November 11, 1918, a date familiar to all students of history, as The Great War (to end all wars) was finally at an end. But for students of culinary history, that date has additional significance: it is the birth day of Karen Hess, who would become one of the earliest American culinary historians and mentor […]
CHNY Scholar’s Grant recipient, Professor Elizabeth Zanoni, opened our 2018-19 season with a fascinating talk about the origins and evolution of airline food service. Although nowadays we may think of airplane food of something to be endured at best (assuming today’s airlines even offer a hot meal, rather than a processed cheese sandwich on cold, […]
This recipe comes from Emma Kay’s Dining with the Georgians: A Delicious History (Amberley Books 2014). One might think that it is a precursor to the chocolate martini so trendy at the turn of the 21st century. In the late 18th century, chocolate would have been consumed almost exclusively as a drink: the great age of confectionery would […]
The archives at Mount Vernon hold a trove of records relating to the day-to-day operation of George Washington’s plantation. While many of these rich documents have been examined for details of the culinary life at Mount Vernon, such as the cookery manuscript owned by Martha Washington, already an antique when she inherited it, with recipes […]
Garum, the fish-based saucy condiment ubiquitous in ancient Roman cookery, shows up in many places, such as the epigrams of Martial, the scientific treatises of Pliny, and the medicinal writings of Galen. Astute students of ancient culinary history will have noticed, however, that the cookery book attributed to Apicius tends to use the term liquamen […]
Oenogarum A classic oenogarum recipe is found in Apicius Book 4.5.1 where a patina, a kind of thick frittata of meat, fish, and vegetables is turned out on to a plate and this sauce poured over it. ‘make an oenogarum for it like this: pound pepper and lovage, pound again, pour on liquamen and wine. […]
In 1989, David Rosengarten and Joshua Wesson published the provocatively titled, Red Wine with Fish: The New Art of Matching Wine with Food. Designed to ease the stress of pairing wines and foods to a generation of Americans proudly describing themselves as “foodies” (and, without the least bit of self-conscious awkwardness, “Yuppies”), the title slyly […]
Herbaceous mayonnaise has been a classic accompaniment to cold salmon since the 19th century, roughly coinciding with the emergence of some of the “traditional” rules of food and wine pairing. “White wine with fish” is a starting point, but then the choices of which white wine to pair with salmon in herb sauce allows one […]
By Michelle Zimmer In What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women & the Food that Tells Their Stories, James Beard award winning author and historian Laura Shapiro examines the eating habits and quirks of six notable women: Dorothy Wordsworth, Eva Braun, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Gurley Brown, Barbara Pym, and Rosa Lewis. By analyzing their journals, archives, and letters, Shapiro […]
This recipe has been adapted for modern kitchens and conveniences (the original recipe on which it is based has the poor cook beating the egg yolks by hand for 30 minutes to aerate). Either a stand mixer with several bowls or a hand-held mixer is especially useful, given all the whipping that this recipe requires. […]
