I love dishes that blend meat and fruit. From Kyrgyz Beef with Apples to Bhutanese Fish with Mandarin Oranges, and Iranian Fish with Sour Cherries. As some ancient Mesopotamian archaeological assemblages of fish bones in proximity to crab apple cores suggest, humans have been pairing meat and fish with fruit for millennia. This is a Roman dish from the book credited to Apicius that blends … Read more
Over the weekend we made an interesting colonial American recipe. Its from a chapter for sea captains in Hannah Glasse’s 1770 edition of the Art of Cookery. Called Catchup to last Twenty Years, I suspect it is a proto-Worcestershire sauce, used to enhance the flavor of a wide variety of foods. Its made from anchovies, lots of ginger and shallots, mushrooms, mace, cloves and pepper, … Read more
The common walnut is anything but common. As stories tell us, its recent spread in Europe – through the ancient Grecian empire – happened in the early centuries BCE, when saplings were sent as gifts from a Persian or more probably an Achaemenid king. Hence the plant’s botanical name Juglans regia, the king’s nut, and its modern secondary name of Persian walnut. Later, the Romans … Read more
French archaeologists have recently uncovered some assemblages on Myanmar’s lower Kra isthmus that shed light onto maritime Silk Road trading communities beginning in 400 BCE. Given the geographic position of the isthmus between the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand, the Myanmar sites served as a stopover for Chinese and other east Asian traders headed west, and for Saudi, Persian, and Indian traders headed … Read more
Sometimes, perception can be like a flash of lightning that changes the world forever. Once something is seen and understood, there is no unseeing or unknowing. A few years back, I had such a food-related epiphany. I was in Istanbul and went into one of the many great food and spice shops that line the streets for some Iranian saffron to take back to the … Read more
We visit New York City a lot, usually to catch a Broadway play or two, or an exhibit at one of the city’s great museums. However much we love doing this, dining in the theatre district can be challenging. There are a lot of tourist traps – pricey places with truly awful food, a canteen or two (like Shake Shack or Pret a Manger), and … Read more
The world is waiting with baited breath to see the outcome of the inter-Korean Summit this Friday. Some are predicting an announcement that will end the 1950s Korean War, others are hoping for baby-steps towards peninsular reunification. Japan is angry about the dessert. Japan is angry about the dessert, because on top of a mango mousse decorated with fresh spring flowers sits a plaque depicting … Read more
Like Christmas Truce in World War I, the recent Olympics allowed for a temporary warming of relations between north and south Korea, between people still locked in a conflict that is decades old. To incorporate these events into the blog, I decided to cook up some more North Korean food, and headed off to the North Korean food website to peruse recipes. What the site … Read more
A shipwreck dating from the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 ACE), has recently been analyzed by a team of archaeologists from the Shandong Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in China. The ship was found at a construction site in Heze City in 2010, and has been under study since that time. The ship itself was of wooden construction and measured over 21 meters long (over … Read more
I’ve been away. A long time as a wandering, mendicant scholar – or something like that. But now I’m back, and trying to get back to the blog and to the next volume of The Silk Road Gourmet. But good plans always get foiled by real life, so bear with me. While I’ve been away, I’ve found scholarly papers that have new Ancient Mesopotamian recipes … Read more
We packed our first born off to college this past weekend. Even though we are still here with our son, the house is eerily quiet. My daughter was noisy enough to be twins or even triplets. No more loud music and singing her lungs out – she has practice rooms at college for that now. Despite her devil-may-care attitude and generally gregarious nature, she was … Read more
Spring has finally come to the Central Atlantic and all the leaves have opened out into a sea of green. In our area, dairy cows graze and suckle their young in fields of buttercups and the first cascades of wild roses are blooming on the edge of the woods. This time of year also means that the fleeting blooming of tree flowers is also upon … Read more
I love glass and glassmaking. Glass is fire and imagination combined. Long have I loved watching craftsmen at historical sites blow air into a molten mass to form a useful bowl or bottle, or see the artisans of Murano twist and sculpt it into a decorative statue. When I was a child, I played with prisms and suncatchers – throwing rainbows around my room. Years … Read more
Wherever I go, for work or for personal travel, I like to hit a good restaurant during my trip. If that restaurant can be a Silk Road restaurant, all the better. I had the chance this past weekend to find a little gem of a Chinese restaurant in downtown Ithaca, New York. Spicy Asian restaurant is a small place on Elmira Road, that delivers a … Read more
Move over Hannah Glasse. Your published recipe for butter chicken that is widely hailed as the first English recipe for curry, has an English contender. In a 1675 anonymous manuscript full of recipes and potions in the Wellcome Library in London (Wellcome Manuscript 4050) is an English recipe for a vindaloo-flavored roast. In the recipe, cloves, mace, and lots of black pepper form the spice … Read more
From cowrie shells; and iron, copper and silver coins; to various kinds of paper, many different materials have been used by merchants and customers as credit or legal tender. Bolts of silk measuring roughly 22 inches wide and 41 feet long were also used as a form of currency by the Chinese, especially in foreign trade or as gifts to foreign lands. The silk used … Read more