Curated playlist
Arab cuisine
- CardamomOne German coffee planter helped make Guatemala the top cardamom grower. He brought the plant there before World War I.
- CamelA camel's hump holds fat, not water. Its real water savings happen elsewhere in the body.
- Strained yogurtStrained yogurt was behind most of the growth in the US$4.1 billion American yogurt industry, according to a report from 2012. It is yogurt with most of its whey drained off, so it comes out thicker but still sour. North American shoppers…
- SemolinaSemolina is a coarse flour, traditionally milled from durum wheat, and one international food standard defines it with a sieve. The Codex Alimentarius says a durum wheat semolina must have grains large enough that no more than 79 percent…
- FalafelFalafel once had a place on the breakfast menu at McDonald's in Egypt, where the chain for a time sold a sandwich called the McFalafel. A global burger company adapting its menu around a fried bean fritter says a great deal about how…
- TahiniTahini is a paste of ground sesame seeds, and sesame shows up in one of the oldest records of food culture. A cuneiform document written 4,000 years ago describes a custom of serving the gods sesame wine. The paste itself is a later story,…
- GyrosGyros is a Greek dish of meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie, shaved into thin slices and wrapped in pita bread. It is a staple street meal in Greece and Cyprus, and it is sold far beyond them. Yet the name on the menu has a curious past.…
- HummusHummus once filled a single dish that weighed approximately 10,450 kilograms. Three hundred cooks in the village of al-Fanar, near Beirut, prepared it. The result was more than double the weight of the previous Israeli-Arab record, and it…
- 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…
- ShawarmaShawarma begins with a tall cone of stacked meat turning slowly beside a source of heat. As the outer layer cooks, a cook shaves it away in thin pieces, and the cone keeps turning. That simple routine plays out at street stalls across the…
- DolmaDolma first shows up in writing in a 16th-century Persian book called Mâddet ol-Hayât, and the author treats it as a curiosity from abroad. Cabbage dolmeh, the book says, is commonly prepared in the land of the Rûm, meaning Turkey, but is…
- CouscousCouscous is a North African dish of tiny steamed granules of rolled semolina, usually topped with a spoonful of stew. Each granule is only about 2 mm across. Yet this humble grain-like food raises surprisingly large questions. Where does…
- BaklavaBaklava is a pastry of paper-thin filo dough, chopped nuts and sweet syrup or honey, and almost nobody agrees on who made it first. Today it sits on dessert tables across West Asia, Southeast Europe, Central Asia and North Africa. It has…
- Pickled cucumberThe pickled cucumber goes by two names, and which one you use depends on where you live. In the United States and Canada, it is simply a pickle. In Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, it is a gherkin. Under either…