Vindaloo began in Goa as the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos, meat in wine and garlic; Goan cooks swapped the wine for palm vinegar and added spices. The 'aloo' is not potato: the traditional dish has none.
📍 Southern Brazil & Uruguay
New Zealanders love feijoas so much that many think they are a Kiwi fruit, but they come from the highlands of southern Brazil and Uruguay. Plants taken from Uruguay to France in 1890 later reached California and then New Zealand.
📍 Lima & the coast, Peru
Beef strips stir-fried in a wok with soy sauce, onion and tomato, served with both fries and rice: lomo saltado is a Peruvian favourite born in chifa, the cooking of Chinese immigrants who came to Peru from 1849.
📍 Junín plateau (Lake Junín), Peru
Maca, a turnip-like root now sold worldwide as a powder, grows at 4,000 metres, where frost and wind defeat most crops. Until the late 1980s it was farmed only around Lake Junín in central Peru, where it is still roasted in earth pits.
📍 Tokyo, Japan
Judo was created in Tokyo in 1882 by Kanō Jigorō, who reshaped older jujutsu styles around safe free sparring; strikes and weapons survive only in set forms. Its name means “gentle way”.
📍 Bengal (India & Bangladesh)
Bungalow comes from Hindi bangla, 'Bengali', short for a low, thatched 'house in the Bengal style'. English speakers in India were using it by the 1670s.
📍 Nepal
In bagh-chal, "moving tigers" in Nepali, one player has four tigers and the other twenty goats. The tigers win by jumping over and capturing five goats; the goats win by hemming the tigers in so they cannot move.