Food Stuff

chicken

The Shmoo was the brilliant 1948 invention of Al Capp, the cartoonist who brought us Li’l Abner. Essentially a self-sacrificing blob with a face, a Shmoo met all human needs. Fried, its meat tasted like poultry, broiled, like steak. As a species, the animals lived to be eaten, and they bred copiously, so their…

broccoli

Broccoli gets such a bad rap. This is perplexing to those of us who love that green, treelike stalky vegetable.

Back in March 1990, then president George H. W. Bush famously declared, “I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!”

the cashew

It’s interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn’t. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known? Who was the first human to…

rosemary

Whenever I think of rosemary, I hear in my mind’s ear the accompanying line from Hamlet: “That’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember,” from Ophelia’s sad, mad little speech to her brother, Laertes, right before she dies. She was onto something. Not only have various scientific studies proved the veracity…

the prune

Plums, and therefore prunes, exist only because of grafting, one of the weirdest forms of genetic engineering I’ve ever heard of, and also one of the oldest. I’m hazy on the actual methods, but as far as I understand it, a branch from one plum tree is cut off. Another plum tree is given an incision. The new…

the leek

The suave European cousin of the working-class, lowbrow onion, the leek is sweeter in flavor, more genteel in mien. It bears the marks of good breeding — it lends itself to more esoteric preparations and its non-sulfuric acids make no one cry. Its silhouette is impeccably handsome, too, a decorous fan of dark…