February 2018
Shakespeare’s French Pears and Claret
France embraced works by William Shakespeare (1564–1616) after Voltaire (1694-1778) became enthusiastic about them in the 1720s, and the English have long embraced French food, so it should not cause much of a kerfuffle to [...]
December 2017
Thomas from the Antilles
France’s first anisette able to rival that of old houses from Amsterdam such as Lucas Bols (founded in 1575) and Wynand Fockink (founded in 1679) was the anisette produced by the 1755 company Marie Brizard [...]
November 2017
Wine Regions and Climate Change
What happens when a wine-producing region is affected by climate change? Below is a sampling of what has been reported in the past five years: eleven articles and two podcast episodes listed in reverse chronological [...]
October 2017
Sharing the Stage
Books that put French cooking on a pedestal abound from the seventeenth century to the present day, but what of books in which French cooking shares the stage with recipes from other countries? Except for [...]
September 2017
June 2017
“Rayt . . . or Wright: Why Moroccan Teapots Look British” by Iziar de Miguel
By the end of the nineteenth century, metalwork made in Europe began competing with the local production of Morocco. European merchants started to sell objects inspired by the local craftsmanship from the North of Africa. [...]