Curated playlist
Mediterranean cuisine
- ThymeMedieval women gave knights thyme leaves to pass on courage. The herb's link with bravery began with ancient Greeks.
- BasilA pot of basil in a Boccaccio tale led to a Keats poem and two paintings. The herb's name means royal plant in Greek.
- Olive oilOlive oil is the liquid fat pressed from the fruit of Olea europaea, and a Carabinieri investigator interviewed on the American program 60 Minutes once said that "olive oil fraud has gone on for the better part of four millennia." Nobody…
- French cuisineMedieval French banquets served every course at once. Diners ate with their hands, and pies were just containers.
- EggplantEggplant, known to science as Solanum melongena, carries a different name depending on who is talking. North Americans, Australians and Filipinos say eggplant. The British, Irish and New Zealanders say aubergine. Across India, Bangladesh,…
- OliveThe olive, a subtropical evergreen tree that botanists call Olea europaea, once led the writer Georges Duhamel to remark that the "Mediterranean ends where the olive tree no longer grows." That is a large claim for a short, squat tree…
- ChestnutChestnut trees belong to the genus Castanea, and the most famous of them grows on the slopes of Mount Etna. The Hundred Horse Chestnut measured 57.9 metres, or 190 feet, in circumference in 1780. By 1883 the figure had reached 64 metres.…
- 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…
- Italian cuisineTwo out of three Italian agri-food products sold worldwide are not made in Italy.
- GyrosGyros is a Greek dish of meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie, shaved into thin slices and wrapped in pita bread. It is a staple street meal in Greece and Cyprus, and it is sold far beyond them. Yet the name on the menu has a curious past.…
- PizzaThe oldest known written pizza was owed to a bishop in the year 997. A tenant owed twelve pizze every Christmas Day.
- Doner kebabDoner kebab, a Turkish dish of seasoned meat roasted on a vertical spit, supported more than 16,000 establishments in Germany in 2011. Together they brought in yearly sales of €3.5 billion. That is a remarkable record for a meal that began…
- 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…
- 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…
- SumacSumac was packed into the cargo of an 11th-century ship that sank off the coast of Rhodes. Archaeologists excavated the wreck in the 1970s and found commercial quantities of sumac drupes aboard. No one can say what the merchants intended.…