Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Cheek, ear, liver and spleen, if there’s a pig part Fergus Henderson has a recipe for it. My favorite piece of anatomy is the pig head and Chef Henderson knows quite a few ways to turn a skull into a fanatic meal, so tonight I’m making a Warm Pig’s Head Salad from his The Complete Nose … Continue reading Warm Pig’s Head Salad
Maybe it’s because of Martin Picard’s Pied du Cochon Burger. Maybe it’s because my friend Sarah Mangrem gave me beef sausage from her family’s farm. Maybe I didn’t need a cause nor reason, maybe it’s just fate. No matter, for days and nights I’ve been carrying around a vision of an improbable, impossible sausage sandwich … Continue reading The Improbable, Impossible Sausage Sandwich.
There it is, the sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings. As a human being she once posed a question about herself, becoming the most unintelligible of living beings. She and the sea. (401) The moment of consciousness, of self-awareness … Continue reading Reading And Eating Clarice Lispector’s Story “As Águas Do Mundo.”
We’ve shopped at the farmer’s market, so now it’s time to cook. Let’s take a look at my beloved fish, meu namorado. Oh, he’s quite a catch. Scaled, gutted and cleaned. Let’s take a look at the shrimp. Lovely. I cut the namorado into thick steaks, saving head and tail for a stock. I remove … Continue reading When In Rio, Cook Like A Carioca.
Tuesday morning which means we’re off to the farmers’ market in Praça General Osorio, Ipanema. I love going to markets whenever I travel, markets in Dublin, Madrid, Stockholm, Thessaloniki and of course, Rio de Janeiro. I’m planning on cooking with local fish and have my sights set on Namorado. Namorado in its dictionary form means boyfriend … Continue reading Market Day In Rio
Saturnalibus, optimo dierum! (Catullus) And so it is. A time of honoring agricultural deities, gathering to brave darkness, exchanging tokens of friendship, banquet-style eating of copious amounts of the gods’ riches, and drinking . . . drinking and drinking. For twenty years I’ve started Saturnalia celebrations with the seasonal Anchor Brewing Christmas Ale, 2016 … Continue reading A Southern Saturnalia
My friend Doug Arno went for a walk with a compound bow in Northern Ontario near Longlac during bear hunting season and brought down a black bear weighing nearly 300 pounds. With one arrow. Bear hunting in North America dates back to the beginning of the Holocene. Bear Hunting at the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition on the Northern … Continue reading “Looking After the Bones:” A Hunt And Bear Stew.
Society has to be crowded with the truth. The truth must kneel on football fields and spill onto our dinner plates. Chefs, writers, bartenders, bakers, farmers, and the lot of us food people are keepers of social space—and we have a responsibility to introduce racial equity as a necessary non sequitur. Tunde Wey writes … Continue reading “You Ain’t As White As You Think.” Braised OxTails And Greens.
In 1900, for just twenty-five cents, a freshly published copy of the “compendium of our local culinary science . . . an authentic and complete account of the Creole kitchen” could be obtained from any New Orleans newsstand. (10) So opens Rien T. Fertel’s essay “Everyone Seemed Willing to Help” The Picayune Creole Cook Book … Continue reading The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book
Sometimes they arrive without an invitation. As in Edward Gorey’s masterful The Doubtful Guest, having a door exposes you to knocks and bells beginning a doubtful process of hospitality. Maybe you had sent an invitation but then forgotten you had, and now as you’ve settled in for a quiet evening with a bowl of leek, … Continue reading The Dinner Guest
