Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
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
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.
The first thing you notice about Pieter Aretsen’s painting A Meat Stall With The Holy Family Giving Alms (1551) is all the meat–an ox head with eyes staring at us, pig trotters on a cabbage leaf, whole side of a slaughtered pig split cleanly down the spine, a large ham shank, sausage, smoked fish, herring; … Continue reading Thinking About Who’s Sitting Down To Dinner In North Carolina
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
I discover Edna Lewis in the pages of the New York Times. Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking by Francis Lam casts me into the world of Freetown, Virginia where people lived close to the land, cooking their harvest in wood stoves, using wells and streams to keep food cool. Lam carefully chooses … Continue reading Edna Lewis And Kidney Bean Soup
