Was Stone-Age Wine a Drink of the People?

“The Plate,” National Geographic • May 23, 2016

Think about wine in the ancient world, and chances are you’ll picture chalices, feasts and rituals: The stuff of elites. But ruins in Greece suggest that wine may have roots that are more populist than we typically think—even as far back as the Stone Age—according to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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Why Thick Flour Tortillas Never Made It Big And Thin Tortillas Did

“The Salt,” National Public Radio • Aug. 26, 2015

Janet Stein Romero of El Ancon, New Mexico, shapes the dough before rolling out flour tortillas.
Janet Stein Romero of El Ancon, New Mexico, shapes the dough before rolling out flour tortillas. (Tracie McMillan for NPR)

About 16 years ago, I lost my hungry heart to a flour tortilla. I was in the small town of Las Vegas N.M., at Charlie’s Spic & Span Café, when a server placed a basket on the table. Inside was a stack of thick, charmingly floppy tortillas, dotted with browned bubbles and closer in thickness to pancakes than the wan, flaccid discs I was used to at the supermarket. My Brooklyn-by-way-of-Michigan palate was infatuated: What magic was this? How could I not have known that tortillas like these existed?

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A Detroit Opera Celebrates Frida Kahlo’s Life And Cooking

NPR.org — The Salt  Feb. 25, 2015

The life of Frida Kahlo seems tailor-made for an opera: pain, love, art, travel and revolution. So the Michigan Opera Theater’s decision to mount a production of the opera Frida, opening Mar. 7 in Detroit — where the iconic painter lived with her husband, Diego Rivera, for nearly a year, and where she survived a miscarriage that marked a turning point in her art — isn’t so surprising.

But here’s something that is: The opera is celebrating not only Kahlo’s art and life, but her recipes and cooking, too.

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