Smithsonian.com

Kindle in kitchen in zip-top bag. Image courtesy of Flickr user jimmiehomeschoolmom.

Whenever a new cookbook comes into my possession, the first thing I do is sit down, scan through the recipes and use Post-Its to flag the things I might actually take the time to make, paying attention to ingredients and the time required to pull a dish together. It makes for easy referencing, especially if I need to break from the same tired old meals and learn to make something new. However, it seems that the digital powers that be are trying to make this facet of my analog life obsolete. Will websites and e-readers ultimately replace the tried-and-true hard copy cookbook?

New York Times tech blogger Sam Grobart fired a few warning shots in his recent piece about which technological gadgets to keep and which ones to toss. While he positions himself as a supporter of books, he points out some new apps on the market that may make cookbooks obsolete. They’re geared to making life in the kitchen easier with instructional videos, built-in timers and the ability to email oneself a list of ingredients when making a run to the grocery store. There’s also the added benefit of having color photographs for every recipe—which is a luxury in printed cookbooks.

But as he also points out in his piece, books are generally not that expensive; if something happens to one, it’s not the end of the world. If something happens to your e-reader, that’s a huge chunk of change gone down the drain. And need I remind anyone of how hopelessly messy a kitchen can be? Although there are preventative measures you can take to protect your investment, the stuff that can gunk up and ruin an electronic device are easily wiped off from a book. Furthermore, if you need to adjust recipes to suit your personal taste, it’s not that inconvenient to find a pencil and mark your amendments in a book’s margins.

Google also threw a jab at the traditional cookbook format with its new online recipe search, allowing amateur cooks to refine a search by ingredients, calorie count and cooking time. Offhand, this sounds pretty handy—but is something lost in the ongoing quest for convenience? New York Times Cookbook editor and blogger Amanda Hesser has her reservations:

Google’s search engine gives vast advantage to the largest recipe websites with the resources to input all this metadata, and particularly those who home in on “quick and easy” and low calorie dishes (which, by the way, doesn’t mean the recipes are actually healthy). In so doing, Google unwittingly—but damagingly—promotes a cooking culture focused on speed and diets.

I gave the search a quick try and, personally, I see this as a fine way to make use of odds-and-ends ingredients lurking in the pantry. For example, I was readily able to find a recipe that could make use of leftover pearl barley and lentils—ingredients I bought for recipes I didn’t especially enjoy, and I didn’t know how to use those ingredients outside of those dishes. Nevertheless, I would never use it as a primary meal planning resource. There’s much fun to be had flipping through a cookbook and stumbling on recipes where the author pairs ingredients in ways that wouldn’t have occurred to you. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not opposed to new technologies. It is a question of form and function, and as far as I’m concerned, physical cookbooks are more practical for primary cooking references.

Do you think the latest technologies will make you stop buying cookbooks? Continue the discussion in the comments area below.

The future site of the author's vegetable garden. Photograph by Lisa Bramen

Urban “farming” is trendy—so much so that when a friend who lives in Berkeley, California (a hotbed of guerrilla gardening) was recently wandering around Home Depot looking clueless, an orange-vested employee cheerfully, and correctly, guessed that she was trying to build a chicken coop.

Having recently decided to start my own vegetable garden, I guess you could say I’m hopping on the same bandwagon. One difference is that there’s nothing urban about where I’m planning to grow: I live in a community of about 300 people on land that once was used to pasture horses and, possibly, cows. But just because I’ve got fields doesn’t mean I have any idea how to make them yield anything edible; only time will tell if my little veggie patch will be transformed into a victory garden or a plot of defeat. Throughout this first growing season I’ll be filing occasional reports on my progress, in the hopes that they will be instructional, entertaining or, ideally, both.

This first dispatch (not counting my recent experiment in micro-gardening, or growing sprouts) is about planning. While much of the country is well into gardening season, up here in the Adirondack Mountains we still have lingering piles of snow on the ground and below-freezing temperatures at night, so I won’t actually be sowing any seeds for weeks. This extra time means I have been able to do some research, but it also means I’ll have to get started as soon as weather permits if I hope to harvest anything before the first frost hits in September.

My research has included reading books and attending a three-part Vegetable Growing 101 series offered by my local office of Cornell Cooperative Extension. In some ways all this information has only served to increase my confusion and anxiety. So many more things can go wrong than I ever imagined—pests and blights and bad soil, oh my!—and no one seems to agree on the best way to do anything. One author swears by double-digging to allow for deep roots, and the next claims that raised beds are the way to go. What’s a novice to believe?

Finally, after I had grilled the class instructor about how, precisely, I should calculate the optimum amount of each vegetable to grow, my husband did the verbal equivalent of slapping a hysterical person across the face. “Stop over-thinking it,” he said. “It’s not brain surgery.”

He’s right, of course. No one’s going to starve if I make a false gardening move. If I grow too much, friends and neighbors will be happy to take some off my hands. In fact, one person in the class pointed out that many local food pantries gratefully accept fresh vegetables, which is a nice incentive to grow as much as I can manage.

If there’s one thing all sources seem to agree on, though, it’s that beginners should scale back their ambitions so they won’t be overwhelmed and discouraged. Taking this to heart, I scratched off about half of the veggies on my wish list (artichokes were a pretty frivolous idea up here anyway), finally deciding on a “starter kit” from High Mowing Organic Seeds that includes lettuce, cucumbers, green beans, basil, beets, peas, carrots and radishes. In addition I’ll buy tomato seedlings (without a grow light to start the seeds indoors before last frost, there’s no way to grow them in my area) and some additional herbs.

Sun, rain, voles, deer, Japanese beetles and powdery mildew willing, in a few months I’ll have an all-you-can-eat salad bar in my backyard—and a new hobby.

A period lunch in period costume. Image courtesy of Flickr user alh1.

Art and culture flourished throughout Europe during the Renaissance. It was the period when Michelangelo wielded his chisel, Galileo defied preconceived notions about the universe and William Shakespeare penned some of the most enduring dramatic works. It was also a period that saw the evolution of manners, as the article “Mind Your Manners” in the Spring 2011 issue of Folger magazine will attest. Manners were a response to the violence and crude behaviors run rampant in burgeoning cities and a means of reinforcing social order and distinguishing the privileged class from everyone else. A first generation of Miss Manners-es—typically men—took up the quill. And the newly defined codes of conduct were especially important at the dinner table.

Italy more or less led the cultural revolution, table manners included. Italian poet Giovanni della Casa advised in “Galateo,” his 1558 book on manners: “One should not comb his hair nor wash his hands in public… The exception to this is the washing of the hands when done before sitting down to dinner, for then it should be done in full sight of others, even if you do not need to wash them at all, so that whoever dips into the same bowl as you will be certain of your cleanliness.” To the modern reader, these attitudes toward public displays of personal cleanliness might seem a little over the top; however, considering that one’s hands were also one’s dining utensils, this sort of advice was of utmost importance. In his study on the social customs of this period, sociologist Norbert Elias noted that “In good society one does not put both hands into the dish. It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hand. … Forks scarcely exist, or at most for taking meat from the dish.”

That’s right: no forks. They were initially viewed as excessively refined or, in the case of men, a sign of effeminacy. The newfangled fork custom began in Italy and was a hit, but forks were slow to catch on in Northern Europe. The use of forks to get food from plate to mouth didn’t didn’t gain wide acceptance until the 17th century—and even then, only the well-to-do could afford them.

Utensils such as spoons were communally used—making the etiquette of eating soups a delicate matter. “If what is given is rather fluid,” Dutch theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam writes, “take it on a spoon for tasting and return the spoon after wiping it on a napkin.”

But in spite of trying to polish social customs, some human behaviors were deemed permissible at the dinner table. On farting, Erasmus writes, “If it is possible to withdraw, it should be done alone. But if not, in accordance with the ancient proverb, let a cough hide the sound.” Slick, no? However, lest you follow this example, modern manners maven Miss Conduct says that “civilized folk will protect others from any sounds or smells that may be displeasing.”

This is not to say that all Renaissance manners are outdated. On respecting fellow diners’ personal space, Giovanni Della Casa says, “It is also an unsuitable habit to put one’s nose over someone else’s glass of wine or food to smell it.” And again, from Erasmus: “It is rude to offer someone what you have half eaten yourself; it is boorish to redip half-eaten bread into the soup.” Anyone remember the “did you just double dip that chip” episode of Seinfeld? George Costanza was definitely a couple hundred years behind the etiquette curve. Even modern science shows that re-dipping partially-eaten foods is a great means of spreading bacteria. It certainly gives you an idea of what Renaissance society was trying to improve upon—and how far we’ve come since.

This month’s Inviting Writing challenge was to tell us about the most memorable meal of your life. We got a wide range of entries—stay tuned each Monday for a new one—and Erika Janik starts us off with a story about the best and worst of meals.

Janik is a Madison-based freelance writer, author, and a producer at Wisconsin Public Radio. Her web site is erikajanik.net and she writes a blog called “Curious About Everything.”

A view of Stratford-upon-Avon, courtesy of Flickr user chemicalbrother

Fed by Thugs

By Erika Janik

My most memorable meal came from a deep and abiding lack of good food. I was in London, in Europe for the first time, as a 20-year-old taking a course on British politics for a month. We spent three weeks in a cheap hotel near Kensington Palace, eating breakfast every morning and dinner every night in the subterranean hotel restaurant known as the Zebra Club.

Every morning we descended into the basement to the sounds of techno and roving colored lights on the dance floor. The Zebra Club clearly took its “club” designation seriously, morning or night, though I never saw anyone dancing. Breakfast was cold toast, served angrily by a man who doubled as the front desk attendant by night. Coming off an all-night shift, he finished his day at 8 a.m. by shoving cheap slices of store-bought bread onto one of those toaster conveyor belts common to cafeterias. He glared at me, daring me take a slice that he had slammed down. Often, he missed the plate and the errant toast would skitter across the crumb-covered tablecloth and onto the floor.

Other breakfast options included stale wheat flakes, worse than the store brand my roommates and I bought to save money back home, and stewed prunes that only old people in children’s stories seemed to love. There was also a pitcher of warm whole milk that tasted incredibly thick and strange to someone who’d had only two percent or skim milk before. We washed all of this down with weak coffee and pitchers of orange-colored but orange-flavor-less juice.

Breakfast was also when we selected which of the two dinner options we wanted. Everything, meat or pasta (and those were the two options all three weeks), came covered in a viscous, metallic-tasting sauce that was either pale red or highlighter yellow. Potatoes, carrots, everything tasted like I imagined the metal filings at the hardware store would taste. Failure to clean your plate—and I failed most nights—often resulted in a menacing visit from the tattooed Eastern European chef who came to my side with a chef’s knife in each hand and a maniacal grin. I’m sure he thought he was being funny, but his thick accent, torn shirt, and inked pictures of knives, blood, and pirates covering his arms somehow failed to make me laugh. Instead, I kept a careful watch on the kitchen doors, feeling nauseous each time they even so much as fluttered. I think I lost ten pounds.

So it was with extreme relief that I checked out of my room for our class road trip through several English towns for the final week of class. Our first stop was Stratford-upon-Avon, where we stayed in a half-timbered hotel straight out of a storybook. We trooped down to the hotel restaurant for dinner and were greeted with platters of food served family-style: plates of potatoes, broccoli, carrots, lamb, beef, bread, and fruit.

Nervously, I placed a single brown potato on my plate to start. I cut it open and took a tentative bite. Three weeks of the Zebra Club had made me fearful of food; I never thought that would happen. The first bite was amazing. It was the most delicious potato I had ever eaten simply because it tasted of nothing but potato. A tear ran down my cheek before I could wipe it away. I looked anxiously around to see if anyone had noticed. I felt ridiculous at my joy over something so simple, but extreme hunger for something familiar and pure can do that to a person. I had no trouble cleaning my plate several times over that night. My unintentional diet was over. And eleven years on, that meal remains one of the most memorable of my life.

A lemon, image courtesy of Flickr user Miss Muffin

In spring a Northerner’s fancy turns lightly to… anything other than the same old starchy winter vegetables I’ve been eating for months. I don’t remember if this used to happen to me when I lived in a snow-free climate, but now that I live up north the only things I’m craving more than balmy breezes and flowers at this time of year are bright, sunny flavors to perk up my palate. Lemon fits the bill nicely. Not only does it add zippy flavor to everything it touches, a bowlful of lemons doubles as both cheerful table decor and subtle home fragrance. I’ve never seen anyone use rutabagas as a centerpiece, and I’m pretty sure parsnip-scented dishwashing liquid would be a commercial flop.

Plus, lemons have been curing scurvy since the 1600s—and providing entertaining videos of pucker-face babies since at least the dawn of YouTube.

If life hands you lemons, say, “thank you,” and don’t limit yourself to lemonade. Here are five ideas:

1. Breakfast. The best time to wake up your taste buds is first thing in the morning, no? You could go sweet, topping your favorite morning bread product with lemon marmalade, a sophisticated alternative to orange. (If you’re going to make it yourself, you might want to hold out for Meyer lemons—they’re a little sweeter and have thinner, tenderer rind). Or try fluffy lemon-ricotta pancakes, which use only the zest (squeeze the juice to use later, or mix up some Bloody Marys, if it’s that kind of morning). If you’re more a savory breakfast type, go for the whole classic New York bagel schmear: cream cheese, lox, capers, red onions and thin lemon slices (tomatoes are also a possibility, if you can find good ones at this time of year).

2. Soup. A recent Inviting Writing essay (with recipe) by a reader who tried to perfect her mother-in-law’s avgolemono soup may have sparked my latest round of lemon obsession. The ultra-lemony soup is one of Greek cuisine’s many delicious uses of the citrus fruit. Lemon also brings lentil soup into new and exciting territory (a squirt of lemon juice can even—almost—rescue bland, over-salted canned lentil soup, I find).

3. Main dishes and sides. The possibilities here are endless—chicken or fish piccata (I like this variation using miso paste); lemon pizza; lemon risotto (Giada de Laurentiis serves it in a lemon cup, if cute presentations are your thing); sole meunière, the French dish that Julia Child said changed her life; and Lee Lum’s Lemon Chicken is one of the recipes I’ve been wanting to try from Amanda Hesser’s The Essential New York Times Cookbook (originally published in the paper in 1969), but I haven’t been able to find water chestnut flour.

4. Desserts. For people like me who like their sweets cut with some tartness, this is the category where lemon truly shines. Last year I made a lemon tart from Cook’s Illustrated that came out brilliantly, if I do say so myself (the link is blocked to non-subscribers, so you can sign up for a 14-day trial or try this one with a pine-nut crust, from Epicurious.). Nigella Lawson’s lemon polenta cake sounds good. And for the true lemon lover, Smitten Kitchen offers a recipe for Shaker lemon pie that uses macerated thinly sliced Meyer lemons, peel and all. Those Shakers sure had some interesting ideas for baked goods. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention an American classic, lemon meringue pie.

5. Drinks. Now, I’ve got nothing against lemonade, especially on a hot summer day. But why not at least jazz it up with basil, mint or—though I can’t advocate it—cilantro? It certainly wouldn’t be out of the question to add some vodka to any one of those concoctions. Even better, do as Tyler Florence does, and make icy lemon-ginger vodka cocktails or, if you can wait 80 days, make your own limoncello. And did I mention the Bloody Mary? Well, it bears repeating.