Cynthia D. Bertelsen's Gherkins & Tomatoes
A Writer's Musings on Nature and Culture, Since 2008
Eleven years ago, I decided to poke a toe into the world of food blogging. I settled on the name, "Gherkins & Tomatoes," based on a painting by Luis Meléndez, a tribute to the period of history known as "The Age of Exploration." Faced with a blank screen demanding something, anything, the first words that…
Continue reading ➞ 11 Years of Writing About Food and Culinary History – A Blog Anniversary!!!
The picadillo at the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida. That's where it began, where the seed got planted. I'd just turned 21. To celebrate, several friends treated me to a fancy dinner there. And I ordered the picadillo, sided with a lime dacquiri. I think. I vaguely recall black beans,…
Continue reading ➞ Cooking Cuban During El Período Especial Estadounidense
Yer may talk of yer flummadiddlers and fiddlepad- dies, but when it comes down to gen-u-ine grub, there ain't nothing like good old salt hoss that yer kin eat afore yer turns in and feel it all night a-Iaying in yer stummick and a-nourishin' of yen.* Think of the seaside on a windy day, waves…
Continue reading ➞ Oh, it’s a Sailor’s Life for Me! Lobscouse and Dandyfunk
With a name like that, of course, I couldn't resist the recipe. "Mulacolong." What on earth did that mean? It seems that no one else knew either, thanks to a Google search and more. So I decided to split up the word, to look at components rather the whole. One tantalizing bit of information kept…
Continue reading ➞ Mulacolong, from Sarah Rutledge’s The Carolina Housewife:
I'd like to introduce you a most interesting woman, Sarah Rutledge. Call her Miss Sally, as did her kin and her friends. She wrote a cookbook, The Carolina Housewife, published in 1847, which tells a most remarkable story. Unlike Mary Randolph's The Virginia Housewife (1824), which tended to focus more on the victuals cooked and…
Absolutely delicious, served with freshly baked bread: See recipe and discussion HERE. This is the kind of recipe you can make by following instructions and hints found in "A Hastiness of Cooks".
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*
Fans of the popular TV series “Game of Thrones” must be feeling bereft. And why shouldn’t they? The curtain finally fell on the last episode of that long-running megahit. Unless they love reruns, that’s it for those fans. I, on the other hand, have barely made it through the first episode so far, “Winter is…
Continue reading ➞ Keep on Feasting! For Lovers of “Game of Thrones”
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!
Paleography refers to the situation in which an historic cookbook is studied,* and perhaps converted to script that a modern reader can understand. The process is highly complicated and experts spend years, even whole careers, devoted to just this subject. So the following discussion is more like a scratch on a grain of sand, small…
Continue reading ➞ Culinary Manuscripts, or, Deciphering the Code
In my latest book, "A Hastiness of Cooks", I deliberately skimmed over France and her culinary heritage. Not because I thought her culinary heritage not worth acknowledging, but because I wanted to savor that heritage in a different medium or venue. With that sentiment in mind, I pulled Terence Scully's treatise - The Vivendier -…
Continue reading ➞ Pignagoscé sur chapons (Pignagoscé on Capons), Plus Some Words on Paleography
His quirky, pixy eyes belie his prolificity as a writer, one that some dub the first so-called hack writers in modern history, and possibly the first to import an Arabian horse into England.** And possibly one of William Shakespeare’s rivals? Some writers such as Robert Gittings, in his tepidly received Shakespeare’s Rival (1960), suggest that…
A recipe analyzed in my upcoming book, A Hastiness of Cooks.
I am thrilled to announce that my new book will be out and available for purchase on November 15, 2018. For more information, please go to Turquoise Moon Press. (Working on the pre-order set-up on Amazon)
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
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
Just a note - life's busy - to share the shortlist for The Gourmand Awards. "What is that," you might ask? Here's their take on it: "The Gourmand Awards are the major Food Culture event in the world. They started in 1995 for cookbooks and wine books, at Frankfurt Book Fair. They now include all…
Continue reading ➞ THE GOURMAND AWARDS
Memory is a funny thing. By "funny," I'm not thinking Woody Allen amusing or Amy Schumer hilarious. No, by "funny" I mean something akin to "strange" or "perplexing" or even "otherworldly." And indeed memory can be perplexing, making it appear as the stuff of fabulists. Trying to remember what happened last week, much less 50 or…
Continue reading ➞ The Fallibility of Memory, or, The Fabulists among Us
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
Rocks tumbled down the rugged sloping ground and dust spun like little tops as Egeria, a nun from early fourth-century Galicia, climbed toward the rocky summit of Mount Sinai. From that craggy point, she gazed at a world she defined by the holy sites mentioned in the Bible. And from there we saw beneath us…
Continue reading ➞ Peregrinations and Pilgrimages: Egeria and the Flour Soup
Cabbage soup and gruel are our food. (Shchi da kasha, pishche nashe.) ~~Russian peasant proverb Trying to ferret out tidbits about Russian food history can be tough going. Aside from the language barrier, anyone interested in Russian culinary history suffers from a major weakness: there is a terrible lack of written material contemporaneous with Forme…
Continue reading ➞ From Mother Russia with Love: The Domostroi
Like many women, and quite a few men, I learned to cook some five or six basic dishes from my mother. And even then, it was all oral. Nothing written. Nevertheless, as a modern person, I guess, I desired to know and understand much more about cooking and cuisine and began to accumulate books on…
Continue reading ➞ The Biggest Food Revolution Ever: The Printed Cookbook?
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
I just wanted to share with all of you an exciting moment: I just laid eyes on my new book - Mushroom: A Global History - and promptly burst into tears. I just couldn't keep a stiff upper lip when I saw the result of years of work on my part and on the part…
Continue reading ➞ A New “Baby” in the House! Mushroom: A Global History, That Is
Today, I am happy to share something with you, a marvelous gift to the world of culinary history: Cuisine & Empire, by Rachel Laudan (University of California press, October 2013). I had the pleasure of reading some of the book while it was still in manuscript,* and that bit whetted my appetite so much that…
Continue reading ➞ Cuisine & Empire: Cooking in World History, a Book You Simply Must Read
It’s hard to imagine another form of earthly life that has affected human beings as much as the kingdom Fungi. Seeking the taste and perceived medicinal benefits of mushrooms,human beings followed a path from superstition to science: from foraging to farming, from medieval old wives’ tales to modern clinical trials, and from food eaten to…
Continue reading ➞ Mushrooms on My Mind, Naturally
I always take a shopping list with me to the grocery store. But I rarely stick to it, because those marketing experts working for the big chains know just how to entice me into buying things not on my list. That’s probably why most people I see in the grocery store don’t shop with a…
Continue reading ➞ The Grocery List: Color, Primates, and Food Selection
I am thrilled to announce that my new book about the culinary history of mushrooms is due out in September 2013. A sneak preview: Known as the meat of the vegetable world, mushrooms have their ardent supporters as well as their fierce detractors. Hobbits go crazy over them, while Diderot thought they should be “sent…
Continue reading ➞ Mushroom: A Global History – New book coming out
What to make of the lavish feasts that come after a funeral? When I attended my first funeral, at age 27, I cried a lot, even though I didn't know the deceased, my sister-in-law's father. My grandparents all died before I turned 20 and lived 1250 miles away. Living as my family did on a…
Continue reading ➞ Foods for a Funeral and a Farewell
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
