Six on Food: Eat Like Royalty With This Cookbook From the Emperor Who Built the Taj Mahal; Politics on a Plate; Hoppin' John; Fairway and What We Mourn in a Store; Georgia’s giant dumpling; Japanese businessman spends $1.8 million on massive tuna
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"So what did Manriquea witness in the Shah Jahan’s chambers? A typical meal, served on gold plates, might have included thick, sometimes-leavened naan bread; Persian-inspired aash or soup; bharta or smoked mashed vegetables; meat kebabs; and pulao or zeer biryan, rice and lamb cooked on a low flame for hours until the lamb juice suffused the rice. Dried fruits and nuts, such as raisins and cashews, were common flavorings, but some of the more complex spice mixtures of contemporary North Indian cuisine were not. Decorations, from warq silver-coated rice to intricately colored desserts, were lavish. Everything that could be coated in sugar syrup, including savory kebabs and biryani, was. Even the water was high-end: The food was cooked in a mixture of rain water and water from the Ganges river, considered sacred by Hindus.
Some ingredients that we today consider typical of Indian food don’t appear in the Nuskha-e-Shahjahani. “The use of potato came in the later period,” says Husain, as did chillies and tomatoes. (There was no spicy butter chicken in tomato-based gravy during Mughal times.) Chillies were brought to India by the Portuguese, and used originally as a medical treatment. Love for their hot flavor, however, quickly spread, resulting in the chilli-heavy Indian cuisines we know today. By Muhammad Shah Rangeela’s reign in the early 1700s, chillies had become common in North Indian cuisine, and they remain so today."
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"Good luck offerings abound around the New Year, but few are as distinctly Southern as Hoppin’ John. In the United States, Hoppin’ John—a savory combination of rice, beans, and pork—has been ladled into Low Country dishes for centuries, becoming one of the country’s most iconic New Year’s Day suppers. And while mysteries persist concerning the origins of the catchy name, a few things are clear about its preparation and flavor.
According to most food historians, enslaved people in the antebellum South brought a rice preparation similar to pilaf (alternately called pilau, purloo, or perlo) from West Africa. In contrast to modern cooking methods, these rice dishes were made with everything tossed into one pot. First boiled, then drained, and finally set over the fire to steam, the broth, meat, and beans would flavor the robust rice by bringing together a melange of smoky, nutty, and umami into one hearty dish. Served with a side of greens (such as collard, turnip, or mustard) and a slice of cornbread, the combination exemplifies the ample yet unfussy comforts many look for in Southern fare.
Despite its simplicity, in the 20th century, Hoppin’ John became known as a food of fortune. Often served with collard greens, the dish cashes in on two prosperous symbols. Legend holds that the peas represent coins and the greens, of course, good ol’ American greenbacks (dollar bills).
Lucky or not, one of the enduring debates regarding Hoppin’ John has been about its modern flavor. As Robert Moss of Serious Eats points out, Hoppin’ Johns of yore neither used the black eyed peas nor the long grain rice that most recipes use today. Instead, red cow peas were the preferred bean and hand-harvested Carolina gold rice the staple grain. The hogs were heritage breeds, raised on local farms and slow-smoked to impart maximum flavor. Some argue that today’s breeds, which have been designed to withstand commercial production, suffer from a lack of flavor and texture. Those looking to capture the traditional taste should seek out small-scale producers growing heirloom varieties or smoking hogs using older methods."
"Fairway is one of those odd original New York institutions that grew up organically, on the sidewalk, unlike the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s stores that have competed with it in recent years, which were dropped down on the street from a retail empire headquartered elsewhere. No less a magus of social history than Simon Schama once wrote of Fairway that it if it were possible to award the congressional Medal of Honor to a food market, Fairway would already have won one for its service to appetite, and that its cheese department alone turned “Rabelaisian excess into a stationary New York festival of aroma, color and texture.”
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