Archives

The Expert (French) Cook in Enlightenment France: A Review

January 14, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

If you scrutinize sixteenth-century Dutch artist Pieter Aertsen’s painting, “The Cook in Front of the Stove,” you will see a rather stereotypical image of servant cooks, one that persisted in popular memory in Europe until well into the nineteenth century. Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason University and codirector of Zotero, attempts to get beyond that image in his thought-provoking new book, The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France. Beginning with the premise that much what passes for fact […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Chefs, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Methods, Paintings • Tags: Chefs, Cooks, Culinary History, Food History, France, French cuisine, Pieter Aertsen, Sean Takats

Vivre en l’Outre-Mer, or, The Trials of Living in French Congo ca. 1923: Part III

August 22, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Once settled into their bungalow overlooking Stanley Pool in Brazzaville, the Vassals faced the problem of hiring household help, especially a cook. Unlike many Europeans, they found a cook who knew his business, of whom Gabrielle wrote: I am glad, too, to have a change from German cooking.* Our primitive black Matamba is far superior to the fair, civilized Anna we have left behind [in Germany]. In such extremely primitive surroundings, I come to a meal without any expectation of […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Chefs, Cooking, French Cooking • Tags: Africa, Brazzaville, Cooks, France, French colonial empire, French Colonies, French Cooking, Gabrielle M. Vassal, Life in French Congo

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

Chartreuse and the Vallée du Désert: The Elixir of Life

February 16, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

While writing my brief “Gherkins & Tomatoes” blog post, “Cookbooks for a Desert Island, or an Autumn Afternoon,” I thumbed through de Groot’s book once more, swearing I would cook “Green Beans Sautéed in Cream” and “Potato Pancakes of the Mountains.” The price of peace and solitude has been unending struggle. ~~Roy Andries de Groot, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth Every once in a while, a book speaks to my soul, over and over again. Roy Andries de Groot’s […]

Categories: Book Reviews, French Cooking, Recipes • Tags: Chartreuse, Cooking, Cooks, Cuisine Francaise, Food, France, French Cooking, Recipes, Roy Andries de Groot

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

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

Edna Lewis, Chef (Used with permission.)

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Edna Lewis

September 2, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Who was Edna Lewis? Why call her an American Idol? Before she wrote The Edna Lewis Cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, In Pursuit of Flavor, and co-authored that recent jewel of a book, The Gift of Southern Cooking with chef Scott Peacock, well, Edna Lewis did many things in her long, experience-rich life, including campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt. But she always cooked — what Southern girl from her background didn’t? After all, she was the granddaughter of freed slaves […]

Categories: Cakes, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Cooking, Cooks, Edna Lewis, Food, Malinda Russell, Mary Randolph, Southern Food

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

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

Christopher Columbus, Portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo (Library of Congress)

BY WAY OF AFRICA: Seafood on the Plate

August 5, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Africa, West “…with a legion of cooks, and an army of slaves.”–Lord Byron– Five hundred and eighteen years ago, an event occurred that changed the world in more ways than its perpetrator thought possible. Christopher Columbus’s voyages caused a collision of cultures, people, and foods on a scale never before seen in the history of mankind. With Columbus’s “discovery” of America, thousands upon thousands of people yet unborn were destined to become slaves. And many millions of people around the […]

Categories: Africa, Food Columns, Recipes • Tags: Acras, Africa, Cooking, Cooks, Food, Haiti

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

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

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

De-Constructing Hawaii’s Loco Moco

January 25, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

For those seeking examples of culinary fusion, Hawaii provides a very deep well to peer into. Rachel Laudan discovered this while teaching at the University of Hawaii and wrote an award-winning book about the subject: The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage.* One of those fusion dishes which Laudan mentions, albeit briefly, is a “traditional” concoction called Loco Moco. One of the plate specials so popular in Hawaii, Loco Moco generally features two scoops of white sticky rice topped […]

Categories: Beef, Hawaii, Home Economics, Ingredients, Methods • Tags: Beef, Cooks, Eggs, Hawaii, Loco Moco

Displaced by Quake, Haiti Woman Cooks in Camp

Idylls of Cuisine, #47

January 24, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Cooking, Haiti, Photography • Tags: Cooks, Earthquake, Food Photography, Haiti, United Nations

Holy Mackerel!

January 20, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Mackerel scales and mares’ tails Make lofty ships carry low sails. ‑Old Sailors’ Rain Warning‑ (Due to family obligations for a few weeks, I’m posting some previous posts that I’ve dusted off and updated. ) Alas, the poor mackerel! A sky resembling its scales bodes rains. An unfriendly person is “cold as a mackerel”. “Dead as a mackerel” leaves no doubt in a listener’s mind: so‑and‑so or such‑and‑such has moved on to clearer seas. Protestants called Catholics “mackerel snappers,” a […]

Categories: Fish, Food Columns, Recipes • Tags: Cooks, Fish, Food, Isabella Beeton, Mackerel

A Cook’s Finger, or, A Pearl Beyond Price, Part 2

January 8, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Continued from January 7, 2010: In the beginning, dealing with Michel’s injured finger didn’t bring out the best in me. Truthfully, I longed to wash my hands of my cook’s ineptness. I did not want to take the time to deal with any of it. And yet, seeing Michel disintegrating in pain, well, I knew that I had no choice. Like it or not, I was involved. With a Burkinabe friend’s help, I found a local doctor willing to look […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Burkina Faso, Cooking • Tags: Africa, African Cooking, Burkina Faso, Cooks

A Cook’s Finger, or, a Pearl Beyond Price, Part 1

January 7, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I won’t pretend that living in a Francophone sub-Saharan African country like Burkina Faso was some romantic T. E. Lawrence kind of thing to do, because it wasn’t. And it certainly wasn’t Karen Blixen’s lush green Kenya, portrayed in her book, Out of Africa. I mean, gritty red dust blown in from desert Harmattan winds constantly sprinkled our refrigerator shelves like glitter on Christmas ornaments. How romantic is that? Even though we lived in the capital city of 700,000 people, […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Burkina Faso, Cooking • Tags: Africa, Burkina Faso, Cooks, Health

Idylls of Cuisine, #43

December 27, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Cooking, English Cooking, Photography, Southern Food, United States, Virginia • Tags: Cooking, Cooks, Food Photography, Virginia

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

Souls of Cooks

December 17, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Slipping like honey off a silver spoon, all the words build up to an earth-shaking, and revolutionary, crescendo. For the first time in history, cooks’ words crisscross the globe, through thin wires and invisible waves of energy, thanks to the Internet. Never before have the words of so many cooks reached so many people, making history daily. Not necessarily chefs — though some are or consider themselves to be, most of these cooks stand over the heat day in and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Methods, Oral History • Tags: Cooks, Foxfire Books, Squirrel Meat

In the Kitchen with Barbara Kingsolver: I

December 8, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’m going to bed every night now with Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, The Lacuna: A Novel, about Mexico, politics, art, El Norte, and — best of all — cooks. After her last book (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life), Kingsolver still finds food a fascinating part of life. In The Lacuna, here’s how she describes the cook who works for the chief protagonist’s family: When Leandro came he would push the fire to the sides, keeping the heat […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Books, Cooking, Latin America, Lit & Food, Mexico, United States • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver, Cooking, Cooks, Mexico, The Lacuna

Cooks Fairfield Plantation blackwoman_kitchen

Idylls of Cuisine, #41

December 6, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: African Cooking, American Cooking, Art, Cooking, Photography • Tags: African-American Cooks, Cooks, Food Photography, Kitchens, Plantations, Slavery

Christmas in Antebellum Virginia: Part II

December 3, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dey ‘s a-wokin’ in de qua’tahs a-preparin’ fu’ de feas’, So de little pigs is feelin’ kind o’ shy. De chickens ain’t so trus’ful ez dey was, to say de leas’, An’ de wise ol’ hens is roostin’ mighty high. You could n’t git a gobblah fu’ to look you in de face– I ain’t sayin’ whut de tu’ky ‘spects is true; But hit’s mighty dange’ous trav’lin’ fu’ de critters on de place F’om de time dat log commence a […]

Categories: Africa, American Cooking, Christmas, Cookbooks, Cooking, Menus, Pork, Recipes, Southern Food, United States, Virginia • Tags: Booker T. Washington, Cooks, Edna Lewis, Liver Pudding, Plantation Cookery, Slavery, Southern cooking, Virginia

Christmas in Antebellum Virginia: Part I

November 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

What is now the state of Virginia boasted the first permanent English settlement in North America. Despite its rocky beginnings in 1607, the settlement eventually flourished. The first Africans arrived in 1619 and the tobacco industry began in earnest. Along with the need for cheap labor, provided by slavery, the colonialists desired nothing more than to live as English gentlemen and gentlewomen on the edge of the vast wilderness. That all this transpired thirteen years prior to the Pilgrims’ landing […]

Categories: Christmas, English Cooking, Menus, United States, Virginia • Tags: Christmas, Cooks, George Washington, Martha Washington, Slavery, Southern cooking

Cooks Last Supper Assisi Piero Lorenzetti

To the Cooks, Prosit! Part II

November 25, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

He turns the spit who never tasted a morsel from it. Proverbes en Rimes, no. 117. Continuing our salute to cooks this holiday season (Thanksgiving), today’s post includes some depictions of male cooks, as well as female cooks. Medieval opinions of cooks, mostly men, tended to reflect the lowly status accorded to people who worked in the kitchen: Medieval attitudes toward the cook and his staff were mixed. There was always a certain contempt for a man with an obviously […]

Categories: Art, Cooking, Europe, Lit & Food, Thanksgiving • Tags: Cooks, Food in Art, Thanksgiving

To the Cooks, Prosit! Part I

November 23, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516), in delineating what would make an ideal society, said: .. all vyle service, all slaverie and drudgerye, with all the laboursome toyle and busines, is done by bondmen. But the women of every famelie by course have the office and charge of cokerye … and orderyng al thinges thereto belonging.” (Utopia, Book 2, Chapter 5, p. 70) It is fitting that there be a tribute to the women who cooked through the centuries. […]

Categories: Art, Cooking, Europe, Lit & Food, Thanksgiving • Tags: Art, Cooks, Cuisine, Flemish Painting, Food in Art, Thanksgiving

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

The Chicken or the Egg? 3. Instructions to the Cook

October 14, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Eggs a guilty pleasure? There’s a reason for that. Thanks to Dr. Thomas Royle Dawber’s research team and the famous “gold standard” Framingham Study,[1] eggs morphed into things to be eaten on the sly, enjoyed alone, like a whole bag of foil-wrapped Dove chocolates. Based on the weak statistical correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease in the original phase of that study, and the assumption that cholesterol in food automatically affected blood cholesterol, the American Heart Association and the […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Eggs, Middle East • Tags: Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchen, Cholesterol, Cooks, Eggs, Framingham Study, Nawal Nasrallah

The Chicken or the Egg? 2. The Cooking of Eggs

October 13, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There is reason in roasting of eggs! ~~~ James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides In nineteenth-century America, giddy with conquest and Manifest Destiny, domestic science denizens rose up, called themselves home economists, and jumped on the bandwagon of cleanliness and right thought. The results of that movement set the stage for today’s proscriptions and prescriptions regarding eating and cooking, especially when it came to eggs. And eggs, thankfully, seem to have survived the greatest roll-coaster ride in […]

Categories: Cooking, Eggs, English Cooking • Tags: American Cooking, Cooks, Eggs, English Cooking

If Salvador Dalí Dreamed Ferran Adrià

October 10, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In honor of Gourmet magazine of dear and cherished memory (and my Danish father-in-law, who would have scoffed loudly and asked for more roast beef, mange tak), I present this link to a video of a multi-course meal (“The Alchemist”) in a futuristic restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, Bo Bech at Restaurant Paustian. Gorgeous music, accompanied by arty and perplexing and imaginative food. A dreamy place that surrealist Salvador Dalí, as Don Quijote, might have envisioned, with chef Ferran Adrià as […]

Categories: Music, Restaurants • Tags: Bo Bech at Resturant Paustian, Cooks, Copenhagen, Denmark

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

Turmeric Flowers (Photo credit: Subharghya Das)

To Balance, Strength, Love, Faith, and Hope:* Jehangir Mehta’s Mantra

September 26, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Reflecting the ayurvedic principle of balance, chef Jehangir Mehta’s cookbook, Mantra: The Rules of Indulgence (2008), carries the imaginative use of flavorings to nirvanaic levels. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Indian-born Mehta draws on the centuries-old practices found in Indian cuisine and combines them in startling ways with many traditional Western, and even Indian, dishes. Take his Turmeric Yorkshire Pudding as just one example: Turmeric Yorkshire Pudding 16 servings 1 cup milk 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted […]

Categories: Asia, India • Tags: Cooks, India, Indian Cooking, Jehangir Mehta, Mantra: The Rules of Indulgence

Boarding House Food in Lagos, Nigeria

September 24, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In Africa, boarding houses enjoy a popularity resembling that of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries in the USA, for the same reasons. More reasonable in cost than buying a house or living in an apartment, a boarding house also eliminates the need to worry about food preparation. Many students, such as those attending school in Lagos, Nigeria, live in boarding houses. Many students come from distant villages and might not have family living in Lagos. And even if they do […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Nigeria • Tags: Africa, Boarding Houses, Cayley College, Cooks, Menus, Nigeria

Good Golly, Miss Molly: Mary Randolph’s Boarding House

September 23, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In March, 1808, readers of The Richmond Virginia Gazette would have read the following advertisement in the pages of that newspaper: “Mrs. RANDOLPH Has established a Boarding House in Cary Street [Richmond], for the accommodation of Ladies and Gentlemen. She has comfortable chambers, and a stable well supplied for a few Horses.” Author of The Virginia House-Wife and affectionately named “Queen Molly” by her friends,* Mary Randolph opened her doors to paying customers when her Federalist husband, David Meade Randolph, […]

Categories: American Cooking, Milk, Rice, United States, Virginia • Tags: American Cooking, Boarding Houses, Cooks, David Meade Randolph, History, Karen hess, Mary Randolph, Refrigeration Invention, Samuel Mordecai, Southern cooking, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia, Virginia House-Wife

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