Category: M

Now seasoned with parsley, the lightly smoked, Italian sausage known as mortadella was originally seasoned with myrtle, a Mediterranean shrub whose pungent leaves taste somewhat like rosemary. Myrtle, in fact, is the source of the sausage’s name, which derives from the Latin word for myrtle, myrtus (further back, the Latin myrtus derived from a Semitic…

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, molasses was the most commonly used sweetener in North America because it was cheaper than sugar and was readily imported from the West Indies. Even in the early twentieth century, molasses remained popular until sugar prices dropped after World War I, about the same time that Boston suffered its…

The strong Arabian coffee known as mocha, often used to flavour cakes and ice cream, takes its name from Mocha, the port on the Red Sea through which it was exported. Mocha was first referred to in English in the mid eighteenth century. The essence of coffee, often accompanied by the presence of chocolate, though…

Although mint—as in doublemint, spearmint, and peppermint—has become the most popular flavour of chewing gum, Alexander the Great forbade his soldiers to chew mint leaves because his mentor, Aristotle, believed that the herb sexually excited the young men and thus diminished their desire to fight. Aristotle’s notion may have had something to do with the…

In 1818, Abraham Lincoln’s mother died of “the slows,” a disease caused by contaminated milk; four years later, Louis Pasteur was born, a French chemist who invented pasteurization, a process that made milk much safer to drink. As a result of pasteurization, milk ceased, in the nineteenth century, to be treated with suspicion and instead…