I looked inside and felt I was peering through a portal. It was a tiny room, decorated as if it were an undersea scene: the walls were painted blue with images of fish and seaweed, the light was filtered and aquamarine. Coral was strewn around the edges of the room, and sand was on the floor. In my memory, there was an eerie music playing (I think this part is probably my imagination, but stay with me). In the middle of the room sat a real treasure chest. Emboldened, I crawled toward the chest and opened it- and it was filled with toys. As instructed, I took one- it was a little metal rocket that you could put caps in. I scrambled out of the undersea room and returned to the table, beaming with excitement.

This happened perhaps fifty years ago, but I remember the event with perfect clarity. I have told innumerable people this very story. Later, I learned the restaurant was named F. McLintock’s, a Pismo Beach wild-west themed “Saloon and Dining House”. The place had a 50 foot wooden cowboy in the front, a giant neon sign, taxidermied bears and buffalos inside, and the servers were famous for pouring water blindfolded from an amazing height into a glass held upon a diner’s head. They served high-quality steaks, ribs, chicken and seafood, but it was all part of a magical beachside circus-meets-old west experience. To a kid like me, it was completely memorable.

I had to wait thirty years to have a similar experience, and it was at a restaurant 45 minutes outside of Bogota, Colombia. That place was Andrés Carne De Res, a sprawling two-and-a-half-square-mile restaurant in the middle of the Colombian countryside. If you’ve been to Andrés, you know what I’m talking about: the place is a full-on multisensory experience of food, drink, performance, dance, décor, and amor. It’s decorated in a cluttered, Latin American outsider-art style, and it’s impossible to describe completely: the food is whimsical and delicious, the vibes are beautiful and zany, and spontaneous parades by the servers and performers spring up at a moment’s notice. I remember the lomo al trapo, steak cooked in a salted, charred cotton cloth, and I remember the beans (I always remember the beans), but what stays with me from that first visit was the feeling of magic- of being transported to another place for a little while.

Food can do that by itself, of course, and it doesn’t take theater. A perfect bite can be transporting, memorable, and magical on its own. But theater doesn’t hurt. Humans have enjoyed entertainment with their meal for thousands of years- from the courts of Medieval Europe and China to the dinner shows of the American midcentury.

Over the years, innumerable restaurants have sought to create an experience for their diners. My dad fondly remembers Clifton’s Cafeterias in the 1950s, two themed restaurants in Los Angeles which featured indoor Pacific Island rainforests, waterfalls, Californian mountain landscapes, lakes, rivers, and the motto “Dine Free Unless Delighted.” Delighted my dad was- he still tells me about childhood birthday parties there.

There were other “magic” restaurants: Farrell’s, an ice cream parlor done in a 1900s style with zany concoctions like a hot fudge volcano with fireworks in the top (and a siren when it emerged from the kitchen!) was fantastic; the Tonga Room, a Polynesian themed restaurant in San Francisco with its indoor lagoon and artificial rainstorms is legendary (it still exists!).

But, aside from Andrés Carnes De Res (which is expanding into other cities), most of these restaurants have vanished, are closing or declining. How come?

Well, I fear the theme restaurant concept went through a rough patch in the 80s and 90s. Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater integrated video arcades and robotic entertainment, Rainforest Cafe created animal-themed forests with, again, robotic entertainment, Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe built more adult-oriented entertainment restaurants, and Medieval Times created the Knight’s Tourney and Banquet themed dinner. All of these concepts, sadly, leaned much harder on the theme than on the food, serving forgettable, industrial food in what seemed to be a gimmicky- rather than truly fun- environment. Cynical, ironic Gen X diners like myself began to see the theme restaurant as inauthentic and artificial, not fun and magical. My generation stayed away in droves. Meanwhile, the old-school experience restaurants forgot about the food too, competing on theater alone. Theme restaurants began closing, and fast.

And in its place came the 21st century restaurant movement. During this period dining became, more than ever, an expression of ethics, good taste, and social class. The farm-to-table movement took its food seriously, situating it in an ethos of sustainability and authenticity. Restaurants employed chefs as artistes, honoring ingredients and producers, with an earnest, reverent atmosphere. The Michelin guide- originally published for elite French motorists seeking haute cuisine in the European countryside- published its first American edition in 2005, bringing the idea of extreme French-style elegance to the American middle class diner. Suddenly, theme restaurants were completely declassé- an abasement of food instead of a celebration of it, an artificial experience instead of an authentic one. To make matters worse, many of the themes themselves- often based in imagined places and cultures rather than real ones- seemed cringey, even offensive. “Good” restaurants were a serious business: the performance was the farmer’s art and the chef’s skill, and anything else was distraction. Restaurant décor should be minimal, this aesthetic dictated: the magic should be on the plate.

But, let’s be honest, sometimes that magic doesn’t hit. Not every chef is an alchemist, not every farm produces the best-of-the-best. Most restaurants do a fine job, but fail to transport diners with the food alone. Contemporary restaurants still try to toe the line, presenting their dishes with a very very straight face, encouraging diners to pay attention to the food. Alas, it can get kind of boring. A little theater wouldn’t hurt.

What I’m saying is I am yearning for a new era of experience restaurants, ones with good food and good fun,.I want to laugh with my family over shared food- I want to see my kids amazed by spectacle or a small, magical moment. Is that so wrong?

I could be missing something. There might be theatrical, fun, experiential restaurants popping up that I haven’t seen yet. Anyone have an example? What’s your favorite “experience” restaurant?

This is exactly the environment in which we humans developed some of our basic food preferences: a craving for salty, fatty, protein-rich meats that stimulate our salt, texture, and umami (meaty) receptors, and a passion for sugary, vitamin rich fruits which taste sweet and sour. A meal with all of those attributes pushes all of our pleasure buttons in a very good way: Meaty, fatty, sweet, and sour: a perfect flavor profile of a perfect meal.

Later, humans domesticated the pig and many of the tastiest and most nutritious plants. We didn’t lose our lust for the flavors of these foods- and as we developed culinary arts, those instinct-driven flavors shaped the dishes we created. One of the places where cuisine flourished was Imperial China, where simple dishes, invented by common people, were perfected and memorialized by chefs working for the royal court. One of these dishes was shanzha pai gu (山楂排骨), stir-fried pork ribs with hawthorn berries, from the Shandong province. Remember our hunter-gatherers from the introduction, feasting on a wild pig and hawthorn berries? Same ingredients here: fatty pork on the bone and hawthorne fruits, this time cooked into a sophisticated, balanced dish. Hawthorn berries bring a sweet, tart cranberry-like flavor to the sauce, cutting the rich fattiness of the pork ribs. It’s a classic of regional Chinese cuisine.

Northern dishes like pork with hawthorn seem to have inspired a similar dish just to the south: tang cu pai gu (糖醋排骨), said to originate in Wuxi province, near Shanghai. It’s fried pork ribs again, but hawthorns don’t grow as easily here, so the fruity sweet-tartness is achieved another way: chefs make a sauce of sugar and vinegar (sugar is tang 糖 and vinegar is cu 醋) hence the name of the dish, “sugar-vinegar pork ribs”. The sugar-vinegar sauce serves the same function as the hawthorn fruit: sour and sweet, perfectly balancing the fatty pork ribs.

China is an immense and creative country, and every province re-interprets dishes in its own style. Continue south to Fujian province, and you’ll find lizhi rou (荔枝肉), “lychee pork” which achieves a lychee-like flavor and appearance using, again, vinegar and sugar. Move south to the Guangdong province and you’ll discover another variation on the theme: this one is called gou lou luk (咕嚕肉) in the Cantonese language, and is also fried pork with a vinegar-and-sugar sauce. And it is this version that became famous around the world as Sweet and Sour Pork.

Sweet and sour pork flourished in Guangdong. Instead of the subtler pan-frying from the dishes farther north, the pork was battered and fried until golden, delivering more crispiness and flavor. The sauce evolved too: instead of a simple vinegar-and-sugar sauce as made in Shanghai, the Cantonese version added fruit back into the mix. However, instead of the northern cold-weather hawthorn, in Guangdong they added pineapple.

Pineapple is indigenous to South America, and may not seem especially Chinese to outsiders. However, like chili peppers and eggplants, pineapples were brought to China by traders in the 16^th century and quickly integrated into Chinese cuisine. Today, Guangdong is the biggest producer of pineapples in China- the county of Xuwen is known as the “sea of pineapples” because of its immense fields of the fruit. Pineapples have their own sweet-tart flavor, and complement the dish perfectly. But there is one more ingredient to make its way into the dish: ketchup.

Now, before you start worrying about ketchup in a Cantonese dish, remember that ketchup has an Asian origin in the first place: it descended from the fish and soy sauces of Southern China and Southeast Asia. Tomato ketchup is an American version of a very Asian idea: a concentrated, umami-rich flavor booster. It’s perfect in sweet and sour for several reasons: one, it is itself both sweet and vinegary; two, its umami lends good flavor to the dish; and three, it is red, an appetizing and appealing color that echoes the hawthorn-tinged red hue of the dish’s ancestor. Some sweet and sour pork recipes use red yeast or even red food coloring, but ketchup is, in my view, the best.

The first wave of the culinary diaspora that came from China to the rest of the world was from Guangdong, home of the Cantonese people. The Cantonese were the ones who created Chinatowns in the U.S., and labored in the American West. The Cantonese also went to Peru and created Chifa culture , and immigrated to the UK where they created British-Chinese cuisine. To all of these places, they brought Sweet and Sour Pork. In most of these places the dish became an early favorite: we are programmed by evolution to love the flavors of fried pork and tart fruit, so it’s an obvious winner. Oddly, its very popularity overseas led to suspicion that the dish was a Western invention, a product of non-Chinese tastes. Indeed, it seems that the habit of using boneless pork shoulder in the dish instead of bone-in rib bits was a concession to the Western distaste for spitting out bones during a meal. This means that Sweet and Sour Pork is often the subject of tiresome “authenticity” debates. That’s too bad- all the various versions of the dish, from northern China to the south, from Peru to London to New York City, are worth eating and delicious in their own right. I am an unabashed booster of Sweet and Sour pork, and I make it (and eat it) whenever I can, whether from my own wok in my kitchen or from a takeout paper carton.

The key to all of these dishes is balance. The pork must be fatty enough to satisfy; lean pork loin does not work for this dish. The meat for Cantonese-style Sweet and Sour Pork is deep or shallow fried in a batter of flour and cornstarch, making it satisfyingly crispy. Any fried meat must be offset with sourness- it’s why we put hot sauce on fried chicken, malt vinegar on fish and chips, and lemon on schnitzel. But the genius of Chinese cuisine is that it goes further, balancing the sourness with sweetness, just as a fruit has. To achieve this, most of these dishes are based on a roughly equal amount of vinegar and sugar. Add to this any fruity food that has a combination of sweet and sour- like ketchup, pineapple, hawthorn, even tomatoes or citrus. And this is exactly how the Sweet and Sour Pork template has changed Chinese diaspora cuisine. To explain what I mean, here is the master template for Sweet and Sour Pork.

You can see there are four major categories: sweet, sour, fatty and meaty. “Meaty” flavor usually comes from the pork, “fatty” flavor comes from the pork fat and oil, “sweet” comes from sugar and “sour” from vinegar. Fruity ingredients like ketchup, hawthorn, and pineapple can, individually or together, boost the sweet-sour flavor. Keep these four categories in balance, and you’ll have a great Sweet and Sour Pork.

But- and this is the cool part- you can substitute other meats and flavors to create equally delicious dishes. This is how the now-famous “Orange Chicken” was invented, first in the Hunan province of China, then by a Panda Express chef in 1987. It follows the Sweet and Sour template, except substituting chicken for the pork and orange juice for the fruit. This template also governs the equally famous “General Tso’s Chicken”, which also follows the classic sweet-and-sour template, except using chicken and a vinegar-sugar sauce deeply flavored with soy sauce and hot chilis. All of these dishes have their nuances and flavor variations, of course, but they all have the beautiful, genius balance of sweet, sour, meaty, and fatty. In this way, the genius of Sweet and Sour Pork has had an outsized influence on foods all over the world.

Anyway, enough talk. Let’s get to the recipes! In writing this article, I made shanzha pai gu, Pork Ribs with Hawthorn, for the first time. It’s not a popular dish in the U.S., so it’s tricky to find ingredients and recipes. But I managed to put a very tasty recipe together based on recipes I found- I loved it and I will make it again! There are two sourcing tricks: first, the pork ribs you use for this dish are not the full ones we smoke on the grill, but those same ribs cut into 1 inch lengths. These are sold at any Chinese grocery; they are used for a number of dishes. You can sometimes get “soft ribs”- the ends of the ribs that are cartilage instead of bone- these are considered an extra delicacy. Next you have to find hawthorn fruits. I found them pre-cored and frozen in the Chinese grocery; I have never seen them fresh in the U.S. Everything else is pretty standard!

Shanzha Pai Gu (山楂排骨), Stir-Fried Pork Ribs With Hawthorn Berries

1 pound pork ribs, cut into 1 inch lengths

about 12 hawthorn fruits, frozen

2 scallions

1 small piece ginger

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

1 tablespoon light soy sauce (if you only have light soy sauce, that’s ok, just use 2 tablespoons)

a bit of white pepper

2 tablespoons stir fry oil (I use peanut, but any high smoke point neutral oil will work)

Step 1: blanch the ribs. This improves the texture, flavor, and appearance of the ribs. Just put them in a pan of cold water, let them sit for 10 minutes, change the water, and bring to a boil. Boil for about 5 minutes, drain, and rinse. The ribs are now semi-cooked and the impurities are gone. You can make this dish without the blanching, but trust me it’s worth the extra step.

Step 2: divide the hawthorn fruits in two equal groups. Leave one group whole, and put the rest in a blender with enough water or rice wine to cover. Blend. This will be the basis for your sauce and provides the sour element.

Step 3: Prepare your flavorings: chop the white parts of the scallions into a fine dice, along with the ginger, also in fine dice. Slice the green parts of the scallions diagonally into an attractive garnish.

Step 4: In a wok, heat the 2 tablespoons oil until very hot. Add the ribs to brown slightly. Once they have a little color, add the scallions and ginger. Stir fry just for a second, as these release their aromas. Add the hawthorn puree, the soy sauce, and the sugar. Turn down to simmer.

Step 5: Cover and let the whole thing braise for about 30 minutes, which will make the ribs tender and succulent. Remove the cover, add the reserved hawthorns, and reduce the sauce until it’s glossy and yummy. Add a dash of white pepper and correct the seasoning.

Step 6: Move to a serving bowl and garnish with remaining scallions, serve with steamed white short-grained Chinese or Japanese rice. Remember, there are little bones in each bite, so you’ll need to provide an empty bowl to each diner.

Next is my recipe for Sweet and Sour Pork. I use the English name, since mine is a Chinese-American version.

Sweet and Sour Pork

For the meat:

1 pound pork shoulder, cut into 1/2 inch cubes or small strips

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 egg

3 tablespoons flour

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

white pepper

Oil for deep or shallow frying, I use peanut oil.

For the stir-fry:
1 cup frozen or canned chunks of pineapple (if it’s canned, get the kind packed in juice and reserve the juice)
1/2 white onion, diced into large pieces

For the sauce:
reserved pineapple juice (if you have it) or 1/2 cup water

3 tablespoons ketchup

2 tablespoons white or rice wine vinegar

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon cornstarch dissolved in 3 tablespoons water

Step 1: Prepare the meat: cutting into bite size chunks, and moving to a bowl. Add the salt and soy sauce, letting it marinate for a bit. Add the egg and mix thoroughly, massaging with your hand or chopsticks. Let it marinate for about 10-20 minutes or so. Add the white pepper, cornstarch, flour, and baking powder, and mix everything into a batter. This is now ready to fry.

Step 2: Heat the oil in a deep pot (4 inches deep for deep frying) or a wok (about 2 inches deep for shallow frying). Heat the oil to about 350 degrees and fry the meat in 2 batches until light brown and crispy. Drain on paper towels and set aside. You can keep this warm in a warm oven if you want to take your time making the rest.

Step 3: Premix the sauce, by putting together the ketchup, sugar, vinegar, and pineapple juice in a bowl. If you don’t have pineapple juice use water. Taste the sauce- this is your opportunity to adjust the sweet-sour balance. It should be sweet but not sickly, sour but not harsh. When it’s right set it aside.

Step 3: Remove the frying oil, reserving a little of it for stir-frying. In a hot wok, put the oil and onions, cooking the onions just a bit, so they are not raw but not limp. Add the pineapple.

Step 4: Add the sauce you made, stirring to coat the onions and pineapple. Add the cornstarch slurry to thicken the sauce, and when it is clear and glossy turn off the heat and add the fried pork. Toss to cover.

Step 5: Move to a serving bowl and quickly serve: the dish is best when the pork is still crisp. Serve with white rice- ideally long grain or jasmine rice for this dish.

Variations: many add coarsely diced green or red bell peppers, a delicious addition. I add chili to my sauce, since I like heat. You can add red food coloring or red yeast extract if you really want that bright-red color, but I think the ketchup gives it a beautiful amber-red hue.

That’s Sweet and Sour Pork, a dish that I love. What about you- how do you feel about the dish? Do you have a favorite version? Sound off below!

But as I grew out of my youthful allergies, I never saw myself as intolerant or allergic to milk; I just didn’t like it. Lactose intolerance was a condition for other people; I was hale and hearty, an omnivore with no dietary restrictions, the guy who ate everything (except truffle oil which is detestable).

As a coffee guy, I just sort of avoided drinking cappuccinos. I love to make them for others; I delight in the feel of steaming milk and the texture of microfoam; the beautiful, elegant dance of pouring an appealing latte. When judging a barista competition I would politely sip and analyze, but I would never drink a milk drink.

That is, until I met Prof. Uyen Phan, a food scientist who studies milk and coffee. Phan is a legend in the first place: she is one of the researchers who developed the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, she has been doing sensory work in the Vietnamese coffee industry for more than a decade, and she teaches and does research at Chapman University in California. That is to say, she knows coffee, but she knows something else: she knows that 77% of people put milk, cream, or an alternative in their coffee. So she studies that.

Anyway, at a conference I attended, Dr. Phan pointed out that according to her research coffee shops were missing an opportunity. Though few coffee shops in the U.S. offer lactose-free milk to their customers, she showed that many consumers would prefer it if offered, and that many people were avoiding dairy milk for digestibility reasons only. Finally, her research shows that lactose free milk actually tastes better with coffee, a shocking claim. Intrigued, I began asking coffee friends about this. And a colleague pointed out something that I never noticed- many barista competitors were using lactose-free milk in competitions, showing that elite baristas seemed to agree that lactose free milk tastes great with coffee.

But what is this lactose free milk thing all about anyway? Turns out it is one of those great food stories. The primary sugar in milk, named “lactose” was discovered by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1780 (we’ve heard of Scheele before- he was also the guy who discovered citric acid). Lactose was determined to be made of two simpler sugars: glucose (the sugar that our body uses, called “blood sugar”) and another simple sugar eventually named “galactose”. (“lactose” and “galactose” both mean “milk sugar”). Over a hundred years later, British scientist R.H. Plimmer discovered that infant mammals secrete a special enzyme in their bodies which can break the bond in lactose, making the sugar digestible. He called the enzyme “lactase”. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, researchers began to discover that adults often stopped secreting lactase, making fresh milk much less digestible. Turns out, most adults are lactose intolerant to some degree- and some ethnicities are much more affected than others. Lactose permanence, that is, the ability to secrete lactase as an adult, is the exception not the rule. About 60% of U.S. adults don’t secrete lactase, and therefore can’t fully digest dairy milk.

Enter Dr. Virginia Holsinger, a chemist who got a job working for the Agricultural Research Service in 1958. She worked in the dairy unit of the service, becoming the dairy research leader in 1974. This was just at the time that researchers were discovering the prevalence of lactose intolerance in the general population, and Holsinger thought she could help. She found a source of lactose enzyme from yeast, and developed a method to add it to milk. This created a slightly sweeter milk (glucose and galactose are sweeter than lactose) which was completely digestible, even by those who had stopped secreting lactose of their own. Holsinger had invented lactose-free milk.

Meanwhile, a third-generation dairyman and entrepreneur named Alan E. Kleigerman, who was reading the same research Holsinger was, saw an opportunity. He used Holsinger’s technique to create “Lactaid”, a dairy milk which had been treated with lactase; it was the first commercially available lactose-free milk. It was introduced in 1974.

I would like to tell you Lactaid was an instant success, but that wouldn’t be true. Kleigerman says he got pushback from the wider dairy industry, who thought that the existence of Lactaid implied that milk was unhealthy. Lactaid didn’t become widely available until the 1980s, and it took even longer for other brands to arise. This created an opportunity for plant-based milk alternatives in the marketplace- soy milk at first, then almond, oat, and others.

In the coffeehouses I ran in the 1980s and 1990s, we offered only dairy milk until the mid-90s. Then customers started asking us to offer milk alternatives, which we did. Phan’s research on coffee drinkers today shows that the primary driver of milk choice is whether a person identifies as a dairy milk drinker, a plant based milk drinker, or a “flexitarian”. And all of these consumer types value taste and texture and health and nutrition most, along with animal welfare and convenience. Interestingly, though, her research suggests that lactose-free would be popular among an increasing number of consumers. And, even more surprising, I discovered that in many geographies, lactose free milk is the dominant choice in coffee shops, especially those places where adult lactose intolerance is more accepted as a normal part of life.

All of this piqued my interest. I had never tried lactose-free milk, at least not to my knowledge. On my way home from the conference, I picked up a half-gallon.

I went home and announced: “Hey kids! Dad’s going to DRINK A GLASS OF MILK.” They looked at me blankly at first. Felix rolled his eyes; Suzy then approached, interested. Perhaps she was tempted by the Girl Scout cookies I held in my other hand. Anyway, I sat down with a plate of Trefoils and a cold glass of lactose-free. And you know what? I loved it. The milk was refreshing and cold, creamy and nice. And it was slightly sweet- I expected that; given the chemistry of the whole thing. The sweetness was delicious however; the sweetness of milk. I drank it all. And then, miracle of miracles, I didn’t feel bad. I had not a hint of queasiness or displeasure. Was I……. the target market for lactose-free milk?

I couldn’t resist taking the experiment even further. I took the logical next step: I borrowed an espresso machine (I don’t normally make espresso at home) and dialed it in. The next morning I….. made myself a lactose free cappuccino and ate it with a croissant. I can’t tell you how strange this felt. Though I have made zillions of cappuccinos in my life, I have never once made one for myself for breakfast. Never once! I texted a friend, “I don’t even know who I am anymore”.

But it turns out to be true. Lactose-free milk is delicious with coffee; its slight natural sweetness complements coffee perfectly. As I mentioned before, competition baristas have known this for a long time. 2024 US Barista Champion Frank La featured lactose-free milk in his winning routine, and even discussed it during his performance.

The more I think about it, the more I think that lactose-free milk is a modern miracle with a bit of a marketing problem. The brilliant invention of Virginia Holsinger made milk more digestible and accessible for millions of people, including me. She went on to invent other things- she created the bean-digesting enzyme known as Beano and developed nutritious emergency foods for use in famines and food-insecure areas. Dr. Holsinger was rightfully (but, sadly, posthumously) inducted into the National Inventors Hall Of Fame last year.

Why don’t more people and coffee shops use lactose-free milk? I’m not sure, but I think people think of it as a drink for sick people; those who have allergies or intolerances. But, in truth, lactose sensitivity is the most natural thing in the world. And lactose free milk tastes great- arguably better than lactose milk, especially with coffee. Anyway, I have lactose-free milk in my refrigerator now.. better late than never, I suppose.

Her feelings were understandable, really. In most of the world, “dressing” a salad is a verb, a process of making a sauce for raw vegetables. A salad is dressed as part of its preparation; and if you order a salad, it comes to you ready to eat. In America, however, “dressing” is a noun: it’s an entire category of food, and it comes in various flavors, sort of like ice cream. This difference is most obvious at restaurants: when one orders a salad in a classic American restaurant, one is asked to choose a “dressing”, and is then offered a list: “Balsamic, Ranch, Italian, Thousand, Blue Cheese, or Honey Mustard” the server might say. Visitors from abroad are often dazzled and confused- the server waits impatiently, as if this is the most obvious question in the world: you should have made up your mind about this before you even entered the restaurant. An entire section in the American supermarket is dedicated to salad dressings which come in a variety of attractive bottles, each with a very specific-sounding name, containing liquids of various colors and ingredients. This is the culture of American salad dressing. In this article, I’ll explain to the uninitiated how this came to be, the flavor rules of American salad dressings, a typology of these dressings, and a few basic tips.

A brief history of salad dressing

I won’t get too deep into ancient history here: salad can be written about all day, but we need a bit of background to understand the concept of salad dressing. Food historians agree that the concept of tossing leafy vegetables with olive oil, vinegar, and salt goes back to the ancient Babylonians, and the practice was inherited by the Greeks and Romans. It was the Romans who called the practice salata meaning “salted”, and this word became “salad”. It was also the Romans who began adding pepper and herbs to their oil, vinegar, and salt, creating a kind of salad sauce. This combination of olive oil, vinegar, salt, and spice became the definitive mixture for flavoring salads because it rounded out the flavors: green leaves were crunchy and tasty, but they benefit from adding a bit of fat (olive oil) for body and richness, acid (vinegar) for liveliness and to cut the oiliness, salt because vegetables always need a bit of salt, and herbs and spices to lend complexity and flavor.

Among the Romans and everywhere in the Mediterranean, salad meant “prepared with olive oil, vinegar, salt, and spice.” But as we’ve heard many times before, when Roman food habits spread to the far reaches of the Empire, they had to adapt. Olive oil was everywhere in the Mediterranean region, but in Germania it was rare and expensive. Vinegar is commonplace in wine-producing areas, but elsewhere cooks rely on other sources of acidity. So, the concept of “salad” morphed: in dairy-producing northern climes, cooks realized you could use sour milk in place of vinegar, and butter or cream instead of oil. This led to the invention of the cream-dressed salad, especially the Dutch cabbage salad called koolsla (kool= “cabbage”, sla= “salad”). Later in France, cooks discovered that oil and vinegar could be permanently emulsified by whipping with egg yolks, creating its own kind of creamy salad sauce called mayonnaise. In Germany, they used bacon fat in salads, in England they invented a boiled-milk “salad cream”. In the German-influenced American midwest, households used buttermilk and sour cream for salads. In other words, as the concept of “salad” spread throughout the world, ways of “dressing” the salad adapted to local customs, though always retaining the fat-acid-salt-spice formula. Italians made salads one way, the French another, the Germans and English and Americans and Spanish their own ways. This was the scene around the turn of the 20th century.

Freedom of Choice: The Invention Of Dressing Options

Amazingly, the concept of offering multiple salad dressings came from a single restaurant in a single place: Columbus, Ohio. In 1896, two Italian immigrants, Joseph and Teresa Marzetti, opened a restaurant across the street from the Ohio State University, and it became popular among students and faculty. When Joseph died suddenly in 1911, the job of running the restaurant fell onto Teresa’s shoulders. The Marzettis naturally offered Italian food at their restaurant, but they did not limit their menu to foods of Italy: Marzetti’s offered French roast duck, American-style steaks and chops, a large selection of broiled and boiled seafood, and several “old world” soups and salads. This international style of cuisine meant that they served multiple kinds of salads from multiple geographies: one early 20th century menu features Dutch cole slaw, French salad, and several seafood salads.

Teresa Marzetti had a reputation as a hard worker and a fair employer. Her motto was, “We’ll serve good food, at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but we will serve good food.” This commitment to quality and a good workplace attracted employees to the restaurant. One of these was a young Black woman named Katherine Hill, who came to to Columbus from rural Georgia in 1932 seeking an education. She began as a dishwasher, but soon was asked to make pies in the kitchen. There was only one problem: she didn’t know how to bake. After several days of making terrible pies, fearing she would lose her job, Katherine prayed for guidance. The next morning she woke up, and suddenly she knew how to make pies. She rushed into the restaurant and made a perfect batch. “The Lord told me what to do”, she later said. Impressed with her skill, Marzetti asked her to try her hand at a new cole slaw recipe. Katherine prayed again, and made a delicious new cole slaw dressing, which became a hit at the restaurant. She then made others. Turned out, she had a talent for making salad dressing. Although she didn’t call it talent. She always said of her recipes, “the Lord revealed them to me. He just told me what to do. ”

The restaurant already allowed diners to choose among salads, an innovation at the time. But now they were encouraged to try Hill’s new “dressings”. Enthusiasm for Marzetti’s salad dressings became so great the restaurant began allowing customers to take them home in little paper ice cream tubs. . Teresa Marzetti had invented the concept of a choice dressings, and Katherine Hill had created the dressings themselves. A new way of thinking about salads was born.

Soon, the upper floor of the restaurant was converted to a salad dressing-making kitchen, and Marzetti’s began packaging dressings in jars. The T. Marzetti Salad Dressing company was founded, and began shipping jars of dressing to grocery stores, restaurants, and households. Katherine Hill evolved from a kitchen worker to a talented recipe developer and food manufacturer, and she led dressing production for almost 70 years, retiring with the title of Senior Food Technologist. So though she never had any formal culinary, business, or food science training, she remains one of the most influential people in the history of American food.

The Marzetti company grew rapidly, basically creating the salad dressing category in the process. By the end of the 1950s, restaurants began to feel obligated to offer a selection of salad dressings to diners. Other restaurants followed the Marzetti’s lead: Wishbone restaurant in Kansas City became famous for its Italian dressing, the Hidden Valley Ranch restaurant in Santa Barbara, California became renowned for their buttermilk-mayo “Ranch” dressing. Both became salad dressing-focused companies. By the 1970s, every self-respecting restaurant in the United States offered several salad dressings, just like Marzetti’s did, often purchasing them from the Marzetti company itself. Though Marzetti’s restaurant closed in 1972, the salad dressing company continues to operate today, and is still one of the largest producers of salad dressings in the United States. Katherine Hill retired in 2002 and died in 2006, but is still honored by the Marzetti company. If you’re interested, I encourage you to watch this video about her legacy.

A Guide to American Salad Dressings

Ok. Now you know where the American habit of offering multiple salad dressings comes from, but how about the dressings themselves? I got you covered. Herewith, a guide to the salad dressings you may be offered.

First of all, all American salad dressings follow a master formula. It is: a lot of something oily, a little of something sour, a bit of salt, and some spices, herbs, or other flavorings. Here is the concept in pie chart form:

Since the components are variable, salad dressings come in two major categories: those based on the ancient oil-and-vinegar formula, and the “creamy” ones which use dairy or mayonnaise. Here we go:

Oil and Vinegar Salad Dressings

These dressings are the modern descendants of the ancient habit of dressing salad with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. In fact, old-school restaurants may offer cruets of oil and vinegar so you can dress your own salad, though this custom is waning. More often you will get offered the following:

Italian Dressing: Generally, “Italian” dressing will be an olive oil and vinegar dressing with herbs and, sometimes, garlic and Romano cheese in the mix. Old fashioned Italian dressing separates, so it needs to be shaken before using, but newer versions contain ingredients that keep the dressing permanently emulsified.

Vinaigrette: This is almost identical to Italian dressing, but takes its inspiration from the French version of oil-and-vinegar. Vinaigrette is more likely to have mustard and shallots as flavorings and it will never have cheese. In an Italo-French mashup, you may be offered “Balsamic vinaigrette” which is this dressing made with Italian balsamic vinegar instead of wine vinegar.

French Dressing: Confusingly, “French” dressing is its own very American creation that emerged during the American French-food craze of the 1950s. It is a oil-and-vinegar dressing flavored with paprika, sugar, and tomato sauce (!). The sugar and tomato allow it to stay emulsified, so it does not need to be shaken, but it has a sweet, ketchupy flavor profile. It’s decreasing in popularity fast. Kraft foods makes a popular brand called “Catalina” to avoid confusion by people who actually know how salads are dressed in France.

Honey Mustard: This is basically a vinaigrette that has been sweetened with honey and flavored with extra mustard. Besides being used as a salad dressing, this one is often used as a dip for pretzels.

“Asian” Dressing: Though the cultures of Asia have several salad equivalents, the classic American “Asian” salad is simply an ordinary mixture of lettuce and cabbage with some Asian-style flavors and ingredients. “Asian” dressing is therefore based on vinegar and oil, flavored with sesame oil, ginger, scallions, or miso.

Caesar Dressing: Caesar Cardini, owner of a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, is said to have improvised a new salad in 1924. The classic version is dressed with olive oil, lemon juice or vinegar, egg yolks, anchovies or Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan cheese, and pepper. Nowadays, Caesar dressings are a kind of oil-and-vinegar flavored with cheese, anchovy, and egg yolks.

“Creamy” Salad Dressings

Many dressings are based on dairy for their acid (buttermilk, sour cream, or yogurt) or their fat (cream or butter). Since mayonnaise has the texture and appearance of sour cream, it often forms the bridge between oil-and-vinegar and cream dressings. Any of the above dressings can have “creamy” versions simply by mixing mayonnaise in, but the classic creamy dressings follow:

Cole Slaw: Though slaw dressing is rarely offered as an option at restaurants, it’s a fixture of supermarket dressing selections. Our word “coleslaw” comes from the Dutch koolsla (“cabbage salad”) and that’s what cole slaw is: a cabbage salad dressed with a creamy dressing, often mayonnaise, vinegar, sugar, and spices like mustard seed or celery seed.

Ranch: The current hands-down favorite salad dressing in America. Ranch is classically made from buttermilk, mayonnaise, garlic, and herbs. It is the descendant of German-American dairy dressings, with a Western tang. Ranch is used just as often as a dip for fries, raw vegetables, even pizza.

Blue Cheese: Sometimes spelled “Bleu Cheese” for extra pretension, this dressing is basically sour cream and mayonnaise mixed with crumbled blue cheese. This was the top dressing before being unseated by Ranch, and is used in much the same way, especially as a dip to accompany “Buffalo wings” and celery sticks. One version of this dressing is called Roquefort after a particular kind of blue cheese.

Thousand Island: This may be the most American dressing of them all, since it is based on a mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup. Oddly, it is named after a Canadian/American tourist spot (The Thousand Islands). It goes by another name too; Russian Dressing (though it is not Russian). Its alternative use is as a sauce for hamburgers, in which case it is called “burger sauce” or “special sauce”. Generally, the ketchup/mayo mixture is supplemented with a bit of vinegar, sugar, chopped pickles, and mustard. One can abbreviate this dressing as “Thousand”.

Green Goddess: Once popular, Green Goddess has faded somewhat from the pantheon of salad dressings. It’s very good, and worth trying if you encounter it. It’s made with sour cream, lemon juice, lots of fresh herbs (parsley, chives, tarragon, etc) and a bit of anchovy or Worcestershire. Fun fact: it is the only dressing named after a play, the 1920s melodrama “The Green Goddess”.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed writing this one. I’ve got a newfound admiration for the Marzetti company and especially Katherine Hill. It’s a real joy to uncover these food stories. Thanks for reading!

I’m a coffee person and a music person. I come by both honestly: my paternal grandfather was a coffee enthusiast- a topic I’ve written about before- and my maternal grandfather was a jazz musician and music teacher (he was also a magician and a Disneyland employee, but that’s another story.) Anyway, both music and coffee have been a part of my life as long as I can remember. So, when I heard about the great coffee writer Noa Berger giving a talk on music and coffee, I had an idea. What if we wrote matching coffee+music pieces? To my delight, Noa agreed: we’d each compose essays on the relationship of music and coffee, from our own perspectives and fueled by our own interests. Here’s mine!

Bonus: I made a Spotify playlist of all the songs mentioned in this piece, you can listen while you read.

To discuss the role of coffee in American popular music of the twentieth century, you must first appreciate a basic fact: the most powerful influence on our musical traditions is African-American culture, especially emanating from cities like New Orleans, Memphis, Cincinnati, and Chicago. The entire structure of American pop music- from blues to house, from rock and roll to disco, heavy metal and EDM, comes from Black music.

And, believe it or not, coffee has had an important role in this music tradition, from its beginnings to now. Why coffee? Well, in the late 19th century, just as now, coffee was a tasty, relatively affordable, seemingly magical drink. It made the drinker alert, happy, and sprightly (unlike alcohol), and it was inexpensive enough to grace every table. Even rural households without much money had coffee and a coffee pot. And, due to coffee pioneers like Rose Nicaud in New Orleans, coffee had a positive connotation in Black culture. This positive relationship- between African-American culture and coffee- gave our favorite drink a role in American music. And that role persists even today.

The Coffee Pot Groups

Though unknown these days, there used to be a musical genre played by “Coffee Pot Groups”. Here’s the story. Jazz and ragtime music were developed in cities, where young Black musicians would receive formal or semi-formal instruction on traditional European instruments. The music was brilliantly complex and creative, and was performed on pianos, trumpets, clarinets, and trombones. Jazz and ragtime became wildly popular in the cities of the American south during the early part of the 20th century, and became known countrywide. Rural people heard this new music and wanted in, too, but there was an obstacle: “real” instruments were expensive. The solution was to improvise. Instead of pricey drum kits, trumpets, and trombones, “country” bands made instruments out of washboards, whiskey jugs, “kazoos”, and….. coffee pots. Why a coffee pot? Well, everyone had a coffee pot, for one thing. And, if you put your mouth on the pot and used your voice, the resonance of the pot would create a convincing simulation of a trombone. Don’t believe me? Check out bit of film from 1928 as two musicians play a variety of instruments, including the coffee pot.

The nickname “Coffee Pot Group” was applied to these bands, and pretty soon young men in the cities began forming them to play on the streets as public entertainment. They played coffee pots of all sizes, along with washtubs, kazoos, and washboards. Some bands even gave themselves coffee-themed names, like Indianapolis’ “The Percolating Puppies”. In some ways, this was the forerunner of the late 20th century “garage band”: young people without formal music training improvising a new musical style. Some of these young musicians went on to musical fame, including the Mills Brothers and Percolating Puppies alumni the Ink Spots, who had a 1940 hit with “Java Jive”, an ode to coffee, and a play on their Coffee Pot Group past. In any case, the early Coffee Pot Groups laid a foundation for improvised, creative, and young musical groups, who created popular music during the blues and jazz eras to follow.

That Lovin’ Spoonful: Double Meaning and Coffee Songs

Now, in the African-American song traditions of country blues and its urban sibling, jazz, there was a habit of making songs a little more entertaining by leveraging a little (or a lot of) sexual innuendo. This style became known as “hokum”, “dirty blues” or “lowdown blues”, and was incredibly creative in its use of double entendre. Song phrases like “Ain’t Gonna Give You None Of My Jelly Roll” and “I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl” used “sugar” and “cake” to mean, well, sex. Hot dogs, tamales, meatballs, nuts, honey, pie, etc. etc. all were part of the rich double-meaning vocabulary of the song style. The phrase “hot” was important too: it described the sound of jazz music , and it also implied sexual excitement. “Hot Coffee” fit right in to the milieu: it was hot, it gave energy, it was sweet, it was black- all positive things in the culture. However, crucially, coffee wasn’t quite as racy as some of the other metaphors. Coffee, while exciting and “hot”, was also a symbol of home and familiarity. This meaning, though present, wasn’t super clear in the first blues song to mention coffee. In 1924’s “Coffee Pot Blues” by Charlie Jackson, coffee was an instrument of betrayal: two young lovers poison the coffee pot to kill her parents so they could elope. It was still a symbol of home and love, however. A better example is Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues” which includes the lyrics: “I woke up this morning with a awful aching head, My new man had left me, just a room and a empty bed, Bought me a coffee grinder, that's the best one I could find, Oh, he could grind my coffee, 'cause he had a brand-new grind.” In this song, coffee was symbolic of the thrill of new love. My favorite song in this genre is “Coffee Blues” by Mississippi John Hurt, which is an incredibly sweet ode to a woman who he compares with Maxwell House Coffee, of which a single spoonful is as good as “two or three cups of that other coffee”. He calls her affection his “loving spoonful” (this name went on to inspire the name of a 60’s folk group). He sings, “Good morning baby, how you doing this morning? Well, please, ma’am, just a loving spoonful.”

Coffee became a potent metaphor for love later in the blues and jazz tradition. In 1948, Sarah Vaughan recorded the amazing torch song “Black Coffee”, a song in which a woman drinks coffee as a lonely substitute for a lost love. The song was a hit for Vaughan, and later became an example of “crossover”, when a white artist covered a song originally recorded by a black one. Singer Peggy Lee named her second album “Black Coffee” and covered the song in 1953. This song may have also inspired a honky tonk singer from Texas, the great Lefty Frizzell, to compose “Cigarettes and Coffee Blues”, one of the great coffee songs of all time. It seems that white artists might have taken more to the coffee and loneliness motif, because fellow Texan Claude Grey recorded “I’ll Just Have A Cup of Coffee (And I’ll Go)” in 1960, a bittersweet tale of a divorcing couple. Amazingly, this coffee song became a hit in Jamaica of all places when aspiring singer Bob Marley recorded a ska version (with the Skatalites) as “One Cup of Coffee” in 1962.

Coffee Pots and Sugar Shacks: Coffee Goes Pop

In 1962, Billy Joe and the Checkmates recorded “Percolator”, a coffee-themed entry into the Twist craze of the time. This was the first of the coffee instrumentals, and was a pop hit. In 1966, New Orleans “Bo Jr” (a pseudonym paying tribute to soul great Eddie Bo) released “Coffee Pot”, a New Orleans soulful scorcher played on the Hammond organ. It’s a must-listen. The same year, Otis Redding recorded “Cigarettes and Coffee”, on his The Soul Album. It is, to me, a perfect love song from a man to a woman, expressing the deep satisfaction and joy of a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the morning together. It’s a soulful classic.

But the 60s were also weird. Texas band Jimmy Gilbert and the Fireballs had a monster hit with “Sugar Shack”, a pop number describing a coffee house where a barefoot, leotard-wearing “girlie” made “expresso coffee” taste mighty good. It was a strange sounding song, but its theme was right in line with other coffee songs of the era: coffee was exciting, hot, and romantic. It’s also the first mention of espresso- though mispronounced- in American pop music.

Though it’s my least favorite of all the coffee tunes, “Sugar Shack” may capture the enduring meaning of coffee in American music. Love, excitement, a little sex, double entendre, affection and sweetness. That’s what coffee is in American song.

Keeping it strange, house music pioneer Cajmere (later Green Velvet) released “Coffee Pot (Percolator)” in 1992. It’s a minimalistic tune with bleeps, bloops, and a single repeated lyric: “It’s Time for the Percolator”. No love here, just pure energy.

Given coffee’s enduring meaning in American music, it was no surprise when Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” went to #1 in 2024. This song is, in some ways, a perfect coffee song: it leverages coffee as a double-entendre, meaning both sex and love, whose partner is addicted to her sweet affection. Perhaps unconsciously, it draws on themes from the earliest jazz and blues tunes, which used coffee metaphors in exactly the same way.

Some things just don’t change.

And it’s not just hot dogs. Pastrami enthusiasts declare mustard to be the only acceptable condiment on their sandwiches. We put mustard on hamburgers, we glaze hams with it, and we dip hot pretzels in it. But what is it about mustard that stokes such passion?

The Poor People’s Spice: Seeds of Sinapis

The interest in mustard goes back a long long time. It really shouldn’t be a thing: certain plants produce glucosinolates, compounds that break down when the plant is damaged, reacting into toxic, caustic chemicals. These compounds are meant to deter predators like insects and herbivores, a job they do pretty effectively. Ruminants and bugs tend to avoid these plants. Thing is, we humans learned to like them. Like all poisons, glucosinolate toxicity is dependent on the dose, and humans learned that a little bit wasn’t at all harmful. This tolerance made it possible for people to eat the wild cabbages of the Mediterranean, which are glucosinolate producers, as well as radishes, horseradish, capers, arugula, and watercress. And soon enough, humans began to actually crave the burning sensation of eating glucosinolates and their byproducts. Furthermore, they realized that these compounds were most abundant in wild cabbage seeds, where the plant accumulated them. Humans grew to like the spicy kick of the seeds, and we became accustomed and even enchanted by the flavor. According to cave discoveries, humans were already using wild cabbage seeds to season foods in prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptians, Assyrians and Greeks all used seeds from the plant they called sinap, sinapi, or sinapis, depending on the culture. These seeds might very well be the first real spice used by humans. Wild cabbages grew easily, and many ancient cultures from China to India to Rome used the seeds for flavoring foods. In a Greek play in about 200 BC, a character quipped that people “liked sinapi so hot that it would make their eyes water while they were grinding it.”

At this point in the story we zoom out a bit. Remember, the diet of the ancient world could get pretty boring. There were no chili peppers, ginger and black pepper were exotic and super expensive, and people didn’t have the wide variety of fruits and vegetables that we do today. By Roman times, most people’s everyday diet was based on wheat bread, cheese, figs, various wild cabbages, onions, olive oil, and grapes. Of these, grapes were super important: they were the main source of sweetness for the Romans. Grapes were pressed into juice to ferment into wine and vinegar, of course; but they used the unfermented juice, too. In fact, it was pretty much their only available fruit juice. Romans called grape juice mustum, from a word meaning “fresh” or “new”, as in “unfermented”. One thing though: grape juice would turn into wine at the drop of a hat (due to natural yeasts living on the grape skins), so the only way to keep mustum sweet and nonalcoholic was to boil it down into a substance too concentrated to allow yeast activity. In this way, you could make a syrup, a jell, or even a paste from the grape juice.

Some ingenious Roman had a brainwave- what about mixing spicy sinapis seeds into reduced grape-juice mustum, lending the preservative effects of the fragrant seeds to the conserve, and creating a sweet-and-spicy flavor combo. It may sound bizarre in retrospect, but it turned out to be an excellent condiment, especially for roasted meats. The combo got a name: mustum ardens, or ‘fiery mustum’. Mustum ardens eventually contracted to the single word, mostarda. The sweet-spicy condiment became popular, especially in the meat-eating Northern Roman provinces- Gallia (which became France), Germania (which became Germany), and Brittania (which became Britain),. They translated mostarda as mustard in English and moutarde in French (though the Germans wisely called it senf from senapis). Here is a recipe from 1393, from the French household management book Le Ménagier de Paris:

“Moutarde: If you want to make a supply of moutarde that will keep long, make it during the picking-season (of wine grapes) from fresh grape juice. The grape juice should be boiled.

If you want to make moutarde in a village (where there is no unfermented juice) in a hurry, grind white moutarde seeds in a mortar, mix with vinegar, and strain through a sieve. When you want to use it, put it in a pot near the fire.”

Here you can see that though the best French mustard was made with grape juice, a quicker version could be made with soured wine, aka vinegar. This vinegar-based mustard turned into the standard recipe in France and Germany. Here we first encounter the irony of mustard: though the name “mustard” derives from “fiery unfermented grape juice” in Latin, most Northern European mustards now contain no unfermented juice, instead using fermented wine or vinegar. And, to add another strange twist, the popularity of mustard was so great that in English and French, the name extended back to the plant itself, supplanting the Latin word sinapis. So, bizarrely, when we call a plant “mustard” we are nonsensically calling it “the made from unfermented juice plant”! (thankfully, botanical names retain the sinapis moniker).

In Italy, however, mostarda retains its old meaning, focused on unfermented fruit and juice. However, they’ve branched out from grapes: nowadays, mostarda can be made from many fruits, including apples, quinces, pears, cherries, oranges, prickly pears, apricots, peaches- pretty much anything with juice. In Northern Italy, this fruit conserve is always spiked with semi di senape, the Italian name for mustard seeds. The result is a sweet-spicy conserve that is the direct descendant of the Roman item. The farther South you go in Italy, however, the senape seeds begin to get left out: the Southern Italian sweet tooth, combined with the relative absence of meat, means that spicy mostarda is less desirable than sweet mostarda. As a result, mostarda in Sicily has no mustard seeds at all, and is simply a fruit conserve.

On the other hand, English mustard has been sold for years as simply powdered Sinapis/mustard seeds, with no juice, wine, or vinegar at all. A cook can mix with water to make their own spicy condiment. This creates a bizarre continuum, where “mustard” means “Sinapis seeds” in Northwestern Europe, “mostarda” means “fruit paste” in Southern Italy, and in places in between it means something in between. Weird.

Why We Love Mustard on Hot Dogs

Despite the whole name confusion, the question remains: why do we love the flavor of mustard, particularly on meats? The question extends to other spices too: we also seem to like black pepper, chili peppers, and horseradish for their slightly painful flavor. But what do we call this flavor? This is a point of confusion among speakers of English, and other languages too. People usually describe the flavor that unifies these spices as “spicy” or “hot”. These make some sense, as many spices- like cinnamon, clove, cardamom, etc.- have chemicals that hurt a little bit. “Hot” makes some sense too, since the same nerves in the mouth that perceive temperature seem to react to spiciness. But “hot” isn’t perfect- sometimes mustard and horseradish actually seem cooling, especially when they get up our nose. Mexicans don’t perceive these foods as especially hot, they call them picoso or picante, describing the “pricking” feeling of eating them. Romance languages generally use the metaphor of a stabbing sensation, the French call the flavor piquant and the Italians call it piccante, all words meaning, basically, pricking or stabbing. Sensory scientists have a different word entirely, avoiding the experiential term and focusing on the anatomical: they call it a trigeminal sensation, after the name of a nerve that leads from the mouth to the brain. These “feeling” sensations travel via the trigeminal nerve, hence the name.

But none of this explains why we like to be stabbed in the mouth a little bit while we’re eating. The traditional explanation has been that since these spices can be used to preserve things like meats, and their pronounced aroma conceals the smell of slightly-spoiled flesh, they have become accepted by people. Myself, I doubt this explanation: people have been enthusiastically dosing food with ground-up mustard seeds for a long time, regardless of meat freshness. We use mustard, pepper, and chili pepper today even though we rarely encounter spoiled meat, and we don’t eat it when we do. I think it has more to do with the greasy feel of meat. A fatty pork chop or sausage can be kind of cloying, and the aromatic, punchy, piquant zing of mustard cuts through the oily sensation in a cleansing and appetizing way. The spicy aroma clears the nose, and prepares the eater for another bite. Cracked pepper in a sausage or a pickled sport chili pepper on the side does the same thing; it cuts through the fat and balancing out the meaty grease. This makes mustard the perfect condiment for hot dogs, but also lots of other boiled and roasted meats, patés, sausages, and charcuterie.

A Typology of Mustard- What You Need To Know

The confusion about mustard names and the diversity of mustard styles means that it can be confusing to understand exactly what you’re eating. I’m here for you. Here’s a guide to mustard styles.

First a little background. To make condiment mustard, we use seeds from two closely related species, Brassica juncea and Sinapis alba. These are both descended from wild
Mediterranean cabbages. Sinapis alba is “yellow” or “white” mustard, which is milder and sweeter, and Brassica juncea is “brown” mustard, which is spicier. Mustards can be made with either species, or both. Secondly, the mustard can either be finely ground to the texture of flour, left as whole seeds, or something in between. This is mainly a texture thing, although grinding does increase the flavor somewhat. Ok, on to the types!

English or “Dry” mustard

This is the most basic type of mustard. It’s simply yellow mustard seeds ground to the texture of flour, that can be mixed with water on demand to make a paste, or used as a spice in recipes. Bottled versions of English mustard are simply this flour mixed with vinegar, water, and salt.

American “Ballpark” mustard

American yellow mustard is directly descended from the English style. Yellow mustard powder is mixed with vinegar, water, salt, and (sometimes) other spices. Crucially, turmeric is almost always added to American mustard, making it a brilliant yellow (“yellow” mustard is naturally a yellowish-brown). American mustard generally uses less mustard powder in the recipe, making it milder and sweeter-tasting. My favorite brand is Los Angeles’ own Morehouse mustard.

French Dijon Mustard

Northeastern France is mustard country. Famously, the city of Dijon produces a style of mustard based on brown mustard seeds instead of yellow. The seeds are finely ground and mixed with salt, wine vinegar and white wine. It is said this combination is intended to mimic the flavor of early-harvest grape juice. There are other styles of French mustard too, but most feature brown mustard seeds instead of yellow.

German Dusseldorf Mustard

Similar in spirit to Dijon mustard is Dusseldorf mustard, which is made with yellow and brown mustard seeds ground fine and mixed with distilled vinegar and salt. The result is more intense than Dijon mustard, and is actually my favorite style for sausages and pastrami sandwiches. I like to buy the kind that comes in the cute jars shaped like mugs.

Coarse Ground and Whole Grain European Mustards

Although the two styles above are based on finely ground mustard seeds, both Germany and France produce various mustards based on coarsely-ground or whole mustard. Grinding creates flavor in mustard, so these mustards can be milder, however they often use spicier grades of mustard to balance it out. Really, it’s more of a texture thing. Coarse-ground mustard is thought of as a “country” thing, while finely ground mustard is a “city” thing. It’s fun to explore coarse mustards.

Bavarian “Sweet” Mustard

As we move south in Europe and approach Italy, mustards begin to get sweeter, demonstrating the increased influence of Italian mostarda. A great example of this is Bavarian mustard, a coarse mustard with sugar added to make it approximate mustards made with fruit juice. Apple juice and honey may also be used to sweeten these mustards.

Italian Cremona Mostarda

Once we cross the border into Italy, we begin to see overtly fruit-based mostardas. Some of these resemble conserves more than condiments, and many use essential oil of mustard instead of mustard seeds or flour for flavor. The best known of these styles is from the city of Cremona, which produces a pear-based mostarda that is sweet, tangy, and just slightly spicy.

Sicilian Mostarda

You’re not likely to encounter a packaged version of Sicilian Mostarda, it’s generally a fruit paste or syrup that is based on the old Roman mustus more than anything else. These mostardas can be made of almost any fruit, but quince, prickly pear, and grape are most common. What these mostardas do not contain is mustard/sinapis seeds or essence; so these are purely sweet with no spice at all.

That’s it! Everything you need to know about mustard. Do you find mustard essential? What mustard do you use and why?

An Ancient Mesoamerican Staple

It makes sense that the Aztecs focused on a cactus-growing area to build their city: the prickly pear cactus was a critical food source for the ancient peoples of Mexico. Nōchtli, the origin of Tenoch’s name, actually referred to the cactus fruit- the plant itself had another name, nohpalli. This word became nopal, the most common name in Mexico for this species of cactus. The nopal was grown by indigenous Mexicans for thousands of years before the Aztecs- evidence shows cultivation of the cactus as early as 8000 BC. (This puts its emergence right at the beginning of human agriculture.) It made sense to cultivate this plant- the nopal cactus is a rich source of water and food. Like most desert cactuses, the nopal stores water by turning it into a mucilaginous sap, making the plant about 90% water. Besides being hydrating, the sap is nutritious- it contains lots of sugars, vitamins, and amino acids. Eaten as a vegetable, the fiber-rich cactus pads are a very healthy food, and the prehistoric Mexicans ate a ton of them- creating a whole cuisine around the nopal as a vegetable.

But that’s not all- during the hot summer, the nopal cactus bears a sweet fruit, which grows in buds off the main pads. It’s super-sweet, tangy, and juicy- a perfect fruit to make into juice or eat raw. When young, the cactus fruits are greenish-yellow and tart, but as they age into a deep red color, they become berrylike in flavor. Food fit for a king, I suppose, which is why it makes sense that Tenochtitlan’s first ruler was named after it. (1)

From The New World To The Old

When European explorers first arrived in the Caribbean and Mexico, they marveled at the curious, thorny plant which bore both sweet fruit and vegetable. And, even stranger, if you broke off a pad and planted it, it would grow into a brand-new cactus. This eager propagation- no need for seed- made the nopal seem magical. Explorers brought the nopal cactus back to Europe, where it became called Ficus indica, or “Fig of the Indians”.

Ficus indica thrived in the dry interiors of Spain and Sicily, landscapes that resemble the arid central plains of Mexico, the nopal’s native environment. Before long, the plant spread eastward, becoming ubiquitous in Greece, Turkey, Syria, and the Levant. A few generations went by, and pretty soon the ficus indica- aka the “Barbary fig”, the “prickly pear”, and dozens of other names- seemed like it had always been there.

The Cactus Becomes Sicilian

And so it was in Sicily, that Mediterranean island ruled by the Spanish, with its dry interior and blisteringly hot summers. The nopal cactus loves Sicily so much it seems to spontaneously sprout from the ground itself, which is one legend that surrounds the plant on the island. In Sicily, the plant is called fighu d’india, an adaptation of the Latin word ficus indica, or figuvallu, meaning “valley fig”, and it’s become a de facto symbol of the island. Just as the Aztecs celebrated the nopal cactus in myth, so did the Sicilians. One enduring legend is that Sicily’s enemies the Turks brought cactuses to the island as a biological weapon, hoping the invasive species would choke out food crops and kill the Sicilians with thorns. But, according to lore, God himself intervened on behalf of the Sicilians, made the cactus nutritious and its fruits sweet, reversing the attack of the Turks.

Images of prickly pear cactuses are everywhere in Sicily, from the decorative ceramics of the island to brilliantly painted traditional horse carts. Sicilians adore the cactus fruit, and make a variety of sweet treats with the juice, from gelato to a membrillo-like fruit paste called mostarda.

I love this cactus because it bridges the two cultures I love most: those of Mexico and Sicily. (2) I have a long theory of how the two cultures are connected in food, history, and spirit, and the prickly pear cactus is central to the story. But that story is for another day. Let’s get into the culinary role of the cactus!

The Nopal Cactus as Culinary Ingredient

As I mentioned before, the nopal cactus is rare in that it produces foods we use as both a sweet fruit and a savory vegetable. This double-duty makes the nopal incredibly valuable in cuisine- in my view it’s way underutilized in most kitchens. I suspect this is because of the cactus’ built-in defenses: thorny foods are understandably intimidating to most cooks. But get past the prickly, leathery exterior of the cactus and you’ll find a delicious, rewarding ingredient that deserves a place on your table. I’ll deal with the vegetable-like cactus pads (which I’ll call nopales) first, and then get into the fruit (which I will call prickly pears). Sound good? Let’s go.

Nopales, Vegetable of the Desert

All parts of the nopal cactus are edible, but the new pads that emerge in the spring and early summer are special. These pads’ spines haven’t fully developed, the skin is still thin and delicate, and the flesh is tender and juicy. If you say nopales in Mexico, it’s usually understood you are talking about the pads. Scrape off the spines and trim the edges, and these pads are ready to be eaten raw or cooked, usually by slicing into french-fry sized strips and cooking to make the vegetable dish nopalitos.

From a sensory perspective, nopales are pretty unique. The first thing you’ll notice when preparing them is the mucilaginous sap, known as baba in Spanish. It’s similar to the slime produced by okra, and it’s valuable (and polarizing) in the same way. If you cook nopales in a soup the baba will thicken it, or you can saute the baba away in a pan. Second thing, is nopales are tart. The cactus plant is loaded with malic and ascorbic acids, which are both slightly, pleasantly sour. Finally, nopales have amino acids, the umami-tasting building blocks of protein. This gives nopales a savory, meatlike character. Taken together, nopales are a tart, savory, pleasing vegetable, similar to tomatillos in flavor.

Another feature of nopales is their durability. It’s really, really difficult to overcook nopales; unlike green beans or zucchini, nopales don’t turn to mush when cooked for more than 10 minutes. This makes them really good in stews- a pork stew with tomatillo salsa and nopales (carne en salsa verde con nopales) is deliciously bright and texture-rich, not a bit stodgy or flat.

Cleaning young cactus leaves is all about removing the cactus thorns. The nopal cactus has two kinds of thorns: big spiky ones and small furry ones. The big ones are easy to avoid. It’s the small ones that are the annoying ones- invisible and persistent, they are to be avoided at all costs. Luckily, simply scraping a young cactus with a knife and trimming its edges will remove all the thorns, and a quick rinse in water will prevent any stragglers from causing any trouble. The nopales are now ready to cook, skin and all. The most common way to cook nopales is al vapor, which, in the cactus’ case, means to cook it in its own juices. Simply slice the cleaned nopales into sticks, salt lightly, and heat in a pan. The juice will render and foam up, cooking the nopales. Eventually, the water will begin to evaporate away, making the vegetables less and less slimy. You choose the level of slipperiness by length of cook-time. Easy. Once cooked, sliced and chopped nopales are called nopalitos and are used in tacos, vegetable dishes, salads, soups, and stews.

Prickly Pears, the Indian Fig

True Mediterranean figs are loaded with tiny seeds, so when Europeans saw that the cactus fruit is also packed with seeds, they thought of it as a kind of fig, hence the name ficus indica. Next to the cactus-spines, these seeds are the bane of the prickly-pear eater. To prepare a cactus fruit, you must first remove the spines. You can burn them off with a torch or flame, scrape them off with a knife, or simply buy pre-cleaned cactus fruits. You can then peel and slice the fruit, and eat it raw, or more commonly crush it into juice. Juicing is the best way to eat cactus-fruit, since you can easily strain out the seeds with a strainer. Mexicans make a delicious agua fresca with cactus fruits, but Sicilians embrace the fruit with gusto: they make jelly, candy, fruit-paste, syrup, and liqueur with the juice. The masterpiece of Sicilian prickly-pear cuisine is Gelo di Fichi d’India, a mixture of prickly pear juice and cornstarch made into a firm jelly, garnished with pistachios and cinnamon.

Prickly pear has a remarkably delicious flavor. Like the entire cactus, it is rich in organic acids like malic, citric, and ascorbic acid (vitamin C). This gives it a juicy tartness. This tartness is complemented by a berrylike sweetness, similar to strawberry or raspberry juice. I’m not kidding! It’s truly one of the most delicious fruit flavors there is. For this reason, my favorite way to prepare prickly pears is as a granita, a Sicilian-style frozen slush I make in the freezer with the juice and a little sugar. The result is a brilliant red-pink and is definitely kid-endorsed.

A couple of weeks ago, I was dining at a fantastic restaurant in San Diego named La Fonda Del Barrio. On their menu was an enticing dish, Huarache con Nopales y Camarón en Salsa de Guajillo; a delicious mix of nopales and shrimp sauteéd in chile sauce served on a masa “sandal”. I’m working on a recipe for that- I’ll share as soon as I perfect it.

Meanwhile, here’s a couple of ways to use nopales in your own kitchen:

Tacos de Nopalitos

1 pound nopales, de-thorned, washed, and sliced into 1/2 inch wide strips

1/2 white onion, sliced

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes or 2 chiles de arbol

salt

6 corn tortillas, warmed

taco toppings like salsa fresca, fresh cilantro, salsa tatemada, guacamole, mexican cheese, or crema

Add nopales, onion, pepper flakes or chiles and a sprinkle of salt to a saucepan. Cover and apply medium heat, until the liquid emerges from the cactus and begins to sauté. Cook from 10-30 minutes: less if you like a slippery texture, more if you like it less slimy. Salt to taste, and remove to a serving bowl.

Serve warm nopales with salsa, guacamole, cheese or crema, just as you would eat any taco.

Granita di Fico d’India (prickly pear ice)

4-5 peeled red, ripe prickly pears (buy cleaned tunas from the Latino market or pick wild prickly pears and clean thoroughly)

approx. 1/2 cup sugar (100 grams)

Peel prickly pears, and add to a blender jar with just enough water to cover. Blend on low speed. Once the fruit is well pureéd, strain through a sieve to remove seeds and pulp.

Measure the amount of liquid you have, and for every 500ml of juice add 100g of sugar (or for 2 cups juice add 1/2 cup sugar)

Transfer sweetened juice to a metal baking dish, like you use for brownies (aluminum works best for this). Put in the freezer. Every 15 minutes, stir the juice with a wooden spatula, breaking up any ice clumps. After about 45 minutes, you will have a firm, slushy ice.

Serve in chilled bowls

(if desired, you can add lemon or orange juice to the mix)

Notes:
1. Thanks to Mario Fernandez-Alduenda, who always helps me navigate the roots of Mesoamerican foodstuffs and culture.

2. I come by my passion for prickly pears honestly, my grandfather would stop the car at any sighting of a cactus bearing fruit, and I just learned yesterday that my great-grandfather started a prickly pear orchard in San Diego in the 1950s!

Though I was born a little farther north, I moved to San Diego as a teenager. I spent my twenties there, and have lived off and on in San Diego for most of my life. I consider myself a native San Diegan, and am proud of the place. I learned to love food in San Diego; I learned to cook there and I had all my earliest restaurant experiences there. I got my first coffee job at San Diego’s original specialty coffee company. I cook and I eat like a San Diegan.

But what is San Diego food, really? Like most cities, San Diego is not a single entity- it is a collision of cultures living together, a web of people and their traditions, it’s a desert city next to a sea. It’s a border town; San Diegan is deeply Mexican in its identity and culture. It’s also a Navy town: it has several Navy bases and is one of the biggest U.S. Naval stations in the world. Camp Pendleton, a Marine base, and Naval Air Station Miramar are just outside of town. This is because of San Diego’s natural harbor, home to fishing boats and fleets for decades. These things link San Diego deeply to the Pacific Rim and its foods. Finally, San Diego is a surf town- a destination for those who love the beach, the water and the waves. These cultural influences make San Diego what it is- a Mexican food heaven, a seafood paradise, a surf-culture epicenter, and a place with a raucous military night life. But let’s get to the food! I’m going to go through my favorite San Diego Cuisines, and give you a sense of how (and where) you should eat in San Diego. Vamos!

San Diegan Mexican Food

I’ve written about this before at greater length, but suffice it to say that the main cuisine of San Diego comes from Mexico. The Fish Taco (read my guide to the fish taco here) is San Diego’s signature dish, which is a synthesis of San Diego’s Mexican and Seafood traditions. In a larger sense, San Diegan Mexican food is about the collision between the cuisine of the Sonoran desert to San Diego’s east and the Pacific Ocean to its west. The Carne Asada Burrito- marinated grilled steak in a giant flour tortilla- is the other iconic San Diegan Mexican food, and is pure Sonora, while the coctel de camaron and the ubiquitous michelada beer cocktail are beach culture favorites. Roll tacos (small fried beef tacos in the shape of tubes) and fresh guacamole (San Diego is historically a major avocado producer) are other key dishes. Most San Diego Mexican food is consumed at “Taco Shops”, small, ultra-casual fast food places, but sit down Mexican restaurants are common too: San Diego’s “Old Town” historic district is loaded with festive, outdoor-seating Mexican places serving huge plates of steak, fish, and tortillas. Sadly, the most iconic and oldest San Diego Mexican Food place, Las Cuatro Milpas, closed suddenly last month. Hopefully it will reopen soon.

Karinas Ceviche Bar N’ Tacos 1852 National Ave. San Diego: Karinas is a reliable Mexican Seafood Place, this one is very nearby the convention center. Good place to try fish tacos, or get a Mexican-style shrimp cocktail. Trust me.

El Indio Mexican Food 3695 India Street, San Diego: El Indio opened in 1940 as a tortilla factory, and its tortillas and masa are the cornerstone of its menu. In some ways El Indio defines San Diego Mexican food: get the “taquitos” aka “roll tacos”, small beef tacos rolled up like flutes and served with guacamole: it’s a San Diego classic.

Kiko’s (multiple locations including 407 C Street San Diego) Another great fish taco spot. Also, any restaurant that includes “Mariscos” in the name of the restaurant is likely to have great fish tacos in San Diego.

Tacos el Franc , Tacos El Gordo, and Taquería los Chuchys are in San Diego, but they are NOT San Diego-style places. They are great examples of Tijuana style tacos- Tijuana is the city just on the other side of the Mexican border from San Diego. You don’t get fish tacos at these places- you get tacos al pastor, those great roasted pork tacos that are sliced from a giant rotating trompo. They are served Tijuana-style, on small tortillas with your choice of toppings. Other cuts like suadero and carne asada are also great. Worth a visit!

I am technically from Encinitas, a coastal suburb of San Diego, so my two actual favorites are Juanita’s Taco Shop and Los Tacos, both in Encinitas. If you find yourself up there, do yourself a favor and visit both.

San Diego Seafood

San Diego is, above all, a port town. The natural harbor formed by San Diego bay has served to give shelter to boats and ships for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In the late 19th century, Sicilian and Italian immigrants with experience in Mediterranean fishing began to come to San Diego to try their luck in the new world. The result was a booming fish industry that peaked in the 1920s. Since then, caution about fish stocks has curtailed the fish canneries that used to exist in San Diego, but fishers still bring in excellent hauls from the San Diegan and Mexican waters. Several San Diego restaurants offer local fish, and are worth seeking out. California-style fish restaurants specialize in hardwood-grilled fish, simply prepared and served as a sandwich or with vegetables and bread or rice and salad. That’s usually a better choice than fried fish or shrimp.

Mitch’s Seafood is one of the many family-operated fish restaurants in the Point Loma area. It’s a great casual spot for a grilled fish sandwich or a grilled fish plate. The wine list is good and tables look over the marina.

Blue Water Seafood is another family operated spot specializing in local fish, in the Mission Hills area.

Fish Market San Diego is an old school place, and is a classic Californian style fish restaurant. Get the grilled fish or the cold smoked fish. If you want to go upscale, they have a “Top of the Market” higher end restaurant upstairs, but I prefer the casual vibe downstairs.

San Diego Italian

The aforementioned Sicilian fishers set up an enclave in West San Diego, and it became known as San Diego’s Little Italy. Along India street are lots of little restaurants and gelaterie; it’s a vibrant place to “go out” in SD. The three old-school places in the area are Mona Lisa Delicatessen and Restaurant, Filippi’s Pizza Grotto, and Mimmo’s. All offer Italian-American “red sauce” type food, the kind that I grew up on. Of course, there are more upscale Italian-style Italian places now, with recent immigrants as chefs, but you’ll have to seek someone else’s advice on those!

San Diego Hippie Food

In the 1950s and 60s, a culture emerged in Southern California based on a synthesis of physical fitness, new age spirituality, eastern mysticism, natural foods and yoga. (food Jonathan Kauffman details the influence this culture had on food in his excellent book Hippie Food) The beach cities of San Diego were a good fit for this culture, and lots of hippies made their homes here; influencing San Diego beach culture to this day. From a culinary perspective, hippie food represents an interesting combination of Indian vegetarianism, Zen philosophy, and an idiosyncratic view of “natural” foods. Whole grain bread, sprouts, avocado, tempeh, tofu, lentils, “ancient grains”, vegetable juices and fruit smoothies kind of come together in a strange vision. I hope to write more about hippie food culture, but in San Diego you can experience it for yourself. It’s more present in the beach towns than San Diego proper, so you can find the juice bars and natural foods emporiums in Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach, La Jolla, Del Mar, and Encinitas. Try a carrot juice, an avocado sandwich with sprouts, Have-a-chips and a smoothie. My recommendations are mostly in Encinitas (my hometown) but you’ll find hippie food places in all the beach towns. If it says “natural foods” that’s a giveaway.

Jyoti-Bihanga (in the Normal Heights neighborhood) calls itself the oldest operating vegetarian restaurant in San Diego. It’s an old-school guru-inspired restaurant (the owners follow a spiritual teacher named Sri Chinmoy), and a perfect example of the SoCal hippie food style. Try the nut loaf (a vegetarian version of meatloaf) it’s a classic.

Ki’s Restaurant (Cardiff) is another classic. Ki’s has a juice bar downstairs and a full-service restaurant upstairs, serving great healthy food with a panoramic ocean view. Brunch is especially good here, but lunch and dinner feature classics like the famous Ki’s millet burger. Don’t skimp on the sprouts.

Lotus Cafe and Juice Bar (Encinitas) is a place run by devotees of the Self Realization Fellowship. It’s a friendly, neatly kept, and casual restaurant, the kind of place you go for a “Soulful Salad” or a bowl of veggie chili. It’s a wonderful place for a smoothie and a snack after a day at the beach or a strenuous yoga class. This place has four different kinds of veggie burger patties on the menu!!

San Diego Coffee

I couldn’t write a piece on San Diego culinary culture without touching on coffee. Though coffee has a long background in San Diego (the San Diego Coffee Company produced old-school brands like Sun Coffee and Ben-Hur coffee in the early 20th century), specialty coffee was brought to San Diego in 1968 by Bob Sinclair, founder of Pannikin Coffee and Tea. At its height in the 80s and 90s, Pannikin had several coffee shops and retail stores throughout San Diego, and I was one of the baristas (even though we didn’t call them baristas yet). One original Pannikin shop remains in Encinitas (and I managed at this very store until 1994), but the impact of the company remains. Cafe Moto, which began as the wholesale division of Pannikin, is now San Diego’s leading roaster, with a solar-powered shop and roasting plant in Barrio Logan. Torrey and Kim Lee, the longtime owners of Cafe Moto, have transitioned the roasting company into a shining example of modern San Diego specialty coffee culture. Bird Rock coffee, founded in La Jolla’s Bird Rock neighborhood, is another fantastic homegrown coffee company, and is now led by longtime Specialty Coffee greats Jeff and Maritza Taylor. But San Diego isn’t just roasted coffee and coffee shops- it’s a green coffee town too. Interamerican Coffee, led by the great Kayd Whalen, is based in San Diego’s east village (and they are offering an open house on Thursday, April 9!)

I hope all this helps you find your culinary way through San Diego! Drop your own favorites in the comments below. See you in SD!

The ancients knew this intuitively. As a species of hunter-gatherers, we observed that we could collect green leaves and eat them, or alternatively hunt the animals who themselves consumed green leaves. Ancient people therefore instinctively worshiped the color green: the ancient Egyptian Great God Osiris had green skin, symbolizing the green hue of plants, crops, and food. The Greek goddess of agriculture Demeter had another name, Chloë, which meant “green”, in reference to the grassy green of new leaves (Chloë and chlorophyll share the same root). Later, another mythological symbol emerged, that of the “Green Man”: from Iraq to England, an image of a man growing green leaves from his face is everywhere, symbolizing the strange and awesome power of green-ness.

But it wasn’t just mythology, of course. Some of our earliest written documents are about green plants as food. In about 300 BC, Theophrastus wrote his magnum opus Historia Plantarum about plants- and book 7 was all about “pot-herbs”, those plants we eat as green leaves. Meanwhile in China, a herbalist named Shennong wrote Bencaojing (神農本草經), cataloging the medical and taste properties of herbs and vegetables. In the 11th century AD, Iraqi scholar Ibn Butlan wrote the Taccuinum Sanitatis, which became a standard food reference in the middle ages- it describes dozens of culinary and medical plants and herbs.

The Flavor of Green

Since our species has been eating green things since time immemorial, we are intimately familiar with the flavor of green. But wait- green is a color, not a flavor, right? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Most green plants have certain chemicals in common- chlorophyll is one. And pure chlorophyll has a grassy, spinach-y taste: the taste of green. Another important (and amazing) “green” flavor chemical is hexanal, a powerful compound produced in green leaves. It’s actually not present in plants under normal circumstances- but crush or cut a plant leaf and lineolic acid in the leaves reacts with oxygen to create hexanal, which has antimicrobial properties. In other words, hexanal is among a plant’s natural defenses- damage a leaf, and the plant creates it’ss own antimicrobial salve. Hexanal is powerfully aromatic- it smells like cut grass or parsley- and it is also used by plants to communicate. I’m not kidding about this. The smell of hexanal attracts predators like wasps who feed on the worms who destroy plants. It’s like this: a hornworm munches on a tomato leaf, the cut leaf secretes lineolic acid which oxidizes into hexanal (that crushed-tomato leaf aroma), the aroma of hexanal attracts tiny wasps to the plant, who parasitize the hornworms. Hornworms die, plant is saved. Magical! In fact, some plants can themselves perceive hexanal, and when they do they begin to secrete other protective chemicals that deter predators. So a single damaged plant can, in effect, “warn” its neighbors about a herbivorous insect raid using a hexanal signal.

From a culinary perspective, hexanal is a treasure. It’s what gives parsley, basil, oregano, and other herbs their characteristic floral grassiness; i.e. its green-flavor. A handful of basil in a tomato sauce boosts its hexanal aroma and makes it seem fresher, chewing a sprig of parsley makes the breath fresh and sweet, a sprig of fresh hexanal-rich thyme on a piece of fish makes it aromatic and lovely.

And it’s not just the Western palate that appreciates “green”. The Mandarin word qīngxiāng (清香) means “green flavor”, and is used to describe the aroma of green tea and cucumber. Japan has a liqueur called Midori (“green”) which captures the green-flavor of melon. This is an example of a psychological phenomenon called “crossmodal perception”, where the brain associates stimuli from two different sense categories. In this case, the brain associates the color green (perceived visually) with certain flavors (perceived as tastes and aromas). In other words, the brain thinks of certain flavors as “green” ones.

Flavor scientists use the term “green” to cover a huge number of flavor attributes, from grassy to spinach-like to herbal to cucumber. These “green” notes pop up in some wines- Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand is seen as particularly green-tasting- in apples, in tea, and even in coffee (green-aroma in coffee is generally seen as an undesirable consequence of unripe harvesting). If you can think of the smell that parsley, cut grass, lettuce, and mint have in common, you’ve got a good idea what “fresh green” means to a flavorist. “Dark green” is a different story- that’s spinach, broccoli, collard greens, artichokes, etc. Maybe we’ll talk about that one later in the summer.

Eating Green

For me, the early spring is the moment when fresh green-flavor becomes most appealing. I grow herbs in my backyard- basil, mint, thyme, scallions, rosemary, oregano, coriander/cilantro and fennel- and when April comes around I just want to eat them with everything. Fresh herbs are the easiest way to impart fresh green flavor to a dish, and they instantly make food more appealing. Of course, fresh green flavor can come from a huge number of sources- lettuce, cucumber, peas, limes, green chiles, etc. These are all most available in the spring, when new leaves are sprouting. Here are a few of my favorite green-centered spring dishes:

Omelet aux Fines Herbes

On a warm spring weekend morning, this is one of my very favorite breakfasts. I head out to the garden and pick herbs: I use parsley, basil, thyme, and scallions; but chervil, tarragon, and chives are also traditional. The mix of herbs is up to your taste, but definitely use multiple herbs. Wash and chop the herbs finely (I use scissors). Next, beat three eggs with a touch of salt and the herbs. Finally, melt a knob of butter in an omelet pan until bubbly but not brown. Add the eggs, and fold them as they cook into a neat football shape. Serve with hot buttered toast and- for an extra dash of green- a bit of extra parsley.

Garden Herb Vietnamese Salad Rolls (Gỏi cuốn)

This is my very favorite thing to eat when the herbs come in. It’s fresh, light, and crunchy, a perfect springtime treat. The below recipe is basic, you can add other ingredients to your taste. You could add tofu and avocado to make them vegetarian, or add roasted pork to make them a little more protein-heavy. But in spring, my salad rolls are heavy on the herbs.

Ingredients:

Cooked, rinsed and cooled rice vermicelli (bun), moistened with a bit of rice vinegar

Vietnamese rice paper wrappers (bánh tráng)

6-8 large poached shrimp (shelled and cut horizontally)

Lots of green herbs and vegetables, ideally from your garden: I use cucumber, lettuce, mint, cilantro, basil, bean sprouts and sliced scallions.

dipping sauce (I make nước chấm but some prefer peanut sauce or hoisin sauce)

Directions:

Wet the rice paper in room-temperature water and lay on a cutting board. Working quickly, assemble the vermicelli, lots of vegetables and herbs, and four of the sliced shrimp on the paper. Fold the sides in, and roll the paper tightly, being sure to trap all the goodies inside. Serve with dipping sauce on the side for a perfect hot-weather lunch. All Vietnamese salad rolls are great, but these are especially herb-loaded. You can add other protein, carrots, or pickled daikon to your taste.

Salsa Verde

This classic Mexican sauce is the essence of green, based on green tomatillos, fresh, grassy cilantro, and spicy green Serrano chiles.

Ingredients:

8 tomatillos, peeled

2 serrano chiles, or more to taste

1 small onion

1 bunch cilantro

salt

Set a large pot of water to boil. Meanwhile, peel and wash the tomatillos, seed and stem the chiles, and peel and quarter the onion. When the water boils, put the vegetables (not the cilantro) in the water for exactly 8 minutes. When its done, move the drained vegetables to a blender. Add the fresh cilantro and (carefully!) blend with the lid on (hot things in blenders can blow off the lid- be careful!) Using fresh cilantro keeps the flavor bright and grassy. Blend until thoroughly mixed and salt to taste. If necessary, you can add a little extra water to thin the sauce. Store in a jar in the refrigerator- you’ll eat it up in a week! Serve as a sauce for enchiladas, in burritos, on eggs, or to flavor soups. You can also stew diced pork in this sauce to make Carne con Chile Verde. Amazing. You can substitute jalapeño chiles, but serranos are brighter, hotter, and greener-tasting. Disfrute!

What’s your favorite green food?

My mom was right about this in many ways, of course. We now know that regularly drinking sweet drinks like Kool-Aid or Country Time (or any other sugary drink for that matter) is particularly bad for our bodies. But my mom was wrong about one thing- powdered lemonade like Country Time was not especially modern or high-tech: the formula for it dates back to the dawn of chemistry. And it was three pharmacists who invented it. My mom was the daughter of a pharmacist; I wonder if that would have changed her opinion at all? Who knows. Let’s get to the story.

Rewind the clock to the late 1700s. For centuries before that, “alchemists” had practiced the arcane, magical art of transforming substances using a variety of techniques, usually focused on metallurgy. Later, a subgroup of alchemists focused on healing emerged, calling themselves “pharmacists” and aiming to use alchemical substances to extend human life. During the period we now call The Scientific Revolution, the practices of the alchemists and pharmacists led to the development of a new physical science they called “chemistry”. Europeans like Joseph Priestly, Henry Cavendish, and Antoine Levoisier began learning how to isolate substances like hydrogen and oxygen, and performed experiments to understand these new “chemicals”. One of these pioneering chemists was a Swedish-German pharmacist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele. Beginning in 1771, when Scheele was only 29, he began an amazing fifteen-year-long career discovering many of the chemical elements of our environment. He was the first to discover oxygen- but since he failed to report it to anyone, he doesn’t get much credit. He went on to discover and describe dozens of other chemicals like barium, magnesium, tungsten, and chlorine, along with their unique properties (he was the first to observe the bleaching action of chlorine, for example). But more importantly for us, Scheele was interested in the chemistry of foods: he discovered organic acids, those compounds that give foods their sour flavor- lactic acid in milk and tartaric acid in wine, for example. In 1784 he turned his attention to lemons, seeking to figure out a way to crystallize the juice, or at least discover what made it sour. As he wrote in his notes: “I saturated the lemon juice, as it was boiling in the curcubit, with pulverised chalk. The compound fell immediately to the bottom as a middle-salt, resembling tartarised lime.” That “middle-salt” was calcium citrate, which could be further purified into a pure, crystalline acid. Scheele had discovered the essence of citrus’ sourness- purified citric acid. He confirmed that sourness by tasting the citric acid- and was pleased by the clarity and intensity of its tartness. (Tasting his discoveries was a bad habit of Scheele’s. Sadly, tasting his other experiments killed him- he died of mercury poisoning a year later.)

Ten years went by, and a French chemist-pharmacist named Joseph-Louis Proust was asked by the Secretary to the Consulate of Havana, Cuba to investigate a way to better preserve lemon juice on sailing ships. Discovering the work of Scheele, Proust began his own experiments, which he published as “Observations on the Preparation of Citric Acids”. In this publication, he noted that by mixing citric acid with sugar and water, he was able to make a version of lemonade, which he found had a very “agreeable flavor”. But this lemonade would have tasted bland: simply sour and sweet, without the aroma or character of lemons. But this could be fixed: shortly after that, in 1798, fellow French pharmacist Jérôme Dizé published his own “On the Preparation of concrete Acid of Lemons” in which he included this recipe:

”A lemonade of the most agreeable taste and appearance may be had by dissolving 40 grains of citric acid in a pint of water, with the addition of a sufficient quantity of pure sugar. It may be rendered fragrant by dissolving a small quantity of oleo-saccharum, prepared by rubbing a lemon on a lump of sugar. The sugar imbibes the volatile oil of the lemon, and renders it soluble. It is easy by this means to preserve the whole of the volatile oil of a number of lemons. The oleo-saccharum thus obtained may be mixed in a mortar with a sufficient quantity of sugar.”

Dizé had perfected the pharmacists’ lemonade by including both citric acid and lemon oil. Lemon peel oil is volatile and fragrant, redolent of the smell of fresh lemons. We would now call it an “essential oil” of lemon. By adding lemon oil from peels to the citric acid and sugar mixture, he not only simulated the sour taste of the lemon (from the citric acid), but its aroma as well. And taste+aroma=flavor. Dizé had invented the first constructed-flavor pharmacists’ lemonade powder.

This lemonade recipe was so useful it began being included in pharmacists’ formula reference books called apothecaries. By the mid-1800s, every pharmacist in the world knew how to make “lemonade powder” by mixing sugar, citric acid, and lemon oil together with water. In 1862, “Professor” Jerry Thomas, a bartender who thought of himself as a sort of beverage-pharmacist, published his “Bon Vivant’s Companion”, the very first bartending book. In it, he included a recipe for “Lemonade Powders”, a version of Dizé’s formula:

By the beginning of the 1900s, almost all pharmacies in the United States had added “soda fountains”, places where nonalcoholic beverages were produced for a thirsty public. These drinks were thought of as quasi-medicines, and the pharmacists doubled as beverage preparers- they became proficient at making drinks and drugs with the materials on hand. They could make you a cherry phosphate (a cherry-syrup soda made with phosphoric acid) or a headache powder, or both. And, they always had lemon oil, sugar, and citric acid on hand, so they could always, always make you a glass of pharmacists’ lemonade.

Enter the ambitious grocer and businessman Edwin Perkins, who established Perkins Products, Inc. in Hastings, Nebraska. Perkins loved two things: he loved designing labels, and he loved introducing classic grocery and pharmacy items as packaged products. In many ways, Perkins helped invent the packaged goods industry: instead of bulk bath salts or foot powder compounded by a pharmacist, Perkins would package his own branded versions of the products with a snazzy label. And, he had an idea: why not package pharmacists’ lemonade powders as drink mixes? That was easy enough, it just took citric acid and lemon oil- people could add their own sugar and water. But Perkins learned that by swapping out the lemon oil with other essential aromatics- raspberry or cherry essence for example- you could create other flavored drinks too. The effect was even stronger if you added a bit of food color: red raspberry drink was extra delicious when colored bright red. But what to call these new “-ades”? Perkins’ genius was packaging, and he came up with a fantastic name. Kool-ade.

Kool-Ade was introduced in the summer of 1928, just in time for the Great Depression of 1929. Though money was tight, people still wanted a treat, and Kool-Ade (soon renamed Kool-Aid) was an economical way to make homemade soft drinks for only a penny a glass. Though Kool-Aid developed from the pharmacists’ lemonade of the 1800s, Perkins took it way past lemonade: Kool-Aid came in exciting new flavors like cherry, grape, and orange. By the fifties, Perkins had grown Kool-Aid into a successful company of its own, and he decided to cash in his chips: he sold the brand to General Foods in 1953. General Foods continued to grow the brand, and it became one of the ubiquitous products of midcentury processed food culture. Sleek, inexpensive, sweet, and fun for kids, Kool-Aid became a household word.

However, after the counterculture revolutions of the 1960s, Kool-Aid’s popularity began to slip. 1950s and 1960s space age modernism and sleek supermarket culture wasn’t in fashion any more, and there was a palpable shift back to “old time” aesthetics. In 1974, Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons were the biggest shows on American TV, John Denver’s country album Back Home Again was at #1 on the charts, and old-timey movies like The Sting and The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams were big in the box office. General Foods saw a need- or an opportunity- for an old-timey lemonade drink. They went to the roots of lemonade powders, going back to the pre-Kool-Aid times. General Foods re-created a 1800s pharmacists’ lemonade powder with citric acid, lemon oil, and sugar, adding a bit of ascorbic acid (aka vitamin C). They gave it an old-timey name, “Country Time Lemonade”, put it in an old-timey looking canister, and introduced the tagline, “…Tastes Like Good Old-Fashioned Lemonade”. They emphasized their use of natural lemon flavor, saying in commercials that “the best part of the lemon is in the peel”- they’re talking about lemon oil. The old-time branding didn’t fool my mom, but it worked in the marketplace- Country Time Lemonade became a big success. So big, in fact, that other manufacturers objected: they found it unfair to market “lemonade” with no lemon juice. But that issue had been settled 190 years earlier: the pharmacists knew that citric acid for tartness and lemon oil for aroma made a perfectly delicious and acceptable lemonade. The Country Time brand has lasted now for 50 years.

What does this teach us about flavor? The key insight here is that flavor is perceived not on our tongues, nor in our noses, but in our minds. Fresh lemon juice reads only as sour on our tongues, due to the citric and ascorbic acids in the juice. We don’t perceive anything but sour, really: we can’t distinguish lemon juice from a purified citric acid solution using taste alone. To identify lemon juice as lemon, we must have lemon aroma, which actually comes mostly from the peels: as we squeeze lemons the lemon-oil gets mixed in with the juice (hot tip- add a little grated lemon peel to your lemonade to boost lemon aroma). When your brain perceives acid sourness along with lemon aroma, it reads the combination as lemon juice, whether or not actual lemon juice is present. That’s flavor, and that’s why lemonade powder can be made with malic or tartaric acid instead of citric- the source of sourness isn’t nearly as important as the smell of lemon oil. From the brain’s flavor perspective, lemon juice+sugar+water isn’t much different from citric acid+lemon oil+sugar+water. And that idea- that flavor is constructed in the brain- that makes flavor science possible.

I’m lucky enough to have a lemon tree in my backyard, so I usually make lemonade from lemons. But I’m not averse to boosting the sourness with a bit of citric acid I keep on hand for just such occasions, or a few drops of lemon oil from my cupboard. And I have made pharmacists’ lemonade with just sugar, citric acid and lemon oil; it’s lovely too. I’ve never actually bought a canister Country Time, though: it’s not that I’m opposed, it’s that I can’t quite bring myself to break my mom’s ironclad rule.

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First a little taste-science primer. We have two main organs with which we perceive food: our tongues and our noses. We call those things we detect on our tongue “tastes” and those things we perceive through our noses “aromas” or “smells”. There is a mechanistic difference: taste buds on our tongue can only sense dissolved compounds, and our noses can only perceive airborne ones- and these are usually different chemicals. When we perceive both tastes and smells simultaneously, it is a different thing with a different name: we call it “flavor”. So, a flavor is a combination of tastes and smells, perceived as a single impression. So, taste happens in the mouth, aroma happens in the nose, but flavor happens in the brain.

We only have five tastes; we call them sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (also known as savory, or the protein-taste). On the other hand, we are capable of perceiving thousands of smells. By combining the two modalities, we basically have an infinite number of perceptible flavors.

Ok: with that background in mind, I will claim that the BLT has a magic combination of all the tastes and many of the most positive aromas, resulting in the best possible sandwich flavor. To do this, I will use a point system, in which I will award a point each time we get a positive taste or aroma. As you will see, the BLT racks up an impressive number of positive points. Here we go.

The Tastes of the BLT

In this section we will evaluate those elements of the BLT we taste on our tongue, via our taste buds. First up, salty. I begin there because the star of the BLT- the bacon- is a salt-lover’s delight. Bacon is salted as the first step in its preparation; it is about 3% salt by weight before cooking, more after. +1 point. Tomatoes and mayonnaise are a bit salty too, especially if you sprinkle a little salt on the tomato. Combined, we’ll call that another +1 point. Next up, umami, that incredibly compelling taste of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. Bacon is especially umami-rich, being made of pork and all- it’s one of the most umami foods there is. +1. But, there is an extra surprise contender in the umami category: the tomato. Unlike most fruits and vegetables, tomatoes are rich in the amino acid called glutamic acid, which is the most concentrated source of umami taste. A good tomato is an umami bomb, and is the secret weapon of the BLT. Another +1. There is a bit of umami in the mayo, but we’ll just consider that a bonus. Let’s move on. Since we’re talking about tomatoes, let’s talk about sweetness. Tomatoes are a fruit, and have lots of sugary sweetness, especially when home garden-grown. +1 in the sweet column. There is another source for sweetness in the BLT however, and that is the bread. Though sandwich bread may or may not have added sugars, carbohydrates in the flour are made up of sugars linked up together (it’s called a polysaccharide). Your sweet-detectors pick up on the carbohydrates in bread, enough to give us another +1 in the sweet department. Next, we come to sour. Sourness gets a bad rap, but really we love tanginess, acidity, and brightness (all euphemisms for sourness). Acids cause sourness, and that sourness stimulates our salivary glands (your mouth might be watering right now thinking about it). This jump starts both flavor perception and digestion. That’s why a squeeze of lemon on fried fish or a dash of vinegar in salad dressing are so great- they provide a bit of sourness to launch our food experience. In the BLT, the tomato is once again the star here: it’s loaded with citric, malic, and ascorbic acids, all of which make a good tomato mouthwateringly tangy. +1. American mayonnaise contains vinegar, enough to give it another +1 in the sour department. Finally, bitter. Though somewhat controversial, bitter greens are a welcome taste to most people. In a BLT, the lettuce can add just enough bitterness to round out the taste balance. +1.

Ok where are we? We’re already at an impressive nine taste points, despite a sandwich with relatively few ingredients: the bacon is salty and umami, the tomato is sweet, sour, and umami, the bread is sweet, the mayonnaise is salty, sour, and umami, and the lettuce is gently bitter. And we haven’t even gotten to aromas yet!

The BLT Aromas

Believe it or not, aromas are even more important to the perception of flavor than tastes are. Tastes are the foundation of flavor, but aromas provide flavor identity. Famously, a potato and an apple cannot be discerned by taste alone (try eating a bite of a potato slice and an apple slice with your nose plugged- you’ll be amazed) it takes aroma to tell the difference. Aromas aren’t as easily classified as tastes are, but that’s what flavor science is all about. Here are the main ones in our BLT.

Maillard: Probably the most compelling food aroma in existence, the Maillard reaction is responsible for the delicious smell of grilled meat, bread, chocolate, coffee, cookies, and approximately a million other yummy foods. Maillard reactions happen when carbohydrates and proteins are heated together, such as in bacon: the small amount of sugar in the bacon’s cure reacts with the protein of the pork in the frying pan to create a distinctive, mouthwatering smell. Can you imagine eating boiled bacon? Me neither: you need the high-temperature frying to create that distinctive, Maillard loaded browned-meat aroma. +1. Toasting the bread- an essential step when making a BLT- makes even more Maillard aromas (I mean, the smell of toasting bread may be the best smell in the world, next to frying bacon of course). Another big +1.

Smoke: American bacon is smoked as part of the curing process, which contributes another fragrant layer. We evolved to love the smell of fire-cooked meat, and smoked bacon pushes that button hard: the smell of smoked bacon is mouthwatering to even lifelong vegetarians. +1.

Fruity /Floral: This may seem like a curve ball in a sandwich, but stay with me here: tomatoes, being a fruit and all, have a strong fruity-floral aroma, which is a huge part of their charm. Don’t believe me? The next time you cut a tomato, imagine the smell of apples or roses. You’ll detect both in tomatoes: tomatoes contain damascenone, a chemical which exists in both roses and apples. This scent gives our sandwich an elegant aroma and is the thing that makes tomatoes so special. +1.

Green: Flavorists like to talk about aromas as colors: “brown” is the Maillard scent, “red” is the smell of ripe fruits like strawberry and cherry, and “green” is the vegetal aroma of grass, spinach, and celery. Lettuce is obviously a big source of green aroma, that refreshing scent you get when you crunch a fresh lettuce leaf. Tomatoes have a touch of green too- that crushed tomato-leaf smell. Another +1.

OK! These four aroma categories- Maillard, smoke, fruity/floral, and green, are all present in the BLT, and this is special- most sandwiches don’t have this level of complexity. In total, we’ve added five more flavor points, and we still have one more thing to discuss: texture.

The Textures of the BLT

Texture- the feel of a food as we eat it- is a critical part of the experience of eating. Our mouths are loaded with nerves designed to feel food, giving us valuable information about its freshness and nutritive value. Research has shown that we respond strongly to foods’ texture: we crave the crunch of carrot sticks, or the unctuous oily butteriness of a rich cake, or the satisfying chewiness of meat. The BLT has three component textures, which is a big swing. The first and most obvious is crunch: lettuce’s main role in this sandwich is to provide a satisfying crispness, a refreshing garden-fresh snap in every chew. For this reason, iceberg lettuce- a type bred specifically for crunch- is the default choice for a BLT. +1. Well-fried bacon provides its own crunchiness to this sandwich, which is unusual for an animal product- most meats are chewy, not crisp. But get the bacon right, and you’ll have a shattering crispness that rivals the lettuce. Another +1. But we’re not through yet- we’ve also toasted the bread, which gives us another layer of crunch, another big +1. Next texture is fattiness. We perceive fat mostly through its texture in food: imagine the texture difference between full-fat and nonfat milk- one is watery and thin, the other thick and almost oily. We have two sources of fat in the BLT, the first being the mayonnaise: it’s there specifically to contribute its unique, emulsified-oil texture. +1. The bacon contributes plenty of fat too, complementing the oily sheen of the mayo with its slightly greasy butteriness. Another +1. Finally, in a power move, the tomato comes in from left field again, providing juiciness. Since we get no meat-juices from the crispy bacon, we get satisfaction in this sandwich from the tomato-juice: it provides a beautiful, unifying sauce that brings the whole sandwich together. If you’ve done it right, the tomato-juice mixes with the mayonnaise, creating something akin to a salad dressing built right in to the sandwich. It’s an amazing move, fully deserving of a big +1. That’s six points in the texture department.

In all, a well-made BLT racks up an impressive twenty flavor points in total. And, these flavors are all harmonious and in balance with each other. Here’s a chart to illustrate:

It’s magic: a sandwich containing only five ingredients gives you a complex experience of flavors, textures, tastes and aromas. That’s why, to me, the BLT reigns supreme.

Making a Great BLT

If you’ve never made a BLT, it’s time to get in the game. It’s one of the easiest dishes to make, and more importantly, it’s one of the easiest to make great. Here are a few tips:

Toast: Of all the sandwiches, BLT is one of the most flexible when it comes to bread. Normally BLTs are made on toasted white bread, but whole wheat bread gives it a welcome extra nuttiness. Sourdough bread can work so long as it’s not too intense, same for rye bread. That said, bread must be toasted to make a BLT. For this reason, the bread must be sliced relatively thin- thick toast can be too much to deal with in a big sandwich. Unlike some sandwiches, the bread isn’t the star here, so choose something delicious but not assertive.

Mayonnaise: The BLT is garnished with mayo only. Americans love mayonnaise, especially the jarred kind: you’ll find people discussing their favorite brand of mayo as if it’s a deeply held part of their character. Mayo preferences are tied to region: Americans from the Western states love Best Foods, Southerners love the eggier Duke’s, and Northerners eat Hellmann’s. Made from scratch mayonnaise is also a great thing on a BLT, but it’s a red flag when a menu or recipe specifies “aioli”: the assertive flavor of garlic has no place on a BLT.

Bacon: Now we get to the first of the triad of main ingredients, the bacon. Thankfully, good bacon is pretty easy to find in the United States: Americans love their bacon. Thick-cut bacon is preferred in this sandwich: it’s a main ingredient, after all, so no cutting corners. The best bacon comes from an old-school butcher, who will cure and smoke it themselves. By the way, ignore the label “uncured” on some bacon- it’s meaningless. Do make sure it’s well smoked, however, ideally with hickory or apple wood: you want that smoky taste. Now we come to the most challenging part of making a BLT: making crisp bacon. Flabby bacon has no place in a BLT, my friends- you must cook it well so it is shatteringly crisp. If you don’t know how to make crisp bacon, here’s a great tutorial.

Lettuce: Crunchiness is essential in a BLT, and so you must choose a crunchy lettuce. Tender lettuces like greenleaf are pretty, but not crisp enough for this sandwich. Iceberg is the default choice for its crunchiness, but you can do better: a good romaine has plenty of crunch and more lettuce flavor. Butter lettuce can work so long as you use enough of it, and its flavor goes very well with bacon. If you’re feeling fancy, you can add a green like watercress or arugula, but these are additions not substitutes: you must have crunchy lettuce. I have heard of people who put spinach on a BLT but this kind of behavior should not be tolerated.

Tomato: This is the most challenging ingredient to find. The quality of a BLT is made or broken by the quality of the tomato; if you can’t get a good tomato you might as well make something else. Your best bet is to grow tomatoes yourself: nothing- I mean nothing- beats a home-grown tomato for flavor. The best tomatoes for sandwich making are called “beefsteak” tomatoes; large, round, meaty tomatoes perfect for slicing. My favorite variety is called the Cherokee purple: it’s an amazing BLT tomato. If you don’t grow tomatoes don’t fret: your second best option is the farmers’ market. Farmers’ markets tend to specialize in good tomatoes: they can handle the delicate fruits with more care than a supermarket, so they can sell riper, tastier varieties. It’ll cost you, but a great farmers’ market tomato from a trusted variety is worth it. If you must get a supermarket tomato, go for one of the upscale varieties that advertise sweetness: Kumato and Campari tomatoes are good choices, but sauce tomatoes like Roma and San Marzano are not.

Toast your bread, spread both slices with mayonnaise, and add bacon to one slice and tomatoes to the other. Lettuce goes in the middle, and a sprinkle of salt on the tomatoes doesn’t hurt. Cut in half and enjoy- you’re about to eat the best sandwich there is.

This is a very happy state of affairs for a food lover like me; I’m proud that my ancestral homeland is known for such a delicious crop. The tomato they are talking about is the pomodoro Pachino, the Pachino tomato, which is well known to cooks and food lovers all over Italy. The Pachino is what is called in Italian a cilieghino or “cherry" tomato, named after its small, round shape. In fact, the Pachino is the cherry tomato in Italy: it is called out specifically on menus by chefs, and it sold as a special variety, at a premium, in markets. It’s larger than a cherry tomato in the U.S., and it is much, much more intensely flavored. It is renowned among tomato lovers for its savory, almost salty taste, its intense sweetness, and its vine-fresh aroma. Taste Atlas named the Pachino the third best tomato in the world. Pachino Tomatoes have their own IGP (Protected Geographic Identity) status, and a consortium of growers commit to growing only certain Pachino varieties, within a confined geography, using specific agricultural techniques. These tomatoes are the equivalent of a truly special wine or cheese; an expression of a unique terroir and farming tradition. Pachino tomatoes are, without question, the pride of Sicily.

You might imagine that the story of the Pachino tomato is one of those “heirloom variety” stories, where seeds are selected and traded over generations, creating a unique and historic local crop. This is a nice story, but it’s not the Pachino story. The real story of this treasured tomato is much more interesting and hopeful. But first, some history:

Pachino was probably given its name by the ancient Greeks, who named the southernmost promontory of Sicily Pachynus (Πάχυνος). The word might have come from the Greek word pachys meaning “fertile”, or it could have been a pre-Greek indigenous Sicilian word lost to time. It is said the name referenced the land itself; the rich, dark, fertile soil of the promontory. The Greeks made a small colony in Pachynus, a sort of sub-colony to a larger settlement of Syracusia to the north. Though the Greeks successfully defended Pachynus during the Greco-Punic wars of 580-260 BC, they lost it to the Romans shortly thereafter. Roman control of the island brought large-scale agriculture; the Romans thought of Sicily as a breadbasket, an agricultural heartland, and they set up large plantations of wheat, citrus, and wine grapes. These three crops defined Sicilian agriculture for centuries, and so it was in Pachynus. In the post-Roman kingdoms of the middle ages, agriculture was always controlled by the elites, ruling over the peasantry who tilled the soil. Sadly, primitive agricultural techniques and overfarming degraded the formerly rich soil, leaving Sicily less and less productive. Poverty reigned, and though Pachynus had some wine and citrus production, it was a punishing life for the poor. The Italian Unification of the 1860s failed to improve the situation in Sicily much: when my great-grandfather was born in 1881, 87% of the Sicilian population was illiterate, and over 90% were impoverished. In 1905, shortly after my great-grandparents’ wedding, they joined the millions of Southern Italian immigrants to the United States. They considered themselves lucky to escape.

The joining of Sicily with Italy meant that Pachynus- now called Pachino- became the southernmost municipality in Italy (and Europe). Being part of Italy had its advantages- for one, Sicilians gained the opportunity to migrate in search of work. But economic development escaped the island- agricultural progress happened mostly in the North, in Italian states like Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. Sicily was a forgotten backwater, the poorest place in Europe. Agriculture there was about subsistence, not plenty. Sicilian wine was commodity jug wine made for cheap export, and lemons and oranges had to compete with well-managed Spanish orchards for international markets. Wheat continued to be the main product of the island, especially in the interior, but the degraded, salty, rocky soil of the promontory where Pachino was situated wasn’t good for much. The town was mired in poverty and despair. in When I first visited there as a young man, my relatives asked, pointedly, “Why on Earth did you come here?”

But what about tomatoes? The Spanish, who ruled Sicily for most of the middle ages, brought tomatoes from America in the 16th century. They were adopted first by the elite as a decorative plant, a curiosity from the New World. By the 18th century, however, they were being grown for food. Their umami-rich flavor made them a good substitute for meat in cooking, and Sicilians began dressing their pasta with tomato sauce instead of chicken broth (the previous default pasta sauce). Tomatoes were a local crop, grown often in backyards or sold at village markets. At the end of the harvest, tomatoes would be put up in glass jars or made into strattu (I’ve written about this before). The tomato became a part of Sicilian cuisine, but not of Sicilian commerce: The commercial tomato market was dominated by more sophisticated growers up north, in places like Parma and Naples, where more developed agricultural techniques led to large, high quality tomato crops.

That is, until 1989. That year in Pachino, a local farm supply company teamed up with Hazera, an Israeli tomato breeder with a history of developing tomatoes adapted to the intense, dry climate of the Eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps Hazera could help develop a tomato that was well suited to the poor soils and the saline groundwater of Pachino (both legacies of generations of overfarming). The result was a variety called Noemi, a Hebrew name meaning “sweet” (also a Biblical character whose life turns from bitter poverty to sweet success). The Noemi was a cherry-shaped tomato that thrived in the extreme heat and salty water of the Pachino summer. Though initially treated with suspicion, the new tomato eventually found success, and by 2000, “Pachino Tomatoes” were being exported all over Italy. This was not a mass-market industrial tomato: it was intended to join the ranks of the special Italian tomatoes like San Marzano- it was fresh tasting, intensely flavored, and sweet. Before long, “Pachino”was not the name of a forgotten Sicilian town, it was the name of a special tomato varietal. Soon, Pachino was the Italian synonym for “cherry tomato”- defining its entire category. Hazera and local breeders continued to innovate, developing several improved varieties in a variety of shapes, all well suited for the local environment and water. Pachino tomatoes, like most upscale tomato varieties, are grown in protective greenhouses, and soon, the arid landscape surrounding the town was covered with green-roofed tomato farms. Other crops, like basil and market vegetables, are grown alongside. It was a big change for a small village.

The existence of a specialty agricultural crop changed the game in Pachino. Besides the obvious benefit of selling a high-end tomato to the rest of Italy, Pachino has enjoyed a variety of secondary effects. Positive culinary associations made Pachino a kind of gourmet destination, and helped turn the local wine culture- formerly dedicated to commodity wine- into a high-end producer of the native Nero d’ Avola varietal. Agricultural tourism- not only for tomatoes but for local cheese, wine, and fish- is now a major source of income for the formerly impoverished region. Pachino’s piazza, desolate and forlorn when I first saw it, is now lively, dotted with pizzerie and trattorie. In 2024, the Pachino tomato got its own postage stamp in celebration of its success. Don’t get me wrong- there are still problems in Pachino and Southeast Sicily- but there is no question the advent of the Pachino Tomato has improved life there.

I love the story of the Pachino tomato because it is a story about my ancestors’ homeland, the ancient place where generations of my family worked and lived. But I also love it because it is a story of agricultural development based on quality, flavor, and investment. We hear the stories of modern agriculture developing flavorless tomatoes and commodity crops, but modern agriculture can develop unique, delicious, sustainable, high-value crops too, like the pomodoro Pachino.

Sadly, if you live outside Europe, you just can’t get Pachino tomatoes, at least not fresh ones. Sometimes I see them in cans, and I snap them up when I do, but they are really a fresh tomato more than a canned one. Do seek them out if you’re in Europe: they are widely available in Italy and sometimes in places like Berlin and the Netherlands! If you want a little tomato inspiration, I heartily suggest this Pasta Grannies video of a Pachinese tomato farmer and his wife’s homemade tomato sauce.

Americans are known everywhere as an ice-obsessed people. I myself am extremely ice-positive: my advocacy for iced coffee is well known, I have gone to some trouble and expense to pipe exquisitely filtered water into my home ice-maker, and I like nothing better than a glass of fresh orange juice served over ice (my mother’s favorite drink). In this ice-positivity I am putting my American roots on display: we are the inventors of the the ice machine, the ice cube, the ice chest, and the ice industry. All this means that we have an elaborate set of rules and behaviors that govern our relationship with ice. Here are the most important ones.

1. Availability: Americans expect immediate access to ice at all times, as if ice will be useful in case of emergency. All American home refrigerators include a special ice-making area dedicated to the creation and storage of “ice cubes”, small cubic, boat-shaped, or tubular chunks of ice intended for beverages. Sometimes, the refrigerator itself is called an “ice box”, especially by old-timers. Since American refrigerators are too big to take with us while traveling, all American hotels include ice-making machines on every floor, so that we are always just steps away from a source of abundant ice. There is a small bucket in every room used exclusively for ice, so travelers may have ice at their disposal 24 hours a day. American aircraft are equipped with ice storage bins, and iced beverages are considered an absolute entitlement while flying. All of this ice is free, and is considered a kind of public utility. However, under special circumstances, ice can be purchased, which brings us to:

2. Bought Ice: On very special occasions, Americans will purchase ice. This usually happens when we need an unusually large volume of ice for some purpose, such as a party or a camping trip. Bought ice is thought to be marginally better than free ice, and will be sold in large plastic bags advertising the ice’s freshness and purity. (I actually think this is a little fib we tell ourselves to make us feel better about buying something that is normally free.) Bags of ice are available for purchase at all supermarkets and liquor stores, but they are sold differently than all other products: they are kept at the front of the store or outside in special chests. Unlike everything else at the supermarket, you do not put ice in your cart before checking out; instead, you tell the cashier how much ice you are buying and they charge you, honor-system style. You then grab the ice on your way to the car. Bags of ice are typically either five pounds or ten pounds; it is not unusual to buy twenty pounds of ice for a normal-sized party. Ice will be kept by the consumer in a special box called an “ice chest” or “cooler” that we keep in our garages especially for such occasions. This ice can be used for keeping things cold, but it is especially used for beverages, which is the next thing we’ll discuss.

3. Beverage Ice: Virtually all beverages in the United States can be served over ice, and usually are. “Ice water”, water with chunks of ice floating in it, is the most common and is consumed by more than 80% of Americans daily. However, tea, sodas, and liquors are generally served with ice. Milk, fruit juice, beer, and white wine are generally served un-iced (but chilled) for fear of dilution. When served in a cup or glass, all carbonated sodas include ice by default, and tea will generally be specified as “hot tea” or “iced tea”. “Sweet tea” as served in the Southern states will always be over ice. Iced coffee is quickly gaining ground as a beverage, particularly in the summer months.

4. Regulations Governing Amount of Ice in a Glass: The standard “ice level” in a glass is 3/4 full of ice before liquid is added. Less than 3/4 full makes the American feel as if they were given too little ice, any more than 3/4 full makes the American feel as if they have been given too little drink. If it is a self-serve soda machine, you may observe a consumer accidentally giving themselves too much ice, in which they might dump the whole thing out and start over. This is considered normal behavior. Overseas, drinks will often be served in a glass with much less ice, which will confuse and upset the American traveler. Sometimes, in the U.S., “light ice” can be specified, which means the glass is half full of ice. “No ice” is considered a special order.

5. Forms of Beverage Ice: Ice intended for drinks comes in a number of forms. The most common is the “ice cube” which is sometimes a cube but is often a different shape due to automatic ice-machine maker function. Whether tubular, oblong, round, or irregularly shaped, a chunk of ice is known as a “cube”. “Nugget ice” is a special shape of ice- in the form of gravel- which is considered especially desirable by fast-food enthusiasts (it is also called “Sonic ice” after the popular drive-in chain.) There is an established fetish for super-clear ice in the cocktail world, we’ll get to that later. “Crushed ice” is simply shattered ice cubes, and is losing popularity fast. In hospitals, crushed ice is known as “ice chips” and is administered as a refreshment to those who are unable to drink liquids.

6. Restaurant Ice Water: American restaurants serve ice water automatically to all customers. Ice water is free. You may request “no ice” but it will be treated as an unusual request and it will cause confusion, and will be served cold anyway. Warm or room temperature water are generally not available. To facilitate ice water delivery, estaurant water pitchers have three pouring spouts, one on the front and two on the sides, which are intended for precise ice regulation. Side pour=more ice. Ice water will be refilled automatically as a courtesy.

7. Cocktail Ice: Since the 1920s, American liquor drinks- especially mixed drinks called “cocktails” are served over ice. In cocktail culture, ice is called “rocks”. A “rocks” glass is designed especially to hold ice, and a drink served “on the rocks” or just “rocks” means with ice in the glass. The alternative to “rocks” is “shaken”, which means the drink is shaken with ice and strained instead of including ice in the glass. Otherwise, drinks may be blended with ice and served as a slush. Liquor drinks without ice are unusual, and thought of as slightly exotic, fussy, or retro. At a cocktail bar, the ice is stored in a bathtub-sized trough immediately in front of the bartender, at waist level, for maximum accessibility. Over the past few decades, cocktail enthusiasts have become obsessed with ice clarity- that is, a total lack of cloudiness in ice. Upscale cocktail bars will present crystal-clear ice with a flourish, and the ice itself might be chiseled off a large block or shaped into a sphere. At the extreme end of cocktail ice culture is a preposterous thing called a “luge”, which is a giant block of ice into which a narrow channel has been carved. Liquor is poured into the channel, it flows quickly down the icy trough into the open mouth of a drinker. In its gross excess and performative frigidity, the liquor luge may be the ultimate expression of the American ice obsession. God help us.

***

Why do people drink coffee? I realize this seems like a preposterous question, especially to a reader of a coffee-themed newspaper. “Because we love it.” is the automatic response. But why? Why do we love coffee so much? It’s a simple question without an obvious answer: coffee doesn’t provide much nutrition, it’s considered by most to be an acquired taste, and it takes considerable effort to grow, process, roast, and prepare. But, despite all that, it’s beloved by millions.

I began investigating this paradox in earnest when, 38 years ago I got my first job as a barista. I had already fallen in love with coffee, but I noticed that the customers in my shop were a diverse and varied bunch- they loved coffee too, but many had very different reasons than I did. I saw that each had their own motivations, likes, and dislikes about coffee. And I quickly realized that to be a good barista, I needed to understand: what makes these people- my customers- love coffee?

Before long, I became a coffee lifer, and this question motivated my professional career. Today, I research coffee as my job, which helps- we’ll get to that in a moment. But I’m also a lover of history, particularly the history of the things we eat and drink. The past reveals so much about us: why we eat the things we eat, what we value and reject, what we love and what we hate. So, let’s start at the beginning.

The Discovery of Coffee: The Energy-Giving Drink

Coffea arabica, the species of coffee human beings first discovered and consumed, grows in only one place: the lush mountain forests that cover what is now Southern Ethiopia and South Sudan. People didn’t keep written records of the discovery and earliest use of coffee, so we have only oral history to rely upon. The most commonly told tale is of a goatherd named Kaldi, who was letting his goats munch on the forest’s shrubs. At some point, he noticed his goats acting differently- they were frolicking and playing more than usual, even dancing. Investigating further, he saw they were feeding on little red berries from a waxy-leaved bush, and being courageous, Kaldi decided to try some himself. Soon he was frolicking and dancing right along with the goats. A passing monk saw the scene, and deduced that the berries had caused the energetic outburst of Kaldi and his flock. Gathering some of the fruits himself, the monk used the stimulating property of the berries to keep him awake during his long prayerful nights. Coffee had been discovered.

This origin tale, like most myths, doesn’t qualify as history. But what myths do is get to the heart of things- they reveal what we think is important, our deepest values and principles. And, clearly, the most important thing about coffee for the goats, for Kaldi, and for the monk was energy. The coffee fruit seemed to be a magical source of power- quite different from food or wine. Coffee made the goats frolic, made Kaldi dance, and made the monk wakeful. The Kaldi mythos tells us what was important to the ancient Ethiopians about coffee: and that important thing was energy.

We get our first written records of coffee a few hundred years later, when the seeds of the coffee plant had made their way to Yemen, just across the Red Sea from Ethiopia. The ancient Yemeni scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri wrote the very first recorded history of coffee, and noted it had been brought to Yemen by the Sufi mufti Jamal-al-Din al-Dhabhani. Al-Jaziri even gave us the reason: “(al-Dhabani) found that among its properties was that it drove away fatigue and lethargy, and brought to the body a certain sprightliness and vigour.” Clearly, these men saw in coffee the same thing Kaldi had- stimulation, wakefulness, and energy.

Adopting a Healthful Habit

Coffee soon developed another reputation as well. Our first European report of coffee comes from Leonhard Rauwolf, a German botanist and physician who visited Yemen in 1573. He described coffee as “A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful.” Rauwolf didn’t mention energy, but he did mention health. Coffee in Yemen and larger Arabia developed a reputation as a healthful beverage, due at least in part to its bitterness- bitter foods (and beverages) were always thought to be good, especially for digestion. Coffee gave you energy, but it was also good for you.

The Spread of a Social Activity

As coffee became a permanent part of the Arabian lifestyle, its use spread throughout the culture. And, as Rauwolf mentioned, coffee began to be consumed by people together, not in solitude at home. Soon, a special venue emerged called the maqha, a public place for drinking coffee. These early coffee-houses became social hubs in a culture that was previously home-centered- the very nature of coffee was seen as a driver for social togetherness and conviviality. Illustrations of maqhas of the period- we now call them coffee-houses- show people sitting in circles drinking coffee, discussing news, and enjoying each others’ company. Even today in Ethiopia, coffee is consumed ceremonially as a structured social event, where discussion and conversation are expected and encouraged.

Coffee wasn’t just an energy-giving, healthful drink, it was also the driver for an entirely new social space: the coffee house.

The Perception of Deliciousness

As coffee drinking and coffee houses spread, we begin to see the fourth of coffee’s properties to be celebrated- its taste. In Arabia, coffee was prepared lightly roasted and brewed like tea, but as coffee spread to Turkey it began to be roasted darker and brewed stronger. This was a flavor preference, and illustrations of the time show coffee as a delectable, enjoyable indulgence. By the time coffee was introduced to Europe, its flavor was legendary- my own personal favorite ode to coffee flavor comes from the libretto of the 18th century operetta we now call the Coffee Cantata, where the main character, a young girl named Lieschen, effuses:

Mm! how sweet the coffee tastes,

more delicious than a thousand kisses,

Sweeter still than muscatel wine.

Coffee, coffee I must have,

and if someone wishes to give me a treat,

ah, then pour me out some coffee!

-from ”Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht”, the “Coffee Cantata”, music by J.S. Bach, lyrics by Picander, 1735

There we have them: energy, health, social interaction, and flavor; the four elements of coffee that our historical ancestors valued. These were the attributes that made coffee beloved to the Ethiopian and Yemeni discoverers of coffee, and created the coffee culture that rapidly spread throughout the world. These were the things about coffee beloved by the coffee-house patrons of the Ottoman empire and the earliest coffee-drinkers of Europe.

But what about today? I mentioned earlier that I now do coffee research. One of these areas of study is consumer research- that is to say, the search to understand what drives peoples’ preferences in coffee. Several years ago, we at the Specialty Coffee Association supported a ‘focus group’ activity, asking a group of consumers to tell us why they loved coffee. In addition to interviews, we gave the coffee lovers scissors, glue, and a big pile of magazines, asking them to make personal, custom collages about coffee. A few hours later, we got a bunch of images like this one:

I loved these images; they gave us a glimpse into people’s hearts as well as their minds. “Dark Energy” the collage above said- expressing no doubt about what “energy” the consumer was talking about. It was the very same energy discovered by Kaldi and celebrated by the mufti al-Dhabhani. Hundreds of years later, the feeling was the same. Dark, thrilling, vigorous, caffeinated energy.

The rest of the collages differed depending on the person. Some depicted friends drinking coffee together. Others showed us a coffee-driven lifestyle built around health and sustainability. Still others cut out words like “rich”, “yummy”, and “pleasure”; evoking the delicious sensory experience of coffee drinking. In the end, we noticed the collages sorted themselves into exactly four familiar categories: some about energy, others about health, some about social interaction, and many about flavor. Four categories- just like the coffee drinkers of the 16th century.

Energy, health, flavor, and social interaction. After more than three decades in coffee, these four concepts ring true- they are the things we love about coffee, the reasons why coffee is the first thing we think about in the morning, and the reason people like me have chosen coffee to build a life around. And, it seems that this has been true since the very beginning.

“They butchered the meat, and divided it into parts; these they cut carefully up into smaller pieces, putting them on the spits, roasting them sufficiently, and then removing them when they were cooked. When they had done all this and had prepared the feast, they ate it, and every man had his full and equal share, so that all were satisfied.” -Homer, “The Iliad”, ca. 700 BC

(Pisthetaerus, speaking to the birds): “A crowd of bird-catchers sets snares, traps, sticky twigs and nets of all sorts for you; you are caught, you are sold in heaps, and the buyers finger you over to be certain you are fat. If they would just serve you up simply roasted that would be one thing; but they grate cheese into a mixture of oil, vinegar and spice, to which another sweet and oily sauce is added, and the whole is poured scalding hot over your back.” - Aristophanes, “The Birds”, 414 BC

The pointy stick was among early humans’ first hunting tools: in fact, the oldest weapon yet found is a sharpened wooden spear, dating to about 400,000 years ago. Spears could pierce and kill animals quickly and efficiently, allowing a hunter to keep a safe distance while pursuing his prey. Pair the sharpened stick with the technology of fire, and you have a perfect cooking system: the freshly-hunted animal can be suspended over the fire, cooking the animal on the very spear that killed it. Spit-cooking was invented in precisely this way- spears did double duty as weapons and cooking spits, and the skewered animal over the fire became one of the earliest cooking methods.

The invention of metallurgy during the bronze and iron ages improved weapon design considerably: simple pointed sticks evolved into swords, pikes, lances, and iron-tipped spears. Eventually, instead of cooking on the weapons themselves, people began designing special, sturdy metal skewers especially for cooking- and the iron roasting spit was born. Soon, instead of manually holding the spit over the fire, racks were designed to support the spits horizontally above the coals, and these could be rotated slowly to roast the meat evenly. Some of our earliest literature describes spit-roasting: Homer’s Iliad includes multiple references to feasts where meat is roasted on spits before a fire.

Though all meats could be spit-roasted, birds were especially well suited to the technique. A plucked bird is round in shape, and will roast unevenly in a pan or on a grill. But turn a bird on a spit, and its skin browns uniformly, basting the bird in its own rendered fat. In the ancient world, pigeons, pheasants, geese, ducks, partridges, and quail were all roasted on spits before eating; that is, until the quintessential roasting-bird was discovered. Enter the chicken.

The ancestor to the chicken is a red jungle fowl native to Southeast Asia, where it lives in the forests of Vietnam, Thailand, India and China. The bird was domesticated about 9000 years ago- some researchers believe that it was selected for its habit of fighting rather than for its meat. But before long, chickens were being bred for eating (not to mention eggs) and the domesticated chicken- Gallus gallus- spread throughout Eurasia. It was the ancient Persians of Iran who introduced chickens to the west- the Greeks and Egyptians both associated chickens with Persia. The Egyptians proved especially adept at breeding chickens, and baby chicks appear in hundreds of ancient hieroglyphs. Apicius, the author of the famous ancient Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria included a recipe for “Parthian Chicken”, referencing the Parthian empire of Iran. Clearly, to the ancients, chickens came from Iran.

Iran, therefore, seems to be the center of origin of our modern spit-roasted chicken. For one thing, the art of cooking on skewers has always been a big thing in Iranian culture- kabāb (کباب) is an elaborate cuisine based on meats, skewered on metal spits and swords, roasted over fire. Combine those skewers with ancient Iran’s central role in popularizing the chicken and you have a perfect confluence: spear, bird, and fire.

Spit-roasted chicken became popular anywhere chickens went, which was almost everywhere. Just like other birds, chickens were well suited to spit roasting: they are basically round in form, and once butchered have a hollow cavity through the middle to accommodate the skewer. So long as they are constantly rotated before the fire, they will cook evenly and thoroughly.

It turns out this rotation has a magical property. The part of the bird facing the fire is heated rapidly, causing the rich skin to release its fats. If the bird is turned, those fats drizzle and cling to the bird instead of dripping into the fire, effectively basting the bird with its own fat. As the bird rotates, the meat transitions to the cool side (facing away from the fire) allowing it to absorb the heat gradually. Continuing its rotation, the skin faces the fire again, repeating the heating/basting/cooling/cooking process all over again. Rotate a chicken in front of a fire at just the right speed and in just the right direction, and you’ll have one of the most delicious foods in human history: golden brown on the exterior, with brittle, savory skin; juicy and unctuous on the interior. The spit-roasted chicken.

Pretty soon, spit-roasted chicken was everywhere, popular throughout Iran, the Middle East, Greece, and the Roman Empire. It wasn’t a commoner’s food- not yet- since live chickens were more important to poor people as egg layers. But for the wealthy, the spit-roasted chicken was the very definition of culinary satisfaction. During the middle ages, rich houses built giant fireplaces to accommodate roasting spits, which would be loaded with dozens of chickens to feed the household. These chickens would be salted, spiced, and basted while they cooked: imagine the smell of several chickens broiling before an oak-wood fire! But how to keep these birds turning? A special job was invented in elite Medieval households, called the “turnspit”, a person (usually a young boy) whose sole responsibility was to keep the roasting spits turning. It was a hot and tedious job- but important: a good chicken must be constantly rotated before a fire if it is to transcend into greatness.

The job of a turnspit wasn’t a pleasant one, so eventually medieval inventors attempted to automate the process. One early attempt was to employ a dog instead of a boy: the dog was kept in a cage like a hamster-wheel and kept running to power the spits. Other inventions relied on clockwork springs which could be wound up, or propellers which captured the updraft from the chimneys to power the spits. Medieval images of kitchens often feature extremely complex and sophisticated spit-roasting devices.

The spit-roasted chicken continued its steady rise of popularity, particularly in France. It was a food of the nobility and an object of desire: a well-roasted chicken was hearty, tasty, and a symbol of wealth. During the renaissance, numerous still-life painters chose a spit-roasted chicken as their subject, depicting them as a luxurious and decadent foodstuff. Eventually, the roasted chicken got its most famous fan, the Emperor Napoleon himself. According to biographers, Napoleon only liked to eat three things: spit-roasted chicken, cutlets, and coffee. (My kind of guy!) He was known to travel on horseback with three roasted chickens wrapped in paper in his saddlebags, available for munching whenever the mood struck. At this time, chickens were still food for the rich, and many observers found Napoleon’s roast-chicken addiction offensive and garish.

Over time, poultry farming techniques became more efficient, and chicken prices began to come down. Meanwhile, automatic spit-roasting technology allowed for the creation of large, multi-spit roasting ovens, which in turn facilitated the creation of a new kind of business: the French rôtisserie. “Rôtisserie” simply means “roasting-shop”, a place selling roasted meats- especially chicken- to the public. Before the rôtisserie, you needed your own fireplace and spit to roast chicken. The roasting-shop, on the other hand, allowed people without such equipment to enjoy spit-roasted chicken anytime. Though the first rôtisseries appeared in the late middle ages, they really came into their own during the 19th century, when falling poultry prices made roast chicken accessible to the emerging middle classes. In this way, the rôtisserie became an example of the benefits of the industrial revolution: efficient chicken production coupled with mechanized cooking made a formerly elite dish available to almost everyone.

It was this version of the rôtisserie- the chicken roasting-shop- that made it to the United States. Americans had cooked on spits long before the arrival of the rotisserie, of course, but the unique shop featuring a large mechanized rotating-spit oven seemed like an exciting French innovation. The first American rotisseries were branded as French-style places, and were shops where you could buy roasted meat to take home or have them roast your own bird for a small fee. Eventually, Americans started calling the rotating spit itself “rotisserie”, confusing the machine and the shop. No matter: the rotisserie made good chicken and was popular. Appliance manufacturers began making home kitchen-sized “rotisserie ovens” to cook chickens at home.

The next big innovation in spit-roasted chicken didn’t happen in Iran, Rome, or Paris, but in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. In 1985, entrepreneurs Arthur Cores and Steven Kolow sought to open a restaurant. Noticing that people liked the convenience of fast food but considered it “junk”, the two businessmen opened “Boston Chicken”, a takeout restaurant serving French-style rotisserie chicken and homemade side dishes. Their bet paid off: in contrast to fast food, simpler, healthier food was popular among the middle class families of the Boston suburbs. Before long, Boston Chicken outlets began opening all over the United States, selling fresh spit-roasted chicken to the masses. (But it wasn’t only Boston: in my own hometown of Encinitas, California, two Iranian immigrants opened Chicks Natural, a rotisserie chicken place which emphasized its healthy menu.) The success of the rotisserie chicken takeout restaurant, led by Boston Chicken, rocked the restaurant world: they operated efficiently, like a fast-food place, except they sold slightly upscale, healthier food instead of burgers and fried chicken. Nobody had ever seen such a phenomenon, and food industry observers heralded the trend, calling it “fast casual”. By the mid-90s, Boston Chicken was a juggernaut, opening 1,200 locations nationwide.

Unfortunately for Boston Chicken, supermarkets took notice of their success. Sensing an opportunity, Kroger Supermarkets and Costco both introduced rotisserie chicken in their stores in 1994, placing visually appealing slowly-turning chickens in full view of the customers. Furthermore, they sold the roasted chickens at a loss, figuring that customers would buy a bottle of wine or a box of cereal while picking up a chicken for dinner. They were right: consumers loved the inexpensive, tasty rotisserie chickens and bought them like crazy. Costco has now been selling rotisserie chickens for 30 years, always at the same price: $4.99 each. In 2024 they sold 137 million of them. Boston Chicken, after trying to rebrand itself as Boston Market to defray the damage, was annihilated by the competition. They now have fewer than 20 stores remaining.

Though the supermarket rotisserie chicken has been turned into a ubiquitous commodity, there is still culinary life in the old bird. My own favorite subset of the rotisserie chicken style is the Middle Eastern version, a direct descendant of the ancient Iranian roast chicken. I already mentioned Chicks Natural, an Iranian-owned rotisserie chicken place in San Diego, but this shop is not unique: Southern California has dozens of Middle Eastern-style rotisserie chicken places, like the Lebanese-style Chicken Maison in Los Angeles and Pasadena’s Armenian-style Zankou Chicken. All of these derive from the Iranian model of citrus-marinated, deeply spiced chicken, tinged orange-yellow with paprika and turmeric. In my view, this is the perfect expression of rotisserie chicken. Is it an accident that Iran and the Middle East was the original homeland of the spit-roasted chicken?

Other magnificent rotisserie chicken traditions are from Paris (the Bastille open-air market is the classic place to get French-style rotisserie chickens) and Peru (apparently a Swiss immigrant who owned a chicken farm near Lima started selling rotisserie chickens). But to me, the magnificence of the rotisserie chickens is in its origin- in the spear-hunted birds of our distant ancestors.

My grandfather, born Vincenzo Giuliano, grew up the child of Sicilian immigrants in Wakefield, Massachusetts. It was a solid and loving family, but soon, tragedy: when my grandfather was 8, his father died of heart failure, leaving him, his mother, and six siblings without a breadwinner. A few years later, the Great Depression hit. Before long, my grandfather left school to go to work. He was a teenager, first finding employment as a grocery clerk, but later landing a job as a fabric cutter at the Leopold Morse Clothing Manufacturing Company of Boston, Massachusetts. Leopold Morse was a Jewish company, a part of what is known in Yiddish as the “schmatta business"- the trade in cloth and clothes. Fabric cutting was a dangerous occupation: giant blades and power saws were used to trim the cloth into patterns for sewing, and the cutters had an industrial-revolution swagger and camaraderie. Though my grandfather was the odd man- a Sicilian Baptist in a Jewish sweatshop- he was embraced and included by the other men; a gesture he never forgot as he grew older. Over time, he learned the clothes-making trade: how to turn a design into a pattern, how to use the pattern to cut hundreds of pieces of cloth at a time, how to assemble those pieces, sewing them into perfect pants, dresses, and shirts. It was an industry of chalk lines, paper cutouts, cloth forms, steel blades, iron sewing machines, and stacks and stacks of cloth. He was lucky to have the work- it was the great depression after all- and he was luckier still to be learning a trade.

My grandfather- standing, far right in all white- with the other fabric cutters of the Leopold Morse Clothing Manufacturing Company of Boston, Mass. 1934.

Anyway, he must have developed his coffee habit during this period. Coffee was the lifeblood of the industrial revolution and its factories: it kept workers alert while operating the almost comically hazardous heavy equipment. The so-called “coffee break” was invented around this time- coffee drinking with one’s coworkers promoted teamwork and focus, and raised flagging spirits in the punishing environment of the sweatshop. My grandfather adopted the name Jimmy, and except for a temporary period of working in shipyards during World War II, he became a lifelong clothes-maker. During the postwar economic boom, he took a risk and opened his own small clothing factory in Los Angeles. By all accounts, he was a kind and focused boss. The (male) fabric cutters and the (female) sewers included family members and local workers alike, and he treated them with respect. I’m told he drank an shocking amount of coffee during this period: it was his beverage of choice at meals, his workday reviver, and his constant companion.

By the time I knew him, his name had changed again: it became nannu, Sicilian for grandfather. I was nannu’s second grandchild (my cousin Vince, his first, was named after him). Nannu suffered his own nearly fatal heart attack in 1973, after nearly 40 years of hard work, and he retired. His illness made his tall frame thin and weak, but he remained kind and charismatic. He and my nanna moved into a small apartment behind our house, and I began spending time with them after school.

Neither my nannu’s retirement nor his heart attack reduced his coffee consumption one bit. He was a legendary coffee drinker- everyone knew how much coffee he drank. He would make a pot in the morning, and drink the whole thing during breakfast, with biscotti or cereal. He then made a second pot, which was poured into a red-and-yellow tartan Thermos, just like the one at the Smithsonian. This coffee-filled Thermos with the coffee-cup lid was his companion for the rest of the day. He carried his coffee with him- the vacuum-insulated bottle kept his coffee hot (or cold during the summer months, when he drank iced coffee instead).

On weekends, I would run the few steps to nannu and nanna’s house, just behind ours. My glorious grandmother would feed me biscotti and milk (with a splash of coffee on occasion), while nannu would plan our day. We might work in the yard (my job was picking weeds), but more often we did errands- visiting hardware or grocery stores, picking up little things the family needed. Between errands, we would “pay visits”. My grandparents had a vast network of family and friends in the area- mostly Sicilians from Wakefield who relocated to California during the war- and a major priority was visiting friends and family to keep in touch. I loved these visits: greatest-generation houses were invariably neat and smelled good, and they would offer cookies or cake to a polite kid like me. The adults drank coffee and visited, while I sat still and listened.

As we drove between errands and visits, the red-and-yellow-tartan Thermos sat on the front seat of the car, right between nannu and me. And every once in a while, nannu would spot a park bench, his favorite place for a coffee break. He would pull the car over, and we would trundle to the bench, his leathery hand holding mine. We perched on the wooden slats, nannu drinking coffee and revealing the napkin-wrapped biscotti he kept hidden somewhere. These moments- sitting beside him drinking coffee on a park bench- are my most treasured childhood memory. The feeling warms me still- the coffee, the leathery hand, sitting quietly in the park next to an old man. I could smell the coffee on his breath as we talked, and I would watch as he poured coffee from the red-and-yellow tartan Thermos into the little cup.

I can’t remember exactly what we talked about. He must have told me stories- he was a good storyteller, and I know a lot of things only he could have imparted to me. I know about how he played trombone with the town band as a teenager, and I know that his cousin Fat the Barber had a haircut shop on Water street in Wakefield. I know he loved his wife- my nanna- and I know that he loved me.

From time to time, I wonder if this is why I chose coffee as my career. Nannu died when I was 20- I was already working as a barista but was pursuing a path as a musician at the time. Among the last words nannu said to me- while he was sick in the hospital- were “keep playing music, you’re good at it.” But it turned out music wasn’t for me, coffee was. I suppose he would have been happy about this turn of events, and I suppose he would have loved the coffee I would have brought them. I imagine he would have brewed it and carried it with him in his Thermos.

After nannu’s death, we lost track of his red-and-yellow-tartan Thermos. It might have gotten sold or given away- maybe it’s the one they have in the Smithsonian, I don’t know. My relationship with coffee is different than his- I don’t drink nearly as much of it, for one thing, and I pay attention to its particulars in a way that he did not. But I do love coffee, maybe just as much as he did. I love how coffee makes people connect- in coffee breaks at factories, at coffee shops on the way to work, during afternoon visits between friends at home or at the café. The bittersweet liquid stimulates us and makes us alert and chatty, and it tastes good, but it also bonds us in a way that other drinks don’t. Nannu knew this- coffee connected him with his wife over breakfast, his friends during visits, and with his grandson while sitting on a park bench. Our coffee breaks weren’t just for him, they were for us.

A few years ago, I got my own red-and-yellow-tartan Thermos, and though I don’t drink nearly the volume of coffee my nannu did, I pour my second brew into the Thermos to keep it warm (or cold) for the rest of the day just as he taught me. I’ve even pulled over to a park bench once or twice, for a coffee break.

My red-and-yellow-tartan Thermos reminds me of those moments with my nannu, when we sat together in the park. I treasure that reminder. But it also teaches me about how powerful coffee can be as a connector between people. Though most of us begin drinking coffee for the caffeine and and eventually fall in love with the flavor, the reason we keep drinking it is because it connects us in a very special way.

I like to think that the Smithsonian knew all this when they added a beat up working-class red-and-yellow-tartan Thermos to their collection. I like to think that there is a curator somewhere whose grandfather had a coffee Thermos too, and understands it not only as a cultural artifact, but as a reminder of the human connections it fostered.

Believe it or not, the story of pâté begins with bread dough. And meat. It was the ancient Egyptians who first put meat inside a bready crust before baking, and the Greeks picked up the technique from them. The Greek word for the food was artokreas, which literally means “bread-meat”. The Romans, imitating Greek food as they always did, made artokreas too, but they made an extra discovery: meat cooked inside a sealed bread crust- like a pie- would last longer than meat alone; the sealed crust protected the meat from airborne bacteria. In another post, I called this kind of meat-inside-crust “preindustrial tupperware”. The Romans appreciated the preserving aspect of the crust so much they started making inedible, rock-hard crusts specifically for encasing meat. The point of Roman artocreas was the meat inside; the crust was just the package. This inedible-crust pie spread throughout the Roman empire, and eventually took on a different name: it became called pāstam, which basically means “in dough”. (Pasta just means “dough” in Latin and Italian- a confusing thing for English speakers who conflate “pasta” with spaghetti).

In Medieval France, the word for the dish was derived from Latin pāstam- they called the dish pâté. (Elsewhere spiced-meat-in-a-crust took on similar names- the Cornish meat pie called the pasty, the Dutch pasteitje meat pie, and the Jamaican patty meat pie all descend from the Roman pāstam).

The good thing about the pāstam was that its crust was its baking vessel and also its storage container. In an era where crockery was expensive, disposable flour-based cookware was a good thing. But as pottery became cheaper and more ubiquitous, it made less sense to bake things in crust just to be thrown away afterward. In France, they began to bake their pâtés in earthenware pots instead of flour crusts, and they called the new dish pâté en terrine, “terrine” meaning “earthenware”. (Literally, the phrase means “dough in earthenware”, but the point was the meat inside. French cooks also kept making crusted pâté, however, and they called that dish pâté en croute, which literally means “dough in crust”. Language is so weird sometimes. )

So, in France, the word pâté had come to mean a medieval-style spiced baked meat dish, and the terrine version became the most popular. Essentially, the earthenware-case (the terrine) had replaced the crust-case. But the focus was still the meat inside.

We’ve gotten this far and not discussed the meat- which is the whole point of this dish. In a pre-refrigeration era, preserving meat was a really big deal. If you slaughtered a pig, you were suddenly confronted with a large amount of pork which would spoil in a few days. It was a race to preserve the animal: a pig’s belly would be smoked as bacon, its hind legs salted into hams, and you could make salami and other charcuterie by salting and drying. French pâté en terrine was an alternative way to preserve meat- by spicing, salting, and cooking the meat in a lidded terrine, maximizing shelf life. Eventually, the French realized that if you used plenty of fatty pieces, the fat itself would melt and, when it cooled and solidified, further protect the meat (a technique called confit). All of this came together in pâté en terrine; meats were finely chopped, mixed with spices and salt, placed in an earthenware lidded pot, and slowly cooked to render the fat and sterilize the meat. Voilà!

The French being French, they embraced pâté en terrine and brought it to amazing artistic heights. Game birds like pheasant and duck were often made into pâté en terrine, also rabbit and venison versions were common. Internal organs- especially liver- were usually included for both flavor and thrift. Goose liver pâté- the famous pâté de foie gras, became justly celebrated for its incredibly rich flavor. But the workhorse of the pâté family was the “country-style” version, pâté de campagne, made of pork and pork liver. Unlike wild game- a food associated with the wealthy- pâté de campagne was food for farmers: a slaughtered pig, chopped coarsely and cooked with salt and spices, including the liver, all in a terrine. What a perfect, economical, tasty food. It became something of a French national dish, perfected over generations, with many regional variations. The spices were especially important- using medieval-style spices like pepper, clove, nutmeg, and ginger (known as quatre épices, “four spices”) balance the richness of the pork and mineral-tasting liver. It was a food your grandmother would make at her house in the country, perfect for a lunch served with pickles and good bread.

But it wasn’t all country picnics and grandmothers- If you’re talking about history, you’ll eventually encounter the spectre of war. Napoleon Bonaparte himself was known to say “an army marches on its stomach”, a truism that underscores the importance of food in the military. Napoleon was so committed to the subject that in 1795 the French Army offered a prize of 12,000 Francs to whomever could discover an improved method of preserving food. Chef Nicolas Appert, already familiar with the conservation of food in terrines, began to experiment with sealing food in containers and heating them in a water bath in an oven- exactly the method French cooks were using to make pâté en terrine. Eventually, he found that by excluding all air from the food in ceramic pot or glass jar, sealing it with a cork stopper, binding it with glue and steel wire, and cooking in a water bath, he could preserve a food for years. Appert had invented the process we now call “canning”, and he won the 12,000 Franc prize on the condition he share his invention with the world. Appert had perfected a concept invented by the Romans and handed down to the French; that cooking something in a sealed container preserves it. Appert demonstrated his method using all sorts of meats, fruits, and vegetables. Unfortunately, history does not record whether he made pâté.

Canning got more and more popular in France (and the rest of the world) in the 19th century, and in 1907, an enterprising grocer named Jean Hénaff set up a canning company in the French region of Bretagne to commercialize the produce of the region. Seeking a product to produce in the wintertime when crops were unavailable, Hénaff hit upon the idea of canning pâté. He produced a delicious pâté de campagne made of chopped pork, liver, and spices, and put it in a steel can- the pâté had traded its container once again, this time from a terrine to an indestructible can.

Hénaff’s canned pâté was a hit with the public. And, the army noticed- by 1920 Le Pâté Hénaff was included in all French army field rations. Soldiers loved it, and they brought their canned-pâté habit everywhere they were deployed. This caught the attention of the American canned-meat company Hormel who produced a U.S.-friendly version of chopped pork in a can- leaving out the liver to suit American tastes. But nobody knew the word pâté in America- so they needed a name. Hormel launched a contest, and a French-American actor named Kenneth Daigneau hit upon a winner by contracting “Spiced” and “Ham” into “Spam”.

World War II popularized canned pâté in both its Hénaff and Spam forms. In Europe, French troops distributed cans of Hénaff pâté to villagers suffering from wartime famine, while American troops shared their Spam with locals in the Pacific Islands and East Asia. Both products remain popular today all over the world.

Meanwhile, non-canned pâté spread everywhere that French cuisine did, most notably in the French colony of Vietnam. There, it took on the form of pa tê, made of finely chopped liver, flavored with spices, fish sauce, and soy sauce. Pa tê is considered an essential component of banh mi sandwiches, and is a popular breakfast food in Vietnam. Another memorable Vietnamese descendant of pâté is chả quế, a kind of pâté de terrine spiced with cinnamon.

I love to make pâté at home. A simple chicken liver pate can be made in a food processor, but my favorite pâté de campagne requires a meat grinder. It’s worth the trouble though- homemade pâté is a joyous lunch or supper. Recipe below.

Pâté de Campagne

500g pork shoulder

250g chicken liver or pork liver

250g pork belly

4 shallots, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

handful chopped parsley (perhaps 1/2 cup)

1/2 cup brandy or cognac

1 teaspoon quatre épices (made of equal parts powdered clove, ginger, nutmeg and white pepper)

1 tablespoon sugar

25g kosher salt (about 5 teaspoons)

2.5g pink curing salt (optional, just to preserve color, about 1/8 teaspoon)

1 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs

1/2 cup heavy cream or milk

2 eggs

terrine or loaf pan

Cut up the meats into 1-inch chunks and toss with the salt, sugar, curing salt, quatre épices, brandy, parsley, shallots, and garlic. Let marinate in the refrigerator at least 2 hours or overnight; the flavors will meld and the meats will firm up from the salt. When you’re ready to grind the meats, set them in the freezer for about 30 minutes to firm up even more- you want them just on the verge of freezing.

Set up your meat grinder. I use a metal meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer, which I also put in the freezer (making everything ice cold makes grinding meat much easier). While everything is cooling, mix together the breadcrumbs, eggs, and cream or milk- this is a panade that will bind the coarsely chopped meats together.

When the meat is chilled, grind it on the coarsest setting of the grinder, alternating pork, belly, and liver as much as you can. When it’s all ground up, add the panade and mix thoroughly. That’s your pâté! Spray the interior of a terrine, loaf pan, (or baking dish) with cooking spray and spoon in the meat mixture, spreading it out evenly. Put some aluminum foil right on top, and add the lid if you’re using a terrine. Prepare a bain marie by putting your loaf pan or terrine in a larger pan of water- the water should get as far up the sides of the terrine as possible. Put the whole thing in a 350 degree oven for about 2 hours, checking the internal temperature of the terrine pretty often. You’re looking to get the pâté to 150 degrees F, no hotter than 155. Remove from the oven.

The next step is not critical but will improve the presentation of the dish: find some way to put some weight on the top of the pâté. I use an identical loaf pan which I weigh down with a water bottle. Refrigerate the pâté overnight. The weight will compact the meat, making it cut cleaner, but will maintain tenderness.

The next day, remove the pâté from the terrine or loaf pan, and cut it in 1-inch slices, like meatloaf. I wrap each slice separately and freeze what I won’t eat in a week. This pâté freezes GREAT and is fantastic to have on hand for a quick charcuterie board.

Serve with French mustard, cornichon pickles, and crusty bread.

Saltiness in Coffee

Anyone who’s familiar with coffee descriptor culture (those label notes!) knows that there are many, many tastes and aromas in coffee. But saltiness? Yep. Believe it or not, right there on the lower left hand side of the Coffee Tasters’ Flavor Wheel, in bright white type, is “salty”. What this means is that the trained descriptive analysis panel who developed the terms used in the the wheel detected saltiness in several of the 100+ samples they tasted for the project.

That doesn’t mean salty taste is common in coffee. In fact, when we published the wheel, I- who had tasted coffee professionally for 20 years by that point- was skeptical about the existence of saltiness in coffee.

But my colleagues disagreed, pointing out that it is detected most commonly in dry-processed coffees. That’s interesting, but still: how could it be? The coffee plant doesn’t have salt in it! Turns out I was wrong about that. Well, probably wrong. Truth is, the scientific literature is extremely sketchy about the amount of salt that exists in coffee beans. What scientific research I could find wasn’t focused on salty taste, but on dietary sodium, and it seems there is a detectable amount of sodium in coffee. And, given that sodium chloride is the most common form of sodium in plants, it’s probably in the form of salt. There is potassium in coffee too, and potassium chloride tastes salty as well. One paper I found shows wide variations in sodium and potassium content of coffee, which supports the notion that saltiness might be an occasional phenomenon in coffee. Most often, the sodium and potassium in coffee are below the threshold of human perception for saltiness- but sometimes it seems to be high enough to perceive. Though far from conclusive, what I’ve found suggests that it’s plausible that coffee sometimes has enough salt to taste.

But regardless of whether the mechanism is clear, most every coffee taster I’ve met has perceived saltiness in coffee at some point. And most associate it with “natural” coffees, the kind of coffees that are dried in their fruit before milling. My colleague Mario actually documented the salty taste in his PhD research, and associated it with some kinds of microbial activity in coffee processing. His hypothesis is that the microbial activity consumes certain flavor precursors, revealing the pre-existing underlying saltiness of the coffee. I’ve heard others say they could taste the saltiness of a coffee when they make espresso with certain dry-processed coffees; something about concentrating coffee’s flavor in the espresso machine magnifies the saltiness.

All this is to say, I’ve let go of my skepticism. I’ve tasted salty coffees myself, and I’ve talked to enough sensory scientists and coffee tasters to convince me that it’s not an illusion- coffee saltiness is real and it’s very plausibly from traces of sodium chloride and potassium chloride in the coffee beans themselves. The next question- is that a good or a bad thing?

Salt in Your Coffee Brew

Though coffee and salt sound like a terrible combination, it turns out that salt’s unique sensory function can have a positive effect on coffee flavor. Scandinavians have known this for generations- it’s common there to add a pinch of salt to one’s coffee. This makes sense when you consider the phenomenon I mentioned in my earlier article on saltiness- salt can mask bitterness and sourness, while enhancing sweetness in foods and beverages. This is a good thing in coffee (and most foods). Adding just the right amount of salt to coffee- just a tiny bit- will brighten and sweeten its taste. This also raises the tantalizing idea that some coffees might seem exceptionally sweet because of their natural salt content, at least partially. Anyway, the right amount of salt seems to be about a half a gram per 1000ml, which is like 1/6 of a teaspoon, but your results may vary according to the coffee. Try it and see!

As I mentioned before, salty taste is one of the most under-studied phenomena in coffee. (Even within the subject of sensory mechanisms of coffee, which is under-studied itself!). Any food scientists within the sound of my voice take note- we’re still wondering about the mysterious, occasional salty taste in our coffees.

The reason for this goes back to the evolution of life itself. Life on Earth appeared during the Archean era, perhaps four billion years ago, when our planet was almost completely covered in water. A few billion years later, the first animals began to appear, swimming in those same seas. Earth’s oceans are salty since sodium chloride in the Earth’s crust- sodium chloride is the chemical name for table salt- dissolves easily in water. Salt is the the part of Earth’s crust that has become part of the sea. And, since animals evolved in the salty oceans, we are salty too. Animal bodies rely on salt for nerve function (the electrical impulses of our nervous system are conducted by sodium ions), not to mention fluid regulation. When animals first emerged from the ocean and walked on land, we brought the salt of the sea with us, inside our bodies: we literally carry a reminder of our marine evolution with us in our veins.

But this blood-salt must remain in balance: too much salt and cellular osmosis is upset, and can throw our whole system off, causing organ failure. Too little salt and our nervous system ceases to function entirely. Like all animals, our bodies are constantly managing the level of salt in our tissues- we excrete salt when we have too much, and absorb it when we have too little. That’s relatively easy for fish, who literally swim in the stuff. On land, it’s another matter.

Some animals, the carnivores, evolved to eat other animals. When this happens, they consume the salt of the other animal’s body; therefore, carnivores don’t need an extra salt source. In fact, they more often get too much salt. Herbivores, on the other hand, don’t get much salt in their diet at all- plants don’t use salt in their tissues and don’t accumulate it. This means that herbivores- animals that eat only plants- must get salt from elsewhere: by sipping brackish water or finding a “salt lick” in a rock outcropping. Omnivores like us need a source of dietary salt too- unless we’re eating an all-meat diet, we need salt to keep us in balance. For this reason, we omnivores developed the ability to taste salt, and a deep craving for it. When our blood-salt gets too low, we crave salty stuff. Cultures that depend on grains know all about this- a bit of salt on bread, or boiling pasta in salt water, or eating salted fish or pickles with rice makes everything taste better. It’s how we survive a grain-based diet; by supplementing salt. Scientists call this the appetitive salt-sense, and we have special receptors on our tongue just to detect tiny amounts of salt for this reason.

But we also need a mechanism to prevent oversalting ourselves- we must reject too much salt in food and water, to prevent us from salt-poisoning. To do this, we actually have another kind of salt-sensing receptor on our tongues, which detects large amounts of salt, preventing us from eating too much. This is called aversive salt detection, or ‘yucky saltiness’.

The result of these two competing senses- the appetitive and aversive salt tastes- creates what sensory scientists call an ‘inverted U-shaped liking curve’: we crave salt when there is none, we love moderate saltiness, but we hate too much salt.

How much is the right amount of salt? As you might imagine, this varies a lot. If you grow up eating a lot of salt, you’ll have a higher salt tolerance than a person who didn’t. Research shows that when someone is depressed, they crave salty foods more than when they are happy and content. Other studies have shown that people enjoy lower-salt foods when they eat with other people, but crave saltier foods when they eat alone. This is why recipes always say “salt to taste”- our desires for salt vary significantly according to our genes, our emotional state, and our physiological condition. When we get the balance of salt just right, we love it. Howard Moskowitz, one of the founders of sensory science, called this the “bliss point” in foods: it’s the place where everything seems right.

Salt as a Flavor Enhancer

One curious aspect of salt is that, besides making things salty, it seems to make food more delicious somehow. As Steve Sabicer put it in his recent article, “salt makes food taste more like itself.” This is true, but also confusing. How can this be? How can something taste more like itself?

Taste scientists have investigated this, and they report a few interesting phenomena. For one, all those electrolytic sodium ions seem to help taste receptors work; they are nerves after all, and the sodium ions may help them with chemical detection. This might boost taste, aroma, and flavor. At the same time, salt increases the perception of sweetness and umami tastes in human subjects, while at the same time masking bitterness and sourness. This means that a sprinkle of salt reduces unpleasant bitter and sour tastes, while enhancing sweetness and savoriness- a positive thing in most foods. Finally, salt has been shown to increase the perception of thickness and mouthfeel of a food- making a sauce feel richer and fuller. It’s an extremely fortunate circumstance, and cooks take full advantage of the effect: a great cook knows that finely controlling salt can make or break a dish.

The Great Processing Additive

Besides being delicious, salt is functional. Since too much salt can kill an organism, salting prevents bacteria, mold, and other pathogens from growing, an effective way to preserve foods. This works in high concentrations, like soaking meat in heavily salted water to make long-lasting bacon, ham, or corned beef, but it also works in lower concentrations: salting bread makes it resistant to mold and extends its shelf life. Though the discourse on “processed foods” often revolves around mysterious so-called “chemical additives”, the number one chemical additive in processed foods is salt. It is used in canned vegetables, tortillas, cured meats, cakes, breads, noodles, jerky, and snacks. It’s the most common and least expensive chemical preservative there is. It can have other functional attributes too- salt tightens curds in cheese and strengthens gluten in breads. Though people sometimes suspect processed food companies of using secret chemistry to make food ultra-palatable, they actually mostly focus on salt balance: the perfect amount of salt in a chip or on in noodle soup gets you to that “bliss point”, and food scientists know it. Chefs do the same thing: they focus on perfect “seasoning” in the kitchen, and seasoning always means “salt”.

Tasting Salt

Though most of us have tasted pure salt at some point, we rarely do it consciously. When I train tasters, I sometimes teach salt-tasting by preparing a solution of .1% salt in water- that’s a particularly appetizing concentration. You can try it yourself- if you have a good scale, just put 1g of salt in 1000 ml of pure water. The water won’t taste salty exactly, but it will taste good. Compare that water to pure water. This exercise will teach you how to recognize small differences in salt concentration, a key thing if you want to taste things better and more consciously. I promise- get better at tasting salt and your cooking will improve overall: you’ll start to understand the nuances of saltiness which are much different than dumping salt on popcorn or french fries.

Using Salt

I normally conclude my articles with a recipe. Today I won’t, but I will share a trick- what people call a “kitchen hack”. And it’s about salt. I do need you to get some materials together. First, a jar of some kind (I use a salt jar my Grandmother brought from Sicily, but you can use any jar or bowl really). Second, fill it with salt. Kosher salt is the best for this purpose, since its large grains make it easy to pinch, but you can use any kind. Third, get a batch of small spoons and put them in a glass right next to your salt jar (I use these little guys). These are your tasting spoons.

The next time you’re making a sauce, soup, or stew and you get to the part of the recipe that says “season to taste”, I want you to get out the above salt kit. This should happen near the end of cooking, when you’re just about to serve. The goal now is to get your food just to the “bliss point”. Use one of your spoons to taste the sauce, and try to estimate where on the liking curve your food is. Ideally, the food will have some saltiness- maybe from an ingredient- but still not be there yet. Take a pinch of salt between your fingers and add it to the sauce. Now, grab a fresh spoon (you have lots of spoons so you can’t be accused of double dipping) and taste again. Repeat the process: you’re trying to sneak up carefully on the bliss point, since it’s very difficult to reduce saltiness once you’ve added too much. Be patient and go slowly. At some point, you will hit an ideal spot. Bam!

Most chefs learn to do this process methodically, but TV and Youtube chefs rarely go into this detail- it’s too slow for TV. But if you take your time and learn to find the bliss point of saltiness, your food will get a lot better.

Salt is easy to love, and hard to master; but it’s the taste that speaks to our very beginnings. So it’s worth it.