Gherkins & Tomatoes

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

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Fence 2

Foods for a Funeral and a Farewell

March 8, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

What to make of the lavish feasts that come after a funeral? When I attended my first funeral, at age 27, I cried a lot, even though I didn’t know the  deceased, my sister-in-law’s father. My grandparents all died before I turned 20 and lived 1250 miles away. Living as my family did on a poor college professor’s salary, attending funerals wasn’t going to happen. Add to that my mother’s extreme reluctance to even speak of her own mortality and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cakes, Cookbooks, Cookies, Cooking, Desserts, Norway, Photography, Pies--Sweet, Reference, Southern Food • Tags: American Cooking, Death, Dying, Funerals, Norway, Southern Food, Wisconsin. Southern cooking

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Macarons 3

Macarons – Food of Dreams and Fairy Tales

July 11, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Macarons. Truly an example of “Don’t try this at home.” But how I longed to recreate the taste and the crunch of the macarons I greedily ate as often as I could, when I passed that fairy-tale bakery on the Rue de Rivoli, close to the Hotel de Ville metro stop: Maison Georges Larnicol. Although they’re kissing cousins of a sorts, modern French macarons don’t much resemble American macaroons. The extra “O” has nothing to do with it. Macarons likely […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cookies, Cooking, Desserts, French Cooking, Uncategorized • Tags: Bérengère Abraham, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Macarons

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Scenes from La France Profonde

April 8, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Categories: Desserts, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Desserts, Fauchon, Food Photography, France, French Cooking, Paris

Monticello

Thomas Jefferson: The Francophile Who Became the First U.S. “Foodie”

February 21, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Thomas Jefferson. President. Scientist. Writer. Man of many passions, some hidden, some not. In his writings and in his actions, food clearly revealed itself as one of those passions. Above all, Jefferson was a Francophile. From the design of his dining room in his house, Monticello, to the gardens surrounding him in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from Paris to the White House — Jefferson’s obsession with food and its preparation inspired him to train his African slaves, particularly […]

Categories: American Cooking, Desserts, French Cooking, Recipes, Southern Food, White House • Tags: American Presidents, Cooks, Cuisine Francaise, Etienne Lemaire, Food, France, French Cooking, Fritters, James Hemings, Karen hess, Mary Randolph, Monticello, Southern cooking, The Virginia House-wife, Thomas Jefferson

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Oreilletes

Oreillettes, A Part of Provence’s Thirteen Desserts

December 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Fried dough, a universal love. Grease, sugar, what more could you dream of? In the south of France,  when you want fried dough, you’ll get oreillettes. As with any traditional holiday dish, each cook has his or her version. The signature taste with these oreillettes is the orange flower water. In New Orleans, oreillettes come with a splash of rum, possibly because it was available and because orange flower water wasn’t. Oreillettes (English version) 3 eggs 2 T. orange flower […]

Categories: Christmas, Cooking, Desserts, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Cuisine Francaise, France, French Cooking, Oreillettes, Provence, Thirteen Desserts, Treize Desserts

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mfk-fisher

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

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Evelyn John Cook Book

John Evelyn: Cook, Or, the 17th C. Man Who Would Be a Locavore

February 1, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Omnia explorate; meliora retinete (Explore everything; keep the best.) ~~ Evelyn family motto Somehow, and how I wish it were so, it would be nice to time-travel, to sit at table with the people I’m meeting through their words, written by long-dead hands with quill pens and India ink. One of my new “acquaintances,” if such a word be the correct way of putting things, went (goes?) by the name of John Evelyn. Seventeenth-century English author John Evelyn chronicled upper-class […]

Categories: Agriculture, Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, Desserts, Eggs, England, English Cooking, Gardens, Herbs, Local foods, Locavores, Milk, Pies--Sweet • Tags: Cheesecake, Chess Pie, Cooking, Cooks, Eggs, Eliza Smith, England, John Evelyn, John Nott, Rennet, Robert May

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Zeus (Photo credit: Gord Spence)

Honey, I’m Cooking!

October 1, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

As an infant, Zeus, the Greek god of gods, fed on milk and honey, or so the story goes. And in Exodus 3:8 (KJV), Moses states, “And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey … “ By these ancient words, we know that honey served as an important food […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cakes, Cooking, Desserts, English Cooking, Honey • Tags: Apicius, Bartolomeo Scappi, Cheesecake, Cooks, Gingerbread, Honey, Martha Washington, Mary Randolph, Scappi's Opera, Zeus

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From the Tacuinum of Paris

Carnevale Cometh: Ricotta and Fritters, Oh My!

February 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Fritters and Carnevale, lumped together like ham and eggs, mashed potatoes and gravy, risi e bisi, rice and beans. Ricotta fritters, to be exact. True, most people associate ricotta fritters more with St. Joseph’s Day, March 19 in Italy. But those fritters lean toward the filled variety, sweetened, creamy ricotta delivering a tantalizing surprise with every bite. No, these particular fritters include ricotta in the batter and puff up like popcorn, spitting and swirling in the oil like little balloons […]

Categories: Cheese, Desserts, Italian Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, Cooking, Food, Fritters, Mardi Gras, Recipe, Ricotta

cenci-012

Carnevale Cometh: Cenci By Any Other Name Would Taste as Sweet …

February 9, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Hereupon, a whole host of absurd figures surrounded him, pretending to sympathize in his mishap. Clowns and party-colored harlequins; orang-outangs; bear-headed, bull-headed, and dog-headed individuals; faces that would have been human, but for their enormous noses; one terrific creature, with a visage right in the centre of his breast; and all other imaginable kinds of monstrosity and exaggeration. These apparitions appeared to be investigating the case, after the fashion of a coroner’s jury, poking their pasteboard countenances close to the […]

Categories: Carnevale, Desserts, Italian Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Carnevale, Carnival, cenci, Cooking, Food, Italian Cooking, Mardi Gras

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fdr-1944

Plum Pudding & Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Christmas Message, 1944

December 25, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

During the Roosevelt years. FDR spent time talking to the American people via radio; these became his famous “Fireside Chats.” On Christmas Eve, Roosevelt would do one of his chats and then read Charles Dickens’s  “A Christmas Carol” to his grandchildren. This what he said in 1944, the turning point of World War II: “The Christmas spirit lives tonight in the bitter cold of the front lines of Europe and in the heat of the jungles and swamps of Burma […]

Categories: Desserts, English Cooking, White House • Tags: Christmas, Cooking, Food, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Henrietta Nesbitt, Plum Pudding, Recipes

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flummery-2

George Washington’s Christmas Brunch, 1769

December 24, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Happy/Merry Christmas/Hannukah/Holiday Season/Winter Solstice and a wonderful, hope-filled New Year. A big “Thank You” to each and every one of you for reading “Gherkins & Tomatoes.” Seven years before the sonorous words of the American Declaration of Independence rang out in Philadelphia, George Washington ate the following Christmas brunch. Betty, the only sister of his who survived to adulthood, served a very English-American menu: Holiday Egg Nog Virgina Ham Beaten Biscuits Corn Pudding Chicken and Oyster Pie Pumpkin Chips Cucumber […]

Categories: American Cooking, Christmas, Desserts, English Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Christmas, Cooking, Food, George Washington, Recipes, Southern cooking

George Washington, by Gilbert Stuart

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

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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.

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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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