lost Generation, Paris, Photography, Steak and Frites

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: M. F. K. FISHER

August 30, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Anyone who reveres food and eats oysters, who yearns for security and longs for love, and who seeks out experiences and thinks much must discover M. F. K. Fisher. Just who was M. F. K. Fisher and why did James Beard, that gentle giant of the food world, call her a national treasure? And why did John Updike refer to her as “the poet of the appetites”?

Categories: Apples, Beef, Bibliographies, Desserts, Food Columns, French Cooking, Recipes, Salads • Tags: Cooks, Desserts, Food, Food writing, France, French Cooking, M. F. K. Fisher

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

Saffron: The Gold We Eat

July 29, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Once used as money instead of gold in Don Quixote’s Spain, saffron costs upwards of $1000 US per pound. Indeed, the world’s costliest spice. Most likely you will not have ever seen saffron for sale in your local grocery’s spice department. Knowledgeable customers ask the store managers for it; they keep it behind the counter, safe from pilferers. Why do cooks desire saffron? Saffron lends an indescribable flavor to food. It also imparts a tenacious yellow color to anything it touches; […]

Categories: Beef, Recipes, Rice, Spices • Tags: Beef, Cooking, Food, Recipes, Rice, Saffron, Tagine

Still Mi Amore — Wild Abandonment Among the Tomatoes and Zucchini

June 14, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A market is three women and a goose. ~~ Italian proverb ~~ I know that for many Italian women my nostalgic idea of Italian cooking would seem foreign, as alien as if I zoomed in from another planet. Louise DeSalvo makes that clear in her book Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family as she debunks the myths of the happy Italian family. And the quiet testimony of an Italian-American friend of mine seconds […]

Categories: Beef, Cookbooks, Cooking, Italian Cooking • Tags: Beef, Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Louise DeSalvo, Marlena de Blasi, Sacra di San Michele, Tuscan Beef Stew

Sugar, Saffron, Spices — The Arab Influence on Spanish Cuisine, a Brief Meditation

June 2, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Spanish food enjoys some quite heady popularity right now. Trendy magazines and the international food punditry (for example, Matt Preston in Australia) say “Si” to Spanish cuisine and predict a continuing surge of enthusiasm for the food of the land of Don Quixote. Just about every grocery store, mundane as well as high-end, displays wedges of Manchego cheese placed temptingly near wrinkly chorizo sausages. And in case you can’t find it locally, an online store, La Tienda, sells everything you […]

Categories: Arab cooking, Beef, Cookbooks, Latin America, Middle Ages, Morocco, Spain, Spanish cooking • Tags: Al-Andalus, ArabCooking, Estremadura, Fudalat al-khiwan fi tayybat et-ta'am Wa-I-alwan, Laila Benkirane, Matt Preston, Mohamed Mezzine, Rachel Laudan, Spain, Spanish Cooking

Idylls of Cuisine, #60

April 25, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Beef, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Pasta, Photography • Tags: Beef, Food Photography, Italian Cooking, Italy, Meatballs

From Mother Russia with Love: Meaty Mushrooms and Relentless Lent

March 25, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribi (looking for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest. ~~ Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory Nabokov hits on something many of us reading his words cannot really sense, cannot really feel. For those of us who grew up on canned […]

Categories: Beef, Cookbooks, Cooking, Lent, Mushrooms, Russia • Tags: Beef Stroganoff, Classic Russian Cooking: A Gift to Young Housewives, Cookbooks, Cooks, Elena Molokhovets, Joyce Toomre, Lent, Mushrooms, Recipes, Russia, Vladimir Nabokov

De-Constructing Hawaii’s Loco Moco

January 25, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

For those seeking examples of culinary fusion, Hawaii provides a very deep well to peer into. Rachel Laudan discovered this while teaching at the University of Hawaii and wrote an award-winning book about the subject: The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage.* One of those fusion dishes which Laudan mentions, albeit briefly, is a “traditional” concoction called Loco Moco. One of the plate specials so popular in Hawaii, Loco Moco generally features two scoops of white sticky rice topped […]

Categories: Beef, Hawaii, Home Economics, Ingredients, Methods • Tags: Beef, Cooks, Eggs, Hawaii, Loco Moco

Deep Roots: A Love Note to the Lowly Carrot

August 11, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A dish of carrot hastily cooked may still have soil uncleaned off the vegetable. ~~ Chinese Proverb Except for the feathery grey braids poking out from under the rebozo, she looked like a child washing dishes. But she wasn’t a child and she wasn’t washing dishes. Rinsing the large carrot— one about the size of a zucchini zonked on steroids at the end of a scorching mid-western summer — in her impromptu sink, the old Indian woman leaned over a […]

Categories: Afghanistan, Beef, Carrots, Lamb, Mexico, Recipes, Rice • Tags: Afghanistan, Beef, Carrots, Chicken, Lamb, M. M. Vilmorin-Andrieux, Qabili Pilau, Recipes, Rice, The Vegetable Garden

Reveling in Books: Fresh, Bones, Fat, and Meat

June 10, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Like Susan Bourette in Meat: A Love Story My Year in Search of the Perfect Meal (did she get this subtitle from Roy Andries de Groot, a food writer popular in the sixties and seventies who wrote In Search of the Perfect Meal (1986)?), many people temporarily eschew meat at some point in their lives. And, as Bourette herself did, they return to eating meat. With gusto. Those of us who, like Bourette, relish meat (but don’t like the conditions […]

Categories: American Cooking, Beef, Book Reviews, Cookbooks • Tags: Bones, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Jennifer McLagan, Meat, Susan Bourette, Susanne freidberg

Flavor Principles Out of Africa: It’s the Beans

June 5, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Fermented Foods, Especially Oilseeds, as Flavoring in the Cuisines of Africa Opo Iru ko ba obbe je. (Yoruba proverb): Plenty of Iru [dawadawa] does not spoil the stew. In Africa, as in other parts of the world, fermented foods form an important part of the diet. Made from plant and animal materials, these foods are transformed into more intensely flavored products by the presence of bacteria, yeasts, and molds. These modify the original foods (or substrates) physically, nutritionally, and organoleptically. […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Beef, Fermentation, Fish, Recipes • Tags: Africa, Beef, Dawadawa, Fermentation, Fish, Flavor Principles, Iru, Locust Beans

Cape Malay Cooking

April 18, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A Cape Malay Cooking Safari: A little history and a scene-setting food shopping tour, then comes the food and a cooking class. Cape Malay Cookbooks and a recipe: The Cape Malay Illustrated Cookbook, by Fadela Williams More Cape Malay Cooking, by Faldela Williams South African Cape Malay Cooking, by Sonia Allison and Myrna Robins Traditional Cape Malay Cooking, by Zainab Lagardien Beef Curry: According to the author of this recipe, Beginning in the 17th century, slaves from Indonesia and India […]

Categories: Africa, Beef, Cape Malay • Tags: Africa, Beef, Cape Malay, Cooking, Curry

A Dish (or Two) for Children in British Colonial Africa

February 20, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

(A tribute to those women who endured the challenges of living in unfamiliar and far-flung places, raising their children without their extended families around. And cooking what they could.) Sometimes it literally WAS a dog’s breakfast. And mothers couldn’t do anything about it. Feeding their children properly preoccupied those mothers who followed their English husbands to isolated outposts in Africa or India or China. And rightly so. Yes. Most mothers, no matter where they live (or when) pay strict attention […]

Categories: Africa, Beef, Cookbooks, English Cooking, Potatoes, Recipes • Tags: Africa, British Colonial Africa, Children's Food, Cooks, Kenya

A Pantry in Africa

February 19, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Maze-like unpaved streets and red-mud brick buildings lend the aura of a rural village to the West African metropolis. Women garb themselves in vibrant and symbolic yellow and red and blue and green batik-cloth robes. Smoke and pollution from thousands of charcoal cooking fires and thousands of overloaded and under-maintained mopeds daily saturate the scorching 96º F air. Lined on either side with towering modern street lamps, each topped with a foul-smelling vulture waiting for something to die, a lone […]

Categories: Africa, Beef, Burkina Faso, Greens, Recipes, Tomatoes • Tags: Africa, African Cooking, Burkina Faso, Cooking, Cooks, Food, Pantries, Peanut Sauce, Recipes, West Africa

A Cook in Colonial Africa

February 18, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Esa nearly drops the wine bottle, all because of colonial British ideas about propriety in cooking and dining. That’s from an unforgettable scene in the film, “Out of Africa,” epitomizing the British way with food in their colonies. And their focus on the cooks, mostly male, who worked for them. Meryl Streep, as Baroness Karen von Blixen (Isak Dinesen), insists that Esa wear white gloves while serving at table. And in the kitchen, her cook Kamante immerses his wooden spoons […]

Categories: Africa, Beef, English Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Africa, Colonial British Cooking, Cooking, E. G. Bradley, Food, Household Book for Tropical Colonies, Kenya, West Africa

A Village in Africa

February 17, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

It didn’t take long for the red dust to coat the white Nissan Patrol 4WD like the sugar crust on a crème brulée. Thick. Crunchy. Slightly gritty. “Look like we here,” Moussa, our Muslim driver, said, his Moré accent glossing the familiar English words. The Land Rover turned off the long straight highway at Koudougou. Two weeks after arriving in-country, not yet used to 120 degree F heat pulsating like an overheated car’s exhaust pipe, we’re deep in the bush, […]

Categories: Africa, Beef, Burkina Faso, Recipes • Tags: Africa, African Cooking, African Dancing, Burkina Faso, Cooking, Cooks, Food, Wollof Rice

Mrs. Charles Darwin’s Recipe Book

December 6, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Nearly everyone on the planet, or at least those with access to education — unfortunately many areas of the world and even this country lack miserably in the teaching of the young — will know the name of Charles Darwin, as the blurb below allows. Now, maybe some people don’t buy into the theory of evolution, but the fact of the matter is that the issue is here to stay. And perhaps convince and persuade doubters as more and more […]

Categories: Beef, Book Reviews, English Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Book Reviews, Charles Darwin, Cookbooks, Cooking, Cooks, Emma Darwin, Food, Recipes

Election-Day Menu: Food from Our Greatest Presidents

November 3, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Hands down, my vote for the greatest presidents we’ve seen in this country goes to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. John Kennedy might have been a truly great president, but he died before he could prove his mettle, though his stand against the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis counts as something commendable, I guess. Anyway, I thought it would be nice to get in the mood for Election Day by cooking up food served […]

Categories: American Cooking, Beans, Beef, Desserts, Pork, Recipes, Soup • Tags: Cooking, Food, Recipes, White House

All the Presidents’ Tables: A. Lincoln’s Inaugural Beef à la Mode

October 27, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Thomas Jefferson’s cook quit upon seeing the kitchen at the White House. And George Washington placed a want ad for a cook: ”A cook is wanted for the family of the President of the United States,” it said. ”No one need apply who is not perfect in the business, and can bring indubitable testimonials of sobriety, honesty and attention to the duties of the station.” Tavern owner, staunch patriot, and spy Samuel “Black Sam” Fraunces got the job, probably because […]

Categories: Beef, English Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Cooking, Food, Samuel Fraunces

Chili con Beans (Photo credit: Janice Waltzer)

BARACK OBAMA’S CHILI AND JOHN McCAIN’S RIBS

October 25, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Barack Obama’s reply to a reporter who asked him in March 2008 what was his favorite dish to take a potluck: Chili. He said that, “I’ve been using this chili recipe since college and would bring it to any potluck. I can’t reveal all the secrets, but if you make it right, it’s just got the right amount of bite, the right amount of oomph in it and it will clear your sinuses.” (See my post on chili, “Chili Days […]

Categories: Beans, Beef, Pork, Recipes • Tags: Barack Obama, Barbecue, Chili, Cooking, Food

Goulash Trieste-Style with Side Dishes (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

GOULASH, BY GOSH!

October 23, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A few weeks ago, while leafing through Lidia Bastianich’s Lidia’s Italy, I came across a recipe for goulash made in the manner of Trieste. I couldn’t wait to get to my stove and start cooking. Now Trieste, which lies in the northeastern part of Italy, relishes a very diverse historical past. Under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Triestines may well have “resented” their rulers, as Ms. Bastianich says, but they certainly loved the spicy red stew called goulash. […]

Categories: Beef, Hungary, Recipes • Tags: Cooking, Food, Goulash, Hungary, Recipes

Baobab Silhouette (Used with permission.)

Monkey Bread, But It’s Not What You Think: Baobabs – Africa’s Upside-Down “Cream of Tartar” Trees

September 11, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

They carried me to a particular spot where I saw a herd of antelopes; but I laid aside all thoughts of sports, as soon as I I perceived a tree of prodigious thickness, which drew my attention. This was a calabash tree (baobab), which the Jaloffes call quol in their language. There was nothing extraordinary in its height; for it was only about fifty feet; but its trunk was of prodigious thickness. I extended my arms, as wide as possible […]

Categories: Africa, Beef, Recipes • Tags: Africa, Baobab, Cooking, Food, Monkey Bread, Recipes

CHILI DAYS ARE A’COMIN’: AN ODE, OF A SORTS

September 10, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Open some cans of chili – mighty good.” -Toots Shor’s recipe for chili- Chili, the stuff of tall tales, legends, grudges, and just plain cussedness. If you earned a buck for every chili recipe ever cooked, fantasized about, or pirated, you’d probably beat Bill Gates at the money game. Not much appeals more to American individualism than that wonderful, spicy concoction, “Chili con Carne.” For the perfect winter night’s supper, chili con carne knows no rival. More recipes exist for […]

Categories: Beans, Beef, Recipes • Tags: Chiles, Chili, Chili con carne, Cooking, Dama de Azul, Food

Familiar Faces (Used with permission of Michael Gwyther-Jones.)

A Little Pocket of Norway

September 7, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In the beginning, the trolls and the lutefisk kind of threw me for a loop, but the rest of it all enchanted me. A long time ago, while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a tiny Paraguayan village, I fell in love with a Norwegian-American farmboy from a small town in Wisconsin. And I fell for his hometown, Holmen, too. A place where the older people still spoke Norwegian and a Fargo-like accent peppered all conversation, even in English. […]

Categories: Beef, Norway, Pork, Recipes • Tags: Cooking, Food, Holmen, Lefse, Lutefisk, Norway, Norwegian, Recipes

Becoming Italian

August 11, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’m hardly Italian. Nowhere near it. With a family tree first planted in America in 1632, a seedling from a village not far from Norwich, England, we’ve been in the New World so long that we have no ethnic ties or traditions at all. But for some reason, Italian food and culture and history tapped something in my soul. Through my pots and pans, I’ve adopted Italy’s cooking. And dreams of idyllic Italian style. My house walls glow terra-cotta red in the morning sun. Rows of rosemary, oregano, and mint sprawl in my garden. And I collect Italian cookbooks like a money-mad King Midas wallowing in gold coins.

Categories: Beef, Food Columns, Italian Cooking, Pasta, Recipes, Tomatoes • Tags: Beef, Cooks, Food, Italian Cooking, Pasta, Tomatoes

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life