Ingredients

“….From the moment I first tasted it, olive oil won over my appetite. I can drink it from the bottle. But for the longest time I hated all but the blandest, the most buttery of olives. If I’ve persevered toward liking them, it was because my tongue knew that somewhere buried in that bitter flesh […]

Cinnamon, the inner bark of a tropical evergreen tree, was used by wealthy Romans as perfume and others as an aphrodisiac. During the rainy season, when the bark is pliable, it is harvested for cinnamon production. As the bark dries, it forms long quills that are either cut into sticks or ground into powder. Two […]

A lemon tree is a subtropical plant, and in its natural habitat, its fruit is green and only slightly acidic. For lemons to develop their tart flavor and yellow color, the temperature must dip below 50 degrees F/10 degrees C but remain above freezing. (If temperatures drop below freezing mature lemons on a tree will […]

Before the well-known English company, Fry & Sons worked out how to manufacture chocolate into a confectionary bar in 1847, chocolate had only been used as a drink for millenia. Chocolate was initially brought back to Europe by the Spanish Conquistador Don Hernán Cortés, who toasted the Aztec King Moctezuma with a gold goblet of his […]

Olive groves line the rocky hillsides of Italy and the Mediterranean coast. For millennia, the region has produced gorgeous olives (they were a favorite street snack in ancient Rome) and olive oils (tools for making olive oil that date back 4500 years have been found in Crete). The average age of southern Italian olive trees […]

Photo by acme  “We grade all foie gras in three groups,” said M. Barbuer. “Extra are the best one. They go into whole blocks of foie gras naturel, the finest, most expensive variety. People in your country always confuse it with Pâté de Foie Gras and Crème de Foie Gras, for which we sometimes use the […]

Photo by Edsel Little The justly famous mole is a complex sauce made from toasted seeds, soaked and puréed chiles, ground raisins, spices, herbs, and a bit of semi-sweet chocolate. Throughout Mexico, the chocolate, seeds, and chiles remain constants, but their types and the rest of the ingredients fluctuate wildly according to the cook. Oaxacan […]

Photo by Edsel L “Despite its name, Worcester sauce was originally an Indian recipe, brought back to Britain by Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal. One day in 1835 he appeared in the prospering chemist’s emporium of John Lea and William Perrins in Broad Street, Worcester, and asked them to make up a batch of […]

Rice, the main source of sustenance for half of the world’s population, comes in an endless variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. Rice grains can be long, like those of basmati rice from India and jasmine rice from Thailand; tiny, like mochi-gome from Japan, which is similar in shape to Italian arborio rice; or somewhere […]

Photo by odonata98 (Kimberly Reinhart)  This herb, which is native to Malaysia and grown throughout Southeast Asia and California, is one of the most important in Southeast Asian cooking. With the great popularity of the food of that region, lemon grass has made its way onto countless ingredients lists for all sorts of dishes. It has […]