Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Look at it. So beautiful. Firm, bright color, everything you would want. Consider Harold McGee’s view of skin in On Food and Cooking. Usually cooks don’t welcome large amounts of toughening connective tissue in meat. But taken on their own, animal skin, cartilage, and bones are valuable exactly because they’re mostly connective tissue and therefor … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater: Skin And Flesh
Certainly one of the most famous severed heads belonged to Louis XVI as depicted in Georg Heinrich Sieveking’s copper plate engraving from 1793. Simon Schama in Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution narrates the final moments of this most unfortunate king. The steps to the scaffold were so steep that Louis had to lean … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater: Head And Face
It’s November 8, 1895, late at night, and Wilhelm Röntgen, Professor of Physics in Worzburg, Bavaria sits in a dark room. He’s enclosed a discharge tube in a sealed, thick, black carton. He lifts a paper plate covered on one side with barium platinocyanide in front of the discharge tube and the plate turns fluorescent. … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater: Bones
The year begins with champagne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (circa 1880-81) and new dietary guidelines. Well, something like that. Marion Nestle at Food Politics offers a review of the impregnable document: The 2015 Dietary Guidelines, At Long Last, while Mother Jones points out that climate goes missing in the document: There’s A Huge … Continue reading A Week Thinking About What We Eat
No, not garbage, nor a disturbing twig sculpture out of True Detective. Though, all in all, given where we travel in this essay, similarities abound. A male satin bowerbird crafted the construction at the top of this post. Why? I found the answer in David Rothenberg’s Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution. He’s … Continue reading “I Just Want To Make Love To You.” Actually, I Just Want To Make Art. Bowerbirds, The Faerie Queen and Etta James.
I’ve roasted a chicken or two in my life, yet when I read this post from Zester Daily today, I knew I’d been given a chance to up my game and learn a wee bit more from the French. http://zesterdaily.com/cooking/for-the-ultimate-roast-chicken-go-french/ The nation of wine and cheese has much to say about poulet rôti. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin … Continue reading Ah, The Beauty And Philosophy Of Roast Chicken.
There’s something compelling about cooking bones. Maybe it’s the strangeness of seeing recognizable body parts within a food culture that so successfully conceals any connection between meat and a living or dead animal. Maybe it’s a deep memory in the brain stem of scaring off predators from their kill, gathering bones with shreds of meat, … Continue reading Cooking The Bones: Pleasures Of The Table And The Grim Reaper
