Curated playlist
South Asian cuisine
- MangoIn 1974, Filipino horticulturist Ramon Barba made mango trees flower on demand.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- JackfruitThe jackfruit, Artocarpus heterophyllus, can weigh as much as 55 kilograms, which makes it the largest fruit that grows on a tree. A mature tree produces around 200 of them each year, and older trees can bear up to 500. This giant belongs…
- 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…
- CurryCurry was a category the British invented, not a dish India named. Indians used specific names for their dishes.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- HalvaHalva is spelled at least four ways in English: halva, halvah, halwa and halua. The spelling is the easy part. Behind it sits a confection spread across North Africa, East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, West Asia, Central Asia and…