Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
To cook, to eat, to kill. An animal’s life taken, body split open, applied to fire and torn between teeth. What are the aesthetic and ethics? Dan Barber argues that good taste necessitates sustainable farming to table. Tayyib and Halal mean the animal has been raised in a “good” environment–think ethically sourced and sustainable–and then … Continue reading Brains and Balls.
Gustave Doré portrays one of the most famous acts of chewing in literature. At the end of Dante’s Inferno, the Poet and Virgil walk upon on ice amidst the very, very damned as we read in Robert M. Durling’s translation. . . . I saw two frozen in one hole so that one head was a … Continue reading Thinking About Chewing
Been away from Empires, Cannibals and Magic Fish Bones longer than I anticipated, but I’m back for the last day of 2017 as a pork belly marinated in honey and molasses smokes outside and I listen to King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man on the Live in Chicago CD (a Christmas gift from my daughter … Continue reading Happy New Year’s Eve And The Indiana Book Of The Dead.
Liver has pride of place in the human body in ancient texts as a producer of blood and a source of life. The Etruscan bronze liver above with its inscriptions guides the reader of entrails through a large, meaty organ considered the basis of life. The ancient Greek term is hēpatoskōpia, which means to examine the liver. … Continue reading Reading And Cooking Liver While Several Species Of Small, Furry Animals Gather Together In A Cave And Groove With A Pict.
Philippe de Champaigne’s painting Saint Augustine (1645-1650) presents the image of a burning heart in the theologian’s hand to emphasize his burning love of knowledge, truth and God. A smoking heart has much to do with a love of taste, and with that, a few words about taste from the Journal of René Redzepi: The connection … Continue reading Smoking Heart Of Love.
Rain falls for six days, rain falls for one hundred and forty-four hours, rain falls for eight thousand six hundred and forty minutes, and so on. As with Aureliano Segundo who fights boredom during the four years, eleven months, and two days rain falls in Gabriel Garcia’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, I have … Continue reading Cooking Hannibal Through Thirty-Six Inches of Rainfall: It’s All About Love.
Houston like any city from Ur to Rome to Hong Kong tells its story through food and those who bring food traditions from around the world to their neighborhood. A Brief History of Houston Barbecue offers such a tale, one where I stir a barbecue sauce in my Houston Heights home and wonder, whose sauce … Continue reading More Alchemy And Travels Through Space And Time With Barbecue Sauce.
Alchemy is a chemical transformation of matter through air, earth, fire and water, a process characterized by melanosis (blackening), leukosis (whitening), xanthosis (yellowing) and isis (reddening), also known as nigredo (chaos), albedo (release, daybreak) and rubedo (intensity, sunrise); which means through the language of the opus magnum, alchemy is to cook, and specifically for these … Continue reading Alchemy In The Afternoon
Such a sacred tableau in Pablo Picasso’s 1902 painting La Soupe. There’s a graceful, reverential bow on the part of the mother as she offers a bowl of soup to her daughter, who springs forward, ready to receive sustenance, ready to receive a gift. I love cooking soup. A small, crafted merging of nature and … Continue reading A Few Thoughts On Soup
This recipe begins with Joan Miró’s The Table (Still Life with Rabbit), 1920 with its mix of realistic details and slightly Cubist perspective, and a paragraph from Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur’s Handbook by Janice Spoon. On page 181, under the title “Pappardelle Sulla Lepre,” I read, In Contorno, Inspector Pazzi and his young wife, Allegra, … Continue reading Cidered Rabbit
