Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Bryant Terry is Chef in Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora and his cook book Afro-Vegan connects food to health, identity and civic responsibility. More than anyone else, people of African descent should honor, cultivate, and consume food from the African diaspora. Afro-diasporic foodways (that is, the shape and development of food traditions) carry … Continue reading Creamy Coconut-Cashew Soup With Okra, Corn, And Tomatoes.
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
Quoting Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin allows me a wry comment on what I’ve been anticipating with great pleasure. Oh, how I’ve been waiting for this book, and on October 18th it arrived: Feeding Cannibal: A Connoisseur’s Cookbook by Janice Poon, the food stylist for Hannibal. Bryan Fuller created a television series under the guise of a psychological … Continue reading A Taste Of Feeding Hannibal / “Tell Me What You Eat: I Will Tell You What Your Are.”
My morning thoughts do not immediately turn to blood, but then I read an article by Katie Macleod which offers a wonderful observation of blood sausage and what we will eat when we’re young and what we will not in Blood for Breakfast is Wasted on the Young. And then, all my thoughts turn bloody. … Continue reading Blood In The Kitchen.
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
A dissolute aristocrat dreams Don Quixote who dreams Miguel Cervantes writing his novel Don Quixote who dreams Pablo Picasso painting two lonely figures on a hill. Our narrator dreams the Knight of La Mancha dreaming an inn as a castle, prostitutes as maidens, and stockfish as trout. I read of Castile and Alcalá de Henares … Continue reading Dreams Of Mustard Greens, Pigs And Shrimp.
A dram of Edradour Whisky on a table changes everything. No longer a horizontal surface where family gathers, which creates the family, no longer a resting place for animals and produce turned into meals, which creates the animals and vegetables, now table and room become taste and memory, where fellow travelers begin their journey and … Continue reading Taste Creates The World: A Dram Of Whisky / Part One.
White to rose to crimson this cow tongue’s muscle, fat, cartilage, and bone draws our attention more as anatomy than food, but food it is . . . simmer for hours, smoke for hours, roast, sautée, stew. Why paint such a raw scene? Gustave Caillebotte’s Calf’s Head and Ox Tongue (1882) exemplifies an everyday reality … Continue reading Transforming Tongue: The Alchemy of Cooking (“True Detective” Style).
Midsummer in the Stockholm Archipelago and I’ve finally become accustomed to falling asleep in daylight. Important to blanket windows, shut eyes tightly, and dream about water and land washing, breaking each other. It’s about four in the morning when I wake to light and silhouette, and what can I do, emerging colors call me out … Continue reading Broth Of A Forest Floor: Walking On Storön.
Leroy Campbell’s Table Talk portrays three generations of a family gathered round plates full of corn, greens, tomatoes and rolls. Newspaper articles focused on African-american culture stitch together the tablecloth. Bright, lively colors clothe family, furniture and walls. Two black and white portraits of ancestors watch over them all. Campbell creates his work out of Gullah-Geechee … Continue reading Gullah Cuisine: An Argument And History About Who’s in The Kitchen With A Chicken Bog.
