Atlas Obscura · November 2019
Three years after a famine that killed millions, the Kremlin decided the country’s real shortage was champagne. A winemaker replaced bottle-aging with pressurized tanks, cutting three years to a month. The bottles were advertised on the vans that carried prisoners to the Gulag.
Read MoreAtlas Obscura · November 2019
Mao regifted a crate of mangoes from Pakistan’s foreign minister because he didn’t like messy fruit. Workers who had never seen one sat up all night stroking and sniffing them. Within a year a man was executed for comparing the fruit to a sweet potato.
Read MoreAtlas Obscura · June 2018
A woman dining alone in the 19th century was assumed to be a prostitute. Ice cream saloons got around it with parlor furnishings, which is where the name comes from. They were also one of the few places a couple could meet unchaperoned, and moralists warned of ice cream drugged with passion-exciting vanilla.
Read MoreAtlas Obscura · January 2021
David Maxwell trained as a Mayanist and became the world’s only scholar of beer can archeology, with 4,500 catalogued by country and brand. His 1993 guide to dating cans by design change is now standard practice, and the most-read thing he has published.
Read MoreAtlas Obscura · October 2019
Jasper McCarthy pulled his first pint at ten and buried his first body at thirteen. The Famine forced the arrangement: an 1846 statute sent bodies to the nearest public house, and beer cellars were the only cold storage in town. The law stood until 1962.
Read MoreAtlas Obscura · December 2018
Gilmore’s network of Black women raised $125 to $200 a week to fund the carpool for 381 days during the Montgomery bus boycott. Most of them worked in white households and couldn’t be seen organizing, so only Gilmore knew who was cooking. Martin Luther King Jr. financed the restaurant she later opened in her dining room, where he held meetings over fried fish and butter beans. She called him “heifer.” He called her “Tiny.”
Read MoreAtlas Obscura · September 2018
On one day a year, millions of women line the streets of the capital of Kerala, build brick hearths on the pavements, light them together at one signal, and prepare porridge for the goddess. It’s the largest gathering of women on earth, and for a day the city belongs to them.
Featured in Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide.
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