Cynthia D. Bertelsen's Gherkins & Tomatoes
A Writer's Musings on Nature and Culture, Since 2008
It’s not REAL mayonnaise. You know the one I mean. Mayonnaise – made with egg yolks, an acidic liquid, a dash of mustard, salt, and oil, usually olive – feels as smooth and soft as a silk pillow, sliding like thickened cream across the tongue. There’re no startled taste buds in the presence of too much…
Continue reading ➞ Real Mayonnaise, Real Food? Or Just Sanctimonious Snobbery?
People throughout history reveal their preoccupations through their architecture, artifacts, and the written word. These aspects reflect what matters to societies at various times. It comes down, in a way, to questions of taste, not just alimentary, but cultural and moral. The fashions, the trends, the modes of the day pass and morph into others…
Continue reading ➞ Worshipping Different Gods … The French (Food) Reformation
... in a way ... holds the future of French cuisine in the palm of his hand, French Agricultural Secretary Bruno Le Maire: Given this short biography, it's not clear where farming enters into his background: Bruno Le Maire became Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries in June 2009. Prior to this appointment he was…
Continue reading ➞ The Man Who …
No, it's not. That's your immediate answer, isn't it? After all, you've got more important things to do, don't you? Or do you? You can live your life without cooking. You can go to your nearest grocery store and bypass all the technology and knowledge that took your ancestors centuries to refine. You can buy…
Continue reading ➞ Is Cooking Necessary?*
Looking at the past almost always calls up that old adage: "There's nothing new under the sun."* Take locavorism's wartime antecedents ... As these WWII posters from England's "Dig for Victory!" campaign prove, the idea of local foods is not one whose time has come, but whose time has come again. Aimed at encouraging the…
Continue reading ➞ Dig for Victory! Locavorism in Eons Past
One cannot both feast and become rich. Ashanti Proverb “Feasting,” for all practical purposes, appears to be the antonym of “hunger.” And yet, feasting is rife (ripe?) with teeming contradictions and ritualistic conventions. For some, feasting implies hunger. Ambrose Bierce defined feasting in a rather limiting manner in his irreverent Devil’s Dictionary: FEAST, n. A…
Continue reading ➞ The Feat of Feasting
A review of Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009) The debate continues on the local foods argument ... To listen to many food activists talk these days, one would think that for dinner --- up until now --- most people just simply stepped outside their doors and plucked fresh…
Continue reading ➞ Fresh: A Look at the Meaning of Freshness and the Refrigeration Revolution
Want to make your own cheese? How about pickles or chow-chow? Sausage and headcheese? Raise a couple of cows or keep a flock of geese? At a time when people want, no, need, to know the how-tos of old foodways, it seems that there’s a book for making just about everything. Fortunately, because this knowledge…
Continue reading ➞ Reveling in Books: DIY (Old) Food, Knowledge Lost and Now Found
