Rachel Laudan

Chocolate is an oddity. It’s one of the few native American foodstuffs to make it immediately to the Old World. And now, when anyone who has any pride in their foodie credentials praises the fresh and natural, chocolate, one of the most elaborately processed and industrialized foods around, is given a pass and allowed into [...]

Soon I want to introduce another of these toasted ground ur-foods that is still used in parts Europe, the Caribbean and South America. But for now, from readers, toasted ground chia, toasted ground soy beans?  More ur-food toasted flours. From Margaret Conover. But what about chia seed? Most of what I’ve read about pinole states [...]

Muleteers were not people I’d thought about much until a few years ago.  Yet 14,000 mules worked the silver mines in the eighteenth century in Guanajuato where I now live.  That at least was the estimate of Henry George Ward in his book Mexico in 1827. 14,000 mules is a lot of mules.  Some were [...]