Category: History

Ah, Bastille Day – I’d say something about it in French but my French is lousy. So rather than subject us all to that, let’s celebrate it by looking at a few French moments and highlights in culinary history.

Rich in dukes and cardinals – but also rich in culinary trivia.

Imagine it. It is 1637. Cardinal Richelieu, for reasons known only to himself – maybe his own safety (he wasn’t universally popular) or maybe he was put off his dinner watching people pick their teeth with pointy ends – suddenly orders the blades of his dinnerware to be ground down and rounded off.

Behold, the modern dinner knife was born. Continue reading “Crafty Cardinal Creates Cutlery” →

Vanilla. We all know vanilla. Naturally warm and sweet, it’s the base note of dessert in the Western World, from the scoop of vanilla ice cream served with apple pie in the US to the warm custard poured over crumbles in the UK or baked into tarts by the Portuguese.

It’s that essential ingredient in cookies and cakes and puddings. It takes the edge off chocolate and coffee, and lifts a mug of hot milk to dreamy bedtime heights. One might even say that vanilla is the umami of the sweet palate.

Vanilla’s Bad Rep?

But vanilla gets a very bad rap these days. There’s a perception in this day and age that vanilla is somehow boring. In our quest for ever more exotic flavours of ice cream we’ve derided the humble but pure pleasures of a well-made vanilla ice cream. Other spices like star anise and  cardamom, lovely though they both are,  have become so achingly hip that good old vanilla seems like a dull, almost matronly staple in comparison. Vanilla has to be dressed up as “French Vanilla” or ” Genuine Madagascar Vanilla” or “Vanilla Bean”. We’ve even-horror of horrors- begun to use the term “vanilla” to mean boring, unimaginative sex. It’s as if vanilla has become the Doris Day of spices.

And that’s not fair. Continue reading “The Spicy Truth About Vanilla” →

It is April 23 – National Cherry Cheesecake Day. Do we really need to expound on the glories of cheesecake? Don’t we all know it already. Instead, let us turn our culinary attention to Shakespeare. Yes, you heard me right. Shakespeare.

Today is the day of Shakespeare birth in 1564 (at best estimate) and his death in 1616. And on both those occasions, I bet food was prepared, served, eaten and shared. But which foods? Continue reading “Shakespearean Noshes, A Literary Nibble” →