The Hot Meal Defence

IMAGE: Mongol hordes attack the walled city of Xiaxia, via. IMAGE: The Imperial Portrait of Emperor Xianfeng, via. IMAGE: A hot meal, via. The tale of General Tso’s Chicken, as described in my last post, may strike many of you as quite convoluted enough already....

Digest | Of Civil Wars, Diaspora, and Culinary Nostalgia

When Fuschia Dunlop, a British cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine, was compiling material for her recent book on Hunanese food, she faced a difficult decision: to include, or not to include, a recipe for General Tso’s Chicken. IMAGE: General...

Hunting/Gathering

IMAGE: “Mangold Golden Tankard” by Charles Jones, via. The mangold, or mangelwurzel, is a root vegetable usually used for animal feed. Charles Jones was “a professional gardener, born in 1866, son of a Wolverhampton butcher” – and...

North Korean Food Diplomacy

IMAGE: Pujon Potato Starch Factory, from the International Starch Institute. Over at the Foreign Policy editor’s blog, Joshua Keating notes with surprise that North Korea’s Central News Agency chose not to make much of U.S. special envoy Stephen...

Sweet and Sour Soils

IMAGE: From “Soil: A Series,” 2001, by Laura Parker: “Palette,” “Clod,” “Soil Bar,” and “Soil Survey Books.” “It used to be,” writes William Bryant Logan in Dirt, “that a good farmer could...