WiDo Publishing LLC
6.5K posts
WiDo Publishing LLC
@widopublishing
Independent small press publishing a variety of genres, since 2007.
Beef Bourguignon is the most celebrated stew in French cuisine. It appears on the menus of Michelin-starred restaurants, it was the dish Julia Child chose to open her very first television episode, and it has been written about more than almost any other French dish in history. Burgundian peasants in the Middle Ages needed a way to make cheap, tough cuts of beef edible. They had no money for anything better so they slow-cooked the unwanted meat for hours in the one thing they had in abundance, cheap local wine, with whatever onions and roots were lying around. That was it. That was the whole recipe. The dish did not appear in any serious cookbook until 1903, when Auguste Escoffier served it at the Ritz in London and the aristocracy went wild for it, having apparently never encountered the peasant food of their own country. The Italians did the same thing repeatedly and more aggressively. Ribollita, which translates literally to reboiled, is now one of the most beloved soups in Tuscany and served in restaurants across Florence. Its actual origin: medieval Tuscan peasants collected the bread used as plates at noble feasts, the bread that had soaked up sauces and been left behind, and boiled it together with leftover vegetables to make something that would last the whole week. Each time it was reheated it got thicker and more flavourful. Pellegrino Artusi, the father of modern Italian cuisine, included it in his 1891 cookbook and described it as a peasant soup that he was convinced would be appreciated by everyone, even gentlemen. He was right. Panzanella was stale bread and water. Cacio e pepe was shepherd's food, carried by Roman shepherds on mountain drives because aged pecorino and dried pepper kept without refrigeration. Carbonara almost certainly emerged from simple wartime ingredients. Every single dish that defines what the world thinks of as Italian cuisine was invented by someone who had very little. What keeps happening across history is that the wealthy ate elaborate food designed to show off money, food engineered for spectacle rather than pleasure, and it has mostly been forgotten. The poor ate food engineered to taste as good as possible with as little as possible, food that rewarded patience and technique and knowledge of ingredients, and that food is what survived. The word for it in Italian is cucina povera, poor cooking. It is the greatest cooking tradition in the world, and almost none of it was designed by a chef. It's poetic that some of the tastiest meals in history were made by those who had very little besides their crops and technique. © Eats History #archaeohistories
in 1646, a mysterious austrian man named johannes gumpp created this self-portrait and then disappeared from history. he painted himself from behind while looking in the mirror, creating 3 different perspectives on a single canvas. it was his only work; nothing is known about him
We have visited Redwood NP several times. The beauty in these forests is just awe inspiring.
In 1953, the American food company Swanson found itself facing an unexpected problem after Thanksgiving. The company had misjudged demand and was left with an enormous surplus of frozen turkey, estimated at about 260 tons. Warehouses were filled with unsold birds, and the company needed a creative way to prevent the costly stockpile from going to waste. A Swanson salesman named Gerry Thomas proposed an idea inspired by airline meals that were served in small aluminum trays. Instead of selling whole turkeys, the leftover meat could be sliced and packaged into individual portions alongside side dishes like cornbread stuffing, peas, and sweet potatoes. Each meal would be placed in a divided aluminum tray, allowing people to heat it in the oven and eat directly from the container. The result was the “TV Dinner,” a product designed for the growing number of American households that were spending evenings gathered around their television sets. Marketed as the Swanson TV Dinner, the meal quickly became a sensation. In its first year alone, Swanson sold more than 10 million trays. What began as a desperate attempt to deal with excess turkey ended up launching one of the most influential convenience foods of the 20th century. #drthehistories
Woke up and realized it’s a lovely day to crash out about how authors are expected to be so performative nowadays and I wish I was born when writers just smoked and drank all day and were comfortably mentally ill and didn’t have to be jesters on social media
The author of Psycho, Robert Bloch, writes at his desk in the 1950s.
I have been informed that I should not write anything that is true if it sounds untrue because a reader can't handle it. For example: There is a legitimate medical condition where if you sever your spinal cord, you could have an erection. However, I am being told an author should not have the legitimate medical fact in their book because it would confuse a reader unaware of it and break their suspension of disbelief. Now, I'm not British, but the word "bollocks" comes to mind. If a reader doesn't know something, they can look it up. I have also been told I should not use Spanish Moss in my book because not everyone is familiar with what it is and therefore would ruin the story. Would really love your opinions because I feel like I'm going crazy with treating my reader, and expecting authors to treat me, with intelligence.