To come upon Roanoke Island on a sun-drenched day, surrounded by Roanoke Sound and Croatan Sound, is to gaze upon a place of mystery, a place, no, the catalyst that set off the English settlement of the New World. It’s a place where glittering blue waters roll like hundreds of diamonds spilling from a jeweler’s velvet sack,…
Tag: Virginia
English Cooking in America: On Phantom Manuscript Cookbooks, Africa, and Other Sundry Thoughts
Stained pages, adorned with notes written in various inks, that’s what some culinary historian will find if ever any of my dozen so-called manuscript cookbooks ends up in a cardboard box at a yard sale. The lucky buyer will never know that the first of the lot began because my hunger for recipes loomed larger…
A Bee in My Bonnet
Coming up with unique and substantive blog content tends to be terribly time-consuming. Combine that with the current chatter about blogging being dead in the water and you end up with a recipe for melancholy, or at least writer’s ennui. But sometimes life throws you a plum, a reason to take up the plume again and…
The Natural World, Part 2
© 2014 C. Bertelsen
Doing What’s Necessary: The Logical Outcome of Haute Cuisine, or, An Extremely Brief Meditation on the History of Privies and Toilets
I came face to face with the truth about outhouses on my first day in my Peace Corps village. Not that I’d never seen (or used) an outhouse before; I became intimately acquainted with the concept during the summer I worked as the assistant cook on an archaeological dig in Ozette, Washington. There, the pit…
