If, like me, you think of Christmas as a time for cookies, you ought to be grateful to the Germans because they invented that custom. German lebkuchen the Cadillac, or should I say the Mercedes Benz of spice cookies, was probably the first cookie traditionally associated with Christmas. Lebkuchen may also very well be the oldest form of cookie know to human kind. The first recorded reference to it appears in an 11th century manuscript at a German monastery, and if that's not old enough for you,

Most of us have an image of the first thanksgiving that we learned in grade school: of the Pilgrims sitting with the Indians at a large table with a white tablecloth celebrating the harvest together over a meal of turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. But research shows that the traditional depiction of the first Thanksgiving may not be altogether accurate. In fact, whatever happened at Plymouth 398 years ago, it may not have been the first Thanksgiving at all. There are no less than twelve

Contrary to conventional wisdom, putting together a Thanksgiving Day menu is not particularly challenging. After all, the fundamentals of the holiday meal are hardly open to debate. Sure, you may have a choice in how you’re going to prepare the turkey, but you’re probably going to have turkey. Similarly, cranberries will unquestionably be on the table. And when it comes to dessert, you’ll likely offer some sort of pumpkin treat. No, picking the menu for Thanksgiving is not the hard part. The

You’ve probably heard the old adage that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You might have thought the phrase was coined by a committee of nutritionists or the Food and Drug Administration, but the truth is it actually originated in 1944 as part of a marketing campaign launched by General Foods to advertise breakfast cereal. Thus, the second most important ingredient in the widespread popularity of breakfast cereal is advertising. (The most important is sugar.) Though some of today

Ready for a fish story? While cruising through Alaska's Inside Passage, I visited a salmon hatchery in Ketchikan - the salmon capital of the world - and renewed my respect for these persistent and tasty creatures. Though easy to prepare and extraordinary to taste, what is truly remarkable about salmon, I've discovered, is its life cycle. Completed against overwhelming odds by means not yet fully understood. Salmon start out in fresh water, migrate to salt water, and return to fresh water to

Just about every major holiday in America is associated with its own signature version of what Jonathan Barlett, author of The Cook's Dictionary and Culinary Reference, calls those "sugary confections that feed our sweet tooth, rot our teeth and lift our spirits." At Christmas it's the candy cane, on Valentine's Day it's the chocolate heart, for Easter it's Marshmallow Peeps and come Halloween it's candy corn. Though candy corn is available year round, 75% of its annual sales occur around

I’m sure you are familiar with Gouda cheese, arguably Holland’s most famous, accounting for over fifty percent of the total production of cheese in that country and these days as ubiquitous, even in this country, as Kraft singles. I too am familiar with the cheese and have been enjoying it all my life. But recently I discovered, upon visiting the Dutch city from which the cheese gets its designation, that for all these years I have been mispronouncing its name. The locals call it “how-da”, not

Long before it began asking, “Got Milk?” the Dairy Association used to tout milk as “Mother Nature’s most nearly perfect food.” The slogan always made sense to me, especially those days when after I got home from school my mother would fix me a tall glass of chocolate milk. Without the chocolate, milk was only nearly perfect. With it, it could not be improved. I was moved recently to think back on those memories and wonder, is chocolate milk really be just for kids? Chocolate made just for

Recently the Ritz, the most famous hotel in the world, reopened its doors after a $450 million renovation. Situated on Paris’ Place Vendôme, where dukes and princes used to live, the accommodation is no less palatial than any royal residence and those who are able to afford a room there (running as high as $25,000 a night) surely must feel like a king or a queen, which was the goal of the hotel’s founder, César Ritz. Ernest Hemingway was a regular guest who even took some of the credit for the

"A handful of couscous is better than Mecca and all its dust." So says a famous Moroccan proverb about almsgiving. The maxim cannot be tossed off as mere chauvinism about the tiny balls of dough that are Morocco's national dish. You don't have to be from Africa to appreciate couscous. The late Craig Claiborne, for example, called it one of the dozen greatest dishes in the world. Paula Wolfert, who 30 years ago wrote what is still, in my judgment, the definitive treatise on the subject, claimed