Jerk meat is rubbed with allspice and fiery Scotch bonnet peppers, then slow-smoked over pimento wood. The method grew in Jamaica's hills, where Maroons, escaped Africans, blended it with the Taíno way of smoking meat.
📍 Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco & Tunisia)
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.
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📍 Misserghin (near Oran), Algeria
The clementine is a happy accident: a cross of mandarin and sweet orange that sprang up in an orphanage garden at Misserghin, near Oran in Algeria. It was named in 1902 after the brother who tended it, Clément Rodier.
📍 Great Hungarian Plain, Hungary
Goulash is named after the cowboys who cooked it: gulyás is Hungarian for 'cattle herder'. It began as a herdsmen's stew on the Great Hungarian Plain; the paprika that colours it only reached Europe in the 1500s. In Hungary, it's a soup.
📍 Chicago, USA
Engineer George Ferris built the first Ferris wheel, 80 m tall, for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It was meant to rival the Eiffel Tower from Paris's 1889 fair.
📍 Canadian Arctic (Nunavut)
Igloo comes from iglu, the Inuit word for any house, not only one made of snow; English picked it up in the Canadian Arctic in 1824. It may be −45 °C outside, but body heat alone can warm a snow igloo to as much as 16 °C inside.
📍 Eastern North America
Britain's grey squirrels are American: the species is native to eastern North America and was released on British estates from the 1870s. It has since displaced most of Britain's native red squirrels.