What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like? (blogspot.com) 197
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.
Depends your status. (Score:2, Insightful)
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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Food was extremely hard to come by and cook
Yeah farms and fauna were hard to come by and we didn't know how to make fires. I'm pretty sure your claim is valid.
Re:Depends your status. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Depends your status. (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
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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."
I have never heard of this beast, but I am intrigued. When did it go extinct? And where can I get a recipe? Or should I just begin experimenting?
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Just google for 'marshmallow fruit salad' and you should start finding piles of options; most recipes are a bit fancied up... replacing the can of fruit cocktail with fresh fruit, adding nuts...
This one is pretty much it:
http://www.geniuskitchen.com/r... [geniuskitchen.com]
This one has a sour cream base...
https://www.tasteofhome.com/re... [tasteofhome.com]
This one is mayo and cool whip...
http://www.cooks.com/recipe/t6... [cooks.com]
This one is may and cream...
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/1... [allrecipes.com]
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Well the irony is that Americans now eat worse than our supposedly horrible diet of the 1960s and 70s. The reason is that sheer amount of refined carbohydrates that have replaced fat calories.
Personally I believe you can eat healthy, and eat whatever you want, the key is moderation. Prioritize real food first, and once you've made that your base if you want to occasionally have a casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and potato chips as ingredients, enjoy.
Re:Depends your Location. (Score:2)
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Food from the 1850's tasted better than today's gmo products.
My example is the tomato
10 years ago, a tomato from the grocers was deep read, juicy, and flavourful. Today it is crunchy, durable, can handle rough handling in the grocery bag, and tasteless. It seems that gmo'd tomatoes were engineered to be insect resistant and dry.
I remember slicing a pre-gmo tomato and the juices were leaking over the saucer/plate. Today, I can slice a tomato, and the saucer/plate doesn't even get wet.
Our forefathers had b
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Except that it was on the verge of rotting by the time it got to your kitchen. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing. (I'm trying to get a kefir culture going to make my milk go sour.)
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It would depend if they were in rural or urban areas.
In rural areas it may be tricky for many because they will have to grow their own food. But if you took people from the 1600 and teleported then in the middle of nowhere with no supplies they would die out too.
If we took people from today give them a few months of supplies. Chances are if teleported to the 1600 they would be able to survive.
In an urban environment we would just need to find a job that would be a good match to our future skills.
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I knew that something always nagged at me when dealing with electricity, and not simply because of being electrocuted...
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I agree. That just made it harder to reconcile everything when I went to tech for electronics. Every little bit of logic and consistency helps.
Among other things, diodes face the "wrong" way in schematics. Now instead of looking at them as directional arrows, you need to look at them as funnels, if you want to envision the actual electron flow.
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It's something people look past (indeed, have to), but I prefer to envision the physical reality of a situation: valance electrons in a metallic medium (conductor) are loosely bound to their nuclei and via an applied difference of potential (voltage), are easily coerced to move A) towards a net positive charge and B) away from a net negative charge; that's the just the physical reality of what's happening in electrical current.
I find it odd that you'd say the truth is basically holding me back, but perhaps
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The direction of the "electrons" is meaningless and I don't think it's helping you to focus on them.
It is the direction of "current" that matters. Whether that is implemented as a stream of negative charge in one direction, or positive charge in the other, is irrelevant.
That may be true in most day to day electronics, but it is not true in all areas. When the electrons or holes are moving through a magnetic field they deflect differently. I remember learning about this back when I was learning basic electronics in the Navy. They had found that in certain materials it is more accurate to think of the holes moving rather than the electrons. And testing those materials in a magnitic field gave differing results based on whether it is holes or electrons moving. Here is a link [phys.org]
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Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
With a centipede crawling into his butt in addition to that.
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However, it will take a huge number of academics an interminable number of years to decide which is which.
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Food was extremely hard to come by? How the hell did the human race continue?
With high numbers of infant mortality and a much shorter life expectancy.
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High mortality was not so much due to food shortage. With no antibiotics, a simple cut in a finger might kill you. Getting they yearly cold always carried the risk of pneumonia and death. Still, if you lived to 40, you were likely to live to 70 as well.
Err, I tend to disagree here. I grew up in a poor country with relatively high infant mortality. Antibiotics were available but proper nutrition for the mother and baby (as well as pre-natal care) were not. I literally saw babies dying from a mild flu because they were so compromised by malnutrition.
Even in the case of infections, a malnourished person will succumb faster.
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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
Re:This isn't that hard to figure out (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
Like Everything Else (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually there's fairly strong evidence that the bland, almost flavorless chicken we now eat is a distinct change for the blandness compared to chickens of-old. As chickens have been selectively bred for a myriad of characteristics that benefit the farmer, the flavor of the meat has been lost. Chicken is the vodka of animals raised for their meat.
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Chicken is the vodka of animals raised for their meat.
You had me right up until there. So what you're saying is, chickens have been purposefully genetically mutated for the purposes of inducing inebriation? Whoever says it was better in ye olden days is obviously wrong! Beer budgets were much larger back then.
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Beer budgets were much larger back then
Yes but that was because drinking stored water was often hazardous. So the brewed lots and lots of small beer. Between the presence of the good yeast and the small amount of alcohol they did produce it drove a lot of the nastier bugs off.
So everyone especially children were given beer when the water was less than fresh.
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Actually, the carbon dioxide driving away the oxygen is more important than the yeast (and not because a bit of global warming never did anyone any harm).
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Yes but that was because drinking stored water was often hazardous. So the brewed lots and lots of small beer. Between the presence of the good yeast and the small amount of alcohol they did produce it drove a lot of the nastier bugs off.
So everyone especially children were given beer when the water was less than fresh.
Check out the documentary How Beer Saved the World [vimeo.com] if you haven't seen it already.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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There Europeans!
If you eat boiled/roast meat and boiled veg... (Score:2)
... then probably very similar to that. Tho I can't remember when potatoes became common.
Re:If you eat boiled/roast meat and boiled veg... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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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Not just chickens, turkeys too. Back in the '50s, when I was a child, dark meat on both birds really was dark, and had a much stronger, richer taste than it does now. If you want to find out how good dark meat can taste, make sure that this year's turkey is free range, because without the mobility that allows, the legs don't get used enough to develop the me
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Yea, dark meat today has an almost watered down chocolate milk color and tastes way less irony and more fatty. Duck meat braised with some butter or lard is about as close as I can get to the succulent dark turkey/chicken meat of my childhood.
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You eat the roosters pretty early as they fight and take resources away from the hens. A couple of roosters is all that is needed.
Re:If you eat boiled/roast meat and boiled veg... (Score:5, Interesting)
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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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.
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I'm aware of the dwarf wheat change; I'm just saying that from a sensory standpoint once you've removed most of the flavor components it probably doesn't make any culinary difference.
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What percentage of the population would have regularly eaten white flour in the 1600's? At that, how much flour was ground from wheat, rather then rye etc.
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Before 1870 or so 0%. The technology needed to remove the endosperm from the germ and bran on an industrial scale did not exist.
The bread we eat, even most "wheat" bread, is made up almost entirely of the endosperm. So my point is that the variety of wheat hardly makes any difference compared to the changes in how we prepare it.
There are some people who believe that semi-dwarf wheat -- whose thicker stalks allow for a much heavier seed head -- is responsible for the rise of gluten intolerance. It's an Int
Fecal matter. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fecal matter. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yet we have numerous examples of masses of people getting violently ill with diseases of the bowel in individual incidents.
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Do you have any idea how many toddlers died from eating grilled cheese sandwiches 400 years ago? You're talking about the people that were tough enough to survive to adulthood, which meant about 5 years of eating the stuff you're talking about.
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1. Many disease risks have increased. Hundreds of years ago, people rarely travelled 250 miles, let alone intercontinentally. The microbes their village maggots had were already familiar to their immune system. Maggots themselves are quite benign - the French, even city folk, like to eat maggots with butter.
These days, you are constantly fighting diseases of next county, next city, next state, next country and next continent ; much much more than your ancestors did.
2. Squeaky clean food is also required bec
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Not so in this 1600's engraving [alamy.com] of Isaac Newton. Nor in even older paintings [courtauld.ac.uk]. Even its wild progenitor, Malus sieversii [wikipedia.org] is of similar size to modern apples.
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"hundreds of years ago they were tiny and almost flavorless. Apples were the size of today's plums." Not so in this 1600's engraving [alamy.com] of Isaac Newton. Nor in even older paintings [courtauld.ac.uk]. Even its wild progenitor, Malus sieversii [wikipedia.org] is of similar size to modern apples.
American apples typically were smaller and sour. These are the apples that made Johnny Appleseed famous and they were mostly used for making apple cider, not eating. With prohibition, those apple trees got cut down and with supermarkets, the larger apples for eating became more popular.
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Even vegetables cut on the same cutting board as raw chicken, just like my grandmother did her whole life.
I do that all the time now and have never gotten sick. If I'm making fajitas or an asian-style dish or something, I'll cut up the meat, rinse off the cutting board and knife with just water, then cut the onions/peppers/etc on the same board with the same time while the meat is cooking.
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Sure, raw chicken is fine, unless it has salmonella. In which case you are pretty much definitely getting ill.
It might be the case that our grandparents didn't worry about it, because salmonella was much rarer then with different farming techniques, but that doesn't mean that you can ignore it *now*...
Also, food poisoning sucks sooooo much I'd rather take some precautions than risk it again...
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Not if we've been eating more or less safe foods all our lives. If you grow up eating shit on shingle you'll probably be fine, but if you suddenly eat it after eating nothing but food served by a germ-o-phobe hypochondriac all your life you're probably going to have a problem.
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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.
Growing up on the farm we had a large wild apple tree growing next to the house. The fruit was small and tasted bitter, we'd pick the larger ones for Mom to make applesauce, with plenty of sugar added in to sweeten it up. Think of a Granny Smith but twice as bitter, and half the diameter. Many of the apples were about the size of a golf ball, my brothers would tee them up to practice their swing. A good swing meant the apple made a nice splat on the golf club face and the debris spread nicely centered d
Re:Fecal matter. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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).
I do that every weekend with pizza! Lo-and-behold, here I am commenting!! ... is it Friday yet?
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Re:Fecal matter. (Score:4, Informative)
Just eat it properly cooked instead of half done or bloody. People weren't completely stupid even if they did not realize why food could be harmful they learned to avoid it, as a result religions banned food that carried parasites or was hard to prepare as evil.
I believe this is the original reason Jews and Muslims had foods marked as "unclean" - pork, meat that still had blood, etc. As a Christian, I believe these kosher / halal laws were God trying to teach people how to keep healthy in a way they could understand.
This is mildly interesting (Score:2)
but strange fare for Slashdot.
Clue (Score:2)
According to the researcher:
Gee, ya think?
Why not Roman Emperors' food taste? (Score:2)
I really think that article is crap, just like my comment.
Eating my neighbor? (Score:2)
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....
As Argued in Doctor Who (Score:2)
Lobster! (Score:2)
Stupid asshole bosses always making you eat lobster all the time.
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Lobster used to be poor folks' food. When servants in pre-Revolutionary Boston went on strike one of their grievances was how often they were served lobster. They got contracts stating that they would only have to eat lobster twice a week.
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Still, no (Score:2)
I have some clue, personally (Score:5, Interesting)
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, ...
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However there is a closely related vegetable called "poosani" which is also called pumpkin in English is native to India. Looks it is called winter melon or ash gourd too.
http://isha.sadhguru.org/blog/... [sadhguru.org]
Corollary... (Score:3)
Mushy, slightly herbal and as salty as affordable (Score:3)
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.
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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
From 4000 years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
To Serve Man... (Score:2)
What a load of nonsense (Score:2)
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
We can't know but we can infer... (Score:2)
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
Easy (Score:2)
With no refrigeration it tasted between rotten or just spoiled.
I bet the tomato's weren't disgusting like now (Score:2)
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.
According to Stephen King (Score:2)
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)
Sicker Yet ! (Score:2)
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I'm sure people were more chewy and stringy back then .. *munch munch*
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so the neighbors' taste?
Where I lived before my neighbors' taste was tacky. Should've seen their horrible lawn decorations...
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Take the red pill.
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Re:On the whole, better than grocery bought stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
those are some entrepreneurial cows you buy from. A bit grizzly that they would sell the flesh of their own brothers and sisters though.
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Most people today will never, in their lives, eat a delicious chicken. The same applies to vegetables.
I absolutely agree.
Most vegetables will never, in their lives, eat a delicious chicken.