Tucked away on a small street in New York City’s Greenwich Village there is a butcher shop called Florence Meat Market which opened in 1936 and doesn’t seem to have changed much since. There is sawdust scattered on the floor and all the meat is cut to order on big cubes of butcher block. These [...]
Archive for the ‘recipes’ Category
The Mysterious Newport Steak
Posted in Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Florence Meat Market, Food History, Greenwich Village, Jack Ubaldi, New York Apartment Steak, Newport steak, recipe, steak on April 7, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Chestnuts: Famine Food on the Holiday Table
Posted in Festival Cooking, Food as Anthropology, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged cake, castagnaccio, chestnut flour, chestnuts, dessert, famine food, gluten-free, Italian food, recipe, Thanksgiving, vegan on November 23, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Wild chestnut trees have flourished in southern Europe since the ancient Greeks brought them from Asia Minor and the Romans spread them throughout their empire. For thousands of years poor subsistence farmers in that part of the world extended their crops with wild foods like chestnuts. In addition to roasting or boiling them, chestnuts were [...]
Now This is Celery!
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Braised Celery, Celery, Food History, recipes on October 20, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Until I started shopping regularly at my farmers’ market I was never a big fan of celery. Sure, it’s important as an aromatic vegetable to build a flavor base for soups or sauces, but on it’s own I always found it pretty insipid; pale and watery in both appearance and flavor. All that changed when [...]
A Plum by Any Other Name…But is it a Greengage?
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Food History, Greengage plums, Greengages, Reine Claude on September 16, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Somehow foreign names for ingredients always sound exotic. Wouldn’t you rather make aubergine Parmesan, than just plain old eggplant? Or creep away after leaving baskets of excess courgettes on your neighbor’s doorstep in the middle of the night instead of secretly gifting them with zucchini? One mysterious ingredient I always wondered about in British cookbooks [...]
A Brief History of the Birthday Cake
Posted in Festival Cooking, Food History, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged birthday cake, blogoversary, Food History, history of the birthday cake, victorian birthday cake on August 26, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Today is Comestibles’ first anniversary, so what better corner of food history to explore than that of the birthday cake. People have been celebrating holidays with special baked goods for thousands of years, but the white fluffy birthday cake with sweet icing we associate with every child’s party is a fairly modern invention. It could [...]
From the Emergency Baking Department: Pound Cake
Posted in Food History, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged cooking with a scale, cooking without a recipe, Food History, pound cake, recipe on June 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Pound cake is the workhorse of the tea cart, able to withstand drowning in fruit syrups and whipped cream, or it can be easily tarted up with a citrus glaze. It’s the perfect thing to toss in the oven when you find out the new vicar is coming to tea in a couple of hours. [...]
Raclette, No Fancy Equipment Needed
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged cheese, Food History, Raclette, Raclette without a machine, Swiss Food on June 23, 2010 | 5 Comments »
In the past, I have expressed my withering disdain for single-use kitchen gadgets like garlic presses, shrimp de-veiners, and pineapple slicers. Today I’m adding another one to the list, the Raclette Machine. I’m bowled over that people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for an appliance that makes a dish created by Swiss livestock [...]
A Mixture of Several Things in No Particular Order: Chimichurri Sauce
Posted in Food History, Ingredients, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged argentinean food, Chimichurri sauce, Food History, recipe, using leftover parsley on June 21, 2010 | 1 Comment »
It has happened to all of us. You buy a bunch of parsley so you can chop up about a tablespoon of it to use for garnish, and the rest languishes forgotten in the fridge, where it eventually turns to sludge. Well, dear reader, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. The gauchos of [...]
Baked Cucumbers with Cream
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Baked Cucumbers with Cream, cooked cucumbers, Food History, Julia Child, Julie Powell, Julie/Julia Project, recipe on June 18, 2010 | 2 Comments »
You know those recipes you hear about and then tuck away in your mental “must try that” file? Today I’m pulling one out from way back in 2003. At that time I was an avid reader of Julie Powell’s groundbreaking blog, the Julie/Julia Project, in which she cooked all 536 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering [...]
