A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)
As I’ve discussed before, in the olden days, catsup/ketchup was about much more than tomatoes. Cookbooks from the 18th and 19th century are ripe with recipes for catsup/ketchup that contain ingredients that are decidedly non-ketchup ingredients, like walnuts, anchovies, and oysters. In the early 19th century cookbook The Cook’s Oracle, author William Kitchiner shares seven […]
After posts on 19th century complaints about plagiarism and the evolution of recipe writing style, we finally get to the recipe that originally attracted me to William Kitchiner’s 1818 book, The Cook’s Oracle: Mock Tomata Sauce [sic]. When I first saw Mock Tomata Sauce on my screen, I had a few thoughts. First: ????. Next: I need […]
Last time, I wrote about an important 19th century cookbook, The Cook’s Oracle, by William Kitchiner and noted that his book was published during an era of significant cookbook evolution. One of the most important was how recipes were written: the structure and style of recipes.
The following Receipts [Ed. note: recipes] are not a mere marrowless collection of shreds, and patches, and cuttings, and pastings, from obsolete works, but a bona fide register of practical facts, accumulated by a perseverance not to be subdued, or evaporated, by the igniferous terrors of a roasting fire in the dog-days. The Receipts have […]
At the 2017 International Food Blogging Conference in Sacramento, one of the sponsors was Avocados from Chile, the avocado promotion agency from that nation. The logic behind their promotional efforts in California is sound: United States avocado growers can’t meet growing U.S. demand The California avocado harvest is typically between April and September Chile is […]
Mexican food is hugely popular in the United States — salsa has been outselling ketchup for years, some of the fastest growing restaurant chains sell Mexican food, the taco truck craze is at its peak — but it took a many years and many innovators for this to happen. Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA: How Mexican […]
Reports from the farmers market and about seasonal food are common today: for example, KCRW’s Good Food has a weekly farmers market report, the San Francisco Chronicle covers seasonal produce in the Sunday Food and Home section, there are apps about seasonal produce for your phone, and guides printed on paper. I have been following these reports for […]
Kale salad — superfood in a bowl, a nutritional powerhouse, a bold canvas for bold flavors — has been a major trend in recent years. A recent article in Food52 — A New Genius Salad from the Chef Who Started the Kale Salad Craze — notes that it was introduced to a wide audience in late […]
I’d like to conclude my celery trilogy by looking at the ngram for celery (the first two parts of the trilogy were about celery on restaurant menus and celery vases). Ngrams show the popularity of a word or phrase throughout time and are especially useful for slang, grammar, and spelling preferences (like ketchup and catsup). An ngram is […]
When I typed “celery” into the CC Search box to search a few museums’ public domain collections to illustrate my previous post on celery on restaurant menus, I was expecting one or two results, perhaps a still life. And so I was surprised when the search returned a bunch of objects called “celery vases” from […]