Portside

Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge. His third book, discussed here, is third book, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue.

Bread "crumbs" found in fireplaces used by hunter-gatherers 14,000 years ago predate agriculture by thousands of years

For her book, America: The Cookbook, Gabrielle Langholtz looked at cookbooks as well as narrative and anthropological books to fully explore America’s culinary history—Little House on the Prairie and the Sterns’ many varied books among them.

Party line suggested that widowhood made a woman’s sex drive fickle and vulnerable. A woman’s libido was a site of such agita that she couldn’t be trusted to keep it quiet, and so her body needed to be governed. The alienation imposed upon high-caste, Hindu Bengali women was meant to act as a hormonal suppressant, silencing the desire more dangerous than hunger for fish or meat: sex.

This 13th centure cookbook of Syrian recipes shows us the opulent upper limits of the cuisine from those who cooked and ate it—chefs developing recipes, explorers discovering ingredients, the wealthy elite who demanded luxury and ingenuity.

In the South, America has identified food-system problems and developed solutions. Today, as Americans agitate for food sovereignty, the bold agricultural ideas conceived in the late 1960s by Fannie Lou Hamer and other radical Southerners suggest paths for us to follow out of our food deserts.

For many in Mexico, cacao is more than just a bean. In its preparation, there is resistance, memory, rituals, identity, and friends and family

The author of The Potlikker Papers discusses paying down a debt to the black and immigrant cooks of the South, and what it means to be an active Southerner.

How we feel about bologna reveals something about ourselves. The history of such seemingly mundane food can be fascinating, as is consideration of its future.

During the Depression, a loose coalition of Progressives set out to remake the American diet. Milk was regarded as the perfect food. This tension between scientific advice and traditional preferences can be traced back to the Great Depression, suggest Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe in “A Square Meal.”