Cynthia D. Bertelsen's Gherkins & Tomatoes
A Writer's Musings on Nature and Culture, Since 2008
If you've ever tried to read Chaucer in the original language, you know what you're up against when you tackle a recipe dating from the poet's time period. Actually, when you read The Canterbury Tales, you have it fairly easy, for there's a multitude of resources to help you as you plunge through Chaucer's Middle…
Continue reading ➞ What’s That You Say??? Medieval Culinary Terminology Unmasked*
As I mentioned, albeit briefly, in “A Hastiness of Cooks”: A Practical Handbook for Use in Deciphering the Mysteries of Historic Recipes and Cookbooks, For Living-History Reenactors, Historians, Writers, Chefs, Archaeologists, and, of Course, Cooks, transcription is one of those things that makes all the difference when you're trying to recreate historic recipes or analyzing…
Continue reading ➞ Transcription of Medieval Documents, or, What an Online Resource!
Cousin Connie Atherton, or Constance as she wanted to be called - she always said it sounded more grownup, you know - inherited Grandma's large coffee-brown eyes. Grandpa's curly black hair went to his great-grandson Jake , whose sister Mildred emerged from their mother Flora's uterus with long tapered fingers, a Doppelganger of Uncle George,…
Continue reading ➞ Many Different Faces: Bibliography’s Extended Family
“Let me take your coat, my dear.” I heard her voice as I stepped off the elevator, into the penthouse suite at the Chicago Hilton on a snowy day in late December. The tall, white-haired woman standing there, holding out her hands to me, drew me over the threshold, welcoming me. The color of Forget-Me-Nots,…
Continue reading ➞ Prelude to a Bio-Bibliography
Compiling bibliographies is a bit like blowing bubbles, for you never know how big the bubbles will be or how far away they’ll float through the air. Or where they’ll land. And that’s the exciting bit about bibliographies. You can’t know when you set out on the journey where you'll end up. If you compile…
Continue reading ➞ The Joy of Bibliographies
Only one of this year’s new releases in print cookbooks covers the cooking of Africa, unless you count books about Moroccan cooking by Fatéma Hal and Z. Guinaudeau, as well as Kittee Berns’s Teff Love: Adventures in Vegan Ethiopian Cooking. The rest only come in Kindle editions, a medium which is not my first choice…
Continue reading ➞ African Cuisines: Cookbooks for Exploration and Discovery of Superb Flavors
Before I list my choice of books for 2013, a caveat: I have not read all of these yet. What I attempt here is to list the food and culinary history tomes that interest me (and hopefully you!), published in 2013. The descriptions of these books come from various sources, usually the publisher. That said, if…
Continue reading ➞ And More Gifts: A Selection of Food and Culinary History Books Published in 2013
“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…
Continue reading ➞ *”Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new”: A Sweet Potato Rhapsody
Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I love books passionately, especially cookbooks and any books about food. Because of my current emphasis on foods and cooking and foodways of the American South - tied as all that is to social change and the influx of new population groups - I have created a…
Continue reading ➞ * New Bibliography Available, on Southern Food & Cooking & Stuff
...visions of sugarplums danced in their heads. ~~Clement C. Moore~~ " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" Happy Holidays to all readers and visitors to Gherkins & Tomatoes / Cornichons et Tomates! I will "see" you again on January 2. 'Tis soon the season to be jolly. And to bake cookies, the sugarplums of today. I'm…
Continue reading ➞ SUGARPLUM VISIONS: Christmas Cookies
"It seems that the word couscous is a Gallic version of "rac keskes," which means "crushed small." ~ Leon Isnard Whether you think about it consciously or not, the nineteenth-century European drive for overseas colonies still molds our world. Ever since the Portuguese sailed for Prince Henry the Navigator out of Sagres, an ocean-facing place…
Continue reading ➞ Léon Isnard: Bringing the Cuisines of Africa to France
Winter still chills those of us north of equator and so the time has come to dream of gardens and kings and and cabbages and things like seed catalogs. A while ago (OK, more than a while!), because of the burgeoning trend nowadays for local foods and backyard gardens --- the most famous being the…
Continue reading ➞ Le Potager du Roi, a Kitchen Garden Fit for a King
Pigs and hams, barbecue and ice cream --- all are foods associated with joy and love and celebration. In the United States, anyway. And writers take these foods and weave words around and around like so many carefully knitted stitches, creating new books, making this year an exciting time for food and history lovers. The…
Continue reading ➞ What’s New in Culinary Books
A novel thing, novels about food? Not really, not any more. It seems like every publisher, and every writer, is racing behind the food-as-novel bandwagon, grasping at the flying straws, straining to hop aboard before the cart crashes. Like all fads, trends, what-have-you crazes, some of these novels succeed, while the others appall, so frightfully…
Continue reading ➞ The Fiction of Food: Good Reads
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…
Continue reading ➞ Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg
A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers. [Lat., Nec rationem patitur, nec aequitate mitigatur nec ulla prece flectitur, populus esuriens.] De Brevitate Vitoe (XVIII), Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) Chronic hunger is something that most of us in the United States will never really know.* Yet…
Continue reading ➞ Hunger is the Best Sauce
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…
Continue reading ➞ Ghosts of Gourmet: Ann Seranne
Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals. ~~Sue Hubbell, A Book of Bees Here are some of the many resources I've relied on for the series on honey and bees (9/28/09 through 10/1/09). If you read no other material on bees and beekeeping, be sure to read Dr. Eva Crane's work. Letters from the Hive: An Intimate…
Continue reading ➞ A Honey of a Bibliography
Food memoirs form just one of many research items on the list of materials used by culinary historians. In rounding out the larger picture of just what was going on in a specific time in history and related to the life of a specific individual, food memoirs cannot be beat. The following memoirs and other…
Continue reading ➞ Coming Up: New Food Memoirs & Other Treats
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.…
Continue reading ➞ Old Cookbooks Online — Some New Goodies
I find the following books enlightening, soothing, and motivating. My plan is to create/design a medieval/monastic herb garden over the upcoming winter and plant it starting next spring.* Monastic Gardens, by Mick Hales (2000) Private worlds glimpsed by a privileged few, monasteries have long maintained an aura of mystery. Outsiders imagine the silent seclusion, the…
Continue reading ➞ The Random Herbalist: Books About Monastic and Medieval Gardens
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
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…
Continue reading ➞ American Cookbooks: History 101 (II)
Throughout the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, the Roman Catholic Church proselytized the vast distances and founded convents. And the nuns who lived in those convents, and their Indian servants, soon became known for intricate sweets and other confections that had roots in the sweets that predominated in Moorish-ruled Spain for eight centuries until the…
Continue reading ➞ First You Settle the Pampas: Food in Colonial Argentina and Today (Conclusion)
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…
Continue reading ➞ Celebrate Colonial American Cooking: Cookbooks for Thanksgiving and Christmas
Note: For further reading on cooking, spirituality, and religion, check out my work-in-progress "Food, Spirituality, and Religion Bibliography," which right now tends to lean a bit more toward Christianity, but will eventually reflect more in-depth aspects of other religious traditions. I find the first-hand experience of cooking delicious Italian food to be one of my…
Continue reading ➞ Cooking Italian Food — Rooted in the Past
"When the wine has stopped fermenting in November, the turkey is ready for roasting." --Italian Proverb-- The slight chill in the air lately conjures up dreams of fall nights replete with soup and crunching leaves underfoot and turkey dinners. Wild turkeys dart in and out of the bushes around the woods near my house. And…
Continue reading ➞ Turkey Talk and Stuff: A Gobble Ahead
"Variety's the spice of life, That gives it all its flavor." ~~William Cowper, English Poet~~ Picture narrow passages, in some exotic locale, thronged with humanity peering at bulging baskets of spices and herbs, heavily laden donkeys swaying along behind them. You're breathing the smoke-filled air, the smell of the smoke competing with the odor of…
Continue reading ➞ Spice of History, or the Long Winding Road and Some Spice Blends for Today
