What’s more child-friendly than a root beer? Syrupy and innocent; often caffeine-free, and perfect for an ice cream float. But if you could travel back to a colonial American kitchen, you wouldn’t recognize the drink. Original root beer wasn’t a soda at all; it was an actual beer, brewed not with a barley malt but … Read more
If you bake a cherry pie, it tastes like tart cherries. A blueberry pie retains the deep, tannic punch of the berries. But if you bake an apple pie without spices, you are left with something surprisingly anonymous: a pile of sweetened, soft texture with almost no “apple” identity. Unlike most fruits, apples lose their … Read more
The Impossible Burger didn’t just launch in 2016; it arrived as the high-tech climax of a three-decade-old narrative: Cows are bad. To build its billion-dollar plant-based meat empire, Impossible Foods stood on the shoulders of an unlikely ideological grandfather: John Robbins. In 1987, Robbins famously walked away from the Baskin-Robbins fortune to preach a gospel … Read more
Global food fraud is a $40 billion industry. It is a staggering figure—one designed to make you feel like every trip to the grocery store is a walk through a minefield. But in the world of forensic data, $40 billion is what we call a PROOFY number: a gargantuan figure that sounds terrifying in isolation … Read more
If you’ve ever been served a piece of fish that tasted like an ashtray with a side of battery acid, you’ve been a victim of the great “Blackening” misconception. Most people believe blackening is an ancient Acadian tradition, but it is actually a specific 1980s invention, popularized by a celebrity chef, that has been hijacked … Read more
Cajun cooking has become perhaps overly identified with New Orleans, causing many to think that Cajun food is food that originates there. Cajun country is, on the other hand, the countryside, and is also called Acadiana. The true cooking of New Orleans is more than boiled crawfish and gumbo. It is also more than Cajun. New … Read more