Pork Adobo

What better recipe to follow a post on pig history than one that uses pork—this one from the Philippines.
The Philippines were once part of the great trading empire that Spain established after the discovery of the New World. It is the Spanish legacy that makes the islands of the Philippines something of an anomaly in [...]

This Little Piggy Went to Market

Pork for sale in Oaxaca, Mexico

If you said “Wall Street” and “pigs” in the same sentence, people might think you were talking about greed and dirty dealing, or perhaps they would assume it was a socialist comment about capitalism. However, Wall Street has an older association with pigs than these metaphorical ones. In the 1600s, [...]

Yes, Sir, Cheese my Baby

Local cheeses at Neal’s Yard, one of London’s great cheese shops.
Clifton Fadiman described cheese as “Milk’s leap to immortality.” In a way, cheese has in turn immortalized other things—how many towns are known primarily because of the famous cheeses that come from them (Cheddar, England, for example, or Gouda, Holland)?
It probably won’t come as [...]

Delightful Bali

Bali’s famous terraced rice fields

Among my favorite books when I was a child was an elegantly illustrated volume titled Bobra of Bali. In this book, I read of life on a beautiful island, where rice grew in terraced fields, children wore sarongs and went barefoot, women went to temple with towers of food and [...]

Chicken Salad’s Russian Roots

Salat Oliviye
When the brilliant, energetic, and visionary Peter the Great of Russia decided to drag his country into the modern age, among the orders he gave were that men had to cut their flowing hair, women had to stop wearing face veils, and everyone among the nobility should learn a foreign language, preferably French. He [...]

Don’t Hold the Mayo

There is a saying in France that Le sauce est tout—“The sauce is everything.” The great chefs of France have given the world a plethora of glorious sauces with which to adorn our repasts. There is Béarnaise, Hollandaise, Bordelaise. But perhaps the most famous and widely used of France’s sauce creations is, due to its [...]

Rajas con Crema

Veggies, fruits, and chiles in a Mexican market.
The second time I went to Mexico, it was for cooking school. But my first trip was just to tour, to visit a variety of regions and sample a variety of regional specialties. Mexico is a key location for culinary history research, because so many foods [...]

Saag, Chole, and Garam Masala

Here are two dish that illustrate the point made in the previous post that many Indian foods don’t taste at all like what many countries define as “curry.” It also illustrates that “spicy” does not always mean the same as “hot.” (Spanish has the advantage of separate words for hot spicy—piquante— and hot temperature—caliente. [...]

Favoring Curry

Spices for sale in a market in Kerala, India’s “spice state.”
A homonym, also sometimes called a homograph, is a word that is spelled identically to another word but has both a completely different meaning and a different origin. Homonyms generally have separate listings in the dictionary. Good examples include compound, bark, and mail. [...]

Malaysian Baked Bananas

Now that I’ve given you the history of bananas, and you know how intriguing they are, I thought I’d share a recipe with you, so that you have something to do with your bananas besides just slicing them on your cereal or eating them plain.
Malaysian baked bananas are wonderfully flavorful. It’s a really easy recipe, [...]