Rachel Laudan

A slight tingle, a flinty taste, verging on sour.  What is this?  A moment of confusion. I am taken back to English pubs in the west country before urbanization and gastropubs hit, when there was bread and cheddar and scrumpy.  Scrumpy, a local cider, alcoholic of course, actually very alcoholic sometimes, had that tingle that [...]

An ah ha moment.  I was re-reading the best book we have on the history of pasta, Pasta The Story of a Universal Food, by Silvano Serventi and Francoise Sabban when I ran across this sentence. What was generally called . . .  “Italian pasta” was actually pasta from Genoa and Naples; pasta from other [...]

All this discussion of ensaimadas (links to previous postings here and here) and I realize that I’ve never really explained what they are. Ensaimadas are a pastry associated chiefly with Mallorca and to a lesser extent with Minorca, two Mediterranean islands to the south of Spain with very interesting histories. Pastries called ensaimadas also crop [...]