Curated playlist
Indian cuisine
- TeaIn 2016, archaeologists found the earliest known physical evidence of tea in an emperor's tomb in Xi'an.
- Indian cuisineIn an 1840 autobiography, the Scot Robert Lindsay set down a small domestic moment. A Sylheti man named Saeed Ullah cooked a curry for Lindsay's family. This may be the oldest record of Indian cooking in the United Kingdom. The scene is…
- 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…
- Masala chaiMasala chai, the spiced milk tea of the Indian subcontinent, comes in a size that surprises first-time visitors to Mumbai. Roadside tea stalls there sell small, inexpensive cups called cutting chai. The name comes from a simple idea. A…
- 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…
- PaneerPaneer is a cheese that refuses to melt. Drop a cube into a bubbling curry and it holds its shape, soft and mild, while the sauce moves around it. It is made from cow milk or buffalo milk, curdled with acid and never aged. Across South…
- Mughlai cuisineA British ambassador at a Mughal emperor's court described a dinner that was, in effect, a curry.
- JaggeryJaggery is a block of boiled sugarcane juice, and in many Gujarati communities its name is part of the word for an engagement. The phrase is gol-dhana, which literally means jaggery and coriander seeds. A sweetener has become shorthand for…
- BulgurBulgur is a cracked wheat food, and in parts of the Middle East people eat it by the sack. A 2007 study in the Journal of Food Engineering measured how much. In south-eastern Turkey, the average person ate about 25 kilograms of bulgur…
- GheeGhee, a clarified butter from the Indian subcontinent, appears in the Mahabharata at the birth of the Kaurava, who were born from pots of it. Few cooking fats carry that kind of mythic weight. Yet ghee is also a practical thing. It is a…
- French toastFrench toast is bread soaked in beaten eggs, often with milk or cream, and then fried in a pan. It is also known as eggy bread and as poor knights of Windsor. A dish with that many aliases invites suspicion. Is it really French? Who first…
- 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…