Slashdot Mirror
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Chicken
We'll make great pets
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
... 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.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
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.
"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."
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
I shouldn't think there would be much difference in white flour. Aside from the loss of protein and fiber, the other macronutrient difference between white and whole wheat flour is whole wheat has five times the fat. Fat carries a lot of the flavor subtleties of food.
The lower fat content contributes to white flour's very long shelf life. Whole wheat flour should only be purchased as needed, because the fats in it flour go rancid.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's not just a matter of white vs. wheat - the wheat itself is different. The vast majority of our wheat comes from from semi-dwarf wheat. Semi-dwarf wheat debatably saved us from mass starvation in the 60s and 70s, because it grows so much denser and is very resistant to insects and disease - crop yields of wheat are many times what they used to be. But dwarf wheat is not as good for you as other wheats... you know those amber waves of grain we sing about? Not anymore.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.