The Old Foodie

My gift to those of you celebrating Cinco de Mayo today was to be the best of all gifts (well, one of them anyway), it was to be the gift o...

It is a while since we had any military food history, so today I want to give you some wisdom and recipes from an American Civil War era man...

Yesterday’s post on the definitive Southern US beverage of mint-julep was the result of a deviation from the rather convoluted search for th...

I got to thinking about ‘milk’ after my post of yesterday. I have always had a vague objection to the concept of soy milk in the context in ...

This week, just for fun, I thought I would see what was considered ‘notable’ in food ideas in a pompously charming book called A Thousand No...

I want to give you two more ‘meals’ today, to complete our series. Firstly, lets take a break for ‘bever’ (or ‘beaver’). ‘Bever’ is another ...

I bought a jar of chilli jam at the Farmer’s Market recently, from a new stallholder, and very good it is too. I can still remember the fir...

I have become interested recently in the evolution of ‘single ingredient’ cookery books. It was the Chocolate Parfait Amour recipe from the...

An interesting article in the New York Times of March 21, 1886 made ponder on the various and devious ways in which the determinedly subver...

The last of our kitchen words for this week is ‘buttery’. The buttery was another ‘room’ in a medieval household which has long since becom...

I wind up my time here in Dublin with some ‘Irish’ recipes – by which I mean those named ‘Irish’ by cookbook writers of the past. They may o...

I am visiting Dublin for a few days, and naturally my sightseeing focus is on ‘food’ – using the term as widely as seems appropriate. Few w...

Today, with much relief, I leave behind the relentlessly awful, cold, uncooked, unsalted, unspiced, decidely unappealing offerings of the ea...

Sometimes a historic trail leads off to somewhere quite different from where you start – which is a large part of the fun of course. I was ...

Feeding the troops is a special sort of catering art, and the military in various countries have published instruction manuals from time to ...

The tricky issue of what to serve in the way of party drinks during Prohibition in the USA was solved by either breaking the law, getting a...

Now this recipe (from the same newspaper source as the previous two days) triggered a real trip down memory lane for me, on account of one o...

Today, August 10th … General Orders No. 54, dated this day in 1861, specified the ration for a Civil War Confederate soldier to be: 22 ounce...

Today, June 21 st This day is the Solstice – the day the sun seems to stand still. In the Northern Hemisphere it is the Summer Solstice...