The cauldron , symbol of cooking, food, and nourishment. And of the basest, most primal horrors imaginable, the power of the Dark Arts, magic, and blasphemy. Everyone who’s ever read Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” recalls THE scene, the one with the three witches stirring the pot, chanting. FIRST WITCH: Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw….
Category: Holidays
Happy Hogmanay!
Perplexed as to what to serve for New Year’s Eve? Look no further than Scotland’s Hogmanay – or New Year’s Eve – celebration, rich in history (read more HERE), with just the right touch of ancient practices. Raucous, animal-skin dressed revelers call to mind Viking invaders of the 9th and 10th centuries, Hogmanay a substitute…
Boxing Day / St. Stephen’s Day and Some Ancient Truths About Social Class and Food
Boxing Day. What is that? It certainly is the precursor to the “Christmas gift” memories of African slaves on Southern plantations, where planters – many with roots in the British Isles – followed these old practices, with a few changes, given the circumstances. The day after Christmas now passes for a normal day here in…
Happy Christmas 2015!
I wish all of you the very best Christmas, no matter where you cook! Thank you all for everything and inspiring me to keep on writing about my favorite subject: food.
Happy Thanksgiving
No matter what your feelings about the origins of Thanksgiving – it did NOT really start with the Massachusetts Pilgrims post-1620 – and the impact of the English settlers in North America or Sarah Josepha Hale’s influence on Abraham Lincoln, today’s holiday has more to do with re-enforcing family ties and culinary traditions often far…
Lefse, and Giving Thanks via a Food of Immigration, Poverty, and Oppression
Term: lefse (food) Definition: thin, unleavened bread of Norwegian origin, traditionally made of a potato-based dough and baked on a griddle [Source: Dictionary of American Regional English] Thanksgiving is a day when Americans recall the myths of their founding, usually associated with the English Pilgrims of Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1620, ignoring the Jamestown settlers who arrived…
What is Home?
What is home? What is not home? The following pictorial essay portrays a number of symbols associated with the United States, and, indirectly, home. Mine, anyway. (If you click on the photos, you’ll see far more detail than this WordPress theme shows in the posts. And further clicking zooms in, I’ve discovered.) © 2015 C….
From Mother Russia with Love: A Monster of a Stove and Tolokno
You can’t cook porridge with a fool. ~~ Russian Proverb ~~ An example of Russian Lenten food, tolokno or oat flour with liquid, demonstrates the use of the astonishing Russian stove. Streamlined in the 15th century, the Russian stove incarnates the old adage, “The kitchen is the heart of the home.” Much of Russian peasant…
From Mother Russia with Love: The Domostroi
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…
