Cynthia D. Bertelsen’s books reflect her varied interests, but the common thread is always food in some way, shape, or form.
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Mushroom: A Global History (2013)
Known as the meat of the vegetable world (although they are not vegetable nor meat), mushrooms have their ardent supporters as well as their fierce detractors. Hobbits go crazy over them, while Diderot thought they should be “sent back to the dung heap where they are born.” In Mushroom, Cynthia D. Bertelsen examines the colorful history of these divisive edible fungi. As she reveals, their story is fraught with murder and accidental death, hunger and gluttony, sickness and health, religion and war. Some cultures equate them with the rottenness of life while others delight in cooking and eating them. And then there are those “magic” mushrooms, which some people link to ancient religious beliefs.
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Winner of Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2020 in Culinary History category,
Best in the World
“A remarkable book.” ~ Publishers Weekly
Wormwood Cakes, Quodling Pie, Sosenga, Hennys en bruet …
Do you like to read old cookbooks and perhaps even yearn to cook some of the recipes, with their enticing names?
“A Hastiness of Cooks” takes you step-by-step through the process of recreating recipes like these for the modern table. By the time you reach the end of the book, you’ll be able to:
- Analyze the subtext of historical cookbooks, regardless of their culinary patrimony and time period
- Decipher archaic language
- Choose the correct equipment and ingredients
- Cook with a wood fire on a hearth or three stones on the ground
- Research historical accuracy with various print and online resources
And much more.
“A Hastiness of Cooks” is not just for chefs and cooks. Living-history interpreters, battle reenactors, writers of fiction and nonfiction, historical archaeologists, historians, artists, and just about anyone interested in how people cooked and ate in the past will find much meat (and vegetable) in this concise handbook.
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In the Shadow of Ravens: A Novel (2019)
Julian D’Arcy knows her family is different. Very different. To preserve their legacy as talented healers, she wanders from place to place, forced to seek safety as she rebels against the prejudices and ignorance of seventeenth-century England. A final desperate decision changes everything when the future once again becomes uncertain. In the Shadow of Ravens portrays the forbidden practice of witchcraft as it evolved in seventeenth-century England. But more than that, it is the story of a family of strong women, of healing, of cooking, and of love.
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Wisdom Soaked in Palm Oil: Journeying through the Food and Flavors of Africa (2020)
In Wisdom Soaked in Palm Oil, award-winning Cynthia Bertelsen celebrates the cooks and spectacular cuisines of Africa. At the age of nine, she read the chapter on Morocco in Walt Disney’s People and Places, and her interest in Africa never diminished. That interest only increased once she’d lived in Africa for several years. With musings on history and books, people and places, Wisdom Soaked in Palm Oil leads the reader into the vibrant, flavorful world she experienced. A series of fifty chapters―replete with recipes―reveals the culinary richness and wisdom found in the kitchens of Africa, from Morocco to South Africa and all points in between.
“Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten”~ Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
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Meatballs & Lefse: Memories and Recipes from a Scandinavian-American Farming Life (2020)
Finalist, Lifestyle/Cooking/How-To/Home Category,
Next Generation Indie Book Awards, 2020/2021
Winner, President’s Medal, Cookbook category, Florida Authors and Publishers Association, 2022
Award-winning author and city girl Cynthia D. Bertelsen grew up in eastern Washington state, in Palouse wheat-farming country. Her father, a plant pathologist, researched diseases of wheat and cacao at a local university. And every spring he planted a big vegetable garden and tended the many fruit trees in the backyard of their old farmhouse, built in 1888. For heat, the house boasted a dilapidated oil burner in the middle of the living room. So, on most winter mornings, frost a half-inch thick covered young Cynthia’s upstairs bedroom window.
Despite this fleeting taste of rural life, when she married Mike Bertelsen, Cynthia had a lot to learn from her Norwegian-American mother-in-law Ethel, both about farming and life in general.
Ethel’s Norwegian ancestors immigrated to America in the 1850s and settled in western Wisconsin, where they farmed for decades. With her Danish husband Knute, Ethel raised six children on a small family farm amid the challenges of the twentieth century: the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, polio epidemics, the social upheavals of the 1960s, and the fluctuating economic fortunes of dairy farming. The day-in-day-out routine of milking, tending to crops and livestock, preparing immense meals for threshing crews, and sometimes dealing with poor harvests meant much hard work, and often heartbreak.
Through recipes, family anecdotes, photographs, and historical musings, Meatballs & Lefse tells the story of the relationship between a young bride and her mother-in-law, each coming from different worlds, yet united by love of family, the kitchen, the land, and each other. Meatballs & Lefse also shines a light on Scandinavian-American immigrant culture and cuisine.
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Stoves & Suitcases: Searching for Home in the World’s Kitchens (2021)
Winner, Best in the World, Food Writing, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2022
Winner, President’s Medal, Florida Authors and Publishers Association, 2022
Longlisted, Memoir Magazine Book Awards, 2022
“Stoves and Suitcases addresses the rootlessness of travel, the solitude but also the ecstasy, the freedom of reinvention, discovery of self and of others. Timeless themes. I thought of a female Odysseus. Ghosts of the old explorers live in Cynthia D. Bertelsen, adventurers who left the familiar behind to see what they could see. For the author, home isn’t a place: it’s a feeling, a new culture, a newly discovered food, another stamp on her passport. She is a citizen of the world. She is also one helluva terrific writer, and this is one helluva terrific book.” ~ Leo Racicot, author of Alone in the Yard: Buddhist, Beat and Otherwise
Take a girl with an iffy start in life. Mix in wanderlust and cooking. Add a dollop of yearning for home and belonging. Knead in a pinch of self-discovery. Let rise and ripen. The result is award-winning author Cynthia D. Bertelsen’s Stoves & Suitcases, a reflective saga that begins in an incubator. Where the author first discovers the world’s culinary diversity as nurses fed her sweetened-condensed milk formula. Later, cookbooks pique her wanderlust and her longing to be elsewhere. A semester abroad in Mexico and a stint in the Peace Corps in Paraguay ignite those embers of wanderlust. That fire never stops burning. Years of living and working and cooking in the developing world follow, with long-term sojourns in Honduras, Haiti, Morocco, and Burkina Faso. And travel to many other corners of the Earth. Stoves & Suitcases weaves an age-old tale of leaving home to find home. Contains over 100 recipes.
For me, stoves became something akin to altars, something almost holy, places of communion where I could prepare meals and share the fruits of my labors with others.
~ Cynthia D. Bertelsen
Take a Goose or a Duck: Eclectic Essays on English Cookery through the Ages
Take a Goose or a Duck is full of culinary stories about old friends like Markham and Mrs. Beeton and essays that give fresh insight. It proves that British food is intriguing and wonderful. It will be my favourite bedtime reading for the foreseeable future. ~ Regula Ysewijn, author of Pride and Pudding and The Official Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook
In Take a Goose or a Duck, Cynthia Bertelsen takes on two persistent myths of modern culinary history with a breezy, casually conversational style, and solid research that is anything but casual. As she champions Britain’s unjustly maligned culinary heritage, she also presents a lively argument for the often-ignored yet critical role it played in shaping our own. ~ Damon Lee Fowler, author of Classical Southern Cooking and recipe developer and editor for Dining at Monticello: In Good Taste and Abundance
Take a Goose or a Duck is a comprehensive exploration of English cooking and its influence in America. A proper page-turner, this study of culinary history is as addictive as it is entertaining. This is an essential read for cookbook enthusiasts and history buffs on both sides of the pond. ~ Sam Bilton, author of First Catch Your Gingerbread
Cynthia Bertelsen dips her finger deeply into every delicious pie in these essays. She is an M.F.K. Fisher for a new century. Take a Goose or a Duck: Eclectic Essays on English Cookery Through the Ages is essential, beyond measure, for every worthy kitchen and culinary collection. ~ Leo Racicot, author of Alone in the Yard: Buddhist, Beat & Otherwise
Mangoes & Roosters: Stories and Tales of Haiti
A fictional exploration of Haitian life by the author of the award-winning A Hastiness of Cooks and Stoves & Suitcases.
Ever since colonial days, when France claimed it as her own, Haiti carried within it an aura of the unknown and the mysterious. Once called the “Pearl of the Antilles,” Haiti became for a time the largest sugar-producing region in the world, thanks to plantations populated by thousands of enslaved Africans, who rose up and defeated their French masters in a bloody revolution in 1804. Rift with unrest ever since, Haiti continues to be an enigma, with its rich culture of art and literature and Vodun, yet forever misunderstood. Mangoes & Roosters, based on a few words found in the popular song, “Haiti Cherie,” paints fictional portraits of key players in Haitian society and culture.
Dispatches from a Kitchen Table: Exploring Life, Love, and Lots of Other Stuff
Dispatches from a Kitchen Table is a portrait of Life in its many tangled facets, from a lush vegetable garden in childhood to the discovery of cookbooks to the upheaval of the COVID pandemic. Written in the novelistic and personal style award-winning Cynthia D. Bertelsen is known for, each of these over 100 mini-essays examines the impact of food on people, society, or history.