Though perhaps the obsession with “extra-virgin” olive oil is more recent?
Nothing wrong with it at all - in fact I bought some for my son’s Christmas stocking.
Looks great - I just ordered a copy. Thanks for the recommendation.
We should start a thread when you get it… It’s very…masculine, but not (I think) in a bad way. My father took it as bible, and he’s a hell of a cook.
Now I am intrigued.
Depends on where you were. My not so little town in the Bay Area is a lot more food diverse than New York was 60 years ago. Lots of delis, lots of Chinese restaurants (but less regional cooking than today) and of course Italian, depending on your neighborhood.
I’ve been cooking since 1972, and the range of ingredients and types of cuisines I make has just exploded since then.
I look up recipes on line to match the ingredients I have, and when you see three or four nearly identical recipes, with just some ingredients changed, you are encourage to experiment. Plus there are lots of dishes that are designed to use what is available, like meat loaf, gumbo and lots of stews. We follow the recipe the first time we make something, and then we diversify.
Here is another one for you food wannabes: https://www.foodtimeline.org/
O the topic of salt.
Can you imagine, building a fort with canons to protect your salt?
Just back from a hike to the remains of the fort. Cruise ships in the distance.
The wealth of medieval Venice was from its production of salt. You don’t skimp on protecting a resource that valuable.
Absolutely. For thousands of years it was one of the most valuable commodities in the world.
Not here, where salt mines aren’t a thing. All our local salt is sea salt
Also tomatoes grown for shipping to supermarkets are often varieties that are selected for attributes that either aren’t about eating quality (uniformity of size, simultaneous ripening of crop), or are outright antithetical to eating quality - durability of skin, toughness of flesh - which helps them survive mechanical sorting and packing, and long distance distribution.
But a ship sails from Europe to the Caribbean, and the locals bombard them with canons! Why can’t we all just get along?
Fire! Me laddies, and take care not to miss!
Leave the Church out of this.
That’s for sure, and why I pretty much only eat tomatoes I grow. There was a New Yorker article about Florida tomatoes which began with the writer seeing tomatoes falling off a truck going at a good clip. He stopped, picked some up off the ground - and found they were undamaged from the fall.
Was that the article in which the writer witnessed tomatoes bouncing off the ground after falling off the truck?
This is how we get attack of the killer tomatoes, isn’t it. Dammit. 
I grew a lot of tomatoes last year. They were some of the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten and of course I cooked with some of them, but I still continued to buy canned tomatoes for cooking, just because the intensity of flavour and colour of tomatoes grown to the peak of ripeness under Mediterranean sunshine, even when canned, would not be matched by my salad varieties grown here in a greenhouse in the UK (even though it was a pretty good year and the tomatoes were excellent).
There are a lot of vegetables that suffer badly from a canning process, but I’d say tomatoes are one of the better examples of canned products (especially when they’re going to be cooked anyway)
It’s sort of hilarious that an OP containing complaints about food snobbery goes on to commit food snobbery in the same post.
Reminds me of a local salt mine, markets as “unrefined sea salt mined from an ancient seabed in Utah where it’s safe from modern pollutants.”