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Recipes

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Recipes

Cumin, Coriander and Fennel: The Ayurvedic Tea That Is Three Seeds and Hot Water

CCF tea is probably the most widely prescribed thing in a modern Ayurvedic clinic. It is also three common spices in water, which makes it a useful test of what such a drink can and cannot be claimed to do.

Sep 4, 2026/3 min read

Whole cumin seeds photographed close up against white. Cumin is the first of the three seeds in this infusion and the one that dominates if you use too much

Recipes

Congee Is What Half the World Eats When It Is Unwell, and It Takes Five Ingredients

Rice porridge simmered until the grains dissolve is the convalescent food of East Asia, and kitchari is its equivalent in India. Adding turmeric and ginger to congee simply puts the two traditions in the same bowl.

Sep 4, 2026/3 min read

A bowl of plain white congee with a spoon resting in it, the rice grains cooked down until they have almost disappeared into the liquid

Recipes

Cumin, Chilli and Mushrooms on Flatbread, or What the Silk Road Actually Tasted Like

Cumin lamb from Xi'an and Levantine flatbread are not a modern mash up. They sit at opposite ends of a road that carried the same spices and the same bread technology for a thousand years.

Sep 4, 2026/3 min read

A flatbread topped with roasted mushrooms, chickpeas and rocket, photographed at a delicatessen. It is not the dish in this recipe but it is the same construction

Recipes

Chicken Biryani, Built in Layers, With the Rice Deliberately Undercooked First

The technique that separates biryani from a rice dish with chicken in it is parboiling: the rice is boiled to roughly seventy per cent, drained, then layered over the marinated chicken and finished in its own steam so every grain stays separate.

Sep 2, 2026/4 min read

A plate of chicken biryani served with raita, a spoonful of pickle and a papad

Recipes

Mandi, Kabsa and Machboos Are Not the Same Dish, and the Difference Is Mostly the Oven

One is cooked in a pit with the meat hanging above the rice. One is built on a tomato and spice base. One is the same dish under a different name across four countries. The word mandi comes from the Arabic for dew.

Aug 21, 2026/3 min read

A large communal platter of spiced rice topped with slow cooked lamb and fried nuts

Recipes

The Oldest Written Hummus Recipe Is Egyptian, From a Cookbook Roughly Seven Hundred Years Old

It contains four things and one of them is not optional. The supermarket version usually gets the ratio wrong, the ownership argument is genuinely political, and the earliest written record does not point where most people expect.

Aug 21, 2026/3 min read

A bowl of hummus swirled with olive oil and topped with whole chickpeas

Recipes

Falafel Was Almost Certainly Egyptian, Made With Fava Beans, and the Chickpea Came Later

The version most of the world eats is the Levantine one, and it is a revision. Egypt still makes it the older way, with fava beans, under a different name. The argument about who owns it is genuinely political.

Aug 21, 2026/3 min read

Freshly fried falafel, one broken open to show the green herb flecked interior

Recipes

Shawarma, Gyro, Doner and Al Pastor Are the Same Machine in Four Languages

Three of those words literally mean turning. The fourth means shepherd, and it exists because a hundred thousand Lebanese migrants arrived in Mexico and their children swapped the lamb for pork and added pineapple.

Aug 21, 2026/4 min read

A vertical trompo of red marinated pork with a pineapple fixed on top

Recipes

Shawarma Is Not an Arabic Word, and the Dish Is Younger Than Almost Everyone Assumes

The name is a loanword from Turkish, the technique is a nineteenth century invention, and the man usually credited with it was a butcher in Bursa who turned the spit on its end. Here is where shawarma actually comes from.

Aug 21, 2026/4 min read

A vertical spit of layered shawarma meat turning in front of a heat source

Recipes

Fatteh Batinjan: Stale Bread, Fried Aubergine, Garlic Yogurt

A dish built to use up yesterday's bread, assembled in layers while everything is still hot so half the bread softens and half stays crisp. Timing is the whole technique.

Aug 15, 2026/5 min read

A wide dish of fried aubergine over toasted bread, covered in garlic yogurt and scattered with pine nuts and sumac

Recipes

The Maqluba Spice Mix, and Why Turmeric Is Doing Two Jobs

Allspice, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin and black pepper. A warm, sweet-leaning blend that has to season rice, meat and fried aubergine at once, and colour the whole thing while it is at it.

Aug 15, 2026/5 min read

A small bowl of warm brown-gold ground spice blend beside whole allspice berries and a cinnamon stick