The Spaniards first came in contact with vanilla in 1519, when the Spanish conquistador Cortez tasted the royal drink cacahuatl in Tenochtitlan. Cortez sent vanilla beans back to Europe, but it would take some time before their full potential was realised by the Europeans. For a considerable amount of time, vanilla beans where only used in conjunction with cocoa beans. Eventually, the Europeans became braver and started using the expensive vanilla beans in other types of food as well. Vanilla beans were also sold as medicine and considered a strong aphrodisiac, just like cocoa beans and products derived from cocoa beans.
Pumpernickel is a German type of bread made from coarsely grounded rye meal. Today, it can also be made from rye flour mixed with whole rye berries.
The first written reference to of pumpernickel dates back to 15th century Westphalia when this type of black bread was mentioned in a text from 1450. It is of course impossible to know if this black bread was exactly the same type of bread that we know as pumpernickel today, but it seems similar.
Pumpernickel is baked really slowly and this gives it a distinguishing dark colour. If you want to make traditional German-style pumpernickel, you need to start with a sourdough. Using commercial yeast and citric acid or lactic acid is not the traditional way of making German-style pumpernickel and this type of short cut is generally frowned upon by German-style pumpernickel aficionados.
Traditional German pumpernickel bread contains no artificial colouring agents, but some bakers use dark toasted bread from old batches to add colouration to the new dough. Even without old toasted bread, pumpernickel bread becomes deep brown thanks to its long baking process and the Maillard reaction. (The Maillard reaction is a type of non-enzymatic browning where an amino acid reacts with a reducing sugar.)
If you think the Internet was created as a part of a military project during the Cold War, to protect the West from the Evil Stalinists, you need to think again. As this video clearly shows, the Internet has always been about one thing.
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter and printmaker. He was born in Moscow in 1866 but spent his childhood in Odessa in southern Ukraine. Wassily Kandinsky is generally considered the first painter of modern abstract works.
Wassily Kandinsky returned to Moscow to study law and economics at the University of Moscow. He didn’t commence painting studies until he was 30 years old. At this age, he focused on life-drawing, sketching and anatomy.
In 1896 he moved to Munich and enrolled in the private school of Anton Ažbe, a painter from Slovenia. He eventually entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and stayed in the city until 1914. Wassily Kandinsky disliked the official art theories of Moscow at the time and returned to Germany in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture. When the school was closed by the Nazis in 1933 Kandinsky moved to France and in 1939 he became a French citizen. He stayed in France until his death in 1944.
Two examples of well-known paintings by Kandinsky are “Composition VII” and “On White II”. According to himself, Composition VII was the most complex piece he ever painted. Kandinsky had a habit of referring to his spontaneous paintings as improvisations and his more elaborate works compositions.
