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Preparing a bowl of chicken soup for a loved one when they’re sick has been a common practice throughout the world for centuries. Today, generations from virtually every culture swear to the benefits of chicken soup. In the U.S., the dish is typically made with noodles, but different cultures prepare the soothing remedy their own way. Chicken soup as a therapy can be traced back to 60 A.D. and Pedanius Dioscorides, an army surgeon who served under the Roman emperor Nero, and whose five-volume medical encyclopedia was consulted by early healers for more than a millennium. But the origins of...

Like a mother with her children, I have a hard time picking favorites when it comes to egg preparation methods. As my esteemed colleague Stephen Johnson has pointed out, cooking eggs can literally teach you how to cook. They truly give us so many gifts. I’ve been on a bit of a scramble kick recently. I enjoy cooking scrambles because they take well to last minute tweaks and additions: You can dash and sprinkle them with a wide variety of sauces and seasonings, impulsively and without much measuring (my favorite style of cooking). As you may know, I am a...

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: About a hundred years ago, a Japanese chemist named Dr. Kikunae Ikeda set out to solve a mystery - what made the taste of the soup stock dashi distinct from other tastes like salty, sweet, sour and bitter? He ultimately distilled a single compound from the stocks' seaweed. It was glutamate. Yet it was only recently that the taste associated with that compound was commonly acknowledged in the West. Chloee Weiner and Emily Kwong at NPR's science podcast Short Wave pick up the story. EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Glutamate is just an amino acid, a building block of...

Monosodium glutamate is deeply misunderstood, experts reveal.Few ingredients inspire as much fear as MSG, or monosodium glutamate. While an overtly chemical name and a similarity in appearance to salt certainly don’t help its case, the food additive is especially reviled because some people believe that consuming it causes a slew of symptoms, from headache to palpitations to numbness. But is MSG actually bad for you? Monosodium glutamate has a terrible rap due to decades of anecdotal reports and xenophobia—but it’s probably nowhere near as detrimental to your health as you think. Here’s everything you need to know about the misunderstood...

Last year, this newspaper said that “Marmite is having a massive foodie moment”, after noticing that the divisive yeast extract was increasingly featuring as an ingredient, rather than simply being smeared on toast. Yes, Marmite has come into its own. As a sandwich filling, it remains polarising, but as an ingredient it is much more subtle, lending a warm, umami bite to all manner of dishes – as demonstrated by the 10 magnificent recipes below. Marmite and thyme roast potatoes We will start with my all-time favourite Marmite recipe, as discovered on a Guardian readers’ recipe swap six years ago:...