The Comforting Appeal of Herbs

ONCE, HERBS WERE weapons. Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians recorded, in cuneiform, lifesaving prescriptions of myrtle and thyme. The oldest surviving text of Chinese herbal pharmacology, extolling the benefits of ginseng, camphor and cannabis, was set down in the first century A.D. Around the same time, the Greek physician Dioscorides documented the properties of…

5 Places: Five Places to Shop in Havana

Visitors to Old Havana usually come to the neighborhood to take in its faded beauty, the vintage cars cruising cobbled streets and the colonial buildings dating back to the city’s Spanish roots in the 16th and 17th centuries. This photogenic neighborhood, a Unesco World Heritage site, isn’t typically thought of as a shopping destination. But…

Eat: Real People Eat Quiche

I was writing the menu for our lunch service at Prune a few weeks ago and kept crossing out then penciling back in a classic: quiche Lorraine. I just wasn’t quite sure where we stood, as a nation, on the subject these days. In the ’80s, “quiche eater” was a casual slur to describe feminists…