You either like hot lime or you don’t. Grace Kwan for Gastro Obscura Hot Egg Lime Juice Fizz From The Dispenser Soda Water Guide, c 1909 With a chatty style and goofy illustrations, Peters told readers to ignore the unhelpful advice of friends and family about the dangers of reducing. Food as fuel was the mantra. “Any food eaten beyond what your system requires for its energy, growth, and repair, is fattening, or is an irritant, or both,” she wrote. A sample lunch consisted of cottage cheese and a French roll (unbuttered). To resist the lure of eating, Peters urged her audience to regard all food as potential calories. The responsibility of watching one’s weight, she wrote, was a worthwhile but lifelong struggle. Diet & Health became the bestselling nonfiction book of 1922. Peters, who was a newspaper columnist as well as a doctor, became “the best known and loved physician in America.” It’s possible shearing cake evolved from caraway bread ( bara carawe), a buttermilk-enriched dough scattered with caraway seeds that also appears in traditional Welsh recipe books. Aside from using less sugar or honey and the omission of lemon zest, there is a strong resemblance between caraway bread and older shearing cake recipes. Both would have been made similarly to scones; creating breadcrumbs by rubbing bacon (or beef) fat and flour through one’s fingertips, then adding buttermilk (which gives shearing cake its slight yogurty aftertaste), caraway seeds, and honey. The cake gets a dusting of confectioners’ sugar. Jamie Ellis for Gastro Obscura There are many ways to prepare it: some people bake cheese into the pie crust, some slip it into the apple filling, some melt it on top of the pie, and others leave it on the side of the plate. Though in the United States, cheddar is the favorite, many types of cheese can be used. Recipes may call for Wensleydale, Roquefort, gouda, parmesan, or Gruyère. The ABC show Pushing Daisies featured an iconic scene in which Ned, owner of a restaurant called The Pie Hole, prepares an apple pie—with Gruyère in its crust—for his girlfriend’s aunts. More cheese, please. jeffreyw/CC BY 2.0 Don’t be fooled: This fruit has a smooth and nutty flavor. Forest and Kim Starr/CC BY 2.0 Most Desired Food: Peanut Butter Fruit

But the USA has laid claim to the iconic dessert, a process that was crystalized when a 1902 New York Times article lambasted an English writer for complaining that eating apple pie more than two times per week was excessive:There’s also a second, very different, version of Washington Pie, which was made primarily in bakeries in the Washington, D.C., area. This style—whose name likely stems from its place of origin—does involve pie crust, though it doesn’t eschew cake entirely. It was essentially a bread pudding made from leftover cakes, baked inside a double crust pie shell in a square tin. It was cheap, filling food, and provided a way for professional bakers to use up otherwise unsellable odds and ends. It’s hard to pinpoint the origin of that iteration, but it at least pre-dates the Civil War, according to newspaper records. The bread-pudding style of Washington Pie helped 19th-century bakers use up their scraps. Have sugar, pepper, salt, celery salt, grated nutmeg, and Worcester sauce handy so a customer may season his drink to suit his taste.” Turn off the heat and pour the tiger nut mix onto a plate. Let it cool for 20 minutes. Form 10 one-inch-diameter balls with your hands. Shape the balls into cones, and stand them straight up. SHAPIRO: Cecily Wong. She is co-author with Dylan Thuras of "Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide." Thank you for talking with us about it and for sending me these delicious things to try. The food that you make as a family tells your family story and your family history,” says Cann. When you see a recipe on a grave, “You can start to imagine the get-together … it definitely creates this imaginary space more than just the average headstone. Pictures don’t even tell a story in the same way that a recipe does.”

On Gastro Obscura, you’ll also find stories about the most awe-inspiring parts of the food world. They include a look at how the food snobbery of Babur, a 16th-century conqueror who once wept over a melon, profoundly influenced the development of some of India’s most famous dishes, as well as an exploration of why the bagel, the quintessentially Jewish breakfast offering, is actually a trendy, foreign food in Israel. I hope you love these stories as much as I do, and I hope they inspire you to see your daily bread as a gateway into our endlessly strange and complicated world. Cue the Russian Revolution. Under the restrictions and scarcities of the Soviet Union, pastila slowly faded away. “It wasn’t part of the necessary food groups,” says Goldstein. “It was hard enough for them to get basic foods to market, which they didn’t succeed in doing either.” Many of Russia’s traditional, unusual, or unique foods met the same fate. But recently, there has been a massive upswing of interest in recovering ancestral Russian recipes. A decade ago, my friend Stas took notice that the interest in restoring Russian foodways became mainstream. To him, it was especially poignant. “We always grew up thinking that a lot of our culture had been just completely obliterated,” he says. “Then there’s this wave of people unearthing really old recipes such as Belyov pastila. And so everybody’s like, holy shit, this is what this thing is supposed to look like.” Staff in period costume prepare tea and pastila at the Museum of Forgotten Flavors in Kolomna. The Washington Post / Getty Images Prominent in both bara carawe and cacen gneifo, caraway seed was an auspicious ingredient on Welsh farms. Brought to Wales by the Romans, the seeds were symbolic of a prosperous harvest and cited in old folk stories as a way to help keep lovers infatuated and as a mild anesthetic, perhaps due to their heady, aniseed-like flavor.

Hot-egg drinks were not the only popular choice. Soda fountains sold hot ginger ale and other sodas, which didn’t come from bottles or cans, but were made in-house from the fountain’s own syrups or extracts. They simply added cold soda water for cold sodas and hot water for hot ones. The October 1918 issue of Confectioners’ Gazette included this recipe for hot ginger ale: Combine the emmer flour, honey, yeast, and warm grape juice in a medium bowl. Mix the ingredients and knead into a ball. Set aside the bowl, and let the dough rise for at least one hour in a warm spot.

Recipes for sweet, scrappy cakes abounded in newspapers and baking pamphlets. The cooking guides did double duty of instructing American women on how to make the most of their leaner pantries while also boosting morale. A widely published bedtime tale from 1918, “ Uncle Wiggly and the Victory Cake,” which was syndicated in The St. Louis Star and Times, The El Paso Herald, and The Buffalo Enquirer, offered home bakers advice. “We must all help win the war,” part of the story reads. “And one way is to save sugar for the soldier boys. Make your cakes without so much sugar in them. Make them victory cakes. Put in cocoanuts or peanuts or something like that.” A vintage victory cake pamphlet offering 10 recipes that are “thrifty in every way.” Courtesy of The National WWII Museum The indigenous Mapuche were the first to cultivate the white strawberries, which they call kelleñ. In addition to eating them raw, the Mapuche would dry them like raisins, prepare them in fermented chicha, and use them for traditional medicines to combat diarrhea, dysentery, and indigestion, mainly using the calyx of the plant, wrote anthropologist Héctor Manosalva. The fragrant aroma of the strawberries was also used to ward off the devil, or weukufu, who was believed to be repelled by all things sweet in the local mythology. WONG: It's a persimmon from Japan. It's a dried persimmon. In the book, we call it a pampered persimmon because it has just a very, very nice life. Remove the pastila from the oven and allow it to cool completely before peeling away the parchment paper.In Rehovot, Israel, Ida Kleinman’s name will live on through her nut rolls. When visiting her grave, which bears the sweet recipe, her son, Yossi Kleinman, likes to hover nearby. Sometimes, a passerby might take note of the inscription and grin. Another might even take out a sheet of paper and write it down.

SHAPIRO: I think this cucumber gave its life for a good cause. Should we see what it tastes like while we're flavor tripping on miracle berries? Add the butter, water, milk, salt, and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir frequently, since you want to make sure the butter has melted and the sugar and salt have dissolved before it’s begun to boil. Auch Pad Thai, ein super- geniales Gericht aus Thailand hat seinen Weg in dieses Buch gefunden und ich verrate euch, dass es in Krabi mal den besten Pad Thai Stand auf dem Night Market gab. Ob dem immer noch so ist, weiß ich nicht, aber ein Versuch ist es wert. My main issue here is that I don't think the title of authors for Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is genuinely justified. I'm sure a whole lot of effort went into editing and compiling the book, so perhaps "edited/compiled by" would make the most sense. To me, the true authors are the people who wrote the original articles that make the bulk of the wonder within.Before I embarked on my quest, I wanted to understand the man behind the cake. How did a bishop with no apparent baking experience become associated with a classic cake? Steven Laurence Kaplan, a historian of French baking, says the legends surrounding the saint certainly played a part, but it was really French baking guilds that cemented the saint’s status. In the 1700s, when guilds strictly regulated the craft, a chapel dedicated to St. Honoré served as the headquarters of a Parisian baking fraternity, giving the saint serious name recognition among bakers. Twice a week] is utterly insufficient, as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished. Mir hat das Durchblättern und Lesen viel Spaß gemacht. Ich mag es, in mir fremde Kulturen und ihre Traditionen einzutauchen. Ich schätze 95 % der aufgeführten Gerichte würde ich nicht essen, aber in dem Buch geht es auch viel mehr um die Geschichte hinter der Mahlzeit. Zu ein paar Gerichten findet man dann aber sogar die Rezepte zum Nachkochen, aber das ist eher die Seltenheit.