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 confectionery bar in 1847, chocolate had only been used as a drink for millennia. 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 […]

Chilli Pepper Photo by pixel2013 You could not count the number of chiles — fresh and dried, pickled and ground — that greet you when you enter a Mexican market center. The chile is ancient — evidence in Mexico traces it back to 3500 BCE. In the 16th century, the Portuguese explorers brought these fiery […]

Semolina is coarsely ground durum wheat, a highly glutinous (hard) wheat. When other grains, such as rice or corn, are similarly ground, they are referred to as “semolina,” i.e., “corn semolina” or “rice semolina.”

Photo by avlxyz  Soy sauce is a staple condiment and ingredient throughout all of Asia. Produced for thousands of years, soy sauce is a salty, brown liquid made from fermented soy beans mixed with some type of roasted grain (wheat, barley, or rice are common), injected with a special yeast mold, and liberally flavored with salt. […]

The name coriander does not signify one thing — it represents a seed, a leaf and a powder used in Central America, South America, all of Asia, the Mediterranean basin, the Southwest of the United States, and in any menu that replicates the flavors of one or all of these regions. Coriander-the-leaf is also known as […]

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 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 […]