Curio Cabinet / Daily Curio

Here’s a citrus to celebrate. Researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered that eating citrus might be an effective way to lower the risk of developing depression. Depression is an extremely common condition, yet it can be extremely difficult to treat. Around 290 million people worldwide are thought to suffer from the disorder, and for many of them, treatments aren’t effective. In fact, around 70 percent of those with depression don’t find antidepressants to be effective. However, in recent years, researchers have found a strong link between an individual's gut microbiome and their mental health, and the Mediterranean diet has been found to reduce the risk of depression by almost 35 percent. Now, similar effects have been found in patients who eat at least one orange every day.
 
Harvard researchers’ recently examined a study known as the Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS2), which began in 1989 and involved detailed interviews with 100,000 regarding their diets and lifestyles. Those who ate a lot of citrus tended to have significantly lower rates of depression compared to those who didn't. Based on the data, just one medium orange every day might lower the risk of depression by up to 20 percent. But it's not the orange that's helping directly. Rather, citrus consumption promotes the growth of F. Prausnitzii, a beneficial bacterium found in the gut. Researchers believe that F. Prausnitzii affects the production of serotonin and dopamine in the intestines, which can make their way to the brain. Serotonin and dopamine are the hormones that are often lacking in people with depression. Apples might keep the doctor away, but it seems that oranges really keep the blues at bay.

 
[Image description: Rows of cut oranges.] Credit & copyright: Engin Akyurt, Pexels

You can’t help but catch a whiff as you chow down with this dish. Referring to a food as “stinky” might seem rude, but it’s actually a point of pride for makers of stinky tofu. This Chinese dish’s actual name, chòu dòufu, literally translates to “smelly tofu”, and is lovingly referred to as stinky tofu in English. The dish has gone viral in recent years as influencers descend on Asian food markets to try unusual dishes on camera, but stinky tofu’s history predates the internet by quite a few years. In fact, it’s ancient.
 
Stinky tofu is, of course, a kind of tofu, which is a gelatinous food made from soybean paste. The paste is mixed with soy milk, then an acidic coagulant is added, causing the milk to curdle, thus producing solid pieces of tofu. Normal tofu has a very mild smell, though it’s great at soaking up the smells and flavors of dishes that it’s added to. Unlike regular tofu, stinky tofu is fermented, and its pungent aroma, which is sometimes compared to that of rotting vegetables, comes from the brine it’s made in. Fermentation is the same process that turns cucumbers into pickles; it involves submerging food into a brine and keeping it in a sealed container until yeast and bacteria create chemical changes that make it taste (and smell) different. Stinky tofu is usually fermented in a brine of veggies like bamboo shoots and greens, meat products like dried shrimp, fermented milk, and spices. While stinky tofu’s flavor is stronger than that of normal tofu, it’s not nearly as overpowering as its smell. The dish is creamy and rich, with a sour, somewhat salty flavor. It can be eaten in many different ways: cold, steamed, or fried. It’s usually served with spicy sauce for dipping.
 
Stinky tofu dates all the way back to China’s Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1912. Unlike many ancient foods, we actually know who invented stinky tofu: a scholar-turned-tofu-merchant named Wang Zhihe. In 1669, he journeyed to Beijing from his home in Anhui province to try his hand at becoming part of China’s state bureaucracy. However, he failed the official examination for the job, and found himself low on funds after his journey. To keep afloat, Zhihe set up a tofu stand in the city. His bad luck continued, though, and he ended up with a lot of unsold tofu. Rather than let it go to waste, Zhihe fermented the tofu in jars. This new, stinky tofu was a hit, as it stood out from Beijing’s other street food offerings. To this day, stinky tofu is mainly sold as a street food, both at permanent food stalls and at pop up events, like festivals and night markets. It’s especially popular in Taiwan, and is considered by many to be Taiwan’s unofficial “national snack food.” Sometimes, pungency is perfection.

 
[Image description: A plate of five thick tofu squares with shredded vegetables in the center.] Credit & copyright: Pilzland, Wikimedia Commons. The copyright holder of this work has made it available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

St. Patrick’s Day might be over, but it’s not too late to learn about this classic holiday dish. Corned beef, usually served with cabbage and potatoes, is considered a classic St. Patrick’s Day meal in the U.S., especially in places with large Irish-American populations, like New York City. There’s one place you won’t find many people eating corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day, though: Ireland. While corned beef does have roots on the Emerald Isle, its connection to the holiday began in the U.S.
 
Corned beef doesn’t actually contain corn. Rather, it’s a type of cured beef. “Corning” beef involves brining beef brisket in a solution of spices, sodium nitrite, and large-grain rock salt (the salt granules are roughly the size of corn kernels, hence the name). During the curing process, the sodium nitrite reacts with a protein in the beef called myoglobin, turning the meat pink. Corned beef is often served with cabbage, which is boiled in the same brine as the beef, and boiled potatoes.
 

To understand why the Irish don’t eat much corned beef today, it’s important to look at their history with beef in general. Before the British began taking over large swaths of Ireland in the 12th century, pork was the most commonly eaten meat in Ireland. The Irish did raise cows, but they were used mainly for milk and for plowing. The Gaels, one of Ireland’s native peoples, even considered cows sacred, and wouldn’t eat beef unless the cows were too old to work or produce milk. As England took greater control of Ireland, culminating in a complete takeover in the mid-17th century, the country’s culinary landscape changed.
 
Beef became big business in Ireland, with many Irish cows being exported to England. This rankled beef farmers living in England, though, and to protect their businesses, the Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667 made it illegal for Ireland to export any more beef to England. Ireland was therefore stuck with a surplus of cows. The solution? Corned beef. Since the process of salting meat kills harmful bacteria, the process has been used since the beginning of human history to keep stored meat edible for long periods. Since Ireland had a much lower salt tax than England, they had access to higher-quality salt, and thus corned beef became a major Irish export. However, because of England’s legal and economic oppression of Irish Catholics, most Irish people couldn’t actually afford to eat beef.
 
In 1845, during Ireland's Great Famine, more than a million Irish immigrants came to the U.S., forming communities in major cities. For the first time, they could actually afford to eat beef…though not the most expensive, fresh cuts. Instead, they opted for corned beef, exported from their own native country. The practice of serving corned beef with cabbage and potatoes actually comes from Jewish culinary tradition, which mixed with Irish tradition in U.S. cities. Back in Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day had been a quiet, religious holiday. But Irish immigrants turned it into a celebration of Irish culture, including Irish food. Thus, corned beef became a holiday staple. In the U.S., it remains so to this day, while back in Ireland, pork has gone back to being the most popular meat. Hey, a new home means new traditions.

 
[Image description: A plate of corned beef, cabbage, and small, whole potatoes. ] Credit & copyright: A1stopshop, Wikimedia Commons. The copyright holder of this work, has released it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

Feeling achy? Break out the nature documentaries. A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Exeter and University of Vienna found that people experiencing pain felt better when viewing scenes from nature—even if those scenes were shown to them via a screen.
 
The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fRMI) to look at the brain activity of 49 volunteers in real time. The volunteers were given a series of small electric shocks while watching and listening to different types of scenes on a screen. These included a scene of an office, a city, and a lake surrounded by trees. While watching nature scenes, participants reported feeling less pain. Their brain imaging also showed a decrease in nociception, the process by which the body senses pain.
 
This surprisingly powerful result could be due to something called attention restoration theory, a psychological theory that spending time in nature improves overall cognitive function and naturally captures human attention. If a person suffering from low-grade pain is able to focus on something else, they’re less likely to feel the pain as intensely. Now, it seems that simply looking at nature is enough to achieve a similar effect as actually being outside. While pain medication is, of course, still needed to treat severe pain, it’s always useful for medical professionals and the general public to expand their knowledge of medication-free pain relief methods. After all, nature videos are almost always a click away these days, making them a uniquely accessible form of therapy. Previous research has also shown that viewing nature has other beneficial physical effects, such as lowering levels of cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone. Time to follow some nature accounts on social media!

 
[Image description: A spruce forest in Sweden. Tall trees are visible with greenery on the forest floor.] Credit & copyright: W.carter, Wikimedia Commons. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

There’s so many layers to love. With its meaty sauce and layers of pasta, lasagna is one of the world’s best-known foods, and it’s available at just about every Italian restaurant on Earth. Yet, this famously Italian dish didn’t originate in Italy. Like modern mathematics and philosophy, the first form of lasagna actually came from ancient Greece.
 
Lasagna is a dish made with large, flat sheets of pasta layered on top of one another, with fillings like chopped tomatoes, meat, cheese, or a combination of the three in between the layers. Usually, lasagna is smothered in tomato sauce or ragù, a type of meat sauce, and topped with cheese (usually mozzarella) before being baked and cut into squares for serving.
 
The lasagna we know today began as an ancient Greek dish called laganon. Like modern lasagna, laganon utilized large, flat sheets of pasta, but these sheets were cut into strips, sprinkled with toppings like crumbly cheese or chopped vegetables, and eaten with a pointed stick. Things changed around 146 B.C.E., when the Romans conquered Greece and began expanding upon Greek recipes. Over the next century, laganon morphed into a Roman dish called lasagne patina, which was cut into squares, but varied greatly from modern lasagna when it came to its ingredients. Some recipes called for fish to fill in the layers between pasta, others for pork belly or mixed vegetables. Sauce was still not standard for lasagna, though cheese did become one of the most popular Roman filling and topping.
 
Sauce, specifically tomato sauce, didn’t become the golden standard for lasagna until the dish got popular in Naples. By the 1600s, Neapolitans were eating their lasagna with ricotta cheese, ragú, and mozzarella cheese, though the dish still wasn’t served in layers. Then, in 1863, Francesco Zambrini, a scholar of ancient Italian texts from Bologna, Italy, published a lost, 14th-century cookbook called Libro di Cucina. Inside was a recipe for lasagna that called for layering egg pasta sheets with cheese filling. This recipe, mixed with the already-in-vogue practice of serving lasagna with tomatoes and meat sauce, resulted in the beloved dish that’s so popular today. All it took to make it happen was the formation of the Roman Empire, a love for tomatoes, and a long-lost cookbook!

 
[Image description: Lasagna topped with greens on a plate with silverware.] Credit & copyright: alleksana, Pexels

Grief affects everyone differently, but the one constant is that it’s never easy. Now, at least, British parents who experience a miscarriage will have the right to take bereavement leave thanks to new workers’ rights reforms. The new law is part of changes to the employment rights bill proposed by the Labour Party and extends bereavement leave of up to two weeks to pregnant people who suffer a miscarriage before 24 weeks, as well as their partners. That’s good news for parents who are trying to have children, especially since most miscarriages happen early in the course of a pregnancy.
 
As tragic as they are, miscarriages are unfortunately extremely common. Though estimates vary, it’s believed that up to 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, with around 80 percent of them occurring in the first trimester, or in the first 12 weeks. Miscarriages can happen for a variety of reasons, but the most common cause is an issue with the number of fetal chromosomes. Extra chromosomes or missing chromosomes can lead to a fetus or embryo not developing properly, which, in turn, leads to a miscarriage. Viruses, illnesses, and food poisoning can also lead to miscarriages. Miscarriage symptoms also vary widely. Bleeding, cramping, or rapid heartbeat while pregnant can all be signs of a miscarriage, but sometimes there are no symptoms at all. In such cases, the miscarriage might go completely unnoticed, meaning that the actual miscarriage rate could be much higher than is currently estimated. Since miscarriages can have so many causes, many of them can’t be prevented—much of it is down to simple luck. Still, avoiding alcohol, smoking, and particularly risky sports can give a pregnancy a better chance at viability. At least with Britain’s new law, parents will have some time to breathe if bad luck strikes.

Let’s have an entire tray of these crispy confections, s'il vous plaît! Macarons are some of the best-known cookies in the world, and they come in so many bright colors that it’s no wonder they’re native to the fashion capital of the world: Paris, France. Or are they? Although macarons are famous symbols of France that were undoubtedly popularized in Paris, they might not have actually been invented there.
 
Macarons shouldn’t be confused with macaroons, which are drop cookies made from a paste of shredded coconut. Macarons are sandwich cookies made from a unique list of ingredients. Instead of being made from dough, like most cookies, macaron’s outer shells are made from almond flour, eggs, and powdered sugar that’s been whipped into a crispy meringue. The chewy filling is traditionally made from buttercream, which itself is made by beating butter and sugar together. All sorts of fillings are used in modern macarons, though, including jams, lemon curd, or chocolate ganache. Food coloring is used to give macarons their color, which means that they can come in just about any shade, and they’re often made purposefully bright to draw attention in window displays.
 
Macarons likely owe their invention to the long history of almond-based confections, like marzipan, and meringue-based desserts that have been popular in both Europe and the Middle East for centuries. Some believe that an early version of the macaroon was invented in the Middle East and brought to Europe by traders. Others say the cookies were invented in al-Andalus, an area that is now part of Spain, in the early 11th century, then brought to Morocco, where they were eaten during Ramadan. Still others claim that they were invented in Italy and brought to France by an Italian chef, though there are no written records of this. An early version of macarons, which were made from meringue but were not sandwich cookies, were sold in Nancy, France, in the 1790s. The sellers were two nuns who had sought asylum there during the French Revolution, though it’s unclear where their recipe came from. The cookies were so popular in Nancy that the nuns were nicknamed the “Macaron Sisters.”
 
While we’ll never know for certain where early macarons were first made, the type of macarons we know and love today undoubtedly come from Paris. Just which Parisian chef invented it is a topic of some debate, however. Some claim that Pierre Desfontaines, a pastry chef at Paris’s famous Ladurée pâtisserie, created the macaron sandwich cookie in the 1930s to match the colorful decor that the pâtisserie was famous for. Around the same time, another chef, Claude Gerbet, was also making macarons at his own Parisian bakery. Some believe that Gerbert invented modern macarons, since the cookies were known in Paris, for a time, as “Gerberts.” What we know for sure is that macarons quickly became an extremely popular, fast-selling snack at pâtisseries and coffeeshops throughout the city, and by the mid-1940s they were heavily associated with France, as they continue to be today. Delicate, colorful, and sweet? Très magnifique!

 
[Image description: A plate of light purple macarons with a matching teacup and tablecloth.] Credit & copyright: Jill Wellington, Pexels