Alex Prud’homme, Dinner with the President

Presented by Alex Prud’homme

Podcast

Links to Recipes:
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Reverse Martini
Lady Bird Johnson’s Pedernales River Chili
Martha Washington’s Preserved Cherries

You all probably know of Alex Prud’homme as co-author of Julia Child’s best selling memoir, My Life in France. Come join us as Alex takes us into the White House to talk about his latest book, Dinner with the President. Alex will serve us a capsulated history of American food and politics, from the grim meals eaten by George Washington and his starving troops at Valley Forge, to Donald Trump’s burger banquets and Joe Biden’s “performance enhancing” ice cream—what they ate, why they ate it, and what it tells us about the state of the nation. Continue reading

Flora, Fauna and Foodways

Presented by Nancy Webster, Archivist
Highland Park Historical Society

Podcast

Recipes recorded orally by Native Americans and written by local pioneer settlers demonstrate sustenance and diet using native flora and fauna.  Using exclusively 19th century or earlier resources, an exhibit and presentation of these natural and cultivated food sources were created‌.  The images of the Jesse Lowe Smith Image Collection’s documentation of flora and fauna provided the inspiration to explore diverse natural food sources being documented. Continue reading

Colombian Exchange Hit World Like Culinary Comet

Presented by Bill St. John, Journalist, Culinary Historian
Podcast

What we call the Colombian Exchange was that vast interchange of foodstuffs (and peoples, non-edible plants, technology, cultures, diseases and various animals) between the New World and the Old World that began in 1492 A.D. when Columbus “reunited” those two hemispheres. Continue reading

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir

Presented by Chef Iliana Regan
Podcast

As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan’s boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that’s suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land’s different mushroom species appear—even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area’s birds. Continue reading