Articles and guides about Food culture: cooking ideas, explanations and tips researched and checked by KitchenPause.
Choose herbs for the food you plan to cook and for what is abundant where you shop, rather than following a universal calendar. Learn how to store tender and sturdy-stemmed herbs, and how to use surplus by freezing or drying it.
Available content that can be reviewed from the recipe collection.
A family cookbook may preserve techniques and tastes, but also clues about who cooked, how knowledge travelled, and what changed over time. This guide offers a curious, careful way to read one.
Market cuisine is a way of planning food around ingredient availability and quality. Its recent history connects with culinary debates of the 1970s, but a flexible idea should not be mistaken for a single tradition or a fixed set of rules.
Oral recipes are not fixed instructions: they travel through conversation, memory, and shared practice. Writing and digital media broaden the ways they can be preserved, but do not automatically replace the family and cultural context that gives them meaning.
A guide to understanding the municipal market as a place to shop, a public space and a setting for urban change—without treating two studied cases as a universal rule.
A cultural look at festive dishes: how they express identity, pass on knowledge, and change with communities, with practical ways to explore their histories without inventing them.
The spice routes were not one fixed road but changing trade networks. From overland and Mediterranean connections to Portuguese maritime expeditions, their history is also about intermediaries, power, and cultural exchange.
A guide to observing bakery work without confusing what we see with what we assume: organization, decisions, cues, and the limits of what can be inferred from the outside.
Soups, stews and potages are not a family defined by one ingredient. Their history is best understood through how they are eaten, the foods available and the meanings communities have given them.
Shared food has not followed a single path or meant the same thing everywhere. Its story is easier to understand by looking at how meals bring people together, pass on customs, and adapt to migration, social change, and new media.
Making good use of ingredients is not about saving everything or following one fixed tradition. It means planning thoughtfully and choosing how to transform ingredients suitable for cooking, while recognizing that every technique changes the result.
Is there a shared, historic Mediterranean breakfast? The evidence tells us more about a diverse region, changing ingredients and exchanges, and the social meaning of eating together than about a fixed morning meal.
Drying, salting, fermenting, pickling, and smoking are not techniques sealed off in the past. Preservation has changed with science and technology, yet it still carries local knowledge, flavors, and ways of relating to food.
Fresh boerewors grilled until browned all over and served in four portions.
View recipe
An Iranian stew of lamb or beef with fresh herbs, red kidney beans and dried limes, slowly cooked until the meat is tender.
View recipe
A Portuguese rice dessert cooked in milk scented with lemon and cinnamon, enriched with egg yolks and finished with ground cinnamon.
View recipe
A simple Australian bread made with self-raising flour, olives and rosemary; this version is baked and served freshly made.
View recipe
A sour-and-spicy Thai shrimp and mushroom soup scented with galangal, lemongrass and makrut lime leaves. It includes homemade nam prik pao paste.
View recipe
Spiced-potato-stuffed flatbread made with a soft dough and cooked on a griddle until golden.
View recipe
Cooked fava beans, partly mashed and dressed with garlic, lemon, cumin, and olive oil.
View recipe
Creamy Portuguese rice pudding cooked with milk infused with lemon and cinnamon, enriched with egg yolks and butter.
View recipe
Creamy chowder for 4, with clams, mussels, prawns and white fish. Total time stated by the reference source: 35 minutes.
View recipe