Azure. It may be that the word is associated with visuality, a perceivable speckle among the spectrum of light; yet within it, just sometimes and specifically somewhere, can there be diluted in it streaks of murky feelings. From the line where the celestial and rippling blues meet, a yearning to explore beyond the horizon; amidst […]

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, […]

The Spanish tortilla is absolutely ubiquitous in Madrid; in fact, I had it four times within a week alone. The first one I sank my teeth into came suffocating in clingfilm. At the conference centre cafetería, I must have taken pity on it as I rescued it amidst its fellow inmates in the display fridge. By […]

The first things that arrived on the table were the deep-fried pastries. From their appearance, my palate jumped to conclusion of what it would taste: crackling on the teeth as they break through a brittle encasement, a filling of curried, starchy vegetables would come oozing out, heavy on Indian spices and perhaps interspersed with green peas or minced […]

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 […]