Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Early 1960s America and Nietta Dunn defies Jim Crow laws by sitting at the H. Green lunch counter in downtown Lexington. African-Americans may buy food, but they may not sit at the counter. Here’s the thing, food doesn’t work well with fear and hate–not when planting, not when harvesting, not when cooking, and especially not … Continue reading Onion Pie With A Cold Eye Cast On Fear And Hate In America.
Fire, wood, smoker and flesh equals Smoking Houston, and smoking I have done with and for family and friends while sitting in the backyard at 2408 Cortlandt. A favorite has been pork belly marinated in apple cider, brown sugar, honey, molasses and herbs seasonings. Smoking the inner organs of animals like this cow heart brings … Continue reading Smoking Houston
Louis Vincent Palliere renders in bright colors the infamous Slaughter of the Suitors” by Odysseus and Telemachus, note those gorgeous capes tripping hues between orange and red. I love cooking sausages. All sorts of sausage. Beef, chicken, lamb and pig; andouille, bloedwurst, boudin, bratwurst, chorizo, hot dogs, kielbasa, knackwurst, linguiça, longaniza, merguez, morcilla, saucisson, soppressata, … Continue reading Sausages And Cooking Murder.
I’m rereading Samuel Becket’s novel Watt, while also listening to Dermot Crowley voice the Singing Master’s words on Audiobook. In the opening pages, we do not meet Watt directly but through Mr. Hackett and Mr. and Mrs. Nixon who sit at a bus stop and observe someone or something disembark from a tram, variously described … Continue reading Cooking Beckett: A Stew For Mr. Knott.
Fifty years ago in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, tall pine trees face a perennial bed of bluebells, geraniums, Black-Eyed Susans, goldenrod and more all bordered by clusters of basil, sage, rosemary, and sweet marjoram. St. Augustine grass covers an acre while a wide, asphalt drive slides down to a dirt road. In the kitchen off the … Continue reading A Goulash For Angela Merkel While Dreaming About Solyanka, My Grandmother Dicing Onions, And The Hot Club Of Detroit.
In the HBO series Westworld, androids also known as “hosts” struggle to achieve the most fundamentally unique experience of the human species, consciousness and all its attendant wakefulness and awareness, or so we’d like to think about ourselves, but hosts like Dolores Abernathy and Maeve Millay become alert to themselves and the world around them, distinctly … Continue reading Banquet World: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends.”
A pulling back of skin and forceps on flesh reveal an inner world of the human body in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Anatomy lessons entertained curious spectators throughout Europe from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century. Such spectacles danced the edge of the sacred and profane as worlds under the skin … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater Of Anthony Bourdain
Oh this tasting and thinking self! We experience it and swear we’re at the heart of who we are, and yet, and yet. But though we may call this thinking self (the soul) substance, as being the ultimate subject of thinking which cannot be further represented as the predicate of another thing, it remains quite … Continue reading Prolegomena To Any Future Single Malt Scotch Whisky.
Vichyssoise made the list for Prolegomena Number 3, but Cocido interceded, so reading Kant and cooking with a pot continues today with garbanzo beans and odd bits. Let’s leap in with the beginning of the “Second Part of the Main Transcendental Question.” Nature is the existence of things, so far as it is determined according … Continue reading Prolegomena To Any Future Cocido Madrileño.
West Africa parades Benin, Burkina Faso, the island nation of Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, the island of Saint Helena, Senegal, Sierra Leone, São Tomé and Príncipe and Togo. West Africa remembers the empires of Ghana, Mali, Oyo, and Benin. West Africa cooks Yassa, Maafe, and Fufu. In The … Continue reading Prolegomena To Any Future Gumbo.
