Category Archives: Chicago Foodways Roundtable

Julia’s Cats: Julia Child’s Life in the Company of Cats

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Presented by Terry Burson, Author

“A house without a cat is like a day without sunshine, a pie without fromage, a dinner without wine.” — Julia Child

The world knows Julia Child as the charismatic woman who brought French cuisine to America and became a TV sensation, but there’s one aspect of her life that’s not so familiar. Soon after the Childs arrived in Paris in 1948, a French cat appeared on their doorstep, and Julia recalled, “Our domestic circle was completed.” Minette captured Julia’s heart, igniting a lifelong passion for cats equaled only by her love of food and her husband, Paul. Continue reading →

Exploring Root Vegetables

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Dug from the dirt, underdogs of the vegetable world
Presented by
Diane Morgan

Podcast by Chicago Amplified at WBEZ Chicago Public Radio

Beyond the locavore movement of shopping at farmer’s markets and joining community-supported agriculture organizations (CSAs), we are global eaters, excited to explore the tables of Thailand, China, Japan, Peru, India, Ethiopia and more at ethnic restaurants.  Adventuresome cooks buy cookbooks focused on a particular cuisine and hunt down ingredients in Asian or Latin American markets so they can make a hot pot, simmer a curry, or madly stir-fry.  If you’re like most, you wander through the produce section of an ethnic market selecting ingredients you know-‐lemongrass, ginger, Thai chiles–‐–‐all the while wondering, what the heck is this hairy potato-like tuber?  Or what do I do with galangal? Continue reading →

Taco World

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A Global History of Mexican Food
Presented by
Jeffery Pilcher, PhD

For the past 20 years, Jeffery Pilcher has investigated the history, politics and evolution of Mexican food, including how Mexican silver miners likely invented the taco, how Mexican Americans in the Southwest reinvented it, and how businessman Glen Bell mass-marketed it to Anglo palates via the crunchy Taco Bell shell. Continue reading →

Lost Recipes Found

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Presented by Monica Kass Rogers,
Writer, cook, photographer and founder of LostRecipesFound.com

Podcast courtesy of WBEZ’s Chicago Amplified

Everyone has favorite recipes they’ve loved and lost. Lost Recipes Found exists to find them, get the best of them back in circulation, and tell some of the story that goes along with them.   Continue reading →

The Early History of Pasta

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Post-Modern Myth and Medieval Reality
Presented by
Dr. Anthony F. Buccini
Author, Scholar

Pasta, now a near-ubiquitous food throughout the world, has achieved global status after a long, complex history, involving multiple points of origin and several periods of rapid expansion of its popularity regionally.  In the West one such period occurred in the late Middle Ages in the western Mediterranean.  Given the paucity of early evidence for pasta consumption, many questions arise concerning where this food first became important in local diets and exactly who diffused it.  Continue reading →