Vinegar is the classic rock of condiments. You know it’s in the house, and you know it’s kinda timeless and it’ll keep for years, so you keep it on the pantry shelf behind all those indie-label spices and sauces. You rock it a few times a year when you’re doing some household cleaning, but you don’t think about it when you’re trying to get dinner on the table.

Vinegar is so deeply ingrained in our history and culture, and so formative of our palates, that it’s easy to overlook and underuse. Human beings have been using it for about 10,000 years. Hannibal used it to crumble rocks that blocked [...]

This is a most auspicious time. The Year of the Dragon is upon us, and as we venture boldly into 2012, towards the edge of the Mayan calendar, let’s turn up the heat with Yucatecan habanero salsa. The dragon is the symbol of transformational power, denoting endless possibility. Habanero salsa is, for my money, the most transformative and versatile condiment you can have on your table. It imparts heat and depth into any savory dish, along with a slightly floral and fruity, yet dry and earthy, flavor profile, and just the right acid balance.

First, a little background on the habanero chili pepper. It’s a thin-skinned, heart-shaped pepper about [...]

Sometimes it seems to me that practically everybody in America is a little uptight when it comes to Asian fish sauce. I mean, some folks are closed off to any condiment that might taste or smell “fishy,” while others are intent on dusting off the hand-hammered iron wok and slavishly chasing the dragon on that authentic dining experience in Phuket. To the former group I’d say, the tree of globalism can only grow tall when good men and women eat challenging ethnic food. Also, fish sauce is really not that fishy. To the latter: I respect that purist’s sensibility, but it’s also okay to use authentic Asian things in nontraditional [...]

Our relationships with condiments can become rote: ketchup/fries, mustard/hotdog, salsa/chips—even sriracha/pho. We robotically dip, drizzle and douse without a conscious thought. In this column, we'll be trying to shake up our collective condiment consciousness. Proust wrote, "The only real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes," and with that in mind, I thought I'd take you along in search of lost time—to my first condiment: Gochujang.

As a Korean kid growing up in American Samoa, I was part of a subculture made up of the families of Korean fishermen and sailors that had sprung up around the tuna industry of the South Pacific. [...]

Pomegranates: beautiful and delicious, but they scare me a little. All those little geometrically arranged blood-red seed pods embedded in fleshy nutritive pulp. If M.C. Escher, H.R Giger and H.P. Lovecraft got together and designed a fruit, it would be the pomegranate. I’m not alone in my ambivalence. Some say it was a pomegranate, not an apple, with which the serpent tempted Eve under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And if in some ancient cultures, the pomegranate was a symbol of fertility and abundance it was also, according to Greek myth, the Fruit of the Dead that trapped Persephone in the underworld. [...]

"During the long decline and transformation of the Roman Empire, condiments entered into a dark age of their own. Roman roads, and more importantly, the Roman view on trade, spread the building blocks of condiments across Europe. Salt, sugar, and vinegar are all processed goods, and the collapse of the system that had processed them so effectively – and hastened their safe movement – left Europe without the infrastructure to make condiments, even if they had wanted to. The West was left without the vast machine that had sustained the fish sauce and vinegar industries; condiment usage retreated east to the chutney of India and the soy and fish [...]