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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.
"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."
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.
I think you're missing the point. Your chickens may be free-roaming, but have been bred for generations for certain characteristics. Fruits and vegetables have been selected for certain characteristics; it's actually very difficult to find "ancient grains," like the wheat that was common back then. It's not just because we've become accustomed to prepared foods, it's because foods have morphed over the years for perceived benefits, like disease and insect resistance.
Stupid sexy Flanders.