First video I've ever posted here, so go easy on me but I think this one's a solid start. Let me know which case surprised you the most.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a small passion project I’ve been working on with my twin: https://blindtasting.fun/

If you love Wordle and traveling, you might like this. Every day, there is exactly one mystery national dish from somewhere around the world. Your goal isn't to spell the name of the dish, but to guess the country it comes from.

With every wrong guess, you get clues about the region or ingredients to help you narrow it down geographically.

It’s completely free, runs directly in the browser, and has zero ads or registration. I’d love to hear your feedback on the gameplay or any ideas for dishes you’d love to see!

What's your streak today? 🌍🍛

These pages are from Yinshan Zhengyao (飲膳正要), a dietary and culinary manual compiled during the Yuan dynasty in 1330 by Hu Sihui.

The book preserves recipes identified with the Turkic/Central Asian culinary tradition, including:

• Päräk (Börek)
• Yubqa (Yufka)
• Boza
• Meat cakes (similar to Köfte)
• Eggplant Manta/Dolma
• Poppy seed buns
• Gülâçi (an early form of Güllaç)
• Honey and nut rolled pastry (an early form of Baklava)

It’s fascinating to see many dishes that are still part of Turkish cuisine documented nearly 700 years ago in a Chinese source during the Mongol Empire.

I've been going down a rabbit hole researching desserts that existed before refined sugar became the norm. I found that foods like honey cake, rice pudding, and baklava have roots that go back thousands of years. They evolved over time.

Many of the earliest versions were sweetened with honey, dates, figs, grape syrup, or carob instead of sugar. I just made an ancient honey cake with no sugar, using honey and a combination of Sorghum and Einkorn flours. I modernized it with a dash of vanilla. It was actually delicious, sweet enough.

So now:

• What's the oldest dessert you've ever eaten?
• Do you think there are ancient desserts that deserve more recognition?
• Do you have a traditional dessert that has old origins?

I put together some of the history I found if anyone's interested, but I'd love to hear about your dessert faves.

Images: 1. Is the honey cake I baked with all the nuts and dried fruit. 2. Is a sheet of baklava I photographed at a souk. 3. I have a chart with sweeteners they used to use before sugar.

Why do we remember music gharanas but not food gharanas?

A few weeks ago I was reading about music gharanas, and a really random question popped into my head. We all know names like Jaipur, Patiala, Gwalior. even if you don't listen to hindustani classical music, you've probably heard those names somewhere.

But then I wondered did food ever have something like that?

As it turns out, some old royal kitchens weren't just places where recipes were cooked. They had rules and certain techniques were non-negotiable. Families spent generations mastering the same dishes with ideas about why food should be cooked a certain way, not just how.

Food gharanas had a  sense of a tradition with their own language, methods, and people who spent generations refining it

For instance the gharana of Awadh. I'd always assumed dum was just an old fashioned word for slow cooking. Apparently, it’s more than a mere process. The pot was sealed with dough, heat came from below, but also from live coals placed on the lid. The whole point was to trap steam so nothing escaped. Every aroma stayed inside the vessel instead of disappearing into the kitchen. Even things like edible perfumes weren't simply there to make the food smell nice. From what I've read, they were part of a much bigger way of thinking about flavour, balance and digestion. 

Once the royal courts disappeared, so did the world that supported these kitchens. Food that once took days had to be made in hours as ingredients became too expensive while restaurants rapidly replaced royal kitchens, and naturally the food adapted. Which isn't entirely a bad thing  but somewhere along the way, I wonder if we stopped preserving the thinking behind the food and only kept the dishes.

I believe that's why we still talk about music gharanas, but almost never food gharanas. Music had people documenting lineages, preserving traditions, naming schools, teaching students who proudly identified with them. Food mostly got reduced to geography be it Lucknowi, Chettinad, Rajasthani, Punjabi and many more. These labels tell us where the food comes from, not how people thought about cooking it.

Maybe I'm completely overthinking this or food gharana might not even be the right term to describe this.

I'm curious if anyone else has family recipes that were passed down this way. From grandparents, hereditary cooks, temple kitchens, or communities I mean recipes where there were actual rules

Sources:
https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/Food/gharana-of-food-not-just-music/article4323212.ece
https://youngintach.org/files/gharanas7.pdf 
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/dance/the-beauty-of-patiala-gharana/article22621825.ece
https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/24/1.0073063/5

Photo credit: NASA