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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.
... 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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So, so wrong. Humans are omnivores, we can eat just about anything without getting sick. Our immune systems are voracious monsters, capable of beating back just about anything. Even vegetables cut on the same cutting board as raw chicken, just like my grandmother did her whole life. Speaking of vegetables, they are better than they've ever been today, hundreds of years ago they were tiny and almost flavorless. Apples were the size of today's plums. A serious case of silly looking backwards and assuming anything that came before today must have been horribly wrong.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sure it is! I used to believe humans could get sick from almost anything. But then, I went overseas and discovered a new life. In Eastern Europe, they take dinner, cover it on the table, and keep it overnight without any refrigeration. The next day, they heat it up and eat it again, and don't get sick. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. In Asia, they do the same thing, keep food out for 12 hours unrefrigerated and then eat it the next day. They don't get sick, I watched them. And even a few times ate the food myself (they didn't tell me, I found out afterwards).
Our immune systems are fantastic things and do an outstanding job of keeping us free of illness. It's just today's ridiculous fear-mongering and paranoia that tells us we must have squeaky-clean food, all the time every day. Honestly it's a problem to live in too-clean environment, our immune systems were developed to constantly fight off infection and without an enemy to fight they find one, which makes us allergic. 20 years ago no kids at my school were allergic to peanuts, not a single one. But today, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich will get your kid expelled because it is a deadly peril to all the other children.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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'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."