Since the BVC blog 1.0 evaporated, this material has been lost, lost I tell you, to all modern knowledge. Pleas from far elsewhere have resurrected this series, which is going to trickle out over the next month or so. As the elect among you may know, I wrote a multi-volume series of Victorian thrillers featuring …
Feeding Your Invalid in the 19th Century 1: Ivory Dust Jelly Read More »
Be careful what you wish for. (Yes, yes. Another State of the Farm entry. I’m in Wisconsin. Sue me.) Some years ago, I discussed the problem of abundance. At the time, I was concerned with production from tree products such as chestnuts and Cornelian Cherries. That particular year we had good crops from several of …
State of the Farm: September, 2023. The Problem of Scale. Read More »
I worked with Kay at the same place where I met Francine Genovaldi (she of the legendarily moist, rich sour-cream-fudge cake). Kay was a living legend. One day my hubby and I walked sixty blocks to her house for dinner, and she offered us this dip when we walked in the door. We cleaned the …
BVC Eats: Kay Martin Grandolfo’s Tex-Mex layer dip Read More »
This is the recipe of Mary Rautiainen Smeds (1893-2001). This treat was often known among her family and friends simply as Grandma’s coffee bread. Her sister Annie, who also baked it, tended to call it kaffeleipää — a literal rendering in Finnish of “coffee bread.” However, the specific Finnish name for this type of bread …
Originally published April, 2021 I wanted to find out if chocolate had ever been used to kill someone, outside of adding poison to the drink. But you’re lucky today, because instead of that macabre subject, while reading Chocolate, a Global History by Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch, I find it far more interesting to write …
Originally published May, 2020 The highlight of our Saturday morning is going to the Albany Farmer’s Market to buy duck eggs. I didn’t think I would be writing today’s blog about eggs, but, well, sometimes if there is no looming personal subject or event to explore, and if I keep my promise to myself not …
One of the surest signs of spring in New England is the sudden disappearance of popsicles and ice cream sandwiches from local grocery stores’ freezers on the first really warm day of the season. Ice cream is extremely popular hereabouts—I remember reading somewhere that more ice cream is consumed in New England than any other …
Originally published January 2019 I recently listened to a lively call-in show on which experts (dieticians) and callers (complainers) discussed food politics. Among the many maladies that food and eating inflict on us were 1. the impact of food production on the environment, 2. the zeolousness of vegans and those who challenge the vegan diet, …
This recipe was given to me by a coworker at my office. She brings these nuts to all office functions and potlucks, and takes care to bring xeroxes of the recipe with her, because the cry goes up forever: “How do I make these?” I made a quadruple batch and brought them to a BVC …
As everyone knows (well, everyone who pays any attention to geopolitical realities), Mars has been a province of the British Empire for the last hundred and fifty years, since the days of George III. Happy George, we call him: to be sure, the balance of his mind was somewhat disturbed by the loss of the …
Mrs Bailey’s Martian Kitchen (and her famous Oxford Marmalade recipe) Read More »
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates Just around the corner from us is asuburban home that has actually appeared on Google Maps as “The Quantified House”. It is inhabited (inevitably: this is Silicon Valley, after all) by techbros, and they use All The Apps There Are to measure everything that is measurable: …
