As the calendar year turns over, we’ve grown accustomed to the barrage of lists telling us where to travel during the next 12 months. Oftentimes these places are a country or even a whole region – you could spend an entire year exploring just one of the locations listed and still barely make a dent. We like to travel on a smaller scale. Forget countries and cities, for us the neighborhood is the ideal unit of exploration. Celebrating neighborhood life and businesses is, of course, essential to what we do as Culinary Backstreets. Since our founding in 2012, we’ve been dedicated to publishing the stories of unsung local culinary heroes and visiting them on our food walks, particularly in neighborhoods that are off the beaten path.

On a stormy night sometime in the mid-9th century, as the legend goes, a Greek pilgrim named Pontus sought refuge underneath a Roman aqueduct in Salerno, some 50 kilometers south of Naples along the Amalfi Coast. With rain pounding down on the town and debris flying everywhere, Pontus took a terrible blow to his arm and found himself gravely wounded. Just as he sought treatment for his wound, Pontus noticed that a fellow Italian traveler called Salernus was also wounded, but applying seemingly innovative dressings to his injury. Fighting back superstitions and embracing his medical curiosity, Pontus approached Salernus to inspect his bandaging technique. As Salernus explained his methods to the Greek, two additional travelers, Helinus, a Jew, and Abela, an Arab, passed under the same aqueducts.

Just as moments in time can be captured by a photograph, to savor at a later date, so too can the freshest meats and produce – almost equally as fleeting – be preserved (albeit in a can) for enjoyment later down the line. Only we can’t guarantee that they’ll last as long, given how good they taste. Prevalent in various Mediterranean countries, including Spain, Italy, Greece, France and Portugal, canning offers a sustainable way to increase the shelf life of delicate seafood and sophisticated recipes. And while many associate conservas, foods preserved in cans and jars, with student life or basic survival fare, they are in fact experiencing a golden age in Spain.

Wandering around the neighborhood of Çarşamba, home to a famous weekly market and close to the sprawling Fatih Mosque complex, we get the distinct impression that this area is honey central: the streets are lined with shops selling the sweet nectar, particularly stuff coming from the Black Sea region. “This area is full of honey sellers,” Aslan confirms on a cold November afternoon after we took refuge in his store, Balmerkez, “but there is no place like this.” He’s right – there’s something about his storefront that we found particularly appealing on that cold day. Perhaps it’s because Aslan’s little shop looks more like an atelier than a commercial outlet. Pots, containers, glass jars and wicker baskets are stacked high on the shelves – a honey lab may be a more fitting description.

Our Born on the Bosphorus walk in Istanbul pays a visit to one of the city’s many shops that sells exclusively pickled goods with incredible variety. What will it be? Pickled garlic, sour green plums, okra or one of the many other options?

Tamales Doña Emi, a tamal mecca in Colonia Roma, was our first foodie obsession in Mexico City. But really, we were just the most recent converts in a long line of devotees. For the unaccustomed palate, a tamal – steamed corn dough wrapped in a corn husk or banana leaf, with some type of filling at its center – may not sound like much. But anyone who has found that tamal, the one they can’t live without, knows that it is no mundane snack. Doña Emi’s was our game-changer. Big and fluffy, and just moist enough without being greasy, Doña Emi’s tamales are a solid meal, with a current list of wild flavor combos never imagined by the original entrepreneur, Ermilia Galvan Sanchez (Doña Emi).

Darra Goldstein introduced a generation of cooks and readers to the cuisine and culture of Georgia with her seminal work, “The Georgian Feast.” Originally published in 1993, the book was awarded the IACP Julia Child Award for Cookbook of the Year. A revised and expanded 25th anniversary edition, which features new photography, recipes, and an essay from celebrated wine writer Alice Feiring, was published in October 2018. We spoke with Darra, the founding editor of “Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture” and the author of five award-winning cookbooks, about this new edition.

As the calendar year turns over, we’ve grown accustomed to the barrage of lists telling us where to travel during the next 12 months. Oftentimes these places are a country or even a whole region – you could spend an entire year exploring just one of the locations listed and still barely make a dent. We like to travel on a smaller scale. Forget countries and cities, for us the neighborhood is the ideal unit of exploration. Celebrating neighborhood life and businesses is, of course, essential to what we do as Culinary Backstreets. Since our founding in 2012, we’ve been dedicated to publishing the stories of unsung local culinary heroes and visiting them on our food walks, particularly in neighborhoods that are off the beaten path.

In a nation with so many baking and confectionary traditions, it’s surprising that one of the most popular cakes – the bolo-rei – was imported from another country (a sweet tooth does not discriminate, apparently). Translated as “king cake,” the bolo-rei was brought to Portugal from Toulouse, France, by one of the oldest bakeries in Lisbon, Confeitaria Nacional. Over the years, the bolo-rei has become a staple during the festive season: ubiquitous on the table before, during and after Christmas and New Year, and certainly a must for Dia de Reis (Epiphany) on January 6, when it’s baked in its fanciest form with a nougat crown (made of caramel and almonds) and fios de ovos (“egg threads,” or eggs drawn into thin strands and boiled in sugar syrup).

Athens supermarkets devote many shelves to Greek chocolate bars, and there is no shortage of shops in the city that produce their own chocolates with different fillings as well as truffles, along with other types of sweets. But the past year has seen a chocolate renaissance of sorts: two shops opened which are dedicated exclusively to chocolate, joining a third, The Dark Side of Chocolate, an old-timer from 2011. What’s fascinating is that the owners are all young people in love with this magical, demanding substance, yet their creations could not be more different.

The Portuguese have a sweet tooth, and one of their favorite ways to satisfy it is with so-called convent sweets, indulgent desserts that were created in Catholic convents and monasteries using egg yolks, sugar and other rich ingredients. We sample some of these sweets on our “Lisbon Awakens: A Culinary Crossroads, Reborn” walk.

Initially, it was books that led Fernando Rodriguez Delgado to his interest in cacao. Today Rodriguez runs Chocolate Macondo, a café that specializes in ancient preparations of cacao, but prior to that he was a bookseller, fanatical about reading and fascinated by the history of Mexico. The day that he came across the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century manuscript documenting Mesoamerican culture, was an important one: it would eventually spark his countrywide search to discover the traditions of cacao and seek out ingredients, the names of which he only knew in Nahuatl. Rodriguez didn’t speak this native language of Mexico, so trying to work out the recipes for cacao drinks he found in the codex was no easy task.

‘Tis the season of the Japanese New Year’s trinity: osechi, oseibo and nengajo. Like newsy Christmas cards, the nengajo is a recap of family or personal news mailed in postcards during the weeks preceding the end of the year and efficiently delivered all over Japan promptly on January 1. The winter gift-giving season is in full swing, with companies and individuals sending oseibo gifts as thank-you expressions for kindnesses over the year. Most gifts are food or household items like cooking oil or soap. The best of the traditions is osechi ryori, traditional New Year’s cuisine. Osechi is not something one can find in a restaurant because it’s eaten only one time a year, at home or when visiting others at home.

The thought of eating unagi (freshwater eel) can be off-putting, yet the super-fragrant, umami-tasting, velvety-textured delicacy is one of Japan’s prized foods. In Tokyo the eels are split from the stomach side for cleaning and then steamed before being grilled over charcoal and lavished with a finishing sauce, gleaming and sequestered in a covered lacquer box or ceramic bowl.

Located between the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Biscay, in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, Galicia is a large, wild cape that almost looks like a gigantic hand stretching out into the sea, hemmed in by the beautiful estuaries of the Rías Baixas to the south and the Rías Altas to the north. Given this location, the region has long been renowned as a fishing and agriculture center (although it’s best known internationally as the site of the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of Saint James, an ancient pilgrimage route). Over the past few centuries, however, Galicia has been also been characterized by the migration of a good portion of its population to more prosperous cities and countries.