On the rolling, bluestem prairies of northeast South Dakota is the home of Ella Robertson. Here, she lives with her husband, her 4-year-old daughter, her twelve-year-old son, and her eldest daughter, 18, who is also mother to Robertson’s newest grandson, just eight months old. Robertson also has an older son, 22, and a granddaughter, 4. The family home is on the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation – home to the Sisseton, Wahpeton, and Wahpekute bands of Dakota, situated on a 2.5-acre farmstead, surrounded by trees, prairie grasses, and extended relatives. Robertson’s early twentieth century farmhouse is encircled by a small fruit orchard, a bustling chicken coop with seven varieties of chickens, bee hives, horses, and a high tunnel where she and her family grow an assortment of berries, fruits, and vegetables.…
In the tiny Czech town of Přeštice, nestled between the Úhlavy river and fields of wheat, there is a controversial statue. Some claim it’s an eyesore, while others tout it as a point of national pride. Its subject? A life-sized terracotta replica of two black and white pigs, perched on a pedestal, one sniffing the air and one the ground. Black-pied pigs, more commonly known as Přeštice pigs after the town where they’ve been bred and raised for over a century, have risen, fallen and risen again in popularity over time, as their home country went from one empire to the next, and finally gained independence in the late 20th century. Each shift in power has left an imprint on the region’s agricultural systems, and with it an imprint on…
What can a chocolate tart do? That was the unlikely question that Neysa Mendes found herself thinking about earlier this year. The food stylist, baker and recipe developer from Mumbai was seeking a way to channel her simmering rage at the state of affairs in India. In early March, a devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic began sweeping through the country. Although it had been long predicted, the ferocity of the wave—likened to a tsunami—brought an already-buckling medical system to its knees. With hospitals in most major Indian cities overrun and amid a dire shortage of oxygen for the critically ill, desperate families scoured Twitter and other social media for help. Even by the grim standards of a global pandemic, India’s second wave was particularly brutal and unremitting, exposing…
The Arctic is a remarkable place, at once harsh, monotonous and desolate, but not without its moments of tenderness. Light hits differently upon the fjords of Varanger; the soothing Yves Klein blues of the north’s infamous winters seem to seep into perpetuity, shifting to joyful, shimmery ambers with the advent of the midnight sun. Inhabitants of Finnmark—home to some of the greatest Indigenous Skolt Sami populations in the world—have an emanant respect for how the seasons dictate their pace of life. It doesn’t take long for one to realize how the height of the sun is the ultimate ruler, commanding everything from botanical growth to one’s mood and diet. The majority of Norway’s 40,000 Sami people live in the country’s far north. They are the oldest extant ethnic group in…
Salawati Mohamed, or Kak Wati as she is known, has no qualms about sharing her recipe for chicken rendang with anyone who asks for it, particularly during Eid. She is a resident of Christmas Island, an Australian offshore territory and the only place in the country where Eid is a public holiday.“During this time, we don’t just visit our own families, we visit everyone we know,” she says. “Every night for about two weeks we go to someone’s house to eat and celebrate.” Her chicken rendang is often a hit. “It’s just the standard way to make rendang,” she says modestly. “The base is always onions, ginger, galangal, lemongrass, turmeric and toasted coconut paste. But I use green bird’s-eye chile and coriander seeds, and that gives it a different color.”…
My grandmother lifts a pile of dry sticks with her small, wrinkled hands and starts a fire in the old tile stove. Her kitchen is equipped with an electric stove and oven, but most of the cooking is still done the traditional way: on a hot griddle of the wood fired stove. “It’s a simple soup,” she explains. “You boil the potatoes in one pot and make a stock with pork and root vegetables in the other. You can use pork shoulder, ribs or shank, but we do not add smoked meat!” she is referring to that one time when my dad wanted to impress his guests and modified the family recipe. We’re making kwaśnica, a tangy sauerkraut soup, typical to Beskid Mountains. In all fairness to my dad, some…
What I had loved for my entire life, I could not find. Not in the colorful pods growing haphazardly out of tree trunks or the tiny orchid-like blossoms the size of my pinky fingernail; not in the pod’s sweet-tart pulp or its pale, acrid seeds. Only through fermentation, drying and roasting would the fruit of the plant categorized by botanist Carolus Linnaeus as Theobroma cacao — “food of the gods” — begin to approximate cocoa and chocolate. Chocolate — the foundation of the $100 billion confectionary industry — has been my lifelong companion: my birthday cakes, my wedding cake and the comestible that got me through my divorce. Historically, cacao has been used as currency, medicine, an aphrodisiac and even, in Mesoamerican rituals of birth and death, a stand-in for…
The ride to the Thaung salt farm is not a smooth one. But once you get closer, you begin to understand the draw of this small island about three miles from Kampot town, on Cambodia’s southwest coast. On a clear day, the bright sky bounces off the salt ponds spread across several hectares of land. When you crouch close, what first appear to be snowflakes are in fact delicate salt crystals floating across shallow ponds pumped by seawater from the nearby Gulf of Thailand. These crystals are later skimmed to form fleur de sel, a premium salt used to finish dishes. Fleur de sel is one form of salt harvested by the farmers at Thaung Enterprise. Every dry season, the salty seawater evaporates in the sun, leaving behind natural sea…
“Dale una sopa de su propio chocolate” / Give him a soup of his own chocolate Josemaria Pascacio hugs a kaleidoscopic variety of cacao pods of varied shapes, colors and sizes with one arm. With the other, he holds up a giant red pod against the sun and inspects it thoroughly through his spectacles. “These are all criollos,” he whispers, “and unfortunately, I can see from this discoloration, that if I open it, we’ll realize that this one is sick. It’s a goner.” We are standing in the center of Josemaria’s cacao cultivation, surrounded by neat rows of cacao trees, in Soconusco, Chiapas. It’s the same land where his grandfather grew the fruit when Josemaria was a kid. Since I am relatively new to this, Josemaria outlines some basics for me:…
Since the time she was a high school student in the northeastern China, my mother has made dumplings from scratch. She starts with ground pork, fresh shrimp, sometimes cabbage, and sometimes chives for the filling. For the skins, she mixes together flour and water, then lets it sit. She kneads the dough, sprinkling in more flour as she goes, the kitchen table gently swaying and groaning beneath her movements. The dough is rolled out into the shape of a snake, about two inches in diameter, then cut into smaller, oval pieces, about an inch wide. The dough metamorphoses, passing speedily through phases of shape and size, until it reaches its final form. Before my brother was born, it was my responsibility to roll the oval pieces into round ones. I…
“If we give up on small pieces of our heritage, we’ll lose ourselves.” Nader Muaddi is a Philadelphia-born Palestinian who has a passion for showcasing his country’s culture. He does this through laborious and meticulous production of the ancient alcoholic beverage called arak. Most people have heard of ouzo from Greece, or pastis from France or Italian sambuca, but not as many people know that they are all derived from the mother spirit, arak. Distilled from indigenous grapes that are used in winemaking and infused with anise seeds, it is a smooth drink with a kick of licorice that pairs well with meze. But it’s so much more than a beverage; it’s a tradition. At a time when Palestine has been punctured by Israeli settlements into what resembles an archipelago,…
In medina quarters throughout Morocco, tangled, cacophonous passageways show no indication, physical or visual, announcing the presence of a communal bakery—except, perhaps, a pile of wood stacked beside an unobtrusive doorway, waiting to be brought inside. If one observes carefully, they may see a woman, a child or a man in a hooded jalabiya weaving through the crowds, carrying a basket or tray covered with a colorful cloth. Follow one of them and enter into a time-honored establishment, unfailingly esteemed by the community. Here, a mosque, a public fountain, a school, a hamman (or public bath) and a communal oven or ferrane comprise five beating hearts of community life. For centuries, homes had no means to bake the daily bread, but bread is considered to be life and subject to…
“Bhaiya, ek geela bhel banana….medium spicy aur extra puri.” (Brother, make a wet bhel…medium spicy and add an extra puri). This used to be my standard order at the bhel puri stall near my workplace in Mumbai. Packed in a newspaper cone, bhel is an afterwork snack for many Mumbaikars commuting by the local train network. It’s easy to carry, non-messy if you opt for sukha or dry bhel (a version that is made without chutneys), and comes with its own spoon in the form of a puri, a crisp, deep-fried disc of flour that doubles as a scoop of sorts. Bhel is a Marathi word which loosely translates to mixture. It is the perfect moniker for a snack that is a riot of ingredients, textures and flavours. These include…
In the Iraqi city of Mosul, there is a popular song titled “Ya Summaq,” which chants the merits of sumac as an ode to a sumac-laced meat stew called summaq. For Bethlehem-based Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan, sumac is something of an obsession. When preparing a quick dinner, a go-to of his is pasta coated in a mixture of olive oil, salt and sumac. For Istanbul-based food writer and consultant Tuba Şatana, sumac’s beauty as an ingredient is best expressed through simplicity. Her favorite way to eat it is mixed in a simple red onion salad seasoned with salt and olive oil. Throughout the Levant, Arabian Peninsula and Turkey, there are distinctions in the use of sumac that reflect distinctive national and regional cuisines, but what unites them all are two…
In the summer of 2015, San Francisco’s economy was flourishing, but my existence there had grown repetitious and increasingly lonely. I had many friends, but that summer, I lost one of my closest, Franklin, with whom I started this magazine. I interpreted my unfathomable devastation as a definitive sign that the respite from the city that I’d been craving had announced itself. The criteria was straightforward, established by Samantha, my partner at the time: 1) sunny and 2) Spanish-speaking. Sold. To that list I added internet. My request was the only one that wasn’t satisfied. We settled in the Samaná Province, an extruding peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic. I was there to write, to gather the pieces of myself and launch Whetstone. The season in Las…
At the seven-hour mark, we finally arrived at the halfway point of our journey to San Luis, an Andean hamlet nestled in Peru’s Ancash district. The repurposed school bus hauling us along clanked to a halt for a rest stop. I’d never seen such a bright 1 a.m., night gleaming against frost-hazed windows. My limbs had long frozen in place, legs clenched in a knot, knuckles white. I peered at the women clambering off the bus, their massive skirts rustling stacked chicken coops, their tall hats bobbing along the aisle. Cholas in the city often garner mockery, their bright, distinctive apparel a beacon for contempt and tourists, but on this journey I was the one who had dressed laughably. Clutching closed a jean jacket that would do nothing to protect…
Author and professor Caroline Finney writes that for too long “the narrative of the Great Outdoors in the U.S.” has been informed by “Eurocentrism and the linkage of wilderness to whiteness.” In this exploration into the truths and traumas behind Black Americans’ distant relationship with the land, These Hands tells the story of Black farmers cultivating life along the West Coast of the U.S. From Seattle to Los Angeles, storyteller and photographer Araba Ankuma examines the origin stories of contemporary Black farmers. Her purpose: to educate and empower Black Americans to reclaim their connection to nature, recover their ancestral roots and most importantly, reconnect with themselves. By visually centering the project around the act of Black hands at work, Ankuma seeks to dismantle the assumption that Black bodies are not…
Unlike most white people in Cape Town, wild food advocate Loubie Rusch regularly drives the sand swept streets of Khayelitsha, the vast township on the city’s crime-ridden Cape Flats. She does it without fear. With Rusch at the wheel, we drive into Khayelitsha’s Section A, passing corrugated tin and wood shacks occupied by families, hair salons and butchers. We’re just a few minutes from the coastline, yet I’m struggling to marry her claim that “we live in a bloody gastronomic landscape” with the immediate surroundings. Rusch is a landscape designer and gifted networker turned activist. Our destination: The Cape Wild Food Garden, her pilot project at community urban garden Moya we Khaya. We’re miles from Cape Town’s colonial-era oaks and plein trees, and the wealth of biodiverse plant life on…
Half a block from La Paz, Bolivia’s, main plaza, Don Alberto, who has been blind since birth, sells prepaid phone cards all day. But if you ask, he will pull out a jar of peanut butter from beneath the striped colored cloth keeping his feet warm in the cold highland air. “I learned how to make peanut butter from a group of American evangelicals when I was a kid,” he explains. “I have a great love for peanuts. They gave me money when I most needed it.” That affection for peanuts has a long history in Bolivia. In 2016, scientists from the University of Georgia discovered that the legume, related to beans and peas, originally comes from the country’s southeastern valleys. Ten thousand years ago, ancient people moved one wild…
While the number of breakfast cereals on super-market shelves is an uncountable entity, the singularity of our beloved banana may threaten its existence. On the edges of the store, fruit is stacked into a colorful, eye-catching cornucopia, but the contents of those fruit piles indicate the opposite trend. The deadly Panama disease, caused by Fusarium oxysporum, is a soil borne pathogen that erodes the roots and vascular integrity of the plant, and it’s destroying banana plantations across the globe. Thousands of hectares have already been wiped out in Philippines, Indonesia, China and Australia. Once the pandemic reaches Central America, the banana as we know it is in serious trouble. While it is widely agreed that the fruit is native to Southeast Asia, where bananas have been cultivated for more…
Korean barbecue might be the most familiar representation of the national cuisine abroad, but grilling huge piles of meat is a recent trend that doesn’t reflect the majority of Korean culinary history. For hundreds of years, beef consumption was limited to special occasions and the aristocracy. The rest of the largely agrarian population kept their cows in the fields, not on their plates. As luck (or geography) would have it, the Korean peninsula is surrounded on three sides by sea, and we’ve helped ourselves to the bounty of clams, crabs and fish for protein. Even as meat consumption has risen in recent years, South Koreans still consume over double the amount of seafood per capita that Americans and Europeans do, edging out Japan and Norway for the top spot in…
People keep asking me where they can get the best Indonesian food in the Netherlands. Every time I get this question, I’m kind of stumped. Because the Netherlands colonized Indonesia, it is now known as a place where you can get great Indonesian food, but really what you get here is Indisch. There is no proper English translation for Indisch. I adhere to Indo-European novelist Alfred Birney’s definition, which is anything or anyone relating to the Dutch East Indies. I think this is the most accurate definition, as it refers to the food, the culture and the people and enables us to add an additional layer to that culture and people without excluding anyone (even former colonizers will refer to their heritage as Indisch these days). Indisch food is best…
Guadalupe toasts peanuts, sesame seeds and pepitas in her home in eastern North Carolina on a summer Sunday afternoon. It’s hot out, the way it always is in July in the South, when the mosquitos get tangled up in the humid, stagnant air before they reach your skin. In the trailer, the makeshift curtains are drawn, keeping it dark and cool enough for Guadalupe, in a Lycra tank dress, to toil over a rich mole for her guests, my friend Peter and me. Guadalupe’s kitchen is modest. The limited décor includes monsters drawn in crayon, by her eight-year-old son Wilbur, all over the walls and above the stove, and a photograph of her parents in a dusty frame on top of the refrigerator. She brings it down to show it…
Saccharine confections are often associated with emotional love. From finely engraved chocolate Easter bunnies and crème-filled eggs to jellybeans and marshmallow peeps, all classes of extravagant and inexpensive forms of sweets related to the vernal equinox are pregnant with procreative metaphor, rejuvenation and endearment. But to taste love itself, in the carnal sense, is most definitely a savory endeavor. Even sugar enthusiasts such as anthropologist Dr. Sidney W. Mintz—whose extensive research focuses on the socioeconomic power structures spawned by delicate white sugar crystals—concede this point. “If there were one taste one might expect to be linked with physical love, I suspect that it would not be the taste of sweet but the taste of salt,” he wrote in the journal MLN. Sweat, tears and other delightfully messy secretions of romance…
FRONT COVER ARTIST Araba Ankuma Araba Ankuma is a Ghanaian-American creative director and visual storyteller whose work seeks to illuminate the invisible narratives that bind us as human beings. As an artist working internationally, Ankuma’s stories focus on the importance of perception and the need to continue shifting it. Reforming narrative through interviews, photography and collage, Ankuma acts as tour guide, transporting viewers from their existing perspectives to new perceptual ground. Kashmira Sarode Kashmira is a curious multimedia artist who loves to play with scale. Her work includes large scale murals as well as miniature pottery. She is inspired and driven by a wide range of subjects including science, history, environment, culture, people, emotions, nature and growth. She is on an ever evolving journey of making art that makes sense…
“Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans.” writes Dame Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), her magnum opus on the history and culture of Yugoslavia.Violence and instability are what many still associate with the region. From their designation as the European powder keg that sparks world wars through to the fragmentation of former Yugoslavia, the Balkans have long been the object of such derogatory stereotyping. The effect of this has been to overshadow their beautiful cuisine. The Imagined Balkans: A Brief and Potted History Delineating the Balkans is complicated. Although the name has become an increasingly recognized form of academic reference, to date there is no real geographical, historical or political consensus where the borders of the Balkan Peninsula or the Balkans lie, and no…
In Taiwanese cuisine, oysters are but an after-thought—something savory to throw in a bowl of thin wheat noodles or a cheap mollusk to deep-fry, stir-fry or flash boil. Unlike in the West, where oysters are an evocation of luxury, oysters in Taiwan are plebeian and used mostly in street food—mixed with sweet potato starch and egg to create an omelet of sorts, or grilled straight and served in night markets. They’re never eaten raw, they don’t really show up in fancy restaurants, and when they do appear on the menu in a seafood restaurant, they’re an addendum to a more grandiose spread of abalone, crab or mullet roe. Yet, despite being relegated to second-class, oysters are one of the most widely used ingredients in the broad canon of Taiwanese cuisine.…
Set in the local pastor’s home and the surrounding area, this essay celebrates the matriarchs who coordinate and host community meals, keeping the village feeling peaceful, connected and fed through fellowship. Rosa Sacul and her mother-in-law, Adelina Sacul, lower a heavy steel bucket of pork hung by rope from the hand-built wooden rafters of their cohune palm–thatched home. They are preparing to make caldo, a spicy hot soup, as Rosa’s husband, the village pastor, gets ready to leave for church after breakfast. Inside the humble house, Rosa and Adelina are starting the fires that will soon be used to cook the soup, tortillas and poch, a tamal of fermented masa steamed in banana leaves. Women from across the village start to arrive at Rosa’s home, bringing with them spices, herbs…
I strolled into the party just a few minutes after the invite had said. The people in the hallway pointed toward the back door, and I snaked my way down the steep, spiral staircase that opened up into a communal courtyard with well-manicured grass, carefully arranged picnic tables and a coat of yellow paint that served to underline exactly what season we were in. It was a perfect summer day, the sun warm and bright but not unbearable, a gentle breeze tickling the back of my neck every so often. I added my chilled wine to the overflowing table of beverages and surveyed the spread. Two picnic tables were pushed together and covered with a butcher’s delight of toppings: cheeses, deli meats, cold cuts, hard-boiled eggs, shrimp, pickled herring, curried…
It’s been more than 400 years since anyone has attempted to grow grape vines near Cuzco, but that didn’t stop pioneering winemaker Fernando Gonzales-Lattini from trying. In Curahuasi, 10,000 feet above sea level, indigenous farmers plant traditional crops such as potatoes or corn, and they pay reverence to apus, the sacred mountain spirits that protect their harvests. Seven years ago, in this ancestral land, Gonzales-Lattini began to build Apu Winery by hand. After surviving the rainy season fungus, a devastating fire and a bird plague, the vineyard’s first vintage in 2017 yielded a small batch of only 150 bottles, including Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese. That was enough to gain recognition from the country’s best sommeliers and to mark the rebirth of wine in Peru’s Andes Mountains. Sommeliers Greg…
Every morning after walking our dog, my fiancée and I get coffee at Cuatro Estaciones in the Plaza de Armas, a café in the colonial city of Old San Juan. Locals and tourists frequent this café for its location and the specific strong flavor of its espresso. There are nine cafés in the small city, not counting the restaurants and bars that also serve local coffee, which was once consumed in boutique coffee shops in Vienna and Madrid. Puerto Rican coffee even reached the Vatican. Coffee’s origin story is not exact, but the most common tale dates back to 850 CE. The Ethiopian ancestors of today’s Oromo are believed to have been the first to discover and recognize the energizing effect of the beans from the coffee plant. This is…
México City. A Saturday night in June. Norma Listman was hosting friends from Mumbai and the Bay Area. I met the group at our favorite café in La Colonia Juarez. Within a few hours and many mezcales later, we all agreed to join Norma in a Sunday pilgrimage to her hometown of Texcoco, to experience the tradition of barbacoa. To set the stage, I’d only met Norma a few months into my México City immigration. A serendipitous event because we rolled in the same Bay Area circles, we went to the same places, but never crossed paths until we both made an instinctual decision to move to México late last year. Norma is a chef and historian born in México. She trained for 10 years in some of the…
Literally translated as “seaweed rice,” gimbap is a rice roll that is filled and rolled in a sheet of gim, or seaweed. It bears a physical resemblance to sushi rolls, so gimbap is often dismissively described as “Korean sushi,” which raises my hackles every time. A quintessential Korean food, gimbap is often strongly nostalgic, associated with school, road and family trips, but even this dish can’t escape being described as the Korean version of something Japanese.Maybe, to a Westerner, the juxtaposition makes sense. On a superficial level, the two cuisines do appear similar—they both center around rice, with meals that often include some kind of soup. Korean and Japanese cuisines both use seaweed by drying it in sheets and wrapping those sheets around rice. In Korean, it’s called gim; in…
What is it, I often ask myself, that makes a plate of food truly special? The quality of its ingredients? The skill of the chef who made it? The plating and how it’s presented? The atmosphere in which it is eaten? The people with whom it is shared? So many things contribute to how we receive a dish, how we taste it, smell it, digest it, remember it. It can be hard to quantify. But in my recent travels across Greece, Turkey and Cyprus researching my new cookbook Ripe Figs (W.W. Norton 2021), I came to realize that perhaps the most important quality forged when enjoying a great meal is how it makes us feel. I had come to the Eastern Mediterrean to follow the story of migration and to…
If you’ve flipped through a Thailand travel guide, you might have seen images of vibrant night markets, ornate temples, or clear emerald and aquamarine waters embracing fine sand beaches. Redundant tourism packages and advertisements have propelled a handful of destinations into the limelight while leaving others in the shadows. In the country’s capital of Bangkok, floating markets may come as an afterthought, often eclipsed by the allure of Wat Arun’s mosaic porcelain spires, Chatuchak Weekend Market’s dizzying array of stalls, or the boisterous and bustling Khaosan Road. However, picture woven baskets filled to the brim with leafy vegetables and cut gourds, towering mounds of tropical fruits, and soup served from steaming vats of broth and showered with a number of toppings that would put build-your-own pizza joints to shame. In…
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered the decision for the court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which effectively struck down abortion as a constitutional right in favor of letting the states regulate it. At the center of this case was a vociferous historical debate. The majority opinion—despite ample evidence to the contrary presented by the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians—put it succinctly: “The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” A month before the Dobbs decision, lawyers Stephanie Nicole Miller and Dr. Mary Kay Bacallao published an article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy arguing that “abortion was overwhelmingly used in the Founding Era to…
Beautiful and renewable, umami-rich and nutrient-dense, seaweed grows abundantly all along the U.S. coastline and should be a cornerstone of the American diet. However, not everyone here has a taste for the quirky, subtle flavors of seaweed. Some of us only know the ingredient as a dark, papery, supporting-player to rice and a cast of interchangeable raw fish and veggies. But for tastemakers who seek it out directly, work with it professionally or in their own backyards, seaweed is a source of endless inspiration with its own unique challenges, celebrated health attributes, and opportunities for adventure on the plate and out in the field (the water, that is). Wild harvesting seaweed on the West Coast isn’t exactly like walking out your kitchen door and snipping a few chives from the…
The foods of a culture are the result of social, economic, and agricultural opportunity. Mexico is a prime example of this complexity: one of the most diverse countries in the world, whose cultural heritage suffered conquest. Recently, however, there’s been a rise of interest in indigenous grains and native cuisine. It’s the start of a trend that, with the right application, could become strong enough to change the health of a nation. It was at one of the country’s cardinal native dance gatherings that I began to grasp this interplay of culture and cuisine. My future husband was proudly describing for me the importance of dance for Mexico’s native population as we strolled through the pop-up market where vendors sold beef tacos, chicharrones, sodas and packaged sweets. “Why do you…
Up in the Peak District, the gently picturesque national park in the Midlands of England, you can find the little market town of Bakewell. Composed primarily of tidy Georgian townhouses, it sits prettily on the banks of the Wye, complete with lazing ducks and a medieval bridge spanning its reach.Every time my wife and I visit the Peak District for our annual hiking trips, we always try to make time to visit the town, to take in the sights and try its culinary delights. If you know English puddings and pastries, the Bakewell name probably rings very familiar, for it is indeed the home of the Bakewell pudding. As the story goes, the Bakewell pudding originated sometime between 1820 and 1860, when a cook at a local inn, misunderstanding a…
With myriad favorites like “Chinese-style spaghetti” and pineapple buns slathered in butter, cha chaan tengs (‘tea restaurant’ in Cantonese) are neither the healthiest choice nor the classiest, and with a multitude of chains that imitate their menus, they are no-longer the cheapest either, but the humble Canto-Western diners remain iconic of Hong Kong. The charm of crustless sandwiches, colorful tiled walls, miniature booths or square tables with bright plastic stools and old Ovaltine containers containing chopsticks and silverware atop every table make cha chaan tengs hard not to like. The cheap and cheerful attitude fuses with functionality, speed and the general nonfussiness appreciated by Hong Kongers. Businessmen, construction workers, grandmothers and tourists alike sit down to enjoy plates of noodles set down with such haste that the broth threatens to…
When Dolce & Gabbana booked Chinese model Zuo Ye to star in a new ad campaign ahead of a Shanghai runway show, Ye thought it would catapult her career. Instead, it almost destroyed it. In the 2018 promos, Ye appears in a sequined red gown; a statement gold necklace and embellished earrings complete the look. She is presented with giant-sized portions of Italian food: pizza, Sicilian cannoli, spaghetti. A male voice instructs how to eat them with an unlikely choice of utensils: chopsticks. The #DGLovesChina campaign backfired spectacularly. The ads, titled “Eating with Chopsticks,” did not go down well with their Chinese audience. Angry netizens criticized the fashion house for its cultural insensitivity, racism and sexism. Less than 24 hours after they had appeared on the company’s social media accounts—Weibo…
Thirty-three-year-old Edilmer Rojas Suarez’s coffee farm sits 1,360 meters above sea level in San Ignacio, Peru — one of 13 provinces that make up the Cajamarca region, a lush, mountainous area in Peru’s northern highlands, where coffee farming is an important economic driver that supports the livelihoods of thousands. In certain pockets of the world, climate, elevation and other factors align to form the perfect recipe for coffee production. Cajamarca is one of those places, a region where it seems specialty coffee is meant to be grown. With high altitudes, fertile soil, ideal temperatures and a historically semi-dry climate, coffee farms known for producing high-quality Arabica dot the hillsides, contributing to the region’s status as Peru’s leading exporter of premium coffee. Although the land is fertile and dense with dedicated…
Spring has clearly arrived at Azienda Agricola Ferro Aristide, a large vegetable farm outside the city of Chioggia in Italy’s Veneto region. Blooming poppies and salvia line the roadsides. The temperature is mild, but low clouds hang over fields covered in rows of thick black plastic, beneath which white asparagus spears thrust their ghostly bodies upwards through the sandy soil like fingers of the undead.Still, inside one of the farm’s buildings, four workers are busy processing thousands of football-shaped heads of radicchio di Treviso, one of Veneto’s iconic winter crops. “These were harvested in December,” says proprietor Igor Ferro, a compact, energetic man in his 40s with shiny brown hair shorn short on the sides and styled almost vertically on top. December was almost six months ago, but the packed…
I was cooking chicken in mustard sauce and butter rice for my couch-surfing host in Amsterdam to thank him for giving a broke backpacker shelter. As I stirred the pot, he reached inside his larder and took out a tiny red tin. “Here, don’t you want this?” I stared at it. It was rusting with age. The label in big, bold letters read “Curry Powder,” and “mild” underneath, as an afterthought. “I use this for all spicy curries,” my host said. A few weeks later that same summer, I was eating dinner with a family in Salzburg, the fresh fried smell of pork schnitzels wafting through the air, when the matriarch turned the conversation to Indian food. “I always use curry powder to make authentic curries,” she exclaimed. As I…
In 1540, when Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led an expedition from Mexico into present day New Mexico in search of the rumored Seven Cities of Gold, he encountered a highly-developed civilization. An entire village, adorned with adobe homes constructed of mud and straw, shimmered golden-brown in the blazing Southwest sun (perhaps giving the illusion of gold). The Spaniards called these villages pueblos, meaning towns in Spanish, to describe this agrarian society with large-scale farming systems. Much of the language, culture, religion and architecture found during Coronado’s early expedition are still being maintained today, in various forms, among the 19 Pueblos dotted aloang the Rio Grande River. A few have no plumbing or electricity in the core of the village to help preserve ancient traditions. Despite these efforts, agricultural…
I deeply miss a man I never had a chance to meet: Heinrich Levy, my Jewish grandfather, a winemaker in Germany’s Rhineland during the 1920s and ’30s. He had a passion for his trade and the Rhineland’s bucolic landscapes, perfect for grape growing. After a successful decade in the business, my grandfather’s world started collapsing after Hitler came to power in the early 1930s. As anti-Semitic persecution accelerated in Germany, he became gravely ill with cancer. Heinrich died in November 1938, age 63, in a Jewish hospital in Frankfurt. It was the month of Kristallnacht (the night of shattered glass), a nationwide pogrom of terror against Jews. There’s so much I wanted to learn from him. What world did my grandfather inhabit as a Jew in the German wine trade…
Freedom is a dynamic term. For some, it means wrists free of spiked cuffs. For others, it’s a state of mind free from coercion. Still, most people would agree freedom starts from the mind and soul. Among them are the Baiana women of Bahia in the northeastern region of Brazil. Their ancestors were taken from their homes in exchange for silvery objects; these enslaved Africans had to survive on offshore meals. They were kidnapped from the western region of Africa, spanning mostly Nigeria, Togo, Mali, Cameroon and Ghana. Shattered and broken at sea, foreigners in a strange land with stringent barricades, they didn’t have a modicum of hope left in the free world. But sometimes, they had homelike food. Through a meal, the mind explores several continents. Before the trade…
Shabnam Ferdowsi FRONT COVER ARTIST Shabnam "Shab" Ferdowsi is a legally blind photographer born and raised in Los Angeles. Before Covid, she was primarily weaving her way around the music industry in the media and experiential space until she started performing on stage herself. Once everything went on hiatus, one thing led to another, and a pizza pop-up and catering business was born out of Shab’s home kitchen. After a year roaming LA’s parking lots, backyards, and bar patios, it was time for another shift. Nevertheless, food has now become the new centerpiece for building community, pursuing creativity, and telling impactful stories. Irina Janakievska The food writer and recipe developer is a Macedonian, Kuwait-raised Londoner. Giaae Kwon Giaae Kwon is a food and culture writer whose writing has appeared in…
The heat in Quillabamba came as a surprise in Peruvian winter. After a month in the rather chilly Andean highlands, I hadn’t expected this fruity paradise with its joyful souther vibe and a perfect summertime combination of sunshine and mosquitos. I sensed I was closer to cacao. Peru is one of those countries that really has it all. It’s the birthplace of the potato and the cradle of the quinoa boom. The diversity of these crops – for instance 6,000 varieties of said potato – kept me busy while researching an organic certification program of the region. But more than anything else, I was led by, and also to, cacao. My infatuation made my trip to the jungle an inevitable one. A few months earlier, I’d worked with direct trade…
Every now and then, my dad gets a text message from a local Turkish supermarket and rushes out the door: He’s just been told that a fresh batch of his favorite peppers has arrived. These peppers are not from Turkey, but his native Kosovo—and he’s got to move quick or he might miss his chance. He is one of more than a thousand Kosovars on a list at the Hilal Food Centre in West London that is kept up-to-date with the whereabouts of somborka peppers throughout the year. This is a relatively new phenomenon for the Kosovar diaspora, who hadn’t always found it so easy to get their hands on the goods in their newfound homes across Europe and the U.S. Shortly after the Kosovo war in 1999, the main…
I’m not sure about G-d, but food, I believe in. Hand shredding potatoes for latkes has always felt like a spiritual, meditative process, and when I cut through the crust of a fresh bagel, and a tiny whisp of yeasty steam drifts up, I understand the meaning of life. It was that feeling of connection that led me to keep pitching and reporting stories about Ashkenazi food, the cooking of my people that got a bit lost in its path to me. In the name of work, I pored over old cookbooks. I wrapped briskets, onions and carrots in foil, reluctantly adding ketchup because my mom said to, yielding spoon-tender meat. And as I stood over a buckwheat groats that toasted and popped and gave off their signature rubbery smell…
Siwa is in the middle of the desert. It’s in the northwest region of Egypt, about 30 miles east of the Libyan border. We had driven seven hours through this desert, from the port city of Alexandria, to live and work in the Siwa Oasis. In Siwa, the men mostly work on farms while the women take care of the children and household. It is segregated by sex — the women are with women, and the men with men. In public, the women are completely veiled, and unless you are a husband, father, brother or child of the women (or a woman yourself), you are not permitted to see them unveiled. The only time the two sexes intersect is between family. Being there was a surreal experience — a bustling…
