Opening a bottle of wine seems such a simple affair. But, in fact, corkscrews are not at all ordinary. They are marvels of mechanical ingenuity, vulgar representations of erotic delight, and useful pocket tools.
About Joseph Tobin
Issues | Summer 2001
My Life and Loaves; Crops, Genes, and Evolution; Vegetable Paper; Food for the Bawdy; Food Patterns in Agrarian Societies; Professor Blot and The First French Cooking School in New York (Part 2); The Corkscrew; Collapsible Table; The Land of Milk and Honey; Table Service; Chocolat; Why . . . the taste of sake?; The Culture of Food in Shakespeare’s Day; and more…
From the Editor |
Something Provocative for Everyone
In this issue you’ll encounter the work of an art historian, an anthropologist, a nutritionist, a biologist, a French professor, a visual artist, a Renaissance scholar, a baker, even a culinary historian.
Chef's Page | La Locanda del Coccio; Providence, Rhode Island
A simple dish of mutton and peas baked in terracotta in an Abruzzese farmhouse marked the beginning of my journey into the history of clay-pot cookery.
Archive | Emile Zola’s Portrait of Les Halles
Zola made these notes for his 1872 novel, Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris). A friend and champion of the Impressionists, he modeled his character, the painter Claude Lantier, after Paul Cézanne, and in fact his preliminary notes resemble an artist’s sketchbook.
Issues | Spring 2001
Mangled Menus; Farmland, Farms, Farming, and Farmers; Christopher Columbus, Gonzalo Pizarro, and the Search for Cinnamon; An Italian Confectioner in London; Professor Blot and the First French Cooking School in New York (Part 1); Emile Zola’s Portrait of Les Halles; Reflections on Cultural Food Colonialism; Chinese Spring Green Tea; and more…
From the Editor |
The Spoon, Not the Scepter
How odd to be writing a second letter before the first issue of Gastronomica has appeared! But such is the timing of publishing. It’s a lot like writing for a time capsule, not knowing how future readers will react, but feeling sure that the world will have changed by the time these words are read.
Chef's Page | Seafood Restaurant; Padstow, Cornwall, England
Once a year in may, the market traders of Dieppe take the ferry to Newhaven and set up their stalls in Bartholomew Square in Brighton, just off the sea front between the Palace and West piers.
Culture Shock | My McDonald’s
My first encounter with McDonald’s was like a sitcom episode. A young and energetic émigré from Moscow, I arrived in Boston in 1981. By a stroke of good fortune I managed to get a job at an architectural firm, even though I could barely speak—let alone understand—basic English.
From the Editor |
Food Studies Come of Age
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture aims to renew this connection between sensual and intellectual nourishment by bringing together many diverse voices in the broadest possible discourse on the uses, abuses, and meanings of food.
