Curated playlist
Middle Eastern cuisine
- CamelA camel's hump holds fat, not water. Its real water savings happen elsewhere in the body.
- 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,…
- Strained yogurtStrained yogurt was behind most of the growth in the US$4.1 billion American yogurt industry, according to a report from 2012. It is yogurt with most of its whey drained off, so it comes out thicker but still sour. North American shoppers…
- FalafelFalafel once had a place on the breakfast menu at McDonald's in Egypt, where the chain for a time sold a sandwich called the McFalafel. A global burger company adapting its menu around a fried bean fritter says a great deal about how…
- TahiniTahini is a paste of ground sesame seeds, and sesame shows up in one of the oldest records of food culture. A cuneiform document written 4,000 years ago describes a custom of serving the gods sesame wine. The paste itself is a later story,…
- KebabKebab is not one dish. In the Syrian city of Aleppo alone, cooks are said to make at least twenty-six versions of it. Some are cooked with cherries, some with aubergine, some with chili, parsley and pine nuts, and one style is made with…
- Turkish delightTurkish delight, called lokum in Turkey, is a family of sweets built on a gel of starch and sugar. English speakers once knew it as "lumps of delight", a name that says plenty about the pleasure it promised. Today the same chewy sweet…
- 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…
- SamosaThe samosa, today a fried snack sold hot beside fresh chutneys across the Indian subcontinent, once appeared at a royal banquet in the 14th century. The traveller Ibn Battuta described a meal at the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq. Before…
- BaklavaBaklava is a pastry of paper-thin filo dough, chopped nuts and sweet syrup or honey, and almost nobody agrees on who made it first. Today it sits on dessert tables across West Asia, Southeast Europe, Central Asia and North Africa. It has…
- 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…
- 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.…