Rachel Laudan

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 and sweet jellies and [...]