The Cook, The Doctor, The Plague and The Linguist visit 14th century Venice

The song remains the same, a pandemic has overturned our world today but this is a repeat visit from an unwelcome guest.  The Plague or Black Death ravaged over Europe beginning in 1348. Venice was a major seaport and each visitation of the disease inflicted great devastation. As a result, Venetians developed the principles of quarantine and utilized “Lazarettos/Lazarets” or quarantine stations.

We will take a moment here, Dear Reader, for the Linguist must pause for a short elaboration of these etymologies; Lazarets from Lazarus, the name of the beggar covered in sores in the New Testament (Luke 16:20). This name is borrowed from the Biblical Hebrew proper name, Eliezer meaning “my god helps”.

The edible phoenix

After a three-year hiatus, Kitchen Academic’s Manifesto is back in revamped form—we are now manifestly plural, so will henceforth switch up the apostrophe and declare ourselves to be the all-new, risen like the phoenix from the ashes of our kitchen fires,

Kitchen Academics’ Manifesto!

More to follow, from our team of two. Meanwhile, courtesy of James Beard—and the Norwegian Government School for Domestic Science Teachers—from the original Beard on Bread (1973), some new-risen

Kitcheri (recipe)

A family recipe for three kinds of dal (lentils) and rice cooked together, as taught to my father by his oldest sister, my Boro Pishi, on one of his visits back to Kolkata long ago

The first generation of women to venture out of the kitchen

Both my parents were the first in their generation, from families half a world apart, to obtain a doctoral degree. This doesn’t seem surprising for my father’s family — comfortably-off Bengali Brahmins who had always placed a high value on education. In their home town in what is now Bangladesh, they were members of the educated class. The surface meaning of being “educated” shifted during the mid-twentieth century, in India as in many other newly independent nations post-colonialism, reflecting a worldwide Westernizing tendency. Underlying values didn’t shift. Brahmin boys have been steered toward scholarship since, literally, time immemorial.

Sometimes all gates except the one into the kitchen are shut

Recently I spent some time in a tiny upstairs classroom in the Khidderpore (also spelt Kidderpore and Khidirpur) slum area of Kolkata that, despite its unprepossessing surroundings, was spotlessly clean and bursting with the high spirits of the forty to fifty teenage girls who filled it to overflowing. They sat everywhere, cross-legged knee to knee (desks and chairs are unheard of). The walls are covered with charts and drawings by the girls and their teachers, all local women of some education who work (for peanuts) with a small local NGO, Institute of Social Work. Since 1978, ISW has been running classes in this slum area. They have nothing like stable funding, but they do it anyway.