The histories, migrations, and moments behind the world's favorite dishes.
Saccharin and corn flakes came from real slips. Potato chips, chocolate chip cookies and Worcestershire sauce are mostly good stories. Here is what the records show.
The Forme of Cury, written about 1390, holds 196 recipes from a king's cooks. Read closely, they undo several popular ideas about what medieval Europe ate.
French cooking did not rise on Italian help alone. The record shows a printed system from 1651, restaurants before the Revolution, and two chefs who wrote the rules.
Black pepper began on India's Malabar Coast and crossed the sea to Egypt, Rome and Venice. Here is what the records say about its trade, its prices and the voyages it inspired.
The oldest bread found so far was baked by hunter-gatherers about 14,400 years ago, thousands of years before farming. From there it runs through Egyptian ovens, Roman handouts and a Missouri bakery.
Dom Perignon did not invent champagne, and he was partly hired to stop the bubbles. The real history runs through a London paper in 1662 and a widow's kitchen table.
Nobody knows who made the first cheese, but milk-fat residue on pottery from Poland puts cheesemaking at about 5500 BCE. Here is what the evidence shows, and what the legends add.
Cacao was in use in Ecuador about 5,300 years ago. The chocolate bar is only from the 1840s on, and several tidy stories about Cortes and Aztec feasts do not hold up.
Egypt was importing cinnamon by about 2000 BC, Rome paid fortunes for it, and the Portuguese, Dutch and British took turns controlling the island that grew it.
Coffee grew wild in Ethiopia, but the first drinkers we can document were Sufis in fifteenth-century Yemen. The goatherd Kaldi is a late legend, and the rest of the story is bans, coffeehouses and plantations.
Cornflakes came out of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the 1890s. Two Kellogg brothers share the credit, and they spent years fighting over it, and over sugar.
The oldest dumplings ever found came out of a dry tomb in Turpan, dated to about 499 to 640 AD. From there the trail runs to Turkic manti, Italian ravioli, Polish pierogi and Siberian pelmeni.
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