Right now I’m in the midst of preparing to cook a feast this weekend, doing some new research, updating some old research, and learning a few new tricks. These are some bits and pieces for now and next Thursday I will post pictures of the feast along with the recipes/interpretations for the course that I was responsible for.
Feast
I was invited to prepare a course of a feast that my mentor is heading up and was given the instructions that I needed to come up with one main course, two side courses, and a surprise. I was gifted 40 lbs of boar for my course and decided that I was going to do Low Country food, specifically from “Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen” (Netherlands, ca. 1510 – C. van Tets, trans.).
The surprise will have to be a surprise, let’s just say that I was inspired by illusion food and some lovely little hearts stamped out of edible gold that I found.
New Research
This semester I’m taking a British History pre-1600 class and one of our required texts is “The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages
I did a first quick read-through and am now going back to do some additional in-depth reading with the intent of developing a class on the material.
Revisiting Old Research
It has been years since I took a look at the research that I did into Frisian food about six years ago and it’s high time that I looked into it. Since then there has been a lot discovered and it needs to be read and my thoughts need to be re-assessed in the light of new information. I’m not planning to move on this quickly and may be what I do during winter break this year.
Things that caught my eye
Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years (from the New York Times)
Ghost Food (from Edible Geography)
New Tricks
I registered to audit a class that starts on 8 October 2013 and I’m really excited about it. Thankfully I can do things at my pace because I will be squeezing this into the cracks where I don’t already have work, school, and my family.
Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science
Top chefs and Harvard researchers explore how everyday cooking and haute cuisine can illuminate basic principles in physics and engineering, and vice versa.
