Food and Drink

Feeding Your Invalid in the 19th Century 1: Ivory Dust Jelly

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 …

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State of the Farm: September, 2023. The Problem of Scale.

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 …

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I Scream…

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 …

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Food Wars

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, …

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a large stockpot overflowing with fresh-plucked Seville oranges from my California garden

Mrs Bailey’s Martian Kitchen (and her famous Oxford Marmalade recipe)

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 …

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BVC Eats: A Quantifiable Kitchen (and a recipe)

“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: …

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