Rachel Laudan

In her informative and delightful book, Sufi Cuisine (2005), Nevin Halici, one of Turkey’s leading culinary historians, gives a recipe for pomegranate sherbet: a cup of freshly squeezed juice, 2/3 cup sugar, and 3-1/3 cups of water. Apart from her useful advice to to “roll an uncut fresh pomegrante underfoot on the floor” [...]

One objection that comes up time and again when people discuss my theory about the Islamic origins of mole poblano is this: how come, if mole was introduced by the Spaniards, it is now the celebration dish in small villages all over Mexico?
Perfectly good question. And I think there is an answer to this [...]

In thinking about Islamic culinary traditions in India, one of the books I’ve found most useful is Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760 (University of California Press, 1994). OK, it’s not about the courts of the Sultans or the Mughals. OK, it hardly mentions food. But it [...]