Category: Books

A Skimmington Shaming

3/2/2018

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it?
In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.

Metropolitan Museum of Art / The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966

Read my piece on skimmington in OZY.

If you want to read even more about skimmington and the European traditions it evolved from, check out Riot and Revelry in Early America, a collection of essays about protest and celebration in the United States from the colonial period to the Civil War.

0 Comments

Resolute like it is 1899, dear fellow (Part 2)

1/14/2016

0 Comments

Let's taste test this stuff.

(For background on the cookbooks I used, visit part 1 of this post.)

Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm, where many episodes of Historieätarna were filmed.

One of my very favorite TV shows is a Swedish series called Historieätarna, which is based on a British show called The Supersizers.... (If you speak Swedish, you can check it out here.) Lotta Lundgren and Erik Haag devote one week to living from a period in Swedish history. They go whole hog - clothes, drink (which means they are drunk a lot), activities, work, and food. Their professional chef cooks mostly what seem like bizarre, but historically accurate, meals from the past.

The last post was about those Victorian cookbooks, and this one is about becoming a history eater in just a tiny way and testing some of those recipes. (But warning, I'm not a food blogger... don't let anyone every tell you that's easy....)

0 Comments

Resolute like it is 1899, dear fellow. (Part 1)

1/11/2016

1 Comment

If it were 1899, and you were making a New Year's resolution, it might be to try that healthy eating style they're calling 'vegetarianism' ....

“You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.” - from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

But if you're not eating the ape and instead sharing dinner with him, what are you eating? Some Victorian cookbooks offered the solution long before the California 1960s hippies did.

1 Comment

Come in, the stacks are open.

A Skimmington Shaming

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it?
In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.

Read my piece on skimmington in OZY.

Resolute like it is 1899, dear fellow (Part 2)

Let's taste test this stuff.

Resolute like it is 1899, dear fellow. (Part 1)

If it were 1899, and you were making a New Year's resolution, it might be to try that healthy eating style they're calling 'vegetarianism' ....

Come in, the stacks are open.

Archives

Categories

Come in, the stacks are open.

A Skimmington Shaming

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it? ​In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.

Read my piece on skimmington in OZY.

Resolute like it is 1899, dear fellow (Part 2)

Let's taste test this stuff.

Resolute like it is 1899, dear fellow. (Part 1)

If it were 1899, and you were making a New Year's resolution, it might be to try that healthy eating style they're calling 'vegetarianism' ....

Come in, the stacks are open.

Archives

Categories

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it?
In early America, the answer would have been skimmington.