Around the world, one dish at a time.
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 …
Long, long before Tom Cruise was shaking up drinks in Cocktail, Jerry Thomas was making theatre behind the bar. With a status equivalent to any of today’s celebrity chefs, his death made front page news in his home of New York — and his life …
In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Edmund is tempted to the dark side with the aid of a bowl of Turkish Delight — just the plain ole rose-flavoured, sugar-coated variant. In Bulgaria, part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire for over five centuries, they …