Category Archives: in the news

Four Pounds Flour Featured on Serious Eats

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Recipe testing Warm vanilla cakes, photo by Jaya Saxena.

There’s a lovely article about me on Serious Eats! Reporter Jaya Saxena shadowed me on a day of recipe testing (for the book…everything for the book…) and I’m charmed by her write-up. We had a lot of fun.

Excerpt below, read it all here!

“Historic Gastronomist” is a title Lohman came up with to describe her mission of discovering American history through food, and using those findings to illuminate our current eating habits. “Molecular gastronomists, or modernists, use modern technology to advance cuisine and our knowledge of food,” she explains. “I use history.”

In the News: NOTABLE EDIBLES: The Cheese Stands Alone

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Clare Burson and I were written up in Edible Manhattan this month for the Silver & Ash Dinner concert we did last spring.  It’s a lovely piece, focusing on the source of our inspiration, a 100-year-old piece of cheese, passed down through Clare’s family.
Clare’s got an album coming out; I’ve heard it.  It’s perfectly sad and reflective.  It drops September 14th; join us for the release party at Joe’s Pub.
In themeantime, read the Edible article here.

In the News: Meat, Meat, MEAT

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A pig’s head made from newspaper, wire mesh, and clay.  Not your grade school craft project. (historicfauxfood.com)

Head’s up! The Brooklyn Beefsteak is back February 20th.  Stay tuned into their blog for updates here, and read my write up of their fall event here.

The New Age Cavemen and the City:  A group of New Yorkers swear by the Paleo Diet, which involves eating and exercising like a caveman. (nytimes)

Historic Faux Foods: “Sandy Levins researches the foodways of bygone eras to create historically-accurate individual faux foods as well as entire period table and room settings. ” Rendered in astounding accuracy–check out her website.

In The News: Historic Gastronomy ‘Round the World

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From December 27th – January 3rd, the Hampton Court Palace kitchens in London will be open to the public and cooking up historic Tudor cuisine:

“The Tudor kitchens at Hampton Court Palace are famous throughout the world for being those of King Henry VIII.

In fact they continued to be used as Royal Court kitchens for a further two hundred years, feeding the tables of Tudor, Stuart and Georgian monarchs and their many courtiers…For the last five years, they have been home to a fascinating research project run by Historia food archaeologists who regularly bring the kitchens to life experimenting with traditional recipes, ingredients and cooking methods to prepare feasts fit for a king!”

The New York Times follows in the footsteps of famous French gourmand Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, and takes us on a culinary journey through 19th century Paris

“Starting in 1803, Grimod, whose family fortune had largely been lost during the Revolution, financed his voracious appetite by writing a series of best-selling guidebooks to the culinary wonders of Paris — its famous delicatessens, pâtissiers and chocolatiers — including the first reviews of an alluring new institution called le restaurant…One of the most exciting things about the Almanachs is that they include detailed gastronomic walking tours of Paris, called “nutritional itineraries” — each one a vivid window onto the past.”

Grimod’s favorite chocolate, Debauve & Gallais, can be acquired this side of the Atlantic at their shop in New York City.

Cooking with the Caliphs analyzes a medieval cookbook from “the court of 9th century Baghdad”:

“A little over a thousand years ago, an Arab scribe wrote a book he titled Kitab al-Tabikh (The Book of Recipes)… The book has come down to our time in three manuscripts and fragments of a fourth—and what a treasure it is. These are the dishes actually eaten by the connoisseurs of Baghdad when it was the richest city in the world.”

The recipes in the article sound amazing. They’re fascinating because they use ingredients common to 19th century American cooking, like citron and rosewater. I think I’m going to have an ancient Middle Eastern dinner party before too long.

In the News: Bring Back Butter!

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Through my experiments in historic gastronomy, I have come to appreciate the beauties of butter, particularly when it’s fresh from the churn.

Apparently, I share this dairy fetish with installation artist Tim Eads, who “…Aims to reinvigorate our appetite for the long-standing table staple by crafting a pedal-operated machine that churns butter while simultaneously operating a toaster…”

“About a year ago I was thumbing through a 1905 Sears catalog I found in a used book store. It was humorous to see how everything was so bulky and strange looking and only performed simple tasks. It occurred to me that in 100 years our machines will look silly and inefficient.

…The reason I chose butter was it seemed like one of the most basic ways to connect to people. Because much of our brain activity is dedicated to finding and eating food we all connect with it on some level.”

If you’d like to support Eads in his butter dreams, then stop by his Kickstarter page, where he’s raising funds to make the butter bike a reality.  I wish him all the best.

And on a similar note, a novel gift idea: handmade butter, presented in a decked-out mason jar.  Visit slowchristmas.org  for the recipe.

In The News: Bacon Beer Hits the Nation

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The New York Times ran this infatuating article on different bacon brews across the country.

The Times also had a rather inspiring article about vacationing in my hometown of Cleveland. Two items of interest in the article are the Velvet Tango Room, a Tremont bar housed in an old speakasy that features home-made bitters and a bevy of classic cocktails; and L’Abatros, the new French restaurant housed in a 19thc carriage house on the Case Western Reserve University campus.
Edible Manhattan reminds us that the Bloody Mary is turning 75 on October 5th; head over to it’s origin point at the St. Regis hotel to get one.
I did a video with The Feedbag at the annual, South American-style pig roast at Il Buco. The prized pigs in the spotlight? An 150 lb Ossabaw and 250 lb Crossabaw (ossabaw crossed with a modern breed). Watch the video to learn more about these breeds, and to see some serious pig fat action.