This holiday week and next (December 20-December 31), learn more about how to make gingerbread houses at the working kitchen in the Museum's new exhibition, Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.

From carrots to cassava, root vegetables are enjoying a culinary renaissance; this Thursday, December 13, at 6:30 pm, noted New York chef and Food Network star Alex Guarnaschelli will be at the Museum for a special Adventures in the Global Kitchen program devoted to how to cook and eat root vegetables, why they’re a lynchpin of biodiversity, and much more. She will be joined by Eleanor Sterling, co-curator of the Museum's new exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.

In the Museum's new special exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, an early edition of the American classic Joy of Cooking, first published in 1931 by Irma S. Rombauer, is featured in a wall of cookbooks, from ancient to modern. We recently spoke to John Becker, a great-grandson of Rombauer, who with others in his family still works to edit and develop the "all-purpose" cookbook.

In the new exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, artifacts from the Museum’s collections help illuminate how people cooked and ate in China some 2,000 years ago, during the Han Dynasties (226 BC to AD 220).

In the new exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, a walk-through diorama depicts a bustling food market, set in the year 1519 in the capital city of the Aztec Empire, in what's now Mexico; it featured domesticated turkeys for sale—among many other foods, including chocolate, from all over the empire.