That’s right: the Caesar salad was invented south of the border in Mexico. And I walked from San Diego to Tijuana to eat at the restaurant that first tossed sturdy romaine leaves together with a creamy dressing and called it a Caesar. Read about the history of my favourite culinary cliché over at BBC Travel.
Pass the Squirrel
“When a food comes back, we should understand why it went away,” writes American journalist Gabe Bullard. His article “Bushy Tails and Old Cookbooks” traces the rise and fall of squirrel in the American culinary canon—and now its unexpected return. He asked me about fashions in food and forgetting, and we chatted about the relationship between what we eat and where we are. Read his article for The Bitter Southerner here.
Restaurants & Reconciliation: Talk at UC Berkeley
Berkeley’s Canadian Studies Program hosts a monthly luncheon colloquium series and I am absolutely thrilled to be giving April’s talk. Titled “Restaurants and Reconciliation: The Representation of Indigenous Foodways in Canada,” I will discuss how restaurants serve so much more than just dinner. Please join me on Tuesday April 2, 2019, from 11:30am to 1pm in 223 Moses Hall.
Paris by Design
Like many, I fell in love with Paris - or even just the idea of Paris - years before I finally arrived at Gare du Nord. Since then I’ll use any excuse to go back and continue this courtship, confident my relationship with the city will always be far more serious than a teenage crush.
And so I am delighted to have contributed to Eva Jorgensen’s Paris by Design: An Inspired Guide to the City’s Creative Side. Together with her husband Kirk, Eva runs what started as a stationary company and has grown into a creative studio: Sycamore Co. It is, of course, no surprise that a paper specialist has put together an inspirited ode to one of the world’s cultural capitals.
Designer and illustrator are only two of the many hats Marin Montagut wears. His love for Paris is as endless as his own creative curiosity and I had great fun interviewing him about flea markets, treasures, and the French capital. The book comes out on April 9. Read more about it here.
California Cooking
Dates and dim-sum, salsa and San Francisco sourdough. This past semester I taught a course at the University of Munich called "California Cooking: How the Golden State Changed the Way America Eats.” After four months of talking about foodways in California, and their many histories, I am delighted to have the opportunity to spend the next two months eating (and, of course, cooking, or at least assembling/dicing avocado and segmenting citrus) in the Golden State. Until the end of April 2019, I will be based at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar in the Department of Ethnic Studies.
Vínarterta: Stories of Migration, Tradition and Cake
The first Sunday of December, I’m heading to the German capital to bake my favourite Christmas cake and chat about migration, tradition, and how a recipe is so much more than “authentic.” Join me for a slice of vínarterta at Berlin’s Contemporary Food Lab.
A Tomato Grows in Iceland
The fall issue of Chickpea is out today, for which I wrote about Icelandic tomatoes and the excellent Bloody Mary they make (which tastes especially good before noon).