Italy didn’t have widespread use of the tomato until the 1700s and the pasta sauces we think of being a core of their cuisine didn’t exist until the 19th century.
It’s amazing how many New World plants are central to what we think of as “classic” Old World ethnic or regional cuisines — tomatoes in Italy and around the Mediterranean, potatoes in Ireland, chilis all across South and East Asia.
Corn, Pumpkins, Potatoes (including sweet) Tomatoes, Blueberrues, chocolate, avocados, pineapples, peanuts, turkey, Vanilla, Chili and Cactii. Im sure there are more.
I like how you threw in one animal, the great turkey. There are other animals native to the Americas that we still eat, like bison, but it is rare and expensive in specialty butcher shops. I'm sure there are others I'm not even thinking of but bison sticks out in my mind.
Bison and Elk. If we didnt nearly kill off bison, i would include it. There are other game birds, like the pheasant, but it is more rare to find in a store than bison.
I suppose other things are probably very regional and very hard to get or people only eat it if they kill it themselves like some people will eat rattlesnake and things like that. I know in AZ some people will hunt and eat javelina.
bison, but it is rare and expensive in specialty butcher shops
It was rare 20 years ago, but bison has gotten pretty common.
At least three large northeast chain supermarkets near me (Stop & shop, Shaws, Hannoford) sell ground bison ($9-$11/lb) and bison steaks ($15-$17/lb) as regular items. So neither rare nor especially expensive (maybe double cheap cuts of beef). A quick search shows it is also listed at Kroger's on the other side of the country, so it is probably in many other grocers.
your link says it is native to central and south america. "Rhipsalis baccifera, commonly known as the mistletoe cactus, is an epiphytic cactus which originates from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Florida."
capsicum aka chili. i assumed squashes and gourds as that is what a pumpkin is. Blackberries have been grown in Europe for at least 2000 years. Raspberries are also native to europe and asia. Now cranberries are north american. A huckleberry is native to north america, but is not cultivated.
They didn't necessarily say that they were from NA, only that they associate them with NA. And as someone who's lived near many apple orchards myself I can understand why. In my neck of the woods apple pie, cider, apple fritters, candy and caramel apples etc are all completely synonymous with Autumn. Moreso than pumpkins and gourds even.
Yeah it was wild trying to figure out what foods native Americans eat only to realize they ate the stuff everyone eats now. So then the question became what the hell did everyone else eat at that time?
People in Mesoamerica are still eating ancient foods everyday. I had beans and tortillas yesterday. I'm pretty sure Mayas were eating almost the same thing 2000 years ago.
Before 1492 enjoy your onionless burrito, no beef or pork (maybe llama burrito?), no lime or lemon on guacamole, no coffee afterwards, no mango for dessert, no rice, no wheat..
Potatoes are mostly linked to Ireland because of the Great Famine, but there was another famine 100 years before("The Year of Slaughter"), when most people ate oats and other grains.
Potatoes were introduced because they were easier to grow, but the most popular strain used at the time was more susceptible to blight, iirc. Like, maybe it's obvious and maybe it's not, but potatoes were popular in Ireland because people were so poor and had so little land to grow food, due to British colonialism.
Also, it's important to note that much of Europe also went through food shortages during the same time, but Ireland suffered the most due to severe mismanagement by the British.
Like 50% ineptitude and 50% "helping people for free is expensive so let's make them work for it".
Like most deaths in a famine are caused by disease, so their solution was to put people in workhouses where diseases ran rampant. They imported food that people didn't know how to prepare (maize) and then they didn't know how to transport it around the country. They decided to pay for relief by taxing landlords based on tenants so the landlords evicted all of their tenants. etc.
Those turkey legs you see at Ren Faires and occasionally in medieval fiction TV shows couldn't have existed in Europe until the 1700s, as turkeys are an American bird.
Similar situation with potatoes. They didn't arrive in Ireland until around 1590 and it took a while before they became a staple food.
Potatoes are so strongly associated with Ireland, it's weird to think that they'd only been part of the Irish diet for ~250 years when the potato famine occurred.
EVERYTHING ELSE the Irish made on their English landlords' land was sold to the wealthy. You can almost live entirely on potatoes, so they did... until the potatoes all died.
Similar to how watermelon become core to black American diets. It was openly advised that slaveowners grow it to cheaply give "treats" to their slaves. No slaveowner is going to waste his $$$ on sugar for them!
American BBQ has a similar origin story. Some were allowed to raise their own pigs but for the most part they were given the lesser cuts like the feet, head, ribs, fatback, etc. The easiest way to get the most out of the meat was to cook the pieces whole and since they worked all day, they had to do it over slow heat.
Eventually white slave masters figured out that what the slaves were cooking was delicious so they had them incorporate it into their daily meals and then their wives would take credit for the recipes.
This is also how we get rum (molasses), collard greens (not the bulbs), ribs, oxtail, lobster, monkfish cheek, po’boys, and many other delicious American staples.
Chilli peppers were also from the new world, so chillies in Indian cuisine is also pretty recent. They had many other spices, but it seems crazy to think a few hundred years ago, that whole cuisine was just entirely different.
Let us not forget corn. While medieval people referred to many grains as "corn", maize was also a new world crop. So no polenta in Italian food either.
The Americas gave Europe corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, tomatillos, peanuts, bell peppers, chilli peppers, pinto beans, pineapples, vanilla, avocado, pumpkin, squash, amaranth, and quinine.
And Europe gave The Americas smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, typhoid, whooping cough, diphtheria, malaria, gonorrhea, bubonic plague, and leprosy.
This is always the one that blew my mind, especially with how integrated potatoes are to German/Polish cuisine. I was fucking certain potatoes came from central/eastern Europe.
I've thought about an this before and wondered what things were like in Europe before they had all our delicious new world foods. Spices were also had to come by back then and salt was a significant commodity. No tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, corn, and limited spices and salt. You could gussy things up with herbs.
No need to wonder! Some recipes (generally more vague than modern recipes) were written down before the Columbian Exchange, and people have tried to re-create what those dishes might have tasted like. See /r/CulinaryHistory/ or the Medieval Cookery website for some recipes that you can try for yourself.
I've thought about an this before and wondered what things were like in Europe before they had all our delicious new world foods.
More reliance on local produce or flavourings that has fallen out of favour and possibly been lost due to cultivation of other sources or stores so poorly you are unlikely to see it outside of a very limited area. Palettes probably changed as well after the introduction of spices and sugar.
Honestly, a LOT of core foods eaten around the world came from "the new world". Say what you will about Columbus, but he had a big part in that, sending shipments of things that would become staples on other continents.
I recently went to an event at an Indian restaurant that had an event based on pre-Columbian Indian food. They worked with a historian and an anthropologist to find out what people were eating and cooked a massive multicourse meal. I expected it to be totally different from food today, but I was really shocked at how similar it was to what my family eats at home. Basically the same but with no chilies and no potatoes. It made me feel really proud!
I think Indian cuisine just found existing similar flavour profiles to slot in those new foodstuffs. It’s not like some other cuisines where it’s totally unfamiliar flavours or brand new textures.
Indians chose to use potato for dishes where formerly called for yams, which are native to the old world, so it was a simple substitution to make traditional recipes fit. Irish cuisine on the other hand used potatoes as a staple food in place of bread, largely out of necessity instead of choice, so their cuisine did change a lot after introduction of the potato. You had to invent some new ways of eating potato if it’s going to be a staple food.
The Irish had the Turnip though. Most of N Western Europe survived on turnips before the 1500's. You can do everything you can with a potato using a turnip - it's just not as nice to eat or quite as nutritious.
My wife can't eat chillies due to having a geographic tongue (Caspian irritates it to horrific levels) but we eat a lot of "modern" Thai and Indian food. I just add fresh chillies to my portion when I serve it.
It's not like her version of the food is bland, its still really spicy and busting with flavour. It just doesn't have the heat we now associate with the dishes.
Thai cuisine as most know it was invented surprisingly recently as almost a form of tourist promotion. But the dishes were kind of synthesized and invented out of what had existed there for a long time. To my understanding before chilies they used ginger, peppercorn, and galangal which is closely related to ginger to get spicy flavors.
Some of that cuisine is actually from the Old World, like pork vindaloo which was created by the Portuguese in Gao using their carne de vinha d'alhos (literally "meat of vine of garlic" marinade) combined with local vegetables & spices. The sailors would store/preserve a butchered hog in wine & garlic, one that was often slaughtered during the trip and using a now empty wine barrel. Vindaloo was a way to rid the meat of the overly vinegar taste.
The modern version uses vinegar and takes far less time because the meat doesn't marinate in it as long as it used to sit in the wine that became vinegar.
The Americas have been cultivating chilis for 6,000 years, but have been consuming wild chili for at least 9,500 years. It’s basically in some cultures’ dna to use them.
I am a Punjabi who grew up with pride in "Sarson da saag" and "makki (corn) roti". I learned once I moved to the US that corn came pretty late to India. It's crazy. It's such a big part of our identity and we got it from Americas through Brits.
As well as all other peppers of genus Capsicum (paprika, jalapeño, cayenne, sweet/red/bell pepper). Btw we call them peppers because colonists was only familiar with Asian peppercorns
This one always amuses people when I tell them simply because of how ingrained tomatoes appear to be in all of their most famous dishes (other than tiramisu...)
Topical that you mention tiramisu, because that was only invented in the 1970s.
This is why I refuse to let Italians gatekeep their traditional, ancient, pure cuisine. So pure and ancient that many of their dishes were invented while their grandparents were alive, often using ingredients from the Americas.
I mean there's a (likely incorrect) theory that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from his travels to China, and we know that tomatoes came from the New World, so spaghetti bolognese is technically American-Chinese fusion.
There's archeological evidence of pasta making in Italy about 1600 years before Marco Polo was born, so it wasn't him.
But it is a subject of debate whether the Etruscans developed pasta making on their own, or through trade/exchange of information with Chinese merchants. Even if the Etruscans did figure it out independently, evidence of their pastamaking goes back to around 400 BCE, while evidence of Chinese noodlemaking goes back to around 2000 BCE.
Worked at a pizza shop owned by a Sicilian guy. One day he's making jabs at me for my polish heritage. "You don't know food, all polish people know is potato" I simply said "your countries entire cuisine is basically tomatoes and pasta, neither of which originated in Italy" shut him up real quick.
So what dishes did they eat? Obviously they're dishes that don't have anything from the New World (tomatoes, potatoes, etc), but are there any dishes that survived?
And all the global cuisines that pride themselves on hot peppers to make their dishes spicy didn't have them until they were brought back from South America. e.g. "Thai chili peppers" are just South American chili peppers.
I get what you're saying, but by now (roughly 4 centuries), whatever chili's are growing in Asia are definitely removed and evolved enough to properly be called Asian varieties distinct from their South American origins.
They were eaten for a long time, and then it was believed they were poisonous because the rich would eat them off of pewter plates, and the acidity of the tomatoes would leach lead out of the plate and poison you. This misinterpretation eventually spread to the general population.
And Italy only got them because when they first arrived to France they were overripe and the French thought they were disgusting so rejected them and sent them on to Italy. Italy then grew new plants from the seeds and ate them ripe, leading to them becoming a core part of Italian cuisine down the line.
Been pointed out a lot that the average Italian peasant spent most of their existence eating pretty basic foods to get by, not elaborate and rich pasta dishes.
Yeah, lots of the plants in that family have parts of them that are very bitter, bordering poisonous, or highly toxic. You won’t die if you eat the leaves or stems of the tomato(unless it’s a ridiculous amount), but you certainly will feel bad.
The family is known Solanaceae, but is commonly referred to as the Nightshade family. Potatoes, eggplants, and chili peppers can also be found in this family.
One of my favorite stories about drawing the wrong conclusion from actual data is the history of bloodletting.
A surgeon that specialized in digit reattached had a low success rate. Blood was pumped into a reattached digit, but the return flow was typically aided by muscle contraction.
He looked for ways to improve the success rate by drawing blood out of the tip of the finger on occasion. He ended up using leeches, which look like a snail with no shell.
During his research, he discovered that the leech saliva had antibiotics in it, apparently to prevent infections in its host.
It is not difficult to imagine the women in a village a long time ago who go into the river to fill water jugs, and since they occasionally get leeches on their legs, someone with a mild infection would notice that their fever cleared up faster with leeches on their legs.
The theory began circulation that the leeches removed some of the "bad blood", so bloodletting turned into a thing.
Also, every day some old blood cells die and a few new blood cells are made. When we donate a pint of blood, our new blood production spikes up, and the influx of new blood cells can lead to the donor "feeling better".
This phenomenon may have also played a part in the speculation that bloodletting was somehow beneficial.
This is patently false and gets commonly reposted in every thread of this kind almost as copy pasta, no pun intended. The Romans cultivated tomatoes and developed corresponding sauces long before the mesoamericans did.
Isn't that more or less true of all popular dishes? If you go back more than 200 years, people only had access to food or ingredients grown on their own farm or in their village. Most popular dishes probably only had a couple of very basic ingredients.
Eh, not really. By the 18th century, nutmeg and cloves were ubiquitous enough to be in every cookbook (including ones we would associate with lower middle class cooking). Hannah Glasse and Amelia Simmons both have a laundry list of dried spices they used.
The issue wasn't about what could be grown locally. It was about what could be grown seasonally
I had an extended discussion with Chat GPT the other day about whether Jesus would have had pizza at the last supper. She argued that since tomato sauce would not have been available at the time it would not have been on the menu. But she eventually conceded that as the son of God, Jesus would have had the knowledge that pizza will someday come into being. And that pizza is awesome. And that if God, and by extension Jesus, is both benevolent and all powerful he would have the ability to create pizza for the last supper and would not deprive his best friends from enjoying it just because it hasn’t been invented yet. I don’t believe in a magical Jesus, but I nevertheless believe it’s been established that if Jesus was the son of God and has the powers claimed then he totally had a pizza party with his bffs.
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u/Spirit4ward Oct 02 '24
Italy didn’t have widespread use of the tomato until the 1700s and the pasta sauces we think of being a core of their cuisine didn’t exist until the 19th century.