Curated playlist
Fast food
- HamburgerIn 1896, a Chicago newspaper described a Sandwich Car selling hamburgers.
- French friesFrance, Belgium, Spain and Chile each claim to have invented french fries. Historians have never fully settled it.
- Fish and chipsFish and chips, the battered fried fish with thick potato pieces that many call the national dish of the United Kingdom, still has one kitchen where an 1860s method survives untouched. That kitchen is not in Britain. It is in northern…
- PancakeA pancake, also called a hotcake, griddlecake or flapjack, once sent a woman running to church with her frying pan still in hand. Tradition places the scene in Olney, England, in 1445. A housewife was frying pancakes to eat before the…
- Fried chickenFried chicken appears in a diary entry from 1773, and the place is not Georgia or Tennessee. It is the Isle of Skye, off the coast of Scotland. The writer describes a plate of chicken fried in fat, a dish most people now link to the…
- 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…
- 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.…
- Doner kebabDoner kebab, a Turkish dish of seasoned meat roasted on a vertical spit, supported more than 16,000 establishments in Germany in 2011. Together they brought in yearly sales of €3.5 billion. That is a remarkable record for a meal that began…
- Dim sumDim sum, written in Cantonese pronunciation, translates literally as "touch the heart." It is the name for a huge family of small Chinese dishes, traditionally eaten at brunch in restaurants with a pot of tea close at hand. Most of the…
- CroquetteResearch in 2008 found that the Netherlands eats 350 million kroketten every year. Each one is a crisp breaded roll with a soft, thick filling hidden inside. The Dutch call it a kroket, Spanish speakers say croqueta, and in English it is a…
- PoutinePoutine, a heap of french fries and cheese curds under hot brown gravy, may owe its name to a shouted complaint in 1957. In the Quebec town of Warwick, a regular customer asked café owner Fernand Lachance to drop a handful of cheese curds…
- PastyA pasty, the crimped and folded pastry now tied to Cornwall and Devon, once appeared in a royal charter as a legal obligation. In 1208, King John granted a charter to the town of Great Yarmouth. Every year the town had to send the sheriffs…
- Momo (food)Momo is a steamed, filled dumpling at the heart of Nepalese and Tibetan cooking. Neighbouring Bhutan and India have taken it up as well. A plate of momos usually arrives with a dipping sauce, and the dish carries more open questions than…