Specifically, how did the cuisines of places that are now so heavily associated with plant imports from the Western Hemisphere—such as peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes—differ pre-contact and post-contact?
What was the food like in…
Here is a much earlier thread on this topic.
Okay, that thread addresses Ireland—oats, etc.—and recaps which foods came over from the Americas, but it doesn’t really say anything about what the food was like in Italy or Thailand or Sichuan Province before Columbus.
Anyone? What’s your average meal like in Italy in 1350? (Well, make it 1300… people in 1350 were still a bit busy with that “Black Death” business…)
Well, they probably had pasta, but they didn’t have it a hundred years earlier, since Marco Polo brought the idea of noodles back from China. They also had:
They didn’t have:
In Italy, they didn’t have tomatoes or polenta or chiles or squash. But mediterranean-style diets don’t rely heavily on New World crops. So any dish that uses a tomato-based sauce would simply not exist, or use some other vegetable such as stewed carrots as the base.
But the main components of the diet would be bread or pasta, olive oil, wine, and cheese. Anything else would be viewed as an accompanyment to the bread/pasta.
Imagine Indian food without chili peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, chicken’s eggs, or tea.
This makes a nice story, but I don’t think the evidence is very strong. Why not independent invention? Noodles are, after all, just flour and liquid. (I’m willing to believe M.P. brought a Chinese influence to Italian cuisine, but the idea they had no noodles at all is a stretch.)
You run into problems, there are not a lot of extant cookbooks that are like our cookbooks. They tended to be more aide-memoire for professional chefs that spent years learning their craft. You also run into ‘food fashion’ where for example, what we think of as french foods actually originated as italian food imported into the french court by a princess married to the french king who wanted her own familiar cooking.
If you are really interested in medieval and renaissance cooking, check out Stefan;s Florelegium. It is searchable.
As Dr. Drake notes, and I have heard elsewhere, pasta predates Marco Polo’s travels. to quote Wikipedia’s entry:
If you want to know what Italians ate, you can read about the Roman diet – lots of seafood, the expected meats, and vegetables. Like the Chinese and Southeast Asians, they had a fermented fish sauce, which I’ll bet could go with pasta.
Romans also used sugar, which came from India, but sparingly, and more as medicine than as foodstuff, probably because it was so labor-intensive. Honey was a more common sweetener.
Potatoes weren’t just big in Ireland (where they practically took over, with disastrous results during the potato Famine) – they were enthusiastically adopted in mainland Europe as well, becoming a big part of German, Polish, and Russian diets. And probably Hungarian, to cite your list. Before potatoes, they probably used several types of grain in its place.
It’s interesting that chilis became so instrumental in Indian and sotheast asian diets, when they came over from the Americas. I don’t know if they supplanted some other strong spice or not, but :Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Modern World makes a big deal about it.
Imagine there’s no curry
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to cook or spice for
And no tandoor, too
Hi Cal!
This is pure speculation, but I wonder how far back the Chinese noodle making method goes. You know how they keep stretching and folding over a rope of dough until they produce spaghetti like strands. Maybe thats where this connection came from. Not necessarily Polo, but just the idea that China developed noodles of this type, later done in Italy. It appears spaghetti is extruded in the modern world. Maybe they used the Chinese technique in the past.
Also, in general, there may be a bias towards crediting the Chinese with inventing a lot of things because they kept good records going farther back than in Europe. Lately, the theory that the Chinese were the sole inventors of gunpowder has been reconsidered, and the prevailing theory is the independent development of gunpowder in several disconnected parts of the world.
One book I have read about medieval life (1200-1300s) indicates that most villeins in Northern Europe had a very grain based diet, with barley playing a major part (a lot more than it seems to nowadays). There were some truck crops too (e.g. carrots or cabbage), and with luck on feast days goose or duck or ham (meat was not a big part of the peasant diet, as you may assume), and made up the protein w/ beans, peas, lentils, etc.
Damned if I know. I suspect the Polo connection just came in because people know that Polo went to China, and they ate noodles there, so obviously he was the one who brought them back.
Except even Polo claimed that his father and others had traveled the same route. And there’s a bunch of folks who believe that Polo himself never made the journey. I haven’t read the original pieces that claim that Polo was responsible for turning lo mein into pasta, but I strongly suspect some sort of folk anthropology.
I’m also a deep believer in independent discovery of things – people are creative and ingenious, and I strongly suspect that in most cases things appearing in different places is the result of independent discovery, rather than diffusion of ideas. Once you start playing with your food, you’ll find different ways to prepare them. I strongly suspect pasta is an independent invention. I don’t know about the history of foodstuffs, but your “rope theory” of pasta discovery seems likely for nboth places, simply because it required no other apparatus. Afterwards, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if they came up with pasta machines or even extruders – look at gREEK OR rOMAN ARTIFACTS AND IT’S IMPRESSIVE WHAT A BATTERY OF DEVICES THEY HAD FOR PROCESSING FOOD IN DIFFERENT WAYS.
Yeah, I’ve noticed in the modern world many people ideating the same invention at the same time due to the discovery of new techniques, materials, etc… I’d probably put noodles in the same category, probably going back to the development of dough. And even Cecil’s column on the wheel gave short shrift to the idea of people rolling things on logs, or rolling large stones downhill. Of course the wheel thing is probably more about the axles than the rims.
I understand the chili peppers, tomatoes and potatoes, because they’re all new world foods, but the Indians had chickens and onions for God knows how long, and tea cultivation started in India before 500 BC.
Sichuan cuisine as it is currently known has only existed for 100 - 200 years. However, even before the introduction of the chili pepper, the region was known for pungent foods using native piquant herbs and spices such as smartweed, southernwood, daylily buds, and Sichuan peppercorns.
I like the way nobody has even bothered to note that Soup for the Qan is a translation of a cookbook written in the Chinese-Mongolian court.
And if you want hot spicey food, make a batch of bal-po soup. It gets its heat from black cardamom, radishes and other integral spices, no need for peppers.
And Scandinavian.
Pre-potato and post-potato, Norwegian peasant cooking was heavy on the porridge. When milk was available, it was made with milk - bearing in mind that for most people that would be goat or sheep milk, not moo-cow. Carrots, cabbage, and turnips and related root vegetables figured in there, too, as did a large quantity of fish, which was dried for long-term storage. The infamous Scandinavian delicacy lutefisk is nothing more than a way of getting this dried fish back to an edible state (although it’s by no means the only way, just the weirdest). This country has always had a lot of land not suitable for farming, but things live and grow there, and people have always harvested what they could, picking berries and other edible plants and hunting for meat.
Actually a very short growing season is why barley was so prevalent - IIRC it has the shortest growing season of the common grains. The scythians were commonly thought of as nomads that did no farming, but archeological evidence shows that they actually had specific summer and winter areas [typically moving north and south along the rivers] and they planted barley in their normal end camping points. I suppose you could call them either proto-farmers or opportunity farmers as they just broadcast the seed and let nature grow the grain without much preparation.
Pasta is just unleavened bread, no?
Perhaps someone forgot to add the fungus/mold and got impatient?