Get back in the kitchen

This isn’t an old-fashioned order aimed at women. It’s a strong piece of advice from researchers in Chicago, who have been studying the day-to-day activity of elderly volunteers. It turns out that cleaning, washing dishes and cooking can dramatically reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, even in people over 80. Those who were least active were more than twice as likely to develop the disease.

Dr. Anne Corbett, research manager at the Alzheimer’s Society, says “regular physical exercise can reduce the risk of developing dementia by up to 45%.”  She adds: “Eating a Mediterranean diet (including oily fish and the odd glass of red wine) can also help.”

So go into the kitchen and cook yourself a plate of pasta - and when you’ve finished, zip back into the kitchen to wipe down the worktops and do the clearing up.  It’s all in a good cause.

Young and gifted?

Do you know anyone between the ages of 10-14 who can cook? The Guild of Food Writers is running its annual competition called CookIt. To win the prize (a family holiday in Cornwall) you need to wow the judges with a stunning two-course meal.

Under 18s are invited to show off their writing skills in another competition, WriteIt. For this you should write 750 words on any foody subject - anything that interests, excites or frustrates you. Click on the picture for all the details and entry forms.

English roast-beef cannot be compared to American roast-beef - it is so superior.

We think that curry is very good and necessary on the borders of the Ganges River - but not on the Hudson or thereabouts.

Muffins, and other cakes or pastes, served warm are very bad for the stomach and teeth.

Opossum, otter, raccoon, skunk, fox, woodchuck, and other like animals: we cannot say that we have had much experience in cooking the above animals.

Frogs: the hind legs only are used as food. Take the hind-legs of fifty well-skinned green frogs, put them in cold water then simmer on the fire for about four hours.

Tstchy soup: put four pounds of beef into a soup-kettle (the poorer classes always use mutton) with a chicken or a duck, pork, sausages and vegetables. Cover with fish broth and a head of cabbage and simmer for about three hours.

I recently spent some time counting the books in my kitchen library: it comes to nearly three hundred. Some have been well thumbed - others have bookmarks pointing to endless appealing dishes I’ve never got round to making.

Don’t feel guilty about spending part of your day reading. I’ll let you into a secret: the armchair isn’t exactly in the kitchen. It’s in a comfortable living room where I go to escape from the washing up after the cooking is done.

Coming up - other people’s thoughts on reading and writing.

What’s new in the world of cooking?

This is the cover of a 600-page book in Italian.  Why should I feature it on a blog going mainly to English speakers?  Because it is a definitive work on the origins of good food. Pellegrino Artusi wrote “Science in the Kitchen and The Art of Eating Well” in 1891. Beginning with a history of food from Roman times, he documents Italian recipes in a warm and readable style: giving instructions and explanations that any modern cook will happily follow.You want to know how to make biscotti, panettone, zabaione and fried zucchini?  You’ll find them all here, as well as what we think of as modern dishes like Black Risotto with squid ink or crostini.

A master cook, Artusi also wrote about foreign food: English plum pudding, Roast beef (‘a dish for mainly male diners’), German Kugelhopf, French brioches and rum babas. He tells how a minestrone soup served to him in the 1850s in Livorno made him ill and left him fearing that he had contracted cholera. He distinguishes between ‘fine cooking’ and a chicken stuffed with sausage and chestnut which he says is ‘for a family’. He devotes 5 lines to the cooking of duck and 2 pages to goose, which he had hardly ever eaten since it wasn’t available in the markets in Florence.

He ponders the purpose of life; wondering why art or music lovers are considered superior to food lovers. He concludes that “you can live if you are blind or deaf, but not without a sense of taste”.

The good news is that this masterpiece has been translated into English. Click on the picture to find out more.

(For more on Artusi and his influence on modern cooking, please scroll down and click on the flower picture to go to my blog in The Huffington Post.)