Rachel Laudan

The theme of the  2009 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery was Food and Language.  I gave a paper on a topic I had been mulling over for some time, “What can the culinary historian learn from the linguist?”  It has now been published by the marvelous Prospect Books, which I urge you to support [...]

In the market in Silao, Mexico, the very geographic center of Mexico, ten miles south of the the city of Guanajuato in the State of Guanajuato, the semilleros (seed shops) sell black eyed peas (Vigna unguicalata) along with all the usual Mexican beans. They call them veronicas. You can see them in the sack at [...]

Here’s another comment, this time on ensaimadas, a topic that we have touched on here and here.  Thanks to Michael Raffael. I probably missed earlier postings, but it seems likely that ensaimadas evolved on Mallorca during its Moorish occupation. The argument against this is that the Moors didn’t use lard (saim in Catalan), but the [...]