refrigerator dills

This is a recipe for the ‘refrigerator dill’ pickles my mother makes. She used to make the old-fashioned kind in vapor-sealed glass jars. This she stopped doing after years and years because the batches ceased to turn out well for whatever reason, despite her use of the same old family recipe. Now she makes these, and they [...]

abat-faim – Debord

Abat-faim, Guy Debord, 1985. 
Abat-faim 
One knows that this term designated a “meal’s principal dish, which one served first to quiet down, to reduce the hunger of the dinner guests” (Larousse).
In their dictionary, Hatzfield and Darmesteter refer to the term as “antiquated.” But history is the infallible master of dictionaires. With the recent progress of technology, the totality of [...]

chopsticks – Barthes

Chopsticks (Roland Barthes, from Empire of Signs, 1970, translated into English in 1982)
At the Floating Market in Bangkok, each vendor sits in a tiny motionless canoe, selling minuscule quantities of food: seeds, a few eggs, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, pimentos (not to speak of the Unnamable). From himself to his merchandise, including his vessel, everything [...]

fresh figs – Benjamin

Fresh Figs (Walter Benjamin, from “Food”. Published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, May 1930.)
No one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it. Unless you do this, you at best enjoy it, but never come to lust after it, or make the acquaintance of that diversion [...]

a nice cup of tea – Orwell

A Nice Cup of Tea
by George Orwell
Evening Standard, 12 January 1946
 
IF YOU look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most [...]

other fish to fry

This article, about the politics (somewhat) of eating fish, is from the Opinion section of The New York Times of Sept. 8, 2006. 
OTHER FISH TO FRY 
By PAUL GREENBERG
Published: September 8, 2006 
AFTER years of carving up tuna carcasses in my bathtub, catching cod in the dead of winter and cooking fish and chips for crowds of 50-plus I have [...]