Archives

Using Cookbooks in Historical Archaeological Research: New Mexico as a Case Study

December 17, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Using cookbooks as a tool in historical archaeological research might sound a tad bit absurd, but by examining certain characteristics of these books, it becomes possible to see dirt-covered artifacts in a slightly different light. As a tribute to my childhood friend, Meli-Duran Kirkpatrick, and at the request of her husband, archaeologist Dr. David Kirkpatrick, I wrote an article DAILY LIFE THROUGH COOKING AND COOKBOOKS: A BRIEF GUIDE TO USING COOKBOOKS AS A TOOL IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY about the feasibility […]

Categories: American Cooking, Archaeology, Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, Spain, Spanish Cooking • Tags: Archaeology, Cookbooks, Culinary History, New Mexico, Research methodology, Spanish Cooking

A German ornament depicting a baker. (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

How to Tempt the Scrooges, or, Christmas, the Cooking Season

December 5, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I love Christmas. Yes, I really do. For I see Christmas as a time that allows us – in these rather sterile, rigid United States, anyway – to cut loose and string up gaudy gee-gaws all over the house. To transcend the daily. To feel the seasonal and mythic cycles of past times. To celebrate the sheer miracle of being alive. That, to me, is what festivals mean, be they football games or saints’ days or other special days. All […]

Categories: American Cooking, Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, Holidays, Photography, Reference • Tags: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Christmas, Cookbooks, Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas, Great Scandinavian Baking Book, Rose Levy Beranbaum

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

At My French Table

July 2, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

If as a child you loved fairy tales and dreamt of being Cinderella, or if you longed to be the handsome prince with a turreted castle, you’re going to adore Jane Webster’s gloriously illustrated At My French Table: Food, Family and Joie de Vivre in a Corner of Normandy. The book imparts the warm feeling you get snuggling up in bed with a magical story and a steaming cup of sweet cocoa. Along with Anne Willan’s From My Chateau Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 2000), Susan […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, France, French Cooking • Tags: Amanda Hesser, Australia, Cookbooks, France, French cuisine, Jane Webster

Rationing and the Black Market in Nazi-Occupied France: Some Thoughts

February 22, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Life is hard (On vit mal). Everyone grows thinner. A kilo of butter costs one thousand francs. A kilo of peas forty-five francs. A kilo of potatoes forty francs. Still we must find them.” – Jean Guéhenno, August 1944 Speaking as the beneficiary of an immense system of food production in the twenty-first century, as the citizen of an increasingly obese nation where over two-thirds of my fellow citizens are considered overweight, I can only imagine food shortages in one […]

Categories: France, French Cooking • Tags: Black market, Cookbooks, Culinary History, Food History, France, French cuisine, Jean Guéhenno, Rationing, World Wars

The Roger Smith Cookbook Conference

February 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Just a reminder that you will be able to see some 10 of the 28 sessions live and for free on Friday and Saturday, February 10 and 11, 2012. See schedule of free sessions below. To brighten up a dreary February in 2011, a group of food scholars and cookbook writers started a cookbook conference. It was so successful that they’re doing it again this year, bigger and better. Unfortunately, this year’s Cookbook Conference is completely sold out, and there’s a […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food News, Food writing, India, Methods • Tags: Cookbooks, Culinary History, Food History, Roger Smith Cookbook Conference

Who was Ginette Mathiot? And Why Should You Care?

November 15, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Ginette Mathiot wrote books that bring up long-lost taste memories in France, much as Marcel Proust’s oft-quoted prattle about about madeleines. Only her work proves infinitely more readable and enjoyable. She also basically sticks it to Julia and makes French cooking seem less like a prolonged session at the dentist’s. One of her books, Je Sais Faire la Patisserie, appeared in an English translation on bookshelves on November 5, 2011. It’s a book that just might crack open the mysteries […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Butter, Cookbooks, Cookies, France, French Cooking • Tags: Book Reviews, Chocolate & Zucchini, Clotilde Dusoulier, Cookbooks, Cookies, Dorie Greenspan, France, French cuisine, Ginette Mathiot, Je Sais Cuisiner, Je Sais Faire la Patisserie

Auguste Escoffier: Le Guide Culinaire, Revised

May 16, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

New, revised version of Escoffier’s premier work, unabridged fourth edition from 1921. In English, glory be. Translated from the 1921 Fourth Edition, this revision includes all-new Forewords by Heston Blumenthal, chef-owner of the Michelin three-star-rated Fat Duck restaurant, and Chef Tim Ryan, President of The Culinary Institute of America, along with Escoffier’s original Forewords, a memoir of the great chef by his grandson Pierre, and more than 5,000 narrative recipes for all the staples of French cuisine. Now that’s enough […]

Categories: Books, Chefs, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Reference • Tags: Auguste Escoffier, Chefs, Cookbooks, France, French Cooking

Why Bother with Culinary History?

May 9, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A friend recently asked me, “Why is culinary history important?” Actually, her words came out of her mouth a little more harsh sounding than that: ”Why are you wasting so much of your time on that stuff? Why don’t you just write up some recipes, like how to make that great bread you always make?” Momentarily speechless, I realized she asked me the question that I periodically ask myself. What difference does it make if we know about French chefs […]

Categories: Chefs, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, France, Lit & Food, Methods • Tags: Cookbooks, Culinary History, England, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, French cuisine, Rick Bayless, Tom Jaine, Virginia Woolf

Elizabeth David Frenc Country Cooking cover

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Elizabeth David

September 20, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Foxed, spotted, acid-rich, the paper crackles under the slightest touch of my hands. The book’s an old Penguin paperback, worth only 74 cents on Amazon.com. As I turn the pages of French Country Cooking (1951), I vaguely recall a comment I once read, written by food activist and restaurateur Alice Waters in her book, The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (p. x), where she talked about how she got started in the whole business of food and cooking: I bought Elizabeth […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores • Tags: Alice Waters, Cookbooks, Cooks, Elizabeth David, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores

Idylls of Cuisine, #80

September 19, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: France, French Cooking, Mushrooms, Paintings, Reference • Tags: Cookbooks, France, French Cooking, Larousse Gastronomique, Mushrooms

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: The Other Mrs. (Lydia) Child

September 16, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Events constantly reinforce the old saying, “History repeats itself.” Like the other Mrs. Child (Julia, that is), Mrs. Lydia Maria Child wrote a best-selling cookbook, The Frugal Housewife, Dedicated to Those Who are Not Ashamed of Economy (1829). Like Mary Randolph (author of The Virginia House-wife), Lydia Maria Child (1802 – 1880) married a man more in love with bad debts and other troubles than with her. And again like her modern “namesake,” Julia Child, Lydia Maria lived in Boston. […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cookbooks • Tags: American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooks, Food. Cooking, Lydia Maria Child

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: The Other Mrs. (Abby) Fisher

September 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Before M. F. K. Fisher, sometimes known as plain Mrs. Fisher, there was Mrs. Abby Fisher. And Abby Fisher’s personage couldn’t be more different from M. F. K. Fisher than if a novelist like Flannery O’Connor dreamed her up. The author of what food historians long believed to be the first African-American cookbook,* Abby Fisher counted on others to actually write What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking in 1881.** As a former slave from South Carolina she went […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cookbooks, Corn, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Abby Fisher, African-American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Cooks, Corn, Food, Recipes, Southern cooking

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Patience Gray

September 6, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

HONEY FROM A WEED: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia, by Patience Gary (Harper & Row, 1987) Although Elizabeth David published the first truly popular English book on Mediterranean Food (1950), another author, the lesser- known English food writer and free-spirit, Patience Gray, wrote the more poetic works. Her Plats du Jour (1957), despite its French title, netted recipes from all the lands of the Mediterranean, mostly gleaned from books and such. Years later, she followed […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Mushrooms, Recipes • Tags: Cookbooks, Cooking, Cooks, Food, Mediterranean Cooking, Patience Gray

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Isabella Beeton (Part II)

August 26, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

(Continued from August 23, 2010): Brillat-Savarin’s comments about the English being the worst cooks in the world drew a sniff from the proper Isabella, sure that her book would right that situation. In spite of the moralizing tone, and the plagiarism, BOHM became a runaway bestseller. Readers and critics considered the soup, fish, sauce chapters the best. Quantities of food served at dinner now seem phenomenal. But Isabella emphasized strict economy, sometimes distressingly so, especially with family meals. She tackled […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, England, English Cooking • Tags: Book of Household Management, Cookbooks, Cooks, English cookery, Food, Isabella Beeton, Rare Books

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Isabella Beeton (Part I)

August 23, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Today in Britain, “Mrs. Beeton” is a culinary trademark not unlike “Betty Crocker,” whom General Mills created in a Frankensteinian moment to boost sales by appealing to Every Housewife.

The difference between the two ladies is that Mrs. Beeton was a real, breathing, living personage who wrote a monster of a book with a monster of a title: The Book of Household Management Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort, BOHM for short.

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, England, English Cooking • Tags: Book of Household Management, Cookbooks, Cooks, English cookery, Food, Isabella Beeton, Rare Books

Seduced by Spaghetti

June 17, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Continued from Still Mi Amore — Wild Abandonment Among the Tomatoes and Zucchini: Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? ~~ Henry David Thoreau ~~ Only when I studied the culinary heritage of Catholicism did I pay deeper attention to Italian food. The saints’ days celebrations intrigued me, although today few people celebrate those days with as much reverence or fanfare as in the past. But the Italians seemed to […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Cookbooks, Evan Kleiman, Gorgonzola, Honey, Italian Cooking, Paola Pettini, Viana La Place

Still Mi Amore — Wild Abandonment Among the Tomatoes and Zucchini

June 14, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A market is three women and a goose. ~~ Italian proverb ~~ I know that for many Italian women my nostalgic idea of Italian cooking would seem foreign, as alien as if I zoomed in from another planet. Louise DeSalvo makes that clear in her book Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family as she debunks the myths of the happy Italian family. And the quiet testimony of an Italian-American friend of mine seconds […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Beef, Cooking • Tags: Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Beef, Marlena de Blasi, Sacra di San Michele, Tuscan Beef Stew, Louise DeSalvo

What Do You Mean You Don’t Need Cookbooks? (Or, What Good are All Those Cookbooks on Your Sagging Shelves?)

May 24, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ll admit it: I collect cookbooks like some people collect plastic pigs or miniature silver tourist-spot spoons or wine corks from bottles they’ve downed. My cookbook collection, like all collections, began small.* When I served with the Peace Corps in Paraguay, my landlady — the mechanical dentist’s wife — giggled when I threw my suitcase on the lumpy mattress in my hut and pulled out my old American standbys — Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook and Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, proudly showing […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Local foods • Tags: Cookbooks, Cooks, Meditations, Paraguay

The Herbs in Spain Grow Mainly on the Plain

May 21, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Many times when I walk through the nearby woods, I marvel at all the plants hiding under rotting logs and peeking out from the boulders. These plants, sharing the same earth and respiring the same air as we do, live and die nameless to most of us. How far away we’ve traveled from the days when we could walk out the door, into the forests and fields, and confidently pick a plant, knowing its name, its properties, and how to […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Spain • Tags: Cookbooks, Ferenc Maté, Herbal Medicine, Herbals, Herbs, Llibre del Coch, Manual de Mugeres, Robert de Nola, Sent Sovi, The Hills of Tuscany

In a Kitchen Far, Far Away …

May 7, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Once upon a time, in a kitchen far, far away … A neophyte Italian cook opened up Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating and two handsome princes swore eternal love over an ethereal pasta roll stuffed with spinach and ricotta.* That’s how the story would begin, and end, in a fairy tale. [More about fairy tales and their real significance HERE].** But this is real life and what […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Honduras, Italian Cooking, Italy, Pasta • Tags: Classic Italian Cook Book, Cookbooks, El Zamorano, Honduras, Italian Cooking, Marcella Hazan, United Fruit Company

The Pull of Italy: An Explanation of, or at Least a Discourse on, an Obsession

April 26, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Just what is it about Italy? The sheer, sheer beauty? Or … The turbulent history The grottoed mushroom-rank earth The Latin-infused language The ancientness The glimmering light The icy green water of northern lakes The needle-like cypress trees The deep phosphorescent colors of art The blue of the sea The dark wood floors and terra cotta tiles The flowers and the grape vines and the olive trees The spirituality mingling with ancient beliefs And food and cooking reflect all of […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Bill Buford, Cookbooks, Enchanted April, Heat, Italian Cooking, Italy, Virginia Woolf

Idylls of Cuisine, #58

April 11, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Cookbooks, Photography • Tags: Cookbooks, Food Photography, Vintage cookbooks

Culinaria Russia: A Picture Cookbook for Grownups

April 7, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ve only known two Russian cooks in my life. First there was Olga, the cook who sustained me during my Peace Corps years, whose Russian roots rarely extended to the table of her Paraguayan pension. Always tripe and manioc and beef à caballo, never borscht or blini or piroshki. Sometimes meat laced with chimichurri, a green sauce from Argentina, which reminded Olga of home, as we shall see. And then there was Marina, who only cooked for me once. She […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, Russia • Tags: A Gift to Young Housewives, Cookbooks, Culinaria Russia, Culinaria series, Elena Molokhovets, Green sauce, Russia

From Mother Russia with Love: Meaty Mushrooms and Relentless Lent

March 25, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribi (looking for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest. ~~ Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory Nabokov hits on something many of us reading his words cannot really sense, cannot really feel. For those of us who grew up on canned […]

Categories: Beef, Cookbooks, Cooking, Lent, Mushrooms, Russia • Tags: Beef Stroganoff, Classic Russian Cooking: A Gift to Young Housewives, Cookbooks, Cooks, Elena Molokhovets, Joyce Toomre, Lent, Mushrooms, Recipes, Russia, Vladimir Nabokov

The British Melting Pot

March 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I recently ran across these books, mentioned on an interesting British Web site providing glimpses and glances at cookbooks published in Britain, cookbooks that we here in the US of A rarely see. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems that the British cookbook market features more books concerned with other cultures and not so much with “slimming,” as our friends across the pond call dieting. So here they are, some books to fascinate you on a rainy day in […]

Categories: Africa, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, India • Tags: Africa, Cookbooks, Cooking, India, Middle East, Peru

Idylls of Cuisine, #44

January 3, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Home Economics, Photography, Southern Food, Virginia • Tags: Appalachian Electric Power, Canning, Cookbooks, Virginia, World War II Food

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

A Russian Cook

December 18, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Another good appetizer is stewed white mushrooms, with onion, you know, and bay leaf and other spices. You lift the lid off the dish, and the steam rises, a smell of mushrooms … sometimes it really brings tears to my eyes! ~~Anton Chekov, “The Siren” With the publication of Gourmet magazine beginning in 1941, stories about cooks appeared sporadically, including a series on Katish, a Russian cook from the childhood one of Gourmet’s writers. Wanda L. Frolov compiled the articles […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Food writing, Mushrooms • Tags: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooks, Katish, Mushrooms in Sour Cream, Russia, Russian cuisine, Wanda Frolov

Christmas Cheer, or, Fire Up the Reindeer

November 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Black Friday marks the first “official” day of Christmas, er, shopping, that is. (You know it’s almost Christmas when the day after Halloween, the grocery stores start hauling out the red ribbon and fake mistletoe.) A bit premature, but that’s cultural change for you. Used to be that you couldn’t find a bit of tinsel or a reindeer before Thanksgiving was over. But Advent and Christmas will soon be upon us, along with visions of sugarplums and plenty of reindeer. […]

Categories: American Cooking, Book Reviews, Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, United States • Tags: Black Friday, Book Reviews, Christmas, Christmas Cookbook, Cookbooks, John Clancy, Mimi Sheraton, Reindeer

Why Cookbooks?

November 21, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Why on earth so many cookbooks, when no one cooks? Or do they? Read Adam Gopnik’s thoughts in the latest food issue of The New Yorker. He starts out by saying Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Critic's Corner, Lit & Food • Tags: Adam Gopnik, Cookbooks, Culinary History

The Historic Gastronomist

November 14, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Like old cookbooks? Like old recipes? Then don’t miss this down-to-earth video, shot by Liza de Guia, entitled “The Historic Gastronomist,” about a 27-year-old Brooklyn woman named Sarah Loman who is resuscitating centuries old recipes from American history. Loman writes a food history blog called “Four Pounds Flour.” Meet Sarah Lohman. She’s not a professional cook, nor a historian, yet what she is passionate about involves both cooking and history. Sarah is a rare breed of hobbyist. A “historic gastronomist”. […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Methods, Video • Tags: American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooks, Historic Gastronomist, Historic Recipes, Liza de Guia, Videos

Ghosts of Gourmet: Ann Seranne

October 17, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

About three days ago, caught in the throes of egg cookery, I realized that Ann Seranne’s name doesn’t ring a whole lot of bells these days in food circles. Who? Even Alice Arndt’s celebrated Culinary Biographies fails to mention Seranne. We shouldn’t ignore this lady and her place in the pantheon of culinarians contributing to the world of food. After all, not only did Seranne serve as executive editor of now-defunct Gourmet magazine, she worked as food editor of the […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Cookbooks, Food writing • Tags: Ann Seranne, Bibliographies, Complete Book of Egg Cookery, Cookbooks, Cooks, The Art of Egg Cookery

Eggs en cocotte (Photo credit: Elke Sisco)

The Chicken or the Egg? 4. Egging Us On

October 15, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A few days ago, I thumbed through the brand-new, hot-off-the-press version of Larousse Gastronomique. You know, Julia Child’s bedtime reading. At least according to the movie, “Julie & Julia.” After all, Julia once remarked that, “If I were allowed only one reference book in my library, Larousse Gastronomique would be it, without question.” First written in French by Prosper Montagné in 1938, it wasn’t until 1961 that English speakers could savor Larousse, edited by Charlotte Turgeon and Nina Froud. Since […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cooking, Eggs, Food News, France, French Cooking • Tags: Cookbooks, Eggs, French Cooking, Larousse Gastronomique

The Chicken or the Egg? 1. The Egg and Art*

October 12, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The egg it is where it was at for Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who once said, rather egotistically (!), that “When I was three I wanted to be a cook. At the age of six I wanted to be Napoleon. Since then my ambition has increased all the time” The other day, thoughts of the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989) floated into my mind, slipping and sliding like one of his weary watches. Or, better yet, […]

Categories: Art, Cookbooks, Eggs, Menus, Spain • Tags: Arno Breker, Cookbooks, Food in Art, Menus, Museums, Salvador Dali, Surrealism

Take Wyte Wyn: A Brief Meditation on Written Recipes, Part II

September 1, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

For us, the word “recipe” began with the Latin verb recipere (to take). And many early recipes in the West indeed started with the instruction to “take” something, usually an ingredient. Our verb “take” – as used in recipes, at least the old ones — implies violence, doesn’t it? Let’s look at what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say on the subject: The earliest known use of this verb in the Germanic languages was app. to express the physical […]

Categories: Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, Europe, Methods, Recipes • Tags: Cookbooks, Cooks, Linguistics, Methods, Old English

Old Cookbooks Online — Some New Goodies

August 22, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

165 of Virginia Tech’s Newman Library’s collection of thousands of rare and antique cookbooks just went digital. Most of the books stem from the late nineteenth century and many illustrate the trend toward scientific home making, or home economics. Browse the entire list HERE. Some of the highlights include: Edward Smith’s Foods. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873. Maria E. Rundell. A New System of Domestic Cookery: Founded Upon Principles of Economy. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1844. (Mentioned in […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Books, Cookbooks, Libraries • Tags: Cookbooks, Home Economics, Libraries, Online Cookbooks, Virginia Tech

Old News: Le Ricette per Cucina Raccolte dal Principe Don Paolo Borghese

June 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Le Ricette per Cucina Raccolte dal Principe Don Paolo Borghese (Recipes from the Collection of Prince Don Paolo Borghese), a new cookbook published by the Ferragamo family of Italian shoe fame, sounds scrumptious. The eighteenth-century recipes come from family archives. According to the Vogue UK Website, the book will be available worldwide in September 2009 for £30.

Categories: Cookbooks, Italian Cooking, Italy • Tags: Cookbooks, Cooks, Ferragamo, Italian Cooking, Principe Paolo Borghese

Reveling in Books: Fresh, Bones, Fat, and Meat

June 10, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Like Susan Bourette in Meat: A Love Story My Year in Search of the Perfect Meal (did she get this subtitle from Roy Andries de Groot, a food writer popular in the sixties and seventies who wrote In Search of the Perfect Meal (1986)?), many people temporarily eschew meat at some point in their lives. And, as Bourette herself did, they return to eating meat. With gusto. Those of us who, like Bourette, relish meat (but don’t like the conditions […]

Categories: American Cooking, Beef, Book Reviews, Cookbooks • Tags: Bones, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Jennifer McLagan, Meat, Susan Bourette, Susanne freidberg

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