Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 099

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  • The Washington Post’s intrepid Rome reporters recently filed a long story about Italy’s equally intrepid parmesan police. It is a good piece, as far as it goes.
  • A tweet from Rachel Laudan alerted me to a conversation about food processing and food safety between Anna Zeide and Robert Shewfelt (start here).
  • A massive EU study looked into the DNA of 487 different kinds of wheat. Results support the current view of its evolution, and also offer some surprising insights into its recent history.

Longer — much longer — version here (and while you’re there, consider subscribing).

Podcasts

Eating Alone Sometimes, you just have to do it

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banner image table set for one

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:15 — 14.8MB)

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person listening to table for one audio in marqueeAt the beginning of April, during the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival, a little marquee in the main square of Kilfinane, a small mountain village, saw a steady stream of visitors enter. They would put on a pair of headphones, listen for a few minutes, and come out beaming a big smile. They had just heard one of the stories in a specially curated installation called Table for One.

After listening to one of the stories myself, I was inspired to reflect on my own thoughts about eating alone, and that prompted me to buttonhole people as they came out of the marquee.

This is the result.

Notes

  1. Huge thanks to Lucy Dearlove for creating the Table for One stories. You can easily hear the four of them on Audioboom, and they were also part of her regular food podcast, Lecker.
  2. In addition to Lucy Dearlove, the voices included those of Marije Schuurman Hess, Aislinn Stembridge, Mair Bosworth, Tom Fisher, Mike Williams and Diarmuid O’Leary. Many of them make wonderful audio themselves. Thanks to them all.
  3. I really mean it about wanting to hear your thoughts on eating alone. WikiHow offers outline instructions for iPhone, Android and Windows phones, and there are lots of other tutorials around.

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Extra Matter

Big beer may not be beautiful

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Beer-drinkers in the UK who thought that consolidation and “crafty” brews were an evil to be found only in the USA will be distressed by news in today’s Guardian: British craft beer boom stalls as big drinks companies muscle in. The paper says that only eight new breweries opened in the UK in the past 12 months, compared to 390 in the year before. And, of course, small breweries – Camden Town Brewery, Dark Star and Beavertown among them – have been bought for big sums. Buyer beware.

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 098

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Longer version here (and while you’re there, consider subscribing).

Extra Matter

A Roman haroset

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We eat a sort of jam called charoset . … There are a lot of different recipes. … It’s made with dates, figs, walnuts, olives, and bitter herbs. Anyway, the last dish is charoset, boiled egg, bitter greens, lettuce, a piece of celery and a prayer is said for everyone.

That’s from Karima Moyer-Nocchi’s book The Eternal Table: a cultural history of food in Rome, in her treatment of Roman-Jewish cuisine.[1] Of course I’m seeing haroset everywhere I look these days, not just because of the time of the year; it is a traditional – although not required – dish on the Passover table. The recipe is clearly Sephardic in origin, although I have not heard olives mentioned in this context before. And no mention of ground terracotta or bits of brick, which at one time Italian Jews did include.

  1. I imagine the translation is her own.  ↩