Rachel Laudan

Mole’s on my mind again (find previous posts by clicking on the tag “mole”).
Last night I was lucky to attend a reception with Patricia Quintana prior to the mole festival here in Guanajuato. Not surprisingly in her eloquent history of mole, she affirmed that the basic techniques were  indigenous with some Islamic ingredients added later. [...]

Here’s a question. In classic French cooking (and much Western cooking) savory and sweet dishes mirror one another. That is, you can have sweet or savory souffles and pastries of various kinds. You have sauces and custards based on similar and often identical techniques. You have gelatin showing up as aspics [...]

Why don’t Indians make cheese? That’s come up in the discussion of Mexican cheese. I don’t have a knock down answer but I do have some thoughts on the worldwide distribution of cheese.
First, let’s be clear about cheese. If you define cheese as the aged cheeses typical of Europe, then you are talking about a [...]