Curated playlist
Cuisine of the Southwestern United States
- Chili pepperBirds can eat the hottest chili peppers without distress. They lack the pain receptor that responds to capsaicin.
- OysterAn oyster has no brain, yet it helped feed whole cities. Its heart sits under a muscle and pumps colorless blood.
- BarbecueBarbecue first shows up as a noun in 1697, and it was a place to sleep. The English buccaneer William Dampier wrote that his party lay down for a night upon their "Borbecu's, or frames of Sticks". Three centuries later, the word names a…
- TacoIn 2024, El Califa de León in Mexico City became the first taco stand to win a Michelin star. The taco itself is a small, hand-sized tortilla made of corn or wheat. A filling goes on top, the tortilla folds around it, and the whole thing…
- 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…
- ChorizoChorizo is a pork sausage that began on the Iberian Peninsula, and it has since taken root in several countries on different continents. In Brazil, the related word chouriço points somewhere unexpected. It names the food that most of Latin…
- BurritoThe burrito, a flour tortilla wrapped around a filling, once alarmed a Scottish noblewoman on the road in Michoacán. Frances Erskine Inglis described the moment in her book Life in Mexico, published in 1843. She was hungry, and a local…
- HardtackHardtack is a dense cracker of flour and a little water, and the people forced to eat it called it dog biscuits, molar breakers, sheet iron and tooth dullers. Australian and New Zealand troops sarcastically named it ANZAC wafers, a joke…
- JalapeñoThe jalapeño takes its name from Xalapa, the capital city of Veracruz, Mexico, yet the pepper is not grown in or around that city. Popular belief gets this wrong, and the mismatch is only the first oddity. The jalapeño is a medium-sized…
- Chili con carneIn 1977 the 65th Texas Legislature passed House Concurrent Resolution Number 18, and chili con carne became the official dish of the state of Texas. The dish is a spicy stew built from chili peppers, meat, tomatoes and often beans. Texas…
- EmpanadaThe empanada turns up in a medieval Galician-Portuguese poem from around 1282, part of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. The poem describes the worst rascal in a band of robbers. He has pulled a cold chicken leg out of a pasty and hides it…
- SourdoughSourdough rode with prospectors into the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898, carried in a pouch around the neck or on a belt. Experienced miners and settlers guarded these pouches fiercely. Inside was a living mix of flour and water, full of wild…
- NachosNachos are a Tex-Mex dish of tortilla chips buried under melted cheese, and unlike most famous foods, this one carries its inventor's nickname. That raises a simple question. Who was the man behind the name, and what sent him into a…