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  • SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine Online
    11/26/19

    A Brief History of the Crock-Pot

    Eighty years after it was patented, the Crock-Pot remains a comforting presence in American kitchens.

  • Five Hundred Years of Food in Theater and Movies

    by Bruce Chadwick

    Most of us go to the theater and the movies to see drama, action, sturdy heroes and despicable villains. Francine Segan goes for the food.Segan, a former school psychologist, is the author of six cookbooks, all connected to history, theater and opera and delivers talks on food and theater and movies around the country. I caught up with her recently at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, where she gives a half dozen talks each year on food in the movies and theater (she will be there again August 12 to talk about food and Shakespearean England).Segan, a delightful speaker with an easy charm and a walking encyclopedia of dining, discovered food on stage and in film years ago when she was watching a Shakespeare play.“I was fascinated by all the eating that went on in the plays,” the thin, black-haired speaker said at the gorgeous old Mahaiwe theater. “I thought about other plays and realized the same thing. Then I thought about movies. In movies, there is even more eating. Everybody thinks like I do. We all get intrigued by all the eating on film.”

  • SOURCE: Special to HNN
    7-10-13

    William Lambers: The Food Law That Changed the World

    William Lambers partnered with the UN World Food Programme on the book Ending World Hunger. He is a member of the Feeding America Blogger Council. Lots of laws gets signed in Washington D.C., but how many have saved millions of lives as the one inked by President Dwight Eisenhower on July 10, 1954? It was called Public Law 480 and with a title like that you might just skip over it and read about something else. But this law has another name: Food for Peace. It was started because there was so much food in the United States, it made sense to avoid costly storage and move it overseas where there were hungry people. This meant food for flood victims in Austria, earthquake relief in Chile, and school meals for millions of children in war-torn Japan and Italy. South Korea's road to recovery from its own war also included millions of school meals for children. India received the largest Food for Peace shipment ever including a food reserve to protect against natural disasters. Food for Peace was a way to continue the amazing humanitarianism of the United States so demonstrated following World War I and II when we fought famine in dozens of countries. Food for Peace was a continuation of the the Marshall Plan which rebuilt Europe after World War II.

  • SOURCE: The Scotsman (UK)
    6-21-13

    Is haggis actually from England?

    A RENOWNED food historian has claimed haggis is an English dish, whose Scottish origins are as “made up” as tartan.Peter Brears, 68, said that many traditional tartans were “invented”, claiming that haggis and tartan were both appropriated by Scots in order to revitalise the country’s national identity.“Haggis is a really good English dish,” said Brears, the author of Traditional Food In Northumbria.“The earliest recipes are from 1390 from a book called The Forme of Cury, which means ‘the art of cooking’....

  • SOURCE: Telegraph (UK)
    5-19-13

    New book shows Tommies ate well in WWI trenches

    In the BBC series Blackadder Goes Forth, Baldrick memorably described the finest culinary delight available in the trenches of the First World War as “rat-au-van” – rat that had been run over by a van. In fact, new research suggests the standard of fare on offer to the men on the Western Front was, if perhaps repetitive, at least nutritious, plentiful and, on occasions, flavoursome.Andrew Robertshaw, curator at the Royal Logistic Corps Museum, has produced a guide to the food eaten by British soldiers of the First World War, complete with recipes for some of the meals.Although there was no rat-au-van, there were some now largely forgotten dishes, such as beef tea, mutton broth, brawn, potato pie and duff pudding.But Mr Robertshaw also shows how some modern favourites, such as egg and chips, and curry were popularised by the conflict.The research, contained in a new book Feeding Tommy, involved an investigation of the archives of the RLC – the successor to the Army Service Corps, whose job it was to feed the men – as well as study of memoirs from serving soldiers....