The South is Rising Again: The 2013 James Beard Nominees

February 20, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

In the culinary world, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize or the Oscars comes down to the James Beard Awards. This year, the list of nominees includes a large number of Southern chefs, restaurants, and other food-related entities. What’s so fascinating about this list lies in the evidence of increasing diversity – it’s not all barbecue and fried chicken and French or Italian. A prime example of the mixing and stirring of cultures that’s been going on for hundreds of […]

Categories: American Cooking, Chefs, Cooking, Restaurants, Southern Food, United States • Tags: Chefs, James Beard Awards, Restaurants, Southern cooking, Southern Food

Are Pole Beans Like Cows? A Crashing Tale

February 17, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Pole beans are sort of like cows. If you keep milking a cow, she produces milk. Likewise, if you keep picking pole beans, the plant keeps producing. Pole beans are not like bush beans, which render up a crop and then die back. I call them pole beans, but some people call them flat beans down here. That’s fine. I intended to write about pole beans from a practical angle. You know, to grow them, you need eight-foot poles for […]

Categories: Beans, Food Columns, Food writing, Southern Food • Tags: Pole beans, Southern cooking, Southern Food

* “We raise the wheat, they give us the corn” : a reflection on life in antebellum Virginia

February 4, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Not too long ago, before the snow fell and kept falling, I drove down to Critz, Virginia, the homeplace of Virginia tobacco baron, J. R. Reynolds. Reynolds’s parents, Hardin Reynolds and Nancy Jane Cox Reynolds, owned  several hundred slaves, who worked the 717-acre Rock Spring plantation. One of these slaves went by the name of “Kitty,” a cook so celebrated that her picture now hangs in the restored cookhouse. Nancy Jane – who could apparently write a fine hand – […]

Categories: Africa, Southern Food, Sweet Potatoes • Tags: Critz, R. J. Reynolds, Slavery, Southern cooking, Southern Food, Sweet Potatoes, Virginia

*”Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new”: A Sweet Potato Rhapsody

January 25, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new,” or so confessed St. Augustine, a Catholic saint born in 354 A.D., in what is now Algeria. And I, I could also say the same, about many things. One of them being sweet potatoes, a beloved Southern staple.** It was a Thanksgiving Day. I was five, going on six. Old enough to know what I liked to eat. But that day I added another “yuck” food to a list […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, American Cooking, Bibliographies, Southern Food • Tags: George Washington Carver, Old Ebbitt Grill, Southern cooking, Sweet potato, Thanksgiving, Virginia, World Food Habits

* The Legacy of a Typo: A Meditation on Tomato Gravy

January 21, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Stirring the flour into bacon drippings, creating a blond roux, and sautéing finely chopped yellow onions in the mixture turned out to be quite an adventure. No, I didn’t burn myself – for once – on the lethal combination of hot fat and flour. No, in the seemingly simple and slow act of making tomato gravy, to serve over biscuits or fried chicken, I started thinking about the role of gravy in Southern cooking, and by extension, in American cooking […]

Categories: Cookbooks, England, Gardens, Local foods, Photography, Southern Food, Tomatoes • Tags: Colin Spencer, Cuisine of the Southern United States, Kate Burridge, Mary Randolph, Southern cooking, The Virginia House-wife, Thomas Jefferson, Tomatoes

* A Cuisine Created by Slave Women: A Review of Kitty Morse’s Mint Tea and Minarets, and a Brief Word about Dadas**

January 8, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dealing with the death of beloved parents takes a great toll on people, leading them on journeys of self-discovery often not possible while parents still live and breathe and exert influence on their adult child’s life. Rarely does settling up an inheritance take sixteen years of patience and hair-pulling, constantly reminding the bereaved of their loss. But that is exactly what cookbook author Kitty Morse endured as she stayed true to her English father Clive Chandler’s last wishes, to preserve […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking, Morocco, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Azemmour, Kitty Morse, Leonora Peets, Marrakech, Mint Tea and Minarets, Moroccan cuisine, Morocco, Southern cooking

* Biscuits and Buttermilk: A New Year and New Directions

January 2, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

After a long fallow period, spent baking (and eating) many Christmas cookies, I have decided to bloom/cook where I am planted, so to speak. Lately I’ve become more intrigued by the cuisine that surrounds me, here in the American South.  After all, I’ve basically been a Southerner for over 30 years. Although many cookbook authors write about the South, I feel that something’s missing in most discussions, chiefly an in-depth examination of the English and French impact on the cuisine. […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, Gardens, Photography, Pork, Southern Food • Tags: Cuisine of the Southern United States, Culinary History, Glen Alton, Roanoke Times, Southern cooking, Southern Food, Virginia

The Saga of a Virginia Coal Town (Part 1): By the Sweat of Your Face You Shall Eat Bread, till You Return to the Ground, for Out of it You were Taken

December 13, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I wandered again to my home in the mountains, Where in youth’s early dawn I was happy and free. I looked for my friends, but I never could find them, I found they were all rank strangers to me. (Traditional bluegrass lyrics, “Rank Stranger”) As I drove along the winding roads toward the coal town of Pocahontas, Virginia, dilapidated trailers and several abandoned Victorian houses lined the way, their filigreed porches sagging under the weight of the wild brush, vines […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cabbage, Cooking, Food writing, Hungary, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Coal mining, Cooking, Hungarian Cabbage Roll, Immigrants, Photography, Pocahontas, Pocahontas Coalfield, Southern cooking, Southern Food, Virginia

Savoring the Daily on the Fringes of the Coalfields

December 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Although grocery shopping here in the United States doesn’t quite reach the challenges I faced when grocery shopping in Morocco or Burkina Faso, the very act of buying food makes me think hard about eating and cooking and just plain living. Shopping for food entails making decisions. What choices do I make when my only option for grocery shopping – so-so Farmers Market* aside – lies with two major grocery chains which ousted a locally operated grocery chain years ago? […]

Categories: American Cooking, Hungary, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Appalachia, Cabbage rolls, Coalfields, Festivals, Grocery shopping, Hungary, Pocahontas Virginia, Southern cooking, Virginia

Long Ago, When Chickens had Teeth …*

October 28, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ve never had to kill for my dinner, unless you count the time I mangled a lobster at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, crying silently as I tried to plunge the knife in the right place but failing to quickly put the creature out of its misery. I doubt I would have known how to kill a chicken, either, although my mother used to hint at what to do by exclaiming, “You’re running around like a chicken with […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Food writing, Photography, Southern Food • Tags: Animal slaughter, Chicken, Fried chicken, Grandmothers, Photography, Southern cooking, Texas

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

‘Tis now the very witching time of night*: Lessons from a Rotting Pumpkin

October 15, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Oh!—fruit loved of boyhood!—the old days recalling, When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling! When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!** Every October, a nearby farm family celebrates the harvest by opening up their land to the surrounding community. Hundreds of cars converge, parking in empty fields, and thousands of people traipse across pumpkin patches, testifying to the power that the earth still holds over us. And […]

Categories: Photography, Pumpkin • Tags: Agrotourism, Farming, Halloween, Photo essays, Photography, Pumpkins, Southern cooking

The Curse of Corn: Poverty and Politics and Pellagra

July 24, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Dr. Joseph Goldberger stands watching the children eating. He’s about to prove his hunch that pellagra occurred in the face of nutritional deprivation. He devoted years to discovering what caused the curse of corn, pellagra. Although the fat cats in the South of the time, and we’re talking early 20th-century here, didn’t want to spend money on feeding programs, Goldberger managed to set up situations where he proved that insects and bacteria had nothing to do with the scourge of […]

Categories: Agriculture, Corn, Hunger, Italy, Local foods, Paintings, Southern Food, Spain • Tags: Gaspar Casal, Joseph Goldberger, Maize, Niacin, Pellagra, Southern cooking

The Curse of Corn: Pellagra

July 20, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

  To be continued … 

Categories: Archaeology, Corn, Southern Food • Tags: American South, Corn, Pellagra, Southern cooking

Hog Butchering Time with Harry Crews

April 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I came within ax-handle length of hog butchering only once. And that was enough for me. My grandparents lived agrarian lives and they carried over many of their habits to their small acreage in southern California, where they raised chickens and rabbits for their table. I, on the other hand, grew up in the shadows of a land-grant university. The cows in the Dairy Science barn were like zoo animals, their slobbering tongues licking me when I offered them an […]

Categories: Books, Pork, Southern Food • Tags: Bacon County Georgia, Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Harry Crews, Hog butchering, Southern cooking

Who were the Cooks? What We Know (More or Less) about Kitchen Servants (1)

March 6, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

While studying The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (Steel and Gardiner, 1888), I found the instructions concerning servants a fascinating insight into the mindset of the authors and – by extension – their time period. And the current intense interest in the British TV series “Downton Abbey” allows us to answer some of  the questions of how servants, their roles, and their presence, made possible many things in history that we take for granted. Cooking, for one thing. And not […]

Categories: African Cooking, American Cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, English Cooking, French Cooking, Reference • Tags: Downton Abbey, Hannah Glasse, House & Garden, Household manuals, Julian Fellowes, Servants, Slaves, Southern cooking

The Ancient Sin of Gluttony: What’s Really Behind the Shunning of Paula Deen

January 26, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

We need strategies that do not drag us back to the dispositional focus of the Inquisition’s witch-hunts, that propelled the notion of the “Satan Within,” when much good and evil is the product of situational and systemic forces acting on the same ordinary, often good people.  ~~ Philip Zimbardo  It’s been with a great deal of amazement that I’ve watched the reaction to the American food-media celebrity Paula Deen’s announcement of her Type 2 diabetes diagnosis three years ago and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food News, Food writing, France, French Cooking, United States • Tags: Culinary History, Food History, Gluttony, Paula Dean, Southern cooking

Coming Home to Roost: The Chickens of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

November 28, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“If I had to choose between trees and people, I think I should choose trees.” ~~Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings If you’ve ever read The Yearling, you know the name and work of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Miz Rawlings owned a 72-acre homestead and citrus grove in Cross Creek, Florida, not that she was a native Floridian or anything like that. Her story began there in 1925, when she and her husband, Charles Rawlings, bought a rather delapidated homestead just south of Gainesville, […]

Categories: Florida, Photography, Poultry • Tags: Chickens, Cross Creek, Florida, Lochloosa Lake, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home, Orange Lake, Poultry, Southern cooking, The Yearling

Grits, Georgia, and Escaoutoun on My Mind

July 7, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Big Hominy Grits (Photo credit: James Bridle) These days, when you drive through the endless piney woods of low-country Georgia and South Carolina, you will see fields of corn, and not so much cotton. And, if you’re lucky when you stop for breakfast, there will be grits on the menu. Not just any old grits, not instant, God forbid, but the real deal: stone-ground little bitty bits of corn flecked with chaff and germ. People who grew up with grits […]

Categories: African Cooking, American Cooking, French Cooking • Tags: Arthur Barlowe, Escaoutoun, Espelette pepper, Florence Fabricant, France, French Cooking, Gascony, Grits, Hélène Darroze, Maize, Mushrooms, Périgord, Southern cooking, Walter Raleigh

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

Cabbage and Black-Eyed Peas, Oh My! An Easy New Year’s Dish with a Long History

December 22, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Yes, I know, you’re overwhelmed with preparations for Christmas. If you’re like me, you’re still trying to come up with THE menu that will knock Uncle Scrooge out of his foul grinchy mood. So how come I’m looking at New Year’s foods already? There’s a good reason — there’s only one thing to eat that day. Black-eyed peas, a gift from a part of Africa ruled by the French for a long time. [They were there as early as 1659 at […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, Cooking, France, New Year's Day, Southern Food • Tags: Africa, African Cooking, Black-Eyed Peas, Cabbage, Chou, Dawadawa, New Year's Day, Niebe, Pois yeux noirs, Science Magazine, Senegal, Southern cooking, Striga, Virginia, Witchweed

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

Not Your Mama’s Lettuce

August 16, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I don’t know about you, but I grew up with the ‘berg in the fridge, with a jar of Hellman’s on the side. That was as green as it got (and still gets) in my mom’s kitchen. Iceberg lettuce. Crisp, colorless, flavorless. Usually just a tired limp leaf garnishing a shrimp cocktail or stuck haphazardly in a sandwich, lettuce is one of those things taken for granted. A part of the landscape, so to speak. A piece of furniture. A […]

Categories: Greens, Recipes, Salads • Tags: Cooking, Food, Greens, Iceberg Lettuce, Lettuce, Mary Randolph, Salads, Southern cooking, The Virginia Housewife

Idylls of Cuisine, #73

August 1, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

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

Categories: Corn, Southern Food • Tags: Food Photography, Fried Tomatoes, Grits, Southern cooking

Ats Jaar: A Little Taste of Southeast Asia in the Antebellum South

February 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A little prickle of recognition, a sense of déjà vu — that’s what happened when I turned to page 86 of A Colonial Plantation Cookbook: The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry, 1770 (1984, edited by historian Richard J. Hooker*). There it was: “Ats Jaar, or Pucholilla.” My first thought was, “What is an Indian (as in India) pickle recipe doing in a cookbook from colonial South Carolina?” And then I read this, in a footnote provided by the editor: […]

Categories: Asia, Cookbooks, Cooking, England, India, Methods, Science of cooking, Southern Food • Tags: Colonial Plantation Cookbook, Fermentation, Hannah Glasse, Harriott Pinckney Horry, Pickling, Richard Briggs, Richard J. Hooker, Southern cooking

Being Catty: Hey, Did You Know That Catfish Tastes OK?

January 13, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

(Due to family obligations for a few weeks, I’m posting some previous posts that I’ve dusted off and updated. ) Well, it’s not “National Catfish Month,” not yet. You have to wait for August for that. But there’s no time like the present for dreaming of summer. Some people hate the cloying texture of these temperamental and be-whiskered fish. Others, well, they love the crunch, and the hush puppies, that come with well-prepared catfish. This article is for them. You […]

Categories: Fish, Food Columns, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Catfish, Catfish Institute, Food, Food Columns, Southern cooking

Thomas Jefferson and His Magic “Maccaroni” Machine

January 11, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Thomas Jefferson, rightly or wrongly credited with first bringing pasta to the tables of Americans, drew a picture of  a pasta-making machine. This drawing, now in the Library of Congress, resulted from a trip to Italy taken by Jefferson in 1787. Don’t forget that “macaroni” served as a generic name for pasta and doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re talking about elbow macaroni … Here’s recipe for Macaroni Pudding from Thomas Jefferson’s Cook Book (the recipe actually comes from Mrs. Horace […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Italian Cooking, Pasta, United States, Virginia • Tags: Macaroni, Pasta, Pasta Making, Southern cooking, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia

Oyster Tales and Pearls of Wisdom

January 5, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

“Secret, self-contained, and as solitary as an oyster.” ~~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Due to family obligations for a few weeks, I’m posting some previous posts that I’ve dusted off and updated. ) There’s something intriguing about the oyster, you know. Maybe its looks?  Maybe its texture? Maybe both? Oysters frankly resemble the human female vulva. Given the ancient human tendency to believe that eating one’s enemy transfers the enemy’s strength to a warrior, well, it’s not a long shot to […]

Categories: Food Columns, Oysters, Recipes, Shellfish • Tags: Bread Stuffing, Food, Oyster Dressing, Oysters, Recipes, Southern cooking, Turkey

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

Chocolate and Coffee Pots from Colonial Williamsburg: Slideshow

December 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Chocolate and Coffee Pots from Colonial Williamsburg collections, a parade of eighteenth-century goodies. Note the lamb’s head on the end of the spout!

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, English Cooking, Photography, Virginia • Tags: Chocolate Pots, Coffee Pots, Colonial Williamsburg, Eighteenth Centucky, Kitchen Equipment, Southern cooking, Virginia

Buttering Up

December 14, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Peppermint flavoring, almond extract, gooey candied fruit, thick dark molasses, perfumey cardamom … the list could go mouth-wateringly on and on. Christmas cooking and Christmas baking demand many ingredients not normally used in everyday cooking. And that’s what makes the holiday season such a sheer delight for those besotted with all things culinary. But one ingredient stands out, essential in many Christmas dishes, and likely resting quietly in just about every refrigerator of every serious cook. Not because of its […]

Categories: Africa, American Cooking, Butter, Christmas, Cookies, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Morocco, Southern Food • Tags: American Cooking, Butter, Christmas, Edna Lewis, Harriott Pinckney Horry, Smen, Southern cooking, Sugar Cookies

Christmas Dinner at Mount Vernon, 1790

December 9, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, served as the backdrop for many scrumptious dinners, cooked by Washington’s slave cooks. Just reading this menu* makes my lips twitch and my fingers itch for my wooden spoons. Note that even at the relatively late date of 1790 and independence from England, there’s a soup called King’s Soup … . It took our forebearers a long time to cease thinking of themselves as English. At least when it came to the table. An […]

Categories: American Cooking, Christmas, Cooking, Menus, United States, Virginia • Tags: Christmas, George Washington, Menus, MOunt Vernon, Southern cooking, 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

Jane Carson’s Colonial Virginia Cookery: Procedures, Equipment, and Ingredients in Colonial Cooking

December 4, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Colonial Virginia Cookery: Procedures, Equipment, and Ingredients in Colonial Cooking, by Jane Carson (1968, reprinted 1985). Filled with the kind of details that come only from wallowing in primary sources, Jane Carson’s synthesis of several cookbooks written by a number of seventeenth- and and eighteenth-century English cookery authors offers modern readers an interpretation of how daily cooking took place in colonial Virginia. The most popular English cookbooks of the times, according to Carson, were Mrs. Smith’s (The Compleat Housewife, 1727), […]

Categories: American Cooking, Book Reviews, Cooking, Reference, Southern Food • Tags: Colonial Virginia, Cooking equipment, Cooking Techniques, Hearth cooking, Jane Carson, Southern cooking

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

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

Counting Beans: A Soupçon of History

June 26, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Not too long ago, I looked at the messy pile of one-pound bags of beans in my pantry and knew I needed to start using them up. But how? For some reason, the night before, I’d cooked chicken-and-sausage gumbo and maybe I could just make red beans to go with the leftover rice. Yes, that would be it. Never having made red beans and rice in the style of New Orleans, I could feel that little frisson of excitement that […]

Categories: Africa, African Cooking, American Cooking, Beans, Haiti, Recipes, Southern Food • Tags: Bean Soup, Bean Stew, Beans, Haiti, New Orleans, Southern cooking, West Africa

American Cookbooks: History 101 (II)

April 30, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Continued from April 28, 2009: By the 1820s other cookbooks followed, The Virginia Housewife among them, written by Mary Randolph, a member of one of Virginia’s first families. These cookbooks were different from what we know today. They failed to mention of the size of the dishes used in baking, the number of portions the recipe made, the temperature at which to cook the dish, or even details about the addition of flour.  All (or nearly all) cooks at that […]

Categories: American Cooking, Bibliographies, Cookbooks • Tags: Charity Cookbooks, Cookbooks, Cooking, Eliza Leslie, Food, Mary Randolph, Miss beecher's Domestic Receipt Book, Southern cooking, The Virginia Housewife