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Cuisine with Francine: Town Hall South lineup features food historian

By Harry Funk 6 min read
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Francine Segan 1
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Francine Segan

nyone who delves as deeply into cuisine as Francine Segan is bound to hear someone inquire every once in a while:

What kinds of foods can help in – you know – the bedroom?

She may not be certain about the actual effectiveness, but Segan can tell you all about what our forebears believed was, uh, good for the goose and gander.

“As a food historian,” she says about her not-exactly-common field of expertise, “one of the things you do is look at old cookbooks. When you start to look before 1900, you’re going to start to see a whole chapter on remedies, things that people could make at home to cure a headache or fix a burn. And there was always something like a Viagra recipe.”

Chapters with titles like “How to increase the seed in a man” or “How to make a barren woman bear children” are pretty much self-explanatory, if not always trustworthy. Consider Segan’s discovery of a cure for infertility that calls for the subject to ingest a concoction of ground-up herbs and nuts three times a day.

“The idea was a barren woman would get pregnant within 40 days,” she explains. “The last line of the recipe said, ‘It might be beneficial during the treatment if the lady made the acquaintance of a man.’ Usually, we kind of think that goes without saying.”

Here in the 21st century, Segan delights in sharing stories along those lines with audiences as she taps her vast knowledge of the world of food. The Town Hall South lecture series is featuring her as part of the lineup for its 50th-anniversary season, with her Dec. 4 talk to focus on American culinary fads of the past hundred years.

She offers this morsel:

“I thought I would start in the 1920s. What did Prohibition and women getting the right to vote, those two big historic things, do to food? For example, it ended up causing us to invent hundreds of kinds of candies. Also, we created a lot of soda. No liquor, I guess, so we’ll have sweets and soda.”

Recipes from Francine Segan

Beyond the United States, Segan focuses her expertise on a country that is especially renowned for its cuisine.

“Twenty years ago, my husband” – Marc is an inventor, with Hallmark’s musical greeting card among his patents – “and I decided for a change of pace to rent a house in Italy. We just had such a good time that we kept going back and back, and then extending the time,” she says. “And slowly, I started to want to write about Italy. I wrote one book, and then it just became one of my major passions, because there’s so much there.”

“Dolci: Italy’s Sweets,” published in 2011, features more than 125 recipes for cookies, cakes, pastries, frozen confections and other delectable desserts. “Pasta Modern: New and Inspired Recipes for Italy” hit the bookshelves two years later, and Segan also hosts a weekly TV show, “Americans in Love with Italy,” in her hometown of New York City.

She recalls her first time on television as not exactly – can’t help this one – a blaze of glory.

“When you’re talking about food, they sometimes like you to make something,” she says. “So I’m making something, and somehow I knocked the wooden cutting board a little too close to the fire, and the cutting board caught on fire. Now, this is live TV. There’s nothing you can do. If we spend time putting out the fire and making a big fuss, you’ll miss your segment. So I kind of doused it with a head of cabbage, sort of just not paying any attention to it.”

The crew’s reaction? “They thought it was hilarious. They thought it was cute. And I always have the excuse, you know, I am Italian-American. I do talk with my hands, and there is a danger with me near fire and knives.”

Before food became a focal point, Segan worked in her field of study as a child psychologist. “One of my specialties was play and toys, and so for my own kids, I would like to try to make everything fun, but with a little learning experience, including meals,” she recalls. “I started to make this little geography and history lesson whenever we’d have a meal, and my friends started to get wind of some of the fun stuff I was doing.”

Among those folks were “Perfect Strangers” star Mark-Linn Baker, who happened to be performing at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., and his spouse at the time, Adrianne Lobel.

“It was actually his wife who said, ‘Wait a minute. What about a Shakespeare dinner?’ And so I thought, that’s such an interesting idea. What did they eat back then? What did they talk about? And that whole dinner party sparked my first book, ‘Shakespeare’s Kitchen,'” Segan explains.

Subtitled “Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook” and published in 2003, the book presents biographies of and recipes from renowned chefs of the 16th and 17th centuries.

“I was having a ball every day going to the library and discovering those old cookbooks that were written back then, which not only were cookbooks but opened a window into personalities back then and what would a dinner party be like,” Segan says about the research process. “There was a book of jokes in the library, from like 1590, because the idea was when you come to dinner, you don’t just sit and eat. You’ve got to entertain your fellow diners.”

From there, it’s a short leap to the seemingly farcical lyrics of “Sing a Song of Sixpence.”

“There really was a recipe. It was basically the idea of dishes that are not necessarily edible, but they’re just supposed to be fun for the guests. And so the way the pie was, you blind bake the crust, then you put the live birds into the pie. But you don’t hurt the birds, because when the guest of honor cuts into the pie with a dull knife, the birds fly out,” Segan explains.

Around that time, chocolate made its way across the Atlantic Ocean, and Europeans couldn’t get enough.

“They saw that it gave you energy, and all the health writers back then would write about how it was invigorating and made you more virile. And so chocolate was considered an aphrodisiac,” Segan says. “So it’s associated with Valentine’s Day for a reason, maybe.”

And it provides yet another possible answer to one of those “you know” inquiries.

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