Luisa WeissIt can be hard to remember the food blogs of yesteryear, when everyone knew everyone and the actual recipes were usually easy to find, unencumbered by endless cruft. Luisa Weiss discovered blogs relatively early, and soon became one of the most-read food bloggers. She was also part of a lively, supportive community, regularly reading and conversing with more than 40 other food bloggers. One thing led to another and she found herself first in cookbook publishing and then with a contract to write her first book, a memoir with food. Two cookbooks followed. We met in Berlin to talk about all that and more.

Notes

1. Here’s a link to Luisa Weiss’ website.
2. She also, and this is both impressive and useful, managed to salvage all of the original The Wednesday Chef when it’s original host, Typepad, decided to close everyone down earlier this year.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Banner image liberated from an archive copy of The Wednesday Chef.

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Robert Spengler IIISettled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand the origin of civilisations. The general view is that humans actively domesticated plants and animals, selecting the traits that made them more reliable producers of food. What if that’s all wrong? What if the traits that mark domestication are not the result of selection but instead an inevitable evolutionary response to changes in the environment? Changes wrought by humans, to be sure, but unconsciously and without any forethought.

That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III.

Notes

1. Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity is published by University of California Press.
2. If you want more details but less than a book, Seeking consensus on the domestication concept by Spengler and colleagues is part of a journal issue devoted to domestication. There’s also the Spengler Lab website.
3. Here’s the transcript.
4. Image of a Neolithic sickle from the Museum Quintana

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The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited the other to teach and to learn, a series of exchanges documented by Maria Fedorova, assistant professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, in a new book called Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.

Apart from food aid and medical assistance from the US, the exchanges included material goods, like seeds and tractors, as well as information and experience, and were motivated as much by ideology and politics as by pressing humanitarian concerns.

Notes

1. Maria Fedorova’s book is Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.
2. Seeds as Technology: The Russian Agricultural Bureau in New York and Soviet Agricultural Modernization, 1921–26 gives more information about Vavilov and Borodin’s organisation, while The Untold Story of “Radical Relief” to Soviet Russia has more on the American Tractor Unit.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Podcast artwork from Бельтюков В. Public Domain.

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In 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but as far afield as New Zealand.

That after-hours dish became the spice bag, and in many ways the story of the spice bag is the story of assimilation, innovation and widespread adoption that can be told about so many “immigrant” foods. The spice bag emigrated, came back home, and found new modes of expression among communities who took the same basic essentials on which to layer their own particular tastes of home.

Notes

1. I met John Mulcahy at the Food and Drink as Education Conference, which he helped to organise.
2. John Mulcahy’s paper “A is for Aircháelán”: the case for compiling a compendium of food in Ireland offers a taste of the breadth and depth of information he has compiled.
3. Here is the transcript.

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After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook the dish, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or maybe there is.

Marieke Hendriksen of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and her colleagues recently published a paper outlining a procedure for approaching the taste of the past rigorously. After a thorough analysis of early cookbooks as well as medical texts and botanical treatises from the Low Countries, they settled on an apple pie from the 1669 De Verstandige kock.

Dough
Take wheat flour, butter, rosewater, sugar and some eggs, of each as needed.

To make an apple pie the Wallonian way
Take peeled apples the cores removed cook them in Rhenish wine well done, add butter, ginger, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, all cooked well together, then stir in the yolks of two eggs put it in your dough and bake in the Oven as above [i.e. “with fire from below and above”].

After all the analysis and experimentation, though, there’s only one thing to do: taste the end result.

Notes

1. The published paper is Tasting the Past? Developing a Methodology for Researching Historical Tastes in Global Food History, which is behind a paywall, but …
2. Here is the transcript.
3. Banner photo courtesy Marieke Hendriksen. Cover photo detail from Still Life with Fruit Pie and various Objects, by Willem Claesz. Heda 1634, from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. This one has a lid, and may not be apple, but that’s OK.

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Naomi Duguid is a writer, home cook and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a world traveller and has converted her experiences into a series of glorious books, part cookbook, part culinary anthropology, wholly fascinating. Her latest, The Miracle of Salt, is no exception. Recipes for everything from Acadian salted scallions to zucchini in golden sand sauce (for which you’ll first need to make some brined egg yolks) are seasoned with chapters on flavoured salts, salt harvesting techniques, the geography of salt and plenty more. About the only thing we deliberately didn’t talk about was lacto-fermentation, although there’s plenty of that too.

Notes

1. The Miracle of Salt is available at bookshop.org and elsewhere.
2. Naomi Duguid’s website.
3. A few years ago we talked about Exploring the World through Food.
4. Here’s a transcript, thanks to supporters of the podcast
5. Banner photograph by me, of the salt flats in Trapani, Sicily.

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The human remains at Neumark Nord, a Neanderthal site in Germany, are around 125,000 years old. Those at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) – aka the Body Farm – in Tennessee, a lot less. What connects them is a remarkable new explanation for the high nitrogen isotope ratios in Neanderthal remains. Normally, such high ratios are the result of eating lots of meat. John Speth thinks there’s a better interpretation.

Speth is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He’s an expert on how hunter-gatherer societies survive, now and in the recent past, and that makes him a valued colleague of archaeologists trying to interpret the remains of Neanderthal societies. At the start of the summer, he was a co-author on two papers that shed light on Neanderthal diets. One identified the site at Neumark Nord as a fat factory where people extracted valuable bone grease in quantity. The other offers a more convincing explanation for why Neanderthals seem to eat as much meat as lions and tigers.

Notes

1. The two papers we talked about are Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago and Neanderthals, hypercarnivores, and maggots: Insights from stable nitrogen isotopes. Science also had an interview with Melanie Beasley, who did the maggot work, on its podcast.
2. And the previous episodes with John Speth are Neanderthal Diets, a very early episode about how Neanderthals might have boiled starches, and It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you, the paper that prompted Melanie Beasley to measure the nitrogen isotopes of maggots.
3. Here’s the transcript.
4. If you’re wondering why the banner is an old and extremely inaccurate reconstruction of a Neanderthal, the Field Museum, a worthy institution to be sure, makes its images available only from Getty Images, which charges through the nose. I hope they’re both happy with that arrangement.

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Dr Joseph GoldbergerPellagra — a terrible disease characterised by the four Ds: dermatitis, diarrhoea, dementia and death — was first noticed in northern Spain in 1735 and in Italy soon afterwards. Physicians had no idea what to do about it. They established that it was a new disease, and quickly worked out that it was something to do with maize and that it seemed to afflict only very poor people. In Italy, sharecroppers grew and ate maize at the expense of any vegetables. And in the southern US, workers in mill towns subsisted on ground maize imported from the midwest because all the local land was down to cotton.

The struggle to understand the causes of pellagra and how to cure and prevent it played out first in Italy and then in the United States, where 1906 saw a large outbreak in Alabama. Competing explanations were driven by large egos and expediency rather than evidence. That was true even after Dr Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service proved that the disease was not contagious and that the deficiency could be quickly reversed with a proper daily diet or a tablespoon of dried yeast.

Notes

1. Pellagra and Pellagrous Insanity During the Long Nineteenth Century, by David Gentilcore and Egidio Priani is available under open access
2. Dana Landress recently published Famished for Freedom: Pellagra and Medical Clemency at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
3. I consulted loads of other publications; let me know if you want a source for anything.
4. Photograph of Joseph Goldberger from the Library of Congress.
5. Here is the transcript.

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Alessandro Biavati, chef. Quite by chance, I booked a brief cycling holiday at an agriturismo based on a farm that is home to Quin Italia, an enterprise that aims to be the first supply chain for certified organic quinoa grown in Italy. The food at the agriturismo was excellent, as it usually is, but there were only two items on the menu that featured quinoa: a beer and a plate of deep fried croquettes that owed more to chickpeas than to quinoa. That was just one of the points I raised with Alessandro Biavati, chef and part-owner of Agrilocanda val Campotto.

Notes

1. Both the agriturismo and Quin Italia offer a lot more information on their websites.
2. Just in case anyone in Italy wants to support cycling, here’s the website for FIAB.
3. There’s a transcript, of course, with thanks to supporters of the podcast.

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Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but that doesn’t stop even qualified people from selling all kinds of snake oil. In this episode, I chatted with Tara Schmidt, a registered dietitian and lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet. We talked about fad diets, and how they are inevitably unsustainable. About weight-loss drugs and whether they are being oversold. About the frustration she feels faced with bad advice, and how the Mayo Clinic’s caution may make it slow, but also makes it sure. About her dismay faced with questions about singular foods and singular nutrients. I learned a lot.

Notes

1. Tara Schmidt hosts the podcast On Nutrition from the Mayo Clinic Press.
2. I was fascinated to discover how many official dietary guidelines exist, though I should have pursued my question further. I’m interested in why people don’t meet them, not whether they could if they wanted to.
3. Here is the transcript, with thanks to all supporters.
4. Here is my episode on Fad diets. There may be some others in the section of related links below, although the thingie that does that has been playing up. You can always search for “diets”.

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Puglia is massive. I mean that quite literally, not as youthspeak, though that too. Its northernmost point is actually north of my home in Rome, though admittedly not by very much, which is strange when you consider that for most people, Puglia is only the high heel itself. That’s true for me and for several past episodes here.

A new book that explores the whole province, and more particularly its food and ingredients, flashed through my feeds a few weeks ago. After just a quick look at the contents it seemed obvious that my next move ought to be to hop on a train to Polignano a Mare to talk to the author, Flavia Giordano. So that’s exactly what I did. It was a long day, and entirely worthwhile.

Notes

1. Flavia Giordano’s book is Puglia: A cooking journey through a land and its unique ingredients, and the simplest way to get hold of a copy is to join Flavia for a tour or a class, easily booked from her website. Of course, you should also follow her on Instagram.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. The banner image is from an early 16th century Turkish Book on Navigation and shows the town of Bari and part of the surroundings, from the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Cover artwork, Puglia’s colourful carrots, by me.

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