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Making Wine and Eating Gold – The History of the New World
More from La Historia del Mondo Nuovo di M. Girolamo Benzoni Milanese, Venetia, 1565 (an English translation published by the Hakluyt Society, 1857, and extracted below, is here in its entirety)
Of those whom they caught alive especially the captains they used to tie the hands and feet throw them down on the ground and pour [...]
Chevreaux Nouveaux
The Viandier of Taillevent (see bibliography for details) is a collection of manuscript cookbooks spanning the 13th to 15th centuries grouped by convention under the banner of Tirel de Taillevent, a 14th century cook to Charles V. It’s a classic of medieval cookery, less famous but more cookable than The Forme of Cury.
Chevreaux, metez [...]
Why I will no longer take couscous for granted
So I found out that couscous dates back at least to the 13th century where it appears in an anonymous Andalusian cookbook (a terrific pro bono translation of which is online) and was impressed. Impressed because couscous seems so modern, subtle, and fragile, and because this means it pre-dated pasta in Europe (Marco Polo [...]
Christmas Goose
I’d never cooked a goose before, but figured it would be a lot like cooking a duck – it is, but with a couple of caveats:
Duck is fatty enough – and the fat is well distributed enough – that it’s pretty hard to dry it out. Goose probably produces more fat when you cook [...]
Salt Cod is Usually Delicious
I’m a big salt cod proponent – it’s semi-cheap (once you factor in how you’re not paying for the water), much tastier than normal fish because the drying process concentrates the flavors, and it keeps forever. So, this recipe seemed like it would be a simple, pleasant success. It wasn’t a train wreck, [...]
“Man needs food like a goat needs a monkey” – Brillat-Savarin
Some people think this somewhat cryptic statement of B-S’s would have made more sense the other way around.
What’s the monkey holding though? Too small to be an orange – a lemon? Clementine? Apricot, maybe?
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