Curated playlist
German cuisine
- 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.
- ColeslawColeslaw has a recipe on record from 1667, credited to a Dutch landlady. It appears in a cookbook called The Sensible Cook, or De Verstandige Kock. The author attributed it to the woman who rented him a room. She mixed thin strips of…
- 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…
- 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…
- SchnitzelIn Austria, a breaded schnitzel served under a sauce is considered unacceptable. That tells you how seriously Vienna takes a thin slice of fried meat. Schnitzel is exactly that: meat sliced thin, usually pounded flat with a tenderizer, and…
- Head cheeseIn the stores of Alberta, Canada, the typical jellied meat on sale is labelled head cheese, whether or not any part of a head went into it. Head cheese contains no dairy at all. It is a cold meat terrine, normally made from the flesh of a…
- BörekBörek, burek, byrek, brik: one family of pastries answers to all of these names across the Middle East and the Balkans. The recipe starts with a thin, flaky dough such as filo. Cooks wrap or layer it around meat, cheese, spinach or…
- 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…
- 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…
- SauerkrautSauerkraut is finely cut raw white cabbage that lactic acid bacteria have fermented into something sour, with a remarkably long shelf life. Captain James Cook trusted it enough to take it on his first and second Pacific voyages, hoping it…
- Chocolate-coated marshmallow treatsChocolate-coated marshmallow treats pour out of Danish factories at a rate of roughly 800 million a year. For a country that small, the number is startling, and most of those treats are never eaten there. The design is simple. A biscuit…