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It can be hard to remember the food blogs of yesteryear, when everyone knew everyone and the actual recipes were usually easy to find, unencumbered by endless cruft. Luisa Weiss discovered blogs relatively early, and soon became one of the most-read food bloggers. She was also part of a lively, supportive community, regularly reading and conversing with more than 40 other food bloggers. One thing led to another and she found herself first in cookbook publishing and then with a contract to write her first book, a memoir with food. Two cookbooks followed. We met in Berlin to talk about all that and more.

Notes

1. Here’s a link to Luisa Weiss’ website.
2. She also, and this is both impressive and useful, managed to salvage all of the original The Wednesday Chef when it’s original host, Typepad, decided to close everyone down earlier this year.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Banner image liberated from an archive copy of The Wednesday Chef.

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Settled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand the origin of civilisations. The general view is that humans actively domesticated plants and animals, selecting the traits that made them more reliable producers of food. What if that’s all wrong? What if the traits that mark domestication are not the result of selection but instead an inevitable evolutionary response to changes in the environment? Changes wrought by humans, to be sure, but unconsciously and without any forethought.

That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III.

Notes

1. Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity is published by University of California Press.
2. If you want more details but less than a book, Seeking consensus on the domestication concept by Spengler and colleagues is part of a journal issue devoted to domestication. There’s also the Spengler Lab website.
3. Here’s the transcript.
4. Image of a Neolithic sickle from the Museum Quintana

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The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited the other to teach and to learn, a series of exchanges documented by Maria Fedorova, assistant professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, in a new book called Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.

Apart from food aid and medical assistance from the US, the exchanges included material goods, like seeds and tractors, as well as information and experience, and were motivated as much by ideology and politics as by pressing humanitarian concerns.

Notes

1. Maria Fedorova’s book is Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.
2. Seeds as Technology: The Russian Agricultural Bureau in New York and Soviet Agricultural Modernization, 1921–26 gives more information about Vavilov and Borodin’s organisation, while The Untold Story of “Radical Relief” to Soviet Russia has more on the American Tractor Unit.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Podcast artwork from Бельтюков В. Public Domain.

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In 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but as far afield as New Zealand.

That after-hours dish became the spice bag, and in many ways the story of the spice bag is the story of assimilation, innovation and widespread adoption that can be told about so many “immigrant” foods. The spice bag emigrated, came back home, and found new modes of expression among communities who took the same basic essentials on which to layer their own particular tastes of home.

Notes

1. I met John Mulcahy at the Food and Drink as Education Conference, which he helped to organise.
2. John Mulcahy’s paper “A is for Aircháelán”: the case for compiling a compendium of food in Ireland offers a taste of the breadth and depth of information he has compiled.
3. Here is the transcript.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:51 — 18.3MB)

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After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook the dish, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or maybe there is.

Marieke Hendriksen of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and her colleagues recently published a paper outlining a procedure for approaching the taste of the past rigorously. After a thorough analysis of early cookbooks as well as medical texts and botanical treatises from the Low Countries, they settled on an apple pie from the 1669 De Verstandige kock.

Dough
Take wheat flour, butter, rosewater, sugar and some eggs, of each as needed.

To make an apple pie the Wallonian way
Take peeled apples the cores removed cook them in Rhenish wine well done, add butter, ginger, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, all cooked well together, then stir in the yolks of two eggs put it in your dough and bake in the Oven as above [i.e. “with fire from below and above”].

After all the analysis and experimentation, though, there’s only one thing to do: taste the end result.

Notes

1. The published paper is Tasting the Past? Developing a Methodology for Researching Historical Tastes in Global Food History, which is behind a paywall, but …
2. Here is the transcript.
3. Banner photo courtesy Marieke Hendriksen. Cover photo detail from Still Life with Fruit Pie and various Objects, by Willem Claesz. Heda 1634, from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. This one has a lid, and may not be apple, but that’s OK.

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