A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)
Mexican food is hugely popular in the United States — salsa has been outselling ketchup for years, some of the fastest growing restaurant chains sell Mexican food, the taco truck craze is at its peak — but it took a many years and many innovators for this to happen. Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA: How Mexican […]
Reports from the farmers market and about seasonal food are common today: for example, KCRW’s Good Food has a weekly farmers market report, the San Francisco Chronicle covers seasonal produce in the Sunday Food and Home section, there are apps about seasonal produce for your phone, and guides printed on paper. I have been following these reports for […]
Kale salad — superfood in a bowl, a nutritional powerhouse, a bold canvas for bold flavors — has been a major trend in recent years. A recent article in Food52 — A New Genius Salad from the Chef Who Started the Kale Salad Craze — notes that it was introduced to a wide audience in late […]
I’d like to conclude my celery trilogy by looking at the ngram for celery (the first two parts of the trilogy were about celery on restaurant menus and celery vases). Ngrams show the popularity of a word or phrase throughout time and are especially useful for slang, grammar, and spelling preferences (like ketchup and catsup). An ngram is […]
When I typed “celery” into the CC Search box to search a few museums’ public domain collections to illustrate my previous post on celery on restaurant menus, I was expecting one or two results, perhaps a still life. And so I was surprised when the search returned a bunch of objects called “celery vases” from […]
I don’t like celery, so it might have been a defense mechanism when I started noticing it on menu after menu from the late-19th and early-20th centuries*. As I looked through the Buttolph Collection of Menus for food conservation messages on World War I-era menus, it seemed that nearly every menu included celery as a […]
I recently finished reading Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA, an interesting combo platter of history, personal stories, and food culture. In his detailed overview of the history and evolution of Mexican food in the U.S.A., Arellano recounts many fascinating stories, like how the first English-language taco recipe got into print, the invention of the frozen margarita machine, […]
In this post, a look at two distinctive fruit crate labels. “Don’t Worry” Apples Fruit Crate Label I doubt that “Don’t Worry” brand apples would be a successful brand today. It’s easy for me to come up with a bushel of worrisome questions when choosing your food. Organic? Local? What pesticides? Imported? In season? By buying the trendy […]
I’m reading Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA, a deluxe combo platter of history, personal stories, and culture. Something from the taco chapter that jumped out at me was a mention of the first taco recipe in English. Arellano claims that it was in the California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book, a 1914 book by Bertha Haffner-Ginger. Haffner-Ginger grew up in […]
On one of the rare occasions when the Bloglovin’ web interface works with my complicated browser set-up, I ran across a fascinating piece of data visualization. It was a Data Visualization of Eight Flavors from the Four Pounds Flour blog in which the author used the Google Ngram Viewer to highlight the eight flavors in her […]