Rachel Laudan

Beer of cacao pulp? That’s what the residues on pots in Puerto Escondido in Honduras suggested to John S. Henderson and Rosemary A. Joyce of Cornell and the University of California, Berkeley respectively.
They reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that people there were fermenting the pulp about 1100 BC. [...]

I write this in large part in response to Colman Andrew’s interesting comment on my post on a recipe using Catalan picada. In it he concedes that mole has pre-hispanic origins but suggests some kind of interaction between Catalonia and the convents of Puebla where by legend the nuns invented the archetypal mole, mole poblano.
I [...]

A couple of days ago, following a suggestion of Adam Balic, I made a dish from Catalonia that uses techniques and ingredients that are very similar to those used in making Mexican mole. It also followed up on a conversation with a young woman in Catalonia earlier this year. She launched into [...]