Word: dish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Geeks in the Kitchen Whipping up a chocolate souffl?, right, is tricky, especially if you have no idea what soft peaks are. Enter the photo-rich blog Cooking for Engineers (cookingforengineers.com). Before mulling your own cider, making lasagna or baking pecan pie, check the site to see how a dish should look at each stage. Learn culinary mechanics as you go. Created as an engineer's personal recipe repository, the site now has a cult following. A highlight: clever diagrams that summarize the steps in a recipe in compact, printable charts...
...foreign minister Robin Cook declared the chicken tikka masala Britain's "national dish"; Collingham reports that the British consume 18 tonnes of it each week, accounting for a hefty portion of the $3.5 billion or so that they spend each year at Indian restaurants...
...Those who sneer at the chicken tikka masala for being inauthentic?and many do?would do well to read Collingham's lovely new book. Tracking down the origins of popular Indian dishes like the biryani, korma, vindaloo, and dhansak, she makes the surprising discovery that most of Indian cuisine is, in fact, a mongrel creation. As she shows, many of the dishes that seem most quintessentially "Indian" to Western palates are reworkings of Middle Eastern prototypes brought to India by immigrants and invaders. Over the centuries, Turks, Mongols and Persians rode down into India, bringing their love of meat...
...kebab, a mincemeat patty, is made with particularly fine meat because a toothless 18th century Nawab would otherwise not have been able to gnaw his way through it. If all these stories make you hungry, Collingham thoughtfully supplies several historically accurate recipes, ranging from the zard birinj, a rice dish eaten by the Mughal Emperor Akbar, to the Besan laddu, a sweet handed out to pilgrims at Tirupati, the most famous of Hindu temples. Although, as the author herself advises, you might want to stay away from the 12th century recipe for roast black rat from the court of King...
...While the first part of Collingham's book describes how many Indian curries came into being, the second part explains how the British Empire spread these dishes throughout the world, by creating the peculiar institution of the Indian restaurant. Almost every Indian who has gone abroad has wondered why the overwhelming majority of "Indian" restaurants in London are run by Bangladeshis; actually, Collingham writes, most Indian restaurants in Britain are run by highly enterprising immigrants from just one province in Bangladesh?Sylhet. Another odd feature of these Indian restaurants, says Collingham, is that "the food ... took on a life...