Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or Europeans before potatoes.
Or peppers. Hungary without paprika!
Not to mention India without the spicy peppers...
Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re interested in what ancient romans ate, that seems well documented. Bread, olives (and olive oil), cheese, meat, fish, fruit, nuts, wine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius
Their giant mound of 53 million olive oil amphorae has always fascinated me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio 20 liters of oil per person annually.
That is an amazing read, thank you for sharing. Not often you see a landfill for welfare recipients turned into a holy place that the popes visit and wealthy people store their wine
Re: Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Onions, carrots, and celery, there you have it. I was trying to find out what renaissance celebrity chef Bartolomeo Scappi typically did for sauce, but I'm not sure. I think mostly meat broth. This tortellini here has a sort of Christmas spices stuffing with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and raisins ... and marjoram and mint and rosewater and saffron ... and sugar and parmesan on top. In meat broth. https://www.theeterna…
> Onions, carrots, and celery This is also a major base of French cuisine and called Mirepoix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix?wprov=sfti1
In Cajun food, bell peppers replace carrots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_trinity_(cooking)
Re: Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes some sense. Given the historic sometime scarcity of food and pressure of starvation, and the widespread availability of milk, I would think people would adapt to it. I guess that lactose-intolerent people today would drink milk rather than starve - do they get zero nutrients from it? - and that evolution would select for those who could survive that way.
Not going to get into the social darwinism stuff. We can empirically measure an apparent selective pressure for lactase persistence, but it's an open question without clear answers what the factors driving that are. I think you're missing why milk is useful though. Dairy allows you to take resources that aren't calorically useful like grasslands and turn them into food. You can consume it either immediately or later…
> social darwinism
There is none of that in my comment.
> I think you're missing why milk is useful though.
? I was saying it is useful, and therefore I expect Homo sapiens would adapt to it.
After writing the GP I was told that humans, and some or all mammals, have a gene that disables lactose tolerance when they reach the stage of life where they no longer need milk. A miniority of humans have a mutation that stops that process, making them lactose-tolerent.
Why haven't we evolved to consume milk lifelong, given its obvious advantages (or why have we evolved to become lactose-intolerent past early childhood)?
A guess: Obviously milk consumption is inherited from mammal ancestors. That provides plenty of time (66 million years +) and population to evolve lifelong lactose digestion.
But other mammals don't have much need for that adaptation - for the most part, they can't figure out obtaining milk from another species as a regular food source. Human ancestors didn't figure out tool use until 2.6-3.3 million years ago; would we have figured it out then?
My guess is that it required domestication of animals ~12 thousand years ago before non-childhood milk consumption was commonplace. 12,000 years isn't much time to evolve much.
Re: Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans
#35Article is mainly about the Baltics, but I always wondered what Italians ate before tomatoes came from the Americas.
There is a YouTube channel and Substack called “Forgotten Italian Classics” that explores old regional specialties. This might be up your alley.
Re: Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that list, I think I’d only really miss apples and dairy (really just cheese) by their own virtue. Pork/beef/meat due to familiarity (which is to say, they had other meat sources, which I’m sure were just a good, if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me). Potatoes and corn, losing though would be absolutely tragic. Also avocados.
> if I’d grown up on venison I’m sure it would just taste like cow to me Having grown up on plenty of both wild venison and farmed cattle, they are pretty different, not to mention that different types of venison are also quite different from each other. So I'm not sure I would consider venison and beef interchangeable simply by familiarity. White tailed deer and gemsbok, specifically, I find the best tasting and muc…
Venison is very different from beef. The most beef-like thing I've had is ostrich (which you wouldn't expect), even though it has subtle differences.
Re: Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Onions, carrots, and celery This is also a major base of French cuisine and called Mirepoix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix?wprov=sfti1
In Cajun food, bell peppers replace carrots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_trinity_(cooking)
Fascinating to see that Mirepoix is such and old base that it was imported into the new continent and adapted with what was available locally!