We know that Eleanor Roosevelt was a passionate nonconformist, little-known children’s book author, and writer of controversial love letters – and now, thanks to this short poem from a scrap of paper found in her wallet, we also know she was a foodie.
Michael Pollan on how cooking transformed us.
First, catch your pig. Then ship it to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away. Fry fat, drain off liquid grease, and combine the residue (called “cracklings”) with:
1 ½ cups water-ground white meal
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk
Bake in very hot oven until brown (about 15 minutes).
Result: one pan crackling bread serving 6. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.
OMELETTE AURORE
Beat 8 eggs with a pinch of salt, 1 tablespoon sugar and 3 tablespoons heavy cream. Prepare the omelet in the usual manner. Before folding it, place on it 1 cup diced candied fruit and small pieces of marrons glacés which have soaked for several hours in 2 tablespoons of curaçao. Fold the omelet to keep the fruit in place, on a fireproof serving dish. Surround with marrons glacés and candied cherries. cover at once with frangipani cream made by stirring 2 whole eggs and 3 yolks with 3 tablespoons of sugar until they are pale lemon-colored. Then add 1 cup of flour and a pinch of salt, stirring until it is perfectly smooth. Add 2 cups of milk and mix well. Put the mixture in a saucepan over the lowest heat and stir until it is quite thick. It must not boil. Be careful that the cream does not become attached to the bottom or sides of the saucepan. When it has thickened remove it from the heat and add 2 tablespoons of butter and 3 powered macaroons. Stir and mix well. Pour the sauce over the omelet and sprinkle ¼ cup diced angelica over the top. Then sprinkle 6 powered macaroons on top and, finally, 3 tablespoons of melted butter. Place the omelet in a preheated 550-degree oven only long enough to brown it lightly.
Fantastic, inventive trailer for Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life.
Modern Art Desserts – from Mondrian cake to Donald Judd tomato soup, edible masterpieces by the pastry chef at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Body mass index around the world, visualized. Pair with What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.
How Americans spend money on food. Also see Hungry Planet – a portrait of the world’s weekly food budgets, from $1.23 in Chad to $376.45 in Australia.
![Lady Godiva [was] thusly named because she came to Toklas and Stein stripped of everything on her dashboard, naked in the way only an open two-seater Ford could be in post-WWI France.
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, illustrated – a rare 1993 edition of the classic.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/db2c36b5e76e36f464ec4e1c03548c40/tumblr_mj54dw3ML21rqpa8po1_500.jpg)
Lady Godiva [was] thusly named because she came to Toklas and Stein stripped of everything on her dashboard, naked in the way only an open two-seater Ford could be in post-WWI France.
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, illustrated – a rare 1993 edition of the classic.
Minneapolis-based illustrator and art director David Schwen does delightful PANTONE food pairings on Instagram, possibly inspired by French food designer Emilie de Griottes’s PANTONE food art.
Pair with PANTONE: The Twentieth Century in Color.
The Cartography of Kitchenware from PopChartLab, who have previously mapped the varieties of coffee, the history of Apple, America’s bike lanes, the composition of classic cocktails, the wonders of serif fonts, Gotham’s villains, and music’s most famous guitars.
Nothing affects public health in the United States more than food. Gun violence kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes kill more than a million people a year — nearly half of all deaths — and diet is a root cause of many of those diseases.
And the root of that dangerous diet is our system of hyper-industrial agriculture, the kind that uses 10 times as much energy as it produces.
We must figure out a way to un-invent this food system. It’s been a major contributor to climate change, spawned the obesity crisis, poisoned countless volumes of land and water, wasted energy, tortured billions of animals… I could go on. The point is that “sustainability” is not only possible but essential: only by saving the earth can we save ourselves, and vice versa.
How do we do that?
This seems like a good day to step back a bit and suggest something that’s sometimes difficult to accept.
Patience.
We can only dismantle this system little by little, and slowly. Change takes time. Often — usually — that time exceeds the life span of its pioneers.
Mark Bittman on fixing our food problem – fantastic NYT op-ed.
Complement with the most ambitious food politics manifesto of the past half-century.
