Part of the fun of going to a new restaurant, or trying a new kind of food, is learning about new and exotic ingredients. This is especially true for Westerners eating Asian food, with its diverse culinary cultures and its whole new world of unfamiliar colors, flavors and textures.
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In the early years of the 20th century, as dairy and other food industries became larger and more concentrated, it became standard practice in America to pasteurize milk.
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Sugar cookies are among the simplest varieties of baked goods, but their simplicity carries with it a degree of elegance. The same basic recipe can be used with equal success at a children's birthday party or a more formal occasion, depending how the cookies are cut and decorated.
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Cakes are something of a challenge for new bakers trying their wings. When they work, they're wonderful, but there are far too many ways for them to not work.
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Cooks rely on breading to give their dishes a beautiful color, a satisfying crunch and a pleasantly toasty flavor. However, breading is also a way to protect delicate foods from overcooking, drying and toughening in the heat of your oven or skillet.
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Like eggs and raw chicken, ground beef -- and ground meat in general -- is a food that knowledgeable cooks treat with extra caution. It can easily become contaminated with bacteria, either at the processing facility or after you bring it home, and has a limited storage life in your refrigerator.
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For anyone who grew up reading the literature of previous centuries, gout has an old-fashioned ring to it, like consumption or "la grippe." Unfortunately, this painful and debilitating form of arthritis is still very much with us.
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Food allergies are chancy things. Sophisticated laboratory testing can analyze the antibodies in your system to determine not only which foods you might be allergic to, but which specific protein in that food. This is why allergy sufferers are sometimes triggered by one kind of nut, but not others.
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The sweet dumpling squash is one of the smallest of winter squashes, usually only a few inches in diameter and less than half a pound in weight. When ripe, they have an attractively variegated skin in shades of yellow and green or yellow and orange.
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Many vegetables are commonly consumed raw, as well as cooked. In general, raw vegetables are bright in color, juicy and fresh flavored. However, there are some vegetables that are seldom eaten raw. The potato is one of those.
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Corn syrup is an ingredient with many uses in the baker's kitchen. It is one of a class of sugars called "invert" sugars, which remain liquid rather than crystallizing. It also helps prevent other sugars from crystallizing, which is one reason it's often added to candy and frosting.
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Garlic is one of the world's favorite foods. It can be found in almost every major cuisine, lending its signature pungent flavor and aroma. However, appreciating garlic too exuberantly can have implications for your social life.
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Roasting pans and baking dishes are two closely related types of kitchenware. Often, they can be used interchangeably, with each performing the other's function. The difference between the two methods is more a matter of custom and tradition as opposed to anything physical.
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Pressure cookers are able to produce full meals in a much shorter time than conventional pots and pans. They do this by artificially creating a high atmospheric pressure in the pot, which allows the trapped water and steam to reach temperatures well above the normal boiling point of water.
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Garlic is one of the world's most popular ingredients, adding a pungent flavor to cuisines from around the globe. It consists of several small cloves, surrounded by papery skin and gathered into a bulb. Cooks appreciate its ability to grow in most climates, and its long-term storage ability.
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Cheesecakes are among the richest of all desserts, so potent that even the smallest of slices can be considered a substantial portion. Most are topped with fruit, to provide a tart foil for the richness of the cake, but this is by no means universal.
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Until refrigeration became cheap and widespread in the 20th century, our forebears kept leftovers covered at room temperature in their pantries. Not surprisingly, sudden illnesses were also common in those days.
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Pumpkin pie is one of the archetypal holiday dishes, almost as important as the turkey itself. Every dedicated baker has strong ideas on how it's best made and will argue eloquently for hours about the selection of ingredients or the correct baking technique.
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Pastry making was a very different proposition just a few centuries ago. Sugar was known, but rare until European planters built their great estates in the Caribbean and South America. Heavy cream for whipping came in the late 19th century, with milk-separating machines.
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The success of bread depends on many factors, most of them centering around the behavior of yeast, the living organism that makes it rise. This means that, on any given day, the recipe you've used for years may prove maddeningly balky and leave you with an inert lump of uncooperative dough.
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