Good Nerdy Food Blog Ramblings

Published on Monday, August 16, 2010, by Joyce Slaton / Edit Post

The Language of Food has only four entries (and the last one was written in 2009), but they are doozies. Author Dan Jurafsky is a Stanford professor who teaches on the etymology of food, and each of the blog posts (on ketchup, the word "entrée," desserts, and ceviche), are interesting rambles, backed up with dissertation-worthy research. Once you've read Jurafsky's blog, you'll be hankering to take his class. Here's the syllabus, just in case you're not a Stanford student.

If all this whets your appetite for more think-and-drool pieces, the blog One Peppercorn is written by an erudite Londoner who plumbs the intersection between food and history. What happened to the once quintessentially American cheese Liederkranz? Why is it a mistake to label Bittman the originator of no-knead bread? Did the adjective "bridal" arise from "bride-ale"?

Via Metafilter

ALLFood Media
POST A COMMENT |2 Comments

COMMENT

  • Food in the South East

    I wish I could pour us all insane and say it’s over. It would be nice to use my measly talents and…”kapoof!”…all the rhetoric would be gone. Maybe it doesn’t help that I am without a beer. My Mohawk is per-fuck-sober-fectly shaven…and I’m sitting here now with a Coke, some Black Olives, and that Cabot “Seriously Sharp” Cheese. Is it possible that I could get any more...+READ

    Food in the South East

    I wish I could pour us all insane and say it’s over. It would be nice to use my measly talents and…”kapoof!”…all the rhetoric would be gone. Maybe it doesn’t help that I am without a beer. My Mohawk is per-fuck-sober-fectly shaven…and I’m sitting here now with a Coke, some Black Olives, and that Cabot “Seriously Sharp” Cheese. Is it possible that I could get any more useless and mundane than this?…oh yes. I can. I have a ton of homework to do, a shitload of financial aid refund money to spend, but all I can think about is South Eastern Pulled pork BBQ. I don’t even know if I can call it that. I spose I should call it Pulled pork BBQ from the region in which I live in and it’s the only way I have ever had it. A vinegar based monstrosity of boiled to death, ultra fatty and completely bad for my current Cholesterol and triglyceride levels; pork product. Oh yes, did I mention that this crap is truly delightful. It’s Wonderful. It has become the glass of my 30′s. Yes, I would steal your grandmother’s little rascal for just 5 ounces of this life giving, life taking sweet and, sometimes spicy, mound of piggy flesh. If my doctor was dead, she would have just done a triple axle in her grave. Good thing for me, she’s not dead. In fact, in about 2 months…she’ll find herself prescribing me a higher dose of that Lipah..something.. medicine that is spose to keep me alive, at least, through culinary school.

    Take 8 pounds of Pork Butt, throw it into a pot. Cover it with enough White wine vinegar, white vinegar, red wine vinegar, red wine, oregano, thyme, cayenne, red pepper flakes, garlic, black pepper, SALT (oh yes. Lets throw some more sodium in there!) , Franks, Brown Sugar, Cumin, Chile pepper…and let us not get silly about from what region the chile pepper comes from or what pepper itself it comes from…just BUY Chile pepper, and, oh yeah…some water. Cover it with plastic wrap and tinfoil. Stick a lid on it and boil it for about 40 minutes. Then throw it into the oven…container and all…at about 400F and forget about it for the next 6 hours. Pull it out; at this point…you should only need tongs. Yank it out, shred it up. Cook the remainder of the fluid down by half, skim, and put all of that satanic unhealthy crap together in a container to refrigerate it. Do Not forget to eat more than your fill. Welcome to the wonderfully gluttonous world of great food in which I live. Shove it down your throat, your neighbors throat, you kids’ throat. Freeze some of it to be able to give away the demon food as Christmas presents. It IS and WILL taste just like all of the “Best Pulled Pork BBQ from the region in which you live”.

    PS, Don’t bother snobbing it up and trimming the fat off before you cook it. EAT THE FAT TOO. It won’t kill you any time soon. God knows…If we forget about the fat, then we, as culinary students, will have forgotten what all of Escoffier’s work was about…TASTE! Hell, after that, light a big one and have a glass of whiskey and watch ESPN. It’s gotta be healthy for everyone.-COLLAPSE

  • I got a third of the way through the linked entry of The Language of Food, and then I realized that I was *only* a third of the way in, and I was very happy about that. I have compiled a little list of questions about what I've read so far. I love homework. And One Peppercorn is just damn charming, a more-than-nice bit of researched musings. I wish Chow would do something similar to this, a...+READ

    I got a third of the way through the linked entry of The Language of Food, and then I realized that I was *only* a third of the way in, and I was very happy about that. I have compiled a little list of questions about what I've read so far. I love homework. And One Peppercorn is just damn charming, a more-than-nice bit of researched musings. I wish Chow would do something similar to this, a column for the history of food. Imagine the potential for in-fighting there. Just like the old days.

    I am contemplating making a pot of sikbāj. If I can find rue and loveage, figure out if today's toothpicks are boil-safe, find a substitute for, um, chicks, and clarify whether or not 'one third less honey than vinegar used' is as much honey as I think it is. It sounds like a lot of honey.

    Thanks for the reading material!-COLLAPSE