Curated playlist
French cuisine
- French cuisineMedieval French banquets served every course at once. Diners ate with their hands, and pies were just containers.
- French friesFrance, Belgium, Spain and Chile each claim to have invented french fries. Historians have never fully settled it.
- TruffleIn 1890, the truffle fields of France spread across 750 square kilometres and gave up 2,000 tonnes in a single year. A truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus that lives underground, and the best known belong to the genus Tuber. Nothing…
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise, casually shortened to mayo, is a pale, creamy sauce that Americans buy to the tune of about US$1.3 billion every year. It is an emulsion, which means oil and a watery liquid have been coaxed into staying mixed. Egg yolk and an…
- PaprikaPaprika appears in a Hungarian dictionary of 1604 under a different name: Török-bors, which means Turkish pepper. According to George Lang's book Cuisine of Hungary, that is the earliest dictionary reference to the spice. Today the red…
- WafflePieter Bruegel painted waffles in the 16th century with such care that their squares can be counted, twelve across and seven down. A waffle is a dish of batter or dough, usually leavened, cooked between two plates. The plates are patterned…
- Foie grasFoie gras, the liver of a fattened duck or goose, appears on a stone wall at Saqqara in Egypt. In the tomb of Mereruka, an important royal official, a bas-relief shows workers gripping geese by the neck while pushing food down their…
- 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…
- CouscousCouscous is a North African dish of tiny steamed granules of rolled semolina, usually topped with a spoonful of stew. Each granule is only about 2 mm across. Yet this humble grain-like food raises surprisingly large questions. Where does…
- PretzelThe pretzel is a baked pastry shaped into a knot. At one festival in the German city of Speyer, 22,000 of them are thrown into the crowd. Today it is a salty snack sold in shopping malls and stadiums. Yet nobody agrees on who first twisted…
- PilafPilaf, also written pilav, pilau or plov, is judged by one old test: does each grain stand apart from the next? Thirteenth-century texts set the bar plainly. The grains should be plump and slightly firm, like peppercorns, with no mush and…
- CaviarCaviar is a delicacy made of salt-cured fish roe, and one rare kind once sold for £20,000 a kilogram, then about US$34,500. It was an Iranian product called Almas, a name drawn from a word meaning diamond. Its eggs came from a rare albino…
- Steak tartareSteak tartare, also called tartar steak, arrives at the table as a mound of raw ground beef, very often crowned with a raw egg yolk. This is a French dish. The plate usually comes with onions, capers, parsley or chive, salt, pepper and…
- RatatouilleRatatouille is the stewed summer vegetable dish of Provence in southern France, and it looks far older than it really is. A recognizable modern version of the recipe does not appear in print until 1930. For a dish that feels like part of…