Coffee anyone?
Fixed.
A lot of medieval recipes make larger use of almonds than we would ever imagine. Almond milk was a standard, paste, flour, extract, almonds in every form permeate the cookbooks I’ve seen. There was also a far greater use of “pulses” as side dishes (basically cooked mesclun,whatever leafy greens were available) and they ate a whole lot more cabbage than we do. Carrots were allowed to grow really large and roasted as we would a sweet potato; this is delicious, and I’m always thrilled when I find some at the farmer’s market.
To get a quick and comprehensive look at what they used and how, you might browse this glossary of cooking terms.
ETA: Turkeys have largely replaced geese, obviously.
Coffee is an Old World plant
I know of the term “pulse” as indicating legumes, like lentils.
Can we also submit examples from the other half of the exchange, i.e., Old World ingredients that replaced ones in New World cuisine? Okay, I get that there’s a huge list of modern New World staple foods like rice and beef and chicken that weren’t known pre-Columbus, so that might be broadening the remit too much.
But what I’m thinking of is specific examples such as the now-widespread use of Asian coriander, Coriandrum sativum or cilantro, in Mexican and other Americas cuisines instead of the native culantro or Eryngium foetidum (not that culantro isn’t still widely used, but the non-native cilantro or coriander leaf appears to be far more common).
Likewise, Mediterranean grape varieties have largely displaced native fox grapes or muscadine grapes in the Americas, and same thing for Asian persimmons.
Returning to the New -> Old half of the exchange, how about blueberries (Cyanococcus)? Would you say they’re now an “essential” ingredient outside the New World, and if so, did they “replace” another food?
“Oats: A grain that in England is fed principally to horses, but in Scotland supports the population.” -Samuel Johnsono.
Potatoes were on the table in filming the Robert Taylor Ivanhoe. Realizing the error, baked apples were substituted.
Yes, good catch, thanks.
Pulses are legumes, not greens.
Yeah, I wonder if maybe TruCelt was thinking of leafy greens like purslane and parsley (which I discovered with some surprise are not in fact etymologically related, slap my ass and call me Sally), and momentarily confused them with pulses.
Of course, the traditional come-back is some variant on “That’s why England has the finest horses, and Scotland the finest men.”
I always had the impression that the big 4 (tomatoes, corn, potatoes and chiles) didn’t actually replace anything per-se, but were just adopted as new staples over time. I suppose you could argue that potatoes replaced turnips as the poverty food of choice, but I don’t know that it really displaced them in a culinary sense.
Here’s the list so far –
Corn (maize)
Potatoes
Sweet potatoes
Tomatoes
Chilis (including sweet peppers/capsicum)
Turkeys
Chocolate/cocoa
Vanilla
Tobacco (stretching the definition of food ingredients to consumables)
Cassavas
Wild rice
Sunflowers (seeds)
Common (Phaseolus) beans
Peanuts
Squashes and pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo)
Pineapples
Quinine
Coca
Agave
Chicle
Strawberries
Blueberries
I gotta say, in that list only potatoes, tomatoes, chilies, chocolate, vanilla and beans qualify as what I think of as essential ingredients in any Old World cuisine as practiced today.
I recall muscadines growing wild on my Grandfather’s farm. What are they used for? The ones I tasted as a child were nasty.
Avocados are native to the Americas. Not a vital crop but I’d miss them if they were gone.
I guess this explains why ice cream wasn’t popular in the Middle Ages.
They’re a wine making grape.
cranberries
Oh, but it was! Just expensive and difficult to make/get, but both the courts of Olite and Istambul happened to have access to it (different versions, the one from Istambul was more like a modern sherbet and the one from Olite more like frozen juice); Istambul’s was famous throughout the known world (and anybody who hadn’t heard of it was officially in the boondocks), Olite was more of a local reputation (its own realm being a lot smaller and less important, and spending a lot of time doing our best to look innocent and non-threatening).