Life of Pie

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You won't mind filling yourself in on the history baked into this dessert
You won't mind filling yourself in on the history baked into this dessert During the nor’easter that descended on New England last week I spent many dull, rainy hours fixing a bicycle and baking pies. Fixing a bike has its charms. There’s a certain sense of accomplishment in taming a balky bottom bracket. But it's baking pies that I find more absorbing. It’s great fun seeing just how many foods can be transformed into dessert. At one time or another this past month I’ve sprinkled sugar over various fillings and packed them into inexpertly shaped crusts. Some pies have turned out better than others. Apple pie, pumpkin pie, and even green tomato pie find takers when I give one away. Great northern bean and evaporated milk pie, however? Not so many. (more…) Read More...

Room for Improvement

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Tenants had a real beef with the food served in New York boarding houses
Neurotic landladies, ill-sorted fellows, uncomfortable beds -- these characteristic annoyances of boarding house life pale in comparison to most boarders' "chief objection," writes Thomas Butler Gunn in his 1857 book Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, which applies "all most universally to the cuisine." American journalist Mortimer Thomson, writing in his 1855 book Doestick's Letters: And What He Says, echoes his contemporary Dunn in this vivid anecdote: Another search and another home. Here for a week things went on tolerably well; the steak was sometimes capable of mastication, the coffee wasn't always weak, nor the butter always strong; but one day there appeared at breakfast a dish of beef, (Bull Dogge asserts that it was the fossil remains of an omnibus horse) -- it was not molested; at dinner it made its appearance again, still it was not disturbed; at tea fragments of… Read More...

The Potato System

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Peeling back the layers of this humble vegetable's history reveals that, no matter how you slice it, there's power in spuds
Peeling back the layers of this humble vegetable's history reveals that, no matter how you slice it, there's power in spuds Nothing orients like food. Wherever I find myself living I try to eat according to the region and season. In Rhode Island I ate mussels and stuffed quahogs. Nopales, carnitas and citrus sustained me in Arizona. Pennsylvania presented me with a real cornucopia -- beets, cucumbers, duck eggs, garlic scapes, delicata squash, ground elk meat. Now that I’m in Maine, it’s potatoes for me. (more…) Read More...

Noshing with Nomads

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Wandering peoples knew no distinction between home-cooked dinners and meals "on the go"
Wandering peoples knew no distinction between home-cooked dinners and meals "on the go" I’m moving again. This move will be my fourth in eight years and, like the three before it, owes not to any restless impulse but to banal necessity. Contrary economic winds have blown me from Arizona to New England, from New England back to Arizona, and from Arizona to western Pennsylvania. Now I’m returning to New England. Relocation ranks just below divorce and illness in terms of unusually stressful events. I feel this fact palpably. (more…) Read More...

Radish Malorum

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Tolstoy's take on the "guns versus butter" problem
"We have pink radishes on the table, beautiful yellow butter, plump golden bread on a white tablecloth.... Our ladies in their muslin gowns are so happy, sitting among the green plants in the garden, because it is hot and they are in the shadow. But beyond, the evil devil famine is already hard at work, covering the fields with weeds, crazing the arid soil, tearing the soles of the peasants' calloused feet and splitting the animals' hoofs, and will so shake and agitate us all that we, too, under the shade of our lime trees, with our muslin gowns and our lumps of butter on our flowered plates, will get what's coming to us." --Leo Tolstoy, "Letter to Afanasy Fet" (May 16, 1865) Read More...

Dutch Treat

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Enlightened government, humane ethics, and bustling trade meant that even the lowliest in the Low Countries shared in the high times
Enlightened government, humane ethics, and bustling trade meant that even the lowliest in the Low Countries shared in the high times The 1806 summer trip British writer and barrister John Carr took through Holland wasn't easy. The Netherlands and Britain had long been enemies, and he had to borrow a passport from an American friend to sneak past customs. The subterfuge paid off. As Carr later noted in his reminiscences, which he published in 1807 as A Tour through Holland, the "aqueous kingdom" impressed him as happy and prosperous. Her stone houses he found "very noble"; her streets, broad and magnificent. Dexterous were her boatmen, and beautiful were her women and cathedrals. (more…) Read More...

Hyperreality Bites

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We'll all float on okay
"You could say that the social is just like the sense of taste in American cuisine. It is a gigantic dissuasion from the taste of food: its savor is, as it were, isolated, expurgated and resynthesized in the form of burlesque and artificial sources. This is flavor, just as there was once cinematic glamour: erasing all personal character in favor of an aura of the studio and the fascination of models. Likewise for the social: just as the function of taste is isolated in the sauce, the social is isolated as a function in all the therapeutic sauces in which we float." --Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (1983) Read More...

The Tao of Chow

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First there is some mutton. Then there is no mutton. Then there is
"From food are born all creatures, which live upon food and after death return to food. Food is the chief of all things. It is therefore said to be medicine for all diseases of the body. Those who worship food as Brahman gain all material objects. From food are born all beings which, being born, grow by food, and, when they die, food feeds upon them." --From Taittiriya Upanishad (ca. 5th century BC) Read More...

History Made Queasy

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A fresh look at rotten food's influence on world events
A fresh look at rotten food's influence on world events Joyous but hellishly hot is no doubt how those in attendance would have described the Washington Monument’s groundbreaking ceremony, which took place July 4, 1850. Yet the heat didn't dampen the appetite of President Zachary Taylor, who presided over the event. "Old Rough and Ready," as he was affectionately known, snacked on cucumbers, "a generous quantity of cherries," and iced milk during the festivities, and he munched a few green apples while strolling afterward along the banks of the Potomac River. On returning home to the White House he capped his afternoon by drinking a few quarts of water. (more…) Read More...

Cat Gut

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9 lives meet 32 teeth
"A fellow, a shepherd at Beverley, in Yorkshire, about eleven years ago, for a bet of five pounds, was produced, who was to devour a living cat. The one produced was a large black tomcat, which had not been fed for the purpose; but was chosen, as being the largest in that neighborhood. The day appointed was the fair-day at Beverley. The parties met. The man produced was a raw-boned fellow, about forty. The cat was then given to him; on which he took hold of his four legs with one hand, and closing his mouth with the other, he killed him by biting his head to pieces immediately, and in less than a quarter of an hour, devoured every part of the cat, tail, legs, claws, bones, and everything. The man who laid the wager gave the fellow two… Read More...

Red Holidays of Genius

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The Italian Futurists' marriage of man and machine was a feast for the senses
The Italian Futurists' marriage of man and machine was a feast for the senses In a room whose walls are lined with aluminum, nimble waiters flit past diners, spritzing the air with perfume. A Wagner opera blares from a phonograph somewhere hidden. On each table sit four plates, each containing a small morsel. A quarter of a fennel bulb occupies the first, a single olive the second, the third holds a minute pile of candied fruit, and the fourth, a "tactile device" of red damask, velvet, and sandpaper, which the diners fondle as they eat. (more…) Read More...

Varsity Voracity

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Higher learning and higher caloric intake have long gone hand in hand
Higher learning and higher caloric intake have long gone hand in hand My first year of college I managed to keep off the dreaded "Freshman 15" by living on Grape Nuts, soy milk, orange juice, and gin. Not exactly brain food, I admit, but I faced limited options. In my dorm room I had a minifridge and microwave, and that's it (no hotpots or -plates allowed). I didn't own a car, and the closest supermarket was miles from campus. The student union was your typical gauntlet of fast food stands complemented by serving lines ladling out overpriced tray-fuls of mashed potatoes, corn niblets and chicken parts. A food co-op operated nearby, but its horn o' bowel-quickening plenty — carob almond mounds, sprouted spelt bagels, tempeh salad sandwiches — asked prices that meant only the very rare splurge. Chronically short of… Read More...

Holiday Spirits High and Low

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What the Dickens gets into some people at Christmas?
"As to the dinner, it's perfectly delightful -- nothing goes wrong, and everybody is in the very best of spirits, and disposed to please and be pleased. Grandpapa relates a circumstantial account of the purchase of the turkey, with a slight digression relative to the purchase of previous turkeys, on former Christmas-days, which grandmamma corroborates in the minutest particular. Uncle George tells stories, and carves poultry, and takes wine, and jokes with the children at the side-table, and winks at the cousins that are making love, or being made love to, and exhilarates everybody with his good humour and hospitality; and when, at last, a stout servant staggers in with a gigantic pudding, with a sprig of holly in the top, there is such a laughing, and shouting, and clapping of little chubby hands, and kicking up of fat dumpy… Read More...