Cheese pulls are fired. Fussy glassware is fired. Oversalting is fired. Gramming every meal you eat is extremely fired!!!!!!!!
You won’t see it on your social feed, but my favorite ballast to the hyperbasic food media scene of late has been a little journal called Petits Propos Culinaires (“Little things about food”).
Published triannually, PPC consists of “essays and notes to do with food cookery and cookery books,” as it’s advertised in the first issue. Each is a completely unsexy volume of mostly text (set in a single typeface) dealing with centuries, sometimes millennia, of minutiae about food history and culture. Unsexy, minus the demurely offbeat covers. I drool over them, especially the older ones.
I love that PPC is unabashedly erudite, deeply curious, lustfully gustatory, and in search of meaning in food—wonderful at a time when we often feel there’s little meaning to be had. Picture an approachable, jaunty academic journal, the mission of which is to understand why we cook the way we do… but edited by Niles Crane.
A sampling of essays from issues I have:
“Good Hay, Sweet Hay”
“The Technology of Cooking in the British Isles, 1600 to 1950—Part I: Before the Use of Gas”
“Crayfish à la Bordelaise”
“Zukanda and Other Delicacies: haute cuisine in the days of Hammurabi”
“A Nuanced Apology to Rotted Barley”
“Vegetable Candy”
“The Bagel and its Origins — Mythical, Hypothetical, and Undiscovered”
“Aztec Cuisine, Part III”
Issue 51 explains the cover image: "The explanation of this striking image ... lies in the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. Some high and precipitous cliffs on the largest island provide nesting grounds for certain sea-birds whose eggs are prized by the islanders. The traditional way of obtaining them is to lower a rope ladder down the cliff face. ... The egg-gatherer climbs down it, wearing a protective wicker helmet to prevent injury to his face from jagged rock or form the enraged mother bird." (p. 4)
PPC was originally a project of two British historians who also started the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (exactly what it sounds like) in 1979. For fellow Britain-based heads of the era like Claudia Roden, Elizabeth David, Sri Owen, etc., the symposium appears to have functioned as a collective brain, in which curiosities about food (see “Science, Tradition and Superstition in the Kitchen,” 1985) marinated in the form of papers, potlucks, and hearty debate. PPC seems to (still) be the mouth sharing that knowledge with the wider world.
I first read about PPC in this great Apartamento interview (the video is also good) with Charles Perry, alternately a scholar on medieval Arabic cuisine, the Rolling Stone “dope editor,” a Los Angeles Times food writer, and a PPC contributor throughout his life.
If you’d like to sample PPC, a single issue is pretty cheap ($8-$15), especially IRL, and it’ll last you a while. You can get them directly from the publisher or at the great cookbook stores of the world (NYers: I got a few at Kitchen Arts & Letters, and I believe Bonnie Slotnick has a whole set if you’re enamored and loaded). Sometimes they pop up on eB*y.
Savor it, and as a treat on the way out, enjoy this gnarly 18th-century recipe for viper soup:
Take Vipers, alive, and skin them, and cut off their Heads; then cut them in pieces, about two Inches in length, and boil them, with their Hearts, in about a Gallon of Water to eight Vipers, if they are pretty large. Put into the Liquor a little Pepper and Salt, and a Quart of White Wine to a Gallon of Liquor; then put in some Spice, to your mind, and chop the following Herbs, and put into it: Take some Chervill, some white Beet-Cards or Leaves, some Hearts of Cabbage-Lettuce, a shallot, some Spinach-Leaves, and some Succory. Boil these, and let them be tender; then serve it up hot, with a French Roll in the middle, and garnish with the raspings of Bread sifted, and slices of Lemon.
— from a recipe by a Mr. Ganeau, reprinted in Jennifer Stead’s “Viper Soup, Viper Broth, Viper Wine,” Petits Propos Culinaires 51, 1995. (12)
love,
Alex
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SOON… computing was almost really different (or: software for stoners) …… how to eat well at home with ease …… a lost publication by Japanese streetwear nerds, found …… FINALLY, a really great way to eat a pomegranate
