A Harte Appetite

Though there are reportedly some 400 versions of the recipe, spaghetti carbonara is fundamentally just warm spaghetti laced with a creamy sauce made of eggs and cheese and studded with cured pork. In other words it’s essentially bacon and eggs with pasta.

If you think grits resemble library paste, you obviously have never tried the real thing. True grits, if you will.

Ever looked closely at an Oreo, the world’s best selling cookie? If you carefully inspect an Oreo you will notice something interesting. Though the confection is described on the package as a “chocolate sandwich cookie” an Oreo is not chocolate colored. It is, in fact, black. That's because of a process called “Dutching.”

Every culture feeds on the belief that eating certain dishes on New Years Day brings good fortune. Perhaps the Chinese have the most New Years food rituals. They take two weeks to ring in the new year and during that time literally everything eaten is considered auspicious.

It turns out, that the question "what is a sugar plum?" is not that easy to answer. I found at least eight distinctly different definitions of the term. Some citing chocolate, some fondant, and others coriander as a chief ingredient.

Over seventy-five years ago Irving Berlin wrote what has become the most recorded song of all time: "White Christmas." It’s easy to understand how Berlin, born in a town near Siberia, could feel nostalgic about a winter snowfall.

Just about every country has a special dessert to mark the holidays. But none is as iconic as the classic French Yule log or Bûche de Noël.

German lebkuchen the Cadillac, or the Mercedes Benz of spice cookies, was probably the first cookie traditionally associated with Christmas. Lebkuchen may also very well be the oldest form of cookie know to human kind.

Research shows that the traditional depiction of the first Thanksgiving may not be altogether accurate. In fact, whatever happened at Plymouth 400 years ago, it may not have been the first Thanksgiving at all.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, putting together a Thanksgiving Day menu is not particularly challenging. After all, the fundamentals of the holiday meal are hardly open to debate.