It might sound like I’m making a value judgment here, that traditional is better than historical. Really, I’m arguing for an awareness of context. There are some traditions that don’t exist anymore. There are some things that really are gone. But it’s not as much as you think. Participating in history, appreciating history, shouldn’t come with a disregard for the present. My point is that before you label something as historical, limited to the past, you should investigate whether it actually still exists in some form in the present.
Category: Barebones Cooking
Eat eggs like the ancient Romans
I can’t say that ancient cuisine sounds particularly exciting, even for someone like me. But I was surprised earlier this week when, after watching this video from the Historical Italian Cooking research group, I felt inspired to make a variation on an ancient Roman frittata.
The great pumpkin pudding experiment
Do you ever get a taste in your mind? Like you just imagine a flavor that you’ve never had before and you wonder whether you can make it happen? That’s how pretty much all of my cooking projects come together. Call it my particular form of synesthesia.
Read MoreComfort Food
The first time I heard the phrase “comfort food”, I asked my mom what it meant, and she told me it was food that made people feel good. I thought that was a strange definition, since at the time I didn’t really have any emotional association with food and so that was a pretty foreign concept to me. I also remember thinking that definition wasn’t it because people seemed to mean something specific when they said it. Comfort food, I realized, was used to describe all the foods I had a viscerally negative reaction to – food that you might see in a commercial being slowly dropped into melted butter or drizzled over something. I guess I did have an emotional association with food after all.
Cracking the sourdough code
How can a home baker get both great flavor and that incredible crust?
Halfway between moussaka and ratatouille
I have a confession. For all my Mediterranean obsession, I hate two of the most essential Mediterranean vegetables: eggplant and zucchini. I would refer to zucchini as a useless vegetable – a filler that restaurants throw in to bulk up better vegetables like cauliflower because it has no particular flavor or texture. As for eggplant, I think it’s horrible in terms of both flavor and texture – mushy, bitter, stringy.
Read MorePersimmon Cake for the warm and spicy in your life
It’s persimmon season in California, and last month a friend with a tree gifted me with a huge haul of bright orange fruits. Read More
Scones – sweet or savory
If I had to encapsulate my academic aspirations into a single image, it would be the memory of sitting around the coffee table in the economics department lounge at Carleton, eating my professor’s homemade scones, drinking tea, and debating applied philosophy with professors and students. Read More
The best ever spinach pie has a lot more than just spinach in it
The problem with spanakopita is that it’s a large, flavorless lump of cooked spinach in a soggy phyllo crust … can you tell I really don’t like it? Read More
Jane Brody’s Butternut Squash Soup – Simple cold-weather comfort
As far as I’m concerned, there are two ways to make vegetable soups. Read More
Robin Writes 