Couscous isn't a grain: it's tiny balls of semolina, rolled by hand and steamed. It began with the Berber peoples of North Africa, and in 2020 Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia put it on UNESCO's heritage list together.
📍 Guangzhou (Canton), China
Dim sum, Cantonese for 'touch the heart', grew up in the teahouses of Guangzhou, where travellers stopped for tea with a few small bites. The custom, called yum cha ('drinking tea'), later flourished in Hong Kong.
📍 Central North America
Neither from Jerusalem nor an artichoke: it's the tuber of a sunflower native to central North America. 'Jerusalem' is probably a garbling of girasole, Italian for sunflower.
📍 Buffalo, New York, USA
Named after Buffalo, New York, not the animal. The Anchor Bar says co-owner Teressa Bellissimo first tossed fried wings in hot sauce there in 1964, though local chef John Young said he was frying wings in Buffalo from 1961.
📍 Mali (Bambara lands)
Shea comes from si, the tree's name in Bambara, a language of Mali; the Scottish explorer Mungo Park spelled it 'shea' in his 1799 travel book. The wild trees grow across Africa's savanna belt, from Senegal to South Sudan.
📍 Canary Islands, Spain
Canaries are named after the Canary Islands off north-west Africa, where the wild birds still live. The islands came first: their Latin name, Canariae Insulae, is usually read as 'islands of dogs', and Pliny linked it to big dogs found there.
📍 Western Sahel (northern Mali)
Pearl millet was first farmed on the southern edge of the Sahara, around today's northern Mali, more than 4,000 years ago. It later spread to India, which now grows more of it than any other country.