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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.
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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... then probably very similar to that. Tho I can't remember when potatoes became common.
Except we have spent the last 400 years actively changing breeding stock - hence the flavors of what we eat today are fundamentally different from those of yesteryear.
Case in point is the way that meat chickens have changed in just over the last 60 years since they started to be bred for more and more white meat.
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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
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
Most younger Americans transported to 1950 would starve unless they were sent back with a large supply of cash, in which case they would be at a high risk of food poisoning. One of the reasons for the rise of restaurant chains in the 50s was to make it possible for travelers to know where to eat without getting "ptomaine poisoning" (most people didn't even understand the microbial nature of foodborne illness).
Until the 1970s most Americans cooked nearly all their own food from scratch, other than bread. I'm old enough remember in the 1960s the tail end of the process of re-educating Americans to "cook" with prepared food. It was the Age of the Casserole, because the food industry was spending huge bucks in training people to dump cans of cream of mushroom soup into "chicken a la king". In seconds a can of cream of mushroom soup replaced spending hours making stock and thickening it by whisking it into a roux.
But it wasn't just convenience; looking back on these product-oriented recipes, it's astonishing how dreadful many of them sound to us. How does combining canned fruit cocktail, mayonnaise, and mini-marshmallows sound to you? I can tell you how it sounded back then, it sounded exciting.
I think the marketers tapped into a pair of contradictory but deep-rooted impulses in human diet: familiarity and novelty. If you look at hunter gatherer societies you see both eating patterns: pursuing go-to calorie sources along with lots and lots of opportunistic foraging.
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You can do a lot more than most people would imagine with beans and root vegetables, although the addition of new world peppers and tomatoes was a huge post-Columbian boost to cuisine worldwide. What potatoes added was a very calorie and nutrition dense (if you eat the skin) crop that could in intensively farmed. Potatoes have twice the protein by weight as turnips and rutabagas which it largely displaced in late 1700s Europe.
Most European cuisines have a basic go-to flavor combo used to liven up boring but nutritious calories like beans or the stewed cheap bits of an animal. In France this is mirepoix: diced onion, carrot, and celery. Take your boiled beef, and instead simmer it in stock made from bones with mirepoix. While the water is heating you have plenty time to go out and pick the weeds you need to make a bouqet garni: thyme, bay leaves and sage. Add that to your stew and result isn't boring, tasteless meat mush. It's something you'd pay money to eat if someone else took all the trouble, and all it takes is stuff that grows wild on the edges of your fields.
In Germany and the low countries you might add dried peas, leeks,celeriac and turnip to your stew -- flavors which might not be so attractive alone but which in concert accomplish something close to flavor alchemy. In Italy you have soffritto: onions and garlic browned and cooked down with herbs, and that's not boring either. In the Eastern Meditteranean you might combine garlic, spices like turmeric and cardamom, herbs like mint, and lemon juice.
As long as you stick to vegetables, legumes, roots, and spices the flavors of pre-modern times are fairly easy to reproduce in the modern kitchen. What's harder to reproduce are the flavors of the actual meat people would have eaten. Beef would have been grass-fed and relatively lean -- that has a very different flavor although you can still obtain lean grass-fed beef from local farmers in many cities I've also had wild hog, which is very likely what the domestic pig tasted like before it was selectively bread into the massive, lean, relatively tasteless pork we're used to now; all I can say is that it tastes intensely swine-y. Old style chicken is as far as I know impossible to obtain as meat. Chicken as we now know it, with grotequely huge breasts and very little dark meat didn't exist until WW2.
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"How does combining canned fruit cocktail, mayonnaise, and mini-marshmallows sound to you? I can tell you how it sounded back then, it sounded exciting."
How dare you mock my inner childs beloved "marshmallow salad"; I still make it from time to time, and I still like it.
" It was the Age of the Casserole, because the food industry was spending huge bucks in training people to dump cans of cream of mushroom soup "
Along with a can of tuna, noodles.... bake for a bit... and 'tuna casserole'. I actually had that for lunch today... leftovers.
Nothing wrong with a few 10 minute to prepare meals in your arsenal that are throw backs to the 60s and 70s. Plus all the essential ingredients keep well for months.
On a cold fall day between school, the kids extracurricular activities, and both of us working... Plus its a kind of nostalgic comfort food. We make it about once a year so its hardly like we live on it.
You're 100% right. We had chickens roaming free in the yard back in the 1950s and 1960s. We fed them a little bit of chicken feed, but they mostly ate whatever they could find. The chicken tasted better AND the eggs tasted better.
My grandmother could kill a chicken, pluck it, gut it, cut it up, and fry it before you could ask what's for dinner. There's no telling how many chickens she killed and cooked in her 89 years.
Oh, and vegetables have definitely changed in flavor since then. Today's commercially raised veggies don't get all the nutrients and micronutients they used to get. "If it ain't in the soil in a form the plant can use, it ain't gonna be in the food you eat."