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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

Idylls of Cuisine, #92

December 19, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: England, English Cooking, France • Tags: Christmas in wartime, Christmas pudding, England, English Cooking, France, French soldiers, Guerre mondial, Soldats françaises, World War I

Sliced Ginger Root (Used with permission.)

“Ginger Shall Be Hot i’ the Mouth Too”

August 19, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Sir Toby Belch: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Clown: Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too. Twelfth Night. Act ii. Sc. 3. If anyone ever makes a movie about ginger’s long and fascinating history, I want Leonardo DiCaprio to play the lead. Imagine him sporting a multi-colored pair of hose, leaping from bow to stern on a flimsy wooden caravel … Anyway, Shakespeare described […]

Categories: English Cooking, Food Columns, Ginger, Recipes • Tags: Chicken, Cooking, English Cooking, Fish, Food, Ginger

See Jane Cook:* A Word About Sophie Grigson’s Mum

July 7, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Jane Grigson is the nearest thing that we have on this side of the great green bouillabaisse to M.F.K. Fisher, with learning and wit that are rarely devoted to such a banausic subject as stuffing food down one’s cake hole. ~~ Philip Howard No wonder I’m feeling a bit green. The annual Oxford Food Symposium begins in a few days and this year’s theme trumpets “Cured, Fermented, and Smoked Foods.” Now, for foodists, foodies, gastronomes, and just plain folks, this […]

Categories: England, English Cooking, Food writing, French Cooking • Tags: Charcuterie, English cookery, English Cooking, Fermentation, Jane Grigson, Oxford Food Symposium, Sophie Grigson

The Eels of Hannah, Or, Hannah Glasse’s Lenten Recipes

February 19, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Poor Hannah Glasse. Literally. Except for Martha Stewart, she may be the only cookery book writer who did hard time for financial woes. Author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, this eighteenth-century woman lived a life that her contemporary Jane Austen could have invented in one of her novels. You know, young illegitimate daughter of a moneyed gentleman marries n’er-do-well rogue, bears eight children, and ends up on the scrap heap, faced with the need to make […]

Categories: Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, England • Tags: Eels, England, English Cooking, Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy

Shrovetide Pancakes — A Shrove Tuesday Tradition

February 15, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Shriven/Shrove: archaic : to confess one’s sins, especially to a priest* When they heard the “pancake bell,” people flocked to the church to be “shriven” or confessed on Shrove Tuesday, and ready to make the pancakes that date back to Saxon times. If you think of Shrove Tuesday pancakes as stodgy, thick American pancakes, think again. Meant to use up eggs, butter, and milk just before Lent, these pancakes resemble French crêpes and Italian crespelle more than the flapjacks so […]

Categories: Cooking, Eggs, English Cooking, Lent • Tags: English Cooking, Lent, Pancakes, Photo Essay, Shrove Tuesday

Wassailing Through

December 21, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Wassaile the trees, that they may beare You many a Plum and many a Peare: For more or lesse fruits they will bring, As you do give them Wassailing. A foot of snow presses against the front door, the presents glimmer under the Christmas tree, and Aunt Lillie’s sugar cookies lie temptingly in the old painted tin box. And the Wassail punch simmers slowly on the stove, the fragrance of cinnamon wafting through the house. On a dark, cold winter […]

Categories: Christmas, England, English Cooking, Video • Tags: Celtic Music, Christmas, England, English Cooking, Recipes, Twelfth Night, Wassail

Fruitcake, Fermentation by Another Name

December 15, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

We never eat fruitcake because it has rum, And one little slice puts a man on the bum. Oh, can you imagine the pitiful plight Of a man eating fruitcake until he gets tight? A man who eats fruitcake lives a terrible life. He`s mean to his children and beats on his wife. A man who eats fruitcake dies a terrible death, With the odor of raisins and rum on his breath! “Away with Rum,” Temperance Union (Aussie Band) Christmas […]

Categories: Baking, Bread, Cakes, Christmas, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Fermentation • Tags: Breads, Cakes, Christmas, English Cooking, Fermentation, Fruitcakes

Civil War Christmases

December 10, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 100 and 50 guns and plenty of ammunition, also about 25,000 bales of cotton. Telegram from William Tecumseh Sherman to Abraham Lincoln, December 22, 1864 Many authors write about the austerity of American Christmas celebrations prior to the Civil War (1861 – 1865), but that’s because those writers focus on the North’s Puritan heritage. Most of our current ways — mostly Germanic in origin — of […]

Categories: American Cooking, Christmas, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Menus, United States, Virginia • Tags: Accomplisht Cook, American Cooking, Christmas, Civil War, Eggnog, English Cooking, Menus, Robert May, Southern, Thomas Nast, Virginia

Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg

December 7, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Now Christmas comes, ‘tis fit that we Should feast and sing, and merry be; Keep open house, let fiddlers play, A fig for cold, sing care away; And may they who thereat repine, On brown bread and small beer dine. Virginia Almanack 1766 To paraphrase former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld: There’s the Williamsburg Christmas we ought to have and the Williamsburg Christmas we actually have. And thus are culinary myths born. Modern-day Williamsburg Christmas only faintly resembles Williamsburg Christmases […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Christmas, Cooking, English Cooking, Oysters, Southern Food • Tags: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Christmas, Colonial Williamsburg, English Cooking, Southern cooking, Virginia

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

To the Queen’s Taste: A Brief Meditation on Written Recipes, Part III

September 2, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Carrying on our examination of the written recipe and its significance in what usually was an oral culture (in more ways than one) — the kitchen and cooking — it’s time to turn to a nineteenth-century English chef named Charles Elmé Francatelli, who briefly cooked French food for Queen Victoria.* But before we get to the man of the moment, the meat of the matter, let’s pause for a moment and revisit Mr. Manfred Görlach, who undertook one of the […]

Categories: Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, Methods • Tags: A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, Antonin Carême, Book of Household Management, British Food, Charles Elmé Francatelli, Colin Spencer, Cooks, English Cooking, French Cooking, Isabella Beeton, Louis Eustache Ude, Manfred Görlach, The French Chef

Cooks of the British Raj: In the Shadows of the Cantonments

August 20, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Moonlight, shadows, and frangipani fluttering in air rich with the smell of curry — many people today might harbor such images of India trending toward those seen David Lean’s film, “A Passage to India,” based on E. M. Forster’s novel of the same name. And yet, to anyone who’s spent time on the ground in certain countries around the globe, an untold backstory surges against the gorgeous scenery, the nights filled with starry skies, the nattering of songbirds in the […]

Categories: Asia, English Cooking, India • Tags: Chota Mem, Cooks, David Lean, E. M. Forster, English Cooking, India, Mrs. C. Lang, The English Bride

Reveling in Books: The Garden Cottage Diaries

June 8, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Most of the time, I judge food by its looks and books by their covers. Sorry, but give me a little art, a bit of color, and a mob cap any day of the week. Mob cap? Take the cartoon-like cover of The Garden Cottage Diaries for example. Like a magnet, this visual rendition of a locavore’s dream popped the romantic in me right into the scene: an intrepid woman wearing a mob cap digs in the ground with a […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, English Cooking, Gardens, Scotland • Tags: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cottage Garden Diaries, Culinary History, Eat Local, English Cooking, Fiona J. Houston, Locavore, Scotland

“The White (Wo)Man’s Burden”: Household Management in the Colonies (With Bibliography)

March 4, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

European women who lived in nineteenth- and twentieth-century foreign outposts sought authoritative voices to guide them through the challenges of living far from the familiar. Although local labor bore the brunt of daily domestic work, wives of the colonialists need information on how to direct their servants. And as the list below amply illustrates, plenty of authors and authoresses took up their pens to relieve the white woman’s burden. Today, many of the books are scarce and rare. Take Bon […]

Categories: Bibliographies, China, English Cooking, Recipes, Russia, Wine • Tags: Africa, British Colonial Shanghai, Cocktails, English Cooking, Recipes, Zakuska

Celebrate Colonial American Cooking: Cookbooks for Thanksgiving and Christmas

November 13, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Want to celebrate American food history and ingenuity this year? The great state of Virginia gave birth to eight U.S. presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. And they all liked to eat, some more than others. In fact, Thomas Jefferson still claims the title of being the most gourmet-minded of the lot. The following books will help you greatly in planning meals, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Cooking, English Cooking • Tags: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Colonial America, Colonial Virginia, Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, Food

A PASSAGE TO INDIA, REVISITED … SORT OF (AND BOOKSTORES)

October 8, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

For those lucky souls living in one of the larger cities of the eastern United States, bookshops purveying only cookbooks exist just around the corner. In Portland (Maine), Philadelphia, and New York City, to be exact. Who knows? You might find a copy of one of Elizabeth David’s favorite books, a rather pompous Anglo-Indian cookbook from the nineteenth century, Culinary Jottings for Madras: A Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles Based Upon Modern English and Continental […]

Categories: English Cooking, India • Tags: Bookstores, Cookbooks, Cooking, Culinary Jottings, English Cooking, Food, India

Forme of Cury (Photo credit: University of Manchester)

EARLIEST ENGLISH COOKBOOK, FORME OF CURY, TO BE DIGITIZED

October 4, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Yippee! Another ancient cookbook to be digitized so that all of us food history lovers can wallow in the old texts without sneezing from the dust or going broke on airfare fees flying to check out archival material in some out-of-the-way library half-way across the world. The Guardian announced recently that the University of Manchester plans to digitize The Forme of Cury, a fourteenth-century cookbook compiled by King Richard II’s cooks. Food historian, Lorna Sass, wrote a cookbook about the […]

Categories: Cookbooks, English Cooking • Tags: Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, Food, Forme of Cury

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life