Around the world, one dish at a time.
Samphire is up there with artichokes as a plant that doesn’t look like it was meant to be eaten, and with fiddlehead ferns as one of the most satisfying plants to forage. And, despite some abysmal weather, samphire season is well underway in the UK. …
When you think of the Bedouin, nomadic people who’ve been roaming the deserts of Arabia for well over five thousand years by most counts, the last dish you’d think of would be fish. Let alone fish with vegetables! But many Bedouin in coastal regions have …
Somebody, somewhere in Beirut – and that someone probably knows who he is – has been doing a lot of cocktail training. And that somebody, somewhere, who’s done a lot of cocktail training should not ever, ever, ever be allowed behind a bar again. Anywhere …
Back in the glory days of Lebanon, the 1960s and the 1970s, before civil war made the place a wasteland for decades, Byblos, an ancient city on the Mediterranean coast was the Middle East’s answer to Saint Tropez. And, looking at its pretty harbour — …
It’s no secret that our appetites shape the animals around us. Compare the snout of a wild boar, long and slender for the quest for food, its tusks and its lean, well-muscled frame with the porkers bred for fat, their snouts a mere stub, their …
I’ve always had what you might call an adaptable palate – as a child, my family called me the “human dustbin”. So when I travel, I actively seek out not just the delicious and the interesting, but the grotesque, transgressive, the culturally unusual… On some …
It’s hard to imagine that an everyday ingredient in the spice rack could once have been worth almost its weight in gold. Yet cloves, just like peppercorns, were more valuable than silver back in their day. And these little dried flower buds, native to the …
It’s a truism, but worth repeating, that until you’ve been to China, you haven’t experienced Chinese food. Tender, juicy Beijing duck bears no relationship to the dried out critters served in the West; chopped pineapple and weird battery things do not feature ANYWHERE; and there’s …
Marmite, like oysters and stinky tofu, is a substance that tends to polarise people, if not actually horrify them. Salty, yeasty and often served on hot, buttered toast, it should never (but often is) be visually confused with chocolate spread. Marmite is, like pavlova, the …
Brussels sprouts are, famously, one of those vegetables folk either love or loathe. And scientists at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, England, are currently exploring the theory that this preference is, quite literally, encoded into your DNA. According to the scientists involved, sprouts contain a …