Curated playlist

National dishes

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.
SushiThe word sushi traces to an old term meaning sour tasting, not raw fish. Fermentation gave the dish its original tang.
RamenRamen, the Japanese noodle soup, is sold in more than 24,000 shops across Japan. Around 5,000 of them are in Tokyo alone. In December 2015, a shop called Tsuta, in Tokyo's Sugamo district, earned a Michelin star. Yet for a long time the…
PhoPho is a Vietnamese noodle soup, and it is absent from Georges Dumoutier's extensive 1907 account of Vietnamese cuisine. That silence is striking. Dumoutier wrote at length about the food of the country, yet a bowl of broth, rice noodles,…
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…
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…
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…
Hot dogIn 1892, a newspaper described a "hot dog" being quickly inserted in a gash in a roll. That line is one of the earliest printed glimpses of the hot dog, a sausage served in a partly sliced bun. Americans now eat 20 billion of them every…
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.…
HummusHummus once filled a single dish that weighed approximately 10,450 kilograms. Three hundred cooks in the village of al-Fanar, near Beirut, prepared it. The result was more than double the weight of the previous Israeli-Arab record, and it…
PaellaPaella, the rice dish of the Valencian Community in Spain, once reached a scale that is hard to picture. On the 8th of March 1992, the Valencia restaurateur Juan Galbis made one that he says fed about 100,000 people. That 1992 effort is…
PizzaThe oldest known written pizza was owed to a bishop in the year 997. A tenant owed twelve pizze every Christmas Day.
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…
KimchiIn 2010, heavy rain shortened the cabbage harvest in South Korea, and kimchi prices climbed so high that newspapers called it a national crisis. Kimchi is the salted, fermented vegetable dish served beside almost every Korean meal, most…
Dim sumDim sum, written in Cantonese pronunciation, translates literally as "touch the heart." It is the name for a huge family of small Chinese dishes, traditionally eaten at brunch in restaurants with a pot of tea close at hand. Most of the…
Full breakfastThe full breakfast, also known as the fry-up, is a substantial cooked meal made across Great Britain and Ireland. Depending on the kitchen, it may be called a full English, full Scottish, full Welsh, full Irish or Ulster fry. The meal's…
CevicheCeviche is a cold dish of raw fish or shellfish, and it travels under at least four spellings: ceviche, cebiche, sebiche and seviche. Versions of it are considered native in places as far apart as Chile and Mexico, all connected by the…
PirozhkiJapan's curry bread is said to have been inspired by pirozhki. Russian refugees brought the pastry there in 1917.
DolmaDolma first shows up in writing in a 16th-century Persian book called Mâddet ol-Hayât, and the author treats it as a curiosity from abroad. Cabbage dolmeh, the book says, is commonly prepared in the land of the Rûm, meaning Turkey, but is…
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…
Jollof riceIn West Africa, people say that "A party without jollof is just a meeting," and jollof rice is the dish that saying defends. It is rice cooked in a sauce of tomatoes, chilies and onions, usually all in a single pot. Its ingredients and…
BorschtBorscht is a sour soup from Eastern Europe, and in March 1961 its recipe was read out from space. The Soviet craft Korabl-Sputnik 4 was circling the Earth in low orbit, carrying animals and a mannequin as a rehearsal for crewed flights.…
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…
PoutinePoutine, a heap of french fries and cheese curds under hot brown gravy, may owe its name to a shouted complaint in 1957. In the Quebec town of Warwick, a regular customer asked café owner Fernand Lachance to drop a handful of cheese curds…
HaggisHaggis, the Scottish savoury pudding, has a reputation that confuses some of the people who come to eat it. In one poll, 33 percent of American visitors to Scotland believed haggis was an animal. The joke behind that belief describes a…
CongeeCongee, pronounced KON-jee, is the rice porridge that a 2011 comedy film dismissed as a food for "small babies and very old people". In The Hangover Part II, which is set in Thailand, the line is used to describe the character Stu Price,…