fernand braudel

Over the past few years, as upscale cuisine has increasingly divorced itself from anything resembling what the average person consumes, an interesting trend has emerged: modest, mainstream foods have often been co-opted by the culinary elites. This has led to a strange reversal, wherein peasant...

Years ago, a teacher forced me to read Fernand Braudel's three volume history of the world. While most of the information contained in Braudel's amazing opus has, thankfully, managed to leak out of my brain, I still remember that he was a huge fan of the potato. In the 40+ plus pages that he spent...