Portside

Food history is replete with honored legends, creative stories, slightly twisted truths, unsupported claims, leaps of faith, and outright lies. Actually most new dishes are not invented; they evolve.

On May 18, 1980, some 600 students and civilians gathered at Gwangju’s Chonnam National University in peaceful protest against Chun Doo-hwan. Gwangju’s rice ball is no less than an edible encapsulation of the city’s history and moral fiber.

Weaving together new research and rich primary sources, the Plant Humanities Initiative recounts stories of global foods, such as peanuts, to illuminate their extraordinary significance to humans.

The prime growing area for Jersey tomatoes is a region now known as the Inner Coastal Plain, which covers more than 1,000 square miles in southern New Jersey, bordering the Delaware River to the west.

Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge. His third book, discussed here, is Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue.

Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge. His third book, discussed here, is third book, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue.

Bread "crumbs" found in fireplaces used by hunter-gatherers 14,000 years ago predate agriculture by thousands of years

For her book, America: The Cookbook, Gabrielle Langholtz looked at cookbooks as well as narrative and anthropological books to fully explore America’s culinary history—Little House on the Prairie and the Sterns’ many varied books among them.

Party line suggested that widowhood made a woman’s sex drive fickle and vulnerable. A woman’s libido was a site of such agita that she couldn’t be trusted to keep it quiet, and so her body needed to be governed. The alienation imposed upon high-caste, Hindu Bengali women was meant to act as a hormonal suppressant, silencing the desire more dangerous than hunger for fish or meat: sex.

This 13th centure cookbook of Syrian recipes shows us the opulent upper limits of the cuisine from those who cooked and ate it—chefs developing recipes, explorers discovering ingredients, the wealthy elite who demanded luxury and ingenuity.