Curated playlist
Christmas food
- BeefBeef traces back to the aurochs, a wild animal painted on the walls of Lascaux.
- Mandarin orangeThe sweet mandarin orange descends from a bitter wild fruit. The pomelo gave most mandarins their sweetness.
- Lamb and muttonIn most of South Asia, mutton on a menu means goat. Mutton curry in India is made from goat meat.
- ChestnutChestnut trees belong to the genus Castanea, and the most famous of them grows on the slopes of Mount Etna. The Hundred Horse Chestnut measured 57.9 metres, or 190 feet, in circumference in 1780. By 1883 the figure had reached 64 metres.…
- 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…
- PierogiAt the 2007 Pierogi Festival in Kraków, visitors ate about 30,000 pierogi every single day. Pierogi are filled dumplings. A cook wraps unleavened dough around a filling and drops the parcels into boiling water. The dish is a traditional…
- Hot chocolateAztec commoners who drank hot chocolate were considered a bad omen. For the Aztecs, the drink marked high status.
- BorschtBorscht is a sour soup from Eastern Europe, and in March 1961 its recipe was read out from space. The Soviet craft Korabl-Sputnik 4 was circling the Earth in low orbit, carrying animals and a mannequin as a rehearsal for crewed flights.…
- MarzipanMarzipan, a paste of sugar and ground almonds, appears in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, in Act 1, Scene 5, under the old English name marchpane. Today it is molded into pigs, potatoes, eggs and tiny painted fruit. Bakers also roll it…
- HaggisHaggis, the Scottish savoury pudding, has a reputation that confuses some of the people who come to eat it. In one poll, 33 percent of American visitors to Scotland believed haggis was an animal. The joke behind that belief describes a…
- GumboIn 1803, the French governor Pierre Clement de Laussat hosted a soirée where cooks prepared 24 different gumbos. That is a single stew in two dozen versions, served at one party. Gumbo is a stew rooted in the United States Gulf Coast, and…