What We’re Reading: January 18, 2014

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Our editors take us both backward and forward in time with stories of sad-but-true vintage recipes, local wine lore and soon-to-be 3D printers for home kitchens.

Can you imagine a world where you have a 3D printer in your kitchen? These researchers want you to, and as early as this year.

Eileen M. Duffy21 Truly Upsetting Vintage Recipes— Buzzfeed
One of the first food articles I wrote for a weekly paper on the North Fork was called “Historical Hors d’Oeuvres.” I had gone to an open house for the Southold Historical Society where members brought the food. There was more cream cheese rolled up in crustless white bread, with pimentos and without, than I’d seen in all of the ’70s. But nowhere near the amount of gelatin in these horrifyingly photographed dishes mixed with canned meat and coconut, or pineapple. Jell-O had a great marketing department. Truth be told, I kind of like cream cheese and crustless bread, but ham and banana hollandaise? No thanks.

Amy Zavatto: Viticulture in L.I., Part IIWine, Seriously
While tooling around on my laptop looking for information on a particular Long Island wine I plan to write about for Edible East End’s “Behind the Bottle” series, I stumbled across this incredibly well-researched blog post on Long Island terroir by sometime wine writer Jose Moreno-Lacalle, MA, DWS. Where has this been all my Long Island wine life? Wow, such great info. For the wine dabbler, it’s going to come off dry as an Australian riesling, but if you want to know more about from whence your local Long Island vines dig down, this is everything you didn’t know you wanted to know and more. I am getting ready to take the plunge and step into the WSET’s diploma program in wine education (wish me luck – damn, I’m going to need it), following in the erudite footsteps of Edible East End’s smarty-pants deputy editor and resident wine guru, Eileen Duffy — I’ll be reading a lot of this stuff in the spring and beyond!

Gabrielle Langholtz: Lentils, Beyond Soups and StewsWashington Post
This is a fascinating and fun read about lentils. Yes, I just said that. From their way-back history through their (unappreciated, in America anyway) economy and gastronomy, this story will get you eating well, and easily, on the cheap. The author is vegetarian, but even confirmed carnivores (I for one am married to a livestock farmer) can sink our teeth into “poor man’s meat” — just focus on the last word in that phrase. May we all view lentils in what the author calls the fourth stage — what CAN’T they do? And winter eves are high time to fall in love with them. “All together now — no soaking!”

Brian Halweil: Food & Ag Investment Sources Explode in 2013 — Food + Tech Connect
From new investment funds to accelerator programs to crowdfunding platforms, 26 new private food and agriculture funding sources launched over the past year.

Lauren Wilson: Early Southern Food Memories Live on with the Alabama ProjectThe Splendid Table
Celebrated Southern chef Scott Peacock has undertaken an ethnography project à la Storycorps that records some of the oldest Alabamans food memories. These stories from my home region strike a nostalgic chord and make me wish that similar projects were a requirement of all schools everywhere.

Featured photo credit: Flickr / GranniesKitchen

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