Luigi dug up this great article — Devil’s Dung: The World’s Smelliest Spice — which reveals more about asafoetida than you could possibly ever have wanted to know. Lord but it is strange stuff to cook with, and yet I do like what it does for a dish. But I digress. Buried in a sidebar near the bottom of the page is a claim, complete with coy question mark, that silphium, most prized spice of ancient Rome, might be alive and well. The article recounts the history of silphium, and how it was believed to have gone extinct by the 1st century CE, so I won’t repeat that here. It also mentions the possibility that Cachrys ferulacea and ancient silphium are one and the same. 1 Personally, I have no idea, and I’m not even sure I know how one would know, but I’m intrigued. Thanks Luigi.
Nibbles: Cacao, Soil mapping, Rice terraces, Maize, Cereus
- “USDA’s Bourlaug International Science Fellows Program has partnered with non-profit and for-profit organizations to identify new agricultural techniques for cocoa cultivation and to control cocoa diseases.” And do some conservation and breeding, surely.
- Big shots call for a decent global digital soil map. Seconded.
- Cool photos of rice agricultural landscapes.
- Roasting maize, Mexico style. Oh yeah, there’s also a nifty new maize mapping population out.
- Peruvian apple cactus doing just fine in Israel.
Nibbles: Pickles, Oysters, Hops, Coconut crab, Korean cuisine, Ecuador ecotourism
- Pickling facts.
- Trouble for the French oyster.
- Grow-your-own hops.
- Saving the coconut crab.
- Korea launches website of traditional recipes. Looks great, but all in Korean, alas.
- Our friend Karen Williams’ work on agrobiodiversity conservation in Ecuador highlighted.
Counting calories conundrum
Regardless of how much raw energy is in the food, factors such as texture, cooking method and fibre content can all alter the number of calories your body is able to extract from it.
Reminding us that people eat meals, not ingredients. Via.
Nibbles: Water buffalo, Distillation, Salmon, Banana, Stem rust, Red rice
- Great photo-essay on the water buffalo.
- A renaissance of gin production in London. Cheers!
- Not bad photo essay on the salmon migration.
- Special issue of Ethnobotany Research & Applications on banana domestication.
- Afghanistan readies for Ug99. Because it doesn’t have enough problems already.
- Saving red rice. Note comment from Bhuwon.