Category Archives: Pork

* 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

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

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

Scenes from La France Profonde

February 5, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Categories: France, French Cooking, Photography, Pork, Restaurants • Tags: Charcuterie, Cuisine Francaise, France, French Cooking

If on a Winter’s Night, a Bowl of Garbure …

January 14, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Nights spent huddled by fires snapping and popping and providing respite from the howling winds and wolves, when you think of the dark and the cold and the danger, don’t you — all snuggled up in your down comforter or quilt passed down from your great-grandmother — feel a slight shiver? Of déjà vu? Not the cold. Maybe that’s why you long for a hearty pot of vegetable soup laced with salted fatty meat when winter slithers through the pines and […]

Categories: Beans, Cabbage, Carrots, France, French Cooking, Pork • Tags: Cuisine Francaise, France, French Cooking, Garbure, Gascony, Jambon, Pork, Saucisses, Soup, Soupe

C’est Pas Foie Gras, Or, Liver Follies and Foibles

November 18, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I have a confession to make: I don’t really like liver. For one thing, the gamey taste lingers on the back of my tongue a tad bit too long. For another thing, the smell of liver frying in butter nauseates me. It’s enough to gag a goat. Don’t ask me why on earth I ended up cooking 20 pounds of goat liver one day in Haiti. It’s a long story. The abbreviated version sounds pleasant enough. I landed a job […]

Categories: Cooking, France, French Cooking, Pork, Poultry • Tags: Cooking, Foie Gras, Goat liver, Haiti, Jane Grigson, Michael Ruhlman, Pâté

Winter’s Leafy Greens: A Romantic History à la Française

November 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A few mornings ago, the pumpkins sprawling on my front porch sparkled with frost. And you know what that means. It’s time for some serious rustic cooking. (And I’d like to include a recording right here of someone yelling “Yippee!”) It’s time to turn to the hardy greens of winter, something that French cooks* use instead of the more delicate summer greens like butterhead lettuce or red oak. Somehow, and this might just be me, after September cold salad just […]

Categories: Beans, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Greens, Pork, Soup • Tags: Cooking, Cooking White Beans, Greens, La Varenne, Le Cuisinier François, Recipes, Soup, The French Cook

Will It Be French?

October 21, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

For most Americans (and Britons), French food means memories of the insipid Steak au Poivre or bland French Onion Soup served in a pretentious “fancy” restaurant. That’s enough to condemn French cuisine to staying put between the covers of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961 and 1970). The perplexing and continuous popularity of Italian cuisine shoved French cooking off to the side. After all, it’s the rare person who finds time these days to cook stock from […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Pork, Potatoes • Tags: Cuisine grand-mère, French cuisine, Julia Child, Marie-Pierre Moine, The Wall Street Journal

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

Cookies and Cookees

September 16, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The importance of logging camp cooks can’t be fathomed, really. But try to imagine being miles from anywhere, without a restaurant nearby or a place to cook for oneself; imagine the sheer dependence on log camp cooks, of men burning up 8000 calories a day while felling trees. Like baby birds counting on their parents to fill their open mouths and gurgling stomachs with food, the men literally couldn’t live without the cooks. This calls to mind a famous, and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Pork • Tags: Cathe Ziereis, Cooks, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Logging Camps, Margaret Kechnie, Marge Reitsma-Street, Robert Dollar, Sawmill Gravy

France Encore

March 10, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

France bewitches. Burgundy. Normandy. The Loire Valley. The French Alps. Provence. All sublime. But the besotted dream most of returning to live in some tiny Parisian garret, drinking high-class red or white plonk, writing of life, death, and love while seated at a sticky Formica-covered table at Flore or Deux Magots. And surreptitously paging through Eric Maisel’s A Writer’s Paris: a guided journey for the creative soul. (Wish there were one for the cook’s soul …) For those who love […]

Categories: France, French Cooking, Pork, Recipes • Tags: Cooking, Food, France, French Food, Paris

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

Día de los Muertos (Todos Santos)/ Day of the Dead Food-Laden Altars

October 31, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

(Note: The italicized portion of the following article is an excerpt from something I wrote for an encyclopedia on the history of dining and entertaining, Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl, Greenwood Press, 2008.) In Mexico, the Día de los Muertos (Todos Santos) (Day of the Dead/All Saints’ Day) resembles the norteamericano Halloween only superficially. Mexico is deeply, profoundly Catholic. And Mexico is also deeply, profoundly Aztec. Or at least traces of indigenous religions color the Catholic festivals […]

Categories: Bread, Halloween, Mexico, Pork, Recipes • Tags: Bibliographies, Calaveras, Cooking, Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, Food, Halloween, Mexican Cooking, Mexico, Pork Chile Verde, Todos santos

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

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

White Beans with Cream, Prosciutto, and Parmesan

September 14, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Autumn teases you, you know, with its chilly mid-September mornings, urging you to dream of sitting outside on cool evenings, wrapped lightly in woolen shawls, a bowl of hot bean soup nestled in your hands, a glass of Pinot Grigio resting on the small table next to you. Dreaming of a stone cottage in Italy’s Piedmont or a small crowded house in Rome, the smoke from the fireplace coating the walls, the whitewash of centuries peeping through. Listening, as it […]

Categories: Beans, Italian Cooking, Pork, Recipes, Soup • Tags: Beans, Cooking, Food, Italian Cooking, Recipes, Soup

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

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life