Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Our collective human memory reaches far back through many doors, many hallways and rooms, and alway we find, though never that first room, a place to cook and a place to sit down and eat with each other. In Homer’s the Odyssey, Odysseus portrays this action and place as the best life has to offer. … Continue reading Happy July 4th! Some Thoughts on Cannibalism For North Carolina.
Ah, ginger beef tripe from Yum Yum Cha Cafe. Though no longer a fixture of Rice Village, many a Sunday morning the Harvey/Maya family traveled to its storefront window and entered in search of dim sum. Beef tripe comes to us from the muscle wall of the first three chambers of a cow’s stomach. The … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater: The Stomach Our Cultural Engine.
I’m in the beer section of a market, what to have? What to have? Ah, Dogfish Head, yes they have some rather . . . oh, an almost three-thousand year old beer recipe from Italy. I’ll take it. Birra Etrusca Bronze: drinking vessels in 2,800 -year-old Etruscan tombs. I taste wine? Sauturne? Fermented pomegranate? A … Continue reading Rome: Porridge or Pig Stomach?
What’s in a cooking pot? Here’s Rachel Laudan in Cuisines and Empires on the subject: The cooking pot, in which diverse elements were brought into harmony, symbolized culture and state. When the Greeks founded a new colony, they carried a cauldron and a spark of fire from the mother city. Confucians argued that the king … Continue reading Aaron Needs A Goat–I Have A Stew To Cook, Sins To Confess, And Côtes du Rhône To Drink. Let’s Here It For Family Bovidae!!
Why would this episode of Empires, Cannibals and Magic Fish Bones begin with Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates? Ah, just you wait–death, drink, friends, and something sacred are all in the air. The Odyssey, so much eating, so much time: sacrifice and feasts, strangers walking in the door and feasting, sailors feasting on cattle … Continue reading Ancient Cuisine Philosophy For 500, Jack! The Odyssey To Yum Yum Cha To Nineveh To Cajun Country.
