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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Traditional Foodways’ Category
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 »
The Kind of Pickle You Want To Get Into
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged cucumbers, Food History, homemade pickles, jewish food, kosher dill pickles, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, recipe on June 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Next month I’ll be attending the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in the UK. Each year, this conference on food, its culture, and its history focuses on a different theme; this year it’s Cured, Fermented, and Smoked Foods. Living in a New York City apartment, the temperature and humidity of which is difficult to [...]
Scottish Shortbread: Gluten-free Baking Ahead of Its Time
Posted in Food History, Ingredients, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged gluten-free, oat flour shortbread, recipe, Scottish shortbread on June 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The current popularity of gluten-free foods has prompted the creation of many wheat-free versions of traditional baked goods, including Scottish shortbread. It turns out that this actually isn’t an innovation at all. Historically shortbread was a food of the poor in Scotland and was made with oat flour, which is (usually) gluten-free. While looking for [...]
Jeweled Rice for a Persian Wedding
Posted in Festival Cooking, Food History, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged cooking with rose petals, Food History, Jeweled Rice, Persian food, Persian wedding food on May 24, 2010 | 3 Comments »
I find there is no better way to get to know a culture than by cooking some of its festival food. When I saw a recipe in Margaret Shaida’s absorbing historical cookbook, The Legendary Cuisine of Persia, for a special rice dish, traditionally served at weddings in Persia, I couldn’t resist. Not only does it [...]
Tasting the Crossroads of the Mediterranean
Posted in Food History, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged chicken with lemon and olives, Food History, Moroccan food, recipe, tagine on May 17, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Oh, to be in the souk bargaining with an olive merchant, while chickens destined for the pot scurry around your feet. I’ve never been to Morocco, but if the mysterious flavors of its cuisine are any indication, I must visit. One of the classic combinations is a tagine of chicken with lemon and olives. A [...]
Deutschland Down Under
Posted in Food History, Traditional Foodways, Travel, tagged australian food history, German-Australian food, Hahndorf on April 22, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Traveling in Australia one expects Vegemite, or a burger “with the lot” which includes, depending upon whom you ask, pickled beets, a fried egg, and a slice of fresh pineapple. But a lunch of homemade mettwurst and sauerkraut, washed down with rich German beer, and finishing off with a nice slice of apple struesel? That’s [...]
Vegemite: Australian for “Yummy”
Posted in Food as Anthropology, Food History, Ingredients, Traditional Foodways, Travel, tagged Australian Food, australian food history, how to eat vegemite, vegemite on April 19, 2010 | 8 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 [...]
The Proper Care and Mixing of Vermouth
Posted in Cocktails, Food History, Ingredients, Traditional Foodways, tagged 19th Century cocktail, Cocktails, dry martini, history, how to store vermouth, martini, vermouth on April 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
If you find yourself among the gentlemen in their frock coats and wide cravats in a Parisian café in the 1880s during the hours just before dinner, and are wondering what to order, the word you’re looking for is vermouth. Between the hours of 5 and 7 all the best people crowded these fashionable watering [...]
Coffee as it was Served A Thousand Years Ago
Posted in Food as Anthropology, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, Traditional Foodways, 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 [...]
