Chocolate Chaud / Hot Chocolate
Hot chocolate in Paris is like nothing else.
Categories: Chocolate, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Angelina's, France, French Cooking, Hot Chocolate, Paris
Category Archives: Chocolate
Banania — an Image of French Colonialism?
I will tear down those Banania smiles from the walls of France. ~~ Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet and first president of independent Senegal* Branding. Such a loaded word, when you consider it. For many Americans it suggests branding cattle and other property, to prove ownership. Very capitalistic, those cowboys, don’t you think? In any case, branding products sometimes pinches cultural nerves. Banania, a French product with very strong branding, began in the heyday of France’s colonial empire and is still […]
Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Chocolate, France, French Cooking • Tags: Banania, Black Skin White Masks, Caricatures, Cocoa, Colonialisme, France, Frantz Fanon, French colonial empire, Lake Managua, Nutrial, Peau Noire Masques Blancs, Pierre-François Lardet, Stereotypes, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, United Fruit Company, West Africa
Thinking of Others as You Bite into that Bûche de Noël
David Lebovitz — a whiz of a pastry chef, cookbook author, and food blogger — got me thinking this morning about the meaning of all the glitz and glitter out there, if only I could just get out of my icy driveway. David is giving away a set of Le Creuset cookware, a gift to him from the French cookware company Le Creuset. To sign up for the random drawing, all you have to do is comment on his post […]
Categories: Cakes, Chocolate, Christmas, France, French Cooking • Tags: Bûche de Noël, Charity, Christmas, Cuisine Francaise, David Lebovitz, France, French Cooking, Gateaux, Joyeux Noël, Le Creuset, Partners in Health
Les Quatre Mendiants au Chocolat, A Candy Offshoot of Provence’s Thirteen Christmas Desserts
Gorgeous, huh? Yummy? You bet! And the best part is that, with a quick flick of a switch and your wrist, you too can make these beauties, part of the Thirteen Desserts of a Provençal Christmas. Mendiants au Chocolat Noir ou Blanc Makes about 75 – 100 candies, depending on size of circles 1 pound dark bittersweet chocolate (60 – 70% cacao) or good-quality white chocolate Candied citron Dried figs, cut into small squares Almonds, shelled, blanched if desired, toasted* […]
Categories: Baking, Chocolate, Christmas, Cooking, France, French Cooking • Tags: Christmas, Cuisine Francaise, France, French Cooking, Les Quatre Mendiants, Provence, Recipes, Thirteen Desserts, Treize Desserts
Just Pie … Chess Pie
Sweet foods haunt many childhood food memories. And usually pie stands high on any list of sweet memories. Sadly, pie-making is fast becoming a lost American art form. Too bad, really, because although the early English settlers brought basic pie-making techniques with them, the culinary skills of the colonial American housewife elevated pie-making to a rarified art form. In hundreds of log cabins, farmhouses, and mansions, women of every socio-economic class invented light flaky pastry and hundreds of fillings.
Categories: Chocolate, Food Columns, Lemons, Pies--Sweet, Recipes • Tags: Brown Sugar, Chocolate, Food, Lemon, Pie, Recipes, Southern cooking
Idylls of Cuisine #28
[A picture, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
Categories: Art, Baking, Cakes, Chocolate, Photography • Tags: Cake, Chocolate, Food Photography
Pie in the Sky: A Review of Janet Clarkson’s “Pie: A Global History”
You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. ~~ Joe Hill*, “The Preacher and the Slave” chorus, 1911 Everybody knows what pie is, right? Wrong, and Janet Clarkson (The Old Foodie) tells us why in her dazzling new book, Pie: A Global History (Reaktion Books, London, 2009). Clarkson brings pie history all together under one crust, as it were, sort […]
Categories: American Cooking, Book Reviews, Chocolate, Pies--Sweet, Recipes • Tags: Book Reviews, Chocolate, Food, Janet Clarkson, Pies, Recipes
Angelina’s Hot Chocolate
For anyone who’s walked through Paris on a rainy winter day, the cold wind whipping your coat about your knees, your umbrella suddenly quitting on you. Drenched, you find yourself on the Rue de Rivoli, making for Angelina’s tea room. You walk through the crowds of tourists, hoping you look as French as those ladies sitting along the wall, their proper black suits and pearls just so. You sit at the small round table that your waitress points to with […]
Categories: Chocolate, France, Recipes • Tags: Angelina's, Bernini's Escstast of St. Teresa of Avila, Chocolate, Culinary History, Food, France, Paris
“Old” News — Chocolaholics of 1000 Years Ago
Put the word “chocolate” in front of my eyes and my salivary glands start secreting. And, oh boy, when the real McCoy appears on a plate in front of me, watch out! Like that Chocolate Mousse Cake looking at you, kid. Even when the discussion involves people drinking chocolate over 1000 years ago, those old glands turn frisky. Recent research by Patricia L. Crown of the University of New Mexico and W. Jeffrey Hurst of the Hershey Center for Health […]
Categories: Chocolate, Recipes • Tags: Archaeology, Aztecs, Chocolate, Culinary History, Maya, Patricia L. Crown, Pueblo Bonito, Recipes, W. Jeffrey Hurst
All the Presidents’ Tables: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s First Inaugural Luncheon, 1953
January 20, 1953 In 1953, the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC) started the now-traditional ritual of hosting a luncheon for the incoming President and Vice President. General Dwight D. Eisenhower enjoyed tremendous public recognition because of his role as Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. Any man who could keep the troops on target probably could do the same for the country, or so people figured. Under Eisenhower, the U.S. interstate highway system matured, as did the […]
Categories: American Cooking, Chocolate, Potatoes, Recipes, White House • Tags: Cooking, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Food, Inaugural menus, White House
CHOCOLATE, CHOCOLATE, & MORE CHOCOLATE
I wait upon the Lieut. Governor at Dorchester and there meet with Mr. Torry, breakfast together on Venison and Chockalatte; I said Massachusetts and Mexico met his Honour’s Table. ~~The Diary of Samuel Sewall,* 1697~~ Chocolate, gotta love it. Most people do, although I’ve known a couple of die-hard chocolate haters. Then there are the poor tragic souls who suffer from allergies to chocolate. But—callously, I might add—that just leaves more chocolate for the rest of us theobromiacs, or, better […]
Categories: Chocolate, Latin America, Recipes • Tags: Chocolate, Cooking, Food, Recipes
