Tag: food

Garlic

There are few foods that can’t be improved with a little garlic. (Ice cream and pecan pie, maybe, but that’s about it.) Its distinctive taste has made it a favorite flavoring for thousands of years…although no doubt the ancient Egyptians and Romans, both of whom used it, also made the first jokes about “garlic breath.” …

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Citrus fruits

Never mind carols in the snow, decorated trees and Canadian Tire commercials, for me the real proof Christmas is just around the corner is the appearance of boxes of mandarin oranges. Equating citrus fruit with anything wintry, though, is really rather odd, because citrus fruits are notoriously unsuited for cold climates. Citrus fruits come from …

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Digestion

Like most of you, I ate too much on Thanksgiving, and felt guilty about it afterward. But then I came up with the idea of writing this column on digestion, and presto! No more guilt. You see, I didn’t overeat, I conducted research. You’ll have to find your own excuse. When you sit down to …

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Food preservation

As a kid, I found the kitchen a rather mysterious place, filled with exotic implements like the bizarre “colander,” the ominous “deep-fat fryers,” and the straight-out-of-the-mad-scientist’s-laboratory “pressure cooker,” as well as bizarre ingredients like “bouillon,” “baker’s chocolate” (real chocolate’s evil twin), “paprika,” “cloves,” and something called “pectin.” Both the pressure cooker and pectin mostly came …

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Cholesterol

Archaeologists five thousand years from now, piecing together a picture of our civilization, might well conclude that we were a highly religious culture, all worshipping at the altar of the great god cholesterol, whose name appeared on all of our food containers and who was a constant topic of discussion in books, magazines and newspapers. …

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Eggs

It’s eggciting for me this week to be able to eggspound on that most eggcellent eggsample of nature’s eggsquisite bounty: the egg. (For one thing, few other topics lend themselves to such eggceedingly eggscruciating eggsamples of eggcessive wordplay.) I’m going to focus on the chicken egg, although scientifically speaking the chicken egg is only one …

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Salt

Okay, it’s pop quiz time. What mineral is used in greater quantities and for more purposes than any other? Give up? I’ll give you a hint: it’s the only mineral we sprinkle on both our roads and our French fries. That’s right: salt. Those innocuous little white crystals in the shaker on your table are …

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Alcohol

Yeasts, rather dull life forms in most respects, have one endearing trait: provided with sugar, they produce carbon dioxide…and an interesting chemical called “alcohol.” Nobody knows who first discovered that yeast could turn ordinary grape juice or grain brew into something quite different, but by 1500 B.C., beer and wine-making were well-established in the Middle …

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Canning

This week I’d like to write about canning. No, no, no, this isn’t a column about corporal punishment in Singapore. “Canning,” not “caning,” as in, “Open up another can of beans, Ma, company’s coming up the walk.” Canning is a form of food preservation, something humans have been interested in ever since some early hominid …

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Food additives

It’s a national pastime. You buy a snack; then, while enjoying it, you read the label. “Contains Yellow #6, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate.” (All of which I found listed on a bottle of iced tea I bought recently.) It doesn’t usually stop you from eating or drinking (not me, anyway) but it does make …

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Barbecuing

Summer may officially begin tomorrow, on the summer solstice, but for many people, summer really begins the first time they’re able to barbecue in their backyard. I am not one of them. I enjoy eating the fruits of someone else’s barbecuing efforts as much as the next guy, but to actually stand at the grill? …

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Coffee

Ask the average coffee drinker where coffee comes from and he’ll probably say “South America.”  Coffee actually originated in Ethiopia, where the coffee plant grows naturally.  Coffee has been drunk in Arabian countries for centuries, but was only introduced to Europe in the mid1600s.  Plantations established in European colonies in Indonesia, the West Indies and …

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