Top Highlights

• THE MODERN USE OF LEMON AND ORANGE PEELS in alcoholic drinks has ample precedents in many places and centuries, but the custom perhaps reached its highest point in Holland three hundred years ago. The drinking Dutch, in the seventeenth century, would peel a helical ribbon of skin from an orange, continuing round and round until the knife reached th...
• On all Spanish ships bound for America, in fact, each sailor was required by Spanish law to carry one hundred seeds with him, and later, because seeds tended to dry out, Spanish ships were required to carry young trees instead.