Idylls of Cuisine, # 83
October 10, 2010
[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
Tag: Locavores
Is Cooking Necessary?*
October 4, 2010
No, it’s not. That’s your immediate answer, isn’t it? After all, you’ve got more important things to do, don’t you? Or do you? You can live your life without cooking. You can go to your nearest grocery store and bypass all the technology and knowledge that took your ancestors centuries to refine. You can buy … More Is Cooking Necessary?*
Forgotten Recipes and Forgotten Cooks
August 17, 2010
If you think that real cooking needs to be resurrected, you’d be right. You can’t exist on McNuggets alone, as the film Super Size Me proved. But if you think we should all go back to cooking everything just like our foremothers (and sometimes forefathers) did, you’d be a bit misguided. Romantic, yes, and it’s … More Forgotten Recipes and Forgotten Cooks
The Feat of Feasting
November 16, 2009
One cannot both feast and become rich. Ashanti Proverb “Feasting,” for all practical purposes, appears to be the antonym of “hunger.” And yet, feasting is rife (ripe?) with teeming contradictions and ritualistic conventions. For some, feasting implies hunger. Ambrose Bierce defined feasting in a rather limiting manner in his irreverent Devil’s Dictionary: FEAST, n. A … More The Feat of Feasting
Fresh: A Look at the Meaning of Freshness and the Refrigeration Revolution
June 15, 2009
A review of Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009) The debate continues on the local foods argument … To listen to many food activists talk these days, one would think that for dinner — up until now — most people just simply stepped outside their doors and plucked fresh … More Fresh: A Look at the Meaning of Freshness and the Refrigeration Revolution
Reveling in Books: DIY (Old) Food, Knowledge Lost and Now Found
June 11, 2009
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 … More Reveling in Books: DIY (Old) Food, Knowledge Lost and Now Found