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…
Tag: Christmas
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.
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #13
Throughout history, cooking shows up again and again as primarily women’s work. As a reviewer of Richard Wrangham’s thought-provoking Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) summarizes, “Here, too, Wrangham apologetically explains, is probably where the global subjugation of women began. Women, he observes, do most of the cooking in most societies (he describes…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #9
One of the most interesting things about the two National Trust cookbooks on this extended “Elves’ Shelves” list is the lack of major curry dishes like Chicken Tikka Masala or Balti dishes. In the British countryside, the old ways do appear to remain front and center, as opposed to the more urban areas where curry houses…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #7
Today you have Jane Grigson again, this time in full force behind the idea that British food is good and worthy of respect. History plays a larger role in this book than in Good Things, making it a delightful read as well as a valuable resource for study. It is one of several books worth looking at…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #4
Elizabeth David presents yet another example of how British culinary sensibilities influenced American cuisine. None other than Alice Waters attributes her love of terroir to Elizabeth David’s work, citing the cover of Ms. David’s French Provincial Cooking as representing how she wanted food to be. And thus Chez Panisse was born. The rest is history, as they…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #3
Mr. Adrian Bailey’s The Cooking of the British Isles follows Ms. Hartley’s work in a logical sequence, for both traveled the length of the land to get the story and record a lifestyle diminished a little each and every day. In addition, Mr. Bailey’s book points out visually a number of English culinary-related traits that still…
A Baker’s Dozen of British Cookbooks for the Christmas Season – Book #2
Dorothy Hartley was one of those quintessential independent English women with a no-nonsense attitude, a journalist who devoted her life to chronicling the fast-disappearing way of life in the English countryside of the 1930s. She wrote several books, including the 6-volume series, The Life and Work of the People of England. And so here’s Book #2: 1954…
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays
No matter what you call your holiday, or where you are, I would like to take a moment to wish you very happy and merry days. At this time of the year in the northern hemisphere, the days are short and the nights long, elements that lend to reflections on the cycle of life,…
