Kirchner Woodcuts

Vincenzo Catena (1480–1531)

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Pimento Cheese

January 27, 2024

My first experience with pimento cheese was in the mountains of North Carolina. On a farmhouse kitchen countertop sat a plastic tub of neon orange whipped cheese with bulbous air pockets packed into commercial food-grade packaging; I dug in with suspicion and delight! Pimento cheese is a processed cheese dip made with a combination of cheddar, mayo, butter, cayenne, paprika, and pimentos; it is unique to Southern cuisine. Traditionally, one can eat it with crackers or on white breaded sandwiches. “By the 1930s, pimento cheese sandwiches had become popular, economical meals.”(Edge) The ever-popular fast food chain Chick-fil-A has a seasonal dish, the Honey Pepper Pimento Chicken Sandwich, made with pimento cheese; this dish is the ultimate Southern food experience, with a combination of sweet, salt, and fat overloaded into addictive bites. In the northern states, I've tried purchasing pimento cheese spread from supermarket chains, but the cold northern experience is just not the same as picking up and eating food products in the sweltering southern heat. According to the Oxford Companion to Cheese, a cookbook from 1867 - Mrs. Hill's Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book - mentions red peppers and butter were added to cheese as a preservative to protect against flies. Pimento cheese is made to be eaten in hot environments, and I suggest the only place to eat the dip is in the Southern United States. 

• McNamara, Tess. "pimento cheese." In The Oxford Companion to Cheese. : Oxford University Press, 2016. 
• Edge, John T. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 7: Foodways. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. muse.jhu.edu/book/27948.
• Hill, A. P.., Fowler, Damon Lee. Mrs. Hill's Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book. United States: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Gerard David

Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976)

January 15, 2024

Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976) was a  Belgian artist who incorporated egg shells, fries, pots & pans, and mussels into his conceptual art sculptures. One work is called the Casserole and Closed Mussels. 1964, which can be found at the Tate in London. The Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art mentions, "the casserole of mussels is the Belgian national dish." (Chilvers) Broodthaers' work Décor: A Conquest XIXth Century (1975), shows a lobster and a crab playing cards, which conceptually represents the Battle of Waterloo. In the work of art, "Napoleon and Wellington (in the guise of crab and lobster) faced each other across a table." (Chilvers).  In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art held a Retrospective of Marcel Broodthaer's work; images from the show can be found archived online, and a digitized version of a Walker Art Center exhibition catalog from 1989 can be borrowed from the Internet Archive.  Examples of Broodthaers' artwork can be found below. 

• Le Problème noir en Belgique (The Black Problem in Belgium). 1963–64, Museum of Modern Art. 

• Casserole and Closed Mussels. 1964, Tate. 

• White Cabinet and White Table. 1965, Museum of Modern Art.  

• Four Eggs. 1966,  Museum of Modern Art. 

• L’ Erreur. 1966. Eggshells and oil on canvas. 

• I Return to Matter, I Rediscover the Tradition of the Primitives, Painting with Egg, Painting with Egg. 1966, Tate. 

• Fries. 1966, Museum of Modern Art. 

• Panel of Mussels. 1968, Museum of Modern Art. 

• Pot of Mussels. 1968, Museum of Modern Art. 

• The Belgian Lion. June 1968, Museum of Modern Art. 

• Gas Stove. 1968-70, Museum of Modern Art. 

• Campbell's Soup. 1969, Museum of Modern Art. 

• The Farm Animals (Les Animaux de la ferme). 1974, Museum of Modern Art. 

• Citron-Citroen. 1974, Tate. 

• Daguerre Soup (La Soupe de Daguerre). 1975, Art Institute of Chicago. 

New Books about Food

January 14, 2024

Every few months, I browse recent cookbooks to learn about the new books printed in the publishing world. I'm always interested in visual art and graphic design trends of book covers, and the books above are crafty and illustrative, with a similar color palate. All four books posted above were published in November/December of 2023, and the theme here is global foods; we have Slow Food, Fast Cars by Casa Maria Luigia, which is a cookbook published by Phaidon about a restaurant in Modena, Italy, the restaurant has a dish called "The crunchy part of the lasagna." Ester: Australian Cooking by Mat Lindsay is about a Sydney restaurant that specializes in contemporary Australian dining. Rumi: Food of Middle Eastern Appearance by Joseph Abboud is another Australian cookbook about a restaurant in Melbourne that serves Middle Eastern cuisine. The only book not about an individual restaurant is A Passion for Whisky: How the Tiny Scottish Island of Islay Creates Malts that Captivate the World by Ian Wisniewski, which is about the Lagavulin distillery. What I find so fascinating is the interconnectivity of countries and regions: Italy, Scotland, the Middle East, and Australia. Yet, all of these books have a similar format, similar design, and similar audience, which might be readers like myself who are interested in learning about the foods and drinks of one global, interconnected, design-driven world.

Poster House Drinks 

January 13, 2024

I visited the Poster House for the first time. The museum opened in 2019, shortly before the pandemic, and it has taken me nearly five years to make my way to 23rd Street. It's an amazing museum, flawless in design. It is welcoming, lively, and full of energy from the bustle of museum visitors, and the gift shop is full of tiny, affordable trinkets and treasures. If you haven't been, go. One of the exhibitions, Art Deco: Commercializing the Avant-Garde (September 28, 2023–February 25, 2024), displayed several food and drink-themed posters from the 1920s-1930s. Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet (1932) by Cassandre was the central piece - a triptych - in the show. Dubonnet is a sweet French wine, an aperitif, made with Quinine. It's quite mild and delicious; the label of the wine has an illustration of a cat sitting next to the bottle of Dubonnet, obviously perfectly designed for the cat-loving librarian trope. "Joseph Dubonnet, a French chemist, introduced the beverage named after him in 1846 as a way of medicinally providing quinine, which helps fight malaria"(Stolberg). Charles Loupot designed a poster called St. Raphael (1938), another sweet (aperitif) French wine similar to Cassandre's design. An aperitif is also an "alcoholic drink taken before a meal to stimulate the appetite" (Ayto), often infused with herbs or spices.  Larousse Gastronomique states, "It was not until the 20th century that the habit of taking an aperitif before a meal became generally accepted custom." (Robuchon). Along the side of the museum cafe is a poster of an Italian aperitif called Cordial Campari (1926) by Marcello Nizzoli. Posters of aperitifs were very popular in Europe, and "the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw branded aperitifs and digestives thrive and proliferate beyond France and Italy"(Wondrich). Another beverage advertisement in the Art Deco exhibit was Twining (1930) by Charles Loupot. According to the Poster House wall label, the artist designed the letter T in the shape of a Japanese kimono to reference the tea's origin, which was China. Generally, one of the main observations I encounter daily in 20th-century libraries and archives is this antiquated mentality that everything European is grand and all other countries are inferior and get lumped into one miscellaneous category and barely referenced. Thankfully, such thinking is being reevaluated, reassessed, and critically corrected.

• Ayto, John. "aperitif." In The Diner’s Dictionary. : Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Robuchon, Joël, et al., editors. Larousse Gastronomique: The World’s Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia. 1st American ed, Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2009.
• Stolberg, Victor B. "Aperitifs." In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Alcohol: Social, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, edited by Stolberg, Victor B., 160-61. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2015. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483331096.
• Wondrich, David, and Noah Rothbaum. "aperitif and digestive." The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails. : Oxford University Press, 2021. Oxford Reference.

Edgar Degas / Edouard Manet

January 7, 2024

Today was the last day of the Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit space was packed with museum visitors like myself, and I could barely get through the crowd to view the work up close. Mostly, I spent my time in the gallery navigating the claustrophobic labyrinth-like museum space, trying to avoid stepping or bumping into priceless art. I can't say I enjoyed my experience. I believe the exhibit's only worthwhile work of art was The Ham by Edouard Manet. According to the MET, "Manet produced many still lifes in his career. Food and its attendant dishware, glassware, and utensils were favored subjects and accessories for him." (MET) Perhaps my judgment of worthwhile art is biased since I mostly viewed the backs of the heads of museum visitors rather than individual works of art within the exhibit, and The Ham, compared to Olympia, did not attract the same amount of viewers, so I was able to view it more closely than the other paintings. 

Almshouse Nutrition

January 6, 2024

My Swedish great-grandfather was born in an Almshouse which was a house for the poor and needy. Around his birth, his father committed suicide in a barrel over the side of Niagara Falls. According to my research, the back story is that his father - a Swedish man - came to America, married an American woman, abandoned her and returned to Sweden alone, met another woman, and had a child with her. Then, the American wife traveled to Sweden, claimed her husband, and returned to Buffalo together. Shortly afterward, my great-grandfather was born, and the Swedish man killed himself. Whatever the reason, it shows the American woman was in need, and the Almshouse helped her family during duress. "Almshouses, which predated hospitals in colonial America and were funded through local taxes, sheltered and took care of the sick, poor, elderly, and mentally ill." (Aldredge) My great-grandfather later married into a wealthy family, which lost it all during the great depression. He loved my great-grandmother until the day she died, nurturing her feeble mind during dementia and refusing to separate from her withering body. The Almshouse provided sustenance for his first breath, so I’m writing this post. According to A Treatise on Food and Diet by Jonathan Pereira from 1843, early paupers in Almshouses were nourished with not gruel like the impoverished were served in England but instead with foods common in America like rice, molasses, beans, pork, beef, wheat bread, vegetables, fish, tea, coffee, chocolate, hominy, butter, milk, Indian pudding, bohea tea, and potatoes. A Report on Food and Diet by John Stanton Gould from 1852 recommended serving Graham bread for almshouse paupers. Dinners served at an Almshouse in Philadelphia around 1852 included beef and mutton soup, corned beef with bread, mush with molasses, and codfish with potatoes. In this report, physicians were concerned about paupers gaining too much weight, which was probably not the worst of their problems! Some people, like my great-grandfather, had it rough. Born into poverty with circumstances beyond their control, temporary places for shelter help during moments of tragedy.

• Pereira, Jonathan, 1804-1853, and Charles A. (Charles Alfred) Lee. A Treatise On Food And Diet: With Observations On the Dietetical Regimen Suited for Disordered States of the Digestive Organs; And an Account of the Dietaries of Some of the Principal Metropolitan And Other Establishments for Paupers, Lunatics, Criminals, Children, the Sick, &c. New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1843.
• Aldredge, Marcus. "Hospital Food." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. : Oxford University Press, , 2013. Oxford Reference. 
• Gould, John Stanton, 1810-1874, Board of governors of the New York (City) -- Almshouse, and Commissioners of New York (State) -- Emigration. A Report On Food And Diet, With Observations On the Dietetical Regimen, Suited for Almshouses, Prisons, And Hospitals; Also On Heating, Ventilation, &c., With Practical Recommendations.. New York: W.C. Bryant, 1852.

Books: Food and Art