Story and Photos by Sharon Hudgins The Golden Eagle train en route across Siberia. Trans-Siberian railroad station restaurant around 1900. If you’ve ever eaten on the dining car of a train, you know that dinner on the diner can range from dismal to delightful. But who would ever think of taking a Trans-Siberian train nearly 6,000 miles across Russia for …
For Carnivores Only
By Dave DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach “The Meating Place of Spice and Smoke” The first outdoor cook to use chile peppers during a barbecue was Jaguar Claw, a somewhat hen-pecked paleo-Native American who lived in the Amazon Basin about 20,000 years ago. He had dispatched his prey with his spear, had butchered the world’s largest rodent with his new flint …
Chiles Around the World, 1889
This seems to be one of the few historical worldwide surveys of chiles and their consumption globally. It is interesting for several reasons. First, it is the first debunking of the notion that chile seeds are hot that I have ever found; second, it reports on adulterated cayenne, a problem in India, England, and the U.S. for centuries; and third, …
Glossary of Chile Pepper Terms
Compiled by Dave DeWitt From The Complete Chile Pepper Book Glossary of Specialized Pepper Terms Not included here are the names of the U.S. cultivars, which, after more than a century of breeding, number in the thousands and are too many to list. Achocolatado. “Chocolatety”; in Mexico, another name for pasilla, a reference to its dark brown color. Acorchado. “Corky”; …
White Gold: Rediscovering the Allure of Sea Salt
By Kelli Bergthold Food photos by Wes Naman Recipes in this article: Mayan Citrus SaladMayan CevicheBean Soup with PorkVegetarian Raise-the-Dead Chili Recently, I have acquired a new addiction. It’s a fine white powder that human beings have been fighting over for thousands of years. The Mayans called it White Gold, but today, we call it salt. Salt has long been …