I yanked the last of the two dozen buttermilk-potato rolls from the baking sheet, yelping a little as the steaming, fluffy bread burned my fingers. The cornbread for the cornbread dressing cooled on a rack across the kitchen. And my spiced cranberry sauce gleamed, ruby-red under the lights I’d just installed under the cabinets. Thanksgiving. … More Retro Thanksgiving: Musings Amid Vintage Menus
President Harry S. Truman found himself on the slimming end of things in 1946. The New York Times reported that Truman’s menus seemed a bit austere and quoted White House housekeeper, Mrs. Mary E. Sharpe, as saying “When I make up menus I keep it in mind.” “It” being President’s Truman’s ongoing battle of the … More Poor Harry: Thanksgiving in the Truman White House 1946
The frost descended on the pumpkin the other night and in the early morning light, as I drove around the curving roads of rural Virginia, a dozen cows stood silhouetted and blanketed in thick white fog. Eerily outlined against the fading green of the sparse grass they munched, for some reason those cows reminded me … More The Harvest Months
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 … More Happy Thanksgiving
HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL! For more vintage Thanksgiving postcards, see my post about them from last year: Vintage Thanksgiving Postcards.
He turns the spit who never tasted a morsel from it. Proverbes en Rimes, no. 117. Continuing our salute to cooks this holiday season (Thanksgiving), today’s post includes some depictions of male cooks, as well as female cooks. Medieval opinions of cooks, mostly men, tended to reflect the lowly status accorded to people who worked … More To the Cooks, Prosit! Part II
Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516), in delineating what would make an ideal society, said: .. all vyle service, all slaverie and drudgerye, with all the laboursome toyle and busines, is done by bondmen. But the women of every famelie by course have the office and charge of cokerye … and orderyng al thinges … More To the Cooks, Prosit! Part I
In the next week, we will see real-time examples of a few of the different types of feasts common to American culture: Thanksgiving — essentially a harvest feast tinged with overtones of cultural identity — and President Barack Obama’s first true State Dinner, to be held on November 24, 2009 for India’s Prime Minister Manmohan … More Feasting in State: Obama’s First Real State Dinner