Cooperative Kitchens of Yesteryear

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Socialism in one country may be a difficult undertaking, but socialism in many American country towns was as easy as pie -- and just as appetizing
Socialism in one country may be a difficult undertaking, but socialism in many American country towns was as easy as pie — and just as appetizing My schedule having become busier, making dinner is now a chore. Before, I’d found a certain serenity in chopping carrots and slicing tomatoes after a day of brainwork. Now, vegetables oppress me, especially as my CSA share has been unusually full of late. Against them I mobilize food processor and pressure cooker. Yet these implements must be hauled from the cupboard, assembled, disassembled, and cleaned. Then there’s the cooking, eating, and cleaning up. (more…) Read More...

Belly Up

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Advice you can stomach
"It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon, it says, 'Work!' After beefsteak and porter, it says, 'Sleep!' After a cups of tea (two spoonfuls for each cup, and don't let it stand more than three minutes), it says to the brain, 'Now, rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature and into life; spread out your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!' "After hot muffins, it says, 'Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field -- a… Read More...

How Early Cookbooks Sparked a Lifestyle Revolution

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The discreet charms of the bourgeoisie owe something to the attractions of life as conjured by cookbook authors
The discreet charms of the bourgeoisie owe something to the attractions of life as conjured by cookbook authors Each year I vow to buy fewer books, especially cookbooks. And yet each week I find myself bringing home two or three new ones. I find them -- or rather they find me -- in the usual places: yard sales, flea markets, used bookstores, Goodwill. Earlier this summer I had to stop myself from saving some volumes of Time Life's Foods of the World series, which I already own, from a “free pile” outside the Peaks Island branch of the Portland public library. They were eventually pulped, no doubt. What is it about cookbooks that makes them so irresistible? (more…) Read More...

Il n'y a pas de hors d'oeuvre

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Dinner parties, deconstructed
"23 November 2004 A digression ('I need not apologize for the digression -- it has been my plan throughout this work'). Plutarch could never forgive Herodotus, the father of history, for suggesting that the Egyptians could be better hosts than the Greeks. 'The host must hurry [l'hote doit se hater],' Derrida says on 17 January 1996 in his lectures on hospitality ... Hospitality is always a matter of urgency, always a question of speeds. The unexpected guests arrive and there is always a rush of activity: a hurried welcoming at the door, a quick cleaning up, a surreptitious rearranging or putting back into order, a preparing of food and drink. But even when the guest is expected, has been expected for a long time, there is a sense of urgency. The guests arrive -- always too early or too late,… Read More...

It Ought to Be Called Vice Cream

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The scoop on how a familiar frozen treat once got respectable folk all hot under the collar
The scoop on how a familiar frozen treat once got respectable folk all hot under the collar Summer has arrived in Maine and I've dug out my ice cream maker. This ice cream maker was a gift. And like many gifts, it's also somewhat of a curse. It coaxes me into making ice cream every two or three days. This means I must also eat a pint of ice cream every two or three days. I try to make my ice cream healthier than usual, using stevia instead of sugar and coconut milk instead of cream. Still, it feels like an almost criminal indulgence. (more…) Read More...

The Eructator of Ice Cream

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Bildungsroman meets brain freeze
"And they would go across the Square to the cool depth of the drugstore, stand before the onyx splendor of the fountain, under the revolving wooden fans, and drink chill gaseous beverages, limeade so cold it made the head ache, or foaming ice-cream soda, which returned sharp delicious belches down his tender nostrils." --Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) Read More...

Breakfast in Bedlam

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Asylum inmates of yesteryear were none too crazy about the food served them
Asylum inmates of yesteryear were none too crazy about the food served them What did the insane eat? In Bram Stoker's Dracula we find the lunatic Renfield dining on flies and spiders. Ken Kesey describes attendants bringing "identical trays of muddy-looking food" to asylum patients in his One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And in her memoir of her time in a psychiatric ward, Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen recalls "cutting old tough beef with a plastic knife, then scooping it onto a plastic fork." (more…) Read More...

Digestive Track

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Meals on the go are good in theory
"A travelling incarceration. Immobile inside the train, seeing immobile things slip by. What is happening? Nothing is moving inside or outside the train. "The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia. Control and food move from pigeonhole to pigeonhole: 'Tickets, please ...' 'Sandwiches? Beer? Coffee? ...' Only the restrooms offer an escape from the closed system. They are a lovers' phantasm, a way out for the ill, an escapade for children ('Wee-wee!') -- a little space of irrationality, like love affairs and sewers in the Utopias of earlier times."--Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) Read More...

A Short History of the Dining Room (Part 2)

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The turn of the last century saw the dining room go from a haven in a heartless world to a fueling station for factory work
The turn of the last century saw the dining room go from a haven in a heartless world to a fueling station for factory work To read part 1, click here. One summer day in 1894 Walter Post took out a line of credit. The Northern Pacific railroad clerk wanted to spruce up the six-room house he shared with his young wife, Ulilla (neé Carl and known fondly as “Lillie”). To Schuneman and Evans, the department store extending him the loan, he pledged repayment in 60 days’ time. (more…) Read More...

Lost in the Supermarket

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In store, circular
"I was let off near a supermarket. It was dark. I was standing comfortably enough, looking at the neon lights, but I needed a direction, the hint of some discernible habit, a movement of some kind. A place to stand but at the same time to appear busy. I have no memories, only vague symbols of separations: an overturned kitchen table, a ripped bed sheet, a broken battleship abandoned at the bottom of a bathtub. I went into the supermarket. The aisles were crowded with evening shoppers. There was Muzak. I slid into the warm colors and the clicks of the cash registers. I tried to remember near the frozen foods, I am trying to remember, what it was I had to remember, but I had forgotten what I had gone in for, what it is exactly I have to… Read More...

A Short History of the Dining Room (Part 1)

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As more people found a place at the table, the concern became that of finding a place for the table
As more people found a place at the table, the concern became that of finding a place for the table For the first time in my adult life, I have a something approaching a dining room. Accustomed to eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a breakfast bar, coffee table, or some other makeshift means of support, I find myself strangely delighted by the idea of sitting down each evening at a table that seats four in a space reserved only for eating. For one, meal time is easier. (There’s no better way to test your coordination and patience than carving a turkey that’s perched atop a folding table.) I’d say having a dining room makes me a fully fledged grown-up, were it not for the fact that I still rent. Precarity is Neverland. (more…) Read More...

Chewing Through History

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Imagine teeth chomping on a human face -- forever
Claude, swinging his arms loosely, took long, regular strides and enjoyed watching their shadows, happily lost in their sway, which he further exaggerated by putting his shoulders into the rhythm. Then, as though suddenly waking from a dream, he asked, "Do you know 'The Battle of the Fat and the Thin'?" Florent, caught by surprise, answered no. Claude excitedly praised this series of prints, pointing out favorite parts: the Fat, bursting from their enormity, prepare the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, look in from the street, stick figures filled with envy; then the Fat, seated at the table, cheeks overflowing, drive away a Thin who had the audacity to approach humbly, looking like a bowling pin among bowling balls. Claude saw in these drawings the entire drama of mankind, and he took to classifying all people… Read More...

Bodies Without Organ Meat

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The offal truth
"I imagine that someone might ask me what my favorite meal would be, an utterly crazy undertaking. It’s true that I always come back to three things because they are three things that I always found sublime, but that are quite properly disgusting: tongue, brains, and marrow." --Gilles Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z (1989)   Read More...

Native Regard

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Some colonial women held captive by Native American tribes found the experience liberating
Some colonial women held captive by Native American tribes found the experience liberating One clear spring afternoon in 1758 a raiding party descended on the Jemison farm in western Pennsylvania. The party, which consisted of six French soldiers and four Shawnee warriors, managed to capture all the family members except the two oldest sons, who escaped. "Every one trembled with fear," one Jemison daughter, Mary, later recalled in her 1824 account of the event. Without “a mouthful of food or a drop of water” they marched until nightfall. Whenever Mary and her siblings cried for something to drink, they were told they may have urine or nothing at all. The Jemisons' captors began to think that they had taken too many captives. Mother and father, along with two of their children, were led behind some trees and killed, their scalps… Read More...

Negative Dietetics

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Kant turn back
"The trajectory leading to aesthetic autonomy passes through the stage of disinterestedness; and well it should, for it was during this stage that art emancipated itself from cuisine and pornography, an emancipation that has become irrevocable." --Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970) Read More...