Curated playlist
Italian cuisine
- GarlicAncient Greeks left garlic on piles of stones at crossroads as supper for the goddess Hecate.
- EspressoEspresso is a drink measured in tiny amounts. A typical serving is 25-30 ml, and a machine finishes the job in roughly 25-30 seconds. In that short window, hot water is forced at high pressure through finely ground coffee. What lands in…
- 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…
- PastaPasta comes in 310 known forms, and those forms carry more than 1,300 documented names. A single shape can answer to a different name in every town. Cavatelli alone is called 28 different things across Italy, depending on the town and the…
- ProsciuttoProsciutto is checked for quality with a needle made of horse bone. Inspectors push it into different parts of a cured ham, because bone quickly picks up the fragrances of the meat. That small test comes at the end of a process lasting…
- 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…
- ShakshoukaShakshouka is a dish of eggs cooked gently in a pan of tomato sauce, built on olive oil, peppers, onion and garlic. Cooks usually season it with cumin, paprika and cayenne pepper. It belongs to the Maghreb, the western stretch of North…
- Italian cuisineTwo out of three Italian agri-food products sold worldwide are not made in Italy.
- PizzaThe oldest known written pizza was owed to a bishop in the year 997. A tenant owed twelve pizze every Christmas Day.
- 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…
- ParmesanParmesan, called Parmigiano Reggiano in Italy, is a hard, granular cheese made from cow's milk, and it has been nicknamed the king of cheeses. About 3.6 million wheels are produced every year, which comes to roughly 137,000 metric tons.…
- 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…
- 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…
- Mille-feuilleMille-feuille is a French pastry whose name means a thousand sheets. Made the traditional way, with puff pastry folded six times in threes, it contains 729 layers. Yet the dessert answers to many names. In North America and across the…