This is the first of a two-part round-up of this year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery which took place from July 9-11, 2010 at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. The weather was unseasonably warm and I was glad the College Bar — why don’t American colleges have official bars? It’s so civilized — opened at [...]
Archive for the ‘Food as Anthropology’ Category
Highlights from Oxford 2010: Cured, Fermented and Smoked
Posted in Festival Cooking, Food History, Food as Anthropology, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, Traditional Foodways, Travel, tagged Cured Food, Fermented Food, Food History, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, Smoked Food on July 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Cured, Fermented, and Smoked
Posted in Food History, Food as Anthropology, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, Traditional Foodways, Travel, tagged Cured Food, Fermented Food, Food History, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, Smoked Food on July 7, 2010 | 3 Comments »
The highlight of my food history year is coming up this weekend. I’ll be attending the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in the UK. This annual gathering of food historians includes both professionals and enthusiastic amateurs and focuses on a specific theme. This year we’ll be exploring cured, fermented, and smoked foods. These are [...]
Vegemite: Australian for “Yummy”
Posted in Food History, Food as Anthropology, Ingredients, Traditional Foodways, Travel, tagged Australian Food, australian food history, how to eat vegemite, vegemite on April 19, 2010 | 6 Comments »
When visiting Australia it is impossible not to encounter Vegemite, that mysterious black goop which many Aussies spread on their toast every morning and hold in a special place in their hearts. As a recent commercial attests, “Australian made….internationally misunderstood.” I can report that while it looks like sludge left over from a secret experiment [...]
Coffee as it was Served A Thousand Years Ago
Posted in Food History, Food as Anthropology, Ingredients, Traditional Foodways, recipes, tagged ancient coffee recipe, cascara, coffee, dried coffee cherries, history of coffee, quishir, recipe, sufism on April 7, 2010 | 2 Comments »
It must have seemed like magic, a substance that not only granted boundless energy, but curbed hunger as well. It wasn’t the first drug of course, we’ve had opium, alcohol, and psychedelic mushrooms for a lot longer. But coffee was different. As Balzac wrote: Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to [...]
Why I Cook
Posted in Food History, Food as Anthropology, Travel, tagged Food History, Why I Cook on February 22, 2010 | 3 Comments »
The other day one of my favorite food writers, Michael Ruhlman, began musing on Twitter about why he cooks. He then wrote a blog post about it and encouraged others to follow suit. Here are my thoughts. Cooking is a magical window onto other cultures. In particular, for me it is a window onto the [...]
Welcome to Comestibles
Posted in Food History, Food as Anthropology, Traditional Foodways, tagged anthropology, cooking, history on August 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I like to poke around in the forgotten corners of food history learning what people ate, and how they cooked differently than we do now. Some, like anthropologist Richard Wrangham, say it is cooking that made us human. What better way to learn about people from different places and time periods than by cooking and [...]
