What exactly is a “sustainable” wine? Easier answered back in the make-your-own backyard wine days. Like so many food and beverage products today, the definition varies depending on who is writing up the label.

Aaron Lange over at LangeTwins Winery and Vineyards broke down the organic, sustainable and bio-dynamic barriers for me recently, and talked about the family winery’s commitment to going a step farther – native wildlife habitat restoration. On a winery. Where a couple acres of grape-worthy land can cost more than the average home.

Supporting the past, in real (drinkable) time.

Get the interview over at Take Part.

The Ailing Dutch Oven

Like many young cooks, I learned to cook with a Dutch oven by my side (here, always and forever, Le Creuset). We learned to sauté onions together. We simmered Better Homes‘ spaghetti meat sauce after school. On weekends, we watched tough cuts of beef magically morph into tender stews and stroganoff when those Junior League cookbook dreams of righteous recipe perfection came true. But even when they fell short, it didn’t really matter. Better to learn now.

I loved my mom’s fiery orange Dutch oven (ginger-haired solidarity, perhaps). Still do, and pull it out every time I visit. The ingredients that we toss into that pot today may be greener, fresher, but not much else has changed after 45+Dutch oven-inspired kitchen years.

This, it seems, is not the case in Los Angeles. In less than 12 years, I managed to chip away enough interior enamel on my own (no surprise: red) Le Creuset Dutch oven, an incredibly generous wedding gift from dear friends, that the exposed cast iron was beginning to rust. The exterior of the pot fared little better; it had enough character to pass for an octogenarian — at least in pot years. Well-loved, always, even during those rough (unintentionally) black bean years.

Which gets me to that Le Creuset  “limited lifetime guarantee….”

Have more food history for thought?  Share it on facebook.com/EatHistory or via twitter.com/EatHistory.

Magnificent Chickens

When we read about something we eat, it often comes with a warning — unhealthy, inhumanely raised, antibiotic-filed, (un)fairly traded. The Magnificent Chicken, a follow-up to Tamara Staples‘ out-of-print book The Fairest Fowl (2001), accomplishes so much more by focusing on the (truly) magnificent side of poultry.

The Brooklyn-based photographer opens a window into the curious world of “show” foul, a veritable soup mix of “bearded” chins, “beetle-brow” foreheads and incredible feather patterns that resemble fine china designs. There are just as many glorious poultry breeds past, like that stunning copper-colored Golden Sebright Bantam (1874) as present (a Porcelain Belgian Beaded D’Uccle Bantam that made the cut in 2009 for its pastel hues and delicate feathers).

Staples includes the year each breed was admitted to The Standard of Perfection manual, the chicken breeder’s gold standard, its country of origin and best career choices (some are good egg layers, others are bred primarily for the pageant circuit). You’ll leave with too much respect for these quirky, charming farm foul to buy anything but those raised in happy coops.

Get five of Staples’s chicken snapshots over at LA Weekly. (Warning: you’re going to want a chick.)

Have more food history for thought?  Share it on facebook.com/EatHistory or via twitter.com/EatHistory.

A Feast of Weeds (UC Press)

Notice how many foraging books have been making the rounds of late? (A favorite: Matsuoka Wong and Eddy Leroux’s field guide and cookbook, Foraged Flavor — lamb’s quarters meatballs!). The latest, from UCLA professor of Italian and culinary history Luigi Ballerini, is  A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Plants with recipes by Ada De Santis (translated by Gianpiero W. Doebler).

In the book, Ballerini abandons that typically straightforward (Bland?) academic tone for a wandering voice (a good thing), so the history woven throughout the book comes with some unintentionally hilarious snark — those overbearing, fat (American) wild blueberry references among them.

Funny, to this overbearing patriot, wild American blueberries are always so lithe compared to their cultivated cousins. Maybe it’s an Italian vs. American theory of fruit relativity issue. Or maybe Ballerini has only been blueberry foraging at Costco when he’s on this side of the Atlantic. No matter.  Nothing a little blueberry grappa can’t resolve.

Have more food history for thought?  Share it on facebook.com/EatHistory or via twitter.com/EatHistory.

Theo Stephan of Global Gardens (Photo: Global Gardens)

What’s in your olive oil bottle these days? It’s a trickier question to answer than back in the days when pantry ingredients came from the grove down the street. In December, the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) held a public hearing to launch an investigation into the olive oil industry. At issue: Whether many of the imported olive oils on our supermarket shelves are truly first-press extra virgin olive oils or blends that are being falsely advertised as such.

A handy time to check in with Theo Stephan of Global Gardens, who makes excellent oils in the Santa Barbara area,  for more on the authenticity issue, as well as cooking and storage tips. Two words: Fried vegetables.

Get the interview over at Take Part.

Have more food history for thought?  Share it on facebook.com/EatHistory or via twitter.com/EatHistory.

Safer Than It Looks

“Making dinner shouldn’t be fatal. But four million people in the developing world die each year from illnesses linked to smoke spewing out of crude stoves — a scourge that has frustrated experts for decades.”

When it’s time to change history: When traditional cooking techniques like open-fire stoves are fatal to millions. Ingfei Chen explores the issues and solutions, including the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a nonprofit saving lives in Bangladesh, China, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. Get more in the December issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

Archive Worthy Recipes

What to bookmark this week:Virginia Tech archivist Kira Dietz’s blog, What’s Cookin’ at Special Collections, sharing her discoveries as she ferrets through recipes housed at the University Libraries.

Like so many food collections, Virginia Tech’s archives include a mishmash of cookbook and individual recipe collections, academic papers and advertising jingles (Sound familiar?).

And serve as a reminder, if you look beyond those jello-mold exteriors, that despite the way that those prudent (and pennywise) foodways of Prudence Penny may appear to modern eyes, they really aren’t much different than our current quinoa salad dinner expectations. Get more on the archival food blog possibilities over at the Virginia Tech News website.

“A lot of Americans have a misconception of what Mexico is all about,” says Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo. “Not just in a negative way, with the [violence] that’s happening in some areas. But misconceptions also come from the press side, with magazines and all the pretty photos and stories. That’s not what the ‘real’ Mexico is. Mexico is even better than that, more real.”

“Every once in a while, I meet people like these women who make the chocolate who are amazing,” he continues.

Indeed. Get more on the fantastic traditional Mexican chocolate — and better still, on why he’s importing it — over at LA Weekly.

Peel’s New Classic Family Dinners

Cooking is often about remembering — actively, looking forward and without regret. You might be inspired by a family member, an incredible vacation, a certain farmer’s produce or a neighborhood restaurant dish that you loved.

A dish, perhaps, in New Classic Family Dinners by Mark Peel.  Whether you ever dined at the restaurant or not, your dinner table arguably has been influenced by it. We owe our evolution from everyday baking powder to yeast-driven crusty loaves at least in part to Campanile’s offshoot, La Brea Bakery, which took the more corporate, less flavorful grocery store route after Peel and his former wife, Nancy Silverton, sold the restaurant some years ago. But the influence lingers in our broader baguette choices today. And then, there’s the sheer quantity of talented chefs who trained in the restaurant’s kitchen that opened restaurant empires of their own.

In the first chapter, “Salads and Warm Starters,” Peel tells us the dishes were all served as first courses at Campanile‘s Monday Night Family Dinner menus over the years: sweet corn and crab salad, stewed chickpea salad with feta, olives, and mint, eggplant Parmesan, and a spring vegetable ragout with lentils. Just the sort of cooking memories, and restaurant elegies, being stirred up last week when Campanile served its final meal — at least within the restaurant’s walls. Get more on the book, and Peel’s recipe for Clams Casino at LA Weekly.