The lore of how our ancestors invented food smoking will, sadly, forever stay unwritten and untold. We can’t hope to retrace this technique to its accidental cavemen discoverers – or relive their excitement, though some primal dancing and howling at each other weren’t much to miss out on. What we can relate to is the first taste, […]

I’ve never quite forgotten the smell of burning coconuts; during my travels in some of Vanuatu’s remote islands, where villages were installed with community furnaces, it was the incinerating copra that I detected in the air: an intoxicating, caramelising sweetness, sticking to my nostrils like molten honey. There was no such aroma in the coconut workshop […]