Cynthia D. Bertelsen's Gherkins & Tomatoes
A Writer's Musings on Nature and Culture, Since 2008
Englishwoman Kate Arding, who owns a cheese shop --- Cowgirl Creamery --- in West Marin, California, traveled to Uganda in December 2007. While there, she taught the Karamojong people how to make cheese. A pictorial essay--- "Curd and the Karamojong" --- appeared in the autumn issue of a new magazine devoted completely to cheese, Culture:…
Continue reading ➞ Cheesemaking in Africa: “Curd and the Karamojong”
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
A possibly apocryphal story, told in many places --- print and Internet --- reads something like this: After a long day of traveling, the emperor Charlemagne stopped at a bishop's residence to rest, conveniently at dinnertime. In a ninth-century biography of Charlemagne, written by an erudite monk at St. Gall monastery in Switzerland, the author…
Continue reading ➞ At the Tables of the Monks: Charlemagne Loved Cheese (Part IV)
