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…
* “We raise the wheat, they give us the corn” : a reflection on life in antebellum Virginia
Not too long ago, before the snow fell and kept falling, I drove down to Critz, Virginia, the homeplace of Virginia tobacco baron, J. R. Reynolds. Reynolds’s parents, Hardin Reynolds and Nancy Jane Cox Reynolds, owned several hundred slaves, who worked the 717-acre Rock Spring plantation. One of these slaves went by the name of…
*”Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new”: A Sweet Potato Rhapsody
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new,” or so confessed St. Augustine, a Catholic saint born in 354 A.D., in what is now Algeria. And I, I could also say the same, about many things. One of them being sweet potatoes, a beloved Southern staple.** It was a Thanksgiving Day. I…
* Biscuits and Buttermilk: A New Year and New Directions
After a long fallow period, spent baking (and eating) many Christmas cookies, I have decided to bloom/cook where I am planted, so to speak. Lately I’ve become more intrigued by the cuisine that surrounds me, here in the American South. After all, I’ve basically been a Southerner for over 30 years. Although many cookbook authors…
The Saga of a Virginia Coal Town (Part 1): By the Sweat of Your Face You Shall Eat Bread, till You Return to the Ground, for Out of it You were Taken
I wandered again to my home in the mountains, Where in youth’s early dawn I was happy and free. I looked for my friends, but I never could find them, I found they were all rank strangers to me. (Traditional bluegrass lyrics, “Rank Stranger”) As I drove along the winding roads toward the coal town…
