Abby Fisher’s Fried Chicken (1881)

Abby Fisher’s Fried Chicken (1881)

Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Etc.  (1881) Is the second oldest African-American cookbook.  When she does relate food to a particular meal, it’s Breakfast cream cake or Waffles for breakfast.  She does not mention a...
Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)

Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)

Atkinson’s satirizes a Sunday School outing by making it a continuous set of missteps that leave the three Lennox children, Clifford, Babs, and Bunty, in such a rush to the train station that only two of them make it. The problem is that Nell Lennox, their...
Eleanor Roosevelt on Campobello Island (1931)

Eleanor Roosevelt on Campobello Island (1931)

During the first summer of FDR’s presidency, the Roosevelts hosted a Fourth of July picnic at their vacation home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick [about a half mile off the coast of Lubec, Maine]. Formality ruled, and men and women dressed in a causal style,...
Abby Fisher’s Fried Chicken (1881)

Abby Fisher’s Fried Chicken (1881)

The second oldest African American cookbook is Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Etc. She does not mention picnics in her text,  but fried chicken is a picnic staple. Fried Chicken: Cut the chicken up, separating every...
Amy Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook  (1999)

Amy Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook (1999)

Colter’s The Secret Garden Cookbook is mainly a collection of high calory, sugary and fatty foods. She starts with Burnet’s essential food path and never wanders far off. “You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner,”...
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal  (1957)

Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)

Bergman’s picnics in The Seventh Seal [Det Sjunde Inseglet], are moments of relief in an otherwise deadly serious drama about death and the meaning of God. When Block interrupts his game of chess with Death, he joins Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson)...