Eatymology
Rum’s dark and stormy past
The liquor's history may be brutal and complicated, but this recipe is sweet and simple
Topics: Eatymology, Food, Kitchen Challenge
Early Americans and pirates drank rum because it was ubiquitous, effective, and, in contrast to the available drinking water, unlikely to cause dysentery. Club girls and tourists drink rum because it’s typically served in sweet, fruity concoctions that represent the sweet freedom of a vacation. I drink rum because it’s delicious.
Rum is wicked with the taste of burnt sugar. The warmth of rum is not the fiery burn of whiskey but rather the decadent breath of the jungle. To drink rum is to indulge in indolence made possible by back-breaking labor. A good rum drink evokes not only the whisper of palms, but the creak of great sailing ships, and the slash of machetes in the cane. Do I drink rum to celebrate its legacy of brutality? No. But I’m a history nerd, and if I have the time to sit around and drink a rum cocktail, the activity is made more enjoyable by contemplating the layers of nuance shadowing a beverage that more often awakens images of simple sloth and excess: deck chairs, azure waters, paper umbrellas, spring break in Cabo.
Continue Reading CloseFelisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers.
Our stubborn faith in aphrodisiacs
Scientists scoff at the idea, so why do we cling to age-old superstitions about sex and food?
Topics: Eatymology, Food, Valentines Day
(Credit: Salon) From the Garden of Eden to the oyster cellar bordellos of old New York, food and sex are entwined. Although every food under the sun has been touted as an aphrodisiac at some point in time, humans tend to get turned on by three categories of food: extremely expensive food, food that is risky to acquire, and food that resembles genitalia.
Rare and exotic foods have favored positions in the canon of culinary aphrodisiacs. Consider the truffle, the piranha and the labor of harvesting a plate full of sparrow tongues. Foods from far-off lands have the spicy whisper of perilous adventure, and there’s nothing quite like a hint of mystery to stimulate the imagination. For example, Aztec concubines taught the conquistadors to drink hot chocolate; when the Spaniards carried the exotic substance across the sea to Europe, they brought with it the rumor that the drink was an aphrodisiac. And during the reign of Charles I, when rice was still a luxury in Europe, noble Casanovas swore by the improbable aphrodisiac of rice boiled in milk and flavored with cinnamon.
Continue Reading CloseFelisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers.
Why Americans sing about food
Elvis helped cement a lyrical tradition where food stands in for everything from sex to rural nostalgia
Topics: Eatymology, Food, Music
Elvis Presley once said, “Ambition is a dream with a V-8 engine.” At once a gentleman and a rebel, a down-home boy and a global conquistador, the King, who would have celebrated his 77th birthday on Sunday, was a powerful amalgamation of American obsessions. The King loved fast cars. The King loved rock ‘n’ roll. The King loved fried food. And the King knew how to interpret America. Take food, for instance. Elvis was notoriously obsessed with food, and he sang quite a few songs about this favorite topic. But “Crawfish” and “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” say more about our culture than they say about the icon himself. After all, Elvis wasn’t a songwriter: He was drawing from a deep well. American music sizzles with barbecue grease and bubbles like red-eye gravy. Food is a metaphor for all things, from your baby’s biscuits to the King’s caviar.
Continue Reading CloseFelisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers.
Why we get wasted on New Year’s
Our Dec. 31st hedonism is the last remaining relic of an ancient Roman carnival of debauchery
Topics: Alcohol, Eatymology, History
Guido Reni's "Bacchus" Soccer balls bulge beneath the men’s polyester skirts and blouses to create exaggerated breasts and derrieres. Their masked faces are resplendent with rouge and eye shadow, wild like plumage. Trumpet, trombone and tuba players garbed in maroon polyester suits play rousing banda, and the men shake their tousled pink and blond wigs. Their dance is a lewd, thrusting affair, accompanied by the glad-handed twirling of tuxedoed dance partners dressed as evil businessmen, who leer at the crowd with sinister rubber masks.
Continue Reading CloseFelisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers.
The birth of America’s bastardized cuisine
Since that mythic first Thanksgiving, we've relied on native plants to augment dishes from the old country
Topics: Eatymology, Food, Thanksgiving
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris' "The First Thanksgiving 1621" (Credit: Library of Congress) America is a country originally settled by scoundrels and religious zealots — thieves, embezzlers, prostitutes, arsonists; English Puritans, French Huguenots, German Amish, Czech Moravians and Russian Mennonites. The screwed-over Scotch-Irish, the shanghaied London street punk, the peace-loving, slave-owning Quaker, the enslaved Gullah. It is also the native land of the Ojibwa, the Zuni, the Makah, the Miwok and the Seneca. This alchemy of sinner and saint, “savage” and sophisticate is the source of our original cuisine: a stolen, borrowed, distorted culinaria that can pique the tongue, clog the arteries, fire the belly, or mellow the soul.
Continue Reading CloseFelisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers.
The twisted history of candy
From the tragedies of the slave trade to the glitz of the Jazz Age, the story of these sugary treats echoes our own
Topics: Eatymology, Food, Halloween
(Credit: carbonated / CC BY 3.0/iStockphoto/lisafx) As frost bites the air and plastic Halloween bunting unfurls in suburban yards, our thoughts turn to the simple delights of candy: the pastel snap of Necco wafers, the dubious rattle of a box of Good & Plenty. Half the candies we ate as kids weren’t actually good. Even at the time we suspected as much. But candy offered an undeniable pleasure: It was fantastic, it was unreasonable, it came in colors and shapes unrelated to actual food. And on Halloween, it was free.
Although tricks and treats have been part of Halloween tradition for ages, October 31st didn’t become a candy-centric holiday until the 1950s, when aggressive marketing campaigns began to tell Americans a different story about All Hallows’ Eve. And naturally, the story was about candy. Perhaps this is appropriate. Our larger story as a people is, in a sense, a story of candy.
Continue Reading CloseFelisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers.
Page 1 of 4 in Eatymology