There’s always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

~~John Updike ~~

To contact Gherkins & Tomatoes / Cornichons et Tomates, please send an e-mail to gherkinstomatoes@hotmail.com or leave a comment on one of the posts.

To see more specific details about the creator of Gherkins & Tomatoes, go to the following page:

Details, Details, Please!

Some people find their passion in clothes or car racing or mountain climbing.

My passion lies in food, especially French food and the touches brought about by cross-cultural contacts.

I write about food and cookbooks and food history because together these three things shape that passion, particularly as it all relates to France. I’ve traveled extensively in France and lived for a total of seven years in former French colonies: Haiti, Morocco, and Burkina Faso. In Burkina Faso, I worked with the American Club restaurant staff in developing a new menu and trained them in a number of new recipes and cooking techniques.

I am studying first hand the colonial experience in terms of French cuisine with the help of the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Culinary Trust Julia Child Boston Foundation Independent Study Scholarship grant, awarded in 2011.

I am also studying the impact of the Huguenot diaspora on the cuisine of the America South, particularly Virginia and South Carolina. I received the 2011 Scholar’s Grant from the Culinary Historians of New York to assist me in this study.

Here at Gherkins & Tomatoes, I indulge my obsession for the life-giving nature of cooking and growing food. Try as I do to keep it all global, my compass keeps spinning toward France. And I also include from time to time the odd bit about places where the French left a gastronomic footprint in their former overseas possessions — New France in North America, Mexico, Burkina Faso (Haute Volta), Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Madagascar, French Somaliland, Togo, Cameroon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Barthelemy, St. Martin, Les Saintes, Marie-Galante, French Guiana, Indochina, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Pondicherry, and French Polynesia.

Over 600 million people in the world speak French. Only 65 million live in France. Half of the world’s French speakers live in Africa.

Food always has been a big part of the amazing life I’ve lived. So have cookbooks. I literally live surrounded by walls of cookbooks.

Starting with Peace Corps in Paraguay — then years in Mexico,  Honduras, Haiti, Morocco, and Burkina Faso, working as a nutritionist — with months of traveling in Europe sandwiched in between, all those on-the-ground experiences turned me into a citizen of the world and an admirer of the women who worked impossibly hard every day to feed their families. I’m also a Southerner, transplanted from Washington state, and it’s been 26 years off and on that I’ve called the South my home region. My genes are English, descended from some of the earliest settlers at Jamestown, namely Richard Pace and Thomas Lane. Full circle, you might say.

That experience underlies everything that I write about, overt or not.

I collect cookbooks — I own close to 3500 plus some — and make it my business to know about what’s been written about cookbooks both past and present. Most of my food-related books span the cuisines of the world.

Because of the nature of my life and interests, I’ve done a lot of different things, seemingly unrelated: Earned degrees in Latin American Studies, History, Human Nutrition, and Library Science. Indexed cookbooks for a living and expounded on how to index them. Worked in restaurants and served as a restaurant consultant for theU.S. Embassy in Burkina Faso, as I mentioned above.

My writing, briefly noted:

• Online book reviewer specializing in French culinary books and French history at the New York Journal of Books.
• Book reviews for Alimentum; Gastronomica; Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming; The Roanoke Times; The National Catholic Reporter (one such comparative review: “Novelists Train Their Sights on Islamic Terrorism“); Food, Culture & Society; Digest of Middle Eastern Studies; newsletter of the Culinary Historians of New York; and Library Journal. Now a member of the National Book Critics Circle. (Most of my Roanoke Times reviews are HERE.)
• Writer and editor, The Virginia Culinary Thymes, online newsletter of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends at Virginia Tech.
• Articles for LEAVEN, La Leche League’s magazine; NRV Magazine; 81 weekly food columns for The Cedar Key Beacon; and several chapters in Handbook of Indexing Techniques: A Guide for Beginning Indexers.
• Three unpublished cookbooks, all multicultural in focus.
• Articles for major food encyclopedias: “Colonial Mexico,” “Día de los Muertos,”  “Feast-Day Celebrations,” “Aztecs,”  “Incas,”  and “Cookbooks, History of” for Entertaining From Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl: An Encyclopedia;  “The Doyenne of Mexican Cooking: Diana Kennedy” for Icons of American Cooking; “Haiti” and “Honduras” for Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia.
• Article on food writer and cookbook collector Elizabeth Robins Pennell in Fine Book & Collections.
• Short piece on Haitian market women in upcoming anthology, The Haiti I Knew, The Haiti I know, The Haiti I Want to Know —  sponsored by Women Writers of Haitian Descent (submission by invitation).
• In the top 10 of entries for the the 2010 MFK Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing, presented biennially in even-numbered years by Les Dames d’Escoffier International (LDEI), for my blog post, “Afghanistan, Land of the Enchanted Snows.”
• Entry on chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten for second edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.
• Article for El Paso Archaeological Society’s The Artifact: “Daily Life Through Cooking and Cookbooks: A Brief Guide to Using Cookbooks as a Tool in Historical Archaeology”

Currently I work with the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends in building the culinary collection at Virginia Tech’s Newman Library.

Member of the Virginia Historical Society, Society for French Historical Studies, French Colonial Historical Society,  National League of American Pen Women, North American Mycological Association, International Association of Culinary Professionals, Southern Foodways Alliance, Culinary Historians of Washington DC, Culinary Historians of New York,  and Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor.

And I’ve written Mushroom: A Global History, for UK-based Reaktion Books and their Edible Series. The book covers the fascinating history of humankind’s culinary relationship with mushrooms, from Alice in Wonderland to six-foot-wide edible mushrooms found in symbiotic relationships with termite mounds in Africa.

But basically I just love cooking, history, and the diverse world we live in — all of which cookbooks reveal. I believe we should all stop being so insular and start respecting other cultures for the richness and beauty they offer us.

I could go on and on about all the other stuff I’ve done in my life to qualify me to write even a single word, but that’s boring and just delays the real work. Which is the business of cooking, eating, and living in community, seeking harmony among people and nations. I don’t pretend to present every single little detail about food history; my goal is to share my passion and hope that others discover something more about this incredible world of ours and all the cooks who have gone on to their reward, hopefully stirring, chopping, and nurturing for eternity.

Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.

-  Gustave Flaubert

The title of this blog,”Gherkins & Tomatoes,” sprang from the title of the eponymous painting by Spanish painter Luis Melendez’s painting, 1772, Prado, Madrid, one of the first European renditions of tomatoes.