© 2014 C. Bertelsen
Tag: Virginia
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…
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* “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…
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*”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…
Continue reading ➞ *”Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new”: A Sweet Potato Rhapsody
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* 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…
Continue reading ➞ * Biscuits and Buttermilk: A New Year and New Directions
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Savoring the Daily on the Fringes of the Coalfields
Although grocery shopping here in the United States doesn't quite reach the challenges I faced when grocery shopping in Morocco or Burkina Faso, the very act of buying food makes me think hard about eating and cooking and just plain living. Shopping for food entails making decisions. What choices do I make when my only…
Continue reading ➞ Savoring the Daily on the Fringes of the Coalfields
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Cabbage and Black-Eyed Peas, Oh My! A New Year’s Tradition in the South
New Year's Day, coming up fast. Planning your menu, are you? There's a good reason to hesitate, to take your time, because there's really only one thing to eat that day. Black-eyed peas, a gift from a part of Africa ruled by the French for a long time. They were there as early as 1659 at St.…
Continue reading ➞ Cabbage and Black-Eyed Peas, Oh My! A New Year’s Tradition in the South
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Thomas Jefferson and His Magic “Maccaroni” Machine
Thomas Jefferson, rightly or wrongly credited with first bringing pasta to the tables of Americans, drew a picture of a pasta-making machine. This drawing, now in the Library of Congress, resulted from a trip to Italy taken by Jefferson in 1787. Don't forget that "macaroni" served as a generic name for pasta and doesn't necessarily…
Continue reading ➞ Thomas Jefferson and His Magic “Maccaroni” Machine
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Idylls of Cuisine, #44
[A picture, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
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Chocolate and Coffee Pots from Colonial Williamsburg: Slideshow
Chocolate and Coffee Pots from Colonial Williamsburg collections, a parade of eighteenth-century goodies. Note the lamb's head on the end of the spout!
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Idylls of Cuisine, #43
[A picture, and nothing else, for silent contemplation.]
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Civil War Christmases
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 100 and 50 guns and plenty of ammunition, also about 25,000 bales of cotton. Telegram from William Tecumseh Sherman to Abraham Lincoln, December 22, 1864 Many authors write about the austerity of American Christmas celebrations prior to the Civil War (1861…
Continue reading ➞ Civil War Christmases
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Christmas Dinner at Mount Vernon, 1790
George Washington's Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, served as the backdrop for many scrumptious dinners, cooked by Washington's slave cooks. Just reading this menu* makes my lips twitch and my fingers itch for my wooden spoons. Note that even at the relatively late date of 1790 and independence from England, there's a soup called King's Soup…
Continue reading ➞ Christmas Dinner at Mount Vernon, 1790
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Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg
Now Christmas comes, ‘tis fit that we Should feast and sing, and merry be; Keep open house, let fiddlers play, A fig for cold, sing care away; And may they who thereat repine, On brown bread and small beer dine. Virginia Almanack 1766 To paraphrase former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld: There’s the Williamsburg Christmas…
Continue reading ➞ Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg
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Baking in Colonial Virginia
Lara Templin, an historical interpreter at Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, demonstrates how people baked bread over 400 years ago, in a Cloam oven. Click on the picture to go to the video, shot by Culinary Media Network:
