Cynthia D. Bertelsen's Gherkins & Tomatoes
A Writer's Musings on Nature and Culture, Since 2008
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…
Nope. I can just see your neurons pointing fingers, your eyes sending signals to your brain, with a little interior voice saying, "Oh, yes, those are biscuits, just like my grandma used to make." But don't be mistaken when you look at that photo. Nope. Those are scones. Which I baked the other day from a…
Continue reading ➞ Biscuits or Scones: British Origins of an American Favorite!
At Christmastime, my kitchen becomes a place where past and present merge. Through food, I honor my ancestors - the known, the unknown, and the never-to-be knowns, all the people whose DNA runs through my veins and shapes my nose and determines my character. They hailed from Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Cheshire, Lincoln, London, Kent ...…
Continue reading ➞ Happy Christmas to All!
Memory, fickle memory. To recall the long-ago past becomes a journey into a place where truth flits behind trees or ducks into closets, an exhausting game of hide-and-seek where no player easily becomes “It.” Do you remember going to the Saturday afternoon movies when you were a kid? How you got so engrossed in the…
Continue reading ➞ Pumping Sunshine: Susie H. Baxter’s Rural North Florida Childhood
Although I'd read her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Yearling (1938), in high school, I came to admire Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's work more via the great unifier - food. I bought a paperback copy of Cross Creek Cookery nearly forty years after Charles Scribner's Sons first published it. Now the spine on my cheap copy splits…
Continue reading ➞ Muses: Cross Creek and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Nine 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 ➞ 9 Years of Writing about History … A Celebration!
There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food. ― Zora Neale Hurston In my house, anyone waking to the soft, misty mornings of a searing Florida summer will be immediately drawn to the coolness of my…
Continue reading ➞ This Wild Land: Florida, Zora Neale Hurston, & Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Alligator meat is quite varied in itself The meat found in the tail is white and sweet, and can easily fried or sauteed. The leg meat is dark and less tender, with a color and texture similar to a beef shank, best used in soups and stews. The body meat is more like that of…
Continue reading ➞ Tales of Alligator Flesh and Tails
I didn’t know it then, but when I was much – heck, I’ll be really honest here and say a lot – younger, I began participating in a grand social experiment, one that I understand more with each passing year. Given my nature, the experiment naturally involved food. And that experiment began with a road…
Continue reading ➞ The Food of Florida: A Grand and Ongoing Experiment
Florida's vegetation reminds me of a willful, obstinate child. You know, the one who seems to be everywhere all at once and defies all the rules, crossing the line on limits, chocolate smeared across her face, filched from a secret and forbidden stash. Wild and ungovernable, in other words. And saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) is one of the wildest…
Continue reading ➞ The Seminoles, Eli Lilly, and the Ancient Saw Palmetto of Florida
