Author: Emily Contois

15 Delightful Ways to Celebrate Julia Child’s 100th Birthday Today

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Food lovers the world over adore Julia Child — and as a current student in the Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy program at Boston University, which Julia co-founded with Jacques Pépin, I can’t help but feel more intimately connected to her now than ever before. I also recently had the opportunity to learn more about Julia from her personal assistant of nearly 16 years, Stephanie Hersh, a food legend in her own right. You can read the Stephanie Hersh profile (hot off the press today!) on the Gastronomy at BU Blog. And while you’re at it, check out these fifteen (Get it? Her birthday is August 15!) delightful ways to engage all of the senses in celebrating Julia Child’s 100th Birthday today — and everything about her that lives on. Read Read Jacques Pépin’s article on remembering Julia Child in the NY Times Read the article, Fond Memories of Julia Child’s Kitchen, from the National Museum of American History blog, written by Julia Child’s niece, Philadelphia Cousins Read Marlo Thomas’ article, Bon Appétit! It’s Julia Child’s 100th Birthday, on the Huffington Post …

A ‘Public Health Nutritionist’ Attempts Food Writing

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I was jump-up-and-down and grinning-ear-to-ear-excited to be quoted recently on NPR’s Food Blog, The Salt, in the post, “Long Before Social Networking, Community Cookbooks Ruled the Stove.” I did a a bit of a double take, though, when I was identified as a “public health nutritionist and food blogger.” While I have an MPH with a concentration in Public Health Nutrition and I blog on food-related topics, I’d never before identified myself that way. But hey, I’ll run with it, especially in this post where I dive into something new. In the BU Gastronomy program, I study alongside many talented, aspiring food writers. While my work tends to focus more on the social, political, and historical context of eating, here, I’m going to attempt to try my hand at actually writing about food… – – – – – – – – – – – – – After wading through streets clogged with rowdy Red Sox fans, I take a quick right turn through a break in the crowd and walk beneath a vibrant red awning into …

Seven Simply Smashing Food Exhibits: No Tickets, Shoes, or Shirts Required

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One of my favorite things on a weekend afternoon, a weekday evening—well, we can go ahead and say just about anytime—is to spend a few glorious hours of levity and escape at a museum. I’m lucky to live in Boston where world-class museums abound as plentifully as colleges and universities, but sometimes, I hear you, we get busy and don’t make it out the door to enjoy the many intriguing exhibits on display. Here you’ll find seven excellent online food museum exhibits that you can visit anytime you like from your computer—and in your pajamas if you so desire. There are likely many more delightful virtual expos, but these seven, listed in no particular order, can be a very filling place to start… 1. Julia Child’s Kitchen Even if you aren’t in Washington D.C. you can peek in the drawers and cupboards of Julia Child’s kitchen, view selected culinary objects, and peruse an interactive timeline that chronicles her love of cooking. Exhibit by the Smithsonian, National Museum of American History 2. War-Era Food Posters Check out …

Food Journals in Popular Culture: Confessing Diet Sins or Legit Rehabilitation?

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At times, diet literature offers the same recommendations that dietitians and eating disorder specialists proffer, but accompanied by an underlying message of guilt—in this case of biblical proportion. In the article, “Diet Confessions” from the June 2006 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, Jim Karas (Chicago-based trainer to the stars and the common man alike) discusses keeping a food journal as a weight loss strategy. The article is accompanied by a disturbing image of a thin young woman kneeling as if at worship itself with her hands pressed together in fervent prayer. A scale lurks forebodingly in the background, a menacing crucifix. Upon her face shines the light of whichever god one confesses dieting sins. Karas discusses food journals utilizing religious descriptive language, including:  coming clean  every bite you take, every vow you break  confessing what you’ve eaten The article portrays an extra cookie as a sin that must be confessed to the food journal. Susan Estrich also refers to food journals in her diet book, Making the Case for Yourself: A DIET Book for SMART Women (1997), saying, …

Phallic Produce and Over-Sexed Peasants in 16th and 17th Century Italian Art

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In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the comedic produce paintings of papal Rome and the naturalistic peasant paintings of northern Italy both presented erotic situations that at surface level appear as juvenile examples of low humor. Analyzing these paintings within the large social and political context of the time, however, reveals tensions, transitions, and insecurities within the Church, class relations, and art itself. Varriano cites the popularity of witty puns in the sixteenth century, contending that they embody the instability of politics and the Church (2009: 118). He argues that lusty fruit and vegetable paintings proved to be: The perfect metaphor for the culture of post-Reformation Rome, in which the quest for religious and political orthodoxy may have increased uncertainties and humor was the only acceptable outlet for transgressive desire (Varriano 2009: 125). In fact, erotic pun paintings were most popular in Rome, where these suggestive works may have provided sexual release from the repression required by Catholicism, especially for the clergy. Caravaggio’s Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge is a particularly strong example …

American Coffee Culture in 1872: So Different from Today?

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Since the seventeenth century, Americans have roasted, steamed, and boiled coffee, causing its gradual transformation into our national beverage and a potent patriotic symbol. In his 1872 text, Coffee: Its History, Cultivation, and Use, (read it for free on Google Books) Robert Hewitt Jr. captured the historical prominence of coffee in the United States, saying, “Since cotton has been proclaimed ‘king’ in the realm of commerce, coffee should be styled ‘queen’ among the beverages of domestic life” (Hewitt 1872: 11). Coffee has since risen from its status of queen of the domestic realm and emerged as a leading global commodity, second only to petroleum oil (Pendergrast 1999: 1). Coffee thus exerts considerable political and economic power. The United States has led world coffee consumption for the past two hundred years (Tucker 2011:18). Coffee plays multiple social and cultural roles within American daily life as a beverage consumed upon waking, shared in social settings, enjoyed at the end of a meal, savored during the workday coffee break, and so on. In his historical text, Hewitt depicts …

Food News Round Up: Celebrate and Assess the Half

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We recently passed the approximate half-way point of summer, a fact worth celebrating in a half-glass-full kind of way — and a reason to perform a mid-point status check. Are you making it through that reading list? Have you spent enough time at the beach? Have you tried at least half of those recipes you’ve been marking, saving, and creating? If not, you have approximately another half to go; plenty of time to fit in everything you planned for your summer. Regardless, you can enjoy these “half and half” edition of Food News Round Up. Research: 1/2 Science + 1/2 News Reporting Media coverage on eating behavior research abounds, but the relationship between science and science news is often tenuous. These three studies were reported in the media this week and are presented here with the study or abstract to ensure research integrity. Due to perceived anonymity, food orders place online are more fattening, complicated Read the study Neuroscience study finds fat in foods directly impacts taste perception Read the abstract Restaurant meals a bit healthier after menu labeling law Read the abstract  Food Policy: …

Chicken Fricassee Face-Off: 18th Century Haute Cuisine versus 1950s Can-Opener Cooking

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When I was a graduate student in the Boston University Gastronomy program, Ken Albala assigned an intriguing final exam question in the course “A Survey of Food History:” to compare and contrast two Chicken Fricassée recipes. While it may appear at first glance that Francois Massialot’s recipe, “Poulets en Fricasée au Vin de Champagn” from Le Nouveau Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois (1748), is the culinary superior of Poppy Cannon’s “Chicken with White Wine and White Grapes” from The Can-Opener Cookbook (1953), such an assumption ignores the complexity of each recipe as a unique product of a particular time and place. As Anne Bower contends, a cookbook can be read as a “fragmented autobiography” (Bower 1997: 32) that reveals unique details not only of the author’s experience, but also those of his or her time. Cannon’s recipe in particular fulfills Bower’s assertion that the main theme of cookbooks is the “breaking of silence” (1997: 46-47), as it reveals the struggles and desires of the 1950s American housewife. Examples of Period Food Trends First published in 1691 and in revised additions throughout the early eighteenth …

Chain Restaurant “Diet” Menus: Serving Up Guilt with a Side of Sin

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Guilt is frequently linked to food in a dysfunctional way and is founded in a belief system that gives food and eating a moral value. Notably, Paul Rozin et al.’s (1999) landmark food psychology study found that compared to Japanese and European subjects, Americans restricted their diets the most, feeling the most guilt and dissatisfaction. The moral construct of food consumption is an important part of American food culture and is what Paul Campos refers to as “orthodox diet theology” (2004: 75). Using this theology, some foods are deemed good, while others are bad, and thus guilt-inducing. The themes of guilt and morality are often used to sell entrees at chain restaurants, usually dishes that are considered “healthy” or low-calorie options. Patrons are encouraged to order from “diet” menus, which claim to offer dishes that make eating out a guilt-free experience. Among 200 menu options (some of which contain more than 1,000 calories), The Cheesecake Factory launched the “SkinnyLicious® Menu” in 2011, which Bruce Horowitz in USA Today argues was a result of “pressure from calorie counters, advocacy groups and party poopers” (Horovitz). At Applebee’s (a …

Sacred Feasts: Food in Art as Literal History and Spiritual Metaphor

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A variety of food centered sacred narratives have artistic appeal, from parables and miracles that involve food to sacred meals. Varriano (2009) discusses at length two sacred meals in particular, the Last Supper and the Dinner at Emmaus, which were depicted repeatedly by a number of Renaissance artists. Given the sparse details of the actual foods served at the meals and the oft-competing roles of literal and symbolic depictions, however, artistic purpose and intention can be difficult to discern, even in works portraying well-known sacred narratives. Biblical Meanings of Food Many of Christ’s parables utilized food as metaphors, symbols, and narrative devices to create commonality with his followers. Humble fishermen and farmers could thus relate to the subjects of his stories—such as the Parable of the Mustard Seed, the miracle of feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish, the miracle of turning water into wine, and the story of Jesus and the fishers of men—because they are told using the common language of food. Meals, specifically, provide powerful subject matter. As Elsen states …

The Woman Suffrage Cookbook of 1886: Culinary Evidence of Women Finding a New Voice

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The Woman Suffrage Cookbook (1886), edited by Mrs. Hattie A. Burr, was created as a fundraising tool for Massachusetts suffragists, but it also provided a powerful new voice. It communicated with women of all classes in the common language of the cookbook about not only food and domesticity, but also the radical cause of women’s right to vote. The Woman Suffrage Cookbook also tracks changing cooking practices in the United States in the late nineteenth century, changes that mirrored larger transitions in society. The growing forces of industrialization, urbanization, and a variety of social movements—among them women’s suffrage—swept the nation, forever molding her into a new shape. This cookbook demonstrates the changes impacting women’s domestic and civic life at the time by documenting the transformation taking place within her kitchen. The Cookbook The cookbook begins: “This little volume is sent out with an important mission,” which we can assume has scope beyond “cookery, housekeeping, and the care of the sick” given when and why it was published. The Woman Suffrage Cookbook is the oldest fundraising cookbook in support of women’s suffrage. It …

Cooking a Sixteenth Century Meal Brings Food History to Life

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As students in Dr. Ken Albala’s Survey of Food History class, we were overjoyed that the Food and the City Conference brought him to Boston not only to deliver the conference keynote, but to allow us the opportunity to meet him in person and cook together a sixteenth century meal. From our course lectures, we had learned that throughout history, specific ingredients have served as markers of social class that exude distinction. The most prestigious ingredients were often rare, expensive, and fashionable among the upper class at a certain time in a particular place. Rarity, cost, and fashion were unstable factors, however, meaning that the symbolic potential of ingredients evolved over time. The existence and expansion of trade networks, and globalization more generally, also played a significant role in specific ingredients securing elite status, while others did not. Trends and fashion made certain ingredients signs of social distinction. The variables of rarity and cost influenced trends, which tended to occur in cyclical and reactionary patterns. Culinary fashions changed for a variety of reasons, among them political, economic, cultural, and even due …

Food News Round Up: Wrangling Action

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Welcome, gastronomes and cowboys alike, to this action-oriented (and alluringly alliterative) edition of Food News Round Up. Part of the news process is indeed passive — the pleasant and oft solitary experience of soaking up the news via paper or screen. But what is so key with food, is the desire to take the next step beyond the passive processes of perusing, reading, and contemplating to the impassioned action of politicking, organizing, and converging. So stick a fork in these delicious bites of news — and then wrangle some food action. Peruse – and Politick – the Politics of Provisions Strawberry lovers rejoice: methyl iodide is off the market Utah governor signs bill, makes unauthorized video or photos of ag operations illegal Can it be more ethical to eat meat? Vote, read the arguments, and vote again Connecticut takes first step toward required genetically modified food labeling Read – and Reason – Rousing Research Results Study finds using antibiotic animal feed creates super germs that can pass to humans New study finds strong link between honey bee die-offs and insecticide used on corn Study finds smelly …