Rachel Laudan

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to post for some time.  This ad appeared in Honolulu in a weekly, The Polynesian, in June 1840.  If it’s hard to read the words, here they are: Good people all, walk in and buy Of Sam & Mow, good cake & pie: bread hard or soft, for land or [...]

Mending woks with molten iron and a bit of paper or felt.  Pretty amazing stuff.  Don Wagner, who is the person on Chinese metallurgy, sent me a link to a page he has put together on historical and contemporary accounts and photos of the Chinese tinkers who mended woks.  Here’s the link. On the culinary [...]

Not much.  Just enough to know that the standard story has to be revised. My long-time friend and fine scholar and anthropologist, E.N. Anderson, told this story in The Food of China (1988). “Wok is a Cantonese word; the Mandarin is kuo. The wok appears to be a rather recent acquisition as Chinese kitchen furniture [...]