Curated playlist
Chinese cuisine
- Chinese cuisineChinese cuisine owes its fiery Sichuan dishes to chili peppers from Mexico.
- TeaIn 2016, archaeologists found the earliest known physical evidence of tea in an emperor's tomb in Xi'an.
- SoybeanThe soybean, known to botanists as Glycine max, is a legume native to East Asia, and in June 1973 the United States briefly refused to sell it abroad. Traders had misread the soybean futures market, which wrongly signaled a major shortage.…
- Glutinous riceGlutinous rice sits behind a statistic that sounds almost invented. In Laos, a landlocked country of roughly 7 million people, each person eats about 171 kilograms of it every year. That is 377 pounds, and it is the highest per-capita…
- CurryCurry was a category the British invented, not a dish India named. Indians used specific names for their dishes.
- 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…
- CalabashA calabash gourd grown in Taylorsville, Kentucky, in 2001 weighed 111.5 kilograms. That single fruit hints at the range of Lagenaria siceraria, the vine known as the calabash or the bottle gourd. Its fruits can be huge and round, small and…
- Peking duckPeking duck, the roast duck of Beijing, once sat at the center of a diplomatic breakthrough. On the 10th of July 1971, Henry Kissinger, the United States secretary of state, was in the Great Hall of the People. It was his first visit to…
- Horse meatHorse meat is a staple of kitchens in many parts of Europe and Asia, and a forbidden food in many others. The eight countries that eat the most of it consume the meat of about 4.3 million horses every year. That is an enormous number for a…
- Century eggCentury eggs, called pídàn in Mandarin, are also sold as preserved eggs and hundred-year eggs, yet a batch is ready in weeks or months, not a century. Crack the shell and the first surprise is color. The white has turned a dark brown and…
- MochiMochi, the Japanese rice cake, once turned into a white bird and flew away. That is the legend recorded in the Bungo no kuni fudoki, a book compiled in the late 8th century, during the Nara period. A rich man took leftover rice and made a…
- 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…