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What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like? (blogspot.com)
Benjamin Breen, an assistant professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, looks at art history to figure out what people cooked in the 1600s, and wonders whether it is possible to ascertain the taste of food. From a blog post: What can we learn about how people ate in the seventeenth century? And even if we can piece together historical recipes, can we ever really know what their food tasted like? This might seem like a relatively unimportant question. For one thing, the senses of other people are always going to be, at some level, unknowable, because they are so deeply subjective. Not only can I not know what Velazquez's fried eggs tasted like three hundred years ago, I arguably can't know what my neighbor's taste like. And why does the question matter, anyway? A very clear case can be made for the importance of the history of medicine and disease, or the histories of slavery, global commerce, warfare, and social change. By comparison, the taste of food doesn't seem to have the same stature. Fried eggs don't change the course of history. But taste does change history. Fascinating read.
Food was extremely hard to come by and cook. Most people didn't have jobs where they could easily go to the grocery after. Almost 100% of Americans would starve within the week if they were transported to 1776.
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There's a good chance it tasted like what it was supposed to...
Chicken
We'll make great pets
Chicken!
... then probably very similar to that. Tho I can't remember when potatoes became common.
There is that highly suggestive genitive case.. ;)
and smelled like it too
There were some sanitation issues back in the day and if you weren't super rich with a manor full of servants to do the butchering and cleaning there were some serious sanitation issues. If you traded in the open market, and many did, you were probably buying something that would give the common person of today all sorts of shits and puking. Fortunately there were also many who did their own hunting and and small villages were on the whole cleaner than the cities for the most part, but I'm not sure I would want meat from that era. Veggies on the other hand - that's back when they were still nutritious and had the vitamins and stuff they were supposed to unlike our nice looking empty filler of today.
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but about the same as stuff from the farmer's markets.
I'm sure I'm a bit unusual here as I have a large garden (about an acre), can my veggies and have free-roaming chickens. Eggs and locally grown vegetables taste much better than store bought. Yolks are more yellow and flavorful and tomatoes are a deeper red. When I hit the local farmers market, things taste about the same.
You won't know what historical food tasted like if you don't get the preservation techniques down, and you have to factor spices into both preservation and cooking. Additionally, specific herbs and plants were local to specific regions, so one region might incorporate dandelion into their food, while another would incorporate sage.
Another example is that cinnamon was used in the past to preserve meat and prevent E. coli growth: http://www.new-ag.info/02-1/focuson/focuson8.html
Trade to a region at any given moment matters a lot to the question also, and any trade disruptions that occurred as the result of weather, politics, war, or other matters.
All of this dramatically affects how food would have tasted at any given moment. Honestly though, food probably tasted like crap a lot of the time for anybody aside the rich. The peasants of the time probably had barely any access to more than one or two common spices. Imagine if everything you ate for this week tasted like cinnamon, or oregano, with no salt.
Cook them and you will know!
but strange fare for Slashdot.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Was cannibalism popular in the 17th century?
Nope, but oral sex was. "Eatin' ain't cheatin'" my pastor always said.
According to the researcher:
Gee, ya think?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Don't mind that little apostrophe which signifies ownership, not plurality. :)
Everything tastes of chicken. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tastes_like_chicken]
The discovery of spices in Asia did more to change human history than the discovery of electricity or gunpowder.
I really think that article is crap, just like my comment.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I arguably can't know what my neighbor's taste like.
Misread as : "I arguably can't know what my neighbor tastes like" and wondered if people were part of 17th century diet....
One thing that NO reenactment community accurately portrays is the constant presence of raw, exposed sewage, particularly in urban areas like London or Paris.
People managed to get through their daily lives, walking along canals of sewage, or with chamber pots stinking up the interiors without so much as an eieeewww, because they were used to it, or as we say today 'Nose Blind'.
I have to wonder if this single olfactory impact would have a significant effect on taste and flavor
None of the foodstuffs in that video look anything remotely what vegetables looked like 400 years ago.
This same basic argument was pointed out in Doctor Who back in '89 in "Remembrance of the Daleks".
Can we learn what 17th century navels looked like? We see paintings that occasionally show them, but we know that paintings from that time were painted to an idealized standard. Did these navels really look like they were portrayed in these painting? We can't know any more that we can know how our neighbors see navels.
Stupid asshole bosses always making you eat lobster all the time.
They didn't even have underwear, and rarely bathed. Let's just say everyone had a pretty crusty bunghole.
so the neighbors' taste?
Where I lived before my neighbors' taste was tacky. Should've seen their horrible lawn decorations...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I still don't care
Written recipes from the time period still exist. Most are for wealthy people but there are regular recipes. For the wealthy recipes, there's some interesting podcasts where they recreate the recipe: https://www.npr.org/sections/m... https://www.npr.org/sections/t... (and many more) As for the ingredients, I know that this is unusual in the USA, but here in Switzerland I still buy most of my food direct from the farm. Here in Zürich there are some city-subsidized working farms placed strategically around the city. My local farm is about a 5-minute pleasant walk through cow pastures. Every week I buy raw whole milk, raw butter, freshly laid eggs, organic vegetables, bread, cheese, etc, and meat from the cows I walk past every week. We make our own yogurt with the raw milk. I think most people back then didn't really cook with recipes. They'd take whatever they got fresh that week and work with that. That's how my wife and I do it today too.
The food served in that feast excludes all the vegetables and spices introduced recently into the country. So we do not use green chillies (just recently brought by the Portuguese in 1500s ) or onions or potatoes or garlic or tomatoes, french beans, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower .... It is mind boggling to me that we have preserved through family practices, never written down anywhere, the knowledge of which foods were native and which were "recent arrivals" for some 500 years. It is very hard to imagine Indian food without chillies, onion, garlic, tomato, potato. But I do get to eat a huge meal every year that is somewhat similar to what my ancestors ate back in 1500s! It features rice, two kinds of lentils (the toor dhal and the urad dhal), black pepper, ginger, snake gourd, cluster beans, plantains, some roots, curds, solid molasses from sugar cane, mangoes both ripe and unripe, mustard seeds, white pumpkin, red pumpkin, coconut, ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Did the taste buds of the 17th century provide the same taste sensations as taste buds do nowadays?
Unless you were lucky enough to have roasted meat, probably most everything you ate was some kind of stew or porridge. It was an easy way to extend what meat and animal fats you have while supplementing it with grains or vegetables when they were available. If you kept adding water, it stayed edible for a while over the fire, extending how long you could eat it without a lot of preparation.
And let's not forget that a good soft stew is about the ideal food when your teeth are half rotted out of your head.
Local herbs were probably the most common flavor enhancer, since they were local. And you probably salted the shit out of it if you could afford the salt in some attempt to make it all palatable.
I'm sure people were more chewy and stringy back then .. *munch munch*
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
"Is bland food eaten without salt? Is there any taste in the white of an egg?" -Job 6:6
When you talk about the taste of food, it is really easy to relate to people from 4000 years ago. Biologically they were just like us.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...it's a cookbook!
It tasted fucking phenomenal. Today's food has been bred, over countless generations and several decades, for it's non-flavor related qualities.
"The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.” --Julia Child, 1961
I can assure, the situaton has only gone downhill since then. Most people today will never, in their lives, eat a delicious chicken. The same applies to vegetables.
like chicken
Okay, it's not 17th century cooking, but there's a whole YouTube channel on 18th century cooking: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw
He'll occasionally delve into earlier centuries. I'd say that's pretty close and it's entertaining to watch too. Nutmeg in all the things!
I can't remember the name of it, but there was a British TV show with a couple of food writers, where in each episode they actually dramatized living in different time periods and cooking and eating the diet of that period for several days. They wore costumes and everything. It was pretty interesting. If anybody knows the show I'm talking about please post the name here. Anybody interested in this topic would probably enjoy seeing them.
You would know, gramps.
Hopefully not Chicken.
Like now, food was flavored to the taste of the cook, and whoever was paying them. We know actually quite a lot about what people were eating when, both because it has always been a fantastically popular subject to write about and because we've found actually quite a lot of evidence left behind and studied it quite a lot in order to get clues to the pasts of various cultures. In some cases, you can actually just ask people, because some of them are still around. The last really knowledgeable natives of many tribes are just dying out, so this is the last chance to pull that off. For instance, the lady who was said to make the best fry bread in this area died fairly recently...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One thing that NO reenactment community accurately portrays is the constant presence of raw, exposed sewage, particularly in urban areas like London or Paris.
People managed to get through their daily lives, walking along canals of sewage, or with chamber pots stinking up the interiors without so much as an eieeewww, because they were used to it, or as we say today 'Nose Blind'.
I have to wonder if this single olfactory impact would have a significant effect on taste and flavor
I spent 2 years in Brazil and passed through many places where there was a raw sewage river on the side of the road. I learned not to make faces in order to not offend the locals. I also got used to not putting toilet paper in the toilet (lack of water pressure meant clogged toilets). You get used to whatever your normal is.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130536078
https://www.netflix.com/title/80148271
"America's Test Kitchen head chef Erin McMurrer and mentor Chris Kimball re-create an 1896 12-course meal from American cookbook pioneer Fannie Farmer."
Did you notice if it affected how your food tasted? If you had the same dish that you ate in a 'stinky' environment, would your experience of it be similar or different?
That's not really an issue until you get a large concentration of people.
Rural communities are dispersed enough to avoid that kind of thing.
Sewage and water treatment plants are necessities of urban living.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
My neighbor was bland. Could have used some garlic and salt. Too late to fix that now though.
You would know, gramps.
We know what many vegetables looked like via diagrams. Carrots now look significantly different from several centuries ago (with orange carrots first appearing in Holland in the 17th century.)
Europeans of the era traveled to virtually every known corner of the world in search of spices. I think it's only reasonable to think that we can guess how their food tasted. Bland. It tasted bland.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
With no refrigeration it tasted between rotten or just spoiled.
Most food and fruit bred so intensely for sugar that the flavours are mostly gone.
Tomato is a horrible sugar bag nowadays, with very little "zest" or bite as it had when I was a kid.
It's frustrating.
"Mushy, slightly herbal and as salty as affordable"...
So, McDonalds, then.
Unless you're lucky enough to have a steak, probably most everything you ate was some kind of slop made from the cheapest ingredients possible. It's an easy way to extend what scrap meat you bought from the grocery store while supplementing it with grains or vegetables when they're available for a reasonable price. If you kept adding ketchup, it stayed edible for a while over the fire, extending how long you could eat it without a lot of preparation.
And let's not forget that a good soft hamburger is about the ideal food when your teeth are all replaced with dentures because your real ones rotted away from sugar decay.
Local herb is probably the most common appetite enhancer, to prevent you from turning up your nose at this garbage. And it's all salted to hell because salt is cheap now.
Things haven't changed much.
You think that sounded good, but you start on the wrong end of the spectrum.
You only use salt to preserve. Which means if you use non fresh meat, its salted so badly to death, it will contain enough.
You also don't really sell the idea of boiling spices/roots in oil/butter to produce stock, which is then used for flavor. Now, herbs where common, but they are far less tasty than onions or celery, or any other plant that is strong in taste.
So herbs is less ideal than roots.
Maybe everything tasted like chicken... ...the broth.
That's what braising and smoking are for. Low and slow are the keys to success!
At the time, most of you were living in England. Don't forget that.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It was probably really bland by today's standards. Columbian exchange, anybody?
This fifty-years-gone world smelled worse than I ever would have expected, but it tasted a whole hell of a lot better
(that was 1960 compared to 2010, taste wise 350 years was also probably more tasty)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It is hard to imagine how food tasted in the 1600s as the stench of death was so think that it amazes me that anyone could eat anything. Dicken's novels mentioned graves that were only one inch lower than the next body heaped upon the plot. Enemies of law or the crown were left handing about as a grim threat of what could easily happen to any citizen at any time, In my youth we used to speak of country air. What we meant was the stink of cattle or hogs oozing from barn yards that one inevitably ran into when leaving the town. Places like London or New York were so vile it is hard to imagine eating anything at all.
And let's not forget that a good soft stew is about the ideal food when your teeth are half rotted out of your head.
Why would your teeth be all rotten? Tooth decay and the need for so much dental treatment is the result of all the sugary foods that you people eat today.
Go back to the 1700s, and sugar was still very expensive. Much of the sweetening in food would have come from natural fruits, whose varieties at that time were less sweet than modern varieties, or from honey, which would still be fairly expensive.
Cane sugar got going with the colonies in the Americas and West Indies, and the associated slave trade, making the price of sugar drop for a while and making consumption increase. Britain, for example, consumed five times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar).
Industrial scale extraction of sugar from beets got going in 1801.
Take away the sugar, increase the fibre in the diet. Barring accidental damage, the teeth of people in 1700 is nowhere near as dire as you seem to think.
Yep. This is where the poem originated --
"Peas porridge hot.
Peas porridge cold.
Peas porridge in the pot
Nine days old."
They just kept re-heating the same porridge every day, adding new stuff from time to time. My roomies and I did this in college with a crock pot. The rule was, eat some, then add something to it. We kept it going for over a month at a time.
salt, sugar and many fats, oils and spices weren't plentiful, also poultry breeds were more gamey and contained less fat - in general everything would be a step more bland....
Many varieties of apple were/are grown for cider only. They didn't need to be sweet for that purpose.
eom
Academics often pontificate on subjects that have been studied for years by "amateurs" whose work they totally discount because no Piled higher and Deeper letters are attached.
On the subject of cooking in the 1700s; it has been studied to the point that Wm. Townsend & Sons has been running a series on that very subject for several years.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw
If you want an Elizabethan era cookbook translated for a modern kitchen; contact your local branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism. (Unless you want to figure out a gill of milk and a fist of ginger yourself)
If you want to talk 19th century cooking; try the Civil War reinactors.
I've seen so many academic "studies" that just filed the author's names off niche group publications and claimed credit for the research done by the "amateurs".
Taste in food changes with a culture. Consider "frumenti". Supposedly it was Shakespear's favorite treat. To me, frumenti is still sour fermented flour and fruit suitable only for catfish bait.
NRRPT/RCT
Did you notice if it affected how your food tasted? If you had the same dish that you ate in a 'stinky' environment, would your experience of it be similar or different?
Actually, I haven't had any of the same dishes since coming back to the states. My wife (who is Brazilian) uses different spices here than there. She does say, though, that our chickens taste different, so she cleans our chicken with lime juice before preparing meals.
That's not really an issue until you get a large concentration of people.
Rural communities are dispersed enough to avoid that kind of thing.
Sewage and water treatment plants are necessities of urban living.
Only since the outhouse building projects of the depression's WPA. Before that open sewage and disease were major problems to the health of rural Americans.
People have no clue that nearly the whole of the world up until just after WW2 basically smelled like sewage and shit. Literally, the atmosphere of most of their daily lives was permeated in the smell of shit and piss.
I have a neighbor (American) who lived in Costa Rica for six years. She talks about how awful American meat is in comparison, particularly the chicken.
Regarding what the parent said about historic smell and taste: it's only pretty recently (last couple hundred years) that food smells have been thought of as positive. In large old houses, where servants would have been expected to do the cooking, you can see that the dining room and the kitchen often have a lot of space between them. This is to keep the kitchen smells away from the diners.