You know that funny little red thing on the top of a rooster’s head? It’s called a cockscomb, and as Francine Segan recounts for Gastronomica, it’s very tasty:

What are these morsels that look like the fingers of a doll-sized woolen globe? . . . We take a taste. The spikes are slightly gelatinous, with hints of delicate frog-leg flavor. “Delicious” is the consensus.

Segan stumbles upon this rare ingredient on a trip to the Piedmont region of northern Italy, where cockscomb is a vital ingredient in a stew known as la finanziera, a 200-year-old dish that also utilizes a rooster’s wattles and testicles (among many other ingredients). The cockscomb seems to be the star of the show, though, which makes sense given the amount of work that goes into its preparation:

Cleaning the cockscombs, which have a thick outer skin loaded with feathers, is a labor-intensive task. The feathers are plucked, and any tiny strays are burned off with a flame. The cockscombs are then washed, blanched, and soaked in lemon juice to loosen the tough skin. The entire staff, even the busboys, gathers around the kitchen table every Wednesday to peel off this outer layer. “You have to handle the crests gently, like a beautiful woman, so as not to ruin the pretty tips,” Chef Beppe laughs.

The article isn't available online, but if you're up for a cockscomb adventure, track down the Summer 2009 issue of Gastronomica—Segan includes two recipes (including one for la finanziera) at the end of the piece.

Source: Gastronomica 

Image by Tennessee Wanderer, licensed under Creative Commons.

Peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiched between two pieces of white bread, known as the fluffernutter, may be one of the most cherished foods in New England. And when Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett Barrios tried to restrict Marshmallow Fluff intake among school children—limiting public schools to just one serving per week—Barrio’s constituents rebelled. As Katie Liesener eruditely reports for Gastronomica, “fluff runs deep in this country.” 

In response to Barrio’s regulation attempt, residents organized a movement to declare the fluffernutter the official Massachusetts state sandwich. Barrio eventually withdrew his anti-fluff legislation, and a loyal aide assured the Associated Press that “He loves Fluff as much as the next legislator.” Liesener provides an engaging and wonderfully crafted profile of the controversy, dubbed a “kerfuffle,” and the enigmatic company behind the iconic Marshmallow Fluff. “Outsiders may know New England for its baked beans and chowder,” Liesener writes, but deep in the hearts and pantries of New England homes lies a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

Source: Gastronomica

Image by jessamyn, licensed under Creative Commons.

In 1654, people weren’t smoking tobacco. They were “drinking” smoke from pipes. And in the early nineteenth century, English speakers referred to a set of false teeth as a “ratelier,” derived from the French word for “rack.” These insights come from the food magazine Gastronomica, where Mark Morton has compiled a linguistic history of chewing tobacco, false teeth, and other non-food items that people stick in their mouths.

In the article, Morton revives the word “gamahuche,” an awkward and little-known euphemism for oral sex. He also sheds some light on the history of “toothpaste,” a word which appeared in English long after the Romans were using human urine to whiten their teeth. An advertisement in The American Railroad Journal used the term “toothpaste” in 1832, just 13 years after the Family Receipt Book suggested the use of gunpowder as a tooth whitener.

Source: Gastronomica 

Nina Katchadourian’s piece of visual intrigue, Genealogy of the Supermarket, makes for a very different “shopping” experience. The artist has created a sort of food-label lineage from the familiar faces that look out from products on grocery store shelves.

In Katchadourian’s version of the family tree, the Sun-Maid raisin girl is a sister to the Saint Pauli Girl… who happens to be married to another beer icon, Samuel Adams… and they’re the parents of two rugged Brawny Paper Towel men… one of which is the partner of Mr. Clean… and together, they’re the adoptive fathers to none other than the Gerber baby. Bet you never knew, right?

Cory Bernat offers up some interesting analysis of the project in the fall 2008 issue of Gastronomica. He feels the advertising ancestry is “hardly burdened by the hard facts of science, the history of food manufacturing, or the politics of nutritional policy.” Rather, the icons are presented in such humorous and thought-provoking pairings that they beg the reader to pose larger questions about the reasons behind each icon’s particular placement. Bernat wonders:

Is the Native Indian icon found on Land O’Lakes butter the Corn Maiden’s mother because Native peoples are more connected to the earth? Or because they were treated for a long time as less than human, making the half-vegetable reference more pointed?

Is the marriage of the smiling Quaker of Quaker Oats fame to Aunt Jemima a reference to the business-trivia fact that his parent company purchased hers? Is it, perhaps, a commentary on marriage as ownership? Or on slave-holding whites? Or, as one historian friend has suggested, perhaps the interracial union is a reference to the Quakers as early abolitionists?

Ultimately, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions about the intricate reasons and motives behind the connections. You can check out close-ups of the iconic food labels on Katchadourian’s website. I also recommend poking around her other projects, which include more family trees, maps, interactive public art, these delicately mended spiderwebs, and amusing collections of sorted books.

Source: Gastronomica

Image courtesy of Nina Katchadourian, Sara Meltzer gallery, and Catharine Clark gallery.

Yossi Gutmann demonstrates the elegance of frugality in a concise, almost sparse essay for Gastronomica, “My Father’s Kitchen, Tel Aviv” (pdf). Gutmann’s crisp writing shrewdly captures the timelessness of a long-occupied apartment and its tenant:

My father does nothing fancy in his kitchen. He prepares the same thing every day: for breakfast, one small cucumber a hard-boiled egg, five tablespoons of low-fat yogurt mixed with cottage cheese (each time he eats it, he tells me how much he likes that particular combination).

Photographs rich in color accompany the brief essay, which—in all its elegance—calls to mind another lucidly written glimpse of family gathering around a table: Toni Mirosevich’s “The Prize Inside,” which we reprinted out of Gastronomica in 2007. For readers interested in more background on Gutmann’s father and his Tel Aviv apartment, Gastronomica offers an online exclusive interview with the writer.

Artists continue to make shocking and sacrilegious art, even after Piss Christ and "dung Mary." Even steering clear of religious subjects, flesh-based projects can still create a clamor. In April, Yale student Aliza Shvarts stirred up a furor by claiming her senior art installation would incorporate blood smears and videos of several of her own self-induced miscarriages. It was a fabrication, but it attracted plenty of ire anyway.

Another woman artist, Chrissy Conant, actually did use her body to make outrageous art. She injected herself with the same fertility drugs in vitro fertilization patients use, an endocrinologist and embryologist harvested twelve of her eggs, and Conant created Chrissy Caviar (a trademarked product). Twelve eggs in flasks were set in jars “similar to those used for commercial caviar,” reports Gastronomica in its spring 2008 issue, and the Chrissy Caviar was placed in a refrigerated deli display case. 

Utne wrote about Chrissy Caviar when it debuted in 2002, and interest has not abated in the intervening years. “One chef wanted to do a tasting of the eggs as part of a media event in his high-end restaurant in New York,” reports Gastronomica, “but Conant has resisted his offer, even though … she was, on a certain level, pleased that the chef made the connection [with sturgeon caviar] so literally. She finds it somewhat shocking that people would actually consider ingesting a part of her.” 

Conant refused the Chrissy Caviar tasting, but she would let the buyer of the installation do whatever he or she wanted with the eggs, according to Gastronomica, for $250,000. Nor does Conant seem to shy away from the possibility that a buyer might want to create little Chrissys. The Chrissy Caviar site includes medical histories for Conant and her immediate family. 

Conant’s project isn’t likely to attract cross-dragging protestors, whereas Shvarts’ might have. Chrissy Caviar is disturbing, but it’s a good example of art that goes beyond provoking simple outrage and disgust to encouraging viewers to think about bigger issues surrounding the ethical limits of art and the use of reproductive technologies. 

Image by Maks D., licensed under Creative Commons.

There is no end to the vocabulary we’ve devised to slap people with the fat label—obese, overweight, portly, soft, plump, chubby, tubby, etc. But are all these words created equal? As it turns out, no. Mark Morton reports in Gastronomica’s summer issue (subscription required) that the language we use to describe fat people smacks of race, class, and gender stereotypes.

More euphemistic words for fat are used to describe those in higher-paying professions. For example, Morton found that a Google search for “portly” resulted in descriptions of doctors, lawyers, and professors, but rarely for janitors and plumbers. And “fat teacher” turned up 10,600 hits, while a search for “fat professor” turned up only 1,190. Race was another factor influencing word-choice. Although “white man,” “white woman,” “black man,” and “black woman” all got around the same number of hits when the phrases stood alone, adding “fat” skewed the results. The phrase “fat black woman” got eight times as many hits as “fat white woman,” while “fat white man” got 12 times as many hits as “fat black man.” And black women were dubbed fat, obese, and overweight at far higher rates than the others.

Now that’s all interesting, but what does it mean? Morton concludes that our propensity for denoting black women’s weight more frequently than others' reflects not the reality of waistlines, but the reality of disenfranchisement: “It’s analogous to what happens in the schoolyard: the outsiders are the ones who get called the names, not those at the center of the clique.”

(For more from Gastronomica’s summer issue, read "The Food Police," reprinted in Utne Reader’s Jan.-Feb. package on our obsession with obesity.)

—Sarah Pumroy

Gastronomica editor Darra Goldstein talks to Utne.com about her savvy, luscious, and provocative food journal

interview by Sarah Pumroy

You could say Darra Goldstein has her plate full. She’s the founder and editor in chief of Gastronomica, the journal of food and culture that won the 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for social/cultural coverage. The quarterly is a labor of love she produces with the help of a part-time managing editor and design director while managing her work as a professor of Russian studies at Williams College. She’s also the author of four cookbooks and numerous scholarly books and articles. 

Each issue of Gastronomica bursts with articles that inform, conjure the senses, and reflect on the cultural impact of food. And each issue brings a bounty of content that ranges in style, format, and gravity, from playful poetry to weighty investigative pieces. Utne.com spoke with Goldstein about how she got the idea for the journal, what makes for good food writing, and why the glossies’ food coverage is worth reading, even if it sometimes falls short. 

You have a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature. How did you become interested in writing about food and where did the idea for Gastronomica come from? 

I’ve always been interested in food. When I started graduate school I wanted to write my dissertation on food and Russian literature. Because there are so many themes of eating in Russian lit, I just thought it would be a wonderful dissertation to write. This was back in 1974, and my professors told me it was not a serious topic. So I did a different dissertation on a Russian modernist poet. I’m not sorry that I did that because it enabled me to enter into a really wonderful world, but I couldn’t stop thinking about food. I got the job at Williams and was teaching Russian literature but I was also continuing to write about food on the side. The two lives were very distinct: the Russian scholar and the food writer. It was almost as though what I was doing had to be secret, a little bit illicit, because I wasn’t supposed to be doing it. But I couldn’t help myself. 

I thought there must be other people like me who were working in their own disciplines but were really interested in food and culture, and there was no place for us to talk to each other. That’s when I got the idea for Gastronomica. I wanted to create a journal that would give legitimacy to food studies in academia. It’s very much a crossover journal; I don’t want it to be a dry, academic thing. I want lively writing but I also want it to help food studies be seen as a valid discipline. 

What makes for good food writing? 

One of the problems that I’m seeing now in academia is that food has become very hot. A lot of people are starting to write about food but are coming at it from the intellectual side, which is important because not enough people think about food in serious ways. But if they haven’t ever spent any time in the kitchen, if they’re not thinking about the textures of food and the smells and the taste and the way food is transformed in the kitchen—the sensual side—then the writing ends up sometimes informed, but more often a little bit flat because they don’t have that more visceral connection to it. Sometimes I’ll accept a piece that’s entirely sensual. It doesn’t always have to be overlaid with cerebral thinking. 

How do you find a balance between the creative and academic pieces? 

I try to put the issues together so that they feel balanced. The poetry appears in every issue; that’s really important to me. The artwork is another way of exploring the sensuality, the beauty, and the aesthetics of food, which I know isn’t food writing but it captures a certain dimension of it that otherwise would be lacking. There are always two articles in the investigation section that are the ballast for each issue, and those are the most scholarly ones. And with the others I try to find a good balance between something that’s more like a memoir and something that’s more like investigative journalism. 

You’ve criticized the popular press for its upbeat, candy-coated coverage of food. Why do you think this is the tendency of the mainstream magazines? 

First, I want to say that I subscribe to all those magazines and I take them to bed at night. I enjoy reading them, and I write for them, so even if I critique them it’s not that I don’t think they should exist. But there is also a place for a deeper and darker exploration of issues surrounding food. With the trade magazines people want to be entertained and enter a fantasy world. It’s a larger problem with American culture—the happy face, as though we should always be smiling. Smiling is good, but we also need to explore things critically and analytically. When you talk about food, the pleasure component is important, but there are also problems of hunger, food security, the environment, the food chain and the toxins that are introduced into it. These issues need to be explored.

How has the magazine changed since it was founded in 2001?  

When I started, I was insecure. I felt strongly that Gastronomica had to be serious to prove itself as an intellectual journal. I no longer feel that insecurity; I think that it has proved itself. Now I feel freer to be more playful, to have articles that are pushing against certain norms. For instance, in the May issue there will be an article that I find very disturbing, and I think readers will, too. It’s about an artist who harvests her own eggs. It’s a social commentary on caviar and the egg as a luxury good and the way women sell their eggs to make money. It’s a perfect Gastronomica article because it’s looking at food, but it’s also horrifying and pushing against the edges of good taste. I would not have had the courage to publish that early on, when Gastronomica was still getting established.

What do you hope readers will learn from Gastronomica? 

I hope they will take tremendous pleasure in discovering how wide-ranging the world of food is; that it’s not limited to cooking. You can take almost any aspect of life and look at it through the lens of food and discover something new about it.

I first encountered Toni Mirosevich’s elegant prose in the Spring 2007 issue of food and culture journal Gastronomica. “The Prize Inside,” a dreamlike account of dinnertime rituals in her Croatian-American fishing family, was so gripping we rushed to reprint it in our September-October 2007 issue.

That essay and 24 others are now collected in Pink Harvest, Mirosevich’s first book of creative nonfiction, published this past November by Mid-List Press. Having previously published a few volumes of poetry and prose, Mirosevich demonstrates no less linguistic prowess in her nonfiction foray. Her words, above all, seem impeccably timed. She beckons great surges of language with sequences of commas, and then tempers her prose with judicious breaks, periods, and alternations of sentence length and structure.

Of course, rhapsodizing about her writing, I don’t mean to neglect the content; Mirosevich’s personal narratives are touching, often funny, and sharply recounted. In “Tilting” a suitor interrupts a widow’s gardening. Mirosevich writes:

There was a rustling, leaves or the scrape of grapevines on the trellis. He cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to change the subject but will you marry me?”

The breeze died down, and with the question, as if slapped, she revived, her sense of smell suddenly keen, as if she could smell the man who had inhabited the suit jacket before Dragovich, could remember the way her husband’s scent laid on the pillow in the mornings, a mix of cigar and fish and the sea.

She stopped, weighing the proposition. “What you got?” she asked.

—Julie Hanus

If you have a passion for food and words, check out Ort of the Week, an online feature from Gastronomica, the journal of food and culture that just won a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for social-cultural coverage. In the delectable column, Mark Morton, author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities, picks apart gastronomical vocabulary, discussing meaning, history, and linguistic origin.  Past entries include cornucopia, aperitif, and plague-water—a brew that was supposed to cure the Black Plague. An ort, by the way, "was originally a scrap of food or leftover fodder not eaten by cattle or pigs," which later came to refer to people-food leftovers, as well.

—Sarah Pumroy