Mouthful

What in the world are you eating?

An Empire of Pudding

26 November 2008 | 1:44 - By Phil Lees

Is Christmas pudding imperialist propaganda?


Plum pudding is a dish that over the last 600 years has transformed into a food almost completely unrecognizable from its original recipes. Plum pudding originated from pottage: a slow-cooked meat stew with dried fruit used as a means of preserving meats in late Autumn, a recipe first recorded in the 1400s.

Share article: 
top

If you want to please pretty much anyone who eats meat, cook a chicken over an open flame. It is difficult to get wrong in a disastrous manner and every culture that has ready access to birds does it.


The SBS Food Safari back catalogue yields not less than five recipes for chicken cooked over fire (Tandoori from Pakistani, Grilled chicken and banana flower salad from Thailand, Malaysian satay, Mexican (Yucatecan) bbq chicken, Portuguese charcoal chicken with piri piri).

Share article: 
top

The global search for delicious

13 November 2008 | 12:12 - By Phil Lees

 I was called a "food warrior" this week, which begs the question, who or what am I fighting? 


I'm not exactly roaming the world, slitting the throats of unscrupulous restaurateurs in defence of honest, law abiding food. I can but dream.

So what am I looking for?

Share article: 
top

The Other Chinese Wine

05 November 2008 | 1:22 - By Phil Lees

Apart from the melamine-tainted milk crisis  that seems like it will never grind to a halt, one of the more noteworthy trends to gain momentum in mainland China over the past year is the growth in interest in grape wine. Unlike the melamine, this has been a few millennia in the making.


While Chinese rice wines like Shaoxing wine and grain spirits are better known to the rest of the world, China has been crafting wine from grapes since some period between 7000BC (relatively unlikely, but not impossible) to 600AD (definitely). Grape wine consumption overall is quite marginal, as China's predilection is still for hard liquor and beer. In the present era, China consumes about a quarter of the world's spirits, but only two percent of the grape wine.

Share article: 
top
Previous 10 | Page 1 | Next 10

About this Blog

A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.

Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.

In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.

Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth.

 
ADVERTISEMENT

Other Blogs

TV
Food
Films
Documentary
World News Australia
Sport
About SBS
Business
Internet and Technology
Cycling Central
Tour De France