White Trash Cooking by Ernest Matthew Mickler

Food is all around. Not just as something that we need to survive, but also in the form of books, supplements in papers, food blogs, super star chefs, Michelin starred restaurants, tv-programs, different "schools" and movements being the it-trend (like raw food is the big thing in Denmark right now), other movements going back. And os on.


Old news I hear you say, and you are right. Food blogging is so not my thing, as well as I know next to nothing about food anthropology. Nevertheless, I have a great interest in food, cooking, books about food and that kind of unscientific research you can do by just reading cook books from a certain place or period. I would've posted this Sunday and made it a part of Beth Fish's Weekend Cooking, but since I already made two posts this evening, I thought I would post this today insted.

Anyway. When I look at old magazines with recipies, I have to smile sometimes, thinking: can you believe we ate that in the 70'es. And check out the plates they are serving this dish on and the glass they are drinking from. On the other hand, at least in Denmark there are very classical cook books more than a 100 years old still being used and re-printed again and again. I have some of those old cook books myself. But mostly I have books about food in the Ramsey, Nigella and Jamie-category and books with certain culinary themes like Danish food, Thai food, Indian food, Jewish food, Greek, Moroccan, American...well, you get it. I enjoy reading them all as well as cooking a dish or two.

It is not like I cannot pass the cook book section in a book store without having to buy the latest book, because I can easily do that. But on my recent trip to USA I stumbled upon a cook book that I just knew instantly was a must have: White Trash Cooking. It was published for the first time in the 1980'es and is apparently considered a bit of a classic, re-printed several times since the first publication. And yes, it is written tongue in cheek, but it is nevertheless a real cook book with real recipes, and I find it a charming book. It is not just a funny joke on behalf of an unfortunate group of people. Let us have a look at how the author Ernest Matthew Mickler describes white trash in the intro:

[...] But the first thing you've got to understand is that there's white trash and there's White Trash. Manners and pride separate the two. Common white trash has very little in the way of pride, and no manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anybody or anything. But where I come from in North Florida you never failed to say "yes ma'm" and "no sir" [...] never forgot to say "thank you" for the teeniest favor. That's the way the ones before us were raised and that's the way they raised us in the South.

In this funny and quirky book you will find recipes for fried and broiled squirrel, fried possum, barbecued alligator tail and swamp cabbage stew. But that is not all. You will also find the most delicious recipes on how to cook shrimp, crawfish, crabs and other kind of seafood that you find in abundance in the South plus lots of cakes and sweets.

The book also states that White Trash-food has less fat (but there is still plenty of calories, though) than  Soul Food and many other interesting facts you can read in the very well written intro.

No, I do not think that I would find fried squirrel a particularly delicious thing to eat. And I don't know what to say about the High Calorie Pick Me Up-drink, which is a bag of peanuts put into a cold coke, so that you can drink and eat at the same time.

But Tutti's Fruited Porkettes (pork chops with sweet potatoes, pineapple and bacon baked in the oven) sounds yummy, as well as Klebert's Cold Crawfish Soup (with onion and potatoes) could easily find its way into my kitchen. I am not here to offend anyone, I truly enjoyed reading this book and leafing through the recipes, and the whole book has been written with much love.

Have you ever cooked a squirrel? Or tasted swamp cabbage stew? I had an alligator sandwich in New Orleans and it was fab.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

I usually do not read non fiction. I have nothing against non fiction at all, it just almost never happens that I feel any urge to read a non fiction book. But this one - Zeitoun by Dave Eggers - I had to read.

I visited New Orleans in the summer of 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina, after having saved up for the trip (remember, I live in Denmark and there is a long way down to New Orleans from here and it's expensive) for a long time. Also visiting was an old dream that finally came true. The visit was part of a larger US-trip, so I did not get to spend more than four days in New Orleans, but I loved it. The heat, the humidity, the depravity, the ghost stories, the building, the history, the food, everything.

When Katrina struck in 2005 I was on vacation in Berlin, Germany, and remember feeling completely devastated hearing the news from New Orleans. First I thought mainly about all the wonderful buildings submerged by water, but when the other news began pouring in after a few days, I became even more shocked and sad. In hindsight, we now know that all the murders, rapes and looting did not take place in the scale the media presented us for, but we didn't know back then. It took me a long time to get those images out of my mind, and I don't even have friends or families there. I can't even begin to imagine what it was (and is?) like for people who live there and were there during the hurricane.

Anyway, I have been wanting to read Zeitoun for a long time, and when it came out in paperback, I bought it. And when the 5 year anniversary was around the corner, I sat down and read it. Zeitoun is the name of a Syrian American man, a repected citizen of New Orleans, who decides to stay back in the city during the hurricane, even though his wife and children has fled the city to go live with relatives out of harms way. Zeitoun wants to keep an eye out for his properties, and when the levees break and parts of the city become submerged, he ventures out in his canooe, managing to save both humans and animals in the horrible aftermath of the hurricane. And he does so with a "light heart", feeling that there is a deeper meaning behind him staying back.

Wife Kathy begs for him to leave. She sees and hears all the horrible stories of murder and mayhem from the media, and she fears that something will happen to Zeitoun. When she looses contact with him for a longer period of time, this family's real nightmare begins. It is hard to imagine that this is a piece of non fiction and that those events took place only 5 years ago. The story is told in a voice which does not criticize or judge neither "sides", and that made it worth reading. The first third of the book was a tiny bit too "lecturing" for this reader's taste since I felt I already knew about some of the issues, but that is a minor detail. I highly recommend this book. Great and thought provoking non fiction.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a memoir done in the form of a graphic novel. Its written and drawn by Alison Bechdel who is also the brain behind series such as Dykes To Watch Out For. I am not all that familiar with GLBT-literature, but have read some books which can be "labelled" as such. Bechdel is lesbian, and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is about realising this and coming out, but it is definitely also about much more, and while homosexuality can be said to form the core and back bone of the story, the main theme is the relationship between parents and their children, in this case the relationship between Alison and first and foremost her father, but also her mother.

Alison grows up with seriously distant parents living in a less than happy marriage, both her mother and father somewhat desilluisioned. Her father is working as an English teacher, her mother is writing an academic thesis and also trying to form a local career as an actress.Alison's father is mainly interested in literature and architecture and spends most of his free time reading and decorating their house in various styles. In between this he and the family also own a funeral home, in short The Fun Home. We follow Alison from her earliest years and until she is around 20 years old and away at college. All the way through her childhood she keeps a diary. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic use a lot of Alison's early diary-material, but seen from the wiser and grown up Alison's viewpoint. The novel is full of literary knowledge, and while the story as a whole is rather dark, there is a definite and clear current of humor and irony running underneath the sadness throughout the story.

Bechdel's drawings are pieces of art, and she is also a great writer. I really liked this story and recommend it highly. I have read it as part of the Women Unboun Reading Challege, which you can read more about here.

NaBloPoMo # 8: Sunday Mini Review: Memories of a Lost Egypt by Colette Rossant

Or Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes as it is called in North America. I bought this book when I was living in Cairo, and I adored it even though it is sad in parts. It is about little French Colette growing up in Egypt during the second World War and her very special family. Colette likes to hang out with the cook in the large mansion she lives in, and that is where the recipes come into the picture. It is a small book, but it is beautifully written and it gives an interesting picture of life among Europeans in Cairo back in the day. There was such a special atmosphere in the book that I haven't really dared re-reading it. I truly think that it is well written, but perhaps the magic feeling I felt stemmed from the fact that I was living in Cairo myself at the time of reading?

This book is perfect for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge by the way, since it is a female writer's memoir and since it takes up issues such as mother-daughter relationships.

This is the eighth post in the NaBloPoMo-challenge. See my page here.

Guide Books Travel Wiriting

I guess that most of us at one point or another has used some sort of a guidebook and/or map of a location. For travelling abroad or to a neighboring town, for finding our way around a city, a museum, a theme park. There are many guidebooks on the (English-speaking) market, and I am familiar with many of them: Rough Guides, Lonely Planet, Frommers, Blue Guides, Time Out, DK and more. In our day and age, sites like Tripadvisor and Holiday Watchdog are popular, and can be used as a more or less real time guidebook, provided your are online as you go - which is unlikely if you are hiking in the Amazonas, but not that unlikely if you are, say, in New York. E-zines and blogs about travelling (pro as well as amateur) are also very popular. Vagabondish is just one example. There are plenty more.

So, what I am trying to say is, that the travel- and guidebook industries are somthing that we have all touched upon, one way or the other. Even in the current economic climate, people are still travelling. They may not spend as much on their vacations and trips as they did in 2007, but they are still travelling. And some of them will buy guidebooks.

Last year there was a "scandal" involving the whole Lonely Planet-industry. One of their writers, a Thomas Krohnstamm, admitted that he had not actually visited Colombia, which he was writing a guidebook about, but had done all his writing from a hotel-room in San Francisco, getting info from a Colombian girl he dated at the time. Naturally, this had an impact on all Lonely Planet guides (and guidebook-writers and other guidebook-series as well), but obviously not all of their books are "fake", and it seems like while Krohnstamm was probably not the only rotten apple in the basket, Lonely Planet guidebooks are still going strong.

They've been my preferred English guidebook for a long time, but I have always had a love/hate relationship with them. First of all, they are written mainly for an English-speaking audience, and not a Danish audience. Danish guidebooks does not dwell so much on whether a city is "safe" or not - LP has a whole entry in each of their guidebooks called "Dangers and Annoyances" - Danes on the other hand want to know where they can smoke or whether a place sell decent beer or not. Not that Danes are taking more stupid risks abroad than other nationalities, they just care more about the other things. For many Danes, despite initially being made for the travellers wanting to thread the not-so-beaten-paths, Lonely Planet has too much of an overtone of "not being written for them". This is very generally speaking and also written somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I hope you know what I mean. But on the other hand, LP has far more info than the average Danish guidebook. I have a little collection of LP guidebooks, and I love to just browse through them for inspiration and day-dreamning.

Aside from the fact that many Danes prefer to read in Danish, we also have our own guidebook-series, written in Danish by Danish authors. The series is called "The Trip Goes To" and has existed since the 1950'es. This series is why other guide-series, like LP, doesn't sell as well in Denmark as they do in other parts of the world.

I am right now in the United Arab Emirates doing some research. Not for a guidebook though (I wish). And I brought the LP Arabian Peninsula with me :-) So far it has not let me down, I only wish it had more info!

Do you own guidebooks? Or do you prefer the related genre travel-memoirs? Or do you prefer not to travel at all, or, if you travel, not to bring any kind of guidebook with you? Maybe you go to the same place every year and doesn't need a guidebook?

Oh - and where would you go if money and time was no objection? And don't say around the world ;o)

National Blog Posting Month # 17: Daily Life 3000 years ago

One of my favorite reference-books in my work with Ancient Egypt is A.G. McDowell's Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs.

A.G Mc Dowell has written a book about the workers who build the tombs of the kings and queens of Egypt's New Kingdom (circa 1550 - 1075 BCE). Those workers, whose daily lives we follow through a wealth of original written sources, lived in a village; today the ruins are called Deir el-Medina, back then the village was simply called "The Village". The workers lived with their families in small houses in Deir el-Medina, and while their main concern was building the tomb of the Pharaoh, they also had all the problems and sorrows and joys as modern people have. We can read about their problems with superiors at work, their love life, marriage, kids, sickness and about their interest in suing each other for minor crimes! While this book use the original sources, Mc Dowell explains each little text in a modern and easily understood language, and this book is for everyone who wants to know how the Ancient Egyptians lived more than 3000 years ago.

The ruins of the village on the West Bank of Luxor, old Thebes.


This is post # 17 in the NaBloPoMo-challenge. See my page here.

National Blog Posting Month # 5: Food

Tonight is the night where I sit down and watch two of my favorite tv-shows about food.

First it is Hell's Kitchen with Gordon Ramsey and next up is Top Chef with Tom Collichio. As we are sometimes very much behind here in Denmark, I am not going to put any links up for those shows. I am not sure what seasons I am watching, although I think that it is season 2 in Top Chef. But I don't want to know who are going to win either of the competitions, so I am staying away from the shows' websites. If you are curious, I know you are able to do some googling yourself.

As this is a blog about books and book-related stuff, I think I better mention that I have a large collection of cookbooks. I do love to cook, but I rarely use a cookbook, which is a shame, because I tend to stick to the same dishes over and over again, and when I look in a cookbook, I usually become inspired to do something new.

I know he often comes off as being a little too much, but I like British chef Jamie Oliver. I am not a huge fan of his TV-shows, but I find his cookbooks very easy to read and understand and with some very cool recipes. I have 3 Jamie Oliver cookbooks, and I believe they are the 3 first ones he wrote.


Another fave cookbook, which I actually care so much about that I do not want it to be on the kitchenshelf is my Culinaria USA. A huge book with recipes from all the different regions in USA. I cannot say that I have cooked a lot of food from that book, but leafing through it is very enjoyable.












I'd love to get my hands on the Top Chef cookbook and a couple of Gordon Ramsey's books as well. The thing is that I prefer them to be in Danish. Not that I do not understand English, because I do, but when it comes to cooking, I do find it easier if measures and ingredients are in systems and a language I am familiar with.


As I am Danish some may think that I could have made this blog about Danish cookbooks. I will just post a few images of some of my fave Danish cookbooks. They are brilliant with very yummy recipes easy to cook. They are written by Sonja Bock and Tina Scheftelowitz. Translated they are called: Super Salads, Super Easy and Genious Dishes in a Pot


The image of the Top Chef book is by the user dulamae on flickr.
Blogger Newyorkerbyheart has a cool foodie-blog, but she mostly blogs in Danish, although there are several posts in English as well.
This post is my # 5 post in the November NaBloPoMo.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

In this funny book you get an extraordinary look into what really goes on in the professional kitchens around USA, mostly New York. The author is the present chef of the New York-restaurant Les Halles, and he tells you everything. From his beginning in humble and small restaurants and cafés to the present day as chef in a famous restaurant. There are gross details in this book, making you think twice about ever eating out again, and sometimes it is hard to believe that this is the truth. Does the fine and elegant food really come from the hands of tattooed and dirty scumbags, fighting and drinking out back or does the author exaggerate a bit here and there? I don't know, but the book and the writing definitely has an honest feel to it, and it is possible that is really is like this. We follow the chef's ups and downs through his cooking and private life, but mostly through his cooking life. We learn about what it is like to work in a greasy café as well as in a huge establishment, and we also get a good look into the business side of running a restaurant as well as some great tips, like not ordering fish in a restaurant during the weekend, and I am also thinking twice about the whole brunch-concept after having read the book, brunch being a mix of a whole week's leftovers. The book is well written, and the language is never too much, even though it may seem brutal and brutally honest in some passages.