Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
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
Ah, the brain. Fergus Henderson devotes an entire section of his Nose to Tail cookbook to Lamb’s Brains. Why lamb’s brains? When brains were available, lamb’s were cheap compared to the calf’s, but still delicious, creamy and rich, and no other ingredient offers you better possibilities of the gentle give and crunch combination. (58) Thank … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater: The Brain (part 2)
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
We open with Gustav Klimt’s Garden Path with Chickens (1916). If a blog post is a path to a particular world of sense and sound, then this one includes a chicken. And a cow. And leeks. Let’s walk further down the path. The first words of a favorite novel open thus, “You are about to … Continue reading If On A Winter’s Night A Cock-A-Leekie
Miley Cyrus has a famous tongue. So do Mick Jagger and Albert Einstein. Merriam-Webster defines a tongue as a tapering flame, long narrow strip of land projecting into a body of water, a moveable pin in a buckle. François Rabelais has Pantagruel cover an army with his tongue to protect them from a rain storm. … Continue reading My Tongue As A Sandwich With A Glass of Burgundy
To further my French studies, Natalie Holstein-Charron has lent me Alistair Horne’s Seven Ages of Paris. I truly admire the tenacity the Parisians display in executing each other from the time of Philippe Auguste in the twelfth century to the notorious Cardinal Richelieu in the sixteenth. And I haven’t yet reached the Revolution! Here is … Continue reading Thoughts of Gallows, Ossuaries, Bourdain, Zombies and Cézanne As I Once Again Prepare Roasted Bone Marrow (Part One Of A Meal)
Here is a description of a food class I’m offering this mid-winter session at The Honors College at the University of Houston. More news to come. While reading, I suggest you listen to the Presentation for The Mystery Sonatas by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Von Biber. What is a recipe? It’s an All in One complex system … Continue reading The Great Banquet: The Alchemy of Recipes
Jennifer Decker
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