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Arts & Culture / Food

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A Midsummer Night’s Surströmming

The Baltic herring ferment inside a can thanks to salt-loving, anaerobic bacteria that produce distinctive organic acids found in sweat and rotting butter

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Mining an Oyster Midden

The Damariscotta River was an epicenter of oyster shucking between 2,200 and 1,000 years ago

A diagram of how the K-Cup works

Coffee Pods, An Instant Classic

Single-serving coffee pods are the most recent form of instant coffee. Its history is much shorter than the espresso shot, though just as inventive

Granita

Three Ways to Eat Ice

For those of you who want to explore chilly desserts beyond ice cream, try these frozen treats

Lapis lazuli cylinder seal

A Sip from an Ancient Sumerian Drinking Song

A newly analyzed cuneiform hymn accompanied a drinking song dedicated to a female tavern-keeper

Summer lobster salad

How to Eat Lobster 10 Ways In 24 Hours

These innovative recipes entice the taste buds for every meal of the day

Why Do Men Grill?

Globally, it seems that this gendered division of cookery is an American thing

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The Unnatural History of the Dixie Cup

The product was a life-saving technology that avoided the transmission of disease from communal “tin dippers”

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Edible Dictionary: Lean Cuisine Syndrome

Where do Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s statistics come from? People underestimate junk food and overestimate healthy food in dietary surveys

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Elderberries, Liqueurs and Meat Stamps

These elder-containing concoctions, credited with reviving a taste for liqueurs, came about as folk remedies

Follow the arrows, find the cheese. This sign led to a sheep farm in the village of Tilhouse.

On the Cheese Trail in the Pyrenees

Make a fuss in the road and someone will appear. Spit out some gibberish about “fromage a vendre,” and that should do it. You’ll get your cheese

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A Taste of Edible Feces

Ambergris, the subject of a new book, “is aromatic—both woody and floral. The smell reminds me of leaf litter on a forest floor.”

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The Peas that Smelled the Leaky Pipe

In 1901, a 17-year-old Russian discovered the gas that tells fruits to ripen

According to famed chef Pierre Gagnaire, an egg slowly cooked at 149 degrees Fahrenheit would be unmatched in flavor and texture.

How Do You Cook the Perfect Egg

Chefs and scientists try to solve the ultimate culinary puzzle

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Meat is From Mars, Peaches are From Venus

It might be predictable that hamburger is considered a masculine food, but what about rabbit or orange juice?

The author, on tour in the Sauternes region of Bordeaux, loved the gold-hued sweet wine of the area but filled his bottle with local bulk red.

Tasting France’s Finest Wines

Sauternes is a village near Bordeaux that would have been cow town if dumb luck, microclimatology and royal wineries had not showered the region in fortune

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The Birth of Non-Alcoholic Ketchup

One of the first recipes for ketchup published in the United States called for “love apples”

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What Sunken Sandwiches Tell Us About the Future of Food Storage

The sinking of the Alvin was an accident that demonstrated the promise of a novel food preservation method

Crawfish étouffée

Five Quintessential Cajun Foods

If you’ve only had the pleasure of eating a bowl of gumbo, queue up some Beausoleil and prepare some of these specialties

Food books worth reading

Books on How To Get Pickled

Curious about the middle ground between fresh and rotten? These four books tell you how to preserve the fleeting tastes of spring

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