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Lustful Appetites is here!
Reviews and podcasts are starting to appear. Read or listen at these links: Kirkus review Wall Street Journal review by Daniel Akst Lisa Hilton’s review in the Times Literary Supplement Mei Chin’s review in the Irish Times Brief excerpt in the Paris Review Interview with Suzanne Harrington in the Irish Independent: Podcast interview with Miranda…
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New Book Announcement!
My next book, Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex, is now available for pre-order in the U.K. and North America! I would love to appear on your podcast, lecture at your university, speak to your class, or give a talk to your organization about the fascinating history of food and…
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Podcast about Unspeakable
Last week I spoke with Graham Foster at the Anthony Burgess Foundation about Norman Douglas and his role as a character in Burgess’s masterpiece, Earthly Powers. Burgess’s novel tells the story of a closeted gay novelist, Ken Toomey, who is haunted by the vision of Norman Douglas’s rapacious sexual appetite. Foster and I talk in…
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Chicken, Oysters, and Time Travel
“To smother a Fowl in Oysters,” advises the first American cookbook author Amelia Simmons, “fill the bird with dry Oysters, and sew up and boil in water just sufficient.” These instructions, from her 1796 volume American Cookery, are bound to make most modern stomachs revolt. We like our surf and turf well enough when it’s steak and lobster, cooked separately,…
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Love’s Oven is Warm: Baking with Emily Dickinson
“Love’s oven is warm” Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Sarah Tuckerman, on a note that enclosed a gift of slightly scorched handmade sweets, possibly chocolate caramels. If the words were by any other author, one would be forgiven for reading in them a possible sexual double entendre. But Emily Dickinson is enshrined in our…
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Benjamin Franklin’s Apple Pudding
Like many eighteenth-century recipes, Benjamin Franklin’s instructions for making apple pudding don’t offer a lot of detail, just enough to inspire certainty that the end result would be inedible by twentieth-century standards. What better reason could there be to break out the mixing bowl! The sense of the unfamiliar has always been what compels me about history. I…
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The Benjamin Franklin Diet
“A Full Belly is the Mother of all Evil,” Benjamin Franklin counselled the readers of his 1743 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. For some mysterious reason this aphorism hasn’t had the sticking power of some of the inventor’s more famous sayings, like “he who lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas,” or “fish and visitors stink in…
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Elizabeth David & Coming Home
When Elizabeth David came home to Britain in 1946, after spending the war years in Egypt, her agonies from the the flavorless diet she rediscovered drove her to write a cookbook recollecting all the wonderful things she had eaten during her absence. Britain was at the height of postwar rationing and gristle rissoles were on the menu, along with flour…
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The Long and Short of It: Looking Back on the History of Same-Sex Marriage, One Year after Windsor
Here is a guest post I wrote for the wonderful history-of-medicine blog Nursing Clio
Historian. Novelist. Greedy Woman. 