A week ago I saw the Eugene Opera’s production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean. The story is well known, thanks to the 1995 movie. Sister Helen is asked to be the spiritual advisor of a man on death row at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. There is …
Category: Food
Fake meat and factory meat
Last week the Oregonian food section had a recipe for vegan coq au vin. I have nothing against vegans, but this just seemed perverse to me; not only the imitation of a meat dish, which was never going to taste like the original, but its use of all kinds of fake meat products. The ingredients …
Modernist Cuisine and Nonna’s Cucina
At the AAAS meeting last week, Nathan Myhrvold gave one of the plenary talks. He is a physicist but is also the author of the magnum opus (really magnum, 6 volumes and 2400 pages) Modernist Cuisine, and more recently the somewhat more user-friendly Modernist Cuisine at Home, which introduces the home cook to the world …
Interview with Stephanie Hersh
A recent interview with Stephanie Hersh appeared here. Stephanie was Julia Child's assistant for sixteen years. I took a pastry course with her at Santa Barbara City College in 2003; she moved to New Zealand shortly after Julia Child's death the following year. She is both a trained chef and a food scholar, and a …
Roast Beef and … salad?
The English diet has been mythologised as one of roasted meats and few vegetables but, as Anita Guerrini concludes from a survey of early modern writings on the subject, the nation’s approach to food has been rather more complicated than that. (Read more in History Today)
Anita Guerrini 