Poultry | Gherkins & Tomatoes

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings trees with Spanish moss

Coming Home to Roost: The Chickens of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

November 28, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“If I had to choose between trees and people, I think I should choose trees.” ~~Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings If you’ve ever read The Yearling, you know the name and work of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Miz Rawlings owned a 72-acre homestead and citrus grove in Cross Creek, Florida, not that she was a native Floridian or anything like that. Her story began there in 1925, when she and her husband, Charles Rawlings, bought a rather delapidated homestead just south of Gainesville, […]

Categories: Florida, Photography, Poultry • Tags: Chickens, Cross Creek, Florida, Lochloosa Lake, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home, Orange Lake, Poultry, Southern cooking, The Yearling

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

Cooking One’s Goose

December 24, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The traditional English Christmas goose didn’t really make it over here on the other side of the Atlantic, chiefly because the native (and meatier) turkey prevailed. Neither did the other traditional dish of the English Christmas season — roasted boar — with its tusked furry head, mouth filled with an apple. [That's a pagan custom, incidentally, handed down since the Druids, or so some authors claim. We'll delve into that one later. After all, we have until January 6th, 2010 […]

Categories: Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Middle Ages, Poultry, Recipes • Tags: Christmas, Cookbooks, Curye on Inglysch, Goose, Recipes

The Artful Pomegranate

November 5, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Guarded treasure, honeycomb partitions, Richness of flavour, Pentagonal architecture. The rind splits; seeds fall– Crimson seeds in azure bowls, Or drops of gold in dishes of enamelled bronze. –André Gide in Les Nourritures Terrestres (trans. Dorothy Bussy) Like the pomegranate itself, so ripe and bursting with seeds, the history of this berry-like fruit reveals more and more the deeper one looks into it. The myths, the legends, and the journeys of the pomegranate serve as an archetypal case of plant […]

Categories: Arab cooking, Chicken, Cooking, Poultry, Spain • Tags: Chicken, Iran, Khoresh-e Fessenjan, Pomegranates, Poultry

Anyone Can Build a Whizbang Chicken Scalder (Even You!)

June 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

From the back cover of Herrick Kimball’s book, Anyone Can Build a Whizbang Chicken Scalder: Every small-farm and backyard poultry producer needs a good scalder to quickly and efficiently scald their homegrown poultry prior to plucking. Precise scalding translates to fast, complete, and easy plucking of feathers. But high-performance ready-made scalding equipment is much too expensive for your average small-scale poultry producer to justify. And no one has every come up with plans for an easy to make, relatively inexpensive, […]

Categories: Agriculture, Chicken, Poultry • Tags: Chicken, Herrick Kimball, Poultry Farming

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

Category Archives: Poultry

Coming Home to Roost: The Chickens of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

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

Cooking One’s Goose

The Artful Pomegranate

Anyone Can Build a Whizbang Chicken Scalder (Even You!)

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