• View
• Edit
• Page History
• All Recent Changes
• Print

Darlas Blog

Food Blog:

The blog "Chocolate and Zucchini" (www.chocolateandzucchini.com) is written by a late twenties Parisian woman named Clotilde Dusoulier who loves to cook. It is in the style of a lot of other food blogs out there; she writes about her experiences cooking certain dishes, gives recipes, writes about restaurants and such, but she puts an emphasis on fresh, organic, local and artisanal products. Her website has been so successful that she has even published some books. She has never had formal training; all of her knowledge is learned from her mother or self-taught, which gives a homey feel to the cooking she describes. Her writing style is explorative, witty, fun and she always seems to have something interesting and useful to say, rather than ranting about how much she loves food. Most of the photographs of food items are taken by her (which are all beautiful). She encourages one to explore food for themselves, and you can't help but get really excited about it.

In one entry, she discusses how to make herbal tea an exciting endeavor:

"I know, I know, herbal tea can be frightfully boring, and just uttering the words -- whether you say "herbal tea," or "tisane," or "infusion" -- can make you feel about a hundred years old.

However, I have found that, just like vitamins can be added back to nutrient-stripped processed foods, the fun can be added back to the tisane by the simple process of mixing your own blend -- think of it as designing your own fragrance, yes?

...

Try it sometime, and once you've experimented and designed your signature blend, would it not make the perfect homemade gift for your friends, especially the ones who own fluffy slippers and a matching cat?"

Letter to the Editor:

Thank you for your series of articles about keeping your own homestead chickens. I now have a raised awareness about the benefits of eating truly pasture-raised eggs.

I am a university student and I am currently in a course about Artisan Food and the Slow Food movement. As a class, we have been cooking lunch together every day using food that is sourced usually within 10 miles of our campus in Fairfield, Iowa. Between this class and your articles about pasture-raised eggs, I have realized how there are not as many local, "farmstead" egg producers as I would like to see in our area.

Your articles have inspired me to start a flock of my own. For my senior project in our university's unique Sustainable Living program, I am planning to construct a hay bale hen house that I am designing. I will sell the eggs all locally at the Farmer's Market and local stores. I feel that the more people that begin to provide delicious, sustainably-raised, local food in a given area, the faster people will become aware of the benefits of buying local. They will understand that "buying local" is not an inconvenient, expensive and "elitest" thing to do; they will understand how good it feels to know the hands and the land that grow the fresh food that they eat everyday.

Book Report:

"The Food of France" by Waverly Root

This book dives fearlessly into everything about French food. It puts a special emphasis on the development of French cooking based on the geography, history and economy of each area.

It starts out by discussing the three different "schools" of cooking in France: those that cook with butter, those that cook with animal fats (mainly goose and pig) and those that cook with olive oil. The school of butter, in the more northern part of the country around Ile-de-France (which includes Paris) over to Normandy and also up to the very northeast by Belgium, is like the Dutch way of cooking in using lots of butter. The German style of cooking with more animal fats continues from the east toward the middle belt of France. And finally, in the south where the olive trees flourish, and the cooking turns more Italian and Mediterranean is the school of olive oil. As Root points out in the book, France seems to be an intersection point for all these diverse schools of cooking, and seems to produce the best possible result out of any and all of them.

The book then continues to systematically discuss each region of France including its historical background (not just of food, but of all areas), its geographical setting, the dishes common to that area, how they developed and why. It becomes very apparent to the reader that the food of a culture not only is developed and evolved from all possible aspects of an area, but also helps to shape it and its people.

Excerpt from "The Food of France" pp. 5 through 9

The most obvious of the interrelationships between a country and its cooking is the construction of its menu in accord with the sort of food the land naturally provides. One of the most fundamental divisions in types of cooking is between that of countries where the basic cereal is rice and those where it is some grain like wheat or maize, most readily usable in the form of flour. The building up of a cuisine about one or the other was originally, of course, a matter not of choice, but of what nature could best furnish. The presence or absence of fish or game, of certain fruits or specific vegetables, is too patent an influence to need mentioning. Sometimes the influences are less apparent. For instance, is the fact that American cooking tends to be sweet a partial result of the use by American Indians of maple sugar instead of salt to season their food?

The effect of the soil and the climate on foods which bear the same name in different places, but may produce quite diverse effects on the palate, is a rather more subtle example °f the kinship between place and kitchen—the ecological relationship, I suppose you might call it, between geography and cuisine. Winegrowers are extremely careful about the variety of grapes they plant, but it seems to be the fact nevertheless that the nature of the soil, the exposure of the vineyards, the amount of sun, and the dosage of rain, have much more to do with the taste of the finished product than has the parentage of the grape. When phylloxera dev¬astated the vineyards of France, immune vines from Cali¬fornia were brought in to replace them. The wine from the grapes which stayed at home and that from those which emigrated are far apart now. In France, the Californian vines became Gallicized. There is a theory that some regions make fine beer and other produce only an execrable brew because of differences in the local water. The water that cattle drink is also some¬times held to affect the quality of cheese made from their milk. Everyone knows the effect on the taste of meat of the sort of pasture available. Some of the most prized mutton in France is obtained from sheep that graze on the salt tidal marches along the seashore—the pres sales, which is the name you will find on the restaurant menu when meat from these animals is served. I once raised myself, on a farm in Vermont, a pair of pigs each of which consumed two twelve-quart pails of apples twice daily for the last two months of its life. I have never tasted better pork. It had a faint flavor of the fruit—built-in applesauce.

When the land gives its savor to the food it often also gives it its name. The most basic foods tend to be known by the names of the regions they come from. Everywhere in Europe the workman or the peasant fills his lunchbox with bread, cheese, sausage, and wine. Bread, probably be¬cause its (sometimes) simple and undiversified nature causes it to spread over a wide area, is less likely to bear a place name than the other components of the worker's lunch, though we do speak of French bread and Vienna bread. But for wine, cheese, and sausage, it is the rule that the name of the food is the name of the place that gave it birth. This was almost inevitable for wine, the flavor of which depends so closely upon the place where it is grown that to name the place is to describe the wine. Anyone who drinks wine regularly can tell a Burgundy from a Bordeaux. Connoisseurs can tell you from what community an un¬known wine comes. Expert sommeliers will locate the par¬ticular plot of ground within the community which pro¬duced a given bottle.

Most cheese names are place names: Limburger, Cheddar, Gruyere, Parmesan, and Roquefort, products of five differ¬ent countries, all point to the localities where they origi¬nated. Sausage usually carries the label of its birthplace even when it is imitated in foreign countries which have forgotten that the frankfurter was invented in Frankfort and boloney in Bologna. The cousin of the sausage, ham, is also apt to be tagged with the name of the place it comes from—Virginia, Parma, York, Westphalia. These are all place names, owing in large degree to the local variations nature has imposed upon universally known foods, rather than to the particular type of processing the food has under¬gone. More artificial are the place names that identify an elaborate dish with the locality that applied a special treat¬ment to it—on French menus, for instance, you will find duck offered in the style of Nantes', of Alsace, of Bordeaux, of Nimes, and, above all, of Rouen (I have a cookbook that lists twenty-four ways of preparing duck, all ascribed to Rouen).

There is a point at which a geographical and an economic factor come together to determine the type of food of a region—a poor country, whether poor in money or in soil, will tend to eat the foods that produce the greatest output for the least input. The favorite vegetable in poor regions is likely to be the bulky potato, with which a good chef can perform miracles, but which in general does not en-courage refinement in cooking, or the turnip, sometimes in very lowly forms indeed. The goat, which can live on pasture which would starve a sheep, tends to replace that animal. Instead of cattle, you find the hog, a most efficient machine for making the most meat out of the least and most unpromising material. And in poor country, poultry means geese—for while it takes four pounds of grain to put one pound of meat on a turkey and three pounds of grain to put one pound of meat on a chicken, it takes only two thirds of a pound of grain to raise a pound of goose. In warm climates, the whole nature of many national cuisines has been shaped by the fact that the olive tree grows on poor soils. Nature determines not only what the menu shall consist of in any given region, but often as well what selection will be made from the various possibilities and how they will be prepared.

Eating habits are likely to be a result of climate. When I was a boy in New England, I thought nothing of starting the day with a breakfast of steak, fried potatoes, and mince pie, in the winter at least. I would not do it now, and I doubt if anyone does, even those who, at today's prices, can afford a breakfast steak. Those were also the days of winter underwear ending at the ankles and the wrists. The climate of New England, in spite of certain periods when it has been difficult to believe that this is true, has been growing milder for the past fifty years, and central heating has become more general and more efficient. It is no longer necessary to be padded against the cold inside the skin as well as outside. In the constantly damp climate of the British Isles, though the temperature may be higher, the humid chill penetrates, and there the heavy breakfast still holds its own. The weather of Scotland demands oatmeal. The Dutch, also ex¬posed to damp and chill, eat diets heavy in fat (and still wear long underwear), and so do the Germans back from the coasts in the area of typical continental climate. But nearer the Atlantic coast, and of course all around the Mediterranean, where the more equable seaside tempera¬tures prevail, you have the Continental breakfast of crois¬sants and coffee and a cuisine that makes more sparing use of fats, or at least of animal fats, and of sugar.

The mention of fats brings us to another of the great di¬viding lines of cookery. We have noted that one boundary is drawn between the realms of two types of cereal—that of flour and that of rice. Rice is dominant, in general, in Asia and North Africa; flour is dominant in Europe. Within this cereal boundary, Europe (disregarding an Oriental in¬filtration in the southeastern corner) boasts three main schools of cooking, and this time the boundaries are marked in terms of fats. The Continent is divided among the do¬mains of butter, of lard, and of olive oil. One reason, though not the most important one, for the supremacy of French cooking may be that within her national boundaries France has large areas devoted to each of the three types of cooking founded on these three types of fat. Though each area tends to adhere most faithfully to its own school, none is unaware of the others. Thus at the outset French cooking is gifted with the great asset of variety.

Iowa City Trip: I enjoyed hearing Devotay owner speak about his start-up of the restaurant and how it started out as a store selling food items and then it gradually mutated into a restaurant because that's what people wanted. It goes to show you need to be flexible and willing to go with the flow when it comes to business, especially ones directly involved with your customers individual satisfaction. The young man who spoke about his experience working at bakeries in France was also very enlightening. It is obviously a different mode of functioning in that country where their society not only supports but demands bakers that must live that kind of lifestyle in order to produce the quality that the public requires. Here, not so much. Because we are a different culture. It was also interesting to see how local wineries are springing up in Iowa all over. The real questions are, is the wine actually good? Is it just a sorry excuse for a new fad in Iowa? The wine-makers seem to think not. They seem to be proud of their product as could be because they are not trying to replicate greatness, they are trying to create it anew. But it is nice to know, for those Iowans that love wine, but also love local food, that they don't have to go dry to stay on the 100 mile diet.