Mont Blanc Gourment

Why have some of the best things to eat and drink been banned over the centuries? The diverse list of beverages includes coffee, chocolate, and absinthe, with savory items including poppy seed crackers, and unpasteurized raw cheese. In the book The Devil’s Picnic, Taras Grescoe makes a strong case that each of the foodstuffs he studies has been banned for reasons related to morality and not to health. The dozen chapters each deal with a different banned food, detailing the reasons why authorities believed that the general population should not be consuming them. Coffee, for example, was banned by Kha’ir Beg, the chief of police in Mecca during the 1500s, because he believed the drink was an intoxicant. Fortunately, the Sultan of Cairo was a coffee aficionado and overturned the ban, allowing the continued spread of coffee from the Middle East into Europe where it soon became a dominant beverage. Chocolate suffered a similar fate during the 1600s in Mexico when a bishop, tired of seeing women drinking cups...

Sweets and candies have been made and consumed for thousands of years, with some of the earliest evidence dating back to 8000 B.C. when honey was first used as a sweetener and added to cereals or grains. Sugar cane was domesticated between 8000 and 4000 B.C. in Papua New Guinea, and from there it spread to India and Southeast Asia. (Surprisingly, on a recent visit to PNG, I found that today there is not a strong sugar industry within the country.) Processing sugar cane into something sweet is complicated, and sugar (as we know it) was not produced until sometime between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C. The Indians created a number of sweets with sugar, in part because the Jains, an Indian religious group who are strict vegetarians, did not want to consume honey because it came from an insect. As they perfected working with sugar, more and unusual ingredients were added to make different treats, including fruits, nuts, spices, ginger and licorice. Because sugar...