Gherkins & Tomatoes

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

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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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Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Ode to the Great Pumpkin [Pie]: Speak, Memory*

October 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye, What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie? ~ John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Pumpkin,” 1850 Some people moan and descend straight into mourning with the first frost. Not me. You’ll find me in my kitchen, with clanging pans and steaming windows, eager to put aside the perpetual salads and raw cucumbers of summer. Yesterday afternoon, I baked my first pumpkin pie of the season. Yes, I confess: I basically […]

Categories: American Cooking, England, Food writing, Photography, Pies--Sweet, Pumpkin • Tags: John Greenleaf Whittier, Libby's, Photography, Pie, Pumpkin, Southern cooking

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Peaches 2

How Cooking Transforms the Aching Soul

September 12, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Living today’s hurry-up-run-run-run-faster-faster-text-text lifestyle tends to blunt contact with more earthy things, like cooking. The act of cooking offers something that the stiffest drink or most potent tranquilizer cannot. Dare I say it out loud? It’s even better than sex, in a way. Especially when chocolate is involved, but that’s another story … . For me, cooking offers a glimpse of the spiritual, but it’s also a calming and mindful activity. After all, I must be in the present moment […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Peaches, Photography, Pies--Sweet • Tags: Cooking, La Cucina, Lily Prior, Meditations, Peaches, Photography, Pies, Spirituality

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Scenes from La France Profonde

March 18, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Categories: Cakes, France, French Cooking, Photography, Pies--Sweet, Restaurants • Tags: Desserts, France, French Cooking, La Procope, Photographs, Tarts

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Idylls of Cuisine, #86

October 31, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

[A photograph and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Categories: France, French Cooking, Photography, Pies--Sweet • Tags: Cherry, France, French Cooking, Jam, Tart

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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chess-pie

Just Pie … Chess Pie

January 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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pie-global-history-clarkson

Pie in the Sky: A Review of Janet Clarkson’s “Pie: A Global History”

March 31, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

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Dorothy's Red Heels (Photo credit: Steve Fernie)

In the Kitchen in Kansas … The Food of Obama’s Mother’s Childhood

November 18, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There’s No Place Like Home … ~~ Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz Kansas is flat, real flat. Yes. And President Barack Obama’s green leaf of choice, arugula, clocks in pretty low on Kansans’ list of comestibles. But none of this means that President Obama doesn’t love Kansas and especially its wholesome, comforting food. That said, there’s nothing the matter with Kansas. Great food. Wonderful pies. Terrific barbecue. True, so true. To balance things out, after writing about Barack Obama’s father’s […]

Categories: American Cooking, Pies--Sweet, Recipes, Salads • Tags: Barack Obama, Cooking, Cooks, Farm Journal, Food, Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham

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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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