spring cleaning · Apr 26, 12:26 PM · noon in the tropics

About the time I realized that denture tablets were my new favorite cleaning friend [drop two in a coffee-stained mug, fill with warm water, et voilà! Pristine in 15 minutes.] I realized that maybe I should read a book.

Easing the transition from housewifery to text is Eat Feed, a podcast hosted by Anne Bramley that “takes you back in time, across the country, around the world, and back to your own table.” The first week of every month approaches food history from a literary bent—Renaissance foods and Shakespeare was topic of the inaugural ’cast. More recently, the show Gastronomic Georgian England features an interview with Ivan Day, an expert in period cookery who discusses what might have been on the table at William Wordsworth’s childhood home. But my favorite moments of gustatory lit geekery slip into Bramley’s questions. [She is currently completing her Ph.D. in English.] During a segment on the evolution of the Chicago hot dog, Bramley asks of her guest, “especially considering that Carl Sandburg wrote that Chicago was ‘hog butcher for the world,’ why does Chicago have the beef hot dog?”. Smart and informative without the breathless, food porn rapture that seems prerequisite for women to host food shows of late. Download each week’s show here, or add the feed to your RSS reader and receive a link to each week’s show when it’s posted. [via The Free Range Gourmet]

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