Before europeans were willing to eat plants from the nightshade family, what did the Italians eat?
please delete this thread moderator, thanks
Well, at the risk of sounding weird… don’t delete it. What did italians eat before they had their tomato paste?
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Isn’t the tomato-heavy food we get in Italian restaurants just an Americanized version of Italian food? They’re just selling what most people want–which is some variation on spaghetti with meat sauce.
I don’t think native Italian cuisine is quite that dependent on tomatoes.
Olive oil is used instead of tomato sauce in many traditional Italian dishes, including pizza. Marinara sauce as Americans know it was probably invented in Brooklyn.
Elmer J. Fudd,
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I own a mansion and a yacht.
I’ve eaten in Italy and they LOVE a good fresh tomato. It is in a large portion of their dishes. Tomato paste is not that big though. Order past dishes and expect to get a heaping mound of noodles and three tablespoons of tomato sauce.
Hell is Other People.
IIRC, it was southern Italy that created the tomato-rich American favorites while northern Italy favored the cream sauces. I may have the geography backward, but it was something like that.
De gustibus non est disputandem
According to Jeff Smith (the Frugal Gourmet) if you go back to the days of the HRE, the condiment of choice was a (IMO vile) fish paste thats closest modern relative is Worcester (sp?) sauce but with exponentially more fish flavor.
And there’s a reason they don’t market it today.
There are several similar fermented fish things in Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, however. They really smell up the kitchen, but somehow they make all the other flavors of the dishes they are used in come together.
Well, they had pasta thanks to Marco Polo. Heated up with some olive oil and garlic and you have food for the Gods!
Here’s something from Raymond Sokolov, food columnist for Natural History:
“Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Europe was in the midst of coagulating modern countries out of fiefdoms and principalities just at the time that New World foods arrived on the continent through Mediterranean ports of entry. When the potato and the tomato crossed the Atlantic in Spanish boats and were offloaded in the port of Seville, they entered a Spain unified under Isabel and Ferdinand only a few years before. Italy, the next place they migrated, did not coalesce into a true nation with a true national language until the nineteenth century…
…The national cuisines we find in European contries today evolved out of a pan-European medieval way of eating at about the same time that France, Italy, and Spain were defining themselves as nations in the modern sense of the word. They were not oddities grafted onto a full-grown tradition of national cooking stretching back to the Caesars. Rather, they were naturalized into everyday cooking in an atmosphere of universal experimentation and invention.”