Category Meats Of The World

• Chilli

  A HAPPIER BLOG ENTRY with no unpleasant surprises, nor native animals. This is simply the chilli recipe. You will need to light a camp fire. Begin at 3pm to 4pm: this is a key element to the process. First, let the fire get hot, then cool down a bit so it's plenty of coals and a little bit of flame, not too much. Warm up your camp oven or cookpot.

  Posted 26 February 2025 · Author Liam Hogan

• Camping

  ‘CAMPING’, THE ACT OF leaving one’s house to sleep outdoors, for the sole purpose of recreation, is a very recent thing in human history, that nobody did before the Victorian era. It’s associated with the late 19th century development of cities and the anti-urbanism that is part of ‘modernity’, that grab-bag of new attitudes to living as an industrial species. I enjoy the irony that I, a professional old building noticer, really enjoy it.

  Posted 11 January 2023 · Author Liam Hogan

• Whole Hog Barbecue

  READ THIS YOU MUPPETS, on cooking and intangible cultural heritage: the rocket scientist who's also a whole hog pit master.

  Whole hog barbecue is different from other styles of barbecue. The hog is cooked in one piece, versus cooking it in parts. It’s considered the oldest form of barbecue in the United States, with roots in the cooking styles of the indigenous peoples of North America. However, the process gained traction in the American South, where enslaved people would cook whole hogs on plantations for celebrations and political gatherings...

  “When I cooked in the ground in 2017 … it was the first time that anyone in my community had done that in 40 years,” he says. “If I don’t recreate that, then it would be lost. I wasn’t going through a WPA narrative to recreate it.” [WPA stands for the Works Progress Administration, a government program that documented local life from 1939-1943.] Instead, he says, “I asked my dad to recreate it. If it hadn’t been done, then I wouldn’t know first-hand."

  Posted 20 January 2020 · Author Liam Hogan

• Gravy

  IT IS DECEMBER, SO Australians cannot escape bushfires, workplace lethargy, and Paul Kelly’s How To Make Gravy. Even for a nation of authoritarians and cop lovers, it’s notable how many of the country’s most beloved cultural touchstones involve someone going to jail, or refusing to. If Banjo Paterson’s swagman had actually got to cook and eat the sheep he stole, I like to think he’d have roasted it and retained the fats somehow.

  Posted 9 December 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Pizza

  PIZZA IS AN ASSEMBLAGE, in the philosophical sense that it is a collection of individually discrete items, brought together and consisting of a unified whole, that can be understood at many levels simultaneously—grouped ingredients and whole-of-dish. It exists as the platonic ideal of a round, baked flatbread with toppings, as a process of putting-together, as the embodied final outcome which is this evening’s dinner, and as mistake: incorrect pizzas with inauthentic aspects make Italians mad. I make dough, I put ingredients on it, I bake it, I photograph it for my neglected blog; at which point has the pizza come into being?

  

  Posted 19 November 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Chicken Marengo

  THE YEAR IS 1800. The French Revolution has proceeded through enthusiasm, terror, slaughter, reaction, and finally to dictatorship. The house of Habsburg, rulers of Austria, Hungary, bits of Italy, the rump of the Holy Roman Empire and an 'it's complicated' list of other chunks of Europe, lead the rest of Europe's crowned heads in a coalition campaign against the French in a war over territories, colonial trade. Napoleon's armies, marching on their stomachs, rout the Prussians, the Russians, the Spanish and the Central European cousin-fanciers, occupy more and more of the land bordering France, and set out on an early version of the European Union project with a will.

  Posted 26 July 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Chicken Roll

  THE SPECTACLE IS NOT a sandwich, but a social relation mediated by sandwiches, or so Guy Debord didn’t say. A long week of ridiculous thinkpieces and social media wank, begun by shameless controversialist and charlatan Bernard Salt, just reinforces the prime role of foodstuff-as-ideology.

  Posted 24 October 2016 · Author Liam Hogan

• Pie

  DESCARTES GAVE THE WORLD a philosophical distinction between material and mental, a sharp break between the body and mind. He was hardly the first to make an artificial dialectic to justify other stances, but because Enlightenment idealists liked to attach the names of Great Fellows to Great Ideas, we’ve been talking about Cartesian duality ever since. Flesh and spirit. Matter and mentality. The apparent world of measurable, objective reality and the immanent world of subjectivity.

  If you, reader, are reaching for the safety catch on your Browning at the gross oversimplification of three hundred years of Western philosophy I’ve just committed, I am sorry. Because sometimes vulgarisation of a philosophy is a helpful approach to answering the important questions in life, like: “Where am I?” and “What the hell did I just eat?”

  Posted 5 October 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Pizza Stone

  SOME MEALS ARE CONVENTIONAL, tracing a predictable curve from an ingredient list to a final shape-form as described by a precise and accurate recipe. They’re the meals Jeremy Bentham would eat, or maybe as a sped-up Taylorism could be applied to gastronomy. Other meals aren’t like that at all, and refuse to conform to your little boxes made of ticky-tacky. They follow their own rules, man.

  Posted 8 April 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Stock

  FIRST, ROAST A CHICKEN. AFTER you’ve enjoyed the bird (and the roast vegies, and the stuffing, and the gravy, and the etcetera etcetera), you’re left with a carcase and a whole lot of gristle and fatty bits. In the morning, grab a pair of scissors, slice the bones up, simmer them in water for several hours with a couple of small onions, some celery, a carrot or two, thyme, and lots of salt. You weren’t planning on going to work that morning were you? You aren’t too hung over from the very nice white wine you had with the chicken to handle the congealed leftovers before noon? Good. Once it’s all bubbled away, strain it into plastic takeaway containers and put them in the freezer for later.

  

  Posted 2 April 2012 · Author Liam Hogan