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spacer RETHINKING HISTORIC CUISINE: a brief introduction to Four Pounds Flour

“I don’t know why old recipes are so evocative, since many of the ingredients are unknown to me or difficult to get, the processes laborious beyond belief, and the results, quite honestly, often nothing I’d want to eat. But they read like a poetry of lost specifics, in which you learn old words and ways to boil, bone, braise, devil, hash, jelly, pot, roast, sauce, steam, stew, and stuff…” (The Education of Oronte Churm)

Why bother deciphering a recipe over 150 years old?

You can take a collection of words and measurements written long ago, and turn it into a physical object. You can create something that looks, smells, and tastes just like it did hundreds of years in the past. And that’s the next best thing to time travel: it lets you understand a little bit about another way of life.

I cook fusion cuisine; but not the usual mix of geographies.  Instead, my food marries different eras of history:  different times, rather than different places.  Let’s call it “temporal fusion cuisine.”  When I recreate an historic recipe, I not only establish a connection to the past, but I rediscover long-forgotten flavors that inspire my contemporary cooking.

This blog will focus on, but not be limited to, 18th and 19th century American cuisine. It’s a lost world of rich foods, of mace and marjoram, of butter and cream. I first learned how to cook these recipes over a wood stove at my first job in high school. Later, they inspired my thesis, a restaurant reinterpreting historic cuisine for a contemporary audience. Now, I do it for the daily adventure.

Sometimes delicious, occasionally disastrous, this is a non-scholarly look at the history of food. Expect 2-3 posts a week of recipes, demos, photos and more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

spacer Sarah Lohman is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where she began working in a museum at the age of 16, cooking historic food over a wood-burning stove.  She graduated with a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2005 and for her undergraduate thesis she opened a temporary restaurant/installation that reinterpreted food of the Colonial era for a modern audience.

Lohman moved to New York in 2006 to work as Video Producer for New York Magazine’s food blog, Grub Street.  Currently, she is an educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and also works as a freelance curator, consulting with historical institutions to create public programs focused on food. Lohman has curated food-related events at museums and galleries around the city including apexart, The Henry Street Settlement, 3rd Ward and the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Dubbed an “historic gastronomist,” Lohman recreates historic recipes as a way to make a personal connection with the past. She chronicles her explorations in culinary history on her blog, FourPoundsFlour.com, and her work has been featured in publications as diverse as Edible Manhattan and NHK Japanese Public Television.  Currently, she is featured in NYC-TV’s mini-series Appetite City cooking culinary treats from New York’s past.

Contact her here.

Blog design by Bin Kinsley.  Illustrations by Peter Van Hyning.

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