In 2008, Thomas Keller of the famous The French Laundry restaurant published Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide. In the introduction, Harold McGee sums up the significance of sous vide cooking in the culinary industry. The great innovation of sous vide cooking is “a way of heating foods precisely.” (McGee, Under Pressure, p.6).  Sous vide cooking…

The paleo diet, short for paleolithic, is designed to mimic what our hunter-gatherer ancestors were eating thousands of years ago. The idea is that our bodies should run optimally if we eat what we were eating while our species was evolving (Kris Gunnars, The Paleo Diet 2013). This means a strict diet of whole foods,…

Daniel Hoffmann is for the most part, a garlic farmer. Daniel is especially passionate about garlic. He loves everything about it! He loves to grow it, cook it and eat it.  Hanging proudly behind his booth at Sorauren Farmers Market is a banner that displays his farming philosophy: “cultivating personal, social, environmental and economic health…

Beef! The sumptuous meat from a cow. Growing up in a household where we did a lot of pork-based German cooking, I haven’t had a chance to investigate the nuances of cooking beef in my own practice. For this assignment, I set out with the intention of choosing an obscure cut that would be unfamiliar…

Pickling is a very traditional method to preserve fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables. The process is combining water, salt, vinegar and sometimes sugar, boil it, and then fruit or vegetables are immersed in this liquid (Bonem 2017).   In scientific terms, pickling is kind of like a controlled decay. When living things like fruit and…

The origin of today’s featured food is Edo, now Tokyo, Japan, during the Edo Period (1603-1868). Tsukudani is a preserved foodstuff that can be made from small seafood like shrimp, meat or seaweed. It is boiled in soy sauce and mirin, and preserved by high osmotic pressure (Tsukuda Syokuhin Co. 2015). It is eaten as…

This week I’ve chosen to look at the complex history of the former German enclave of East Prussia during the interwar period (1923-1945).  My maternal grandparents came from Wirballen, a village in East Prussia, and fled to Canada during the Second World War. My mother grew up speaking German, (in an East Prussian dialect) and…

My name is Hannah Milliken and I’m here to find out! During my days as a student of art history I found myself drawn to images and texts about food. What were people eating in those 17th century still life paintings (see header image!) for example? How did the Second World War impact food production?…