Meal 53: Egypt
For 12 millennia, people in what’s now Egypt have successfully built civilizations around agriculture in a virtually rain-free desert environment. While there’s plenty of evidence that they grew fruits and vegetables, the annual cycle of the Nile’s flooding made it much easier to grow plants that could thrive on their own in properly inundated soil — which means grains and legumes were much easier than relatively more fickle fruits and vegetables. So, it should be no surprise that our meal was ...
Meal 51: Dominican Republic
Another Thanksgiving weekend, another nosh in San Francisco! To go with the gorgeous weather, the calendar aligned on Dominican Republic, the second-largest country of the Caribbean. While the Bay Area is no stranger to foods from Spanish-speaking lands, there’s few Caribbeans around, so these dishes made for something more of a novelty here than they would have been in Dominican-immigrant-heavy New York. Thanks to the kind folks at Hattery, I had a big kitchen to discover the intriguing Dominican way ...
Meal 44: Cuba
A friend who’s been to Cuba suggested that “for many Cubans, food at the moment is state-issued ham sandwiches, which you could approximate with some layers of wet cardboard standing in for bread, and finely shaved erasers for the ham, all encased in a blister pack of clear cellophane.” Our guest Tennessee reported that by far the most disgusting food she’s had in her life was “street pizza” in Havana, during her time as a student there. Fortunately, we were able ...
Meal 43: DPR Korea
Nothing about making a North Korean meal is easy. First of all, it’s even hard to find someone from North Korea to talk to: estimates say that only 14,000 people have managed to escape the totalitarian state in the 59 years since the end of the Korean War, and there’s virtually zero Internet access within the country. Secondly, except for a particular noodle dish, most (South) Koreans aren’t really aware of which of the foods they eat originated across the DMZ. ...
Meal 39: Costa Rica
Our travels have taken us to Laura’s parents’ place on the shores of beautiful Lake Josephine on Anderson Island, Washington. How lovely to hit our one-year mark of Noshing, and make it 20% of the way through the nations, amongst the pine trees, outdoor, during a break in the rain! Costa Rican food, as I remember it from visiting there in eighth grade, is very simple and straightforward, with one distinctive aspect: Salsa Lizano. For a Tico, the colloquial name ...
Meal 32: Cape Verde
For some countries it’s tough to nail down which dishes to cook, but Cape Verde, a cluster of islands off the coast of Senegal, offers an unmistakable national dish. The cachupa is a stew based on dried corn and beans, and what goes in beyond that depends on your family history, socioeconomic status, and whether the rains came. To inventory the sorts of ingredients that typically go in a cachupa is to trace the extent of the Portuguese empire: corn, dry ...
Meal 31: Cameroon
For our first Nosh in DC, we teamed up with WFP USA to host the biggest yet, with over 25 people — just about none of whom Laura or I had ever met! — coming to experience a Cameroonean feast meal. It was quite the affair, with a buffet line, speeches before and after, a Q&A with our guests, a slideshow of prior Noshes, and a really powerful video about the amazing work WFP does that we hope to put ...
Meal 30: Canada
Laura is Canadian, Monday was her birthday, and we’re at the beginning of the C’s. That’s a recipe for a Canadian blowout party! For eight hours we fried, drank, and sang our way through the Great White North. We went through the better part of twenty pounds of potatoes, five pounds of cheese curds, a gallon of gravy, and every last bottle of wine in the house. Let’s be honest, this isn’t a collection of dishes you’d likely find on ...
Meal 27: Burundi
Starting with Burundi, six of the next eight countries alphabetically are African. I suspect I’m going to get to know some of the shop owners up around Franklin and Fulton, which is the best area I’ve found for the various starches, oils, greens, and other distinctly African ingredients that you just don’t find in the supermarket. That said, it’s amazing what you can find in supermarkets in Brooklyn, such as goat! But the one thing I couldn’t find anywhere was ...
Meal 24: Brazil
Brazil is a hugely diverse country both geographically and demographically. Well, first, it’s just huge, ranking #5 for both land area and population. The geography spans from the depths of the Amazon jungle to tropical shores (over 4,500 miles’ worth!) to temperate cattle-grazing lands. Its people come from all over, and of course brought their foods with them: Africans brought palm oil and okra, Europeans contributed pastry and cattle, the local lands provide manioc and all manner of fruit. (Also, ...