Curated playlist
Ancient dishes
- Puls (food)Ancient Romans treated a plain pot of boiled grain as their founding food. Puls was just farro, water and salt.
- YogurtRed wood ants have been dropped into warm milk to make yogurt. This happens in Bulgaria and Turkey.
- CheeseThe earliest preserved cheese found came from mummies in China's Taklamakan Desert, as early as 1615 BCE.
- BreadThe oldest evidence of bread comes from a desert site in Jordan, not a kitchen. The Natufian site is 14,500 years old.
- SausageThe sausage, a meat product built from ground meat, salt and spices, once stood at the center of an ancient Greek comedy. In The Knights, the playwright Aristophanes tells the story of a sausage vendor who is elected leader. A sausage…
- TamaleA red light burning outside a home in Guatemala at night signals that tamales are for sale inside. The tamale itself is a parcel of corn dough and filling with roots thousands of years deep. Today it appears in Andean valleys, Caribbean…
- TofuTofu, the pale block of pressed soy curds, was traditionally laid out at graves in China for a curious reason. Legend held that ghosts had lost their chins and jaws, which left tofu as the only food soft enough for them to manage. Before…
- KebabKebab is not one dish. In the Syrian city of Aleppo alone, cooks are said to make at least twenty-six versions of it. Some are cooked with cherries, some with aubergine, some with chili, parsley and pine nuts, and one style is made with…
- BörekBörek, burek, byrek, brik: one family of pastries answers to all of these names across the Middle East and the Balkans. The recipe starts with a thin, flaky dough such as filo. Cooks wrap or layer it around meat, cheese, spinach or…
- PilafPilaf, also written pilav, pilau or plov, is judged by one old test: does each grain stand apart from the next? Thirteenth-century texts set the bar plainly. The grains should be plump and slightly firm, like peppercorns, with no mush and…
- SauerkrautSauerkraut is finely cut raw white cabbage that lactic acid bacteria have fermented into something sour, with a remarkably long shelf life. Captain James Cook trusted it enough to take it on his first and second Pacific voyages, hoping it…
- HalvaHalva is spelled at least four ways in English: halva, halvah, halwa and halua. The spelling is the easy part. Behind it sits a confection spread across North Africa, East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, West Asia, Central Asia and…
- CongeeCongee, pronounced KON-jee, is the rice porridge that a 2011 comedy film dismissed as a food for "small babies and very old people". In The Hangover Part II, which is set in Thailand, the line is used to describe the character Stu Price,…