The histories, migrations, and moments behind the world's favorite dishes.
Tea began as a Chinese medicine and became a daily drink, then a cargo that tied together silver, opium, war and revolution. Here is what the records show and which stories are legend.
Vanilla began with the Totonac of Veracruz and became a global crop in 1841, when a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion found a way to pollinate the orchid by hand.
A Tamil word, an eighteenth-century spice blend and the ships of the British Empire carried curry from India to Glasgow, Tokyo, Durban and Trinidad, changing at every stop.
Pizza, chop suey, hamburgers and Tex-Mex all took their American shape from immigrant cooks. Here is what the records show about where each dish started and what changed.
A 2009 government campaign, a palace-kitchen TV drama and a Los Angeles taco truck all helped Korean food travel. Here is what each did, and how well the plan worked.
The potato reached Spain around 1570, spent two centuries as a suspect curiosity, then became a staple from Ireland to Prussia. Most of the famous stories about its rise are myths.
The tomato reached Italy from the Americas by the 1540s, but it spent about two centuries as a garden curiosity before it became the red sauce we call Italian.
Jollof rice traces back to ceebu jen, a fish and broken rice dish from Saint-Louis, Senegal. Here is what the evidence shows, and how Nigeria and Ghana ended up fighting over it.
Four household dishes, from Italian bread soup to Jewish schmaltz, show how family recipes survive, change or vanish when nobody writes them down.
The croissant grew from the Austrian kipferl, reached Paris with an officer's bakery in 1838 or 1839, and became a laminated pastry in the early 1900s. The siege and queen stories do not hold.
The word pizza is on paper in Gaeta in 997, but the tomato pie came centuries later in Naples. The famous Margherita story of 1889 is the weakest link.
Ramen began as Chinese noodle soup in Japan's treaty ports, then took off in the hungry years after 1945. Here is what the records show, and what is only legend.
One food history story, delivered every week.