Nutmegs, seven

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Nutmegs, seven

On taking the pulse of a food culture

May 16, 2023 Elly McCausland

In 2022, the website TasteAtlas published their annual ‘World’s Best Cuisine’ awards. The award involved ranking 95 world cuisines according to audience votes for ingredients, dishes and beverages, and its methodology and subjectivity were thus somewhat questionable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Japanese and Indian cuisines topped the rankings, and so the media were less interested in these predictable front-runners than in the cuisine with the dubious honour of coming bottom of the list: Norway.

On happiness being, in fact, a potato

August 17, 2022 Elly McCausland

I have long nursed a deep love for Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 novel Villette. It is a love made stronger by the fact that it is rarely shared. My friend and colleague Matt, upon hearing that I had decided to put Villette on my Victorian literature syllabus, responded with a derisive snort and expressed his sympathy for my poor students. Those poor students went on to prove him right, bursting into violent critique at the beginning of the seminar when I asked, as I always do, for their general thoughts on this week’s reading. They argued hotly for its tedium, its highly unlikeable narrator, its excessive length. Voices were raised. Passionate gesticulation occurred. I was thrilled.