Rachel Laudan

More on nixtamalization

By Rachel Laudan March 16, 2011 Adventures, Mainly Culinary, Grinding, Mexican Food 2 Comments

A very nice post by David Arnold of the French Culinary Institute on nixtamalization. I think he is not right about the kind of metates and molcajetes needed.  Pores are…

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Who ground the chocolate? Not a trivial question

By Rachel Laudan February 13, 2011 Drink, Food History, Globalization Then and Now, Grinding, Mexican Food 12 Comments

Of all the difficult things to turn into food (and most plants and animals are difficult to turn into food), cacao beans and their processing rank way up there. Let’s…

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Cuisine and Language 9: Can We Reconstruct Dead Cuisines?

By Rachel Laudan February 10, 2011 Oddities and Things that Don't Fit 2 Comments

Linguists have developed ways to reconstruct dead languages like Proto Indo-European, the language from which many of the languages of western Eurasia, including Celtic, Latin, Sanskrit etc are descended.  Not…

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