Curated playlist
Filipino cuisine
- TaroTaro, the root vegetable that botanists call Colocasia esculenta, reached 18 million tonnes of world production in 2022. Nigeria alone grew 46 percent of that total, far ahead of every other country. The crop ranks fifth among the world's…
- 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…
- Dioscorea alataAround 1939, a Mambatap greater yam grown in Maprik, in the East Sepik District of Papua New Guinea, reached 3.5 m in length. That giant root belonged to Dioscorea alata, a species of yam better known as ube. People also call it ubi, uwhi,…
- ChicharrónChicharrón has a Canadian cousin called oreilles de crisse, a traditional Quebec dish of salted fatback fried until crisp. It appears in spring at the sugar shacks, the cabanes à sucre. Diners eat it between plates heavy with maple syrup,…
- Blood sausageBlood sausage is a sausage filled with blood that has been cooked or dried, then mixed with a filler until the mass sets firm as it cools. Pigs supply the blood most often. Sheep, lambs, cattle, chickens and geese serve too. The idea shows…
- 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…
- CurryCurry was a category the British invented, not a dish India named. Indians used specific names for their dishes.
- Corned beefAstronaut John Young once hid a corned beef sandwich in a pocket of his spacesuit and sneaked it aboard Gemini 3. It was contraband. Corned beef is salt-cured beef, known as salt beef in Ireland and across Commonwealth countries. It sounds…
- 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…
- 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…
- SambalAcross Indonesia, cooks are reported to make somewhere between 212 and 300 distinct kinds of sambal. That is one country, one family of sauces, and a count that nobody can quite pin down. Sambal is a category of chilli-based sauces and…
- 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…
- 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…