Category: Food

  • These 7 Companies Ship Unique Seeds for Your Quarantine Garden

    These 7 Companies Ship Unique Seeds for Your Quarantine Garden

    IN 1944, AT THE HEIGHT of World War II, 20 million home gardeners across the United States dug deep to support the war effort. As the country poured the bulk of its resources into the conflict, Americans grew Victory Gardens to bolster the domestic food supply. Nearly a century later, Jes Walton is trying to bring…

  • Taste the Globe With Recipes From New York’s All-Grandma Kitchen Crew

    Taste the Globe With Recipes From New York’s All-Grandma Kitchen Crew

    WHEN JODY “JOE” SCARAVELLA OPENED Enoteca Maria in 2008, he was sorely in need of a grandmother. Scaravella grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, where his Nonna Domenica cared for him while his parents worked. “I remember her going to the market everyday, bringing her shopping cart,” Scaravella writes. “She stopped at the vegetable shops…

  • Eat Like a 1970s Radical With ‘The People’s Philadelphia Cookbook’

    Eat Like a 1970s Radical With ‘The People’s Philadelphia Cookbook’

    “A VERY GAY MEAT LOAF” requires several key ingredients. First, wrote Michael Goldberger, a gay activist and neuroscience researcher, combine ground beef, pork, and veal with spices. Then, add partially-cooked spinach and—if you have the money—mushrooms, taking care not to overmix. Hard-boiled eggs and sour cream top it off. Goldberger adapted the recipe from gay New York…

  • The Return of Japan’s Female Sake Brewers

    The Return of Japan’s Female Sake Brewers

    MIHO FUJITA WAS A HIGH-POWERED executive working at a Tokyo toy company. Miho Imada worked in traditional Noh theater. Chizuko Niikawa-Helton was in the fashion industry. But at some point in their careers, all three women had a realization: Their true passion was sake. Since sake is the most iconic alcoholic drink of Japan, these career…

  • Copenhagen Wants You to Forage on Its City Streets

    Copenhagen Wants You to Forage on Its City Streets

    COPENHAGEN IS ABOUT TO BECOME the embodiment of grab-and-go snacking. In a recent vote, the City Council resolved to introduce free, portable, city-wide munchies: public fruit trees. They’ll opt to plant edibles, from blackberry bushes to apple trees, wherever city planning calls for greenery. For Astrid Aller, a Copenhagen City Councilor from the Socialist People’s Party who…

  • Tour Honolulu’s Japanese Food Scene With This 1906 Map

    Tour Honolulu’s Japanese Food Scene With This 1906 Map

    WE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT Takei Nekketsu. The proprietor of a dry-goods store, he was one of the many small business owners who made up the thriving Japanese community of early 20th-century Honolulu. But Nekketsu had a number of special talents. He wrote some of the earliest Japanese-language histories of Hawai’i, and he made maps. One…

  • The Gobi Desert is a Red Sea of Chili Peppers

    The Gobi Desert is a Red Sea of Chili Peppers

    In Northwest China’s Gobi Desert, autumn tints the landscape a flaming scarlet. The fields of red aren’t deciduous leaves blushing with the season. They’re chili peppers, spread out to dry under the hot desert sun following the late-summer harvest. Each September and October, farmers across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which produces a fifth of China’s world-leading pepper…

  • Found: Milk Residue That Proves Ancient Europeans Used Cute-as-Heck Baby Bottles

    Found: Milk Residue That Proves Ancient Europeans Used Cute-as-Heck Baby Bottles

    FOR DECADES, ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXCAVATING ANCIENT children’s graves in Germany and Austria were puzzled by a set of artifacts: small, rounded vessels, some with handles, and some with designs that looked like the ears and feet of unrecognizable creatures. “We think of [them] as mythical animals,” says Julie Dunne, a Senior Research Associate in chemistry at the…

  • Sold: Charles Dickens’ Liquor Log

    Sold: Charles Dickens’ Liquor Log

    ON JUNE 6, 1870, CHARLES Dickens strolled into the cellar of his country house, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, and surveyed his liquor stores. The day before, wine merchants at Joseph Ellis & Sons had dropped off a cask of good sherry. If Dickens wanted whiskey, he could dig into stone jars of it, including some…

  • The Founder of America’s Earliest Lesbian Bar Was Deported for Obscenity

    The Founder of America’s Earliest Lesbian Bar Was Deported for Obscenity

    IT TOOK OFFICER MARGARET LEONARD three tries to get her hands on Eve Adams’ book of lesbian short stories. We don’t know what, exactly, the New York Police Department officer experienced when she first slunk undercover into Eve Adams’ Tearoom at 129 MacDougal Street. But it’s easy to imagine a group of artists gathered under gleaming…