Taketh One Unicorn

IMAGE: “Detail of a unicorn on the grill,” courtesy the British Library. Yesterday, in a charming April Fool, the British Library’s Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts bloggers breathlessly reported the discovery of a long-lost medieval cookbook,...

Brooklyn Bridge Champagne

IMAGE: Wine Cellar, Brooklyn Bridge, 1992, by photographer Stanley Greenberg, via Urban Omnibus, where you can also view it much larger. Photographer Stanley Greenberg likes to shoot hidden spaces and invisible infrastructure — the overlooked, neglected, or simply...

The Art and Reward of Penguin Charming

IMAGE: “Penguin Interviews,” from Frederick Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1896-1899, via Peter Smith, Food & Think. Very good news: my former colleague at GOOD, Peter Smith, has joined the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog as a...

P. O. Bread Box

IMAGE: Damien Petit and his “Boîte A Pain,” photo by La Dépêche du Midi. Both natives and non-natives alike tend to agree that bread is central to French cuisine, history, and national identity. Indeed, Steven Kaplan, a Cornell University professor who has...

How to Clone Mineral Water

Although the secret recipe for Coca-Cola is known to fewer people than the U.S. nuclear arsenal’s launch codes, there are other, more expensive fizzy drinks whose exact ingredient ratios are proudly revealed on every label. Helpfully, several websites have...

Smell-designing Sheffield

IMAGE: Victoria Henshaw’s Sheffield smell walk, mapped. Regular Edible Geography readers will know that smellscapes are a recurring subplot of this blog — a diversion that I justify on the basis that roughly ninety percent of what we perceive as taste is...