Saturday, June 5, 2010

Celebrating great cooking in reduced circumstances.


This blog owes its existence to two delightfully contrary inspirations: the image of Scarlette O'Hara shaking a dirty turnip at a menacing sky vowing "never to go hungry again!" and a US newspaper headline proclaiming. "Veggies too expensive! Americans doomed to eat junk!"

Even in hard times, occasionally you just have to laugh.

Some of the best food ever invented has come, not from the fancy kitchens of the rich (obsessed with figuring out how to stuff humming birds into quails into chickens into peacocks into ostriches like a grotesque feathered nesting doll), but from impoverished peasants forced to get creative to feed their families, with, for example, turnips.
Like hardy Australian plants that bloom only after a devastating fire, we Americans tend show our best selves under pressure of adversity. This is true also, we believe, of our food.

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