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In Amsterdam, a popular street snack of brined herring comes with chopped onions and a side of sour pickle. The history of Dutch trade, too, is buried under those onions.

The salt used in preserving both the herring and the pickles enabled sea travel for hundreds of years. The salt trade is credited with building a foundation upon which the Dutch consolidated wealth and power in the 16th century. Dominating the seas for over three hundred years, they were able to establish colonies in tropical climates to monopolize the valuable spice trade. As we reported before, the Dutch went to some extreme lengths to control the Indonesian islands where nutmeg was discovered.

Spices flavor many of the foods served in the Netherlands, especially in baking, but they scent the savories, too, like pickles, from one end of the former Dutch empire to the other.

One of the best known pickles for the famous multi-course rijsttafel, a bountiful spectacle developed by Dutch-Indonesians to display their comestible power, is atjar tjampoer, mixed pickles of shredded vegetables. It's typically seasoned with sambal oelek, Indonesia's ubiquitous spicy pepper sauce, as well as ginger, turmeric, vinegar, and sugar.

Karin Vaneker, a Dutch food scholar and author, points out that atjar tjampoer have a decidedly colonial makeup. "If you look at the ingredients," she says, "several aren't Indonesian but Dutch. Vegetables like spitskool [a pointy-headed] cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower probably would not grow well in Indonesia. In general, colonizers weren't interested in developing local agriculture, and [immigrants] likely tried to cultivate European crops."

A Colorful Jumble of Dutch-Surinamese Culture

Lined up on the shelf at Surinaams Buffet Catering in Amsterdam is a vivid display of the byproducts of Amsterdam's colonial past. A beribboned bottle of spiked punch cream and very European brandied plums flank jars of onions with a cucumber-like tree fruit called birambi, and mixed vegetable pickles of shredded carrots, pearl onions, cauliflower, red peppers, gherkins, and baby corn.

Caterer Mavis Hofwijk, originally from Paramaribo, Surinam, immigrated to Amsterdam in the 1960s. From a family of pastry chefs, Hofwijk cooks for visiting dignitaries, most recently Kofi Annan and Princess Maxima of the Netherlands.

Her pickles are soused in a big plastic tub. Bay leaves float lazily around the top of a murky brew fragrant with allspice, clove, coriander, onion, celery sticks, smashed whole ginger, and spicy pepper. Hofwijk stresses certain principles in her cooking, ones illustrated nicely by her pickles: "the best food needs balance," she says, "sweet, sour, and salt."

The very Surinamese souse marries well to many kinds of vegetables, including ones the Dutch love: beets and onions.

Jewish Pickle Carts And Famous Art

Dutch trade routes were not always long journeys by sea. Hofwijk's Surinamese flavors may lend an exotic flavor to Dutch cuisine, but they also share a kinship with the Jewish immigrants who circled Amsterdam with their pickle carts. Fourth generation pickle purveyor Fred Ooms has a cozy little shop in Amsterdam that he runs with wife Monique, but recalls the hard life of the previous generations.

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A masked assailant threw acid into the face of the Bolshoi ballet's artistic director on Thursday in Moscow in what may have been a "reprisal for his selection of dancers in starring roles at the famed Russian company," The Associated Press reports.

Russia Today writes that 42-year-old Sergei Filin "may lose his sight." He "suffered severe burns of multiple degrees to his face and eyes," it adds. And, the news outlet reports that:

"It will take Filin at least six months to recover, Bolshoi spokesperson Ekaterina Novikova said. She added that Sergei Filin had received threats from anonymous callers before. 'We never imagined that a war for roles — not for real estate or for oil — could reach this level of crime,' Novikova said to Channel One.

"Bolshoi general director Anatoly Iksanov said he believed the attack was linked to Filin's work at the theater. 'He is a man of principle and never compromised," Iksanov said. 'If he believed that this or that dancer was not ready or was unable to perform this or that part, he would turn them down.' "

Get recipes for Barley Risotto With Mushrooms, Manchego And Thyme, Mom's Beef And Barley Soup, Pearled Barley Salad With Apples, Pomegranate Seeds And Pine Nuts (above), Curried Barley And Quinoa Cakes and Warm Barley Salad.

We're in Tanzania on safari, when two stately looking giraffes walk into view, looking thoughtful, gentle, as giraffes do, and all of a sudden one of them drops way low and swings his whole neck and head into his buddy's legs, hard, so hard the other giraffe gives off a little cry and then, wham, slams him back, and then the two of them are slamming, parting, clinging, pushing (Are they comparing necks? Looks that way ... ) just like boxers. It doesn't seem like either gets hurt, but wow! I didn't know giraffes do this. I looked it up. It's called "necking."

For a little while, two scientists got a lot of attention when they proposed that these fights were the main reason giraffes have long necks. In a 1996 study, zoologists Robert Simmons and Lue Scheepers challenged the traditional explanation that giraffes born with longer necks could better feed themselves and therefore reproduce more successfully. There are other ways to evolve long necks, they said, proposing what has become known as the "Necks for Sex" theory.

Necks For Sex

Simmons and Scheepers claimed the giraffes in the wild don't do that much reaching for food in high places. They find most of their meals lower down, nearer the ground. Combat, they felt, was a better way to predict which giraffes passed their genes into the future. The stronger, bigger-necked males, they believed, would mate more often, producing more and more bigger-necked baby giraffes. Females would develop long necks as a side effect, and if this went on long enough, then, Thock! Bam! Clump! You get a modern giraffe.

Necks for Sex sounds like a plausible explainer, but according to Brian Switek (who is the reason I'm writing this story; he's fascinated by big animals, and I devour his blog Laelaps), it now seems Necks for Sex may be wrong.

Brian wrote how a second group of scientists went back into the field, took another look, and found that giraffes in the wild do indeed eat food that's high up (and sometimes low down), and long necks do give individuals a feeding advantage. And now this month there's a new paper by much the same group that says it's likely these necking bouts are not always related to copulation, sometimes it's just a king-of-the-mountain thing, and that "males with the longest and most massive necks don't always win these contests."

Ah, well. I don't mind that these neck slams may not be evolutionarily important, that they're more like prize fights, what feisty young giraffes do when they're feeling strong and combative. But it's extra-nice to know that not infrequently, the bruiser loses, and the skinny guy wins.