At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, the…

“A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered…

— Mark Kurlansky

“The Romans, Jones pointed out, called a man in love salax, in a salted state, which is the origin of the word salacious.”

— Mark Kurlansky

When you're in theater, you inevitably wind up working in restaurants. I made pastry.

— Mark Kurlansky

“For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings…

— Mark Kurlansky

I blurbed a nice book, not at all like my book 'The Big Oyster,' called 'The Essential Oyster.' I blurbed a pretty good book…

— Mark Kurlansky

The entire trendy foodie world - food writing, food television, celebrated restaurants - is all about food for the rich. But the most important…

— Mark Kurlansky

One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way…

— Mark Kurlansky

It's true that writing and pastry-making are similar, but when you work as a pastry chef, you can get a kind of mania that…

— Mark Kurlansky

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as…

— Mark Kurlansky

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.

— Mark Kurlansky

Religion is a big problem in Israel and the Arab world, but again, the problem isn't religion but political leaders who want to use…

— Mark Kurlansky

“It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same…

— Mark Kurlansky

“The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power.”

— Mark Kurlansky

Don't forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.

— Mark Kurlansky

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

— Mark Kurlansky