Gherkins & Tomatoes

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

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Artist palette film grain rs

A Bare Table is Like an Artist’s Canvas

May 16, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There’s something about tables, big, little, or bare – and those bare ones  in particular – that make me want to festoon them with food I’ve cooked, like floral garlands at a grand wedding. I feel an urge, too, to seat people on the equally vacant chairs, saying, “Come on now, sit down a spell, and let your worries fade away like the mist on a hot summer morning.” Well, maybe I wouldn’t say it exactly that way, but the […]

Categories: Art, Beans, Cassava, Chile Peppers, Corn, Latin America, Photography, Potatoes, Pumpkin, Tomatoes, United States, Virginia • Tags: Beans, Cassava, Chiles, Corn, Photography, Potatoes, Squash, Tomatillos

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Dr. Joseph Goldberger

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

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Pellagra skin

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

what-mrs-fisher-knows

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

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Grits and fried tomatoes

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

Polenta CouCou

A Rogue’s Gallery: The Many Faces of Polenta

October 9, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

With apologies to Shakespeare and Romeo & Juliet and all lovers of the same: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So polenta would, were it not polenta call’d, Retain that dear perfection which it owes Without that title. The big fuss in today’s food media and fancy restaurants about polenta —  cornmeal mush slyly passing as haute cuisine — proves once again that, in seeking the old, new […]

Categories: Africa, Cooking, Corn, Europe, Latin America, Photography, United States • Tags: Cornmeal Mush, Cou-Cou, Funchi, Kachamak, Mamalgia, Mealie pap, Nshima, Polenta, Puliszka, Ugali

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Cows Owned by Luo People (Used with permission.)

What’s Cooking in Kenya? Ugali, Sukuma Wiki, and the Food of Barack Obama’s Father’s Childhood …

November 15, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“When two locusts fight, it is always the crow who feasts.” Nigerian saying quoted in Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father An article in The Times of London stated that Barack Obama’s Kenyan family, members of the Luo group, to celebrate his presidential election victory, slaughtered four bulls, sixteen chickens, and a number of sheep and goats milling around. Grilled meat and beer, plus other dishes, rounded out the menu. But the chief draw was the popular Nyama choma, or […]

Categories: Africa, Corn, Food News, Greens, Recipes • Tags: Barack Obama, Cooking, Dreams of My Father, Food, Kenya, Recipes, Sukuma wiki, Ugali

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A Farmers' Market

Ecstatic in Farmers’ Markets (with a List of Cookbooks at the End)

September 8, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Not too long ago, driving through the flat land of northern Illinois, I passed near Galena, a charming Victorian town nestled among bluffs and rolling hills near the Mississippi River. Just before arriving in the town, along scenic Highway 20, several small farmers’ markets beckoned. Now, truth be told, my hands tingle and my blood thunders through my veins when I spot a farmers’ market on the side of the road or in the middle of a busy town. The […]

Categories: Corn, Food Columns, Recipes • Tags: Bibliographies, Cooking, Corn, Farmers' markets, Food, Galena, Recipes

Corn-on-the-Cob

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

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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.

My book, due out September 15, 2013

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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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