On the Table - Just Served

Food Sites for July 2013

2013-06-14T11:16:00.000-04:00

“There is something in the red of a raspberry pie that looks as good to a man as the red in a sheep looks to a wolf.” Evelyn Waugh

It’s berry season in the Hudson Valley. Need I say more?

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served, directly -- but there is much more at the blog that isn't delivered automatically.

We recently gave a talk to the Red Hook Historical Society about the influence of early Dutch colonists on the eating habits of modern Americans: “Dutch Trea t.” The online version includes notes and references.

Truly adventurous (and/or masochistic) readers can follow us on Facebook, or Twitter. If you are still not completely off your feed, links to all of our online scribbles can be found at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner.

Leitesculinaria has reposted twenty-or-so of our backlisted (and, no, I didn’t say “blacklisted” – so don’t get your hopes up) LC pieces here, as part of their archive of food history & science articles.

Here are a few excerpts from On the Table’s culinary quote collection that celebrate the very thing that makes us what we are (foodies, connoisseurs, gourmets, essers, fressers, noshers, gourmandizers, feinschmeckers, gluttons -- take your pick):

“One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” Luciano Pavarotti

“So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.” Franz Kafka

Gary

July, 2013

PS: If you encounter broken links, changed URLs -- or know of wonderful sites we’ve missed -- please drop us a line. It helps to keep this resource as useful as possible for all of us. To those of you who have suggested sites -- thanks, and keep them coming!

PPS: If you wish to change the e-mail address at which you receive these newsletters, or otherwise modify the way you receive our postings or -- if you’ve received this newsletter by mistake, and/or don't wish to receive future issues -- you have our sincere apology and can have your e-mail address deleted from the list immediately. We’re happy (and continuously amazed) that so few people have decided to leave the list but, should you choose to be one of them, let us know and we’ll see that your in-box is never afflicted by these updates again. You’ll find links at the bottom of this page to fix everything to your liking.

----the new sites----

Anthropological Journal Discussion of Classical Food Framework Tools

(Robert Lawson’s paper comparing theoretical approaches to the study of food)

Charming the Ignorant: A Rhetorical Analysis of Michael Pollan's Introduction to The Omnivore's Dilemma

(Berry College’s Jordyn Wagner examines the mechanics, and intent, of Pollans’ writing style)

Chiles of Mexico, The

(Isabel Hood’s introduction to this hot topic, followed by pages on specific chiles)

Chiles of Mexico, The: El Jalapeño

Chiles of Mexico, The: El Mulato

Chiles of Mexico, The: El Pasilla

Cuisine of Mexican Convents, The

(Rachel Laudan looks at the foods of 18th–century nuns in Mexico)

Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security

(detailed FAO report on entomophagy; a large PDF file)

Food Writing Lives: Sheila Hibben

(Anne Mendelson looks at one writer’s approach to honest American food; Hibben was an early exponent of regional cooking)

Foodies

(former LinkedIn discussion group, now a public site)

Gastronomic Writing - Then & Now

(Jason Adamson looks at its roots in 19th-century France)

Haggis - Peasant Food to Diasporic Icon

(whether productive of longing or loathing, this Scottish dish tells us a lot about our notions of food and identity)

How Britain’s Appetite for Beef Influenced American Taste

(Kara Newman traces the histories of our taste for meat and the technologies that catered to it)

Inside the Zodiac Club

(Danielle Oteri serves the inside scoop on New York City’s 145-year-old secret dining society)

Kaiseki in Kyoto, Japan: a Regional Foodway

(Jason Adamson explains the history and culture of this traditional meal, then describes his experience at one of these unique dinners)

Mystery of Curry, The

(Andrew Lawler’s article, on Slate, about archaeological investigations into ancient curries)

Nutritionally Improved Agricultural Crops

(nutritional aspects of GMO research – an article that does not address thorny environmental issues – from the National Institutes of Health)

On Authenticity

(Raymond Sokolov asks, in essence, “What does authentic mean?”)

On Literature and Food

(another essay by Raymond Sokolov, who is not impressed by celebrity chefs)

On the Gas

(e-zine on “the art, science & culture of food”)

Table Comes First, The: Adam Gopnik on the Meaning of Food

(Maria Popova’s review in The Atlantic)

Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater, The

(how the internet is making it impossible to find something [safe] to eat)

-- inspirational (or otherwise) sites for writers/bloggers --

A Dab of Vaseline? Perfect

Attending a Food Blogging Conference (the What, the How, the Why)

Hoard and Historian

How to Write an Effective Book Description

Recipe Attribution

Should You Self-Publish? 15 Questions

Thank You, Apple, for Going to Court Over E-Books

-- yet more blogs --

Salt, The

Shut Up, Foodies!

Will Cook for Friends

----that's all for now----

Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

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The Resource Guide for Food Writers (Paper) (Kindle)

The Herbalist in the Kitchen (Hardcover)

The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food And Drink Industries (Hardcover) (Kindle)

Human Cuisine (Paper) (Kindle)

Herbs: A Global History (Hardcover) (Kindle)

Terms of Vegery (Kindle)

How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating (Kindle)

Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

...for the moment, anyway.

______________

"The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #153" is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication -- unless with the author's prior written permission -- is strictly prohibited.

Going Dutch

2013-05-19T20:08:00.000-04:00

Roelof Koets, "A Fruit-filled Pastry, Fruits, Glasses, and Plates;" ca. 1645.

------------

This paper was read to a meeting of the Red Hook Historical Society, Red Hook, New York, 19 May 2013. Society members and local restaurants recreated many of the period dishes mentioned in the paper, making the event a festive occasion of which the region's Dutch settlers would surely have approved.

------------

One of the ways we can learn what people ate in the past is by reading the recipes that were available to them. For example, the first cookbook produced in the US was the 1745 reprint of Hannah Glasse's modestly titled The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which Far Exceeds Any Thing of the Kind Ever Yet Published. Fifty-one years later, Amelia Simmons' American Cookery appeared in Hartford. CT. We can also get a taste of the period's infatuation with subtitles, as the book's cover is completely filled with this:

or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.

The subtitle alone exceeds the attention span of most of today's readers -- but the book was so popular in the eighteenth-century that a second edition was published the same year, in Albany.

Glasse and Simmons’ books were not, however, the first cookbooks used in our part of the New World.

The Van Cortlandt family, who arrived in the Hudson Valley in 1639, ordered a copy of the 1683 edition of The Pleasurable Country Life from Holland. Originally published in 1667, it was a virtual encyclopedia of how to live the good life, and it contained the most popular Dutch cookbook of the time, The Sensible Cook. Dutch authors were as liberal in their use of subtitles as were their English-speaking colleagues. Fully half of the cover of the Van Cortlandt's edition bore, in smallish type:

or Careful Housekeeper
Describing,
How to cook, stew, roast, fry, bake and prepare all sorts of Dishes in the best and most able manner; with the appropriate Sauces:
Very useful and Profitable in all Households.
Enlarged, with the
DUTCH BUTCHERING TIME.
To which is added the
SENSIBLE CONFECTIONER,
Instructing how to prepare and preserve good and useful confection from many kinds of Fruit, Roots, Flowers, and Leaves, etc.

All that cover text was needed because advertising (or book-signings, or author appearances on talk shows) had not yet been invented, so -- if a book was to sell at all -- it had to market itself. That wordy subtitle also suggests a question (which I will not attempt to answer here): With all that cover copy, what could possibly have been omitted that required the use of that final "etc."?

Peter Rose, the leading expert on Dutch cookery in our region, has translated the Van Cortlandt's copy (which is now part of the collection at Tarrytown's Sleepy Hollow Restoration, now called Historic Hudson Valley). I have drawn heavily upon this and other books she has written.

When we think of "American food," the first phrase that comes to mind is: "American as apple pie." Of course, apple pie is not really American – some think it's English (because the English do make apple pies), but The Sensible Cook contains four recipes for apple-taerts that we would still recognize as apple pies – and it was here before any English cookbooks. Also, the first apple tree in the New World was not planted by British settlers in New England – the one planted in 1647, in Manhattan, by Peter Stuyvesant (the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam) continued to bear fruit for 219 years. If not for the fact that a derailed train uprooted it in 1866, it would probably still be producing heirloom apples. That unfortunate event was clearly something that Stuyvesant could never have foreseen. By the way, all the stories about John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, are much newer – he didn't begin planting apple nurseries until shortly before 1800.

Just down the street, here in Red Hook, there's an historic eatery, the Halfway Diner. It's singled out for historic recognition because it represents an architectural style that is not only uniquely American but, also because diner cuisine is quintessentially American. For us, a meal is not really a complete meal unless it has a minimum of three components: a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. "What about such things as hamburgers and hot dogs", you ask? If you were to order either at the Halfway, the meat and bun would not be alone on the plate. There will always be a pickle, or a token cup of coleslaw, or both. We may not always eat them… but they will have served their purpose, just by appearing on our plates.

How long has this been going on?

Well, The Sensible Cook has a recipe for sour pickles that would perfectly suit the average diner customer (although most of us would expect a more garlicky version – later immigrants from eastern Europe liked garlic more than did the Dutch). But what about the coleslaw?

When Carl von Linné (better known today as Linnaeus) wanted to expand his comprehensive listing of scientific names to include species of the New World, he sent young botanists here to collect and categorize our wild plants. The Swedish Royal Academy co-sponsored Pehr Kalm, one of Linné's protégés, in the hopes that he would bring back valuable plants and seeds. Linné immortalized Kalm by naming a genus after him: Kalmia latifolia is our Mountain Laurel.

What's that got to do with coleslaw?

Kalm’s journals tell us a lot about life in colonial America -- and he spent a lot of time in the Hudson Valley. He rented a room in a Dutch home and, in an entry from 1749, he described what he called "an unusual salad" served by his landlady:

She took the inner leaves of a head of cabbage, namely, the leaves which usually remain when the outermost leaves are removed, and cut them in long thin strips about 1/12 to 1/6 of an inch wide, seldom more… she… poured oil and vinegar pon [sic] them, added some salt and pepper… melted butter… is kept in a warm pot or crock and poured over the salad after it has been served. [i]

He meant that melted butter was sometimes used in place of oil. The dish was called "koolsla" -- short for "koolsalade" – or cabbage salad. The dish seems different from our coleslaw because of two later developments: inexpensive graters that eliminated the need for hand-slicing of the cabbage and the absence of mayonnaise. That omnipresent ingredient was invented seven years after Kalm's observations, and didn't become an American mainstay until after Richard Hellman started selling it, readymade in jars, in 1912.

While Kalm said quite a bit about the food he ate in Dutch homes, it’s important to remember that our region was largely British at the time. On that subject, he was more succinct: "The art of cooking as practised by Englishmen does not extend much beyond roast beef and plum pudding."

One of the other things that makes diners uniquely American is that their menus are achronological. By that, I mean that almost everywhere, we expect to find different meals served throughout the day. Breakfast dishes in the morning, lunches at mid-day, and dinners in the evening – except on Sunday when everyday routines are disrupted. When our religions were more puritanical, the Sabbath was reserved for activities that made everyday schedules inconvenient. Today's religious observances – like brunch, shopping, and seasonal rituals like cookouts, baseball and football – still make Sunday an exception to the menu clock we obey the rest of the week.

However, diners are like little islands that exist outside of our clock-driven existence. At a diner, one can order from any part of the menu at any time of day. If your stomach can handle it, you can feel free to have ham and eggs, a shrimp cocktail, and piece of lemon meringue pie that is somewhere north of eight-inches tall. Diners are culinary anarchies, and that's just the way we like them.

What makes diners so democratic is the fact that we can eat breakfast whenever we feel like it -- before the workday begins, or after a long night of drinking, or anywhere in between, alone or with friends. Consequently, it's among the breakfast items that we should be looking for traces of early Dutch gastronomic influences.

The early Dutch settlers brought chickens and pigs when they sailed to New Netherland, so they had eggs, bacon and sausages – but so did every other European cuisine. What they had that was different were two other mainstays of the American breakfast table: pancakes and waffles.

Just as in today's diners, the Dutch ate pancakes at any time of day. Dutch dining habits anticipated our modern diner expectation of “breakfast, any time.” However, their pancakes were not the airy confections we know today. Our pancakes are chemically-leavened; they use baking powder to create the carbon dioxide bubbles that lighten their batter. Baking powder not invented until 1843 (and didn't begin to be produced in the US until 1855). Simmons' book 1796 book was the first to mention use of pearl ash -- potassium carbonate -- that cooks extracted from wood ashes. Since Dutch pancakes contained neither pearl ash nor yeast, they tended to be heavy and filling.

Pancakes came in several forms, and The Sensible Cook mentions three of them. The most basic contained only flour, eggs and milk (and sometimes a little sugar). Sugar was just beginning to be cheap enough for everyday use (there were some fifty sugar refineries in Amsterdam in the 1640s). However, it still had to be shipped to the colonies here, and arrived in hard cone-shaped loaves that had to scraped and pounded before it could be used.

A second, fancier version, named Groeningen (after a fortified city and province in the far north of the Netherlands), adds currants and cinnamon. The Dutch East India Company was at the peak of its power at the time, so cinnamon and other spices were readily available, even in the colonies.

This was even more evident in the third recipe "To fry the best kind of Pancakes." It had a higher egg-to flour ratio, and lots of spices: cinnamon, cloves, mace, and nutmeg. These pancakes were fried in butter and sprinkled with sugar before serving.

Later Dutch pancake recipes included appel pannenkoeken a plate-sized, dense and savory version that included apples, bacon and gouda. New Netherlanders ate similar pancakes almost every day.

Tiny poffertjes -- bulging silver-dollar-sized pancakes cooked in special pans that had dimple-like indentations -- were served only on special occasions. Flensjes were thick crêpes served like a layer cake, with applesauce for filling, and served dusted with powdered sugar. Another special pancake was called drie-in-de-pan. They were yeast-raised pancakes cooked, as the name implies, three at a time, often with a filling of apples and currants or raisins.

Like ordinary pancakes, waffles were eaten almost every day. Recipes for modern waffles usually contain more oil than is found in pancake batter. It helps them avoid sticking to their convoluted griddles – and their Dutch precursors were no different. Their waffles used melted butter, and instead of baking powder they used yeast – so the batter had to rest for a while to allow the yeast to ferment some of the starch into leavening gas.

Of course, the most basic breakfast at a diner is taken at the counter: a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

The Dutch didn't develop a taste for coffee and tea until the end of the seventeenth century. Despite the fact that the Dutch East India Company had planted coffee plantations in Ceylon in 1658, the first coffeehouse to the New world didn't open until 1689, in Boston. Coffee was not nearly as popular as tea (in fact, it didn't become an American staple until after the famous Tea Party in Boston's harbor in 1773).

Once the Dutch started drinking tea, they made it a big part of their social lives. Nearly a century after the English took control of what had been New Amsterdam, the Dutch inhabitants still preferred tea. Pehr Kalm noted that

Their breakfast is tea, commonly without milk. ...They never put sugar into the cup, but take a small bit of it into their mouths while they drink. ...Coffee is not usual here.[ii]

Sixty years later, in 1809, Washington Irving was able to write:

The tea was served out of a majestic delft tea-pot, ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs – with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies.

He went on to describe some early-American ingenuity, and at the same time reaffirming Kalm's observations:

To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup – and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was to suspend a large lump directly over the tea table, by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth – an expedient, which is still kept up by some families in Albany; but which prevails without exception in Communipaw, Bergen, Flatbush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.[iii]

Before you ask, Communipaw is today's Hoboken, and the Flatbush he mentioned isn't the one in Brooklyn – it's part of modern Saugerties, between Esopus Creek and the Hudson.

The boundary between history and comedy is not always well-defined in Irving's writings, so it's often good to take his culinary observations, not with a lump of sugar, but with a grain of salt. In Irving’s second edition, Knickerbocker said the “worthy burghers of Albany” had told him that “…suspending a lump of sugar over the Albany tea-tables… had been discontinued for some years past.”[iv]

Some serious historians complain that Knickerbocker is lousy history -- however their inability to recognize satire merely proves that they were born without funny-bones.

Irving was not, however, joshing us with his praises of doughnuts:

Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks – a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, except in genuine Dutch families.[v]

These early doughnuts were not the ring-shaped versions we know today. Doughnuts didn't get their holes until well into the nineteenth century, because while the originals were yeast-raised, the newer "cake doughnuts" contained baking powder and didn't begin to rise until the frying started – and the batter in the center was often undercooked. The holes were meant to allow all of doughnut batter to cook evenly. Olykoeks were round balls, a little smaller than a tennis ball (another name for these fritter-like cakes was oleibollen) and sometimes flattened a bit. They were sometimes filled with stewed apples or raisins, and were seasoned with nutmeg or mace; either way, they were fried in lard, not the oil we use today. Oliebollen (in German it’s slightly different from the Dutch spelling) were made as early as the tenth century by Germanic cooks, but found their way to the New World via the Dutch.

They took days to make, because the yeast dough had to rise twice before frying. Once they were done, they were rolled in sugar, which sounds familiar to us. It's curious, that a century after doughnuts began having holes, the holes themselves are marketed as treats in themselves – in a sense returning to something very like their Dutch origins.

In the 1819 story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving has Ichabod Crane admiring “the ample charms of a Dutch country tea table,” especially “the doughy doughnut, the tender olykoek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller.” Yes, the Dutch invented our alternative doughnut as well – and their twisted crullers were remarkably similar to our modern crullers. The French cruller, on the other hand, is related only by the fact they're fried. The batter for French crullers is pre-cooked – it's more like the pâte choux batter used to make cream puffs, than doughnut batter.

Of course, we don't live for breakfast alone; there are other meals. But, if anything that characterizes American eating habits, it's our love of snacks that really sets us apart. Anything we can eat with one hand, while driving, watching TV, or standing up – especially if it's got carbs, fat, salt and/or sugar – we love.

You can guess where I'm going with this, can't you?

The Dutch gave us just what we want.

Pretzels? A Dutch invention. There's a great painting, done around 1681 by Job Berckheyde, showing a Dutch baker blowing a horn to announce his freshly-baked wares – he stands behind a counter covered with various breads, rolls and pretzels. Behind him there's a wooden rack from which six more fat pretzels hang. They look like the ones still sold on the streets of Manhattan. However, they're somewhat harder and, in place of salt they've got sugar and cinnamon. They're called krakelingen, and would be good dunked in coffee, like doughnuts or biscotti. They were commonly made in Holland, but we know they were made here too – because they were mentioned, in court proceedings in New Amsterdam, in 1653.

Is there any snack dearer to our hearts than the humble cookie?

In French and British English, it's a biscuit – 'though before adopting the French word, the English called them "New Year's cakes." In Italian, they're biscotto; in Portuguese, biscoito , -- like the German word zwieback – all words that reflect the fact that they're twice-baked (or, at least, baked to twice-baked crispness). In German it's a keks, which sounds suspiciously like our "cake," or plätzchen, and in Spanish it's galleta – both of which literally mean "little cake." Our "cookie" also means "little cake" – because it's based on the Dutch word koekje, the diminutive of koek (a flat, barely risen cake). Only in America and other former Dutch-speaking colonies are these little treats called anything like "cookies."

The Dutch didn't have chocolate chip cookies or oatmeal-raisin cookies, but they did make many different types. Speculaasbrokken were a kind of spice cookie that had a blanched almond embedded in its center. These seasonal treats were served during the period before Christmas. They were a smaller version of speculaas, a molded spice cake.

Theerandjes were bar cookies, softer and chewier than most other cookies of the time. The recipe appeared in a Dutch cookbook, Perfect Instructions for the Pastry Bakers or Their Students, published in the Netherlands in 1753. They stayed soft because they contained honey, which is hygroscopic – it drew moisture from the air, so they didn't completely dry after coming out of the oven. These cookies were topped with candied orange peel and citron in a honey glaze.

Honey was, before mass-produced sugar, the primary sweetener in Europe – so it's not surprising that colonists brought bees with them to the New World (the first honeybees in North America arrived in 1622).

Once sugar became affordable, candying was a popular way of preserving fruit. Another was fruit leather. Fruit Roll-ups were not invented by General Mills in the 1980s – they just added the saran-wrap and trademarked the name. Recipes for fruit leathers appeared in The Sensible Confectioner, as early as 1683 (the edition that the VanCortlandt family had).

Tea cookjes were thin wafer-like butter cookies with slightly-browned edges. Their name is half English and half Dutch because the recipe comes from a recipe book from a Dutch household that was hand-written sometime around 1800, long after the Dutch and English were no longer in control of the region. Today, we think of wafers as any thin crisp cookies, but in Dutch colonial times, they were thin crisp waffle-like cookies, similar to the cones that we use with ice cream.

When most of us went to school, the Dutch period in our US history classes was glanced over, in a rush to get to the presumably more-important English-focused historical events. Part of the reason for this is the fact that English language and culture are the supposed models upon which the American experience is based.

We also tend to think of American history as somehow independent of events in other parts of the world. The back-and-forth control of the Hudson Valley, between the English and the Dutch, was but a small part of larger wars being waged between the two countries in the seventeenth century. At issue was control of the seas, and especially the trade routes and colonies used by spice merchants. What was happening here was mirrored, in a bigger way, by battles waged in South Asia and the Caribbean.

However, we should also consider the fact that, for most of the last century, the textbook industry has been centered in Boston (for the same reason, most students are unaware that much of the Revolution happened south of Philadelphia). In Boston, history -- as it's understood -- began shortly before the Revolution. Here, in the Hudson Valley, it started over a century and a half earlier.

Today, we've considered just a tiny part of the Dutch influence on American culture – the things we love to stuff in our faces. Even through the narrow window of food history, it's easy to see that, given a choice, Americans still enjoy "going Dutch."[vi]

Notes

[i] Quoted in Rose, Peter G. Foods of the Hudson. 1993, p. 142.

[ii] Quoted in Rose, Peter G. The Sensible Cook. 1989, p. 27.

[iii] Irving, Washington. A History of New York. 1940, n.p.

[iv] ibid.

[v] Quoted in Rose, 1989, p. 29.

[vi] While many pejorative “Dutch” terms (like “Dutch courage” and “Dutch widow”) arose during the seventeenth-century conflicts, “Dutch treat” and “going Dutch” are not among them. It reflects the sensible “everyone-pays-his-own-way” practice that is still common among the Dutch today. It was depicted, in 1845 -- without a hint of a slight -- by James Fenimore Cooper. After one character in his novel, Satanstoe, set in the mid-eighteenth century, paid for several Dutch people to get into a fair, they all carefully repaid him for their share of the cost.

References

Barnes, Donna R. and Peter G. Rose. Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life. Albany and Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.

Heiss, Mary Lou, and Robert J. Heiss. The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2007.

Hess, Karen. Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Irving, Washington. Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York. New York: The Heritage Press, 1940.

Kalm, Pehr. Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770. New York: Dover, 1966.

Prendergast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Rose, Peter G. Food, Drink and Celebrations of the Hudson Valley Dutch. Charleston, SC: Hickory Press, 2009.
Matters of Taste: Dutch Recipes with an American Connection. Albany and Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
Foods of the Hudson: A Seasonal Sampling of the Region's Bounty. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993.

Rose, Peter G. (trans. & ed.) The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World (De Verstandige Kok): Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

food sites for June 2013

2013-05-11T12:52:00.000-04:00

Nettles, Urtica dioica – Dutchess County, New York

June is literally "bustin' out all over" in the Hudson Valley, and young greens, wild and domestic, are at their best. Slow cooked, or simply served as salads, they're a welcome change from the root vegetables of winter. But first, a word of advice from someone who -- once, and only once -- became unwittingly intimate with Urtica dioica: Don't consider, even for a second, making a salad of raw nettles – heat is required to denature the enzymes that provide their sting.

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served, directly -- but there is much more at the blog that isn't delivered automatically. It's Spring, a time when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, and an old man's fancy turns to... well... thoughts. Every once in a while, Dr Sanscravat ventures into the realm of fiction (yes, intentionally). Last month Just Served featured one of these excursions: "Caddis." It is not about food, but the vagaries of memory.

Persistent (or otherwise unoccupied) readers can follow us on Facebook, or Twitter. Links to all of our online scribbles are available at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner. Also, Leitesculinaria has reposted twenty-or-so of our backlisted LC pieces here, as part of their archive of food history and science articles.

In recognition of wedding season, here are a few excerpts from On the Table's culinary quote collection:

In the nineteenth century, it was traditional to serve three courses of asparagus -- thought to be a powerful aphrodisiac -- to a French groom on the night before the wedding. The modern French gentleman has discarded the noble asparagus for the more romantic passion prompter -- Champagne. Sharon Tyler Herbst

After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of what women want. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate. Mel Gibson

My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked. Winston Churchill

The most dangerous food is wedding cake. James Thurber

Gary

June, 2013

PPS: If you wish to change the e-mail address at which you receive these newsletters, or otherwise modify the way you receive our postings or -- if you've received this newsletter by mistake, and/or don't wish to receive future issues -- you have our sincere apology and can have your e-mail address deleted from the list immediately. We're happy (and continuously amazed) that so few people have decided to leave the list but, should you choose to be one of them, let us know and we'll see that your in-box is never afflicted by these updates again. You'll find links at the bottom of this page to fix everything to your liking.

----the new sites----

Antiquity

(Part 1 of "History of Health Food," from The Smithsonian Institution’s blog, Food & Think)

Bibliographical List Related to Food Advice in Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries

(compiled by Peter Scholliers)

Birth of Dieting, The

(Part 3 of "History of Health Food," from The Smithsonian Institution's blog, Food & Think)

Dressing for Dinner

(Jan Whitaker's site, Restaurant-ing Through History, tracks the evolution -- or devolution – of what-to-wear at the table)

Eating Alone in Italy

(Lynne Curry shows that M.F.K. Fisher wasn't the only one who could write well about solitary dining)

History of Baseball Stadium Nachos, The

(the true history of nachos may be elusive, but origin of the stuff they serve at ballgames is not; an article from Food & Think, a Smithsonian Institute blog)

Illegal Food: Step Away from the Cheese, Ma'am

(a few forbidden foods)

Importance of the Humble Fig to Humankind

(short article in Archaeology News; with a link to original article, sold at Springer Journal Human Ecology)

Mean Cuisine

(as Juvenal is alleged to have said, "It’s impossible not to write satire;" this biting amuse bouche is served by Joyce Wadler, in The New York Times)

Medieval and Renaissance Periods

(Part 2 of "History of Health Food," from The Smithsonian Institution’s blog, Food & Think)

Most Unusual Restaurants in the World, The

(carrying themes to extremes)

Newly-Discovered 12th Century Recipes to Be Recreated

("...food recipes from a 12th century Durham Priory manuscript have been found to pre-date the earliest known ones by 150 years")

Science Behind Beer Nuts, The

(the Monell Chemical Senses Center explains why beer tastes better with peanuts – among other things)

Slippery Business

(Tom Mueller writes about "The trade in adulterated olive oil" in an archived article from The New Yorker)

Treasures from the Past

(Ammini Ramachandran collects and annotates books about Indian cookery and food science – Supasatra -- that date back to the sixteenth century; plus forgotten recipes from the period)

What Iconic American Food Helped America through WWII?

(hint: it contains Yellow Dye #5 and Yellow Dye #6)

What Makes Eating So Satisfying?

(deconstructing the sensory experience)

-- inspirational (or otherwise) site for writers/bloggers --

After Self-Publishing: How to Find an Agent and a Publisher for Your Self-Published Book

Compare POD Publishers!

On Food

Photo Gallery: Photographing Food

Secrets of Writing Recipes for Big Food Magazines

What Is Considered Previously Published Writing?

What Writers Earn: A Cultural Myth

-- yet more blogs --

Eat Like a Man

Pass the Garum

----that's all for now----

Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not give, sell or share your e-mail address with anyone, for any purpose -- ever. Nonetheless, we will expose you to the following irredeemably brazen plugs:

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The Resource Guide for Food Writers (Paper)

The Herbalist in the Kitchen (Hardcover)

The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries (Hardcover) (Kindle)

Human Cuisine (Paper) (Kindle)

Herbs: A Global History (Hardcover) (Kindle)

Terms of Vegery (Kindle)

How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating (Kindle)

Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

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______________

"The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #152" is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication -- unless with the author's prior written permission -- is strictly prohibited.

Caddis

2013-04-22T13:58:00.003-04:00

Everything in the room is brown—except for the man, who is gray. The walls, covered with ancient photographs, diplomas, newspaper clippings, and mounted insects… brown. Bookshelves overflow with brown books. Towers of browning books and faded scientific journals lean into the corners. The brown desk is covered with browning papers, a rack of brown pipes that haven’t been used in decades sits atop a stack of brown magazines, a humidor holds crumbs of desiccated brown tobacco, and—everywhere—dozens of small jars of alcohol, each containing tiny brown Trichoptera larvae.

The miniscule worms, slightly shaggy, seem to have all their legs at the front of their bodies, bunched just behind their dark bumpy heads. They are not beautiful, except to the gray figure sitting at the desk. “Any damned fool can be a lepidopterist,” the man mutters. He says this to himself, as there is no one else in the room—and hasn’t been for as long as the man can remember.

The retired entomology professor prefers the uninterrupted quiet of his study, just as he had always preferred the solitude of field work over the incessant bother of the classroom. Swarms of co-eds reminded him of butterflies, pretty to look at for a moment but of no lasting interest. He often told his colleagues, while looking over his bifocals, and down his own long proboscis, that it was no coincidence that the author of Lolita was an amateur lepidopterist.

The man is working on his magnum opus, the definitive treatise on his beloved caddisflies. He’d spent thousands of hours lifting slippery rocks from streams to find the tiny creatures clinging there. Many of them build little mansions for themselves of whatever they can find. Some species cement miniscule pebbles and grains of sand into slightly-curved masonry cylinders, just large enough to protect their soft abdomens, while leaving their heads and legs free to feed on the streams’ slime of algae, bacteria, protozoa and other microfauna. Others weave tiny twigs and bits of leaves into ragged basket-like huts that are virtually invisible in the detritus that accumulates in quiet backwaters of the streams.

They are never invisible to him.

He loves all the caddisflies, but resents the “flies” in their name. They are not (he is quick to point out) nasty disease-bearing Diptera, but lovely little moth-like beings that flit above the most beautiful trout streams as adults, after living as architects of their own larval homes. He admires their ingenuity, even though he knows better than to assume conscious thought involved in their constructions (each species having all of its blueprints safely locked away in its DNA).

Of all the 12,000 Trichopterans, he most loves the ones that don’t use their skills to construct homes. His favorites make tiny nets of some gossamer material, like the silk of spider-webs. They cast little bag-like seines that billow downstream to capture microscopic bits of food from the current. “Like me,” he thought, “they sample the waters for what most interests them.”

The gray bachelor is happy in his work. He has spent his life collecting, preserving, describing, and cataloguing insects that are no larger than one of his neatly-trimmed fingernails. Like a caddis larva, he can stay comfortably encased in the clutter of his study, a perfect home he has assembled over the course of a long career. His is not the sort of life that one shares with a mate.

As he writes, he occasionally reaches across the detritus to look closely into one of his specimen jars. He knows, without a glance at the meticulous label, the species of each larva. He also remembers the day it was collected, the weather, the time of day, and—most of all—the stream that yielded it. He is amused by the ironic fact that flowing water always lingers longest in his memory.

Sometimes, when examining a specimen, Thoreau’s words form in his head.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

He savors the brief literary distraction, then returns to work on his own book.

Other times, a recalled stream triggers memories of another stream, one that flowed over bare white rock, so clear, so devoid of biota, that no caddisflies ever built homes there.

He visited the stream, just once, sixty-odd years ago, while he was still a university undergraduate. He no longer remembers how he arrived at the stream, or when he left. All he remembers is that he walked beside it with the most lovely girl he had ever seen. He doesn’t remember how he happened to be with the girl, who he had never seen before, or would ever see again. He recalls that she was slender, with long blonde hair. Her voice was soft and quiet, though he doesn’t remember a word of what they said. He knows that it was sunrise, because the low clear light across white rock seemed to pass through her, lending a luminous translucency—like fragile porcelain—to her delicate features.

The recalled experience is so dream-like that sometimes he imagines that it is, in fact, only a dream. If it is a dream, it is a recurrent one, and one that intrudes far too often into his waking hours. The interruptions to his work irritate him, but not as much as the fact that he is never able wrest any more substantial data from the evanescent vision.

How could this have been just one brief encounter?

Why didn’t he try to see her again?

How did he even manage to spend those few moments with someone so far out of his league?

Indeed, did he even have a league?

Did he ever go out on a date, with anyone?

What could he have possibly had to say to such a radiant creature?

Did he say anything, or just walk along in stunned silence?

Was he silent because he feared that a single word might break the transcendent spell that held him?

Again and again, year after year, decade after decade, he asks himself these questions. He can picture, but doesn’t actually remember, her blue eyes asking similar questions—but suspects that detail was added to the mystery long after the event.

All he knows is that the experience, real or imagined, occurred so long ago that he will never find answers to any of his questions about it. Its constant interruptions and sheer fruitlessness annoy him. He much prefers science, where asked questions may sometimes be answered, where the answers can be tested, and either kept or discarded—but do not linger, unfathomable, for a lifetime.

Just before returning to his manuscript, for a brief instant, he pictures himself as one of his beloved caddis larvae, eternally casting a net in waters that race across smooth white rock, so clear, so pure, that nothing—ever—is caught in its web.

Foodsites for May 2013

2013-04-19T13:58:00.001-04:00

Ramps, Allium tricoccum, Dutchess County, NY

It's practically May, a month in which it's said that we are prone to "go blissfully astray" – as if any one month is more likely than any other for such digressions from the path of righteousness. Speaking of paths (was that a terrible segue, or what?), I found the two ramps, pictured above, growing beside a trail where I normally hunt for morels. Not enough to pick, of course, but a welcome sight where I'd never seen them before.

With Spring, the urge to partake in outside sports begins to take hold and -- for those of us whose competitive spirits aren't necessarily accompanied by a longing for physical exercise – barbecue and chili cook-offs provide another venue for public displays of chest-thumping. Not coincidentally, they also provide an opportunity for the consumption of beer – an often-essential preliminary event at such pissing contests (actual or metaphorical). We recently took a little look at the history of chili competitions in Seeing Red.

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served, directly -- but there is much more at the blog that isn't delivered automatically. Continuing in the "blissfully astray" direction, Dr Sanscavat added a tale of culinary woe from his youth to Just Served last month. It's called "Eggs" Truly adventurous (and/or masochistic) readers can follow us on Facebook, or Twitter. If you are still not completely off your feed, links to all of our online scribbles can be found at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner. Leitesculinaria has reposted twenty-or-so of our backlisted LC pieces here, as part of their archive of food history and science articles.

In celebration of the beginning of foraging season, this excerpt from On the Table's culinary quote collection:

A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini. Bill Buford

Gary

May, 2013

the new sites

American Association of Meat Processors, The (AAMP)

(trade group providing information on food safety, recall information, regulations, and nutritional labeling)

Art of Fermentation, The

(an interview with the fermentation guru, Sandor Katz, at the American Museum of Natural History)

Classics Professor Unearths Archaeological Clues about Ancient Roman Vineyards

(first century grape seeds may tell us something about the origins of today's Chianti)

Foraging and Parasites

(Rosemary Drisdelle asks, "Are You In Danger When You Eat Wild Food?")

graze

(a Chicago-based literary food magazine – with a refreshing lack of recipes or restaurant reviews)

Hidden Forces That Shape What We Eat, The

(a brief interview with professor Frederick Kaufman, at NY's American Museum of Natural History)

Joy of Cooking's Family History, The

(interview with Irma S. Rombauer's great-grandson -- John Becker -- who is still editing and updating the classic cookbook)

Maya and Aztec Chocolate History and Antecedents

(Patrick Hunt explores archaeology and chocolate in Electrum Magazine)

Sauces

(a hierarchy of mostly Classical French sauces)

Turkeys Part I

(The University of Leicester begins to tell us "The reason why cranberry jelly was invented")

U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF)

(trade group site that offers information on international markets, news and statistics, plus export resources)

inspirational (or otherwise) site for writers/bloggers

Why Bookstores Aren’t Helping Indie Authors -- Yet

yet another blog

My Culinary Joy

that's all for now

Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not give, sell or share your e-mail address with anyone, for any purpose -- ever. Nonetheless, we will expose you to the following irredeemably brazen plugs:

The Resource Guide for Food Writers (paper)

The Herbalist in the Kitchen (hardcover)

The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food And Drink Industries (hardcover) (Kindle)

Human Cuisine (paper) (Kindle)

Herbs: A Global History (hardcover) (Kindle)

Terms of Vegery (Kindle)

How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating (Kindle)

Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

...for the moment, anyway.

______________

"The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #151" is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication -- unless with the author's prior written permission -- is strictly prohibited.

Eggs

2013-03-31T20:16:00.004-04:00

When I was a child, I developed a loathing for eggs. Sometimes, when I was ill, my mother would stir an egg into my milk, sweeten it, and try to convince me that it was a kind of milk shake. Invariably, a quivering piece of raw egg-white—something like a boiled booger, cooled and congealed—would lie stranded on my tongue.

Even now, I shudder in remembered disgust.

I could be induced to try a little scrambled egg (if very dry) or a hard-boiled egg (if very cold, and with its shell dyed in the gaudiest Easter-egg colors that modern chemistry could provide), but the very idea of slurping down runny yolks—reeking sulfuriously in their fluorescent yellow nastiness—was the stuff of nightmares.

Just sitting at the breakfast table when my father cut into his sunnyside-ups was an unbearable ordeal. I could turn away, of course, but that eggy smell soon overcame my pitiful attempts at table manners—and there was no way to hide the kicking-in of the gag reflex. I was certain that there was nothing worse that could happen at breakfast.

I was wrong.

One morning, I woke to find that my grandfather had spent the night at our house. He was a silent gray figure, as grizzled and uncuddly as the generations of taciturn Danes who preceded him. He sat—hunched slightly forward—at the breakfast table, looking down at his glass of milk. He remained silent as I sat across from him. He lifted the glass, and slowly—in one long draft—drank the whole thing. It was only at the end, when the cloudy glass was nearly empty, that I saw it.

A raw egg had been lying, hidden like some foul serpent, at the bottom of his glass. Slowly, oh how horribly slowly, the slimy thing slid down the milky film and into his mouth.

Some sixty years later, I have become as gray and grizzled and uncuddly as my grandfather was then—but no power on earth could make me swallow one of those milky raw eggs.

Food Sites for April 2013

2013-03-30T21:53:00.000-04:00

Fiddlehead season

April, the first month of the year to have a feminine name, is about to grace us with her presence. Isn’t it curious that the only gendered months* occur in the Spring? We’re not going to attempt to wrest something meaningful from the fact; it’s just a ponderable something-or-other to aid in procrastinating from actual work.

In celebration of the first day of Spring, we chatted up some cannibalistic aspects of vernal equinox festivities at a meeting of the Culinary Historians of New York, on March 20th. There will be a podcast of the event sometime soon (and we’ll post when it’s available), if you’re the sort of person who reads footnotes, the talk (minus any adlibs) is posted here.

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served, directly -- but there is much more at the blog that isn’t sent automatically. Just Served slings more leftovers than most people want to face, especially this time of year -- but, if you that feel you’re up to the challenge, you can follow us on Facebook, or Twitter. In the unlikely event that you find yourself stranded and book-starved, there’s even a kind of index at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner.

While this newsletter is mostly about food, food history, food science, food writing – let’s face it, we’re filling our faces and thinking about the process, before, during, and after the fact – Dr Sanscravat occasionally has another thought. When he does, it’s usually about himself; there’s a new example of such self-indulgent blather, On Evolution, at our blog.

Leitesculinaria has reposted several of our own articles – and there should be another new one appearing there, hard upon year’s end. Twenty-or-so backlisted of our LC pieces are available here, along with several articles by more noteworthy writers on food history and science.

In honor of the most fickle part of the season, this excerpt from On the Table’s culinary quote collection:

The weather here is gorgeous. It’s mild and feels like it’s in the eighties. The hot dog vendors got confused because of the weather and thought it was spring, so they accidentally changed the hot dog water in their carts. David Letterman

Gary

April, 2013

*OK, if you want to get technical, we’ll grudgingly admit that July and August are named for a couple of Caesars – but we’re sticking with the idle question we’ve posed.

PPS: If you wish to change the e-mail address at which you receive these newsletters, or otherwise modify the way you receive our postings or -- if you’ve received this newsletter by mistake, and/or don’t wish to receive future issues -- you have our sincere apology and can have your e-mail address deleted from the list immediately. We’re happy (and continuously amazed) that so few people have decided to leave the list but, should you choose to be one of them, let us know and we’ll see that your in-box is never afflicted by these updates again. You’ll find links at the bottom of this page to fix everything to your liking.

----the new sites----

Boxty, Coddle, and Balnamoon Skink

(a glossary of Irish foods, from Bon Appétit)

Fork of One’s Own, A

(“A History of Culinary Revolution;” Jane Kramer’s extended review, in The New Yorker, of Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat)

From Zoo to Table

(one man’s meat; journal entries from the starving time in Paris, 1870-71, published in Lapham’s Quarterly)

Gastronomy

(the culinary section of cultural e-zine, Nowness)

How to Force Ethics on the Food Industry

(Michael Mudd’s op-ed piece in The New York Times)

In Obesity Epidemic, Poverty Is an Ignored Contagion

(Ginia Bellafante’s article about the health effects of class and government inaction in The New York Times)

Interactive Visual Guide to the Common Cuts of Beef, An

(the basics, from Primer, a men’s magazine)

Lampascioni

(Nancy Harmon Jenkins’ post about the edible bulbs of wild hyacinths)

Nordic Food Lab

(studying Scandinavian foods, at a house boat laboratory in Copenhagen)

Ottoman Food Map

(curiously, chick peas – either as hummus or falafel – don’t appear much farther north than the Syria/Turkey border)

Past the Potatoes: What the Irish Ate Before the Late 1600s

(Sam Dean’s article in Bon Appétit; spoiler alert: “moo”)

Polarizing Practice of Eating Horses, The

(Corby Kummer on hippophagy, in The Atlantic)

Rise of Independent Cheesemakers, The

(Kendra Nordin’s article about producers of artisanal) cheeses, in The Christian Science Monitor)

Setting a Place for History

(Ivan Day makes museum exhibits come alive by including period food; article in The New York Times)

Total Pig: On Meat

(a “friendly, open-minded” look at carnivory, in The Santa Fe Reporter)

-- yet more blogs --

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Comfortably Hungry

Mister Meatball

----that’s all for now----

Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not give, sell or share your e-mail address with anyone, for any purpose -- ever. Nonetheless, we will expose you to the following irredeemably brazen plugs:

The Resource Guide for Food Writers (paper)

The Herbalist in the Kitchen (hardcover)

The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food And Drink Industries (hardcover) (Kindle)

Human Cuisine (paper) (Kindle)

Herbs: A Global History (hardcover) (Kindle)

Terms of Vegery (Kindle)

How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating (Kindle)

Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

...for the moment, anyway.

______________

“The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #150” is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication -- unless with the author's prior written permission -- is strictly prohibited.

Spring Fever

2013-03-23T16:20:00.001-04:00

This was a talk delivered to The Culinary Historians of New York, 20 March 2013, at New York University. The talk was preceded by a delightfully appropriate buffet of treats: Butterfingers, Baby Ruths, gingerbread men, ossi del morto, lady fingers, virgin's cakes (shaped like the sacrificed breasts of St, Agatha), and more. CHNY plans to make a podcast of this available (complete with ad libs and Q&A)-- and when it is, a link will be added here.

Spring Rituals: Fertility Rites

Spring is a critical time in the life of a farming society. First, it marks the end of winter starvation. It also places great responsibility on farmers: crops have to be planted—not too soon or too late—or the entire community will starve the following winter. Limited supplies of seed corn left from the previous year often exacerbate the pressure. It is essential that everything be timed perfectly.

Almost every agricultural society has had some form of ritual to guarantee the success of the spring planting. Spring rituals, and the initiation rites that mark puberty, are obviously about fertility. Sex, eating, death and rebirth dance together, their movements blurring the boundaries that modern, non-mythic, peoples use to separate the concepts into more easily managed parts. Paul Wirtz described a puberty rite of the Marind-anim of what was then Dutch South New Guinea. After several days of orgies by adults, virginal initiates were brought to the center of the village, to a massive structure of logs. One specially-prepared girl stayed under that structure and had sex with all the male initiates. While she was lying with the last youth, all the logs came crashing down, killing them. Their bodies were then chopped up, cooked and eaten by the villagers.[1]

The Liberian Poro society, up until the 1940s, combined sex, eating, death and rebirth in their initiation rites. Young men and women were circumcised and the excised parts dried, cooked, and eaten by initiates of the opposite sex. The male initiation, however, only began with circumcision. It was followed by a long period of isolation (up to four years), when the boys were supposed to be in the belly of the crocodile spirit. They received scars that represented passing through its teeth. When the ritual crocodile pregnancy ended, the youths were "reborn." The Poro's initiation process overcame their dread of vaginal castration during sex. Bruno Bettelheim saw a connection to the terror of the vagina dentataexperienced by some mental patients. He wrote, "The rather unusual custom of eating part of the female genitalia might further suggest inordinate fear of or desire for the vagina, an emotion which is mastered through oral incorporation."[2]

Castration, fertility and the cycle of birth and rebirth are the stuff of myth. Of course, they are not always displayed as obviously as in the case of the Poro society's initiation rites. Often, they are called upon to serve several functions in a society at the same time.

In Egyptian mythology, Isis and Osirus introduced farming to the world. Their jealous brother, Set, tricked Osirus into climbing into a sarcophagus Set had made, then sealed it with the help of 72 confederates, and tossed into the Nile. The sarcophagus drifted all the way to Phoenicia, where Isis eventually found it, sending it back to Egypt. Set, however, was boar hunting[3] in the Nile delta when the body arrived. He ripped it into small fragments, throwing them far and wide. Isis managed to find all the pieces, except for Osirus' genitals. She reassembled Osirus and brought him back to life—almost.

A fish had swallowed Osirus' penis.

How does that detail of the myth fit into an agricultural myth? What do anthropophagic fish have to do with farming? Only in Egypt—where, each Spring, the Nile overflows its banks, flooding the fields—would this element of the story make sense. The severed organ, now part of the river, is able to continually fertilize the farmers' fields.

The absence of genitalia also helps to explain his new role as Lord of the Dead. The realm of the dead is the reverse side of the living, reproducing, world. You may recall that Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter,[4] had to stay with Hades in the underworld because, while visiting, she ate a pomegranate seed. Pomegranate seeds were a symbol of fecundity in ancient Greek and other Mediterranean cultures. After a time when Demeter prevented the crops from growing, Persephone was permitted to spend half of every year above ground—the Greek explanation for the ever-changing cycle of seasons.

A myth of the Marind-anim of Ceram, New Guinea, contains hints of the Osirus story. In it, Admeta killed a boar and found a coconut stuck on a tusk. He planted it, and six days later it flowered. When he cut a flower, he accidentally dripped some blood on it. That blood became the girl-child Hainuwele. When she grew up, she stood in the dancing-ground, giving gifts to the dancers. However, the dancers killed her and buried her there. When Admeta discovered the murder he disinterred her, cut her in small pieces and buried them in many places. He made a doorway to the dancing-ground out of her arms, and the dead Hainuwele called upon the murderers:

"Since you have killed," she said, "I will no longer live here. I shall leave this very day. Now you will have to come to me through this door." Those who were able to pass through it remained human beings. The others were changed into animals (pigs, birds, fish) or spirits. …after her going men would meet her only after their death, and she vanished from the surface of the Earth.[5]

Here, again, is the murdered god, the dismemberment, the pieces of the body that yield the foods of later mortals. The source of human mortality is directly connected to an ancient ritual murder that is, simultaneously, the source of human nourishment. Killing and eating are inseparable. The package is tied up even more neatly by the reuse of Hainuwele's arms. The woman's arms become the entrance to the afterlife—the only way to approach divinity. The embrace of physical love is a metaphor for death and transfiguration.

People once believed that their kings were closer to their gods, or that their kings actually were gods. However, the crowns worn by kings were originally used to mark sacrificial animals. Again and again, in culture after culture, we see the sacrificial animal (or person) crowned and decorated as royalty (or rather, that royalty is crowned and decorated like sacrificial victims), then killed so that others might live and prosper.

Euripides had Iphigeneia, in speaking of her approaching death on the altar of Artemis, alluding to the process: "As the priest takes from the basket the barley; So may the fire blaze with the meal of purification, and my father will turn to the right and encircle the altar. …Put on my hair a wreath of garlands and on my head a crown."[6]While she saw herself as means for others to live and prosper, in a general sense, most of these ritual sacrifices were intended to literally increase the yields of agriculture.

Originally, the kings of ancient Egypt served for thirty years, then were sacrificed and eaten at a feast called Sed. This was supposed to guarantee the fertility of their fields and the power of the next king. Over time (no doubt at the urging of later kings), other animals began to be sacrificed instead of royalty. Curiously, certain Hebrew demons were called Sedim. In the worship of Moloch, children were sacrificed to appease the Sedim.[7]

A revisionist mode of thought—similar to the stories of Isaac and Iphigeneia—is apparent in xenophobic attitudes toward those who sacrificed human beings (especially children, in a process called "passing them through the fire") to the god Moloch. According to some scholars, the

…Moloch of the Old Testament was neither Milcom nor any of several other foreign deities who had similar names (e.g., Muluk) and were worshipped in neighboring regions. Rather, it was to the Jewish God Yahweh, himself, that human sacrifice was offered… Later Israelites apparently were so appalled by the practice that they tried to blot out their shame by changing the name of the god from Yahweh to Moloch (or Molech), as though human sacrifices had been offered only to a foreign deity.[8]

Religions, as they evolve into—or are replaced by—new religions, must suppress the old ways—even if they are the ancestors of the new. At the same time, the past's essential character must be incorporated so that nothing important is lost (just like the spilling of blood beside the altar, so that life can return to its source).

We know that the meat eating is intimately tied to notions of sacrifice, and that the life taken is essential to the continued spiritual life of those who consume it. What happens when non-believers eat the meat of the sacrificial animals? Certainly, there is no incorporation of the sacred—but might some other kind of sin be involved? For instance, if an animal is sacrificed to a god in whom one does not believe, does that act of eating its sanctified or transubstantiated flesh constitute an unauthorized act of theophagy? Does eating such flesh, in some way, give authority to any idols to which the sacrifices were made? Christ equated the eating of meats sacrificed to idols with fornication.[9]However, St. Paul hesitatingly disagreed. He wrote: "As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one."[10]So, if the gods are false, there can be no recognition of them in the mere eating of their sacrificial meats. However, he continued his argument: "meat commendeth us not to God: for neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither, if we eat not, are we the worse."[11]

He is, in effect, denying that some foods carry a magical burden—that eating them cannot be a path to the sacred. This is a rather odd position for St. Paul to take—considering the fact that he was the founder and promoter of a new religion whose central ritual is the magical transubstantiation of mere bread and wine into the flesh and blood of its God.

Communion

The Christian Rite of Communion is perhaps the most obvious example of symbolic cannibalism.[12]Christ, warming to the idea of self-sacrifice, offered himself metaphorically to his dinner companions. The Last Supper was a kind of living will, in which Jesus bequeathed his legacy to the Apostles. His acquiescence to fate and elevation to a greater spiritual significance actually occur at that moment. The Passion on the cross can be seen as a formality, the logical conclusion of the promise made with symbolic flesh and blood.

The Romans were not indulging in any spiritual activities. It was a purely political act of expedience, although it appears that they did take some pleasure in it. Crucifixion was

…derived from a Carthaginian sacrificial rite that the Romans adopted and used mockingly against their defeated enemies. Later they applied it widely to low-class and non-Roman felons. Christ himself was mocked as a Jewish king by the crown of thorns and the inscription INRI. The Roman treatment of Christ can be seen as the degradation of a fallen king."[13]

The story of the crucifixion of the King of Kings can be seen as the last in a long line of kings sacrificed according to the rules of ancient fertility cults. It may have been coincidental that this particular sacrifice took place so close to the vernal equinox—but that fact only made it easier to graft the growing Christian mythology onto older, tried and true myths.

When Paul, on the analogy of the mystery religions, evolved …the myth of a Savior who should die, be eaten, and rise again, he felt that the only explanation of the mysteries necessary was the story of Jesus…But as times changed, and as the church expanded and began to take in learned and intellectual men, the myth was no longer all-sufficient. The fundamental idea of the absorption of deity by killing and eating it became less obvious. Men began to speculate how the bread and wine could be the very body and blood of immolated God. And thus, turning to Aristotle or to other philosophers, they evolved the dogma of a transmutation…[14]

The Eucharist, like the traditional Easter leg of lamb, is a symbolic eating of the Agnus Dei. According to Roman Catholic doctrine, the bread and wine are actually the flesh and blood of Christ; they are transubstantiated.[15]The Roman Catholic Church does not accept the Eucharist as a symbol—it believes that beneath the surface appearance of this food is actualdivine flesh. In the thirteenth century,

…[e]verything possible was done to make vivid to the people the reality of the body and blood. Thus the bread was made in the image of a man and pierced by the priest, just as the great god of the Aztecs had once been treated; hot water was used to increase the resemblance of wine to blood.[16]

The Catholic Church was neither first nor alone in believing that genuine transubstantiation occurs.

Transmitted through the Orphic mystery cult, the tradition of partaking of the torn god's flesh and blood entered in a sublimated and symbolic form into the rites of Christianity. Even in the sixteenth century, men were excommunicated from the Lutheran church because they denied the doctrine of ubiquity—the physical presence of the blood and body of Christ in the consecrated host…[17]

In the Byzantine Church, the Eucharist used to be cut from the center of a special loaf of bread. That piece was known as the Lamb. The Lamb was cut into smaller pieces in a series of symbolic shapes and arrangements. No crumb was lost or wasted. The Lamb, or body of Christ, was not the only "person" that was eaten, however.

Pseudo-Germanus… considers the entire loaf as a symbol of the body of the Virgin Mary. From this body, he tells us, the body of the Lord has been extracted… The remaining part of the loaf, which he specifically called "bread of the body of the Virgin," is distributed to the faithful… Mary was considered to be the symbol of the Church; so it may again be supposed that the symbolic distribution of her body meant communion with the body of the Church.[18]

The Eucharist was not always the tiny, non-nutritive wafer we see today. In fact, Communion used to be part of a "love feast," in which all participants received real food. "Libations over sarcophagi led naturally to ritual meals over the tombs of the Christian martyrs, until, that is, Saint Ambrose [fourth century Bishop of Milan] forbade them, and substituted the symbolic meal of the eucharist."[19]

Massimo Montanari wrote about the bread/body metaphor in the early Christian church:

A sermon of Augustine explained in careful detail the metaphorical analogy between the making of bread and the formation of a new Christian: "This bread retells your history. It began as a seed in the fields. The earth bore it and the rain nourished it and made it grow into a shoot. The work of man brought it to the threshing floor, beat it, winnowed it, put it in the granary, brought it to the mill, ground it, kneaded it and baked it in the oven. Remember that this is also your history. You did not exist and were created; you were brought to the threshing floor of the Lord and were threshed by the work of oxen (so I shall call the preachers of the Gospel). While awaiting catechism, you were like the grain kept in the granary. Then you were lined up for baptism. You underwent fasting and exorcism. You came to the baptismal fount. You were kneaded into a single dough. You were cooked in the oven of the Holy Ghost and became the true bread of God." The essence of bread was, however, Jesus Christ himself, "planted in the Virgin, fermented in the flesh, kneaded in the Passion, baked in the oven of the sepulchre, and seasoned in the churches where every day the Holy Host is served to the faithful."[20]

The idea of transubstantiation achieved the status of reductio ad absurdum in the thirteenth century when Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (later Saint Hugh of Lincoln) was viewing a sacred relic at Féchamp—the desiccated arm of Mary Magdalen. He shocked those present by taking a bite out of it—but defended his actions by saying, "if he could touch the body of Christ in the mass, he could certainly apply his teeth to the Magdalen's bones."[21]

Christ was the "incarnation"—literally, God in the form of meat—and the fruit of Mary's womb. There is a nice symmetry in Christ's beginning and ending as foodstuffs for our nourishment. Is it a coincidence that the infant Jesus, destined to be eaten, was laid in a manger—a feeding trough for animals named for the verb "to eat?"

When the Magi visited the infant Jesus, they came bearing gifts. Today, we think of them only as precious gifts, suitable for a young king. However, at the time they carried immense symbolic value as well. Gold, obviously, was expensive—but it was also the color of the sun (and Christ was a new incarnation of solar deities like Apollo). Its most significant attribute, the characteristic that makes it desirable as a form of currency, is that is incorruptible. It does not rust or waste away. It is eternal—just like the young deity. What about the other two gifts, the frankincense and myrrh? "Though the whole range of spices was used for culinary purposes and in aphrodisiacs, it was frankincense and myrrh that were use almost exclusively for sacrifices"[22]—and in funeral preparations, for anointing of bodies and masking the scent of decomposition.

Of course, the three wise men could not predict that the boy they visited was destined for sacrifice. In all probability, they—themselves—never existed. They functioned, in the story, to connect events from the life of Jesus to existing mystical ideas. The Gospels were written more than a generation after the crucifixion, and were molded by Paul's vision of the new church.[23]By then, Paul had reconstructed the story of Jesus' life to fit as closely as possible the ancient prophesies and mythological structures that were the lingua franca of eastern Mediterranean spiritual life.

All religions build on fragments of previous religions, as ancient cities were built upon the rubble of still older cities. St. Peter's, in Rome, stands upon the spot where ancient worshippers of Attis sacrificed bulls. Muslims and Jews still fight over the Dome of the Rock, the supposed site of Isaac's near sacrifice. Both Artemis and Mary were virgins who were known as the "Queen of Heaven," and both—despite their virginity—were associated with childbirth. In Ephesus, the ruins of Artemis' great temple stand nearby the church that marks Mary's grave.

The Jesus story sounds very much like that of the Bacchus/Dionysus of the Orphics or of Adonis, Osirus of the Hellenistic Egypt, or even Sumerian Tammuz. That's because the basic ideas were in place, waiting (as it were) for incarnation.

Dionysus was believed to be actually within the substance of the wine and raw flesh that the worshippers consumed. A Persian Mithraic text reads: "He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood will not be made one with me or I with him, the same shall not know salvation." Dionysus, like Christ, was sacrificed, and saved his followers through "…initiation in his mysteries …Did he not appear in the communal feast of his initiates as the model of those gods who offer themselves as victims … of sacrifice?"[24]

[1] Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Viking, 1959, pp.170-171.

[2] Bettelheim, Bruno. Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male. London: Thames and Hudson, 1955, p. 217.

[3] Joseph Campbell associates the boar with "the force of the abyss," the abyss being the cannibal past recently abandoned by the emerging agricultural societies. Isis and Osirus "were the first to plant wheat and barley, to gather fruit from the trees, and to cultivate the vine, and before their time the races of the world had been savage cannibals." (Campbell, p. 424)

[4] The goddess of grain, her Latin incarnation was Ceres.

[5] Eliade, Mircea. Gods, Goddesses, and Myths of Creation: A Thematic Source Book of the History of Religions. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p. 19.

[6] Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis (Walker, Charles R., trans.). New York: Modern Library,

[7] Jobes, Gertrude. Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962, v.2, p. 1412

[8] Encyclopaedia Britannica IV:982.

[9] Revelations2:14, 2:20.

[10] I Corinthians8:4 [emphasis in the original].

[11] I Corinthians8:8.

[12] See Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-25, Luke22:15-20

[13] Ross and Robins, p. 94.
The Romans were used—if not by Christ (to give substance to his sacrifice), then certainly by Paul, who actually molded the facts of Christ's short career into the passionate fulfilling of Jewish prophesy that it was to become.

[14] Quoted in Smith, pp. 78-79.

[15] Questions about the substance of the Eucharist were satirized by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil's Dictionary: "EUCHARIST, n. A sacred feast of the religious sect of Theophagi. A dispute once unhappily arose among the members of this as to what it was that they ate. In this controversy some five hundred thousand have already been slain, and the question is still unsettled."

[16] Quoted in Smith, p. 90.

[17] Koestler, Arthur. The Ghost in the Machine. London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1967 (paper ed., London: Picador/Pan Books, Ltd., 1975), p. 229.

[18] Galavaris, George. Bread and the Liturgy: the Symbolism of Early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps. Madison, Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970, p.183.

[19] Ragon, Michel. The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration, and Urbanism (Sheridan, Alan, trans.). Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1983, p. 70.

[20] Montanari, The Culture of Food. Carl Ipsen, trans. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994, pp.16-17.

[21] Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987 (paper edition, 1988), p. 255.
This other Saint Hugh (not to be confused with the child martyr, supposedly killed by Jews in 1255) was one of the best-loved bishops in England, a confidant of three Kings (Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, and John). He is mentioned in the opening paragraph of the Magna Carta, although he had been dead for fifteen years (John had been one of St. Hugh’s pallbearers). Hugh was canonized in 1220.

[22] Spencer. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1995, p. 37.

[23] "The earliest Gospel, of Mark, was composed around AD 66, those of Matthew and Luke around AD 70 and 75, and that of John another twenty years later." (Spencer, p. 109.)

[24] Spenser. p. 52.

_________

After the talk, anticipating the kind of question people always have (but don't always ask), an additional -- shorter -- paper was read:

Discovering the Flavor of Human Flesh

The French diplomat/explorer Paul Morand knew William Bueller Seabrook had the requisite verbal skills, and suspected that he had the courage needed for the task. Morand knew tribes that still practiced cannibalism. He smoothed Seabrook's way with equipment, letters of introduction, transportation—everything he would need. Morand believed that the opportunity for such a trip was fast disappearing, telling him, "…you must …get yourself invited to dinner with the cannibals."[1]

It made perfect sense to Seabrook. "I made up my mind before leaving New York that when it came the subject of cannibals I would either write nothing whatever about them, or I would know what I was writing about."[2]His book, Jungle Ways, examined our subject in greater detail than most of us would admit to wanting to know.

Seabrook spoke with the Gueré tribe and, after asking about their source of human flesh, he posed a basic question. "To my asking why they ate it, they had returned the question back against me, saying 'Why shouldn't we eat it?'"[3]

Rather than beginning with taste directly, he asked which parts they preferred. They replied

that for solid meat the loin cuts, the ribs, and the rump steak were the best. The liver, heart, and brains were tidbits, but tasted identically the same as those of all other animals. …as a matter of personal choice, the palm of the hand was the most tender and delicious morsel of all.[4]

They said the flesh took long slow cooking to tenderize—but that was because they ate only mature men, other warriors they killed in combat. Convinced he was in the company of cannibals, and knowing the rarity of such experiences, he

felt in duty bound to make the most of it. [He received] a portion of stew with rice, …so highly seasoned with red pepper that fine shades of flavor might be lost to an unaccustomed palate.[5]

However, the Gueré were wary of this white stranger and feared retaliation if the authorities learned of their cannibal feast. Seabrook later discovered that they'd served meat from an ape, not a man. He left Africa without achieving his goal, knowing he would have to write about his experiences as if he had been successful. He went to France to write the book, where he solved his problem:

…[a friend] obtained for me from a hospital interne at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of the first healthy human carcass killed by accident, that they could dispose of as they chose. I cooked it …[and] ate a lot of it in the presence of witnesses.[6]

Seabrook understood that the experience was limited by its cultural context, specifically the cooking itself. He decided to isolate the part of the meal that was truly unique.

He knew what he had to do.

Seabrook's writing hesitated at this point, as if at a threshold. If ignorance is bliss, there can be no return to the Garden of Eden after stepping outside. He was a gentleman, and he was giving his reader one last chance to avoid taking that step. "The raw meat," he wrote,

in appearance, was firm, slightly coarse-textured rather than smooth. In raw texture, both to the eye and to the touch, it resembled good beef. In color, however, it was slightly less red than beef. But it was reddish. It was not pinkish or grayish like mutton or pork. Through the red lean ran fine whitish fibers, interlacing, seeming to be stringy rather than fatty, suggesting that it might be tough. The solid fat was faintly yellow, as the fat of beef and mutton is. This yellow tinge was very faint, but it was not clear white as pork fat is. In smell it had what I can only describe as the familiar, characteristic smell of any good fresh meat of the larger domestic animals.[7]

Preliminary observations completed, Seabrook continued the experiment. Once again, he tried to limit variables that might obscure the facts he was after. He

…prepare[d] the steak and roast in the simplest manner, as nearly as possible as we prepare meat at home. The small roast was spitted, since an oven was out of the question, and after it had been cooking for a while I set about grilling the steak. I tried to do it exactly as we do at home. It took longer, but that may have been partly because of the difference between gas flame and wood coals.[8]

He did not say how he determined the cooking time. His perception of elapsed time might have been altered by the extreme nature of the experience. His cooking observations continued:

When the roast began to brown and the steak to turn blackish on the outside, I cut into them to have a look at the partially cooked interior. It had turned quite definitely paler than beef would turn. It was turning grayish as veal or lamb would, rather than dark reddish as a beef-steak turns. The fat was sizzling, becoming tender and yellower. Beyond what I have told, there was nothing special or unusual. It was nearly done and it looked and smelled good to eat.[9]

Some readers at the time were bothered by the very thing that fascinates us: Seabrook's logical and dispassionate exploration and exposition of a subject most people consider to be the stuff of nightmares. An editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser summed up the general response:

It is not agreeable to think that an intelligent, educated member of the white race and of the American nation, has voluntarily descended to a scale lower than that observed by these lowly peoples. And not the least repugnant feature of this indescribably sordid affair is the levity, almost the pride, with which Seabrook has recounted to the representatives of the press his adventure in a new "experience."[10]

Seabrook responded, with justifiable annoyance, "Those who might have forgiven me for eating a [N-word] couldn't forgive me for eating with one."[11]

This was no monster, devoid of human feelings. Seabrook was a sensitive, intelligent person who had willingly put himself in one of the most psychologically-challenging positions imaginable. His description of the experience:

I sat down to it with my bottle of wine, a bowl of rice, salt and pepper at hand. I had thought about this and planned it for a long time, and now I was going to do it. I was going to do it, furthermore—I had promised and told myself—with a completely casual, open, and objective mind. But I was soon to discover that I had bluffed and deceived myself a little in pretending so detached an attitude. It was with, or rather after, the first mouthful, that I discovered there had been an unconscious bravado in me, a small bluff-hidden unconscious dread. For my first despicable reaction—so strong that it took complete precedence over any satisfaction or any fine points of gastronomic shading—was simply a feeling of thankful and immense relief. At any rate, it was perfectly good to eat! At any rate, it had no weird, startling, or unholy flavor. It was good to eat, and despite all the intelligent, academic detachment with which I had thought I was approaching the experience, my poor cowardly and prejudiced subconscious real self sighed with relief and patted itself on the back.[12]

So, he did it.

Without any external compunction—no famine, shipwreck, siege or plane crash—he became a cannibal. This was almost fifty years before Arens' assertion that there never was a reliable eyewitness to any act of non-emergency cannibalism. Can a more reliable eyewitness be imagined?

Still, we are left with that nagging question: What does it taste like?

Seabrook was not finished with us, yet. He wrote:

I took a big swallow of wine, a helping of rice, and thoughtfully ate half the steak. And as I ate, I knew with increasing certainty what it was like. It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable. As for any other special taste or odor of a sort which would be surprising and make a person who had tasted it not knowing exclaim, "What is this?" it had absolutely none. And as for the "long pig" legend, repeated in a thousand stories and recopied in a hundred books, it was totally, completely false. It gives me great comfort here to be able to write thus categorically.[13]

When word of Seabrook's deception by the Gueré leaked out, the press had a field day with the news. He could not, of course, reveal his real supplier of human flesh, so he had to endure the laughter from all of France.

Almost all.

Seabrook had one last surprise for us:

Daisy[14] came to see me one day with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and said, "It was just too bad, you poor credulous little boy—and with all the trouble you took. I think you deserve to know what human flesh really tastes like, so I am giving you a dinner next week in my garden." …[O]ut on the lawn marched the major-domo followed by lackeys in knee-breeches and white gloves, bearing a charcoal brazier, silver dishes, and a platter of meat cut up to be grilled. We ate it and liked it. It looked and tasted exactly like fully developed veal or fine young baby beef. In other words, it looked and tasted exactly like human flesh."[15]

[1] Seabrook, No Hiding Place, An Autobiography. Philadelphia, London, New York: J.B. Lippincott Co., p. 287.

[2] Seabrook, Jungle Ways. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 131., p. 131.

[3] Ibid., p. 167

[4] Ibid., p. 163

[5] Seabrook, 1931, p. 184

[6] Seabrook, 1942, p. 306
According to Marjorie Worthington—Seabrook’s second wife—the cooking took place in Montmartre, at the apartment of a writer she called "Daniel Blanc."(Worthington, Marjorie. The Strange World of Willie Seabrook. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966, pp. 55-56.)

[7] Seabrook, 1931, p. 185.

[8] Ibid.,pp. 186.
Seabrook did not do the cooking himself. The cook in the little apartment did the work—being told only that the meat "was a kind of wild goat that no one had ever eaten before." Seabrook sat by, taking careful notes about the process. (Worthington, p. 56)

[9] Ibid.,pp. 186-187.
His host’s wife came home while the meat was being cooked. She was a teetotaler and a vegetarian and was upset by the fact that Seabrook "had brought not only cognac and wine into the house—but meat." She was, however, curious about the "exotic African food," and wanted to try it—but Seabrook’s wife begged "them not to touch it because it was something utterly nasty." When Seabrook ate the cooked meat, Worthington became nauseous and had to leave the room. The next day Seabrook dictated while his wife typed the passages for Jungle Ways. "He told exactly what the human flesh tasted and looked like when it was cooked; but the repast, as he dictated it, was eaten in the heart of the African jungle with his black African hosts." (Worthington, p. 57)

[10] quoted in Seabrook, 1942, p. 309.

[11] Ibid., p. 308 [emphasis in the original}.

[12] Seabrook, 1931, pp. 187-188

[13] Ibid., pp. 188-189

[14] Daisy Fellowes was a famous socialite of the day. She was an heiress, descended from Isaac Merrit Singer (of sewing machine fame), was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar in France, and was related by marriage to Winston Churchill.

[15] Seabrook, 1942, pp. 311-312 [emphasis in the original].

On Evolution

2013-03-17T12:21:00.000-04:00

Editor’s Note: By all accounts, Dr Sanscravat has never progressed beyond the navel-contemplation stage. He has, however, pushed digression well into the realm of obsession.

_______

I’ve spent many years—too many, perhaps—thinking about money.

Nothing useful, of course, such as how to get my hands on some, but about the stuff itself. Nor do I care about the reasons why some people are so driven to the acquisition and accumulation, or spending and wasting, of filthy lucre. Such concerns would only take me into realm of psychology (or worse, pop psychology), a mental exercise in which I have no interest.

The numismatic aspect of the subject was slightly more intriguing, but only because of the interweaving of art, technology, and history. It is oddly pleasant to hold a Roman coin, to feel the ancient cold metal slowly take on the heat of one’s hand, a hand the existence of which no Roman citizen could have ever imagined. However, while the coin is re-warmed, the coin is not actually revitalized. The idea of the coin does not acquire new life. Admiration of the artifact is a shallow kind of love, if love it is at all.

I was only interested in money as a concept.

The first “money” was not money at all. The earliest transactions were literally exchanges; they were barter. One had a surplus of something, and traded it for something else of equal value. We’ll ignore, for the moment, the capitalist notion of exchange for something of greater value than that which is traded (as I said, mere acquisition and accumulation doesn’t move me).

Barter had one significant limitation: it only worked when items of equivalent value were traded. If one had an extra cow, but needed only a new hat, matters became more complicated. That is when the first money was invented. One could trade that cow for something that stood for the cow’s value—a large number of beads, brightly-colored feathers, whatever—then exchange just a few of those items for the hat. What was traded was an abstract slice of cow for an actual hat. Over time, we discovered that the accumulation of beads or feathers was inconvenient, so we invented special pieces of metal that stood for beads and feathers. Later, we developed pieces of paper that stood for accumulated piles of metal stored somewhere else. More recently, we developed pieces of plastic that stood for the pieces of paper, that stood for the piles of metal, that stood for the feathers and beads, that stood for that much put-upon cow. Today, most of our exchanges are made of nothing more than virtual ones and zeros, passed electronically from machine to machine, with no need to shovel cow manure at all.

What has happened is that the notion of money has been increasingly abstracted, refined to an essence so ethereal that the connection to its bovine roots is completely lost.

What has happened here, in this essay, has little to do with money. Well, in a way it does—but we don’t want to dwell on unpleasant thoughts, so we’ll ignore them. I suddenly realized that my career has followed the same evolutionary path as money.

When I was young, I was a painter and photographer, using media that consumed more money than they could ever earn. I was accumulating a large number of cows that were not exchangeable for hats (or food or rent). As a result, I turned to drawing. The fact that, with nothing more than a pencil and paper, one could make art, was fascinating. Drawing led to a career as an illustrator, which—unlike painting—occasionally brought in actual income.

Illustration is a curious mixture of concept and technique, and technique has a lot to do with physical facility. The muscles of one’s hands, like any other muscles, get better and better at doing certain things through repetition. A lot of what is considered an artist’s “style” is what the artist calls his/her “hand.” The muscles really want to go where they always go, so the kinds of lines one makes—their curvature, their weight, their varying thicknesses—are decisions made, automatically, by one’s muscles. After a time, the conscious mind has little to do with it.

Eventually, I began to lose interest in drawing. It felt like I was no longer learning new things about the craft. Perhaps I was dissatisfied with the limited range of things those finger muscles would let me do. Whichever it was, I longed to spend more time on the conceptual part of drawing, and less on the merely physical. I craved the same sense of exhilaration I’d experienced when I traded camera and paintbrush for pencil and pen.

The transition to writing has accomplished some of that. Writing, by its very nature, is more conceptual, less physically-driven. That makes it very appealing to those of us who are basically lazy (at least in the physical sense). Significantly, writing is a skill that can never be mastered; one can always learn something new. It offers an opportunity for unlimited growth, something I wasn’t feeling with illustration.

What’s more, a writing career pares one’s focus down to an essence, a life that—like money—is evolving into something that is ever-more abstract.

_______

Editor’s Addendum: Dr Sanscravat does not seem to have carried his analysis to its logical conclusion. A career can only achieve a perfect level of abstraction upon the death of its practitioner.

food sites for March 2013

2013-02-23T10:19:00.001-05:00

Citrus fruits -- providing vitamin C before Spring's first greens appear.

It's almost March, which means -- according to the calendar, at least -- Spring is on the way. It can't come too soon for us. For example, we were supposed to be on a panel at this year's Cookbook Conference, but Winter Storm Nemo got in the way. Consequently, we posted our contribution here.

To mark the occasion of Spring's arrival, we'll be chatting about some unusual aspects of vernal equinox festivities at a meeting of the Culinary Historians of New York, on March 20th. The evening promises to have less to do with "blue birds, blossoms, and bunny rabbits," than with Le Sacre du Printemps. While cannibalism and human sacrifice will be on the menu, attendees have nothing to fear...

Regular subscribers to our updates newsletter receive these updates from our blog, Just Served, directly -- but there is much more at the blog that isn't sent automatically. Just Served slings more leftovers than most people want to face, especially this time of year -- but, if you that feel you're up to the challenge, you can follow us on Facebook, or Twitter. In the unlikely event that you find yourself stranded and book-starved, there's even a kind of index at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner.

Here's a talk we gave (about the evolution of food service styles) at the IACP Food History Symposium, Innovation at the Table, held at the Hagley Library and Museum, University of Delaware, September 29, 2007.

Leitesculinaria has reposted several of our own articles. Twenty-or-so of our backlisted LC pieces are available here, along with several articles by more noteworthy writers on the history and science of food.

A vaguely seasonal excerpt from On the Table's culinary quote collection:

A Jewish woman had two chickens. One got sick, so the woman made chicken soup out of the other one to help the sick one get well. Henny Youngman

Gary

March, 2013

PS: If you encounter broken links, changed URLs -- or know of wonderful sites we've missed -- please drop us a line. It helps to keep this resource as useful as possible for all of us. To those of you who have suggested sites -- thanks, and keep them coming!

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----the new sites----

Between the Recipes, Scribbles Speak Volumes

(Kate Murphy's article on the joy of marginalia in The New York Times)

Cappuccino Conquests, The: The Transnational History of Italian Coffee

(essay by historian of consumption, Jonathan Morris)

Celebrating with Sweets in Ottoman Turkey

(Mary Isin's presentation to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery)

Chicken Soup

(Dr. Stephen Rennard's research re: Jewish penicillin)

Eat Your Books

(a tool for indexing all the recipes in your cookbook collection)

Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, The

(Michael Moss, in The New York Times, serves up a taste of his book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us)

FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950–2000

(an exhibit at the Smithsonian)

Fork, Pen & Plow

('zine from the Food Studies Graduate Programs at NYU Steinhardt)

How Forks Gave Us Overbites and Pots Saved the Toothless

(an Atlantic interview with Bee Wilson, author of Consider the Fork, about some of the effects cooking have made on human evolution)

Making 1000 Year Eggs

(method, and a little chemistry, of the ancient practice of preparing these not-so-ancient eggs)

Prosperity Starts with a Pea

(Jessica B. Harris' article, in The New York Times, on black-eyed peas)

Recipes Project, The

(a site that researches the history of recipes)

Soy Sauce

(Robert Carmack's article in Feast Magazine)

Weed to Wonder

(the history and science behind the development of corn from a weed called teosinte; a project of Cornell University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)

Wrapping and Stuffing Food Relationally: Pleasure, Place, Production and Power

(geographer Mike Goodman's paper, delivered at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery)

Yale Global Online

('zine about the globalization of food and plants)

-- inspirational (or otherwise) sites for writers/bloggers --

How Much Should E-Books Cost?

How to Write Yourself Into Existence

-- yet more blogs --

-- changed URL --

AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials

----that's all for now----

Except, of course, for the usual legalistic mumbo-jumbo and commercial flim-flam:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not give, sell or share your e-mail address with anyone, for any purpose -- ever. Nonetheless, we will expose you to the following irredeemably brazen plugs:

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The Resource Guide for Food Writers (paper)

The Herbalist in the Kitchen (hardcover)

The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food And Drink Industries (hardcover), (Kindle)

Human Cuisine (paper), (Kindle)

Herbs: A Global History (Hardcover), (Kindle)

Terms of Vegery (Kindle)

How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating (Kindle)

Here endeth the sales pitch(es)...

...for the moment, anyway.

______________

"The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #149" is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication -- unless with the author's prior written permission -- is strictly prohibited.