Keep calm and use a style guide.
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Keep calm and use a style guide.
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by Simon de Swaan
“A” is for dining Alone… and so am I, if a choice must be made between most I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.–M.F.K. Fisher, An Alphabet for Gourmets
M.F.K. Fisher, born in 1908, is perhaps America’s best-known food essayist. She redefined the way Americans write and talk about food, and is therefore a true reference in American food writing. Gourmet wrote a lovely homage to her in 2008, the 100th anniversary of her birth.
Alphabet for Gourmets was originally published in Gourmet magazine in 1948.
Read more about her classic The Art of Eating.
Photo courtesy of Cliff 1066
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by Jonell Galloway
I was recently interviewed for a Swiss Info documentary called “Finding the Right Food Formula.” In the context of recent childhood obesity figures in Switzerland, Veronica De Vore is exploring the Swiss relationship to food and how that might have changed, how it might be related to the rise in childhood obesity.
Click here to listen to the show. I cooked a Kentucky Fried Chicken feast for Veronica, while discussing the more serious matter of relationships to food in the context of my work in mindful eating. (The article also includes an abridged recipe for my grandmothers’ traditional Kentucky Fried Chicken.)
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Be the poem. Write the poem of your life every day through your kind words and good deeds. When your nights are dark, rise up. Take the rays of the morning sun into your heart and warm it again. Keep writing your poem.
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Peter and I are eating dinner. Chopin’s Etudes play in the background; we sit in the midst of our eclectic collection of objets d’art from France and Italy and more exotic ones from Tibet, Persia, India. I am in my element. I am surrounded by music, poetry and art. How have I come to this? My mother. For her, life has been poetry, art, and music, syncopated with dramatic andantes and crescendos, tearing at her guts and ripping them wide open. She took it all in; she swathed herself in its drapery of blood-wrenched red and chilly blue pain. She has not gone gently into that good night; she is a fearless survivor. She has lived through earthquakes and hurricanes and always landed on her feet. I continue to write the poem of my life, blunder through the Gymnopèdes. Mother is playing Scarbo, flitting in and out of the darkness, disappearing and suddenly reappearing. I touch her hand. She hands me a pen.
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by Dee Rintoul
I grew up with “cheater” knepfle. I learned from my Oma, who had a Southern German background, but was Romanian-born. She made all kinds of noodles and pasta dishes — spatzle, real egg noodles that were dried and stored, but for everyday use. Knepfle were child’s play. In our own home, we made them for lunch and threw them into Lipton chicken noodle soup (which was not something we’d ever find in Oma’s kitchen!). God. That woman could cook…
Anyway. The way we did it was to beat an egg or two (depending on how greedy we felt at the time), add a pinch of salt and some dried parsley if we thought of it or wanted to impress schoolmates, then beat in all-purpose flour until it was so stiff it wouldn’t take any more and/or became too difficult to stir. Then we’d drop pieces in a pot of boiling water with a fork and a teaspoon, dipping both implements into the simmering soup in between to help the stiff dough drop. Once they were all in, we put the lid on, turned down the heat, and kept it covered for a few minutes.
When we finally lifted the lid, we found gorgeous, fluffy-looking, but very chewy little dumplings, all floating together on top of the soup. We loved these so much that as kids we used to scorn dumplings as being “too soft”. To our minds, dumplings, or anything that remotely resembled knepfle, ought to be quite al dente.
I still make these for chicken soup (and I try not to rely on Lipton but make my own as often as possible!).
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In Paris to the Pyrenees, David Downie takes us right along with him on the Way of St. James, without our ever leaving our armchairs. As stated in the subtitle, “A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Ways of St James,” we’re not talking about a conventional pilgrim, so we don’t expect his transformations to be like those of traditional Christians. But then, the Way of St. James, like so many pilgrim routes in the world, becomes a spiritual journey spreading well beyond the confines of Christianity.
Downie makes it a personal journey, full of the classical culture and history he knows so well, and we have the pleasure of experiencing it along with him. His journey through classicism and French history becomes ours, as we learn about the Druids, the Galls, the Romans, former French President François Mitterand, and much more; as he carries around a stone he was convinced had magical power because it looked like a scallop shell, until it becomes too heavy to carry; as we wolf down hearty French meals and sup coarse local wine after a long day of walking, before we fall like a stone into bed.
And though we might not receive penance, we end the journey all the richer in knowledge, having read a good tale, too. The book is a latter-day Canterbury Tales, with a varied lot of pilgrims, locals, and farmers all along the way. Alison Harris’ photos are in perfect harmony with Downie’s narrative. You’ll want to wear a scallop shell around your neck after reading this book.
Other sources of information about the book: NPR, 3 Quarks Daily, Boston Globe, Bonjour Paris
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