Food & History

A Pinch of Power — How Spices Shaped Our Palate and the Planet

Open your spice drawer. That humble lineup of jars — cinnamon, cumin, turmeric, pepper — holds more than flavor. It holds history, empire, migration, memory, and magic. Spices built global trade long before tech stocks or fossil fuels. And they continue to shape how we cook, taste, and connect — one pinch at a time. The Origins: From Preservation to Pleasure Long before foodies and fine dining, spices had a practical job. In ancient kitchens, they preserved food, masked spoil

7 hours ago3 min read

The Cat Trains: How Leningrad Was Saved by Its Smallest Allies

There are chapters of history that endure not because they are grand, but because they are unexpectedly gentle.The Siege of Leningrad—one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century—is remembered for its brutality: 872 days of hunger, cold and silence, a city fighting for breath. Yet within that devastation lives a quieter story, one shaped not by armies or ideology, but by animals. During the siege, Leningrad’s cats vanished. Hunger, desperation and relentless winter erased

7 hours ago2 min read

«Qu’ils mangent de la brioche»: The New Aristocracy in the Age of Dangerous Simplicity

It is almost ironic that one of the most infamous sentences in political history is almost certainly a fabrication. «Qu’ils mangent de la brioche» — “Let them eat cake” — is widely attributed to Marie Antoinette, yet historians agree she likely never said it. Rousseau wrote the phrase years before she set foot in France, and he attributed it to “a great princess”, nameless, timeless, convenient. But the line survived because it crystallised a universal instinct: the arrogance

7 hours ago3 min read

General winter and politics beyond the table

One clarification is indispensable. At The Epicurer, we stand firmly against the current invasion of Ukraine. Aggression, revisionist imperial nostalgia, and the violation of sovereignty are incompatible with the cultural, humanistic and intellectual values that guide this maison. But condemning a war is not the same as erasing a civilization. Russian culture—its literature, cuisine, rituals, myths and aesthetics—belongs to a chronology far older and far more nuanced than the

7 hours ago3 min read

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Liquid Gold: Olive Oil, the Soul of the Iberian Peninsula

When you think of the Iberian Peninsula, vivid images come to mind: sun-drenched hills, stone villages clinging to the edges of cliffs, and tables set with wine, bread, and shimmering pools of golden olive oil. While jamón, cheese, and seafood often steal the culinary spotlight, it’s olive oil—humble, ancient, and endlessly versatile—that quietly anchors the cuisine of both Spain and Portugal. Together, these two countries produce nearly half of the world’s olive oil. Spain i

7 hours ago2 min read

When agave becomes couture: The Raise of a global Maison

It happened quietly — as true markers of cultural shift often do. In London, within the intimate architecture of private collections, a bottle of mezcal was acquired for a five-figure sum. Not in a theatrical auction hall, but through a discreet exchange grounded in trust, taste, and the invisible handshakes of the world’s rare spirits community. It was bottle number two of six from Santo de Piedra’s Pastorale series x Massimo Bottura. The collector, aligned with a life lived

7 hours ago3 min read

The Quiet Soul of Longquan Celadon

Longquan appears on the map of China as a discreet dot between mountains and rivers, yet it is, in truth, a state of mind — a place where clay learns to become jade without ever ceasing to be earth. For a thousand years, the kiln-dragons climbing the hillsides have breathed a slow, contemplative fire, transforming raw matter with the same patience with which the landscape allows itself to be carved by time. Inside those vaulted tunnels, fuelled by wood and rhythm rather than

7 hours ago3 min read

Where Fishermen and Cormorants Still Work as One

Along a quiet stretch of the Li River in southern China, there is still a place where fishing begins not with engines or nets, but with the subtle understanding between a man and a bird. At first light, fishermen here push their narrow rafts into the water, accompanied by cormorants they have trained and worked with for years. What follows is a practice that looks simple from a distance, but is in fact a form of cooperation that has shaped generations. The method is straightf

7 hours ago2 min read

Macau, where cuisines learned to speak more than one language

There are cities that accumulate cultures, and others that ferment them. Macau belongs firmly to the latter. For more than four centuries, this small peninsula at the edge of the Pearl River Delta has functioned not as a border, but as a translation table—between China and Europe, between maritime Asia and the Atlantic world, between memory and adaptation. Few places on earth embody the idea of a culinary melting pot with such precision, restraint, and continuity. Macau was n

7 hours ago3 min read

The Egg , Form Before Time

Before the line, before the gesture, before the word, there was the egg. In Greek thought, the cosmos itself began enclosed. The Orphic tradition speaks of a primordial egg—the cosmic shell—from which Phanes emerged, radiant and complete, containing light, order, and desire before any division of the world. Creation was not an explosion, but a careful opening. The Romans inherited this intuition without mythic excess and embedded it into ritual. Ab ovo—from the egg—meant from

7 hours ago2 min read

The cuisine of a small country that has spent much of its history being told to be quieter.

There is a cookbook written in Catalan in 1324 that most of the world has never heard of, and that contains, in its medieval parchment pages, a more sophisticated understanding of flavor than anything produced by the industrialized food system in the last fifty years. The Llibre de Sent Soví predates the printing press. It describes sauces of extraordinary complexity, combinations of sweet and savory, techniques of preservation and preparation that speak not of a cuisine in f

7 hours ago4 min read

Ginori 1735, the Discipline of Continuity

Heritage, when genuine, is never decorative. It is structural. Founded in 1735 near Florence, Ginori 1735 did not emerge from fashion or commerce, but from inquiry. Marquis Carlo Ginori was not seeking to imitate Chinese porcelain—he sought to understand it. The early years of the Manifattura di Doccia were marked by experimentation, failures, reformulations, and an almost scientific obsession with matter. What survived was not a style, but a method. Porcelain, at Ginori, was

7 hours ago2 min read

Honey, the first luxury.

Luxury is often measured in rarity, craftsmanship or price. Yet long before gemstones, silk or porcelain became objects of desire, humanity had already discovered something far more extraordinary. It is easy to forget how remarkable honey truly is. Today it sits quietly on supermarket shelves, competing with jams and breakfast spreads. For most of human history, however, sweetness itself was an exception rather than an expectation. Honey was not simply an ingredient. It was o

7 hours ago2 min read