How many different foods can you name that originated in ancient times with the thought of “Gee, I wonder how we can avoid starving to death next winter?” I can think of a few right away - cheese, bacon, sauerkraut, pickles, and lutefisk. Can anyone expand this list?
I have never tried lutefisk. Should I? Is it available in New Mexico? Would it be good with red chile?
(Another question occurred to me as I was typing this post. How do you properly punctuate a sentence which is a question that ends with a quote that is also a question. Did I do it right? This question probably belongs in a different forum.)
I’m not sure lutefisk is good with anything. I understand it is an acquired taste. However, it seems that you need to start acquiring it at a young age.
In the same vein as sauerkraut, there’s kimchi (which is a different process that produces different flavors, and which can be done with a wide variety of vegetables, not just cabbage).
Off the top of my head, there’s also jerky, pemmican, and a wide variety of dried fruits.
And are we counting foods (such as most root vegetables) that can last for months or years in their natural state?
That’s not really what I was thinking about this morning but I still wouldn’t mind discussing them. What motivated my question was the thought that mankind might never have invented certain foods if it were not for our ancient ancestors lack of modern technology. Can you imagine a world without bacon? What a horrible scenario that would be.
Not really. Whiskey and most other fermented beverages like wine or mead don’t have the nutritive value of beer. Also, distilled beverages like whiskey date to only around five hundred years ago, which aren’t really “ancient times.”
Whiskey provides mostly calories, and has little food value beyond that. While it’s a more concentrated form for shipping alcohol than beer, it wasn’t developed to serve as a food.
Raisins and Prunes, which I supposed could fall under the heading of “dried fruit”, although it’s whole dried fruit, as opposed to dried apple slices and the like.
I don’t know how ancient it is, but the US Navy shortly after the Revolution had “Dried soup”, which was soup with all the water boiled out of it, leaving a solid black mass that could be reconstituted by simply putting it in a pot of boiling water. There’s a solid black chunk of this stuff at the USS Constitution museum in Boston. It looks more ike building material than food, but it could apparently keep forever.
For that matter, Ship’s Biscuit also keeps forever, if you keep it dry. It was basically flour and water, mixed to a paste (with little water in it) and baked. The result was hard as a rock, but woulkd keep without preservatives. They must have had stuff like this in the ancient world – when Ernest by Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper were making the film Grass in Afghanistan in the 1920s (well over a decade before they made King Kong), they followed the nomadic herdsmen who themselves followed the grass that kept their herds alive (hence the film’s title). Their financial backer, a woman whose name I can’t recall, reportedly broke a tooth on the nomads’ rock-hard bread, which must have been a cousin to ship’s biscuit.
Miso is apparently REALLY old. As in, 4th century BC old.
I’d imagine that dried fruit and dried meat are probably the very oldest preserved foods though- they take very little in the way of extra ingredients or infrastructure.
